Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None Review (no fat)

Game Description

There aren't many people on this world who haven't read at least one of Agatha Christie's book or at least heard about her. Many critics were never quite able to explain what drove everyone to her books. Nevertheless, her style and the mysterious crimes that her books narrated made her books some of the best sellers of the century. But does the same formula work for a game?

And Then There Were None – The Plot

The story's starting point follows the book quite closely. A mysterious Mr. Owen invites eight people to a rather remote island off the coast of Devon. The eight strangers, along with a butler and housekeeper have dinner, not really knowing much about who this Mr. Owen is, when the gramophone stops singing anything and plays back a recording that accuses each of them of a murder. Minutes after that, one of the guests chokes on his liquor and dies, just like it was said in a strange rhyme found inside the house.

The entire plot is not actually a full representation of Agatha Christie's novel. An extra character is introduced so that the player can actually get a chance to understand something (the plot in the book is hard enough to follow anyway), and the ending is obviously changed so that people who read the book still enjoy their stay. The nursery rhyme is also changed for a reason that may seem a little bit puerile to some of you. The original "Ten Little Indians" has been changed to "Ten Sailor Boys" so that the game stays politically correct, a little bit of a push-up considering this is a work of art and not an electoral speech, even though the impact over the story itself is minimal.

The player is not confined to the storyline either. However, in order for the game to remain a representation of Christie's novel, some effort has been put into keeping the storyline without getting the player stuck in a book. The side effects do exist though, as we will see.

And Then There Were None Gameplay

What will immediately strike you about this game is the extremely atmospheric creation. The graphics are not exactly top-notch and the backgrounds are not too brightly-made either, but the effect is, ultimately, excellent. The mansion feels nice and worm, and the outdoors feel cold and windswept. An important contribution to this comes from the sound effects, which sound very realistic and have nothing in common with the usual ridiculous things we get to hear from adventure games every once in a while.

Although the game does manage to recreate the general atmosphere of the book, it fails when attempting to create all the feelings inside it. This happens for a number of reasons that were mostly unavoidable due to the nature of the game itself. First of all, the player must stick to the storyline, but still do something, so there are (naturally) a lot of puzzles to be solved. The problem is that they sort of break the story apart and make it feel a bit artificial, as if the puzzles where there so that you don't watch a movie. This impression is completed by the overuse of pre-rendered cut scenes.

The other problem of the game is the heavy use of dialog. Actually, at first, you will hardly see this as a problem: the voice acting is one of the most strikingly natural ever to be found in the game. The characters are nicely contoured and feel very personal, managing to draw you into their world. The problem with this is that you just can't skip the dialogs. You'll find yourself staring at the screen for minutes while the characters are talking, even when they're not saying anything related to the game itself. It's just chit-chat.

Talking too much actually seems to be a problem of the game in general. The main character has something to say for almost anything you encounter. This isn't disturbing at first, but hearing him saying something about something for the millionth time you run into it starts to get on your nerves.

The characters also feel a bit disconnected from the world due to the game's structure. The game uses the popular point-and-click interface, with characters moving around pre-rendered background scenes. Unfortunately, the scenery seems a little bit too static, feeling like one of those artificial-looking backgrounds from the movies in the 1930s.

All these summed up, break the developers' intention of remaking the original atmosphere. The serious intrigue of the book is that any of the characters could actually be the killer, but none of them knows who he is, and they obviously feel paranoid. The game doesn't manage to do that, simply because the fear for the life of a virtual alter ego will never be strong enough to make a decent plot. Sure, there's the mystery of "who's the killer?" but you somehow know all along that you're not going to get murdered. Besides, the game is heavily linear, so the puzzles feel just like a reason to do something between the murders. The ending feels a little bit artificial too, as if it was introduced so that some players wouldn't get put off.

The only serious challenge of the game remains finding out who the killer is, by solving puzzles and combining the right items. This side of it won't be too much of a challenge for adventure fans: the puzzles are quite obvious, and the lack of dialogue skipping will probably bore most of them.

And Then There Were None 2cent

There is a very restrictive crowd for "And Then There Were None". The developers had some good ideas, but the lack of an experienced script writer is very obvious. If you have the time to stay through the dialogs, it may be worth a shot.

And Then There Were None Price

The game currently retails for 29.99$.