Agatha Christie: Evil Under the Sun Preview

Agatha Christie, one of the most influential writers in the past century, not only from being one of the earliest woman writers, but from the stories themselves. Her stage play, Mousetrap, is still being performed to this day, having started in 1952 with more than 20,000 performances. Plain and simple, her stories speak for themselves.

And having said that, Evil Under The Sun is the first of the Agatha Christie Trilogy from The Adventure Company that I’ve had the privilege to play. The basic synopsis of the game is you visit the Whitehaven Mansions to hear a story from Hercule Poirot about his most recent investigation. It’s the 1940’s so the war is raging and the air-raid sirens are sounding in the background. As he begins to tell the story, you are taken into the story itself, and are playing as if you were trying to solve it.

It plays like most third-person point-and-click mysteries, and the graphics aren't too bad. Everything has a very “smooth” texture to it and you are forced to use 1024x768 so if you have a widescreen monitor it doesn’t look too pretty stretched. The voice acting on the other hand is acceptable but the lip synching is the normal pre-animated “open mouth, close mouth” render.

The environments range in quality quite a bit and are very pretty in some of the outdoor areas. You do a fair bit of walking and since you play as a fat man it takes a bit to get from one place to another. But the puzzles themselves are what we are all about here. And I must say they are well crafted and thought out. Not too many obscure ones like most adventure games. It didn’t feel like someone was trying to put a gate in an unreasonable position just to add another puzzle, and I commend Awe for that.

In the end if Awe can deliver a longer version of this beta I think it will satisfy and occupy adventure fans as well as Agatha Christie fans.