In this game I intentionally killed a parrot with poison and there’s not a jury on Earth that would convict me.
For as much as the Nancy Drew Cyber Mysteries have a reputation for being formulaic, actually playing through them in release order has so far revealed a series that is constantly pushing and pulling at the boundaries of its identity, always exploring new ideas, settings, and gimmicks. We’re deep enough in it now to have identified a comfortable stable of puzzles and premises, but I think its safe to say that Her Interactive is still interested in tugging at the thread of what these games can be, in both writing and in conventional gameplay, and more boldly in some games than in others. Curse of Blackmoor Manor falls firmly into the camp of games that are trying new things, this time an admirable attempt to expand the scope of the play style, but as with many first tries in these games I think it’s largely clumsy and comes at the expense of the other elements of the game. It’s a particular shame this time because this could easily have been a story about some interesting stuff, but in the game we got there’s just no room for any actual plot or characters.
Let’s get to that plot then because it’s possibly the flimsiest premise so far in the franchise (complimentary/derogatory). Okay hang on I gotta remember the correct sequence of words here…Nancy’s…Dad’s…Neighbor’s…Friend, Linda, has recently married a rich dude and moved in with him at his ancestral home, the titular Blackmoor Manor in England, but she has been sick for a while, and I guess this is concerning enough to the neighbor lady to for some reason ask Nancy to look into it? And the husband, who is actually away on business and never appears or is heard from throughout the game is like “oh sure this delinquent 18-year-old can come hang out at my house with my ailing second wife who I personally believe is faking her illness while I’m not there with the express purpose of investigating what’s going on why not?” It’s fucking weird, bro.
We only kind of get to meet Linda, who is bedridden and mysteriously hiding behind her bedcurtains for the entire game, and otherwise we spend most of the story interacting with her new step-daughter Jane, the manor’s caretaker whose name I’ve already forgotten, and Jane’s extremely creepy tutor Ethel, who is descended from a long line of attendant type people who have served the Pevellyn family for generations. I’ve written at length about how these games tend to split time between modern day stories and what I’ve been calling “historical plots” which usually intertwine with the villain’s plans in the form of some sort of buried treasure or historically important document or whatever, and in this game it’s a bit looser but the niche is filled by the Pevellyn family legacy, its rumored hidden treasure, and its supposed ancestral curse.
See, Linda thinks she’s been victimized by the curse somehow as a rejection of her marriage into the family, while Jane is fascinated with the house’s secrets and hidden passageways and weird puzzles, largely because she’s a bored 12-year-old who lives alone with three adult women and has nothing else to do all day (or so it seems at first). Nancy, being the unsatiable puzzle guzzler that she is, also starts solving the Blackmoor Manor secret puzzles immediately, more out of a lack of really anything else to do than any particular driving force? And that’s kind of the biggest problem I have with the game.
The structure here is different from previous Nancy Drews in that instead of a linear mystery and set of puzzles, this game is presented as a borderline open-world puzzlebox, where you’re basically free to wander about the manor and poke at any puzzles you have access to at any given time. It’s certainly an ambitious shakeup to the formula, and I appreciate the idea of a more freeform approach to a space (the manor is well-designed for the most-part, too – lots of little connective tissues across the areas to keep things flowing well MOST of the time). But I think there are two huge flaws that shoot this new structure in the foot and really make me wary of adopting it as the default style moving forward.
First is that there’s just like…toooooo much gameplay here? This sounds like a weird criticism to have but hear me out. The ratio is off. There are SO many more puzzles and minigames in Curse of Blackmoor Manor than your average one of these and way less plot propping them up. This might be fatiguing on it own, but the second flaw is that many of these puzzles are poorly designed time sinks on top of this.
Take, for example, my mortal enemy, Lou Lou the Parrot. There comes a point fairly early in the game where you have to twist the many hands on a dragon statue into the correct configuration to open a false wall to descend a secret staircase until you find a door with a word inscribed upon it, under which is a space for you to enter a related word. Your possible configurations are mathematically enormous, and the presentation makes them very difficult to guess. Helpfully, though, there’s a carving of a parrot over the door, so sussing out that you need to get Lou Lou the octogenarian parrot to tell you the word to enter, you go to talk to her. She refuses to speak to you. Okay, you go around asking people how to communicate with Lou Lou. Two conversations later you’ve got her password. Lou Lou will talk to you but she won’t give you the code unless you first feed her a cake. So you walk to her special bird kitchen and do a little minigame where you bake her a bird cake, take it back, watch her eat it, THEN she’ll give you the word, you walk back to the hidden passage, complete the dragon puzzle again, go back down the secret stairs, enter the codeword, and are presented with another word. So you go back to Lou Lou, who will happily tell you the next word, if you go make her another cake. Once you have it, you’ll return to the hidden passage, complete the dragon puzzle again, go back down the secret stairs enter the codeword, and oh my god a third one.
You repeat this sequence four times, all the while enduring Nancy’s own voice actor pulling double duty as the bird, obnoxiously screeching some of the most painfully drawn out parrot dialogue I’ve ever heard, tormenting me with unfunny references and bizarre non sequiturs. By the end of it could you possibly blame me for intentionally poisoning her?
This is only one example of needless, bizarre padding in a game that’s already competing for the longest playtime of the series so far. There’s an endless cavalcade of minigames here too, most of which are recycled from previous entries, all of which are forced on you two or even three times over the course of the game (more, if you fuck them up). Perhaps most offensively, two of these are variations on go fish? Why?? Why do we need two go fishes?? This is true excess.
It even applies to the good puzzles. The relentless gauntlets of nonstop solves led me to a feeling of fatigue, even when on an individual basis I was having a grand old time. It turns out that balancing all the different parts of these games is really important, and the guided experience of a linear structure maybe works for the kinds of narratives Nancy Drew games have thus far established themselves to be. I’m not saying that this is prescriptive – I would never do that – I think I’m just reacting particularly harshly here because there is SUCH potential in these characters and this narrative setup and none of it gets paid off.
So let’s talk about where this all ends up, and what it could have been. Curse of Blackmoor Manor, is, unfortunately, not the Nancy Drew game where we commit full on to some sort of supernatural thing, despite the CRUEL TEASE halfway through that Linda has been cursed to become a werewolf. Instead, at the end of all this, it turns out that Jane has used a combination of other people’s prescription drugs ground into her food to make her sick, hair growth formula mixed into her moisturizer to make her “grow fur,” and insistence on have Linda read her bedtime stories about monsters and shit to essentially incept the idea that she has been cursed into her brain and placebo her into thinking she’s a werewolf, because Jane is mad that her parents are divorced. Simultaneously but COMPLETELY separately Ethel has been training Jane in secret to solve the Manor’s hidden puzzle box elements herself and claim the treasure at the end, which turns out to be essentially worthless, and it’s suggested that Nancy has in fact ruined an old family tradition by coming in and solving things herself unwittingly. It’s suggested that Ethel is involved in the werewolf plot too because there’s some technology involved that’s used to scare Nancy away separately from Linda’s whole thing, but largely these two plots seem to be wholly unrelated. Everybody laughs, there was never any danger, this kid spent months psychologically torturing her stepmom but everybody’s gonna make it work! It’s 2004 bud and we do NOT talk about therapists.
Perhaps this all sounds fucking insane to you, and let me assure, you, it is, but what might be more surprising is that almost everything I just wrote actually comes out in literally the last like two minutes of the game. There is SO little happening with ANY of these characters for the preceding three and a half to four hours. Ethel doesn’t even appear outside of cutscenes. And there’s so much potential here. For a relationship between Jane and Linda, a real one. To explore the culture of dedicated generational master/servant relationships in noble houses; the loneliness and burdens that must come with the privileges and weird rituals of being a kid in the ever-dwindling mega-upper class of old British society. There is SO much shit here and it’s the kind of shit that the team at Her would normally eat the fuck up, which is why it’s so much more frustrating than usual to see it squandered in exchange for, essentially, nothing?
That’s not to say the game is without its upsides. I’ve talked about the bevy of new puzzles in the game, and how it seems like Her was making a conscious effort to kind of shake up their standard book of tricks (even if they also included all of the old ones, leading to a weird bloated mess), and that effort is certainly appreciated. And there’s a TON of the classic Nancy Drew Cyber Mystery Charm in this one, just a ton of goofy bullshit that I absolutely love to see, which I will be listing now:
1. Like, three different times in the game Ethel just APPEARS when Nancy turns around in the most effective scares in series so far.
2. There’s a point where you’re talking to Ned on the phone and he seems to legitimately not know what a picture book is, and to be confused by the very idea of one.
3. It’s extremely clear that nobody in this cast is actually British (the three main blood relatives you meet don’t even have remotely similar accents lol), but in particular the guy Nancy orders food from has the worst cockney accent I’ve ever heard, like Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins but not one of Golden Age Hollywood’s most beloved character actors backing it up with charm. This character was also written so bafflingly that I had to enlist your friend and mine Woodaba to tell me if he was using actual British slang or if the game was making fun of me and/or British people before we realized that they were using cockney rhyme slang, which the book also comically provides you a very dry in-game dictionary for eventually.
4. There’s a guy in this whose computer you have to borrow a couple times and his desktop background is a picture of himself doing a cool pose, which is definitely like, you never see this guy stand up but that’s short king energy imo
5. One of the game overs in this game involves being eaten by a gigantic carnivorous plant and context won’t make that any more or less funny
So yeah I dunno this game is fine, it really tried some stuff that I personally think mostly didn’t work and I think it had some STELLAR opportunities that it completely failed to jump on but what is here isn’t the worst, it’s just littered with small annoyances and disappointments throughout. A real death of a thousand cuts, this game.
PREVIOUSLY: THE SECRET OF SHADOW RANCH
NEXT TIME: SECRET OF THE OLD CLOCK
ALL NANCY DREW PIECES
For as much as the Nancy Drew Cyber Mysteries have a reputation for being formulaic, actually playing through them in release order has so far revealed a series that is constantly pushing and pulling at the boundaries of its identity, always exploring new ideas, settings, and gimmicks. We’re deep enough in it now to have identified a comfortable stable of puzzles and premises, but I think its safe to say that Her Interactive is still interested in tugging at the thread of what these games can be, in both writing and in conventional gameplay, and more boldly in some games than in others. Curse of Blackmoor Manor falls firmly into the camp of games that are trying new things, this time an admirable attempt to expand the scope of the play style, but as with many first tries in these games I think it’s largely clumsy and comes at the expense of the other elements of the game. It’s a particular shame this time because this could easily have been a story about some interesting stuff, but in the game we got there’s just no room for any actual plot or characters.
Let’s get to that plot then because it’s possibly the flimsiest premise so far in the franchise (complimentary/derogatory). Okay hang on I gotta remember the correct sequence of words here…Nancy’s…Dad’s…Neighbor’s…Friend, Linda, has recently married a rich dude and moved in with him at his ancestral home, the titular Blackmoor Manor in England, but she has been sick for a while, and I guess this is concerning enough to the neighbor lady to for some reason ask Nancy to look into it? And the husband, who is actually away on business and never appears or is heard from throughout the game is like “oh sure this delinquent 18-year-old can come hang out at my house with my ailing second wife who I personally believe is faking her illness while I’m not there with the express purpose of investigating what’s going on why not?” It’s fucking weird, bro.
We only kind of get to meet Linda, who is bedridden and mysteriously hiding behind her bedcurtains for the entire game, and otherwise we spend most of the story interacting with her new step-daughter Jane, the manor’s caretaker whose name I’ve already forgotten, and Jane’s extremely creepy tutor Ethel, who is descended from a long line of attendant type people who have served the Pevellyn family for generations. I’ve written at length about how these games tend to split time between modern day stories and what I’ve been calling “historical plots” which usually intertwine with the villain’s plans in the form of some sort of buried treasure or historically important document or whatever, and in this game it’s a bit looser but the niche is filled by the Pevellyn family legacy, its rumored hidden treasure, and its supposed ancestral curse.
See, Linda thinks she’s been victimized by the curse somehow as a rejection of her marriage into the family, while Jane is fascinated with the house’s secrets and hidden passageways and weird puzzles, largely because she’s a bored 12-year-old who lives alone with three adult women and has nothing else to do all day (or so it seems at first). Nancy, being the unsatiable puzzle guzzler that she is, also starts solving the Blackmoor Manor secret puzzles immediately, more out of a lack of really anything else to do than any particular driving force? And that’s kind of the biggest problem I have with the game.
The structure here is different from previous Nancy Drews in that instead of a linear mystery and set of puzzles, this game is presented as a borderline open-world puzzlebox, where you’re basically free to wander about the manor and poke at any puzzles you have access to at any given time. It’s certainly an ambitious shakeup to the formula, and I appreciate the idea of a more freeform approach to a space (the manor is well-designed for the most-part, too – lots of little connective tissues across the areas to keep things flowing well MOST of the time). But I think there are two huge flaws that shoot this new structure in the foot and really make me wary of adopting it as the default style moving forward.
First is that there’s just like…toooooo much gameplay here? This sounds like a weird criticism to have but hear me out. The ratio is off. There are SO many more puzzles and minigames in Curse of Blackmoor Manor than your average one of these and way less plot propping them up. This might be fatiguing on it own, but the second flaw is that many of these puzzles are poorly designed time sinks on top of this.
Take, for example, my mortal enemy, Lou Lou the Parrot. There comes a point fairly early in the game where you have to twist the many hands on a dragon statue into the correct configuration to open a false wall to descend a secret staircase until you find a door with a word inscribed upon it, under which is a space for you to enter a related word. Your possible configurations are mathematically enormous, and the presentation makes them very difficult to guess. Helpfully, though, there’s a carving of a parrot over the door, so sussing out that you need to get Lou Lou the octogenarian parrot to tell you the word to enter, you go to talk to her. She refuses to speak to you. Okay, you go around asking people how to communicate with Lou Lou. Two conversations later you’ve got her password. Lou Lou will talk to you but she won’t give you the code unless you first feed her a cake. So you walk to her special bird kitchen and do a little minigame where you bake her a bird cake, take it back, watch her eat it, THEN she’ll give you the word, you walk back to the hidden passage, complete the dragon puzzle again, go back down the secret stairs, enter the codeword, and are presented with another word. So you go back to Lou Lou, who will happily tell you the next word, if you go make her another cake. Once you have it, you’ll return to the hidden passage, complete the dragon puzzle again, go back down the secret stairs enter the codeword, and oh my god a third one.
You repeat this sequence four times, all the while enduring Nancy’s own voice actor pulling double duty as the bird, obnoxiously screeching some of the most painfully drawn out parrot dialogue I’ve ever heard, tormenting me with unfunny references and bizarre non sequiturs. By the end of it could you possibly blame me for intentionally poisoning her?
This is only one example of needless, bizarre padding in a game that’s already competing for the longest playtime of the series so far. There’s an endless cavalcade of minigames here too, most of which are recycled from previous entries, all of which are forced on you two or even three times over the course of the game (more, if you fuck them up). Perhaps most offensively, two of these are variations on go fish? Why?? Why do we need two go fishes?? This is true excess.
It even applies to the good puzzles. The relentless gauntlets of nonstop solves led me to a feeling of fatigue, even when on an individual basis I was having a grand old time. It turns out that balancing all the different parts of these games is really important, and the guided experience of a linear structure maybe works for the kinds of narratives Nancy Drew games have thus far established themselves to be. I’m not saying that this is prescriptive – I would never do that – I think I’m just reacting particularly harshly here because there is SUCH potential in these characters and this narrative setup and none of it gets paid off.
So let’s talk about where this all ends up, and what it could have been. Curse of Blackmoor Manor, is, unfortunately, not the Nancy Drew game where we commit full on to some sort of supernatural thing, despite the CRUEL TEASE halfway through that Linda has been cursed to become a werewolf. Instead, at the end of all this, it turns out that Jane has used a combination of other people’s prescription drugs ground into her food to make her sick, hair growth formula mixed into her moisturizer to make her “grow fur,” and insistence on have Linda read her bedtime stories about monsters and shit to essentially incept the idea that she has been cursed into her brain and placebo her into thinking she’s a werewolf, because Jane is mad that her parents are divorced. Simultaneously but COMPLETELY separately Ethel has been training Jane in secret to solve the Manor’s hidden puzzle box elements herself and claim the treasure at the end, which turns out to be essentially worthless, and it’s suggested that Nancy has in fact ruined an old family tradition by coming in and solving things herself unwittingly. It’s suggested that Ethel is involved in the werewolf plot too because there’s some technology involved that’s used to scare Nancy away separately from Linda’s whole thing, but largely these two plots seem to be wholly unrelated. Everybody laughs, there was never any danger, this kid spent months psychologically torturing her stepmom but everybody’s gonna make it work! It’s 2004 bud and we do NOT talk about therapists.
Perhaps this all sounds fucking insane to you, and let me assure, you, it is, but what might be more surprising is that almost everything I just wrote actually comes out in literally the last like two minutes of the game. There is SO little happening with ANY of these characters for the preceding three and a half to four hours. Ethel doesn’t even appear outside of cutscenes. And there’s so much potential here. For a relationship between Jane and Linda, a real one. To explore the culture of dedicated generational master/servant relationships in noble houses; the loneliness and burdens that must come with the privileges and weird rituals of being a kid in the ever-dwindling mega-upper class of old British society. There is SO much shit here and it’s the kind of shit that the team at Her would normally eat the fuck up, which is why it’s so much more frustrating than usual to see it squandered in exchange for, essentially, nothing?
That’s not to say the game is without its upsides. I’ve talked about the bevy of new puzzles in the game, and how it seems like Her was making a conscious effort to kind of shake up their standard book of tricks (even if they also included all of the old ones, leading to a weird bloated mess), and that effort is certainly appreciated. And there’s a TON of the classic Nancy Drew Cyber Mystery Charm in this one, just a ton of goofy bullshit that I absolutely love to see, which I will be listing now:
1. Like, three different times in the game Ethel just APPEARS when Nancy turns around in the most effective scares in series so far.
2. There’s a point where you’re talking to Ned on the phone and he seems to legitimately not know what a picture book is, and to be confused by the very idea of one.
3. It’s extremely clear that nobody in this cast is actually British (the three main blood relatives you meet don’t even have remotely similar accents lol), but in particular the guy Nancy orders food from has the worst cockney accent I’ve ever heard, like Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins but not one of Golden Age Hollywood’s most beloved character actors backing it up with charm. This character was also written so bafflingly that I had to enlist your friend and mine Woodaba to tell me if he was using actual British slang or if the game was making fun of me and/or British people before we realized that they were using cockney rhyme slang, which the book also comically provides you a very dry in-game dictionary for eventually.
4. There’s a guy in this whose computer you have to borrow a couple times and his desktop background is a picture of himself doing a cool pose, which is definitely like, you never see this guy stand up but that’s short king energy imo
5. One of the game overs in this game involves being eaten by a gigantic carnivorous plant and context won’t make that any more or less funny
So yeah I dunno this game is fine, it really tried some stuff that I personally think mostly didn’t work and I think it had some STELLAR opportunities that it completely failed to jump on but what is here isn’t the worst, it’s just littered with small annoyances and disappointments throughout. A real death of a thousand cuts, this game.
PREVIOUSLY: THE SECRET OF SHADOW RANCH
NEXT TIME: SECRET OF THE OLD CLOCK
ALL NANCY DREW PIECES
8 Comments
lmao yeah i'm never actually upset about the reasons nancy is wherever she is i just think this one is particularly funny because it's SUCH a non-reason. And that is something I failed to mention in the review, in a series that across eleven entries has already gone to the haunted mansion/castle well three times, this is a very good haunted mansion/castle!
I've def seen and been told that this is considered one of the iconic classic ones and I really have no idea why? Secret of Shadow Ranch is RIGHT there! It's an anniversary game, it's based on a book so famous that even I, someone with no nancy drew experience, have heard of it, it's uh, really good lol. Seems weird to latch onto this one when it's kind of paint by numbers for this series and missing a lot of what the best ones offer imo
I've def seen and been told that this is considered one of the iconic classic ones and I really have no idea why? Secret of Shadow Ranch is RIGHT there! It's an anniversary game, it's based on a book so famous that even I, someone with no nancy drew experience, have heard of it, it's uh, really good lol. Seems weird to latch onto this one when it's kind of paint by numbers for this series and missing a lot of what the best ones offer imo
I like to pretend Nancy just in her everyday life outside of mysteries spends all her time BARGING into peoples homes, rifling through their cupboards and pressing all the buttons on the speak-n-spell just in case it makes a bookcase swing open. Its also why most of the town cant stand her and why Bess/George/Ned keep her at phone's length most of the time. Its not that people trust Nancy to hang around places, its because Nancy INSISTS so damn hard.
I am pretty thankful that Secret of Shadow Ranch was my first one I played through. Unsure if this was the first if I would have played the others.
I am pretty thankful that Secret of Shadow Ranch was my first one I played through. Unsure if this was the first if I would have played the others.
"a child put hair growth solution in my moisturizer because she believes me responsible for the collapse of her father's marriage" is the excuse I use when i wanna wear a skirt but don't wanna shave my legs
banging my fist on the table BACKLOGGED LET ME LIKE COMMENTS
This game really used to rank high on people's best of Nancy Drew lists (a thing I know about and have visibly participated in for reasons unclear and obvious) and its like. The tone is great, don't get me wrong, but all those annoyances just build and build and until you're spinning around in that secret passage for SO LONG.
But god you DO gotta give it up for the Ethel jump scares. The fact that they clearly couldn't afford to actually have that model around somewhere in the game weirdly adds to the feel that she's just AROUND somewhere, sneaking about.
But god you DO gotta give it up for the Ethel jump scares. The fact that they clearly couldn't afford to actually have that model around somewhere in the game weirdly adds to the feel that she's just AROUND somewhere, sneaking about.
I think it was like the third secret passage puzzle where it just opens you up into a big room with a bunch more puzzles lmao I was so mad.
GOD I wish that 2021 me was on whatever forum these discussions were happening on in whatever year they were happening!!!! I would have been EXTREMELY unpopular lmao
GOD I wish that 2021 me was on whatever forum these discussions were happening on in whatever year they were happening!!!! I would have been EXTREMELY unpopular lmao
also how are you gonna give me a completely out of the way irrelevant carnivorous plant death but then have your climax revolve around a giant underground forge and not let me die horribly in it!!! Missed opportunities the game imo
Jamesbuc
2 years ago
I get the over-puzzling here a lot and agree, the game does suffer from a lack of meaningful thread to properly piece things together and a endgame thats wrapped up so quickly you could blink and miss it. I do think however on a location/theming level, Her Interactive managed to strike the nail quite well.
I think I gave up putting logic into why Nancy is at any given scenario a while back. I do mostly agree with this review though and always find it weird that this game is the one a lot of Nancy fans squawk over as being the highlight of this era of the series when that really isnt the case. Oh well. Its also weirdly the only Nancy Drew game on GOG. Guessing it didnt sell very well over there.