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--
Days in Journal
1 day
Last played
December 31, 2021
Platforms Played
CW for discussion of systemic racism, blackface
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Responding to an inquiry about the seeming removal of the game from digital storefronts in August 2020, a representative from Her Interactive had the following to say:
“Thank you for your interest in Nancy Drew: Ransom of the Seven Ships. We have discontinued this game as there is a character who disguises himself as different ethnicities.
As a company, we are addressing the critically important issues of racism, inclusion, and diversity that Black Lives Matter has helped us all to place a spotlight on. Meaningful changes need to happen within companies, and we will continue to be a part of these changes. We are committed to being sensitive and respectful to people of color, and therefore have discontinued availability of this game.
We apologize for the inconvenience. Please consider another game from our collection.
Thank you for understanding!”
Now obviously gamers by and large did not understand and the majority of responses I could find to this were breathlessly, embarrassingly trying to explain why this character was not doing blackface and his portrayal was not racist, how this was a bad move that would hurt the company in the long run despite as far as I can tell this also being generally the least popular and most critically reviled game in the series, etc etc. But we’re not gonna spend a lot of time on that, it’s not news that there are awful gamers in all corners of the medium.
No, what I think is noteworthy here is how incredibly revealing this statement is about the failure of these games, and this company, to understand or grapple with actual material conceptions of things like race and class and how they relate to systems of power, and how the media we create reflects those understandings.
Because looking at this statement in a vacuum, right, it does feel less cynical and more genuinely well-meaning to me than the overwhelming majority of Corporate Responses To BLM, an absolutely rancid genre of company PR interaction. They didn’t make a big thing out of it, they didn’t try to cash in some good will, they didn’t make a public statement at all – they just quietly removed the game from sale, and this only came out as the reason when they responded directly to a customer’s private request. Hell, the only reason I know about this whole thing at all is because I tried to buy it, first from Steam, then from their website, and couldn’t and went searching, and stumbling into this saga. It’s just listed as “sold out” on their website, no note or anything. And I mean come on, it’s Her Interactive, they have very little to lose or gain here, I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt on this one, for better and worse.
But to look at the blackface in this game (which came out in 2009! Fuckin’ hell dude what the fuck), say “oh yeah that’s pretty bad we should just scrub that from history” and call it a day really reveals how shallow the thinking is here. Something that is very pointedly not mentioned directly in that statement is the way the most highly publicized protests of 2020 (which were not unified by a singular cause and despite what the news would have you believe never really petered out so to lump them together as a “BLM movement” feels weird because that’s not really a thing in the way The News talks about it) were direct responses to abuses of power by America’s police. This is important in the context of Her Interactive’s relationship with their art, right, because Nancy Drew as she’s presented in these games specifically is at the core of her a cop. She is deeply loyal to interests of the wealthy and the powerful. In every instance so far she has aligned with The Letter of the Law even when she would have good reason not to. They obviously don’t see it this way but in every game where issues of race and/or class and their conflict with the state or other hegemonic structures are front and center (The Final Scene, Secret of the Scarlet Hand, Creature of Kapu Cave, and to a lesser degree Treasure in the Royal Tower and The Phantom of Venice), Nancy comes out on the wrong moral side of things without fail and without ever questioning her conviction that she’s in the right, even when the system she’s working for is openly corrupt – which, it should be said, it is in LITERALLY each of these games.
I believe that this statement is an earnest apology for an uncritically racist act by a heretofore uncritically racist team, but it’s blackface lol. It’s the layup of apologizing for racism. It’s the easiest thing you could possibly self-identify as a mistake if you were looking through your past actions. It doesn’t convince me that there’s an understanding here of the colonial violence against the people of Hawaii, not only by governments but by corporations and gentrifiers. It doesn’t make me think they really understand why it’s fucked up to have the game about the US government conspiring with a famous museum to steal indigenous cultural artifacts from Mexico and then grossly undercompensate them when their government is rightly mad about it ends with the Mexican consul arm in arm with the people who are robbing his nation, sharing a laugh and applauding Nancy’s puzzle solving ability despite the situation being essentially identical to where it was when we started. It doesn’t give me faith that they understand that the wrong guy went to jail at the end of The Final Scene.
I understand that this isn’t what these games are, there’s a degree to which this isn’t what these games would ever be allowed to be, and these are issues that the entire genre deals with. I also understand that media can’t and shouldn’t be a moral barometer that perfectly reflects an idealized version of my own morality for me to gratify myself with. I’ve never expected or really wanted that from these games, and I’ve generally really enjoyed my time with them, ridiculous, occasionally evil politics and all. But when the developer is taking actions like removing a game from sale and directly citing real social movements to customers with a stated intent of critically examining their own work and promising to be more responsible with their content in these specific ways, it’s hard not to want to hold them accountable. This isn’t to say that I want them to go back and strike all of their racist games from store shelves – it’s only to say that I am incredibly curious to see what the future of this franchise might look like if A. any more Nancy Drew games ever even come out at all (given the relatively well documented behind the scenes troubled the studio has faced since 2015, this is in serious doubt) and B. whether the modern Her Interactive would even attempt to address subject matters approaching their thornier entries in the early canon. This statement was made in 2020, and the last Nancy Drew game was released in December 2019 to turgid reception with not a peep on anything coming down the pipe since then, so we may never know.
So that leaves us with Ransom of the Seven Ships, the blockbuster twentieth entry in the Nancy Drew cyber mystery saga. ASIDE FROM THE THING, how is the rest of the game, you ask?
It fucking sucks dude. It’s one of the bottom five dirt worst video games I’ve ever played. When we talked about Creature of Kapu Cave I was like wow this game is fucking boring and nothing happens and the puzzles suck shit and it’s racist and the story is stupid trash and I feel like I owe that game and apology because this is in a lot of ways Just That Again but Worse lol.
Nancy, Bess, and George win a free vacation at an island resort, Nancy has to do rich people shit with her dad and arrive a day late, when she does George is like “yo Bess got KIDNAPPED and they’re holding her RANSOM” and the kidnapper is like “you have to solve this island’s secrets and bring me the treasure if you want to get your friend back” and that’s it. It’s back to the semi-open structure of Blackmoor Manor which I generally dislike but has seen greater success in more recent entries (Phantom of Venice did it too and that game rules, for example), except here’s the big kicker: there aren’t any characters in this game. The only person on the island besides George and Nancy is The Guy Doing Blackface, so like, yeah, of course he’s the culprit. He is literally the only other character in the entire game. They REALLY try to make you think it’s the owners of the resort who are themselves on vacation somewhere else but, again, they are not in the game. So given that there is only this one guy to interact with, you spend most of your time doing Chores for him (another bad sign for one of these) and doing tedious minigames over and over with the other denizens of the island, mischievous and intelligent monkeys who have trained themselves to play various boardgames, and are voiced by Lani Minella, the voice of Nancy, who also voiced the annoying parrot in Blackmoor Manor, and also oh yeah, there is another parrot she voices in this game, except I could not figure out a way to get a game over by killing it this time, so that also sucks. I guess Lani Minella just really likes doing these voices? I dunno man.
Everything is so monotonous, so stretched out, separated by a wind waker-esque sailing minigame where you’re at the whims of randomized wind currents, forced to repeat the same minigames and puzzles multiple times, fetching back and forth between George and Blackface Guy for scraps of nothing because there’s no mystery because there are no characters to bounce off of or investigate. Occasionally you will have to switch perspectives and play as George will usually have to repeat whatever you just did as Nancy, so that’s fun. There’s nothing here, nothing to latch onto, no joy to be had, none of the little flourishes or charms that make this series stand out. What should be a celebratory milestone (20 games!!) would be a disgraceful flop even without the overtly racist stain it leaves on the series.
And speaking of that, to really kick me in the teeth personally, Blackface Guy turns out to be our first returning villain, the bad guy from the second game, Secrets Can Kill, and once he stops doing an offensive Jamaican voice and takes off his makeup he immediately reverts back to that unhinged persona and for three glorious minutes I got to bask in Dwayne Powers again. Cannot believe they brought the best Nancy Drew voice actor back and THIS is what they did with him.
Jesus fucking christ, Her. What were you thinking.
PREVIOUSLY: NANCY DREW DOSSIER - LIGHTS, CAMERA, CURSES!
NEXT TIME: NANCY DREW DOSSIER - RESORTING TO DANGER
ALL NANCY DREW PIECES
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Responding to an inquiry about the seeming removal of the game from digital storefronts in August 2020, a representative from Her Interactive had the following to say:
“Thank you for your interest in Nancy Drew: Ransom of the Seven Ships. We have discontinued this game as there is a character who disguises himself as different ethnicities.
As a company, we are addressing the critically important issues of racism, inclusion, and diversity that Black Lives Matter has helped us all to place a spotlight on. Meaningful changes need to happen within companies, and we will continue to be a part of these changes. We are committed to being sensitive and respectful to people of color, and therefore have discontinued availability of this game.
We apologize for the inconvenience. Please consider another game from our collection.
Thank you for understanding!”
Now obviously gamers by and large did not understand and the majority of responses I could find to this were breathlessly, embarrassingly trying to explain why this character was not doing blackface and his portrayal was not racist, how this was a bad move that would hurt the company in the long run despite as far as I can tell this also being generally the least popular and most critically reviled game in the series, etc etc. But we’re not gonna spend a lot of time on that, it’s not news that there are awful gamers in all corners of the medium.
No, what I think is noteworthy here is how incredibly revealing this statement is about the failure of these games, and this company, to understand or grapple with actual material conceptions of things like race and class and how they relate to systems of power, and how the media we create reflects those understandings.
Because looking at this statement in a vacuum, right, it does feel less cynical and more genuinely well-meaning to me than the overwhelming majority of Corporate Responses To BLM, an absolutely rancid genre of company PR interaction. They didn’t make a big thing out of it, they didn’t try to cash in some good will, they didn’t make a public statement at all – they just quietly removed the game from sale, and this only came out as the reason when they responded directly to a customer’s private request. Hell, the only reason I know about this whole thing at all is because I tried to buy it, first from Steam, then from their website, and couldn’t and went searching, and stumbling into this saga. It’s just listed as “sold out” on their website, no note or anything. And I mean come on, it’s Her Interactive, they have very little to lose or gain here, I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt on this one, for better and worse.
But to look at the blackface in this game (which came out in 2009! Fuckin’ hell dude what the fuck), say “oh yeah that’s pretty bad we should just scrub that from history” and call it a day really reveals how shallow the thinking is here. Something that is very pointedly not mentioned directly in that statement is the way the most highly publicized protests of 2020 (which were not unified by a singular cause and despite what the news would have you believe never really petered out so to lump them together as a “BLM movement” feels weird because that’s not really a thing in the way The News talks about it) were direct responses to abuses of power by America’s police. This is important in the context of Her Interactive’s relationship with their art, right, because Nancy Drew as she’s presented in these games specifically is at the core of her a cop. She is deeply loyal to interests of the wealthy and the powerful. In every instance so far she has aligned with The Letter of the Law even when she would have good reason not to. They obviously don’t see it this way but in every game where issues of race and/or class and their conflict with the state or other hegemonic structures are front and center (The Final Scene, Secret of the Scarlet Hand, Creature of Kapu Cave, and to a lesser degree Treasure in the Royal Tower and The Phantom of Venice), Nancy comes out on the wrong moral side of things without fail and without ever questioning her conviction that she’s in the right, even when the system she’s working for is openly corrupt – which, it should be said, it is in LITERALLY each of these games.
I believe that this statement is an earnest apology for an uncritically racist act by a heretofore uncritically racist team, but it’s blackface lol. It’s the layup of apologizing for racism. It’s the easiest thing you could possibly self-identify as a mistake if you were looking through your past actions. It doesn’t convince me that there’s an understanding here of the colonial violence against the people of Hawaii, not only by governments but by corporations and gentrifiers. It doesn’t make me think they really understand why it’s fucked up to have the game about the US government conspiring with a famous museum to steal indigenous cultural artifacts from Mexico and then grossly undercompensate them when their government is rightly mad about it ends with the Mexican consul arm in arm with the people who are robbing his nation, sharing a laugh and applauding Nancy’s puzzle solving ability despite the situation being essentially identical to where it was when we started. It doesn’t give me faith that they understand that the wrong guy went to jail at the end of The Final Scene.
I understand that this isn’t what these games are, there’s a degree to which this isn’t what these games would ever be allowed to be, and these are issues that the entire genre deals with. I also understand that media can’t and shouldn’t be a moral barometer that perfectly reflects an idealized version of my own morality for me to gratify myself with. I’ve never expected or really wanted that from these games, and I’ve generally really enjoyed my time with them, ridiculous, occasionally evil politics and all. But when the developer is taking actions like removing a game from sale and directly citing real social movements to customers with a stated intent of critically examining their own work and promising to be more responsible with their content in these specific ways, it’s hard not to want to hold them accountable. This isn’t to say that I want them to go back and strike all of their racist games from store shelves – it’s only to say that I am incredibly curious to see what the future of this franchise might look like if A. any more Nancy Drew games ever even come out at all (given the relatively well documented behind the scenes troubled the studio has faced since 2015, this is in serious doubt) and B. whether the modern Her Interactive would even attempt to address subject matters approaching their thornier entries in the early canon. This statement was made in 2020, and the last Nancy Drew game was released in December 2019 to turgid reception with not a peep on anything coming down the pipe since then, so we may never know.
So that leaves us with Ransom of the Seven Ships, the blockbuster twentieth entry in the Nancy Drew cyber mystery saga. ASIDE FROM THE THING, how is the rest of the game, you ask?
It fucking sucks dude. It’s one of the bottom five dirt worst video games I’ve ever played. When we talked about Creature of Kapu Cave I was like wow this game is fucking boring and nothing happens and the puzzles suck shit and it’s racist and the story is stupid trash and I feel like I owe that game and apology because this is in a lot of ways Just That Again but Worse lol.
Nancy, Bess, and George win a free vacation at an island resort, Nancy has to do rich people shit with her dad and arrive a day late, when she does George is like “yo Bess got KIDNAPPED and they’re holding her RANSOM” and the kidnapper is like “you have to solve this island’s secrets and bring me the treasure if you want to get your friend back” and that’s it. It’s back to the semi-open structure of Blackmoor Manor which I generally dislike but has seen greater success in more recent entries (Phantom of Venice did it too and that game rules, for example), except here’s the big kicker: there aren’t any characters in this game. The only person on the island besides George and Nancy is The Guy Doing Blackface, so like, yeah, of course he’s the culprit. He is literally the only other character in the entire game. They REALLY try to make you think it’s the owners of the resort who are themselves on vacation somewhere else but, again, they are not in the game. So given that there is only this one guy to interact with, you spend most of your time doing Chores for him (another bad sign for one of these) and doing tedious minigames over and over with the other denizens of the island, mischievous and intelligent monkeys who have trained themselves to play various boardgames, and are voiced by Lani Minella, the voice of Nancy, who also voiced the annoying parrot in Blackmoor Manor, and also oh yeah, there is another parrot she voices in this game, except I could not figure out a way to get a game over by killing it this time, so that also sucks. I guess Lani Minella just really likes doing these voices? I dunno man.
Everything is so monotonous, so stretched out, separated by a wind waker-esque sailing minigame where you’re at the whims of randomized wind currents, forced to repeat the same minigames and puzzles multiple times, fetching back and forth between George and Blackface Guy for scraps of nothing because there’s no mystery because there are no characters to bounce off of or investigate. Occasionally you will have to switch perspectives and play as George will usually have to repeat whatever you just did as Nancy, so that’s fun. There’s nothing here, nothing to latch onto, no joy to be had, none of the little flourishes or charms that make this series stand out. What should be a celebratory milestone (20 games!!) would be a disgraceful flop even without the overtly racist stain it leaves on the series.
And speaking of that, to really kick me in the teeth personally, Blackface Guy turns out to be our first returning villain, the bad guy from the second game, Secrets Can Kill, and once he stops doing an offensive Jamaican voice and takes off his makeup he immediately reverts back to that unhinged persona and for three glorious minutes I got to bask in Dwayne Powers again. Cannot believe they brought the best Nancy Drew voice actor back and THIS is what they did with him.
Jesus fucking christ, Her. What were you thinking.
PREVIOUSLY: NANCY DREW DOSSIER - LIGHTS, CAMERA, CURSES!
NEXT TIME: NANCY DREW DOSSIER - RESORTING TO DANGER
ALL NANCY DREW PIECES