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

They really had a good thing going here. For an hour or so, there's some true wonder to unpicking the gorgeously filmed, intriguing trio of movies that has been put together here. The fims - Ambrosio, Minsky, and Two of Everything, are all gloriously shot and composed. Whilst you can see the cracks at some points, it's oh so easy to fall into Immortality's facade of the lost old media - The giallo inspired and notably horny Ambrosio in particular being an utter delight. And it's all filmed so well and with a degree of authenticity that just feels so right.

And those initial few hours, where you're both trying to piece together the plots of these movies, noticeing the flaws and trying to figure out the threads and what overarching story really is about is pretty great stuff. When clicking on each weird item in the background can send you to god know where. And the prospect of this all tying together with some cool allegorical narrative or whatever, some light horror and so on - god it could work.

Shame the narrative that you uncover is absolute trash. It is a very bleh fantasy/horror thing that I would feel would fall flat on your average creepypasta site - and it still could have worked even if it was mostly invested in exploring that immortality of art/people in cinema, the aspect of lost media "reviving people" so to speak but no. Its way too bogged down in the very literal mechanics of it's bad storyline and I hate it. It's bad enough to retrospectively make me feel like an idiot for wanting to pull on the threads, and care way less about the pretty well built up and interesting character relationships you learn through the snippets.

There's also some good old gamey issues to get in the way. Searching through clips, especially at the point where you'd probably just before getting to the big storyline hooks, is a pain in the arse, and bizzarely this point and click game works best by far with controller. It's also pretty buggy and in general way more finicky and less responsive than it should be. It detracts a fair bit from an otherwise incredibly immersive experience. The music is also quite bland and is constantly repeating the same shot clips as you go over the movies. And you can't turn it off because you need it for the sound cues to know how to find a lot of the secrets. Yay.

And its such a damn shame. It's probably the best looking FMV game ever released. The performances, particularly from Manon Gage and Hans Christopher, are spot on, and the way each of the movies captures their respective spheres of cinema - Giallo (mixed with hitchcock), 70s Neo-Noir and late 90s cheapo indie is absolutely spot on. And maybe if it was edited more consicely, the game more directed in terms of getting you to the right clips at the right time, and less navel-gazing in terms of it's very bad overarching narrative, it could have been incredible.

It's a better game than it's progenitor Her Story on account of the game not being so focused on a twist you'll work on in the first two seconds, and god knows it's better than Telling Lies, a game so shit even annapurna didnt try to push it, but I do think the end result is still a failure. Barlow has got the technical side of an FMV game absolutely down pat now though, and I think if he was given a competent writer, maybe then, this long project can bear some truly great fruit.

Nancy Drew Sea of Darkness was released in May 2015. The 32nd game in this quiet little franchise, publishing two games a year to a niche crowd, not making much in profits. There’s a whole mystery to untangle about how this company even survived for twenty years. Anonymous reports from people who left Her company reported that they received funding from an outside investor who just felt it was the right thing to do to support “educational games for young girls.” Future attempts to gain investors or gimmicks to boost sales failed handily. Even so, there was no reason to suspect anything about the company’s structure would change.

At the end of 2014, just before the release of Sea of Darkness, former Disney marketing director Penny Milliken was installed as the new CEO of HerInteractive. Under Millikin, the entire structure of the company changed. Half of the staff was fired. Several quit in frustration. The remaining crew was given the job of making a new Nancy Drew game in Unity, compared to the previous engine the franchise used. Communication from the company died down. Lani Minelli was replaced with a new Nancy Drew voice. There was a weird announcement that MIdnight in Salem would be a “VR game,” which went nowhere. The game released in 2019, to poor reviews. It's unlikely another Nancy game is on the horizon. Sea of Darkness is sort of the last hurrah of the franchise.

As much as it's tempting for me to lay all the blame on Milikin, I will reluctantly grant that her decision to port all the games to Steam was the correct move. Previously, the games could only be bought in-stores or on HerInteractive’s website. The website is… bad. Games you bought can just up and vanish. Wanna play it again? Better pay up a second time. And the fact of the matter was, HerInteractive was unmistakably in the red. These games do not turn a profit. It gained a diehard (but tiny) fanbase that was basically content to accept anything, myself obviously included. But these are not “exciting” games. They’re goofy. They’re silly. Comfortable Bs. If the company wanted to really thrive, I can understand to an extent why shaking things up seemed necessary.

On the other hand, she also signed a big petition a bunch of rich fucks in California wrote to protest a potential bill that would taxing big companies more. The structure of the bill probably would have resulted in mass firings so companies could pay less taxes, but the threat towards the workforce clearly wasn’t the motives of the business people protesting that “this is hurting the poor innocent companies that are helping California thrive :( :( :( how could they bully us like this :( :( :(“ So with all that in mind, I don’t feel too bad about calling her a corporate monster.

I’ve put off playing this game for a long time. The Nancy Drew games are a huge part of my childhood and saying goodbye always feels… weird. I still haven’t even touched Midnight in Salem yet, even as it sits in my Steam library taunting me. Maybe it's actually good. Who could say. But all the things that defined the franchise as Nancy Drew are in THIS game, not Midnight in Salem. Yeah, the system’s clunky and Minelli’s acting is always a little stiff. But that’s kind of part of the charm, you know? And I think the devs knew that. People like to pretend the point and click genre “died”, but I think it mostly just started marketing to girls more than men, and gaming culture hated that. So for newer generations this was one of the best ways to get into the genre. I’m sure the newest gen have enough great indie point and clicks that I’m not too worried about the genre vanishing. But its still hard to see.

Maybe part of what’s so devastating is the sense that Nancy Drew’s legacy and cultural importance has been virtually abandoned. I’m not going to claim the franchise didn’t have problems from the onset. It's always been about a rich white teen who inspired people like Hilary Clinton. The original versions of the texts had major problems depicting race, and then the revisions of those books chose to whitewash all the characters and erased much of Nancy’s sassiness in favor of a girl with devotional loyalty to cops and authority. Both versions of those books are, as hard as it is for me to admit, bad! But I truly believe there’s something in this universe that hasn’t been fully utilized yet. Nancy had to answer the 1930s question of a "proper" female heroes by basically being loose enough to fill any ideal. But this results in something interesting. Because her character is written to be so thin, Nancy Drew can represent anything. Her potential is infinite. She can fly planes. She can solve murder by Tesla electrocution. There can be a jetpack homeless woman. She can do anything, BE anything.

But no one’s willing to give Nancy that chance. Simon and Schuster never advertised these games, leaving HerInteractive to foot the marketing bill. The 2008 movie is 90% great, but also shows embarrassment over the franchise’s supporting cast and spends too much time focusing on Ned’s romantic drama. The tv show is an attempt to rip off Riverdale without having any of the things that make Riverdale or Nancy Drew work. (“work”). Shit like Ready Player One take jabs a villain for liking Nancy Drew, because that’s the only kind of nerd franchise that’s not “important” I suppose. The last really great Nancy Drew work was a 2018 comic by Kelly Thompson. It took a noir approach to the character, wringing out some edgy character drama out of Nancy’s relationship with her friends and how her snooping has helped or hindered them in life. It's genuinely amazing. Ended on a cliffhanger that hasn’t been followed up on.

For Nancy’s 90th Anniversary, they announced a sequel to a Hardy Boys comic instead. The Hardy Boys in “The Death of Nancy Drew.”

How appropriate.

Anyway, now that I’m done having an existential crisis about my childhood hero for eight paragraphs, this game’s pretty alright.

The franchise’s formula has often tried to write some kind of tragedy set in the past and I’ve generally tuned it out. I’ve seen it before, you know? But at some point, I genuinely think the writing became something special. They nailed down giving characters unique voices and personality. The suspects particularly charming this time around. Gunnar, the boisterous drunkard who can’t tell a lie. The grumpy Lisabet who seems to teleport around town trying to keep some measure of peace in the town’s chaos. The girlboss lesbian Dagny, who’s such the stand-out of an already great cast. Her lines are constantly peppered with mean-spirited jabs so over the top that you can’t help but adore her. At one point, Nancy catches Dagny doing something shady and Dagny starts crafting a cover story. When Nancy acts like she buys it, Dagny immediately drops the lie on her own accord to lecture Nancy on being too trusting, before revealing the truth of the situation just for kicks. She’s a bitch and I love her.

But the writing also gives these characters a real tragedy to their lives. Dagny’s recently divorced and she still has her ex-wife’s last name in a lot of her paperwork, even years after the separation. Lisabet is grappling with a messy break-up and a messier financial struggle. Gunnar is irritable towards outsiders and over-the-top in his antics, but he keeps talking to someone as nosy as Nancy just because she looks like his lost daughter. Everyone’s struggling through these messy parts of their lives and the care to give them that depth highlights just how far the series has changed since the plot beat about the Trauma Therapy Robot back in the Haunted Carousel.

The game also takes a genuine swing at dealing with some more Nancy/Ned relationship drama, with the usual oddly paced writing decisions that entails. I've never been a Ned fan, but there's an attempt at tenderness here that truly feels warm and fresh in ways it hasn't been before.

Of course, it's still got the usual Drew problems. Some motivations and plots go nowhere, there’s a lot of red herrings that don’t quite line up, puzzles that barely make sense within the world’s setting, and this is probably the thirtieth treasure hunt plot these games have had. But those aren’t bugs per se. Those are features. That’s what you’re here to see.

Among the staff on Sea of Darkness were three notable writers. Nik Blahunka, Cathy Roiter, and Katie Chironis. The former two became the main Her writers for a good eight years and I think churned out some of its strongest swings of the franchise. Nik Blahunka is currently one of the staff on Fortnite while Cathy Roiter I couldn’t track down.

But I want to give special attention to Katie Chironis, a new hire at Her at the time.In between this game and being overworked for MiS and the dozens of other projects in between, Chironis spent 2013 to 2019 writing Elsinore, one of my favorite games of all time. I didn’t know about this connection until I was browsing the Elsinore website on a whim. It's one of the most touching, beautiful stories on narrative and the terror of an inevitable tragedy. Even while under the nightmare conditions of Midnight in Salem, she was making something truly personal and well-crafted.

And I think that’s where I really come down to with Nancy Drew. It's goofy, it's contrived, the writing isn’t always good, and you can really wander around for hours without a clue of what’s going on. There’s some copaganda aspects that come up here and there. But goddamn, you can feel the heart. There’s a genuine desire to just look around a new locale, teach some history, and maybe have some fun along the way. It was a franchise so comfortably in its groove, it kept finding new ways to expand and experiment, even within its formula. You got to see the team grow and change over the course of the years and make something really, truly sincere. Even 32 games in, I still wanted to see them do more.

But at the end of the day, I have no right to complain. 32 games in any franchise is a miracle. It was there for as long as it could be. And it really did make something wonderful in the process.

• this is just a pet peeve but i lowkey hate that they used lani’s voice for kate.
• making jammies is so soothing. <3 if only real life work was the same as making jammies in a nancy drew video game.
• nancy calling herself an accidental terror added ten years to my life.
• i love that they included the fight scenes between kate and carson instead of glossing over it.
• “have i ever missed a date?” “yes… all of the time.”
• the archery is so fun!
• “hey, if your dad catches me, do you think he’ll still be my lawyer?”
• “i gotta say if you’re so attached to your mom’s jeans, why did you take them on an international flight?” “those are mine.” “oh…”
• NANCY DREW DOES NOT DESERVE NED NICKERSON.
• as much as i love the atmosphere and story i do not like the puzzles. 😭
• it’s also really easy to get stuck. :/
• how crazy is it that the villain was considering luring nancy out to scotland by telling her that her mom is alive.
• it feels odd that moira and alec would be helping nancy and zoe in the end? maybe that’s just me though.
• the long complicated process of the ending annoyed me too.
• nancy’s letter in the end never fails to make me wanna cry.
• overall this is a great entry in the series, and after almost thirty games of investigating everything from ghosts to death threats to curses, it was fun to explore a mystery so personal to the titular character.

i've been following SLARPG ever since it was a different, worse project and i'm delighted to report that: it fucking rules and you should absolutely play it. SLARPG is one of the best RPGs i've played in years with some of the most fun characters, great writing, and tunes in a video game. i worry some people will write it off as a meme game or cashgrab targeting queer people but it's absolutely not that. SLARPG has, on top of being a great game in its own right, an incredibly earnest and heartfelt story with characters who's identities aren't played for drama, plot twists, or tragedy. shit's just casual and cool and sweet, it's really refreshing. the over-arching story is pretty simple on its face but it's mostly used as a wacky adventure for the cast to get fleshed out and developed. everyone's got some shit going on and it's the kinda shit that a lot of people are probably gonna go "damn she's like me fr fr" towards. it's also the best type of game - a satisfying 15-20 hour RPG that never gets stale and is only the good parts of a game. a real passion project type of game.

SLARPG is also the first RPGmaker game where i can call it an RPGmaker game and NOT mean it derogatorily. SLARPG's combat is remarkably great, even beyond the standards of its engine. each character has a ton of really creative moves that lead to fun experimentation and "oh, wait!" moments. on top of each character's normal moves, there's the spellbooks - a set of equip-able items that give a second moveset of sick magic to its owner. both of these interact with the star power metre, which fills as you perform your RPG role correctly and gives you access to the character's best special moves. the combat never got boring for me, even into the late game when you inevitably find the best way to kill everything it never feels static or tiring. shoutout to Allison's special move that plays one of the best songs i've ever heard in a video game.

i have two complaints. sometimes dialogue can just go on a bit too long, a few jokes don't land as well because of this (the capitalism comment from Allison at the kids' shop for example) and it can make the pacing a little weird. second, it sucks ass that the reaper spellbook has the 'make healing hurt enemies' spell but you can't even target enemies with healing as Melody. that's really it, though.