Adaptations of Agatha Christie’s works almost always take some creative liberties to make them feel fresh and modern — some for the best, others woefully misguided. Warner Bros., for example, set Murder in Three Acts in the 1980s and gave Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot a computer, which was somehow too formidable for his little grey cells to comprehend. Poirot, ITV’s popular television series starring David Suchet, frequently altered entire stories. Even Billy Wilder’s 1957 film Witness for the Prosecution, which Christie reportedly called her favorite adaptation of any of her works, includes an entirely new character meant to add another dimension to the protagonist’s personality.
Plot lines come and go, characters change entirely, yet the appeal of Christie’s mysteries keeps pulling people — and creatives — back for countless remakes and reimaginings. Audiences want surprises, and creators don’t want to tell a story that’s been told countless times already. Such is the case for Agatha Christie – Death on the Nile, an adventure game from Microids Lyon that launched on Steam on Sept. 25. Of the many (many) alterations the studio made to Christie’s original 1937 story, one stands out the most: This time, it takes place in the 1970s. On its face, leaping forward by four decades sounds like a bizarre, even random, choice. But for studio director David Chomard, it was an essential change to make.
“There have already been dozens of adaptations in films, theatre, comics, and video games,” Chomard tells Polygon in an interview. “We didn’t want to alter the core storyline, [so] changing the time period was a way to avoid the feeling of ‘yet another’ adaptation.”
Something old, something new
It’s not an easy balance to strike, but Microids has experience getting it right. Following two poorly received Christie adaptations from Blazing Griffin that Microids published — Hercule Poirot: The First Cases and The London Case, both of which featured new stories instead of adapting existing material — its internal studio, Microids Lyon, tried its hand at putting Christie’s famous fictional sleuth in video games. The result was 2023’s Agatha Christie – Murder on the Orient Express, which was set in 2023 and found a warm welcome among fans of Christie’s works and adventure games alike, despite taking plenty of (occasionally questionable) creative liberties of its own.
Agatha Christie – Death on the Nile preserves the essentials of Christie’s tale of love and jealousy, but it also builds a second narrative around a private detective named Jane. Her investigation happens alongside Poirot’s, and eventually ties into it.
Chomard’s team teased out various bits of subtext and background details from Christie’s novel and turned them into side stories for both detectives. A burglary in Mallorca that gets a brief mention in the novel becomes a full case for Jane, who runs, shoots, and fights to get the job done — all the things Poirot would never do. Jewel theft is a recurring subplot in the book, and rather than starting the game with the book’s slow-paced club scene that introduces all the major characters, Microids Lyon kicks things off with a little jewel robbery for Poirot to solve. It’s a handy little tutorial for the player and also a little nod to some of Christie’s short stories (like “The Jewel Robbery at the Grand Metropolitan”) where Poirot tackles similar crimes.
Most of these things could happen in any time period, but Chomard says the 1970s were a kind of Goldilocks zone for what the team wanted to achieve. It’s historical enough to feel exotic and new for most players, which Chomard hopes will help their take on Death on the Nile feel more memorable than another adaptation set in the ’30s.
This historical setting also meant the team had an easier time remaining faithful to the original story. With Murder on the Orient Express taking place in 2023, Chomard says writing around things like computers, mobile phones, and modern forensic science made sticking to the original plot much more difficult. Just as 12 people crammed into a single train compartment in Murder on the Orient Express would’ve left a lot of DNA evidence, a single, well-placed CCTV camera on board the ship where Death on the Nile‘s crucial murder takes place would spoil the entire mystery.
The period also gave Chomard’s team plenty of material culture to build puzzles and obstacles around, and they made sure Agatha Christie – Death on the Nile has a lot of those.
Solving the puzzle
“The foundations of a good mystery are timeless, [but] there’s a big difference between a good detective book or film and a good detective video game,” Chomard says.
The Christie twist at the end of a novel, where her detective reveals to an assembled audience, and the reader, exactly how the crime went down and how they cleverly figured it out, just won’t work in a video game.
“The player expects regular rewards for their progress,” Chomard says. “You can’t wait until the last few minutes to piece the whole puzzle together. A good detective game needs to let the player uncover secrets and solve parts of the investigation throughout.”
The team was also keen to give the player more to do in addition to interviewing suspects, since one of the recurring complaints against Blazing Griffin’s Poirot games was that they skewed too closely to interactive stories, with minimal effort or thought required on the player’s part. Microids Lyon wanted to make players feel like proper detectives, and spent weeks hashing out puzzle design ideas in a manner that invokes Christie’s own writing style. One puzzle came about because the team wanted to use an intriguing decorative object, and another ended up being an escape room because the team likes escape rooms. All of it makes use of the ’70s setting in one way or another, whether through period tech like Super 8 cameras and cassette players or just through the soundtrack, which uses the composer’s Minimoog Model D, ARP Odyssey 1, and other retro synth instruments.
Chomard says the ‘70s setting had to feel worthwhile, like it was the only possible choice for the game’s puzzles and dramas. He doesn’t mention previous adaptations directly, but it’s not hard to think of a few that didn’t quite have the same level of commitment to justifying their producers’ creative liberties. CBS’ 1985 version of 13 At Dinner, for example, begins with Poirot making a guest appearance on a talk show (for reasons that are never explained), while Kenneth Branagh’s Death on the Nile (2022) makes so many arbitrary changes to Christie’s story that it’s hard not to see the plot as the real murder victim. The critical consensus panned Branagh for his shallow attempts at adding new life to an overly familiar story — justification, perhaps, for Microids Lyon’s desire to be different on a grander scale.
Whether that approach pays off remains to be seen, but the reception on Steam is mostly positive so far, with players praising the fresh approach to a well-worn classic and a different take on Christie’s familiar hero.If you’re looking for a whodunit with psychedelic flair and immaculate vibes, Death on the Nile seems like an ideal weekend escape.
