Ratings and Reviews by Tabitha

I can certainly see what the intent of this work is, but for me it wasn’t very successful. It wants to humanize the suffering that’s happening in Palestine, but it speeds through multiple generations so quickly and perfunctorily that I never felt like any of the characters were real people. It’s just a sketch of a family, with 100% predictable story beats--a house and land passing down from one generation to the next, young love, an aging parent, a tragic death. The game wanted to elicit emotion from me, but it didn’t do enough to earn that. If it had slowed down and developed its characters as individuals, and really explored the circumstances they find themselves in instead of skipping from one major development to the next, I think it would have been a lot more effective.

A confession: I’ve only ever read one Agatha Christie novel, and it’s the Poirot-less And Then There Were None, so I went into this game with absolutely zero knowledge of the characters or their circumstances. But fortunately, that didn’t matter. There was enough context provided that I could easily pick up the backstory, and I was charmed right away by both the writing and the setup--a bachelor and a widower sharing a flat and co-raising the latter’s children together. The homoerotic potential of this arrangement is high, and the game doesn’t disappoint there; I loved the results of repeatedly examining Poirot and the response to telling the PC to kiss him.

As other reviewers have mentioned, the biggest hiccup I encountered was the mystery bit; I spent a fair bit of time re-examining everything I’d already looked at, which was kind of tedious, and when it came time to make an accusation, the game’s multiple layers of “Are you sure?” made me chicken out the first time--but at that point the game wouldn’t let me reload a save, so I had to quit and restart. But that was the only rough spot I encountered; overall, this was a very enjoyable experience.