LMAO THE HARDY BOYS. Look at Joe’s hair. Is there anything more painfully 2008 than that? I bet he loves All Time Low.
So at the beginning of the year last year, I caught COVID (in 2023, how embarrassing), and spent about two weeks hacking up a lung. That was pretty un-fun, but on the upside, it did give me a couple of weeks to hang around my house and play mystery games. And then it took me another year to finish this post because I’m lazy. But anyway, I played the Hardy Boys game! And I didn’t hate it!
Loath as I am to compliment the Hardy Boys, this game is not bad. Most games recommended as Nancy Drew replacements tend to be unevenly balanced, either being essentially hidden object games without much of the dialogue-and-exploring adventure game aspect, or being visual novels without much in the way of puzzling. This game strikes a pretty good balance between the two and is fun and immersive to play, although tone of the mystery is a little weird, and the game overall lacks some of the polish that makes Nancy series feel complete. We’ll get to those factors later.
We open with a brief recap of the Hardys’ previous adventure, where they’re stealing something from some crime boss who nearly catches them and then they have to jump out of a window yelling, “Geronimo!” They’re such dorks. Also this has nothing to do with the actual story.
We open at the Hardy house, where they’re being yelled at by their mom and Aunt Trudy for getting caught speeding on their motorcycles. As it turns out, though, it’s all a ruse! You know the Hardy Boys would never break traffic laws! (Frank protests “How could you not believe us, we would never” in the flattest, least energized voice ever. The Hardy Boys’ voice acting is overall completely unenthused about being here, which is…not really surprising when you consider that they got Jesse McCartney and Cody Linley as Frank and Joe, respectively. If I were coming off Hannah Montana fame and the masterpiece that is “Leavin’“, I wouldn’t be thrilled about having to be a Hardy Boy, either.)
(By the way, the character designs in the game were also based on what McCartney and Linley looked like in 2008, if you wanted a different real-life visualization for the Hardy Boys than the version with feathered hair. I mean, not that Joe’s hair is much better.)
The “cop” who busts them reveals that he’s actually an agent for ATAC, and he only arrested the Hardys so he could give them their latest assignment. Joe’s like, “Couldn’t you have just dressed up as a delivery guy?” For some reason, they can’t just explain to their mom that the guy is an ATAC agent, so we’ll have to sneak around her later. The guy leaves Frank and Joe a DVD(!) detailing their mission.
So let’s go to our inventory and find the DVD so we can play it. Dig the Comic Sans!
The ATAC dossier explains that a professional burglary has occurred at nearby Spencer Mansion, with the thief making off with a bajillion dollars in bearer bonds. How very Hans Gruber of them. The bonds were stored in an unbreakable safe, thus the thief must have known the combination. And yet, the bonds have not been cashed and there are no signs that the thief has left town. Mysterious! Clearly this is no common criminal, ergo, the only ones who can crack their twisted psyche are two teenage boys. Also Spencer Mansion just so happens to be in Bayport and ATAC doesn’t want to pay to fly anyone in, you feel?
Our next move is to go to Spencer Mansion, but Mom and Aunt Trudy have grounded the Hardys for their supposed motorcycle accident, and the Hardys can’t just explain that it was part of their ATAC mission because silly women have to be protected from the dangers of mystery-solving, even though it’s fine for two high schoolers to be involved. So our first mission is to get the Hardys’ cell phones, which are in their motorcycles in the garage. We have to call Mr. Hardy to explain to Mrs. Hardy that the boys need to be ungrounded to go on their mission, because silly women have to be protected from the dangers of mystery-solving (x2).
If we try to waltz down the stairs, Mom will bust us for sneaking out, so we have to resort to subterfuge. We want to climb out the window, distract Mom and grab the motorcycle keys from the kitchen, then use them to unlock the motorcycles and grab the phones. Obviously, we can’t be both outside the house and in the kitchen at once, so the Hardys have to split up. Joe has to climb out the window and down a tree to get outside, while Frank is responsible for the key-stealing, because apparently Frank has a track record of falling out of trees. Heh. He’s so lame.
The game makes kind of a big deal out of the ability to split the Hardy Boys up, but it’s only necessary once or twice over the course of the game. Unless you absolutely have to, splitting up is pointless and won’t do anything — a lot of the dialogue will proceed as if both brothers are still there; one of their voices will just happen to be disembodied. You also then can’t teleport to another location while the brothers are separated and you can’t switch back into joint-brother mode until they’re physically standing next to each other — so if you, say, ditched Frank and sent Joe on an adventure, you have to manually walk back to where you left Frank to proceed. I learned this the hard way.
I mentioned that this game is less polished than a Nancy game, and the disembodied dialogue is one of the main examples of that (and similarly, what also made the Rosemond Valley game seem less finished) — in Nancy games, doing something the wrong way will result in a game over with specific dialogue; taking alternative paths through the game often results in different dialogue options or optional sidequests. There’s a sense that the devs actually accounted for players not following one specific linear route through the story. In contrast, if you don’t progress the way the game expects you to, a lot of these Nancy-lite games will either stop your progress entirely or will just fumble through the intended dialogue with a bunch of errors like disembodied voices or lines that make no sense out of order.
And then, of course, there’s more than a few typos and leftover developer notes visible in the dialogue and interface.
When Joe goes out the window, he’ll break off a branch (for fuck’s sake, can the Hardys not be incompetent for five seconds) and Aunt Trudy will come out of her room. Frank will run back to the boys’ room in a cutscene (so you don’t have to worry about getting busted by her), and you then have to walk him back out into the hall.
So as Joe, we want to go around the side of the house and play ding-dong-ditch…
Then, as Frank, you sneak downstairs and grab the keys while Mom is distracted. You have to move super quickly (I think I had to position Frank right at the top of the stairs and then immediately go back up the stairs after grabbing the keys), otherwise she’ll come back from the door and catch you. Again, however, there’s no game over — she’ll just lecture you, then you have to go back upstairs and try again.
Much like The Curse of Blackmoor Manor, somebody (wrongly) thought it would be cute to have a talking bird in the game, although at least this one doesn’t give out any plot-important information. Frank uses their parrot (“Playback”) to fly the keys down to Joe, which is mostly funny because every time the boys grab something from their inventory, they’ll say, “I don’t think anyone will miss this”, including when they grab Playback. The Hardy Boys don’t give a fuck about their pet bird.
Keys in hand, as Joe, we can now open up the motorcycle trunks and retrieve our phones. Let’s check our contacts — we can call Fenton (Mr. Hardy), Laura (Mom), Chet (friend of the Hardys), and…Nancy Drew! Let’s see, it’s 2008, so we’d be interrupting Nancy in the midst of either getting hit on by Colin or trying to save Kyler Mallory’s wedding. Eh, so it’s really not a big deal if we distract her.
Our cellphone also has stuff like a task list and journal that will recap some of the events of the game, which is actually pretty useful in terms of keeping track of what’s going on. (Also, per the inventory description: “They play MP3s, too!” The future is now!)
Frank calls Fenton, who lies to their mom that he needs the boys’ help somewhere so she’ll un-ground them. Seriously, is there a reason they can’t just tell their own damn mother they work for ATAC?
Fenton has a weird ’70s cop ‘stache. Also his shirt has way too many buttons open for my comfort. Also what is that camera angle?
The Hardys then make for Spencer Mansion, except they immediately pause so that Joe can rib Frank about some girl he had a crush on over the summer: “How’d you do at [baseball] camp? MVP?” Frank: “I broke my arm the first day, you know that.” Joe: “So you never got to first?” On the one hand, hee. On the other hand, can we please focus? (This is, perhaps, why you shouldn’t ask teenage boys to fight crime.) Then Joe needles Frank about one Lily Spencer, who lives at the mansion and goes to their school. Apparently Lily like-likes Frank, and Joe wants to know if Frank like-likes her back. Jeez, is Callie Shaw dead to these writers?
(Jokes aside, I do think there’s more of a vested interest in keeping Frank single than Joe — if not to tease Frank/Nancy, then because Frank is more likely the brother that the audience has a crush on, since he generally gets into fewer embarrassing situations than Joe. No offense to any Joe girls out there.)
With all the introductory stuff out of the way, Chapter 2 begins. It’s called “Brother Against Brother” perhaps to fool you into think that Frank and Joe are going to fight, but they are not the brothers the title is referring to. Which is a pity, because I’d love to fight Frank Hardy in a game.
Upon arrival at Spencer Mansion, the Hardys promptly run into Officer Con Riley (who the hell names their kid “Con”?), who’s one of their main enablers friends on the police force in the books. He has a few helpful moments in this game but otherwise doesn’t do much.
Following Officer Riley, we immediately meet Samuel Spencer, the victim of the theft. He’s ranting that he’s sure the bearer bonds were stolen by his brother (the stepfather of Lily, Frank’s crush) and how said brother is dead to him forever, etc. Joe awkwardly points out that the Hardys are here on behalf of Samuel’s brother (“Thomas”). They are? I thought ATAC hired them? Whatever.
We’re now free to roam around and interrogate our suspects. Let’s talk to ol’ Samuel here. He tells us that he thinks Thomas’s new wife is a gold-digger and Thomas stole Samuel’s bonds for her; it would’ve been pretty easy since apparently Spencer Mansion’s burglar alarm has been broken since like 1927.
Let’s harass some of our phone friends, right in front of Sam. He’s like 80, there’s no way he can hear us, right?
We can’t talk to anyone about much yet, but let’s run down the list of phone friends anyway. We can call Fenton Hardy, which we already did earlier; we can call Chet Morton, one of the Hardys’ friends, whose defining features are that he’s lol fat (can’t have a children’s detective story without some bodyshaming!) and that his sister, Iola, is Joe’s girlfriend. Iola features pretty prominently in this game, which again makes me question why we’re pretending Callie Shaw doesn’t exist — especially because while neither girl is written with much depth in the books, of the two of them, Callie actually has more screentime across the various series. (She’s promoted to something of a Hardy sidekick in the Files series; the same series casually kills Iola off in the first book, so she never gets any time to shine. RIP.)
Chet doesn’t have much to say yet, although he says he’s going out for a haircut, and we’ll bump into him in town later. Last up is Nancy Drew! Since this game is setting Frank up with Lily Spencer, I guess I can be relieved that Nancy won’t cheat on Ned in this game, right?
Nancy also doesn’t have much to say for now, although she does joke that a theft from a spooky mansion sounds like her kind of case. She also is definitely not voiced by Lani Minella, which I guess makes sense, since this game isn’t tied to HER at all.
We go in and talk to Lily. She and Frank make eyes at each other for a minute while Joe whines about being ignored. Lily of course doesn’t think her dad stole the bonds; she instead tells Frank and Joe that she saw someone suspicious lurking around the utility shed a few weeks ago, who she assumed was just a repairman. She also indicates that her family doesn’t like Samuel much, either; apparently, he acts like he’s doing them a big favor by letting them live on the mansion grounds, which like…I guess he kind of is? Is there a reason these two brothers who hate each other still live together? Is this biting commentary about the 2008 economy?
All in all, Samuel Spencer isn’t Lily’s “favorite person.” Frank: “So, um…who is your favorite person?” Frank, can you focus? Anyway, Lily exposits that her bio dad left when she was very young and she doesn’t know anything about him. Hmm, do you think her father might be important? She very weirdly goes on about how her stepdad is the “sweetest and most loving father a girl could ask for”, which is definitely how teenage girls in the 2000s talked. Joe is mildly suspicious of Lily and Frank is all offended that Joe thinks his waifu might be a criminal.
Enter super-far stage right, Thomas, Sam Spencer’s brother and Lily’s stepfather. He claims not to know anything about the theft, although he admits that Sam gave him the combo to the safe. Thomas is also “strapped for cash” and doesn’t always get along well with Sam — who he claims is paranoid and quick-tempered — although of course he denies that he’d steal from him. Thomas is currently under house arrest since he’s the prime suspect in the theft.
Now, let’s be creepy about Lily! We bring her up and Thomas says, “She’s beautiful, isn’t he?” and Frank says, “She certainly is,” and Thomas is like, “Well, after this is over, maybe I’ll let you take her on a date!” Dude, gross. Also, why are we talking about her like she’s not right there? Then we segue into asking about Thomas’s wife (Lily’s mother) and he mentions that she has polyneuropathy and is wheelchair-bound. We’ll meet her later.
We then move on to snooping around the house. Frank and Joe won’t let us poke around the main room too much, although we can check out this nifty clock over here. We can zoom in on the clock face, so clearly that’s some type of puzzle, and we also see a keyhole off to the side of the clock. If we click on it, though, Frank will note that “It’s locked.”
We go through the door and into Sam Spencer’s office instead. We can’t open any of the drawers yet, but the item of interest is the paper shredder off to the side. Inside, we find a random shredded piece of blank paper. Mysterious! Then we go over to the window, note that it’s been broken — although as Thomas noted, the hole wasn’t big enough for a thief to get through, so this isn’t the point of entry — and pick up a shard of glass.
Let’s call Nancy again, because I always miss out on fun phone conversations when I play adventure games and I’m going to remedy that in this game by simply calling everyone ten times a day. Nancy immediately makes fun of us for calling her twice in one day. Jeez, sorry, Nancy. I wasn’t expecting you to have this much self-awareness, given that this game can’t even tell when Frank and Joe are separated.
We can talk a bit about the case with her, and the name Samuel Spencer rings a bell for Nancy. She says she read about him having a connection to a fire in Bayport once, although she can’t remember the details and figures it’s probably nothing, since Spencer is a common last name. I bet it’s not probably nothing, which is also spoiled for us by the graphics featuring a fire on the loading screen. I will complain about this further in a minute.
Then I call Fenton because I can. He asks Frank and Joe what’s “the haps” and they’re both horrified by their father using youth slang. Hee. We ask Fenton to use his connections to find out stuff about Sam Spencer, which Fenton agrees to do except he’s not going to find out anything that we don’t discover on our own.
Aaand I got a little too overzealous with the up key here. Okay, hang on, I think if I just go forward and kind of to the side, the camera will move over to the window —
Or not. Please stop staring at me like that, Joe.
Several keysmashes later, I finally get the Hardy Boys out of my face and we go outside. We want to talk to Sam Spencer again, who tells us that he writes down a new combination for the safe every day, leaves it on his desk, then shreds it once he has it memorized. He also opens his window every morning for a breeze. You see where this is going. He also tells us that on the day of the break-in, a mysterious salesman came by and Sam briefly left his desk to talk to him.
Now, if you’re smarter than me, you can follow up on that clue by clicking on the blank piece of paper behind the flower pot in the screencap above. For some reason, I was completely incapable of seeing this scrap of paper and wandered around, baffled, for like half an hour looking for it. Every walkthrough I checked was like, “It’s right behind the flower pot!” and I was like WHERE??? HOW???
Embarrassing. Anyway, while I was wandering around, I ran into Officer Riley again, and we had a quick chat about how none of them really think Thomas did it, but all the evidence points to the culprit not having to force their way in, so who else could it be? This is the game is nudging us to figure out how someone who isn’t Thomas could have gotten in the combination, so let’s go back and find that blank piece of paper behind the flower pot.
We go back inside and place the piece of paper on the desk, then we prop the door open with a doorstop (found on the outside of the study, just to the right of the door). We go back outside and a cutscene plays, showing how a breeze lifts the paper right off the desk and out the window, where anyone could’ve found it. The Hardys explain that Sam wrote down the combination, memorized it, but was interrupted by the salesman before he could shred it. While he was talking to the salesman, a breeze blew the paper with the combination out the window, and Sam randomly shredded a blank piece of paper when he got back to his desk. Therefore, anyone who was on the grounds that day could’ve found the combo; ergo, Thomas isn’t guilty and Frank can hit on his stepdaughter without guilt! Maybe not that last part. Officer Riley agrees to lift the house arrest so that Thomas can roam around the grounds.
With that done, we can now also roam around the grounds. We get the above loading screen when we move between most locations, and now, let me tell you about how dumb this is. The asylum and fire referred to in the newspaper are both major plot points, but we don’t find out about them in the game until the final act. The fire is meant to be a reveal that causes a couple of important plot pieces to click into place — but the reveal falls kinda flat because we already knew that it happened from the loading screen. It’s also a little misleading, because you see this loading screen from the very start of the game, so if you expect there to be any kind of arson or fire-related investigations in the first 2/3rds, you’ll be confused and disappointed.
Anyway. Now that we can explore the rest of the grounds, I’ll end this post here. Up next: We meet some more suspects and Joe shoves a pile of mud in his pocket.
Leave a Reply