Agatha Christie – Death on the Nile

Written by Eric Hauter on 9/23/2025 for PS5  

You might know the classic story of Death on the Nile, particularly if you have been catching Kenneth Branagh's unlikely but highly enjoyable film series about lead detective Hercule Poirot. But Microids’ new video game adaptation has a few tricks up its sleeves that both expand and enhance the classic narrative. While some features in the new game are more successful than others, mystery fans will still probably want to give this game a look. But the overall gaming public will probably sail right past this one, as it doesn’t do much to distinguish itself, despite a cool new setting and some interesting narrative twists. The riverboat down the Nile isn't sunk completely by weird UI choices and obtuse puzzles, but it is sputtering a bit.

Agatha Christie: Death on the Nile is actually the second Microids Studio Lyon game to feature the legendary detective Hercule Poirot. The first, Murder on the Orient Express, was released in 2023. And outside of the Lyon Studio, Microids’ adventures with the whodunit series seem to go back to the release of The ABC Murders in 2016. My point is that this publisher has experience with both the Agatha Christie franchise in general, and Poirot specifically. Which is why I was a little bewildered playing through Death on the Nile, which feels a bit like a first stab at a game of this nature.

Things actually get off to a decent start. Set in the groovy disco-era 1970s, Death on the Nile is awash with the colors, fashions, and architecture of the time. Whereas 2023's Murder on the Orient Express game was set in the current day, Death on the Nile is dealing with strictly old-school tech, with players engaging with such mysterious objects as rotary telephones, film cameras, and turntable jukeboxes. It's a great idea, and there are lot of cool touches in the game that I enjoyed, particularly some of the set design. It’s all fringe and egg chairs, and I’m here for it.

The game adds a neat prologue to the Death on the Nile narrative, which serves to introduce some of the primary characters. And you might think that you know every beat of Christie’s story, but in fact, Microids has expanded upon the familiar tale by weaving a parallel story focusing on co-protagonist Jane Royce, a younger detective tracking a murderer through the same world. There is a ton of connective crossover between the two mysteries, leading to a dynamic where you are seeing similar events play out from different perspectives, filling in back story and revealing new character depth before it all converges near the end.

The character work in Death on the Nile is actually pretty good. Yes, some of the performances are kind of stiff (both leads are fine), but the game does a swell job of introducing the sprawling cast in ways that make them memorable. To reinforce the player’s understanding of who is who and why they matter, there is a neat interface in the game’s “Mindmap” that allows players to fill in characters’ names, vocations, and relationships to one another. The game is fully voiced, and the bored-sounding, ultra-entitled elite characters come off just as you would expect. The writing is snappy and witty, and the player occasionally gets to make choices that have a minor impact on how the story plays out.

The graphics are just as good as they need to be, and not a squidge better. Agatha Christie: Death on the Nile is an adventure game, just an iota more interactive than a point-and-click title. Don’t show up here expecting AAA-level graphical fidelity, and you might be nicely surprised by some of the vistas on display. Characters are not terribly expressive visually, and everyone moves about as though they were animated marionettes—which I guess they kind of are. More than anything, I was reminded of early, pre-Walking Dead Telltale games, both in form and function.

So, if you are keeping a tally, we’ve got a pretty good storyline, decent characters, and somewhat subpar but serviceable graphics. The area that sent the game overboard for me was the gameplay itself, which sometimes seemed barely evolved from the old pixel hunt adventure gaming days of yore.

The gameplay can mostly be divided into three subsections; you interact with and question other characters, you solve the game’s environmental puzzles, and you interact with the Mind Map (which doubles as the pause menu) to put together the overarching themes and timelines of the mystery.

Interviewing the other characters was the best part of this circle of activity, but you couldn’t exactly call it “interactive.” Most characters have two or three conversational prompts available, and you just run down the list and listen to the script play out. After you have completed the conversation with someone, a tiny icon near them changes slightly, indicating that you are done with them for now. If you happen upon new information that opens new conversational pathways, the tiny icon changes again, indicating that they might have new things to say.

Much of my playtime was spent running a circuit around a chapter’s level, checking to see if anyone had any new info that might allow me to progress. Every now and then, you catch someone in a lie or exaggeration, which prompts confrontation, but there is really nothing interesting or strategic about this either. Just another new conversation option and an interface to select which part of the previous conversation you find to be incorrect.

A few times during each chapter, you also have to interact with the game’s puzzles, which feel jammed into the experience in the most awkward way possible. For example, in the first chapter I needed to speak with a particular character who would not interact with me unless I played her favorite song on the jukebox. Okay, stupid enough, but I dutifully worked through the complex series of puzzles to get the jukebox up and running.

But that wasn’t enough. No, I then had to find the correct song to play, with zero clues and no information about her preferences. This led to a hideous sequence where I had to go through the jukebox song by song (there are 16 songs), playing each tune, then running over to see if this was the song she liked. To make matters worse, Poirot needs coins to play the jukebox, which necessitated repeated runs to a nearby counter to get change. The whole sequence was ridiculous, made even more ridiculous once I found the correct song by the character standing there dancing awkwardly while I interrogated her. Jank, jank, jank. There might have been a way to determine what her favorite song was without just muscling through it, but if there was, I sure didn't see it anywhere.

It feels frustrating to have progression locked behind some of these arbitrary puzzles, forcing the player to interact with them in ways that don’t necessarily advance the story. There are many instances where puzzles do hold the key to solving various mysteries, but at least one-third of the time they feel like they are simply there to pad the experience.

You analyze all of the information gathered via conversation and puzzles in the Mind Map, which is a sprawling interface littered with various discovered data points. It can be a bit difficult to describe, but the game actually does a nice job of laying out the expectations for the player. Essentially, this is a place to visually parse the information you have gleaned, and an attempt to gamify intuition and deduction. It isn’t always successful, and there were times when I struggled to understand what the game was looking for, but I’ll give it credit for feeling like a new and original way to assemble puzzle pieces in a mystery game. Still, the intricacy of the scenarios feel as though they are frequently given the short shrift by this interface, as it is possible to simply enter random answers and figure out the mystery by process of elimination.

As you ask questions, solve puzzles, and pick up other bits of information, they are added to the Mind Map. Once it reaches a certain level of complexity, you can start making connections between the different waypoints, figuring out the dynamics of the mystery. There are also timeline reconstructions, where you define where different people were at various points in time. It's interesting, but it also maintains a multiple choice style, which will allow less motivated players to simply power through without really figuring anything out. 

While some aspects of Death on the Nile are more successful than others, what we are left with here is a game that will likely appeal to fans of other mystery/adventure titles, but won’t really draw in any new players. Though the funk-filled setting is appealing (hell, it’s what got me to try out this game in the first place), the gameplay doesn’t deliver on the promise of disco fun, instead feeling very rote and methodical once the novelty of the setting wears off. Probably what solving a mystery in real life feels like, come to think of it.