I wish that this was a game about trauma. I mean, it sort of is. Every Nancy Drew is split between at least two identities that often feel like they’re meant to synergize into a thematic whole, but they so rarely find the balance. Most commonly this takes the form of a modern day mystery plot and its historical roots, and the issue comes from finding a way to make enough time for both, or making sure the weight of one side is appropriately felt in the other.

Nancy Drew: The Haunted Carousel seems initially like it might nail this element – with its historical intrigue about a guy who carved the horses for a carousel in the titular amusement park which are now considered extremely valuable for some reason (there is a historical heist involved, these games LOVE historical heists and listen man SO DO I so I will NOT be taking them to task for this), and his modern-day descendent, Joy, who is RATHER IRONICALLY a very sad woman who works at the park today. See, Joy’s whole life has revolved around the park; everybody in her family works or worked there going back generations, her mom died in a car crash that feels responsible for during a park-related incident when she was four years old that led to her repressing all of her early childhood memories as a coping mechanism, normal precocious kid shit.

Another very normal thing about Joy is that her dad, who used be like, an attraction designer for the park, eventually realized that helping his extremely young child essentially condition herself to forget her entire early development instead of dealing with her grief was an extremely fucked up thing to do (hindsight is 20/20) and talking to her about it, waited until he was on his deathbed and then invented a wacky little robot guy to give her riddles in hopes that solving them would prompt her to resurface park-related memories of her mother. Most of the game’s story ostensibly involves solving these riddles for Joy, and helping her push through her shit and come to terms with some real ugly feelings, in ways that I have gripes with but are clearly the emotional core of the game and also by far the most interesting stuff here. It’s just that this is where we come back to my tragic thesis for this review: this SHOULD be what this game is about, and although it’s certainly the EMOTIONAL center, and you do spend a lot of the middle portion of the game working towards the few key scenes where Joy gets to have these moments, the moments themselves are few and brief. The best, most interesting, most resonant content in the game, and the content that’s most directly tied to the Traditional Nancy Drew Historical Storyline, is FIRMLY the b-plot of the game, only given slightly more time and weight than “what’s the wacky new age engineer up to” and “hmm the security guard seems kind of cagey about his past.” I would have much rather seen Joy have to reckon with her father’s role in all of this than learn about fucking Ingrid’s secretly selling rollercoaster blueprints to a friend or whatever the fuck she was up to.

The tone of it all doesn’t help? These games do have a history of playfulness to them, but I mark mood-setting as maybe their greatest and most consistent strength normally, which is why it feels so weird to have this complaint. The scenes with Joy feel very grounded, very real. A woman finding catharsis by embracing grief is a powerful thing, especially when the circumstances of the whole situation lead to a lot of murkiness in the way she must feel retroactively about a lot of what came after and people she thought she knew growing up in a relatively closed and tight-knit environment. So to have these scenes always end with Joy and Nancy turning to see a funny little robot guy literally cough up a new clue and piddle out a little rhyming riddle to hunt down the next piece of this deeply sad trauma puzzle feels deeply inappropriate. Like yeah man it IS super funny but this is the one moment in the game I don’t want to be laughing?

Although these are my only REAL complaints with this one they do feel big enough to sour what is otherwise a perfectly fun Nancy Drew Cyber Adventure. The amusement park (which is not even slightly haunted and nobody acts like it is so the title of this game is a fuckin TEASE AND A HALF) is a cute setting that lends itself really well to puzzles and I think they make the most of it. Plenty of fucking around with rides, going behind the scenes, working in the offices, playing minigames based on attractions around the park; everything you would want to see out of this kind of setting is here.

The characters are all pretty good too, if a little underwritten. This game is a little shorter than the last few have been, and leans more heavily on puzzles than narrative, but it also has the most characters to speak with of any of the games so far and I think the surplus of content crammed into a barely two hour runtime really shows. I do like everyone. Joy is obviously the one with the most meat on her bones, but I also really enjoy the very sensitive jersey accented beefcake security guard Harlan and the person who turns out to be the villain, who is not a particularly deep or interesting character but who is lifted up by a much higher-than-usual-quality performance for these games by their voice actor.

Also I’m starting a new segment that I expect will recur at the end of many of these reviews moving forward called Nancy Drew Cop Watch, to catalogue all the times Nancy needlessly acts like a huge asshole cop for no reason when she could just leave the fuck alone and be cool instead.

Today she finds out that Harlan the security guard used to be incarcerated when she accidentally contacts someone who turns out to be a parole officer, and immediately runs to his boss to tattle on him, framing it as “disturbing information.” When his boss is like “yeah I know I hired him anyway he’s cool he told me up front and I trust him” Nancy STILL tries to finger him for some extremely petty harmless shit he did to get him in trouble, JUST because she doesn’t trust him for being in jail when he was younger! He gets mad and won’t talk to her for a while, and then later, HE apologizes to HER for getting mad about this!

Additionally she finds out that Ingrid the engineer is doing an actual criminal act of stealing the park’s roller coaster blueprints and giving them to her friend to copy so they can make their own roller coaster out of them but Nancy doesn’t care about this, presumably because Ingrid is not already a felon, who knows, she contains multitudes.

So anyway I am impressed that this series continues to press up against the edges of the kinds of subject matter they want to try to tackle, and that despite not doing it in the MOST graceful ways, the stories they try to tell so far have been pretty respectful and not really embarrassing. It’s a better track record than any AAA game series I can think of, and I look forward to them continuing to broaden their horizons.

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NEXT TIME: DANGER ON DECEPTION ISLAND

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