if i were a theatrical murderer who left threatening notes and ticking time bombs and shit in a world where it is considered annoying but not unusual for your coworkers to bar your entrance to rooms that you need access to for your job by making you answer three riddles, i would simply not make my calling card alias an anagram of my real name. (i also probably would not embark on lengthy extremely venomous rants against the guy i was trying to murder with literally no prompting to every single person i spoke to but mostly the puzzle thing). it is however, goofy little bits like the riddles and and killer using a saw voice modulator to say "hello rick, don't try to run away from my bomb please, just let it blow you up that would be really sick for me" that save this game from being a complete waste of time. well, that and the fact that the time wasted amounted to about two hours on the normal difficulty.

while this is still recognizably the funny, semi-laytonesque universe of Secrets Can Kill, all the verve of that game is missing here in favor of a plot that feels a lot more limp and meandering, despite the fact that there are 100% more klieg-light-attempted-murders, literal timebombs, strangulations, and sonic the hedgehog voice actors present (robbie daymond doing an incredible in-universe actor-who-sucks-at-acting performance here in one of his earliest acting credits).

all of these characters are funny or interesting on paper but shallow and boring in game, except for the killer, whose character is entirely carried by a truly unhinged performance by his voice actor, which is entertaining but does lead to the problem of making it easy to finger him as the villain within the first conversation you have with him, which somehow makes a game that could easily wrap in less than two hours feel like it drags longer than it already does. the fact that a lot of this runtime is spent setting up an incredibly unconvincing red herring does not help.

there are very few puzzles in the game and inexplicably almost all of them revolve around trying to figure out how to open up various doors, and when you're not doing that you're usually trying to figure out how to open various doors at night time. that's right, this game has a day night cycle, which affects very little except certain puzzle solutions, and mostly serves to add another layer of tedium; just slapping another set of screens to click through when you realize you know where you need to go but you've hit an arbitrary wall in your progression. this system is emblematic of this game as a whole when you compare it to the first one: simultaneously more ambitious in ideas but unwilling or, more likely, unable to actually follow through with any of the interesting ideas. surely this has less to do with a lack of interest or talent on the dev team's part and more to do with the fact that these things got cranked out twice a year and as far as i am aware never really turned a profit. that's pressure and i understand wanting to try new things but not really being able to achieve what you wanted to with extremely limited time and resources, and ending up with something neutered and unsatisfying.

two final notes that don't fit anywhere else: first, the final puzzle in this game is criminal: a strictly timed, completely randomized, eight part puzzle that resets itself upon failure and results in a game over as the last challenge of your game with no warning or prep time fuckin sucks dude what the hell. Nancy's neck must be sore because she got strangled to death literally four times before i finished the game by complete luck.

Second, where character models in the first game were the very loose bluthy 2d american animation that you see a lot in that mid period of pc adventure games before 3d had taken over but after crude pixel art was considered acceptable, this one moves on to full 3D models for every character and they're hideous and i love them. their torsos are completely still, their mouths GROSSLY overanimate when they talk and to compensate for not being able to move the centers of their bodies their heads and arms gesticulate wildly. ALSO there are PHOTOS EVERYWHERE and for some godforsaken reason HeR thought the move here was to either photoshop a 1999 CG guy into a picture with real dudes or edit 1999 CG dude heads and hands onto real people and both of these look extremely fucked up, it's incredible.

So yeah, the game is obviously an aesthetic joy, Lani Minella still has a bunch of awkward as hell line reads but she's clearly a lot more comfortable as Nancy, the audio quality is all around better and the supporting cast's performances are, for the most part, actually good, unlike the previous game. However, as a story and as an experience this is basically nothing at all, an often irritating and always tedious (and at one point super racist, I KNOW that dude was not voiced by a real indian guy) chore that only kept me on the hook with semi-regular doses of that Nancy Drew CyberAdventure Series absurdity that i love so much. Just uh, not enough to save it. Game sucks shit.

PREVIOUSLY: SECRETS CAN KILL
NEXT TIME: MESSAGE IN A HAUNTED MANSION

ALL NANCY DREW PIECES

The PC version of this game is a very clunky but strangely compelling genre-melding sandbox game with an ending cutscene that I'm 99% sure is just an extended reference to the final scene of Evangelion. How Jimmy Neutron of all things has a game like this is deeply confusing to me, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy the nostalgia that comes with it as a result.

It's full of classic licensed kids' game weirdness. Jimmy is a genius human child with a head so large his center of mass must be roughly nose-high, so naturally he moves around with third-person tank controls. The world is filled with multiple categories of collectables drawn from the series' early iconography, all ultimately worthless to varying degrees. The main voice cast reprises their roles, but they sound... off. It's like they were asked to have really slow, flat delivery so it could be heavily compressed for some technical reason and still be intelligible afterward. Most of the characters are at least a teensy bit unnerving to look at. You get the picture.

What really makes this game so unique is the gadgets. Some of Jimmy's inventions are in the game as unlockable items that work as both abilities that open up new areas and weird physics toys/alternative movement systems. A baseball shooter that lets you hit things from a distance, equally useful for puzzle solving and screwing around with the carnival games at the amusement park. A giant bubble that makes you bounce around like you're chaining long jumps in Mario 64 and protects you from environmental hazards on the ground while you're doing it. A grappling hook that attaches to most surfaces and can be detached and re-attached multiple times in mid-air. Every single one is fun to screw around with in its own way. And since all these gadgets can be used pretty much whenever and wherever you want once you've found them, the experience is weirdly open ended for what is essentially just a sequence of people telling you to to from point A to point B and back over and over again.

Like, take a look at the power plant level toward the end of the game. All you need to do in this level is hit a bunch of switches so you can hit the switches next to them, then go into the room at the top and pick up the plutonium. But the overengineered mechanics of this game give you so much freedom to goof off within that structure that the blandness of your objectives isn't as much of a weakness as it could be.

I'm not going to lie, there are parts of this game that are truly miserable. The mandatory rocket segments immediately come to mind, as does most of the time you spend in the alien ships. But the game is super short and has some neat ideas, so I think it's worth a look if you like trying odd stuff and can manage to get it running on modern hardware.