ADDENDUM 09/29/2021: hey this ended up being the first part of a comprehensive retrospective of all 32 (and counting, hopefully!) of these Nancy Drew games. There will always be a link to the review of the next one at the bottom if you're interested!
Addendum 2: when I first did this I didn’t realize how different the remaster was in form and content from the original so when I do get around to playing the remaster I will probably make a separate entry and fix these.
the closest i’ve come to engaging with Nancy Drew in any form before now was when a piece of ND memorabilia became key to solving a mystery in the second season of the CW’s Riverdale, but i’ve always loved the cozy mystery genre that seems like it must at least partially have its roots with Nancy, and I’ve always longed to correct my unfamiliarity with the point n click genre, so these seemed like a great place to start and oh boy, this game was not made for me!!
which was not to say that it wasn’t a good time! it’s only to say that Secrets Can Kill CLEARLY expects you to know who Nancy Drew is and what she’s about AND be down for 90s adventure game realities (although thankfully it never leans into the terrible design difficulties that made the genre’s most famous 90s franchises infamous).
Nancy is either 19 or 40 (VA makes it very hard to tell) and has been enlisted by her aunt to go undercover at a high school to investigate the murder of a local shithead. The need for a cover story is funny because she literally solves the case in two hours but don’t worry about it.
At any time you can call any of a cadre of Nancy’s friends/boyfriend, all of whom are so unhelpful it’s actually funny, but also none of them are characterized in any way so if George or Ned, who I assume are major players in the wider world of Nancy Drew, actually have personalities, this game offers piss poor fanservice for them even if in doing so they end up making a pretty good joke out of the extremely abrupt way they hang up on you after telling you like i dunno you’re in a school go to the library bitch???
and she’ll need to go to the library because this is a bizarro high school where everyone is posting rumors and clues about the recent murder and all associated parties in rhyming acrostic code, like everyone at school is a tricksy little devil and not uh, stealing steroids from the local pharmacy or blackmailing the exchange student who’s afraid of being deported if he can’t get a scholarship next year. It’s this weird mix of whimsical puzzles and like, extreme video game simulacra. the football player guy gives you some exposition and then tells you “okay now get lost I gotta go to practice” but he'll never move, he'll just continue to stand there in a corner tossing his football hand to hand like a jackass forever. Despite dialog constantly alluding to all the cops crawling around the school the halls are EERILY empty.
this strange mix of very grounded high school dramatics with very funny video game artificiality all adds up to something that isn’t particularly substantial but is very fun and a great foundation for one of video gaming’s unsung franchises.
NEXT TIME: STAY TUNED FOR DANGER
Addendum 2: when I first did this I didn’t realize how different the remaster was in form and content from the original so when I do get around to playing the remaster I will probably make a separate entry and fix these.
the closest i’ve come to engaging with Nancy Drew in any form before now was when a piece of ND memorabilia became key to solving a mystery in the second season of the CW’s Riverdale, but i’ve always loved the cozy mystery genre that seems like it must at least partially have its roots with Nancy, and I’ve always longed to correct my unfamiliarity with the point n click genre, so these seemed like a great place to start and oh boy, this game was not made for me!!
which was not to say that it wasn’t a good time! it’s only to say that Secrets Can Kill CLEARLY expects you to know who Nancy Drew is and what she’s about AND be down for 90s adventure game realities (although thankfully it never leans into the terrible design difficulties that made the genre’s most famous 90s franchises infamous).
Nancy is either 19 or 40 (VA makes it very hard to tell) and has been enlisted by her aunt to go undercover at a high school to investigate the murder of a local shithead. The need for a cover story is funny because she literally solves the case in two hours but don’t worry about it.
At any time you can call any of a cadre of Nancy’s friends/boyfriend, all of whom are so unhelpful it’s actually funny, but also none of them are characterized in any way so if George or Ned, who I assume are major players in the wider world of Nancy Drew, actually have personalities, this game offers piss poor fanservice for them even if in doing so they end up making a pretty good joke out of the extremely abrupt way they hang up on you after telling you like i dunno you’re in a school go to the library bitch???
and she’ll need to go to the library because this is a bizarro high school where everyone is posting rumors and clues about the recent murder and all associated parties in rhyming acrostic code, like everyone at school is a tricksy little devil and not uh, stealing steroids from the local pharmacy or blackmailing the exchange student who’s afraid of being deported if he can’t get a scholarship next year. It’s this weird mix of whimsical puzzles and like, extreme video game simulacra. the football player guy gives you some exposition and then tells you “okay now get lost I gotta go to practice” but he'll never move, he'll just continue to stand there in a corner tossing his football hand to hand like a jackass forever. Despite dialog constantly alluding to all the cops crawling around the school the halls are EERILY empty.
this strange mix of very grounded high school dramatics with very funny video game artificiality all adds up to something that isn’t particularly substantial but is very fun and a great foundation for one of video gaming’s unsung franchises.
NEXT TIME: STAY TUNED FOR DANGER
2 Comments
These games REALLY improve graphically in a way that I think actually hurts the atmosphere a little bit haha. I’m playing through ghost dogs right now and I think part of the reason it’s failing to click on the creepiness level is there is a real lack of the artificial emptiness in the way they’re able to more successfully emulate the way the environment looks and feels.
whereas this high school that is supposedly normal and stereotypically suburban but really haunted by murder and drugs and blackmail being physically represented as this weird desolate space where the most sign of life you ever get is the distant echo of a ghostly basketball game when you stand right next to the gym is super effective even though it’s an earnest attempt to do the best they could with what they had at the time
whereas this high school that is supposedly normal and stereotypically suburban but really haunted by murder and drugs and blackmail being physically represented as this weird desolate space where the most sign of life you ever get is the distant echo of a ghostly basketball game when you stand right next to the gym is super effective even though it’s an earnest attempt to do the best they could with what they had at the time
Nerdietalk
2 years ago