In 2006 Her Interactive finally caved to the ravenous and unquenchable bloodthirst of gamers everywhere and added combat to Nancy Drew. The context of this is a joke but the fact that this game has a final boss fight is not, it is one its few redeeming qualities.

In Danger By Design Nancy finds herself in Paris working undercover as an assistant to an up-and-coming haute couture designer who has a reputation for being difficult to work with and has been acting particularly unstable lately, flying into terrible moods at the drop of a hat, making extremely unreasonable demands like to only work out of an antique windmill and refusing to remove a porcelain mask that she recently took to wearing at all times. Her investor, a friend of Nancy’s RICH DAD OBVIOUSLY, is worried that she won’t get a return on her investment and is considering pulling her funding and has asked Nancy to check in and see if the designer (whose name is Minette) can be trusted to finish her work at all, much less deliver a product that will sell. Nancy is absolutely down to clown because she loves narcing on people and taking unpaid vacations, so this shit is right up her alley.

This is easily one of the worst games in the series so far, a nonsensical mish mash of garbage elements, nothing characters, puzzles that are JUST okay, a truly baffling aversion to the use of the word nazi, and a complete failure to stitch any of many disparate elements at play into anything remotely resembling a coherent narrative between or across either of the two main plots on a character or thematic level. TRULY weak shit all around.

I believe I’ve mentioned once or twice that Nancy Does Chores is my least favorite default mode for these games to lock into, but I’ve accepted that Chores are a core part of these games’ DNA, and I really don’t mind them under a few circumstances. When they’re brief detours, the associated minigames are fun, or they’re well-integrated into the story or vibe, it’s fine I’ll deal with it. UNLESS of course the story is flimsy shit like “you are a professional gopher” and the chores are literally the entire first half of the game in an unbroken chain before anything else happens. Typically no matter what else is going on, these sequences still find ways to weave in foreshadowing, clues, important interactions, soooomething. In the first hour and a half of Danger By Design I made tea, went shopping, baked cookies, fetched a model, went to retrieve prints and then printed them when it turned out the guy hadn't had time to do it, and gossiped with several people about the high fashion industry but at no point in any of that did anything really happen that would come up later beyond “I met some people I would have to talk to again.” It’s just so out of step with a series that, even at its worst, is usually pretty good about this.

As is the norm, the game splits time between two plots, a present day and a historical, although unusually they half basically nothing at all to do with each other except for one very small and entirely coincidental connection that, like everything else in this game, just does not matter. One guy in the modern day storyline is the great nephew of the Sympathetic Nazi from the historical story (lmao yeah dude I know) and he has a clue you need to uncovering the obligatory treasure but he’s so far removed from the actual action of that plot that even when you discover a literal secret passageway in his personal office leading to further clues only minutes after he gifts you the puzzle necessary to uncover it, he’s so disinterested that he doesn’t even come out of his dark room to check it out. He just keep developing his photos and says “yeah man poke around all you want I literally do not care.”

So literally all of the actual puzzle solving and adventuring and stuff is siloed off into that story chunk, while over in Nancy Drew Is An Unpaid Intern Town nothing after nothing continues to happen. Every once in a while someone will leave a bomb at the door of the windmill workshop or you’ll get a threatening phone call but it doesn’t amount to anything, and Nancy herself doesn’t even seem to care! She doesn’t tell Minette, she doesn’t call the police, she doesn’t even investigate things herself, she literally defuses a bomb and then just continues to go about her day until she gets a free enough moment to fuck around in the catacombs in pursuit of her own personal quest for historical loot.

When things finally DO “come together,” as generously as you could describe that to be what happens at the end of this game, it’s literally only because the treasure is located in a secret basement of the Windmill where Minette works, and Nancy happens to be in there when two German spies come in to loudly reveal that they’ve both paid Minette to put surveillance technology in the dress she’s making for the German First Lady AND that they’re the people who have been threatening her as “incentive” for her to finish her work on time. When Nancy exits the basement the men have gone, but Minette is still there, and she attacks Nancy in an indescribably baffling action sequence where you…guess where she’s going to hit you and click on one of the nine squares the screen has been divided into with the correct timing, until she gets too tired to keep wailing on you and gives up? I think that’s the best way to describe it but you should look it up, people have played through this game on youtube it’s fucking wild man. And that’s it the game’s over Nancy thwarted perhaps the most high profile crime she ever will in this series and she did it completely by accident, it’s very funny.

Also we need to finally have the return of my least favorite feature for these reviews, the NANCY DREW COP WATCH:

1. Nancy agrees to spy on Minette, who she doesn’t know and who hasn’t done anything actually wrong besides be kind of a weirdo, for FREE, because a rich person asked her to

2. At one point in the game you find out that one of the threatening letters Minette receives was fake and came from Heather, her actual non-spy assistant, who is sick of working for this asshole and is venting frustration. Nancy can RAT HER OUT and I don’t know what happens if you do because I’m NOT A FUCKING COP but in my heart of hearts I know it’s Nancy’s true character to do it.

So that’s it this game is a mess. I actually had a good time with a lot of the puzzles here and I like that they brought back the free exploration and money management from Secret of the Old Clock, but the actual spaces you have to navigate kind of suck shit and despite some fun characters at play they’re just not here in service of anything. I like talking to a lot of these guys but at the end of it all there’s not a story here to support them and it blows. Bad game!

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NEXT TIME: CREATURE OF KAPU CAVE

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