(What do you mean Suchet's backed out at the last minute? But we've got those photos of him in that sauna in Frankfurt… Yes, I know I'm meant to be in charge of organising the guest reviewer but… Well there's no time for that now, someone's just clicked on and wants to read it… I'll have to try and do it myself. If I can just get the voice right then perhaps no one will notice… Okay, sharp suit... check... comical Belgian accent... check... fake, waxed moustache... double check. Alright 'ere we go…

Mesdames et Messieurs. Ze reason zat I 'av called you all togezer like zis is because not long ago a crime was committed and, after my investigation most thorough, it is the belief of Poirot that ze one who carried out zis act most heinous may be among us at zis very moment. I 'ad come to Egypt for a vacation; a cruise down ze waters of ze Nile seemed like ze perfect tonic to relax both ze body and ze mind; because nowadays, ze little grey cells don't re-energise zemselves as easily as zey once did. Yet no sooner 'ad I made myself comfortable on zis wondrous vessel zan my constitution was required to be at its stiffest and my powers of deduction at zeir sharpest, as Monsieur Simon and Madame Linnet Doyle, a pair of young people seemingly in ze first blushes of love, suffered not one but two tragic events. Firstly, Monsieur Doyle was shot in ze leg by Mademoiselle Jacqueline de Bellefort, the woman he 'ad jilted for 'is new bride, and zen, only hours later, 'is wife was killed in 'er cabin by a single bullet to ze head. Since zen I 'ave occupied every waking second trying to unravel zis mystery most complex. But it was only a short time ago zat I realised zat I 'ad been operating under a foolish misconception, and zat I 'ad been playing a deadly game in all ze worst possible senses of ze words.

Alright, I'm sorry. I can't do this any more. This was never going to work. I'm taking off the stupid wig and false pot belly and starting this review properly... Oh wait, the pot belly appears to be mine...

Here's a question for you. Who invented the mini-game? Answers on a postcard please to AceGamez. The prize is a rare copy of one of Agatha Christie's lesser known works, Murder on the Manchester Ship Canal in which Hercule Poirot tires to work out whether it was Noel Gallagher, Sir Alex Ferguson, Joy Division, Burt Kwouk or Terry Christian who killed Curly Watts. It's a gripping read.

The thing about mini-games is that they're so frequently used by companies nowadays that removing them would leave some videogame heavyweights out of a job. Imagine the queue outside your local employment office snaking around the block with the likes of the Raving Rabbids and Wario being forced to 'shake it' in some seedy nightclub just to make ends meet. It wouldn't make for a pretty sight. Thanks to Oberon Games, even the world's greatest detective, the man who cracked the murder on the Orient Express, has decided to hop on this gravy train to re-solve one of his most famous cases; but the real mystery here is who will get anything more than minimal enjoyment out of the experience.

Now, it's important to remember that Death on the Nile is very much a casual adventure game and it would be completely unfair to criticise it for not being something more than this. As such, it doesn't have high-end graphics and sound or a huge amount of different gameplay options (it just has the one mystery to solve; the murder of Linnet Doyle that our friend, Hercule, gave us the set up to above). Despite all of this, Death on the Nile isn't without its virtues. The main case is considerately divided up into twelve smaller investigations, each of which gives you twenty-five minutes to search amongst the clutter in a handful of the twenty-four rooms on the S.S. Karnak for items that are then either eliminated from matters or revealed as important clues. It's simple Where's Wally style gameplay that caters well to the pick up and play market it's aimed at and it's exactly the kind of thing that someone walking past you at your computer will pull up a chair to join in with.

Rather than alienating its target audience by being too rigid or punishing, the game almost does itself an injury by straining to display the kind of flexibility that casual players appreciate, continually bending over backwards to provide guidance and assistance with its challenges. You can wander back and forth between rooms as you wish, request up to five hints to pinpoint objects that still need to be found, and pause time whenever you want for as long as you want. In any event, the clock stops dead during the bonus puzzle rounds that complete each level or when you decide to examine clues or question some suspects in the saloon - and at these points the game even highlights those individuals that are worth interrogating and leads you, via Poirot's notebook, through the possible questions you can ask them. The difficulty curve is smooth, slowly increasing the number of rooms and items from one investigation to the next and, if you fail a section, giving your enquiries a much better chance of proceeding the second time around by varying some, but not all, of the objects on your list. At around six to eight hours in length and at a price that puts it firmly in the budget range, the game even seems like good value for money.

In fact, the way that Death on the Nile, quite rightly, issues a thirty second penalty every time your clicking with the mouse stems more from desperation than deliberation is about the only obviously non-player friendly feature - at least that's the way it initially seems. The trouble is, however, that it's not very long before you discover the game's major problem: it's boring. We've all come across titles before that are just a collection of mini-games bundled together, but Death on the Nile has taken just one of these, saddled it up with a licence and tried to pass it off as a full release. It's not even a one trick pony - it's a one trick miniature pony. The slightness of the central idea is something you notice as early as the second investigation, which not only resorts to asking you to look in most of the same rooms as before but also for some of the same items.

These limitations are further compounded by the ones that the game itself imposes by always keeping the same objects in the same places and, if you have to repeat a level, always requiring that the same clue items are found to drive the same plot forwards. Not content with presenting every room that you have to search as a veritable curiosity shop, where exotic and obscure objects are piled high and strewn across the screen, Death on the Nile resorts to a variety of tactics to try and distract from its shortcomings. The colour or size of items can vary in order to camouflage them, or they might be placed in unexpected positions - a paintbrush, for example, doubling as part of the stand for a lamp. There are times when the game even resorts to more desperate measures, making things that you need to find almost indistinguishable parts of other objects, like pictures on walls and, at one point, hiding an item in a dark wardrobe that is located right at the back of a scene. The descriptions the of objects that you have to find also periodically seem deliberately imprecise; a 'Man of Steel' turns out to be a suit of armour and requests like the one that simply states 'rhyme for cradle' appear born out of the fact that the game has run out of ideas. In a title that isn't far removed from completing a jigsaw puzzle, it quickly becomes irritating when you start to suspect that the game is deliberately hiding the pieces from you down the back of the sofa. Perhaps the way in which the hints system work is the game's acknowledgement of its slightly underhand methods; a silent admission that "there are a few of these we really don't expect you to get."

Despite being simple, Death on the Nile sometimes lets you down by failing to register when you click on an item or not explaining clearly what it wants you to do when it tries to make things slightly more exciting by getting you to move objects around. Apart from when you're looking for items as your time is running out, excitement is probably the one thing you'll have to search hardest to find here; Death on the Nile makes its alternative, non-hide-and-seek sections so simple that they become the kind of child's play that it doesn't take Nancy Drew, let alone Hercule Poirot, to figure them out. The bonus puzzle rounds include putting the torn up pieces of a letter back together by moving them around on a grid and an awful chemicals test where you spend ages waving a pipette about. They're all very easy, especially as there are no time constraints and some heavy assists. The questioning suspects portions are even worse, as the game basically leads you through them, doing all of the hard work for you. The limit on the number of questions you can ask is very rarely a concern, as the game tells you which characters to speak to and exactly what to ask them. All you have to do is sit, repeatedly click the mouse, read the unimaginative text (there's no voice acting) and watch events unfold during largely static, 1930s style cut scenes that are so dull that they conspire to leave Christie's brilliantly drawn characters looking more two dimensional than the cardboard cut out style is used in Death on the Nile to depict them, and her twisting plot creaking more than the game's flimsy theatrical sets. It's just a shame there isn't an option to use Poirot's cane to beat a confession out of someone.

Upon reaching our denouement then, it's difficult to know who Agatha Christie: Death on the Nile is actually for. Anyone who doesn't know how the mystery unravels would be better off reading the book or watching its TV adaptation. Anyone who likes puzzles can choose from amongst the many, more well rounded suspects available on the PC. Other Christie books like And Then There Were None and Murder on The Orient Express have been translated into more entertaining adventure games, while both CSI and Law & Order have done this type of title better. There's something unfulfilling about solving crimes with mini-games, which is why Columbo never whips out a balance board from inside his tatty raincoat and why Inspector Morse hung around with Lewis rather than Luigi & Co. By relying primarily on just one of these entertainment hors d'oeuvres, Death on the Nile is so short on ideas that it quickly becomes repetitive and bland, making such stunted use of its source material that it fails to capture even a taste of its excitement or romance. The thing is that, even after all of this, you still can't accuse Poirot of being the guilty party; but by stepping into his shoes in Death on the Nile, you realise who is - the guy who invented the mini-game in the first place.

Reviewed by James Hamblin for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).