- As Miss Marceau, the assistant manager of the Orient Express, solve puzzles, interview passengers, search compartments and gather forensic evidence to help temporarily indisposed Hercule Poirot solve a paradoxical murder on the train.
- The world-famous Agatha Christie mystery novel is given the point-and-click adventure game treatment. With some new twists and turns added in, the player takes the role of new character Antoinette Marceau. Aboard the luxurious Orient Express, sinister American businessman Mr. Ratchett has a dark secret. In the morning, the train is snowbound and Ratchett is found murdered. Antoinette acts as assistant detective to Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot, as he is confined to bed with a sprained ankle...—L. Hamre
- The classic story by Agatha Christie about the murder on the Orient Express is endearingly turned into a point-and-click adventure game, which was later followed by an adaptation of another Poirot's story, Evil Under the Sun, as well as an adaptation of the most popular one-off story by Christie called And Then There Were None. The game expands on the original story and adds some new elements including a new ending.
The player is not actually Poirot in the game, but his temporary eyes and ears, Orient Express assistant manager Antoinette Marceau. Marceau is in fact a completely new character created specifically for this game. She works for M. Bouc, the friendly manager of the train in the novel and most other adaptations, and basically takes his place in the game's story.
The game begins with a flashback to 1924 and the police siege of an old farmhouse, which ends in a shootout and the surrender of the two unknown criminals inside.
Shifting 10 years later in 1934 is where Antoinette's story begins. In order to reach the train station in Istanbul and start the adventure proper, Antoinette must first complete several fetch quests for other passengers who literally stand in her way in the market outside of the building. Since Mr. Bouc specifically chose her to represent the company during this trip and greet and make Bouc's esteemed special guest, the famous Belgian private detective Hercule Poirot, feel at home, Antoinette is under great pressure to make everything right. In the evening, the train stops in Belgrade, Yugoslavia and Antoinette searches the station in order to find a crate with bacon for the train's mad chef. Before returning, she notices a suspicious cloaked figure boarding the train conspicuously.
To accommodate Poirot and find him a free compartment in the overbooked train, Antoinette is forced to give up her room and share a bunk with introverted teacher Greta. After some commotion outside their compartment during the night, Antoinette finally managed to fall a sleep. In morning, the train is snowbound between Vinkovci and Brod, Yugoslavia and Ratchett is found stabbed to death with multiple stab wounds of varying degree of fatality.
Antoinette, a genuine amateur sleuth who loves obsessing over true crime stories in her free time, agrees to assist Poirot, her personal hero, after he becomes temporarily indisposed and confined to bed due to a sprained ankle. Throughout the game, he remains in the role of Antoinette's advisor and the player can chose whether or not to accept his help or compete with him and solve everything with as little input from Poirot as possible to win his praise.
After searching the train, solving several puzzles, interviewing everyone (including the train's numerous staff created just for the game), gathering everyone's passports and fingerprints, scanning the train for forensic evidence (specifically, other fingerprints) and exploring the footprints in the snow which lead from Ratchett's window to an abandoned snowed in cabin in the woods, Antoinette and Poirot finally gather enough evidence to come up with three possible scenarios which can explain what happened and who killed Ratchett. In the first, a rogue assassin boarded the train in Belgrade, pretended to be a conductor on the train and killed Ratchett after everyone went to bed. He escaped through the window of Ratchett's compartment and is hiding somewhere in the snowy forest, probably freezing to death.
In the second scenario, all twelve passengers were part of a carefully planned conspiracy long in the making with only one goal in mind - vigilante justice. All the passengers were in fact either relatives, employees or close friends of the Armstrongs, a nice, well off, upper middle class family, destroyed by the kidnapping of their little daughter Daisy. In his previous life of crime, Ratchett was a master serial kidnapper who abducted the girl and then killed her even though the ransom for her life was paid in full. He then left his two helpers, the two brothers from the game's opening scene, who helped him in kidnapping but objected to killing the girl, to take all the blame. The Armstrongs mostly either died of grief or committed suicide after this, which created an even bigger need for some kind of just punishment in the hearts of many.
Finally, Poirot to everyone's surprise presents the third solution to the mystery that was not in the book or any other adaptation of the story. In this scenario that ends up being the actual solution to the mystery, Poirot realizes that some evidence still can not be explained even by the second theory. That's when he declares that the train's conductor, Pierre Paul Michel, is actually one of the brothers who helped Ratchett (one was sent to the electric chair while the other one escaped, disappeared and is presumed dead). The brother confirms this, explaining that Michel agreed for him to take his place on the train without telling anyone. But he then reveals the shocking truth about the tragic events of 1924 as well. The girl that was killed was actually not Daisy but his own daughter. Ratchett mixed the two up. Afterwards, he adopted Daisy as his own, changed his identity and eventually decided to seek revenge against Ratchett for his real daughter. He found out about the plan through Michel with whom he was in contact and brought Daisy secretly on the train to finally reunite her with her real family once Ratchett is killed.
He then brings young Daisy into the room to everyone's shock and exhilaration. Touched by this magical and completely unexpected turn of events, Poirot, Antoinette and a doctor who was traveling with them but was not part of the conspiracy agree to keep quiet and when they arrive in Brod tell the police that the killer was the fictional man from the first scenario, a tiny dark assassin sent by the Italian mafia to kill Ratchett over some unknown previous vendetta, who's now lost in the frozen wilderness, never to be found by the police or anyone else.
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