I wish that this was a game about trauma. I mean, it sort of is. Every Nancy Drew is split between at least two identities that often feel like they’re meant to synergize into a thematic whole, but they so rarely find the balance. Most commonly this takes the form of a modern day mystery plot and its historical roots, and the issue comes from finding a way to make enough time for both, or making sure the weight of one side is appropriately felt in the other.

Nancy Drew: The Haunted Carousel seems initially like it might nail this element – with its historical intrigue about a guy who carved the horses for a carousel in the titular amusement park which are now considered extremely valuable for some reason (there is a historical heist involved, these games LOVE historical heists and listen man SO DO I so I will NOT be taking them to task for this), and his modern-day descendent, Joy, who is RATHER IRONICALLY a very sad woman who works at the park today. See, Joy’s whole life has revolved around the park; everybody in her family works or worked there going back generations, her mom died in a car crash that feels responsible for during a park-related incident when she was four years old that led to her repressing all of her early childhood memories as a coping mechanism, normal precocious kid shit.

Another very normal thing about Joy is that her dad, who used be like, an attraction designer for the park, eventually realized that helping his extremely young child essentially condition herself to forget her entire early development instead of dealing with her grief was an extremely fucked up thing to do (hindsight is 20/20) and talking to her about it, waited until he was on his deathbed and then invented a wacky little robot guy to give her riddles in hopes that solving them would prompt her to resurface park-related memories of her mother. Most of the game’s story ostensibly involves solving these riddles for Joy, and helping her push through her shit and come to terms with some real ugly feelings, in ways that I have gripes with but are clearly the emotional core of the game and also by far the most interesting stuff here. It’s just that this is where we come back to my tragic thesis for this review: this SHOULD be what this game is about, and although it’s certainly the EMOTIONAL center, and you do spend a lot of the middle portion of the game working towards the few key scenes where Joy gets to have these moments, the moments themselves are few and brief. The best, most interesting, most resonant content in the game, and the content that’s most directly tied to the Traditional Nancy Drew Historical Storyline, is FIRMLY the b-plot of the game, only given slightly more time and weight than “what’s the wacky new age engineer up to” and “hmm the security guard seems kind of cagey about his past.” I would have much rather seen Joy have to reckon with her father’s role in all of this than learn about fucking Ingrid’s secretly selling rollercoaster blueprints to a friend or whatever the fuck she was up to.

The tone of it all doesn’t help? These games do have a history of playfulness to them, but I mark mood-setting as maybe their greatest and most consistent strength normally, which is why it feels so weird to have this complaint. The scenes with Joy feel very grounded, very real. A woman finding catharsis by embracing grief is a powerful thing, especially when the circumstances of the whole situation lead to a lot of murkiness in the way she must feel retroactively about a lot of what came after and people she thought she knew growing up in a relatively closed and tight-knit environment. So to have these scenes always end with Joy and Nancy turning to see a funny little robot guy literally cough up a new clue and piddle out a little rhyming riddle to hunt down the next piece of this deeply sad trauma puzzle feels deeply inappropriate. Like yeah man it IS super funny but this is the one moment in the game I don’t want to be laughing?

Although these are my only REAL complaints with this one they do feel big enough to sour what is otherwise a perfectly fun Nancy Drew Cyber Adventure. The amusement park (which is not even slightly haunted and nobody acts like it is so the title of this game is a fuckin TEASE AND A HALF) is a cute setting that lends itself really well to puzzles and I think they make the most of it. Plenty of fucking around with rides, going behind the scenes, working in the offices, playing minigames based on attractions around the park; everything you would want to see out of this kind of setting is here.

The characters are all pretty good too, if a little underwritten. This game is a little shorter than the last few have been, and leans more heavily on puzzles than narrative, but it also has the most characters to speak with of any of the games so far and I think the surplus of content crammed into a barely two hour runtime really shows. I do like everyone. Joy is obviously the one with the most meat on her bones, but I also really enjoy the very sensitive jersey accented beefcake security guard Harlan and the person who turns out to be the villain, who is not a particularly deep or interesting character but who is lifted up by a much higher-than-usual-quality performance for these games by their voice actor.

Also I’m starting a new segment that I expect will recur at the end of many of these reviews moving forward called Nancy Drew Cop Watch, to catalogue all the times Nancy needlessly acts like a huge asshole cop for no reason when she could just leave the fuck alone and be cool instead.

Today she finds out that Harlan the security guard used to be incarcerated when she accidentally contacts someone who turns out to be a parole officer, and immediately runs to his boss to tattle on him, framing it as “disturbing information.” When his boss is like “yeah I know I hired him anyway he’s cool he told me up front and I trust him” Nancy STILL tries to finger him for some extremely petty harmless shit he did to get him in trouble, JUST because she doesn’t trust him for being in jail when he was younger! He gets mad and won’t talk to her for a while, and then later, HE apologizes to HER for getting mad about this!

Additionally she finds out that Ingrid the engineer is doing an actual criminal act of stealing the park’s roller coaster blueprints and giving them to her friend to copy so they can make their own roller coaster out of them but Nancy doesn’t care about this, presumably because Ingrid is not already a felon, who knows, she contains multitudes.

So anyway I am impressed that this series continues to press up against the edges of the kinds of subject matter they want to try to tackle, and that despite not doing it in the MOST graceful ways, the stories they try to tell so far have been pretty respectful and not really embarrassing. It’s a better track record than any AAA game series I can think of, and I look forward to them continuing to broaden their horizons.

PREVIOUSLY: GHOST DOGS OF MOON LAKE
NEXT TIME: DANGER ON DECEPTION ISLAND

ALL NANCY DREW PIECES

I really thought that Stay Tuned For Danger or maybe Ghost Dogs were competing for bottom of the barrel but I failed to account for the barnacles clinging to the underside of the barrel, which constitute the start to finish unmitigated disaster that is Nancy Drew: Danger on Deception Island.

In this game, Nancy is off on another ill-fated vacation attempt to hang out with George’s friend Katie on her fishing boat off the coast of Oregon. Instead, she finds herself embroiled in the politics (sort of! they are barely touched upon really) of a financially struggling fishing town/tourist trap because there’s a seemingly orphaned orca that’s taken up residence near the island and Katie has reported its presence to the government who are evaluating the situation and in the meantime none of the fisherman can work because they might be a danger to the whale. Seemingly in response to her activism, Katie’s boat, which she lives in, is horribly vandalized right after Nancy arrives and our mystery is afoot.

Or, is it? I mean like, ostensibly yes that is what you start out doing but Nancy pretty quickly veers off into investigating a lot of other things, like the mysterious puzzles in the lighthouse basement, the 100 year old rumors that the island used to be the base of operations for a kidnapping/smuggling ring, trying to find out what happened to an old old shipwreck that nobody knows or cares about for no real reason, figuring what happened to the eccentric millionaire couple that used to live on the island before they mysteriously disappeared (the wife just moved away after the husband died you morons it’s not that hard to puzzle out – though I guess most of the game’s actual puzzles are explicitly set up in-universe by this character, it’s weird) and mostly, walking around a gigantic island and its underground tunnel system doing chores for a bunch of rude assholes who hate her, including the woman she is ostensibly there to live with!

It’s another Nancy drew game where instead of solving puzzles and actively working on mysteries you are explicitly just doing chores for people, the worst manifestation of busywork in this series. I know that these tasks don’t differ ALL that much from the kinds of puzzles that open up secret passages or old timey letters about jewel heists or whatever, but that’s precisely why the framing is so important. I’ve played nine of these games now in nearly as many days and I’m not tired of them yet, but they locked in a formula pretty quickly. That’s okay, but it does mean that the flavor is everything, and there’s a feeling of laziness to this one that permeates the entire thing. For example, at one point in the middle of the game you return to a guy you’ve already interacted with a lot. He’s gruff, conservative, cares a lot about the island and its community’s welfare, does not care for this orca shit, and wants to get back to work as a fisherman. He’s extremely no nonsense and he’s running for local office to protect what he views as the interests of the working people. He’s an asshole. So you return to him and ask him for a favor and he says “hey sure thing, just solve this CHESS PUZZLE for me” and then he pulls out a piece of paper and gives you a hand written “how would you win a chess game with this board configuration in two moves” puzzle and it’s like fuckin what?? Why would this character have this? Did he make it? Does he do these for fun? I don’t fuckin know, and neither does the game, but I guess we were in kind of a dry spell of activities that weren’t walking around and talking to people so we’re gonna take a break for Holt’s chess puzzle real quick, it doesn’t MATTER.

The entire GAME is like this. Fellow backloggd user and Nancy Drew Cyber Adventure connoisseur Nerdietalk commented on my last review of Haunted Carousel to point out that some of the weird inconsistencies in that game are almost certainly byproducts of the fact that these games are products of absolutely brutal six-month dev cycles, by a team that at its peak had maybe 30 employees from top to bottom. She said, “the whole two games a year format is not doing the franchise any favors at this particular point” and this HAS to be what’s going on here right? The game is a mess. It feels fatigued, incomplete, and incoherent.

The actual plot of the game, so to speak, doesn’t even emerge until maybe twenty minutes from the end, and involves, and I’m going to use direct quotes from Nancy’s summary monologue at the end, word for word here: a “plan cooked up to recover smuggled animal furs” using “an orca that the Russians had trained for covert military operations.” If you’re wondering why you got to the very end of this review before I gave you that little nugget, come to my apartment and pat me on the back because I’ve successfully communicated the feeling of playing this game.

It includes an ORCA that the RUSSIANS had trained for COVERT MILITARY OPERATIONS being used to secretly dive into shipwrecks and smuggle shit out of an island in secret wearing a goofy little backpack harness thing and yet, somehow, it’s still the worst one in the series and maybe one of the worst games I’ve ever played. It’s a tragedy.


PREVIOUSLY: THE HAUNTED CAROUSEL
NEXT TIME: THE SECRET OF SHADOW RANCH

ALL NANCY DREW PIECES

Well this is just about exactly what you like to see, huh?

Perhaps fittingly for a tenth entry, which feels like something of a milestone, Secret of Shadow Ranch is without a doubt the most perfect game in the Nancy Drew Cyber Mystery series to this point. Which is not to say it’s a perfect game in general because it sure isn’t, just that it’s the most representative of everything that makes these Nancy Drew games recognizably themselves, for good and for ill (mostly good though!).

I will be identifying the bad guy in this rundown, if you care!

Nancy’s two best friends, cousins Bess and George, are taking a trip to visit their aunt and uncle at the titulat ranch they own in Arizona to have a week’s worth of horse girl adventures in the desolate southwestern desert I guess, but unfortunately for the two of them they’ve also invited Nancy Drew on the expedition. At this point in the series we the audience all know that Nancy is cursed specifically to not be allowed to take vacations, so naturally Bess n George’s flights get held up for the entire length of the game in Nebraska AND their uncle gets bitten by a rattlesnake (in a funny twist this does turn out to be a complete coincidence and not a part of the villain’s scheme) and is hospitalized, accompanied by his wife, in the distant city for several days, which leaves Nancy alone at the ranch with no one around for miles but one store owner and the three ranch employees whom I can only describe as a group of nasty little freaks.

There’s DAVE who seems like the most normal guy but is so fucking horny it’s obscene, you gotta beat this dude away with a stick until Nancy tells him she has a boyfriend (dubious, hasn’t even mentioned Ned this game). There’s TEX, who should not be allowed to be named that if he lives in Arizona and who is in charge of all the horse stuff at the ranch. He is very funny because he’s supposed to be like the gruff cranky asshole character with a hidden dad-ish heart of gold who only talks in a hoarse, Eastwood-esque snarl, but he’s also the conduit through which almost all of the game’s SUBSTANTIAL edutainment content is channeled so he’s doing this terse tough guy act but he’s ALSO like “okay before you can take this horse out riding around you have to answer my ten randomized horse trivia questions that are mostly not practical riding information and also would you like to learn how to lasso.” Love this guy he rules. Then there’s SHORTY, the chef, who definitely has the most overt nasty little guy energy but whom I also hate with every fiber in my being for giving me like 10,000 game overs. We will return to this later.

At first Nancy thinks it’s fishy that Mr Uncle was attacked in his bedroom by a rattlesnake and starts poking around about that, but quickly the game’s historical plot, about the star-crossed love between a cowboy robber and the county sheriff’s daughter and the scavenger hunt he left her for the stock on his hidden treasure before he died, takes center stage. OH and also every night a spectral horse runs by the ranch and destroys something essential to life in the desert; a water pump, power lines, etc. That’s a big deal. Clearly something strange is going on, and Nancy, despite insisting that she’s an amateur (presumably because the number of crimes she’s thwarted while on vacation outnumber the crimes she’s actually been hired to solve like four to one, so, fair I guess) is the only person who immediately realizes this is a Scooby Doo scheme to scare everyone off the land and that this needs to be investigated.

Here’s where we come back to fuckin Shorty and how if I ever see this dude on the street it’s on sight, motherfucker. Without the two owners at the ranch and with an ever-increasing number of important facilities being incapacitated, Mrs Aunt and Mr Uncle (I forgot their names I’m sorry I usually take better notes) ask Nancy to help out with chores that might need doing around the ranch. And you do! It’s another Nancy Drew Does Chores game! Surprise! I said every defining aspect of the series was here and I meant it. They’re really bad in this one too, extremely tedious, easy to fail, they trigger game overs, AND almost all of them have to be REPEATED during all three full days that you play in-game. Shorty is the most annoying chore-giver and the one most likely to give you extra work (which is weird considering he turns out to be the bad guy who is relying on Nancy to solve the treasure hunt so presumably he would not want to waste her time but he’s deep undercover I guess). At the end of the game I thought Nancy was gonna leave him to die of dehydration or heat stroke in the desert but unfortunately she’s not cool enough to do this and I guess also he didn’t really commit any crimes severe enough to warrant such a harsh punishment except try to kill her right at the end of the game, but Nancy is too square to go eye for an eye on that shit.

Anyway these chores aren’t a death knell to the game like they have been to past Chore Games because this isn’t really a Chore Game, it’s just a game that Has Chores? Part of this is just scope; Secret of Shadow Ranch is BIGGER than any previous game by a wide margin. I’ve never really gone over two and a half hours playing one of these, but here my time was bumping up against 4, and it feels like that’s precisely because this is the Nancy Drew that really has it all. Every kind of puzzle you see in these games is here. Lots of fun characters to hang out with and chat with, even if none of them are particularly interesting, well-written, or performed. The hunt for the treasure is sprawling and every stage of it is fun and interesting to work through. Just after I was complaining about it a game or two ago, I think this one finally hit the perfect sweet spot of spotlighting the historical story with the modern day plot of the game, in terms of both the mystery and the thematic parallels (the former more gracefully than the latter but it’s cute anyway). It would be cooler if that happened in one of the Nancy Drew games that was actually About Something, but these games don’t need to be issues games to be likeable.

Being an entertaining and pleasant mystery puzzler is enough, and Secret of Shadow Ranch is that to a T. Far from perfect but honestly after the last one, just doing everything I want the minimum amount I consider acceptable with the most friction I’ll tolerate feels like ecstasy. I love it when I like these.

PREVIOUSLY: DANGER ON DECEPTION ISLAND
NEXT TIME: CURSE OF BLACKMOOR MANOR

ALL NANCY DREW PIECES

On September 11th, 2001, the World Trade Center in New York City was destroyed, the aftermath of which would change American culture in ways we can still pinpoint decades after the fact. The greater minutia of the War on Terror or the Bush Administration is not something I'll be delving into here, but what's important here is that specific period of time, where the tragedy was still warm on American minds and the War on Terror was just beginning, because it's that specific cultural maelstrom that gives birth to something like Postal 2.

The reason 9/11 is so important to Postal 2 is due to the fact that the transgressive nature of the game lies in its nihilistic social and political commentary about America: From offensive Muslim stereotypes modeled after Bin-Laden who violently ransack churches and yell about Allah, to a 1:1 recreation of the botched Waco Siege operation by the ATF, to a whole in-game task about getting signatures for a petition dedicated to making whiny congressmen play video games, Postal 2 is a game that could have only been made in the transitional post-9/11 period between 1997 and 2003. Yet, despite Postal 2's attempts to be an apolitical parody piece that spares no demographic or political party, there are some aspects to the parody that belie a reflection of post-9/11 American society. The Postal Dude, despite being a violent lunatic who has no qualms about violence, is a model American: He votes on Voting Day, he loves the Second Amendment, and he makes time to go to Church. The fact that the Muslim stereotypes are all part of a terrorist organization, yet reside in the heart of small-town Americana, running the grocery store and hosting their base of operations right in The Postal Dude's backyard, reflect the Islamophobia that was rampant in American culture at the time due to the 9/11 Attacks, the paranoid ignorance that led to wide-spread discrimination against Muslim-Americans. Compound this with critiques of the U.S. Government, from rampant police brutality, to a recreation of the infamous Waco Siege, to the bombing of a Muslim terrorist camp in Apocalypse Weekend by a gung-ho, hyper-violent military force in a way that reflects the worst of the War in Iraq, the post-9/11 nature of the game is prominent in it's bloodstream. It's a perfect time capsule of the era, sensibilities and all.

Following in it's predecessor's footsteps, Postal 2 aims to be transgressive, in a much more aggressive sense than the original Postal, in a way that feels like a direct, personal response to the controversy courted by Postal upon its release. One of the first missions The Postal Dude embarks on is picking up his paycheck from an in-game replica of the Running With Scissors studio, where he works and interacts with real-life staff members in-game, before the studio is besieged by moral guardians protesting against violent video games, who hypocritically, launch a violent assault the studio and its staff. The Running With Scissors office in-game is crafted with love, with photos of staff on the wall, real-world photos of documents, meticulously crafted office spaces, and a whole faction of RWS NPCs that will always support The Postal Dude and whom you are allowed to kill with zero consequence. All of this paints a meta-context for the game going forth: A direct response to RWS' critics and cultural legacy, at a time where Joe Lieberman was still in the headlines and Mortal Kombat was being presented in court hearings on violent content in video games. Where Postal was a statement, Postal 2 is a response.

The most interesting part of Postal 2 as a response piece to the criticism of Postal is the fact that it's entirely possible to complete the game without a single kill. While the original Postal was a mass-shooting simulator that required you to kill in a commentary on the casualness with which we treat violence as entertainment, Postal 2 amped up it's transgression to the surface-level with the political commentary on America, but reworked the core gameplay loop in order to put the impetus for violence on the player. While there are systems in place for all manner of violence and crass actions from a myriad of murder implements to a functioning arson and urination mechanic, there are also mechanics for the mundane: waiting in line, paying for your goals, getting arrested peacefully and non-lethal takedown methods for every enemy you encounter. The meta nature of the game is pushed further than the interaction between Postal Dude and his creators at Running With Scissors, with a complete lack of a 4th wall as the Postal Dude comments on and interacts with the player in a mostly jeering way. The game itself taunts you with tedium and annoyance in an attempt to make you go postal, holding a finger an inch from your cheek while claiming to not touch you. The violence is shifted from a requirement to complete the game to an optional way of approaching a situation, and the casualness with which the average gamer will resort to violence ties into the main underlying theme of the series: the prevalence of violence in the media.

In our entertainment, violence is the most common language with which we communicate. Even in something as innocent as Mario, you still engage in violence to reach your goals, stomping on enemies and bosses, even if the violence is abstracted enough to not feel weird over it. This is not a condemnation of violence in our media, but simply an observation. Postal was so controversial because of the fact it stripped away the layer of dissonance we create by contextualizing the violence in real-world terms: a lone gunman engaging in meaningless violence to fulfill his goals. Postal 2's commentary on violence is much less upfront than the original Postal's, but it's still interesting in the detached way in which it lets the player engage in it. If you kill or if you don't, Postal 2 passes no judgement on your actions. It knows you'll resort to violence just because it's what you're conditioned to do as someone who plays video games, but the only thing goading you into engaging in said violence is the tedium in place in our own reality. It's a horrifically offensive, ultra-violent jankfest. It's cathartic form of virtual rebellion against the mundanity of everyday life.

"POSTAL 2 is only as violent as you are."

Hey look, we are finally getting to the games that are pretty alright and don’t need a ton of qualifications before you can sort of recommend them to people under 50.

Like a lot of these early launch Atari titles, Indy 500 is an amalgamation of some of Atari’s arcade racers which they thought were necessary to help them stand out from all the other pong boxes on the market and it worked! For a while this was the high water mark of console racing games and honestly for all its simplicity it holds up, I mean its not any more simplistic than most mobile racing games when you think about it.

As is standard, there are a few slightly different game modes here to and a couple different tracks - including the treacherous and amusingly nicknamed DEVIL’S ELBOW - and all of them are pretty fun as well if not entirely drastically different from each other. While I’ve never gotten a chance to mess around with this one with the original driving paddle jawn, the controls are still shockingly responsive for this old of a game. There is a game mode where you race but on ice and your car actually slides around, but not in the frustrating icy surface way that would come to plague platformers and such going forward. There is also a demolition derby-ish mode and a tag mode which are all just different enough to add give things a good variation. Overall just a really solid racing game from 43 god damn years ago.

Mascot character platformers are one of the most exciting genres in gaming to me. They have the potential to be an intriguing concoction of every visual, aural and story element that normally goes into games, but benefit strongly from their bend towards the main controllable character being the mechanical focus. Characters like Rayman, Ratchet & Clank, Hat Kid, their games are informed by their personalities and rulesets in a way that contextualises the player’s involvement in their worlds. Conceptualised well enough, the degree of exploration and interaction afforded to the characters can elevate these titles to surprising degrees, and give them a unique voice with a sense that they really have something to say.

This is pretty much where Psychonauts comes in. The first game came about in the full swing of the mascot platformer craze of the 00’s - and with the help of Double Fine’s history in sharp character writing and adventure exploration, concocted a game where the themes are both broad and accessible: Psychics exist and can explore people’s mental planes to empathise with visualisations of their own unique psychological issues.

Part of my adoration for the first Psychonauts comes from its strong visual direction, with off-beat and illustrative takes on individual character’s mindscapes. Psychonauts goes above and beyond with its core concepts by allowing its cast to express themselves through clever writing and impressionistic environmental caricature. Likely inspired by Rankin Bass stop motion movies and the artwork of Tim Burton, who’s styling has roots in ideas of eccentrism, depression and nonconformity - as well as have a level of cheeky humour that complements its attempts to depict darker themes. It sets the perfect stage for what Psychonauts is setting out to do; to let its cast express themselves in unique and personal ways of which the player is tasked with physically navigating, a visual metaphor for the therapist and the client. All these abstractions never go too far into sheer chaos because they’re balanced wonderfully and grounded with stereotypical visual metaphors that help keep things grounded, like “censors”, “emotional baggage”.


Psychonauts 2 is great, I’m amazed that it not only delivered on its promise of being a follow-up to the original title, it also exceeded it in almost every aspect. My main complaints are that I simply didn’t find it anywhere near as laugh-out-loud funny, and that the climax is a little contrived to the point it simply wasn’t satisfying. One of the strengths of the original was the level of interaction you had with the world in the form of use-items and environmental objects, and character count… something Psychonauts 2 seems to have made an effort on trimming down. I think a lot of my disappointment in the humour of this game stems from how little there is to reveal, by comparison? Still, it’s a fun story to see unfold - I’m hugely fond of how there is a throughline across the levels in the form of a kind of shared trauma within the cast.

This is simply one of the best looking games I’ve ever seen from a technical standpoint. Uses, and masters every trick in the Unreal Engine book while also inventing new ones. Unbelievable work with gravity tricks, false scale, shaders and portals. Every area is simply stunning. I can’t believe how good it looks. Oh my god. Platforming feels wonderful and mercifully there’s an easy mode for the less-than-stellar combat.

This review feels bad to me so I'll just end it here.

This has to be one of the most astonishingly stupid stories I've come across. The majority of the game is a piss poor Firewatch rip off, but then it decides to take a sharp turn into WEIRDO CITY. It's an exercise in how not to handle sensitive subjects, and the twists/revelations are complete and utter bullshit. It's beyond me that actual human beings wrote this nonsense and thought "Yea this is it". Even if it wasn't filled with weird pedo shit, the story just makes absolutely zero logical sense. What a waste of some good atmosphere.