CW: Mentions of systemic racism.

wowgoodname recommended this one on my list here: https://www.backloggd.com/u/Woodaba/list/recommend-me-a-game-and-ill-review-it/ and while I didn't pick this one originally, I simply HAD to play this one once I realized there was an Ireland One. And boy, was I not disappointed.

Something that is depressingly common among older Irish people - though it still crops up among younger generations from time to time - is a sentiment of Irishness being an identity with similar generational trauma and associated systemic violence as that experienced by people of color in America and other places. Inevitably, they'll bring up the "no cats, no dogs, no blacks, no irish" signs and point to that as evidence of the "fact" that Irish people "were just as hard done by" as the people kidnapped from their homes and enslaved, and some of these people will even go so far as to say that the Irish actually had it worse than black people in America for certain periods of time.

Obviously, this is horseshit of the highest volume. This is not to downplay the very real marginalization that many Irish people throughout history did encounter or the equally real violence perpetrated to the Irish at the hands of Britain but it's so cringeworthy to hear people who really should know better try to claim a similar level of violence was visited upon them because it just is not the same by any stretch of the imagination and yet people like My Dad will continue spouting this cheerfully racist delusion, crawling forward through history unchallenged and uninterrogated.

I say all this to make clear a certain awareness of the context surrounding what I'm about to say and the image I am invoking: Nancy Drew: The Haunting of Castle Malloy is eire-sploitation of the highest caliber. I cannot tell you how much fun I had experiencing the most bone-headedly cartoonish depiction of the emerald isle I have encountered in recent memory. Right from the beginning, the suggestion that the titular castle was simultaneously a couple hours drive away from Dublin and just down the road from Donegal got me giggling, and from there, things just got better and better. The phone booth run by the "Lepre-con" telecom company, bumper stickers advertising a radio station boasting "All Bodhran, All the Time", and of course, the man that stole the show and my heart, Donal.

The sole Irish character Nancy Drew interacts with (aside from a bartender who is only heard, never seen) in her quest to exorcise the uh "haunting" of Castle Malloy, Donal the Caretaker, whose name is pronounced in a manner hilariously divorced from anyone with that name I have ever known, who wears a cap, spends all his time drinking in the local pub (The Screaming Banshee) has the most "jaysus begorrah" accent you could possibly imagine, and will rant to anyone who can hear about the faeries and their ineffable ways is a man that has stepped right out of John Wayne's The Quiet Man, and he rules. A king. A legend, even if he made me spend the majority of this game's runtime on meaningless bullshit chores.

The sheer absurdity of The Haunting of Castle Malloy is easily the highlight. I won't go over ground wowgoodname has already covered in her excellent review (https://www.backloggd.com/u/wowgoodname/review/281822/) but it's the sheer ridiculousness of the premise and the amount of absurd curveballs thrown in your way, like enormous cybernetic doomsday device which...sheared sheep, the underground nazi(?) missile silo and the MULTIPLE JETPACKS in a plot that is ultimately ABOUT JETPACKS, that carried me through a series of puzzles that are, generously, a bit of a mixed bag. A couple are genuinely fiendish brainteasers, but too many just test your ability to take notes, or your patience with minigames that don't require skill or quick thinking as much as they do memorization of instructions. I think someone once said that a good puzzle should never take longer to input the solution than working out the solution, and this game consistently breaks that rule to intensely frustrating levels.

It's not a bad little game, all things considered. I have a nostalgia for this kind of "CD-ROM" game that we don't really get anymore, as games like this picked up from the bargain bin at TK Maxx and Woolworths made up the majority of my PC gaming as a child, but I also think this is a perfectly good adventure game in it's better moments. Like I say, I got a huge amount of enjoyment from the perverse thrill of this ridiculous depiction of my home country and the ludicrous directions the story goes. But also I think there's genuine skill and artistic craft on display in this game that unfortunately doesn't really get the place in the spotlight it maybe deserves when the game is such a directionless mess. There's some really well-crafted pre-rendered backgrounds in this game, particularly in the haunted playroom of the titular castle, which is genuinely creepy and never quite feels wholly comfortable to be in, despite how many times you return there over the course of the adventure. Parts of this game are funny, parts are well-written, parts are fun to solve and parts are unnerving. But all the good is lost in the endless tedium of bad minigames and sheep-herding.

Still. While I do think it may have been a better game if it wasn't ultimately about an old woman flying around a castle in a jetpack while an offensive irish caricature yells about faeries, I don't think I'd take that hypothetical better game over this beautiful, hilarious, mess.

Her Interactive is an enigmatic developer. I need to start paying attention to the writing credits on these games because I KNOW that this studio never had more than like 50 people working for it at its peak, and the interests of these stories fluctuate so wildly from game to game (and the games were pumped out at such a rapid rate) that it’s hard to imagine the same writer or writers on every single project. They clearly all work from the same editorial mandate – new and interesting locale, preferably some kind of educational opportunity to an American audience about a niche subject or location, keep it more or less PG – but what each game chooses to do with this stuff is just like…clearly there is a range of interest in actually engaging with these mandates. Take our previous game, The Phantom of Venice, for example: despite my complaints about its unfocused theming, it leans pretty hard on the Seriously Educational end of the spectrum. You have to navigate a real map of Venice as your overworld, there’s a serious if half-hearted interest in local politics, the game painstakingly teaches you about the history of Venetian mosaic culture and the restoration methods, you spend a lot of time hanging out with a mob boss who inexplicably refuses to talk shop without first being beaten in a round of a regionally specific Italian card game, and the climactic encounter revolves around memorizing and regurgitating basic Italian vocab. It’s all sprinkled through the whole game but it’s clear that they understood the assignment, so to speak.

On the other end of the spectrum are games like The Haunting of Castle Malloy, where it’s like, okay yeah we have a list of things that are loosely going to check all these boxes but we’re not gonna like…we’re not gonna do RESEARCH. Not gonna READ A BOOK about any of this shit, I dunno man! Who cares!!!! It’s set in Ireland right? Great, we’ll do like uhhhh, sheep ranching? How does that work? There’s probably like, like a giant rotating scissor machine that works based on the sheep’s breed and MOOD and looks like the thing that takes Iron Man’s suit off for him. That sounds right to me. Sure. What do Irish people like? Drinking beer right? What if you were a bartender? And had to like play the drums?? Darts?? Can any of our stock voice actors do an Irish accent? No? Whatever we’ll make it work. Irish people have mythology right? Fairies? Banshees? Nuclear weapons? I’m pretty sure nukes are a thing there. WHATEVER. So yeah, you get the point, the game really paints a picture of Ireland that fellow backloggd user, Irish person, and my friend Woodaba describes as “absolutely 100% just like I’m outside my house.” And that’s not even mentioning the jetpacks (WE. WILL. GET TO IT.)

(Incidentally, since finding out that one of these was set in Ireland, Woodaba has played this game and written an excellent review that I strongly encourage everyone to check out! https://www.backloggd.com/u/Woodaba/review/285284/)

Don’t worry though, the reason Nancy is here in the first place is very normal also. See she has this British friend, Kyler, who stayed with Nancy and her father as an exchange student two years ago and now she’s getting married and she wants Nancy to be her maid of honor at the small private wedding she’s having at the semi-destroyed Irish castle she inherited from a grandfather who was Secretly Irish, which she only found out upon his recent death. See, he had moved to England and changed his name because his BROTHER was a crazy mad scientist and possible nazi sympathizer who owned the castle and destroyed half of it in some kind of explosion, killing his entire family, so he fled the country to avoid…y’know, all that, I guess.

SO ANYWAY the wedding might be cancelled because the GROOM is MISSING and he’s apparently something of a notorious prankster so while the crazy old castle caretaker thinks he was kidnapped by fairies, Kyler thinks he’s pulling the world’s shittiest prank, and Kit, the only guest to still be at the castle, is hoping he got cold feet and ran off because he’s also Kyler’s ex boyfriend and he wants to get back with her. AND ALSO when Nancy approaches the castle for the first time she’s driven off the road by an angry screaming ghost. So, while the primary objective of the game is to find the missing groom, Matt, there’s lots of other stuff to dig into, like the nazi science and the bog ghost. Or whatever.

Clearly we are starting from a place of wacky chicanery and it only gets worse. This is one of these writeups where I just have to explain everything that happens in this game because you’re gonna pop. It rules dude it fucking rules. And I mean that mostly in the sense that this is really funny but also kind of seriously? Because this game does do something that hasn’t happened yet in this series which is that there is no actual villain. Constantly throughout the game the driving questions shift fluidly; everybody has a different perception of Matt’s character and everybody has credible reasons to be biased in those perceptions. Things keep HAPPENING around the castle that are suspicious but difficult to pin on anybody in the castle. As is often the case in these games, you slowly uncover the history of Kyler’s ancestors who lived here but unusually for the series, this is a very recent history, and it becomes more relevant than usual as the mystery unfolds, just uh, not in a way you would ever ever guess.

See, there’s this ghost, right? This Banshee. You hear her wailing as you creep through the darkness of the bog surrounding the castle throughout the game, and in a couple of key set pieces she appears, performing impossible feats, but never explicitly DOING anything. I’ve been waiting for a WHILE now for Her Interactive to pull the trigger on having An Actual Ghost Or Something in one of these games and this seemed for a while like maybe the one where they would finally do it…until about halfway through, in a mysterious shack deep in the bog, you open a basket, and find a jetpack. So it eventually comes out that there is no ghost, there is only a very old woman flying around on a 70 year old jetpack, one that was made for her by her ambiguously nazi rocket scientist father for her SIXTH BIRTHDAY, and she’s been living in the bog since she survived the castle explosion that year, with her jetpack, mute, her mental growth stunted by a lack of human contact other than the mysterious bog hermit who adopted her, for 70 years. So throughout the game she’s been trying to alert people in her own way that Matt The Missing Groom had somehow accidentally fallen into her father’s secret nazi rocket science bunker underneath the castle, where a botched launched caused the deadly castle explosion that claimed the life of her parents in the 40s. Nancy falls into this same bunker in the climax of the game, you solve a VERY tedious puzzle to launch a rocket successfully, the wedding happens, Fiona the Jetpack Bog Witch is taken into protective care, and everybody is happy. I guess. Nancy also gets a jetpack and you fly around on it for like the second half of the game. It’s pretty sick. I don’t fucking know dude this one is wild.

So all of that rules. It’s no thoughts head empty time here in Nancytown but I’m fully here for it, hooting and hollering the entire way, descending into madness the same way I descended into a secret nazi science lab at the end of the game. Extremely pleased to reach my hand into a cookie bowl labelled “ghosts?” only to have the game slap my hand and say “GHOSTS AREN’T REAL YOU DUMB FUCK, IT’S NAZI JETPACKS, BE REASONABLE, YOU FOOL, YOU FUCKING CLOWN.” This aspect of the game is simply incredible and I think I’ll only look back on it more fondly over time as the more sour elements of the game fade from my memory.

The PROBLEM with The Haunting of Castle Malloy is, unfortunately, that the part where you play it is frequently tedious. Even when the puzzles are padded with some of the most insane and hilarious Irish accents I’ve ever heard in a piece of media, and peppered with absolutely bizarre sci-fi replacements for very normal parts of life that could have also easily been gameplay, the fact of the matter is that this is handily one of the weakest sets of puzzles in the series. Tedious, overly padded, lots of walking around a very large map that starts atmospheric and quickly loses that quality as you realize nothing will happen inside of it except an overlong sheep herding minigame. Overlong is the name of the game generally here, where even puzzles that would be fine in theory just overstay their welcome. It’s a real shame, and the game is just constantly stopping you in your tracks to do tedious bullshit when the absurd story is picking up its goofy momentum.

But even with those misgivings, the outrageous pleasures of this game are pretty much unassailable to me. You simply cannot tear down something this gloriously, BOLDLY stupid, this CONFIDENTLY unhinged. It plays out exactly the same as every other one of these, with nobody in universe even acknowledging how fucking wild any of it is. I wouldn’t want every Nancy Drew to be like this, and I think Danger on Deception Island, the last one of these to have a terrible and absurd twist, proves that you do have to have SOME sort of entertaining backbone propping it up, but to its credit I think The Haunting of Castle Malloy has enough going for it to make it all worthwhile (at least by this series’ standards). A really rewarding breath of fresh air.

PREVIOUSLY: THE PHANTOM OF VENICE
NEXT TIME: NANCY DREW DOSSIER: LIGHTS, CAMERAS, CURSES!

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