We look upon the ocean, us, we foolish creatures, with our feet planted to the soil, incapable of knowing just how deep the Earth is beyond the six feet below we'll be buried. Incapable of feeling anything other than air fill our lungs without dying, dying, dying slowly and painfully.

We dull knives, attempting to cut land like cakes, and flesh like butter. We stupid, knife-swinging braggarts, thinking we can slice the ocean, too, that water could be our servant to take us on jolly cruises.

We built our tools to build our blades. We built our tools to build our wharves to build our boats. They, the blades we cut into the ocean's skin with, merely scratch its enormous surface, and soon, we sink down in it... And all language becomes meaningless signage in the blubbering of our submerged lungs.

All our life snuffs out, like throwing a body to the sea is the same as throwing a lit candle.

Sometimes, our human bodies look like Mario Mario. Sometimes, we sink to a whale fall, and there, the residue of the electronic toys we enjoyed, impossible to play underwater, becomes physically manifest on the ocean's bottom; a cavalcade of trash born of our, at the hands of sea-detritivores, soon-devoured brains.

We pass by our life like it's a museum. We can't read the plaques, and only the sea is left of it. You have no more life. You've drowned.

Titanic II. In theatres, now.

--

Titanic II: Orchestra for Dying at Sea is a strong little game. I like it immensely, but found the deafening, rising scream of the music genuinely prohibitive for those with sensory processing issues. The point is appreciated though, and I got a lot out of this philosophically, and from the perspective of a design-ethos - repurposing and creating with the old, the pre-made - in short, making 3D collages - is great, and I hope to see much more in this vein as time goes on. If you let it in (which you should), Titanic II has a lot to give.

The name says it all for this one. At first I assumed it was an ironic deployment on some 20 Jazz Funk Greats shit, like “haha, postcards! Those cheesy little idealized frames for your gaudy-ass vacation where you went to someone’s home like it was a carnival.” And I guess that’s a read you could take if you were being incredibly uncharitable, but then you’d have to explain the weight which lifted every time I plugged through the chaos of thecatamite’s thorny satirical comedy and into a large, unobstructed picture of a human’s written accounts of... Experience?

That’s what this whole game’s about, right? We talk about texture a lot in games, often in the utilitarian sense, but here it’s being employed to such an extreme extent. This collage type of game has been made many times, yet it’s this one which elides barriers and nearly all traditional forms of interaction games have to show just how MUCH we are responsible for, good or bad. It certainly helps that thecatamites has a truly deft pen and easel game. There's some really striking zine-like moments often tied up with genuinely funny byte-sized characters in here.

I hate to speak in such general terms for a game which has some HIGHLY specific pathos coursing through it, but I guess that’s inevitable. It’s hard to convey this decathlon of synapse roadways that loop into and through and above and below and around each other with words alone.

SeaBed made me cry for like 20 minutes straight while trying to read it through tears. I've never really read anything else quite like it, and it seems to me that it's truly a shame that it isn't widely regarded as one of the best visual novels out there. Sure, part of what makes it so unique – the extremely slow pace, and a story that is mostly interested in looking at its characters through everyday conversations and the mundane details of their lives – is somewhat off-putting to a lot of people; so it probably makes sense that it's not that well known.

However, by the end of the game I personally felt like there was hardly a wasted moment in it despite how slow and relatively light on plot it is. All the time spent on characterization and building up the central mystery of the game was, to me at least, absolutely essential for the story of SeaBed to be so affecting and end so strongly. It really is a beautifully constructed visual novel, that's well worth reading even if its narrative structure is different from anything else you've ever read.

• i totally understand her is a small company on a budget, but they couldn’t have hired japanese voice actors?
• “what happened to your mother?” JEEZ.
• i love getting to grade homework. <3
• doing the katakana lesson on a touchpad sucks.
• also the backing portrait has me in a fetal position.
• her interactive letting people use dave gregory as their phone background: the hoes gon loveeeeeeee this.
• why does nancy OPENLY admit to looking through yumi’s things?
• come to think of it, why does she do most of the things she does in this game? 🥴
• i wanna kiss savannah, she sounds so cute.
• are bess and george just dropping things off at the ryokan and not saying hi to nancy?
• “a ghost doesn’t need to be real to haunt you.”
• how did nancy record the conversation between yumi and miwako and not hear or see it happening? why did they not see her hiding behind a tree? why am i trying to make sense of this game?
• the puzzles in this one just make my head hurt. i’m looking at you, cache puzzle.
• so nancy says after many months of begging miwako allows rentaro to repair some of the damage he’s done… why am i writing a closing letter months later? was nancy in japan that long? 😵‍💫
• exploring themes of japanese traditions and a family struggling to grieve is wonderful, but the story her interactive is trying to convey is a bit muddled by clearly white voice actors trying to do accents, nancy being incredibly insensitive even for her standards, and some of the culture included seems a bit stereotypical. probably one of my least favorites despite it ranking so high for others.

This is the first time I found myself glad it wasn’t a ghost. This is the first irony of Shadow at the Water’s Edge: considering this might be tit for tat the most explicitly and effectively frightening game Her Interactive has done, and my usual clamor for the supernatural to appear in earnest in these games that, scooby-doo-like, are constantly teetering on the cliff of indulging in it. But for once I was happy for one of these games to give me what I got, which in this case is easily the best writing in the series to date, a quietly unfolding story that first seems to be one of the failures of deep-seated cultural structuration and generational trauma that slowly reveals itself to be, while not NOT that, also one of deep and mundane inability for a small group of people to work through their own shortcomings, both to themselves as individuals and to each other as family. It’s a dark, fresh situation that Nancy walks in on, unusual for this series, where it’s much more common to parallel the modern day mystery with something in the distant past. Here, the supposed ghost that’s ruining the ryokan’s business is the mother/daughter of the main characters of the game; that wound is fresh, and open, and frankly none of Nancy’s business, and picking at it is a genuinely uncomfortable affair. There’s a real sense that Nancy is kind of out of her depth in this game, that she’s stepped in something a little bit over her ability to emotionally handle. No one has hired her, no one asked her to do this, she just kind of stumbles into somebody’s ugly past while she’s on vacation and she kind of brute forces it into the shape of one of her mysteries – seriously this might be the most unintentionally ghoulish Nancy has ever been she’s a fuckin sociopath in this game - but things can’t and don’t really resolve as cleanly or happily or whimsically as they always do for her.

This marks a moment of maturation for these games. In the past, even when we’ve tackled really difficult and sober subject matters, difficult questions tend to go unacknowledged and the themes of the work tend to get swept aside in the name of wrapping everything up in a bow (I think about the Mexican government official arm in arm with the American museum employees at the end of Scarlet Hand despite the situation of the violent robbery and exploitation of Mexico’s cultural artifacts not being even slightly different than it was at the start of the game all the time). Here there are gestures towards healing and Nancy certainly forces some wheels to turn, but nothing like the sunny rejection of any backbone the story might have had.

The second irony, then, is that all of the above is true while this game indulges in a not unexpected but certainly disappointing amount of LOL JAPAN SO WACKY racism of I guess you might, for lack of a better word, call a more “subtle” variety, coupled with overt racism like having three of the four Japanese characters in the game be voiced by white Nancy Drew Series Regulars who are all doing deeply offensive fake Asian accents. It does muddle things a bit, when you’re trying to tell an actually affecting story about how the strict social mores of traditionalist Japanese conservative politics have effectively destroyed three generations of a family, resulted in one actual death, and twenty years later almost a murder, when one of the characters driving the conflict sometimes borders on cruel stereotype. I don’t think it’s QUITE there, and it’s not as bad as some other depictions of other cultures have been, but I think that there is also a lack of care here that points to Her Interactive’s general lack of understanding of the responsibilities of the storyteller, especially in an educational role. Yes, this is a better depiction of Japan and its culture than, say, the outrageous caricatures of Ireland and its people in Castle Malloy, but the United States have done incalculable material harm to the Japanese people over the last 80 years and I think that in the context of a game like this with the kind of interests these games have, the bar for how they depict some cultures is higher than others, and if you ask me this game doesn’t QUITE clear it even as it’s not nearly AS fucked as others have been in the past.

That said it IS pretty funny that “taking the subway” is by far the most difficult puzzle in the game. That’s a solid goof, you got me there.

NANCY DREW CUCK WATCH: It’s been a minute but since she can’t namedrop him to ward off all the GAY TEENS at boarding school I do think it’s worth noting that Nancy just DOES NOT EVEN MENTION Ned he doesn’t even COME UP idk dude if I was going on a vacation of indeterminate length with my best buds I would maybe invite my boyfriend who is the fourth member of our friendgroup and is also best friends with my other two friends. Seems suspicious lol.

PREVIOUSLY: TRAIL OF THE TWISTER
NEXT TIME: THE CAPTIVE CURSE

ALL NANCY DREW PIECES

It’s been a mixed bag with anniversary games in the Nancy Drew Cyber Mystery series so far; game ten, Secrets of Shadow Ranch was a relative high point at the time of its release that in retrospect shores itself more firmly in the middle of the pack, quality-wise, while game twenty, Ransom of the Seven Ships, is an unmitigated disaster from top to bottom, easily bottom two in the series in terms of gameplay, a story so boring it features precisely one character in it, and racism so overt even by the standards of both its time and this series that Her has since removed it from sale. Luckily for them, we celebrate 25 as readily as we celebrate increments of ten, it’s even a little more special than a twentieth or thirtieth thing in a list might be, so Her got another shot at doing something special for an anniversary project and god damn did they take it.

Her’s Nancy Drew games settled their formula really quickly, as early as the third game and with the core elements in place since arguably the second, so when a game DOES break some element of that formula in a significant way, you do tend to feel like Something Is Happening. In The Final Scene it’s an urgent hostage situation; in Secret of the Old Clock it’s an alternate universe where you’re experiencing the kind of history you might investigate in any other game; in The Phantom of Venice you’re doing uhhh, international espionage sort of?? HERE, things go off the rails IMMEDIATELY, and they stay off the rails for almost the entire game.

In the first twist, the game actually takes place in Nancy’s home town of River Heights. No vacation, no weird internship, no international employers whisking her away to have wacky, garrulous, possibly racist adventures. Nancy is actually, for once, just hanging out with her friends, participating in a town-sponsored team-based clue-hunting event (which seems like an unfair thing to put on when you have a literally world famous consulting detective hanging around like at least ban Nancy guys come on) when she is lured by a mysterious note to town hall one night. Once she’s inside, town hall immediately burns down, and Nancy is framed for the arson, and in the second twist, she’s immediately arrested and spends a good 80? 85? percent of the game in the police station while her trio of Best Buds team up to clear her name on the outside.

you’ll note that I said in the police station and not in a jail cell, because of course, Nancy is on very good terms with the local chief of police, and it takes very little poking to convince him to let Nancy out of her holding cell and roam the station entirely unattended, where she quickly recovers access to her personal cell phone and lock picking tools, breaks into multiple desks and file cabinets, generally commits many crimes, and comes out completely rosy in perhaps Nancy’s greatest flex of power and privilege in the series so far.

The third way that this game is markedly different from usual is in objective. Alibi in Ashes is much more overtly a whodunnit than most of its predecessors. While the “villain” of each game is always one of the characters you interact with throughout, the degree to which they give a shit about Nancy varies wildly, and most of the time they would be entirely content to do their scooby doo real estate scheme or thievery or whatever and leave – Nancy’s meddling is incidental to their schemes and their inevitable confrontations are rarely personal beyond the character being a general asshole who’s smug about murdering her. Here, though, Nancy’s been directly framed for a pretty bad crime, there are four possible suspects, and Nancy’s friends are directly working to both clear her name and finger the actual perp.

To this end there’s a lot of good stuff going on. You can swap perspectives at almost any time between Nancy in the police station, who collects and organizes the group’s aggregate evidence, steals useful police information and documents for them, and within the story is directing the course of the others’ investigations, and any of her friends, each of whom share special relationships with the suspects. Cheerful, feminine Bess is the perpetual enemy of Nancy’s preppy rival Deirdre, gets on great with ice cream parlor owner and councilperson Toni, and immediately gets kicked out of cynical antique shop owner Alexei’s store because upon entering it she breaks a valuable vase, so he won’t even SPEAK with her. Wise tomboy George is more mature than her friends, and gets more out of Alexei than they can because she’s better at manipulating him. POOR FUCKIN NED is an object of desire for Deirdre (just one of many reasons she hates Nancy), and more than once throughout the game he’s forced by Nancy to take advantage of Deirdre’s crush on him to manipulate her, something he’s very uncomfortable with and is ultimately fruitless lmao. This guy is the only person who is physically present in the game who doesn’t get a character model either. You can visit Bess and George when you’re not playing as them, they’re doing specific jobs for the mission. Ned just disappears, it’s wild. The boy stays losing. I love this guy he sucks.

So obviously there’s a lot going on in this game, and from a play perspective it’s maybe a little TOO much? There are a LOT of THINGS to be done here, and juggling three characters who all have unique dialogue puzzles to wade through and each carrying different inventories and more than one puzzle that’s just like “go find me a battery” where’s a battery? Fuck you that’s where, it’s just like, there’s a lot of space in this game and there are a lot of ways to navigate it. Easy to get mixed up, easy to lose track of objectives. But none of that really matters, right, because the novelty of the experience more than makes up for it. Bess and George and to a significantly lesser extent Ned (I write about him a lot because I think the way these games treat him is fascinating but he is undoubtedly the most thinly drawn recurring character in a series where the Hardy Boys have only made like five appearances) are fun characters who never quite feel like they get enough to do, so getting a chance to really shine a spotlight on them in a game that is in large part celebrating the history of this branch of the franchise does feel earned.

The thing that puts Alibi in Ashes over the top, though, is how mean-spirited it is. Something that has emerged from this block of Nancy Drew games (what I’d think of as the third distinct era of the series, games 16 through 25, but especially emerging during the ongoing hotstreak since 21, Waverly Academy) that I feel has done them a great deal of credit, and that’s a willingness to engage in a level of mundane adult emotion that lends an air of Maturity to the proceedings, even as they retain their goofy elements. This incarnation of Nancy Drew has always existed in a weird space of adaptation; one one hand the character’s ages and often the subject matters dealt with are clearly rooted in the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys young adult novels of the 80s and 90s which were aimed squarely at older teens and whose edge could border on too sharp (never let the world forget “Joe! Hand me the Uzi!”). On the other, characters’ actual personalities and dispositions and worldviews, the tendency towards overt educational content, and a lot of the weird, often childish humor that strongly characterizes these games is rooted deeply in the earlier Nancy Drew works through the 1970s and the later Nancy Drew Notebooks series that were aimed squarely at children. It lends the series a distinctly all-ages vibe, something I’ve praised and chided in the past.

But while the darker series has always had dark pasts and spooky locales and the occasional attempted murder, I think these last few have gone for something a little more daring (at least, in the context of this series and its framework), in choosing to include and often center a lot of just kind of normal, mundane ugliness. It could be the myriad ways high school kids are beaten down by each other and the systems that govern them, or social norms precluding a family from properly coming together in the wake of a tragedy, or a man letting fear of vulnerability steal years of his life from him – each of the recent games seems interested in letting the quiet sadnesses that everyone collects naturally as part of living weave in and out of their standard Nancy Drew games, along with more of the complexities of adult life in general.

Never is this more apparent than in Alibi in Ashes, where Nancy’s own sterling All-American hometown of River Heights is revealed to be a nest of vipers ready to eat her alive at the very first sign of disharmony. The news people hate her for scooping their hottest stories, the politicians hate her for the weird attentions she brings and for how her successes negatively impact the reputation of the police, who are shown to be as lazy and corrupt as an other police office anywhere else. When Nancy is very obviously framed for a crime that’s wildly out of character and evidence is quickly found to put doubt on her guilt, she’s given no quarter because the people with the power to help her don’t really care and the people who are actually in power have a vested interest in seeing her go down regardless of whether she’s guilty or not.

This isn’t even the first time this has happened – insofar as this game has a “historical subplot,” it’s about Alexei the antique shop owner, who was once a famous teen detective like Nancy, busted for a crime he swears he didn’t commit. Nancy doesn’t lose her characteristic pep or her faith in the system, her belief that if she and her friends can just find the right combination of evidence that she’ll be cleared and the real arsonist brought to justice, nor does she ever doubt that this will happen, but Alexei was broken by his experience. As he puts it himself, he spoke truth to power and was swiftly and brutally destroyed for it. Now he’s a pariah, eking out a solitary, bitter existence running a store he hates in a town that hates him. And for what? For allegedly stealing one thing, one time, thirty years ago?

That’s the kind of All-American Town that River Heights is, under the sunny facades and ice cream parlors and colonial architecture. A town where people’s memories are long, and there’s no room for forgiveness, no room for generosity, no room for grace. Where altruism and charity are met, privately, with resentment. Where you can’t rock the boat. Where local town politics are the supreme power. Where your neighbors who were your friends yesterday will throw rocks through your windows and leave threats at your doorstep before you’re even tried for a crime, and once you’re exonerated will act like they were on your side all along. In a way, Deirdre is one of the only real friends Nancy has, because while she doesn’t like Nancy and doesn’t want much to do with her, she’s open about her problems with Nancy, and equally open about being a normal person who just wants Nancy to shut the fuck up and maybe break up with her boyfriend and not like, rot in prison for 10-20 years for a crime she didn’t commit and/or die.

And maybe the most damning thing about Nancy herself is that, as usual, she doesn’t understand any of this is happening to her. It’s bad apples all the way down in her eyes. She’s quite happy to be back in her neighbors’ good graces when all is said and done; quite happy to simply ruin the popularity of one shitty politician in a system that she knows is historically ingrained into the fabric of her town; quite happy to use her own connections to the police and her father’s position as an important and wealthy judge to get her out of a situation that would ruin and has ruined anyone else. This is the dichotomy right? Ever-present in the series and as strong as ever here now that a lot of these disparities and injustices are being brought back to the forefront as explicit text.

There’s a lot to chew on in Alibi in Ashes generally but it IS the Big Twenty-Fifth Game in the series and I do want to note before we end that it works really well in that capacity. The game is chock full of little easter eggs (not counting the literal hidden easter egg items you can be rewarded with for doing weird shit in these, which I didn’t find this time) like all the playable characters having box art for previous games as their phone backgrounds (deep cuts too), or Nancy’s desk drawer having a picture of her friend from The Final Scene in it, or the town map for the game being an exact replica of the map for Secret of the Old Clock, except with many small changes to reflect the modernizations that have been implemented over the intervening 100 years.

Those bits of fanservice are littered throughout and LIBERALLY and that shit matters in a series as long as this one. There’s a real sense of mythology to it, it’s fun to celebrate on a milestone, and it’s frankly a relief to finally have a milestone game worth celebrating. As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been generally pleased with this run of Nancy Drew games, a lot of series highs lately imo, and Alibi in Ashes still stands out among what already felt like the cream of the crop. It’s a little bittersweet too – my understanding is that this game closes out this third era of Her Interactive’s Nancy Drew series, and with the series kind of perpetually stalled after its ill-fated retool in 2019, it seems likely that the next one will be the beginning of their final stretch. If that’s the case, I can only hope they keep up the pace they’ve set so far in the twenties. I would love to see this series close out strong.

PREVIOUSLY: THE CAPTIVE CURSE

NEXT TIME: TOMB OF THE LOST QUEEN

ALL NANCY DREW PIECES