A Choose Your Own Adventure for Time-Strapped Agatha Christie Fans
William Magnus is dead. He was killed in the early hours of the morning on the Disorient Express: a train destined for Istanbul. There is no shortage of suspects: his daughter, Olivia, is due to inherit a family fortune, while her lover, Thomas Carter, is filing for bankruptcy. Geoffery Chamberlain Snr is William’s business partner but far from a friend, while his son, Geoffery Chamberlain Jnr, has his eyes set on Olivia. Even the baggage boy knows more than he’s letting on.
Alas, you don’t get to be Hercule Poirot. While this is clearly based on Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express (and a maid, Alice Christie, has fun suggesting there are parallels), this is a different case. You play Robert, who isn’t even a detective. But you’re also not a suspect, since you didn’t know William Magnus, so you get to at least pretend that you’re Poirot until the cops show up.
Turn to Page 146 to Twiddle your Moustache
This murder mystery takes the form of a choose your own adventure book. Each choice you make will whisk you to a different page of the book, where you can see the consequences of that action. If you’ve played a FIghting Fantasy or Lone Wolf game book, you will know what to expect here. You just don’t get to jam a finger into a page as a bookmark and undo any mistakes that you’ve made.
You are free to enter any room or carriage within the Disorient Express, and ‘Engage’ (i.e. talk to) anyone there. You will be able to eavesdrop on soliloquies and chat to suspects, building a picture of what happened that night. By ‘Engaging’ you use up 15 minutes of time, and there is an ultimate time limit: when the clock ticks to 6am, the train stops and you have to deliver your verdict to the police.
What separates Murder on the Disorient Express from your average game book is that the train is a bustling place, and people arrive in different rooms at different times. A character might only stay in the Dining Carriage for thirty minutes before moving away, so you have to schedule appropriately. If you know that someone has called a meeting at 3:45 in the Recreation Carriage, then it’s best to be there precisely at that time.
Sliding Doors, Agatha Christie Style
Every move has to be considered very carefully. On my first playthrough, I found myself forming conclusions and chasing after the people who might solidify it. I was reactive, chasing after drunkards who finally turned up, or interrogating bellboys that I didn’t trust. Slightly shamefully, I got the suspect completely wrong on my first go, and dived immediately in for a second go. It turns out my evidence was a tad circumstantial.
The structure is pretty good. I liked how forgiving the passing of time was. I could explore the train from back to front several times over, but it wouldn’t cost me 15 minutes. It’s only the ‘Engaging’ that costs time, making it similar to The Seance of Blake Manor, which is similarly generous. You don’t accidentally make a mistake in Murder on the Disorient Express.
Fingering a suspect is a little long-winded (we had to tab through five pages for potential clues to submit to the police chief), but there’s a simplicity in throwing evidence at the chief and letting him sieve it for relevance to the case. A lot of deductive games can tie themselves in knots with manually connecting evidence together, but that’s not the case here.
But it’s certainly not perfect either. I have issues with how logical the investigation feels. There’s a question mark hanging over the cause of death, but you can’t check the body for bullet holes and stab wounds. You can learn about a potential murder weapon, and even head to where it’s located, but you can’t search for it or find it. It’s the characters who trigger the events in Murder on the Disorient Express, and you have to find them to locate the item for you. It’s a bit convoluted.
Where did Klauz Metz go?
Characters disappear. Others lie, or contradict evidence you’ve gathered. One character called me gullible to my face after giving his evidence. But you can’t shout “stop!” and intervene, asking further questions or calling them out on their contradictions. Murder on the Disorient Express is very much a railroaded narrative, and you just have to note the discrepancy for the end of the story. Which is a bit of a shame: I wanted to press X to doubt in an LA Noire style, but it’s not quite that interactive.
The case is solvable, if a bit enamoured with its own red herrings. Once you strip out all of the superfluous information, there’s only a few pieces of information that point to the real culprit and motive, and their story is a bit naff as a result. It’s a motive that could have been an email.
But what bothers me the most is the writing and how it’s presented. The quality of the writing is a little wanting, with fragments of sentences, some absolute clunkers of lines, and plenty of unbelievable situations. The first time you meet Geoffery Chamberlain Snr and Jnr, they are accusing each other of the murder. If father and son hate each other enough to believe they are capable of murder, why are they on a train together for a business trip? Why do they spend so much time together? Credulity gets stretched.
I also don’t like that everything is robo-voiced. I’d rather it wasn’t there. It gives the story a cheap quality, and leads to some very clunky delivery. At one point my character was hiding in the shadows and pretended to be a cat, but the following “uh, meow” was delivered so straight-faced and in Received Pronunciation that I cried myself with laughter. Yeah, Robert, they’re going to believe you’re a cat now.
I found myself appreciating the game more than the story. I enjoyed treating Murder on the Disorient Express like Hercule-Poirot-does-Groundhog-Day. I’d note down the best room to be in at each quarter-hour, then form a watertight case against my chosen culprit. Anticipating where I should be at a given time was the best part.
A Template Where Better Games Might Follow
But while the game structure holds up, the story buckles. It’s rough around the edges, with histrionic characters, some sketchy dialogue, and robo-voice acting that distracts. The mystery is a little perfunctory too, and it never really allowed me to get my hands dirty. I wanted to rummage around in crime scenes, but I really couldn’t.
As an Agatha Christie-referencing murder mystery, Murder on the Disorient Express shows promise. I thought it would feel stiff, working better as a book than a game, but I was wrong. Slicing the investigation up into 15-minute chunks works well, and makes you think carefully about next steps.
It’s the narrative that lets Murder on the Disorient Express down. The mystery just didn’t suck me in. With some more focus on that side of things, Infinite Zone’s adventures could become real page-turners.
Important Links
Murder on the Disorient Express Pulls Into Console – A Whodunit You Can Shape? – https://www.thexboxhub.com/murder-on-the-disorient-express-pulls-into-console-a-whodunit-you-can-shape/
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/murder-on-the-disorient-express/9NJLMZJDB44F/0010
