At the end of my last review I was wondering what these games might look like in a post-9/11 world, what their political ambitions might be, whether the steadily increasing fire that had been building in the belly of this series for four games in a row would continue to grow or be stifled by the sudden weight of America in those months and years of cultural transformation following the event. If you’re new to my Nancy Drew project I promise that this makes sense to ask about these games, but it won’t seem like it based on everything we’re about to talk about because the answer is no this game is Not About Anything so hard that at first I was thinking wow this is kind of nice, kind of refreshing to just have a chill cozy mystery, but by the end I think I have settled on this being firmly at the bottom of the barrel.
Nancy’s got a friend named Sally who bought a remote cabin that used to be owned by Fake Al Capone on a lake on the edge of a nature preserve, with nobody around for several miles except the local ranger, a weird old man obsessed with bird watching, and the woman who runs the small store on the other side of the lake. Unfortunately for Sally, who was really looking forward to fixing up this old rotting lake house and doing photography there or something, it’s haunted by the ghosts of Malone’s four dogs who attack her every night! Well, they kind of run around in her yard and then get up by the window and bark a little bit and then leave every night, but that’s scary enough for Sally to freak out and leave AFTER calling Nancy in to help her look into it, so it’s up to Nancy to figure this shit out on her own, of course.
Sounds like a cool setup for a creepy campfire sort of mystery, right? But the reality of the game is anything but frightening. This game, like most of the prior ones, heavily features a day/night cycle that you control by adjusting the time of day in your bedroom, but despite the premise of the game involving near-nightly attacks by the titular ghost dogs, they only make one, comically unthreatening appearance on Nancy’s first or second night there and never again, no matter how many times you find yourself needing to swap the times because x character only shows up at night or y bird you need a picture of will only appear on this particular branch between 4 and 6 AM.
There’s a feeling that this game was an attempt by Her Interactive to give the impression of stretching their legs a bit after pretty much only setting their games in relatively restrictive urban and domestic environments. This is easily the largest map in the series to date and the Great Outdoorsiness of the main chunk of it is deceptively impressive at first glance, until you realize that it’s mostly taken up by very long paths to and from an actually smaller number of areas than is usual for these games plus a large forest maze that you will return too TOO MANY TIMES over the course of SEVERAL quests in search of MULTIPLE different species of animals. During this game you will track down dogs, bugs, and birds almost entirely in place of clues, which mostly just kind of fall into Nancy’s lap by chance right at the end of the game where the bulk of the actual puzzle solving is done, after two hours of rote busywork and fetch questing.
These puzzles are, to their credit, related to this game’s historical curiosity, What If We Made Up A Fake Al Capone But He Was Obsessed With Dogs And Also Obtuse Puzzles which is actually a great character idea that goes sorely underutilized, and I think once you do literally get his 100-year-old ex-girlfriend to mail you the key to his secret speakeasy so you can start actually working on the plot of the game IMMEDIATELY before the game ends things really pick up, and the climax is good and fun! It’s a very stimulating 15 minutes, and the villain of this one is pretty fun. Terrible game that I hate, nothing interesting happening, but it goes out on a high note, I’ll give it that.
At some point they started putting teasers at the end of these games for the next release and in a bold move they are doing two Haunted Whatever ones in a row so HOPEFULLY “haunted amusement park” will turn out better than “haunted secret lakeside basement gambling den and also the ghosts are dogs” which is something that fucking sucks to have to say, but, it almost couldn’t be worse!
PREVIOUSLY: SECRET OF THE SCARLET HAND
NEXT TIME: THE HAUNTED CAROUSEL
ALL NANCY DREW PIECES
Nancy’s got a friend named Sally who bought a remote cabin that used to be owned by Fake Al Capone on a lake on the edge of a nature preserve, with nobody around for several miles except the local ranger, a weird old man obsessed with bird watching, and the woman who runs the small store on the other side of the lake. Unfortunately for Sally, who was really looking forward to fixing up this old rotting lake house and doing photography there or something, it’s haunted by the ghosts of Malone’s four dogs who attack her every night! Well, they kind of run around in her yard and then get up by the window and bark a little bit and then leave every night, but that’s scary enough for Sally to freak out and leave AFTER calling Nancy in to help her look into it, so it’s up to Nancy to figure this shit out on her own, of course.
Sounds like a cool setup for a creepy campfire sort of mystery, right? But the reality of the game is anything but frightening. This game, like most of the prior ones, heavily features a day/night cycle that you control by adjusting the time of day in your bedroom, but despite the premise of the game involving near-nightly attacks by the titular ghost dogs, they only make one, comically unthreatening appearance on Nancy’s first or second night there and never again, no matter how many times you find yourself needing to swap the times because x character only shows up at night or y bird you need a picture of will only appear on this particular branch between 4 and 6 AM.
There’s a feeling that this game was an attempt by Her Interactive to give the impression of stretching their legs a bit after pretty much only setting their games in relatively restrictive urban and domestic environments. This is easily the largest map in the series to date and the Great Outdoorsiness of the main chunk of it is deceptively impressive at first glance, until you realize that it’s mostly taken up by very long paths to and from an actually smaller number of areas than is usual for these games plus a large forest maze that you will return too TOO MANY TIMES over the course of SEVERAL quests in search of MULTIPLE different species of animals. During this game you will track down dogs, bugs, and birds almost entirely in place of clues, which mostly just kind of fall into Nancy’s lap by chance right at the end of the game where the bulk of the actual puzzle solving is done, after two hours of rote busywork and fetch questing.
These puzzles are, to their credit, related to this game’s historical curiosity, What If We Made Up A Fake Al Capone But He Was Obsessed With Dogs And Also Obtuse Puzzles which is actually a great character idea that goes sorely underutilized, and I think once you do literally get his 100-year-old ex-girlfriend to mail you the key to his secret speakeasy so you can start actually working on the plot of the game IMMEDIATELY before the game ends things really pick up, and the climax is good and fun! It’s a very stimulating 15 minutes, and the villain of this one is pretty fun. Terrible game that I hate, nothing interesting happening, but it goes out on a high note, I’ll give it that.
At some point they started putting teasers at the end of these games for the next release and in a bold move they are doing two Haunted Whatever ones in a row so HOPEFULLY “haunted amusement park” will turn out better than “haunted secret lakeside basement gambling den and also the ghosts are dogs” which is something that fucking sucks to have to say, but, it almost couldn’t be worse!
PREVIOUSLY: SECRET OF THE SCARLET HAND
NEXT TIME: THE HAUNTED CAROUSEL
ALL NANCY DREW PIECES