[Themis78]

Hello everyone. This is one of my first posts, so I apologise if I should post this specific thread elsewhere!

I just finished "Murder on the Orient Express" by Adventure Company.

I am a big fan of Agatha Christie's Hercules Poirot. I have also played "And then there were none" , and I must say I was not THAT impressed with the game, although I really enjoyed its graphics and some of the puzzles (yet some of them were really absurd, anyway...)

All in all, I must say I wasn't really optimistic of the quality of "MotOE", when I heard about it being released. Unfortunately, now that I have finished the game, I feel quite unsatisfied.

I really enjoy 3-rd person point n click adventures, but "MotOE" was more like watching a movie - rather than playing an adventure. Collecting all fingerprints, talking to everyone, then go and report to Poirot - what's the difficuly in that? The puzzles were few and far between - and again, some of them required - In my humbe opinion - too much of someone's imagination. Especially fixing that ham radio was far beyond *my* imagination and abilities. And trust me, I've been playing adventures for the last 15 years!

The story was really good - but then , so was the book! The third solution presented by Adventure Company was also good , but of course couldn't match the original solution.

For me, "MotOE" was more of an... interactive movie, rather than an adventure...

What do you guys and girls think of this game?

Now that I've finished it, I'm thinking of playing either CSI 4 OR "Evil Under the Sun". "EUtS" was my first choice but I guess my disappointment from "MotOE" makes me want to stick to CSI 4 instead...

Themis,
Greece

PS "Cudos" to the Adventure company for the "MotOE" main music theme. I really loved it - as well as the "And then there were none" main music theme. They were both amazing!

[aries323]

I think the point in MotOE was that you were supposed to be playing as young or somewhat young female and try to outwit Poirot, that is solve the murder before Poirot did.

I don't really understand what you mean by playing or watching an interactive movie, but I do know that I enjoyed playing the demo for Murder on the Orient Express as much as I enjoyed playing the demo for Secret Files: Tunguska.

They may well both been seen as interactive movies with some puzzles thrown in. It just sound like you might like more puzzled based games more which is a perfectly valid thing to do.

[Terramax]

I imagine you found it more of an interactive movie possibly because you found the puzzles too easy(?). The fact that you've been playing adventures for 15 years and you sound like a pretty smart person.

I didn't think the puzzles were that far and inbetween at all. Although it did seem like that if you compare it to the amount of clues that you had to pick up (which was far too many). I also believed there were far too many items in the inventory screen and going into a separate screen for combining became cumbersome very quickly.

The problem the Adventure Company and the programmers at Awe Games had also was basing the game on the 2nd or 3rd best selling author of all time.

How do you make such a famous book/ book series new and exciting without keeping the same perspective?

I've never read the book, and I wasn't a big fan of the films or television series (although I did like the film 'Death on the Nile'). Having not experienced the story before, I'm sure I enjoyed it more than you did.

Overall if you didn't enjoy MotOE much I can't imagine you'd find Evil Under the Sun entertaining, as that's been criticised for being even more of the same as you now take up Poiret directly.

And finally, the theme music was terrific. I resent them for not adding more music into the game.

Hope some of this helps.

[Themis78]

Thank you very much for your comments and replies!

Oh well, I guess I prefer watching David Suchet on TV rather than in a PC game! :-)

Take care

[Panthera]

I've just finished MotOE and it was very much like it was described in the review, although I have to say, I thought it was much better than AttwN.
The interface, especially when it came to examining objects and combining them were very cumbersome, and the game was a bit too linear to let you explore so freely, I kept picking up things because I could not because I needed, and often had conversations with people that didn't match where I was in the game.

I also thought the "kidnapping" scene was a bit strange, because I didn't see a reason to go out of the train at all there. I also found the ham radio puzzle way too hard - making a butter knife into a sender isn't really the first thing you think of, and I also had trouble with the first puzzle, because the game gave me very little explanation on what I was meant to do and how. I kept trying combining the fire thingy with the hat frames in my inventory.
I got stuck one time because I wasn't progressing and didn't know what I hadn't done, wondered if I was supposed to do something with the wolfes, and went looking for some food or something to lure them off. Pointing the gun at them never occurred to me as a possible solution (probably because I would never have done that, and the usual adventure way of dealing with it is meat and sleeping drought, which the train had plenty of).

I also didn't like those "you can't progress before you've gotten every single thing of this". Especially the shoes were annoying here, since I had found the right ones, but I still couldn't continue because I hadn't compared the print to all the men's shoes.

The thing that most annoyed me was that I didn't actually get to make the choice in the end! Here he tells me several times that I'm supposed to choose which is the right ending, and then the choice is taken away from you. Really killed my mood after being exited about the alternative third ending we were told.

What I liked was making the fingerprint powder and using it to print things (I stupidly felt really smart when I suddenly discovered what the coal was for, I kept trying to use the ink band to smear onto the prints).