Agatha Christie: Hercule Poirot - The London Case Review (UthersonL)
tl;dr: short and easy but too buggy for comfort.
The game at its core is ...fine. Not great, not terrible. A little weaker than the previous one: The First Cases but also feels more ambitious, with more varied environments than TFC's house in the prologue and a single mansion for the entire rest of the game.
The game overall is short. My playtime of under 7 hours already includes my replaying one chapter to investigate a sequence break I ran into earlier, and replaying the better part of another, lengthy chapter to chase down an achievement I missed in my playthrough for the sake of closure.
Initially, my biggest gripe with the game was the return of utterly awful facial animations from The First Cases; I'd hoped they'd improve this particularly weak link for the sequel. I ran into some annoying bugs before long, however, so I gave the game a few months to patch them out between August last year and now. Nearly three quarters of a year later, the game is still badly in need of thorough polish and bug-squashing. Even today, it doesn't feel fit for release. Whether it was rushed to bail out an ailing publisher or to beat another Poirot game (the film tie-in Murder on the Orient Express) to market by mere weeks, I couldn't say, but it feels like either of those had to have been the case.
What kind of bugs are there? Objectives don't match the tasks required to progress (e.g., you're told to talk to a certain character but all you can say to them is a goodbye, instead you have to find and examine a specific item at a specific spot), interaction hotspots are unmarked/unlabelled, Poirot moves his mouth in some spoken lines that are meant to be his thoughts (with comedic effect, like when he mutters his intention to manipulate his interlocutor right to their face before proceeding to do so), mild sequence breaks (the worst in the penultimate chapter, when talking to a character before developing some photographs through a series of interactions skips the whole process and goes straight to discussing the revelations in the contents of a picture you've yet to produce, robbing you of making some important environmental observations), Poirot struggling to get into position to examine an object or interact with a door, subtitles not matching the spoken line, and plenty more.