Nancy Drew: Trail of the Twister

released on Jun 29, 2010

$100,000,000 is at stake in this competition to discover a formula to predict tornado touchdowns. But when equipment starts failing and crew members are injured, you as Nancy Drew, must join the team to keep them in the competition. Is it just bad luck that's plaguing the storm chasers or is someone sabotaging their chances of winning in the action adventure Nancy Drew: Trail of the Twister? Nancy Drew®: Trail of the Twister is a first-person perspective, point-and-click adventure game. The player is Nancy Drew and has to solve a mystery. Explore rich environments for clues, interrogate suspects, and solve puzzles and mini-games.


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This game is just really bland. Flat characters, mediocre setting, and bad puzzles. The rat one that you have to do over and over again sucks. I found the driving really fun though. It’s really funny to cause massive accidents in this game.

Don't care for the setting. The culprit is obvious and kind of a jerk. Why do I have to do the mice puzzle three times. This game is the real chore simulator (though it makes more sense for this one than others).
Also Nancy asking Pa where Ma's at even after seeing the newspaper girl wtfffff😭

objectively worst nancy drew game i hated every minute of it

This feels like a Nancy Drew game I should hate, but I came away from this one pretty positively. There’s not much mystery happening here and not much to explore, but idk I enjoyed my time with it.

Location: Big empty sprawling farming town is probably the most at home I’m gonna feel in a Nancy Drew game tbh. I'm on the east coast so I can’t relate to the tornadoes and dust and shit, but driving around a big empty map filled with cows? Yeah that's pretty much what it’s like out here. It’d be more accurate if the ma and pa general store was a dollar general but I guess that wouldn’t have the same vibe.

But I did really like the cozy countryside feel of the locations. The farmhouse, the cluttered barn that’s half garage, the big empty fields. All very familiar. The music complemented the theme very well, big fan of that simple guitar track that plays in the house a lot.

Characters: I like the whole cast! I don’t love anyone in particular, but I enjoy everyone’s presence and all their short little storylines. If anything I think Debbie is probably the weakest character, she’s like the only one who doesn’t have a Thing going on. Mostly just tells you when it’s time to progress to the next day.
Loved being able to give everyone candy though.

Puzzles: well, I really enjoyed the mini games in this one! Yes, even the mouse trap one. I wish you can manually move the mice forward Instead of just waiting for them to cycle forward and we really didn’t need to play 4 different variations of this puzzle, but idk I kinda enjoy it. It’s relaxing.

I’m still not sure what I did correctly to solve the puzzle, but I gotta mention the prairie dog vacuum one because holy shit what a whimsical concept for a puzzle. I love you prairie dog vacuum. I can’t believe this is a real thing that exists in the real world and not a dumb made up video game invention.

Once I got the hang of the circuit board puzzle I enjoyed it, but ooh boy i hate timed puzzles. So land rush ended up being my go to money maker. Honestly Land Rush had no right being that fun

But the real issue is that none of the puzzles are actually related to solving a mystery. I'm a fan of chore puzzles, but that's like....all this game is. I still liked it, but it's not very Nancy Drew.

is driving a puzzle? maybe i'm just dumb, but realizing there was a gps and a map was certainly a puzzle. once I found that it made navigation much more tolerable. this is the best version of driving yet, but that doesn't mean it's good. well, driving full speed around a corner into another truck and causing a 5 car pile up is pretty good. i am glad they made driving faster though, but then they also added other vehicles as obstacles. but i can't really complain because the wild car crashes I can get into in this actual Nancy Drew game are amazing.

Story: where's the mystery :(

ok I liked the storm chasing concept and the initial idea of trying to figure out who's sabotaging everything, it's a grounded, realistic storyline. but it's not like you're actively uncovering that in the game. Nancy just does a bunch of fun little chores and accidentally reveals the culprit in the last 15 minutes of the game. There's very little snooping or interrogating, you don't get to unravel a big mystery or solve a 200 year old scavenger hunt. this is definitely the least grandiose Nancy Drew storyline yet. I don't hate it, it's just kinda bland.

Final Thoughts: These games go through a wildly short production cycle and this one might suffer the most from it. It's possible this game got the short end of the stick as the team might've been working on Shadow at the waters Edge, the Secrets Can Kill remaster, AND this game at roughly the same time. That's just speculation I saw on reddit, but it makes sense.

This is easily the buggiest one I've played yet. There's strange pauses in the dialogue, my camera turned red after taking a couple photos, characters sometimes mentioned things I hadn't done or discovered yet, and a couple of small graphical errors that popped up during puzzles.

But even with that and the lackluster mystery and chore heavy puzzles and lack of explorable locations, I still enjoyed my time with the game overall. Yeah, I would have liked to see a more fleshed out mystery in this location and it would have been nice to do more than just chores, but at least I still had fun. I'm just glad it wasn't another Ransom of the Seven Ships.

Best part was offering people candy then giving them cheese.

• what’s with pa and the long pauses?
• i feel like they probably thought it would make the conversation feel more authentic but it didn’t, it just makes it uncomfortable.
• i really hated having to trap mice three times.
• i lied, it’s actually sort of relaxing to do.
• “we need you to chase down the bad guy before he gets away but let’s have an unskippable three minute conversation before you leave because why not?”
• feels way shorter than i remember.
• seriously how is this game six days long? you get up, do two chores, and then debbie’s telling you to go to bed.
• honestly there’s just not that much else to say about this one.
• it’s sorta boring but i also have a soft spot for it.