So it took me seven years, a college degree, and two jobs, but — I finished recapping the Nancy Drew games. The main ones, anyway. I have the Dossier games but never installed them, and I intend to do them some day, but not today. Probably not tomorrow, either.
So! Let’s conclude with an overall listing of these games and how I rank them. This is purely subjective — I mean, I tried to take shit like nonsensical plotting or bad dialogue into account, but overall, this is really just a list of the games in the order that I like them best. I should probably mention, too, that with the exception of like The Shattered Medallion, I enjoy all the games in this series. Even you, Creature of Kapu Cave. Even you.
Also, watch out for spoilers, if you care about that sort of thing.
—. Secrets Can Kill (Original)
Does this even count as a game? Really, I don’t think it’s fair to rank this one against the other games in the series because it is just so clearly HER’s first effort. The graphics are bad. The sound is bad. They hadn’t established — or considered establishing — a personality for Nancy yet, so all of the dialogue is really stiff and robotic, and none of her questions are woven into any kind of conversational format with the suspects. The plot is tonally very different from the rest of the series — Nancy doesn’t touch murder again until 2012, in The Deadly Device, and when she does, it’s with a very different take on the subject. This game treats Jake Rogers’s death with absolutely zero gravitas — everyone spends all their time talking about how much they hated this guy who just got brutally murdered, and the game never bothers to convey the danger Nancy’s in through its music or environment. The culprits are cartoonishly incompetent — and ultimately the real villain isn’t even one of our suspects — and the whole thing is resolved in a deus ex machina revelation that ends with Nancy watching the police tackle the culprit from afar. Like, if we’re not close enough for the culprit to strangle us with their bare hands, is it even a Nancy Drew game?
The puzzles are okay, but get a special mention for being integrated very oddly. They don’t show up in realistic places at all; instead, you do things like spell Nancy’s name out in a jukebox or notice different colored letters on a diner sign. This feels more like a Carmen Sandiego or Cluefinders game, where the puzzles are put in the environment, and the characters don’t notice or comment on them, and the player isn’t necessarily supposed to think that the puzzle-filled environment has anything to do with the story.
I want to forgive most of that because those seem like inevitable pitfalls for an introductory game released in 1998, and the game itself is solidly mediocre. The plot is really weird and the puzzles aren’t integrated well, but overall the game makes it from start to finish without too much convoluted weirdness or face-stabbing frustration — with the exception of the disc-switching, which again, I want to forgive because of the 1998-ness of it all.
What I remember from the one and only time I’ve played this game was that it was okay, but the disc-switching killed (ha ha) my desire to ever even attempt to play it again. The ’90s were such a dark time for technology that actually ranking it last seems unfair, but the game still isn’t good enough to be worth the effort of replaying and evaluating it on its own merits. The original Secrets Can Kill…exists. That’s pretty much all I can say about it.
MED earns the honor of last place because it actively sucks, by which I mean it is not at all hemmed in by the limitations of ’90s technology or a company on its first game, and yet it still is a mess. I mentioned above that Secrets Can Kill, for all its flaws, manages to move its story from point A to point B fairly simply and clearly. MED doesn’t even manage that, and that’s before we get to the nonsensical dialogue, the weirdness of the plot itself, the boring puzzles, and the anticlimactic ending. Where to start with this game?
So first of all, can we talk about how Nancy Drew is apparently the winner of a reality TV show now? Way to keep a low profile. That’s just the start of “things that they clearly didn’t think through when writing”. The reality TV setting is incredibly half-assed, which is a rarity for these games. Usually the games attempt to provide some educational value along with the mystery, and creating a sideplot about the history of the environment allows the creators to do some research and adds to the richness of the game. In this game, however, they didn’t much bother with that, leading to a game whose central premise makes no sense. The stupidity of the game feels pointless when you consider that nothing in this game is functioning the way that it should. Like, the whole “using a reality TV show to hunt for aliens” was never going to be a top 10 Nancy Drew plot, but maybe something about it — the constraints the characters are under, the characters themselves — might have been written more tightly with some actual research.
Speaking of characters: they’re all nonsensical and boring, but I want to especially acknowledge Kiri for being a walking cringe of what the writers think trash talk sounds like. Her mood swings from friend to villain were abrupt and also pointless — like, I’m hunting for aliens here, Kiri, I do not CARE that you broke our alliance (which only lasted for five minutes anyway). Every conversation with her was awkward at best and I was actively cringing at worst.
The scenery is really beautiful, so much so that I didn’t hate my life while I was actually playing the game. The dialogue and puzzles were annoying even then, though, and trying to write out the plot in the recap really just made it clear how little sense the game makes. The two plots — reality TV and aliens — never really come together in a way that makes sense, and the reality TV challenges and tasks become a drag within the first five minutes. Actually, the mystery solving itself is also a drag. I think I multitasked and watched Hart of Dixie on my phone while I was playing this game the first (and only) time.
31. Secrets Can Kill (Remastered)
So if you thought that perhaps there was a good game hiding in the OG Secrets Can Kill, waiting to be set free from its 1998 game engine — the remaster proves you wrong. It’s not good. Admittedly, the actual plot is probably beyond saving, given how unlike the rest of the games it is, but damn is it boring. Basically, you wander around solving puzzles and occasionally having awkward dialogue with the suspects (that they did not bother to improve from the original game) until you’ve solved enough puzzles to find a MacGuffin that triggers the end of the game. The culprit still comes out of left field, but I mean, you can actually talk to him in the game now, so there’s that.
Still, it got rid of most of the worst aspects of the original game (one disc! one disc! USA! USA!), and as mentioned above, it manages to drag the player from point A to point B without too much stupidity, which makes me rank it above MED. But only barely.
I initially ranked Ransom of the Seven Ships a little higher, because I was thinking, “You know, the scenery’s nice, the twist is fun, and I’ve never had a problem with that fruit-throwing game, so I might give this game some points.” Then I remembered the fucking sailing, and the long minutes I spent fruitlessly pressing arrow keys, watching a 2D boat zip around an endless and unchanging blue screen, while the compass needle spun pointlessly around no matter which direction I was going.
Yeah, this game is bad. We can talk to exactly two people on the island besides our friends: one (1) human man, who is so obviously our culprit I can’t believe we have to play an entire game to accuse him; and one (1) parrot. Why they thought a talking animal would spice up a game that otherwise only has one interactive character, I do not know. Also, I hated the talking bird thing the first time they did it, so I was in no way enthused to see it pop up again here. Then you have the tedious activity of running all over the island/sailing all over creation to put together a bunch of random objects, with nary another soul to talk to. Oh, and also the island is apparently run by monkeys who mockingly best you at all activities you try, and they can also kill you at several points during the game. WHY. I love the sheer batshittery of bringing back Dwayne Powers — all the way from 1999! — and the treasure mystery is otherwise classic Nancy Drew, but the game makes it so irritating to solve that I overall do not care.
Also, holy shit, can we discuss the graphic design? Can we discuss Bess’s face? The poor girl did not deserve that.
29. White Wolf of Icicle Creek
I actually like the environment of this game a lot, but Fox and Geese is the bane of my entire existence. You might be like, “Is that one minigame enough to kill your entire enjoyment of ICE?” and…yes. Yes, it is. The experience of playing Fox and Geese pretty much encapsulates the problem with this game, which is that it is tedious as all hell. Every chore and minigame has to be completed several times over, multiple times a day. When you do manage to leave the lodge, you can barely be outside for ten minutes before Nancy starts freezing to death (and then you have to complete another minigame to get some heating packs).
That soul-sucking experience sadly isn’t compensated by the rest of the game. The suspects range from mildly entertaining (Yanni, Ollie) to extremely boring (everyone else). Special mention of Guadalupe Comillo, who you can manage to bring out of hiding for exactly one (1) conversation before she drops out of the game, if you play it wrong (or right, depending on your tolerance for wispy-voiced women who are obsessed with wolves). The titular wolf is cool, but I dunno, I’ve never really been a wolf girl.
I do like the setting — the lodge is very homey and fun to explore — and Yanni the wolf-hating fake-country patriotic bomb-setting cross-country skier cracks me up. Everything else about this game, though, kills me softly.
I might be ranking this game so comparatively high because it takes place on Hawaii and I spent large chunks of my youth in Hawaii, so I’m really into any media set there. I also like that it avoids the “island paradise!” concept and digs into Hawaii as a base for competing scientific facilities that don’t always have the locals’ best interest in mind. I mean, it doesn’t do it well, but I appreciate the effort.
Anyway, like the games above (below?) it, this game’s problem is how insanely tedious it is. Do you know how long it takes, in real time, to wait for the GPS screen animation to play, select Three Finger Rock, walk through like three screens to get to where Dr. Quigley is, only to be told to turn around and go back to camp to get her stuff? And then you have to walk all the way back and to her again, and she tells you to go back because you forgot something? This happens like three times. I nearly lost my damn mind.
The titular kapu cave also has a “mystical Hawaiian” vibe that’s incongruous with the “shady laboratories” aspect of the rest of the plot — what plot we manage to eke out in between all the various tasks and traveling around we have to do. The game hints at some really interesting things about the suspects, but they never actually get resolved, because we’re too busy sorting bug poop. I swear.
27. The Curse of Blackmoor Manor
Hahahaha, I hate this game. I know a lot of people consider it one of the best — if not the best — Nancy Drew game, but not I, you guys. Not I. Really, my main issue is how goddamn ugly it is. I don’t want to spend a single minute in a mansion that looks, as one of the characters puts it, “like it was decorated by a medieval monkey.”
But for real, though: this game is tonally very weird. It’s supposedly a spooky game — a woman thinks she’s turning into a werewolf, shady cloaked figures wander the hall at night, we find a maze hidden under the mansion’s floors — but each scary event is interspersed with shit like pulling the arms of a garish green dragon decoration and finding little glow-in-the-dark smiling ghosts scattered through the castle. As mentioned, all this spooky shit goes down in a mansion with the interior color scheme of a preschool. The characters are okay but not particularly memorable. Also, this was the first introduction of a talking bird as a character, which someone incorrectly thought was cute enough to bring back for another game.
I mean, I guess this game is solidly plotted and everything — I can’t hate it for being tedious or having shitty navigation — but I just am not entertained by any of the characters, I’m not interested in alchemy, and 12 years of Catholic school ruined Latin for me. This game just isn’t my cup of tea.
26. Message in a Haunted Mansion
Bias alert: I’m from San Francisco, and I’m just salty because this game doesn’t portray my hometown in a way that specifically caters to me. LOL. Seriously, though, SF has some of the best known Victorian houses in the US, and they…didn’t even bother to use a picture of one.
There’s some cool edutainment stuff about the city’s seedy history — props on basing large parts of the game around Chinese-Americans in 19th-century California, all those Laurence Yep books I read in grade school really paid off — and the game manages to pull off some spooky events despite its technical limitations. Otherwise, the characters are all pretty boring, and the central mystery (hidden historical treasure being the reason for a bunch of household accidents) is nothing special. Since this was only the third game released, the graphics are still pretty poor and the navigation is rough, making this game overall forgettable on a good day.
25. Last Train to Blue Moon Canyon
Another day, another dead guy turns out to have left hidden treasure that is the cause behind a bunch of shady shenanigans happening in the present day. Snore. The Hardy Boys appear in this game and pretty much only serve to drag Nancy Drew down — HER hadn’t quite decided to go all in on the multiple-POV thing yet, so you only play as Frank for one (1) cooking minigame, and Nancy pulls everyone’s combined weight for the rest of it.
The train environment is really gorgeous, but all we do there is wander around picking metal pieces off the floor and solving puzzles. After the initial disappearance of Lori, very little action or spooky shit happens on the train, which seems like a missed opportunity — can you imagine the environment of being in a small, enclosed space, hurtling towards an unknown destination, with an unknown thief or kidnapper? Chills.
Instead, we end up in the depressing mine town of Copper Gorge, and find out that our culprit was after some corny letter written from the dead guy to Abraham Lincoln. We have some interesting suspects in this game, but we spend a lopsided amount of time talking to the two most boring ones (Lori and Tino). There’s also an offensive amount of puffy zip-up vests in this game. It doesn’t do it for me, I’m afraid.
24. Danger by Design
Aw, man. I want this game to be better than it is. I’m interested in fashion and Paris is a promising location for a mystery, but this game just…totally wastes its premise. Like, can we talk about how bizarre it is? The concept, revolving around Parisian history and the world of high fashion, is so rich — but it’s executed in a garish environment of ugly park statues and poorly-dressed suspects with bad dye jobs and weird hobbies not at all related to fashion. Nobody even bothers to cut Nancy’s mom jeans down to her face. And then there’s the ending, which is just…I mean, who came up with that “fight” scene? Let’s not even get into how the culprit is working for former East German spies. Does anyone in this game’s target audience even remember East Germany?
There’s an energy to the game that actually makes it pretty fun to play, with some great moments scattered here and there: skin-diving in the Parisian sewer system is a fantastic use of the environment (I’ll ignore how deeply gross that would probably be in real life), and the moulin is very atmospheric. I love a good food-making game too, and creating several layers of ice cream and choosing different toppings is one of the better time-wasters in these games. But this game has a similar problem to The Shattered Medallion, in that the writers clearly didn’t bother doing much research on the fashion industry. Who the hell would ever invite Jean Michel Traquenard to Fashion Week? Honestly.
I wrote a 10k+ word recap on this game and I honestly don’t remember that much about what happens in it. As one of the later games to come out, it has an advantage in the graphics department — the tomb is stunning, and the Egyptian desert is impressively rendered in a way that they definitely could not have pulled off in the mid-2000s. I’m always here for a story about the seedy underbelly of academia, so the game delivers in that area for me, but then…eh. I get bored wandering around somehow translating hieroglyphics with nothing but a “Ancient Egyptian for Dummies” book. The game spends a lot of time hinting at the villain’s motive and dancing around what he’s up to and MAYBE this thing is happening and it sure looks like this thing is happening but we’re not going to actually say that it is. Except then we’re going to pretend like we did and play off the end of the game like that. It’s confusing, dudes.
Oh, and also F this game for introducing the BS aliens plotline that pops up in The Shattered Medallion. Guilty by association.
This is an alarmingly short game, judging by the fact that there are only two parts of the recap instead of three. Some of the puzzles — like the “Baldo Mathias” gravestone — are really juvenile, especially when held up next to the more mature later games in the series. I also don’t care much for the birdwatching or wandering around the woods trying to find worms. That said, I really enjoy zipping around the lake, and there’s a coziness to the environment in the daytime and a creepiness at night that’s really fun and immersive. Also I’m super into Jeff Akers even though he’s a weirdo uptight park ranger killjoy. Don’t judge me.
Also, this has nothing to do with the quality of the game itself — and was purely unintentional, given that it came out in 2002 — but the evocation of Sarah Palin in every aspect of Em’s character bumped it up in my ranking by like, at least two places.
21. Danger on Deception Island
Props for the stunning and accurate depiction of Pacific Northwest weather — I’ve mentioned that I’m from San Francisco, and I also lived in Oregon for some time, so I’m super into fog. I think it’s homey! No props for the clamming, Hilda Swenson making us do her bidding from an island away, or once again basing the plot of a game around the former Soviet Union. This game has beautiful environments, some nice puzzles, and a tense ending sequence, but running around solving Hilda’s puzzles while she condescends to us over the phone really kills the whole middle third of it for me.
20. The Silent Spy
This is an actually excellent game that lands in the bottom half of the ranking because I so deeply dislike its core premise. The various locations around Scotland are well-drawn and beautiful, and the cast is full of snarky and shady figures who are all great fun to interact with. The dialogue manages to be emotional without verging into corny — corniness has always been a weakness of this series, so it’s great to see it avoided here when dealing with a heavy subject like a parent’s death — and there are some really elegant, poignant lines.
I just…can’t get over Nancy’s mom being a spy. It’s just too outlandish for the scope of the series’ canon. The idea that a large government organization has been watching Nancy places the games into some wider universe that I’m not comfortable with Nancy occupying. I can’t help but think they could’ve accomplished a similar emotional story by having Nancy find out some other secret about her mom that wasn’t “She was actually an international spy murdered by bioterrorists.” I feel dumb just writing that sentence.
19. Treasure in the Royal Tower
This entry is going to be wildly different from my reactions in the recap — in the 5 (lol) years since I wrote that recap, I’ve really come around on this game. Real talk, the first time you break into the library through the vents is so fun and tense and atmospheric — it actually makes me want to live in the game’s environment for that bit. Exploring the castle is fun, which is good because the actual motivation for doing so — trying to find Marie Antoinette’s journal — is a bit tepid; this game is like peak “Nancy comes up with a bullshit reason to find treasure from 200 years ago which also leads us to the culprit.”
I can’t get much into Dexter Egan’s tragic background — miss me with that garden in the back of the castle, I straight up do not care. That said, it’s cute how we slowly become friends with him over the course of the game. The rest of the characters range from bland to unintentionally funny — Lisa is every sassy career woman from a ’90s movie — but I can’t complain about lines like “It’s all soooo 18th C.”
Plus, like, this game uses a harpsichord in its soundtrack. I love me a good harpsichord.
Why do I like this game so much? I know, I know, that it’s full of busywork and the characters are uninspired and Oklahoma is not the most exotic of locales, and yet — I dig it. The chores are many, but they’re pretty fun and more importantly, have a very real vibe to them. Even when doing the most mundane shit, I somehow have this feeling of, “Fuck yeah, I am a storm chasing intern right now.” I also get a perverse joy out of popping down to Pa’s general store and needling him about his dead wife. This game is mediocre, but I have too much fun inhabiting its world to really hate it.
The more I think about this game, the more I actually like it. I like the mildly depressing, gray desolation of the closed amusement park; I like Harlan Bishop’s OTT Joisey accent; I like the puzzles and central carousel story. The little subplots about insurance money and Harlan’s shady past tie up neatly and give a little extra life to the game, too.
Just…Joy. Joy and that dumbass weirdly sentient robot that she keeps in her office. What the fuck was up with that? Oh, and also Paula Santos kicking us off the case every time the culprit tried to murder us. Between her and Joy needing my emotional support every five minutes, my patience got stretched real thin.
16. The Secret of the Old Clock
Oh, wow, in my original write-up I said that this game was in my top 5 Nancy Drew games, and here it is, just barely in the top half of the ranking. I think I might have given a lot of weight to the fact that I love the culprit so much, but honestly — the central plot of this game makes no damn sense. As mentioned above, “quirky rando leaves a bunch of puzzles after his death for no good reason” is not a favorite trope of mine, so Josiah Crowley’s weird passion for riddles unlocked by endless mini golf games does nothing for me.
Things I do love: the ’30s setting is SO FUN; every little quirk from the phone operators to the telegram delivery delights me. Speaking of the telegrams, the driving mechanism eventually turns into a pain in the ass in later games, but Titusville is super charming and all the little voiceovers that play when we visit the various residents are full of fun references. I also live for Jane Willoughby, the morally bankrupt sidekick from a ’30s screwball comedy who got lost and ended up in a Nancy Drew game. The core plot — the culprit gaslighting Emily to steal her house — is really excellent and creepy. Sadly, the plot that we spend most of the game on, “old man obsessed with cross-dressing and mini golf”, sounds better on paper than it works in reality.
15. Legend of the Crystal Skull
The setting of this game is so rich and atmospheric. I love every minute that we spend inhabiting it; it’s just a pity that the plot has no idea what the hell it’s doing. You spend this entire game collecting glass eyeballs. Like, there’s some detours to do some other stuff, but it always comes back to the eyeballs, man. Bruno Bolet’s bizarro puzzles are not at all scary — oOoOoOH he has a bunch of cartoon teeth in his spooky gothic mansion! What even. A lot of those puzzles, as well as other stuff like setting up Lamont’s shop to make him sneeze, were just purely inane — the puzzle version of busywork chores, if you will.
But goddamn does this game render its environment beautifully. I almost like the bits where you play as Bess better — Lamont’s shop and that weirdo secret society we uncover are both really fun. Sometimes I think this game is actually meant to be offbeat and kooky instead of actually scary, which would improve my opinion of its tone a lot — then I remember that it tells you to play it with the lights off at the beginning, so it really just has an inflated sense of its own scariness.
14. The Final Scene
This is such a solid game. I’m not super invested in any of the characters or the plot, but everything about it works really well and it clips along at a great pace. There’s some nice black comedy — Simone ordering a funeral wreath as a PR move, Brady letting our friend die because he wants the theater property for personal branding purposes — that’s pleasantly surprising for a Nancy Drew game. I don’t ever really feel the urge to replay this game, but I can’t think of any faults with it.
I love a good realistic mystery, which Labyrinth of Lies both is and then is so very much not that I half-expected a reveal at the end that we were inhaling carbon monoxide the entire time.
As with all the later games, the environment is beautiful — parts of the museum feel very alive and real, which the game builds on with some of the more realistic tasks we do, like tracking provenance or cross-referencing employee timecards. I like the characters, even though Grigor’s thousand-yard stare is terrifying and Niobe is such a relic of early 2010s twee quirkiness that it’s a little painful, but overall they’re a fun bunch to interrogate. I loved the reveal that they’re all working together in a forgery ring — honestly, it was about time that the suspects were all in on something together, instead of everyone being up to their own individual shady projects.
That fucking underground river, though. Oh, and also the underground ROOM ON FIRE. What was that even.
Don’t @ me. I’ll just get it all out of the way now: the catsuit dancing is bizarre and vaguely uncomfortable, Colin is the wettest blanket these games have ever tried to smother us with, putting together his tesserae almost made me need glasses, and GOD by my tenth restart I was sick of getting zapped by those weird robot security guards. Yeah, this game is weird as hell, but I like it a lot. The interior of the ca’ is gorgeous and its inhabitants are great fun — Helena’s slightly dickish personality and Margherita’s TOTALLY dickish personality both crack me up. As mentioned, Colin is lame, but brutally rejecting him is pretty fun. The spy shit is slightly preposterous, but it’s not as full-on as the plot of The Silent Spy, so I give it a pass. I also dig the random Samantha Quick subplot — I love any sense of continuity these games have, so I enjoyed there actually being consequences to Nancy stealing someone’s identity.
Also, Scopa is the best minigame this series has ever thrown at us. I’d commit crimes for Helena’s burglary ring any day if it meant I could play more Scopa.
11. The Secret of Shadow Ranch
Baby’s first Nancy Drew game! As ever, the game loses me with the whole “find a treasure buried 100 years ago” thing. Also, these games are pretty terrible at romance, and I’m not that interested in Dirk Valentine and Frances Humber’s star-crossed teenage lust. (I am lowkey into Tex and Mary Yazzie’s forbidden rival ranch love, though.)
Apart from that, though, this game is really fun to play: it’s paced nicely — I’m actually really fond of the linear progression through the days, with cutscenes playing when you finish one day, and I wish it was used in more games — and I think there’s a good balance of immersive chores and actual mystery solving. The ghost town is appropriately eerie — finding out that it’s our culprit’s hideout is just icing on the spooky cake — and I dig the rest of the melancholy Southwestern vibes a lot.
Plus like, full confession, I was very much a horse girl at the age of nine, and this game really speaks to that part of me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
10. The Haunting of Castle Malloy
This game has possibly one of the stupidest endings of all the games — maybe the stupidest ending? Ransom of the Seven Ships has a dumb ending, too, but the reappearance of Dwayne Powers saves it for me. The moment Nancy puts on that stupid jetpack, my suspension of disbelief is ruined, and then we find out that the culprit is some feral old jetpack woman. It’s so incredibly dumb. I get annoyed just thinking about it.
But! I do love the rest of the game; I love the setting — the run-down, open space of the castle design captures the melancholy of the characters’ backstory very well, and the outer environments are really lush and atmospheric. This was the first game, I feel, to really commit to having drama between the suspects that we have to uncover, which felt very sleuthy and realistic to me. Like, yeah, in what universe does Kyler Mallory have two guys fighting over her, but it makes for some great drama.
By the way, assuming their marriage hasn’t collapsed over their trust issues, Matt’s immaturity, and Kyler’s total lack of personality, Matt and Kyler will have celebrated their 10th anniversary this year. Chew on that for a bit.
09. Warnings at Waverly Academy
Another game that I claimed would end up higher than it actually does. My bias towards this game is purely for the setting: as I mentioned in the recap, I went to an all-girls’ high school in the late 2000s, so this game is BASICALLY tailor-made for me and is an accurate depiction of my teenage years. JK, but really, I’m a big sucker for “undercover at a high school” stories. I like fish out of water stories a lot, so the core concept — the detective setting foot into an environment with a bunch of set social groups and hierarchies that they’re totally unfamiliar with — pushes all my buttons. Waverly Academy is really pretty, too — lots of dark woods and a cozy library surrounded by a forest that eventually gets blanketed in snow. The cast of characters is full of wacky students who are hiding petty drama and dark secrets — yeah, the constant pawning off of their chores is annoying, but they’re pretty fun once you get past their requests for snacks and get down to gossiping with them.
The actual mystery is pretty tepid — we eventually end up searching for treasure from 100 years ago, as usual, and honestly not even with the commitment that we threw into looking for Dirk Valentine’s gold or anything. Nancy was getting tired, I guess.
08. Sea of Darkness
I’m not a huge fan of any particular element of this game, but everything about it comes together beautifully and makes for a cohesive, well-paced game. The environment is actually stunning — the Northern Lights, the dark skies, the snow, the main streets…the sadness and heavy melancholy in this game is, like, visible in the empty landscape and dark surroundings and it’s incredibly immersive. The dialogue is entertaining, even if I’m neutral on the actual characters (except Dagny, who I adore). A really solid, really beautiful game.
I love this game, and I’ll fight everyone about it. Despite being only the second game, it has pretty much zero of the issues that plagued Secrets Can Kill: the puzzles are all integrated well and the culprit is actually someone we can talk to. The mystery comes together neatly, as every step we take points us more and more towards one person, while the other clues we find are revealed to be red herrings. While I sometimes love the open-endedness of later games, the fact that this game leaves very few of its questions unanswered is really satisfying. Mattie and Millie are both kind of forgettable, and Rick is not memorable in a good way, but LILLIAN. God, I love Lillian and her cheekbones.
And honestly, Dwayne Powers is actually an icon. It can’t be denied.
06. Secret of the Scarlet Hand
Is this the best of the classic-era games? I think it might be. Again, it relies on “realistic” mystery solving like calling various museums and checking on our supply of cinnabar, and I love it all. Every minute that we spend on the phone trying to get another jade carving only makes my envisioning of myself as Robert Redford in All the President’s Men stronger. I could do without Taylor Sinclair — who’s basically just a recycled version of Louis in MHM — but I otherwise love the various characters we interact with throughout the game, and in my heart I still believe Alejandro and Joanna had a torrid affair.
I do kind of hate that “match the audio files to the display case” puzzle, but I also always use a walkthrough for it, so whatever.
As I go down my list, I’m discovering that I really love when a game throws a twist about a suspect at you — instead of just trolling around looking for treasure, I like when we go digging for information about suspects, or when we’re looking through their stuff, and we find out something that makes us question whether or not we can trust this person. Calling Anja’s past employers only to find out that she lied about her previous job to get into Castle Finster is the kind of shit I live for, as is the bonus reveal that Renate’s sister was kidnapped in the woods decades ago. Like a lot of later games, this game has a wonderful, palpable sense of tension: Karl’s fear that his bad luck has brought the monster to the castle, Anja’s web of lies obscuring her real personality, Renate’s creepy-ass stories covering for her personal tragedy. And then there’s Lukas, who’s mostly comic relief but also has a sad story in his own way. Castle Finster is a gorgeous setting for all this to play out — I’m not a huge fan of castles and mansions as settings, but it’s territory that HER knows well, so at least I can rely on them always being well-drawn and fun to explore.
I don’t even mind the Ned subplot — I’m a total Ned apologist, and I like the later games’ tendency to try and give Nancy a little bit of a personality and life back in River Heights instead of making her a pure player proxy. Joe trying to get them back together also gives me life. Not even your own brother wants you to get with Nancy, Frank.
Nancy Drew got dark with this game, and it honestly worked so well. There’s so much to love about it — the spooky atmospheric plantation house, the incredibly dark secrets surrounding the Thornton family, the family themselves. I love every character — Wade “Pretty Philosophical For a Guy Wearing Boots” Thornton, Jessalyn and Colton and their sad un-love affair, Clara and her icy personality masking a tragic past, and especially my girl Harper. Props for making her so humorous and quirky and yet managing to hold it in check to let the game do its spooky thing. Each of the characters have a hand in their family’s dark past, and it makes for some really affecting and unsettling discoveries during the game. As I mentioned, I like a bit of open-endedness — the fact that the game only hints at some disturbing things about the Thorntons and leaves you to figure it out makes the game feel mature and ominous compared to other “spooky” games in the series.
That said, the “carbon monoxide” explanation for everything is a bit dumb, but I let it slide because of the rest of the game is so excellent.
03. Shadow at the Water’s Edge
Both SAW and GTH are really successful at pulling off a spooky atmosphere, which to be totally honest has not always been something these games are good at. That said, I think SAW is the only one that actually manages to feel like a horror game. Holy fuck, the ryokan is terrifying. The abandoned saunas, the slowly emptying rooms that are revealed to be connected, the palpable sense that the Shimizus have a secret…and then, outside the ryokan, there’s the eerie text messages and the sense that the culprit is following and watching us while we’re alone in Yumi’s apartment. Spooky, spooky shit.
I love the dialogue and all the characters, especially Rentaro, my evil deer-impersonating boyfriend, and Miwako the emotionally repressed Tina Belcher lookalike. YMMV on whether or not the dialogue is funny, but I think it is, so I’m impressed with the way the game manages to pull off both comedy and horror without losing a sense of cohesiveness overall. There’s a lot of touching, well-written dialogue about grief and guilt — say what you will, but the later Nancy games have a really excellent grasp of emotional weight and catharsis, see also GTH, SPY, and SEA — and I don’t even mind that it’s delivered in the jankiest accents ever.
If there is a fault to this game, it’s that A) I fucking hate math, miss me with all those nonograms, and B) it’s a little sprawling; good God do we spend a lot of time going down extraneous conversation trees when we’re just trying to get Savannah to send us a book or whatever. These faults feel very minor, though, in the overall picture of how much I love this game.
Plus, that bento puzzle is fun as hell. I could put together rice balls shaped like bunny heads all day long!
02. Alibi in Ashes
This game marries together all of my favorite things: a strong sense of internal continuity and Nancy as an actual character, solving the mystery through note-taking and phone conversations, and my girl Deirdre Shannon. Nancy’s hometown is so charmingly designed and fun to explore, and all its residents are delights to interact with. Like, they’re also all assholes, but that just makes them more fun. The game is hilariously self-aware of how insufferable Nancy would probably be in real life, and its willingness to portray the protagonist as a nice but kind of self-righteous pearl-clutcher makes me respect it a lot.
Switching characters is kind of a pain in the ass, but so are half the puzzles in these games, so whatever, honestly. I love that each character will elicit a different reaction from our suspects — real talk, these games don’t have much replay value, so the ability to play through as different characters is a boon — and that there’s an intertwined history that comes from all these characters having lived in the same town for years. I love every minute we spend in River Heights, and my only regret is that we can’t become best friends with Deirdre Shannon by the end. Invite me to your parties, Deirdre!
I know Nancy has never been explicitly an edutainment series like Carmen Sandiego, but the games do feel very rooted in that late-’90s/early-2000s genre, so I always dig when that element has a strong presence in a game. It’s very apparent here, in the exploration of a science facility formerly owned by Nikola Tesla. The facility is really beautifully designed, an excellent mix of early 20th century architecture and modern sciencey shit. (Disclaimer: I’m not a designer.) As ever, the realistic mystery solving — combing through security footage and SD cards, relying on our friends to do outside research for us — is a strong point.
I’m a fan of the quirky dialogue present in the later games — most embodied by Ryan Kilpatrick here — so every conversation is really fun, when it’s not getting heavy with deep shit about scientific ethics and existential crises. Oh, and also the murder. That’s a big deal, too. The game finally explores murder again and manages to nail the tone properly this time — the atmosphere is very tense and ominous, but broken with some comedy in the right places.
Mason and Ellie are an excellent asshole duo, and Gray is…kind of just there, but he doesn’t actively offend me so whatever. The twist with the culprit was also really novel and shocking at the time — I don’t know if they would have tried the same twist again if the games had continued but as it is, it remains unique in the series — and I enjoy it a lot.
Finally: this game contains Deirdre Shannon, love of my life and provider of helpful clues and excellent zingers. Every conversation with her gives me life. I love, love how fleshed out and smart she is, how she provides Nancy with information that Nancy can’t look up herself. She’s such a strong supporting character and absolutely seals the deal on how much I love this game. I mean, I’d still like it without her, but she is the best part of an already well-put together story.
Do I actually dislike anything about this game? There are a couple of continuity snags — Nancy and Ellie both get locked in the facility and straight up never mention it to each other — and some of the puzzles would probably kill me if I didn’t use a walkthrough to blow through them and get to the meaty story bits. Also, fuck Frank Hardy trying to use Nancy’s near-death experience to get in her pants. But overall, I enjoy the story too much to mind any of this. Deadly Device is fantastic, such a great mix of the later games’ depth and humor while still being connected to the series’ early roots. A+++, would let Deirdre Shannon mock our potential brain damage again.
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