Remember Agatha Christie? How she, her friends, and a talking dog would ride around in a van and solve mysteries like that ghost at Old Man Winters's farm? Wait, that might have been somebody else. But what most people probably DO remember correctly is that Agatha Christie was a best-selling mystery writer who penned classics like Murder on the Orient Express and who pretty much defines the genre for a lot of people. Like the Half-Life of mystery novels or something. So Agatha Christie and/or classic point-and-click adventure game fans should be happy to know that AWE Games and The Adventure Company are releasing a series of games based on Christie's work, starting this fall with the classic And Then There Were None.
The setting is much like the book: a group of people are lured to a sprawling mansion on a lonely island, only to find that their host is nowhere to be found and each of them is revealed are guilty of some unpunished crime. Then things really start to get interesting as, one by one, the guests succumb to murder -- murder most foul. Your job as a new character who did not appear in the books is to unravel the clues about the murderer's (or murderers') identity before you get greased, too.
Those who have read the books won't automatically shout, "You fools! So-and-so did it! The clues are so obvious!" Actually, they might, but they'd probably be wrong. The game's plot varies enough from the book's so that even Agatha Christie fans will find it engaging. In fact, there are many alternate endings planned for And Then There Were None, depending on how you progress through the game. Players can unlock an ending that re-creates what happened in the book, but their game experiences are pretty much guaranteed to differ.
As far as gameplay goes, if you're familiar with traditional adventure game conventions, you'll slip right into And Then There Were None quite easily. It all appears to be there: exploration, environmental puzzles, inventory puzzles, mining dialog for clues, et cetera. The pre-rendered graphics and the character models looked pretty good, just as you would expect them to in a modern game of this type. If you're itching for a traditional adventure game with a murder mystery plot, this appears to be just your thing. Look for it in fall 2005.