Not every casual game needs to have a great storyline backing it up, but this one is all the better for it. This game is an adaptation of Agatha Christie’s longest novel, Death On The Nile, and its plot is revealed in a series of still cut-scenes depicting the characters as unmoving “talking heads” while the dialog is shown below. Foul murder has occurred aboard a Nile river cruise, and Detective Hercule Poirot needs you to find the clues! What more could you ask for?

Each level of the game presents you with several rooms aboard the S.S. Karnak which are connected to a particular character or event in the mystery: various passenger quarters, the baggage room, the engine room, the salon, the sun deck, and so on. Just like in the MCF games, each area is lovingly rendered as a still picture cluttered with objects. You have a limited time to find and click on over a dozen hidden items in each area.

A helpful clue button in the shape of a magnifying glass can point out items you are missing, but it only has a limited number of uses. Also, if you make too many false guesses in a row, you’ll have time deducted from the clock – but the designers have left a fairly large margin for error, so half a dozen wrong clicks won’t hurt.

As is always the case with this kind of game, the items can sometimes be a bit obscure, and you might be puzzled by how messy the crime scenes can get, with debris such as marbles and bits of ribbons strewn all about. Some of the hidden objects can be very small and hard to see, while, others are cunningly concealed as patterns on fabric or drawings on surfaces. Still, 25 minutes per level is just enough time if you save your clue button for the really hard bits.

There are also other neat activities during and between levels – you get to interview the suspects and witnesses in the salon, and at the end of a level you get to assemble the jumbled pieces of the clue that you’ve just found, be it a ripped-up letter or a suspicious photograph.

The artwork portraying the ill-fated cruise ship and its various rooms is excellent, and even the interface at the side of the screen fits the period mystery theme quite well. It’s only the various human characters who look somewhat bland and boring by comparison. This makes the crucial cutscenes between each level feel less meaningful than they should.

Finally, there shouldn’t be much to say about the music and sound effects in a puzzle game like this, but I really did like the pleasing “Egyptian mystery theme” music that looped in the background, which gave the game the right kind of atmosphere and put me in the mood for mystery.

Now that the clues have been found and the evildoers have been caught, only one question remains: Will they adapt Murder On The Orient Express, too? We hope so.

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