When I think of the Platonic Nancy Drew Cyber Mysteries I think of games like Secret of Shadow Ranch, Secret of the Old Clock, and Last Train to Blue Moon Canyon; games that deploy all of the standard elements you see in these games and balance them well. None of these titles are my FAVORITES in this series (my heart will always belong to the messy bitches like Final Scene and Scarlet Hand) but if I were to recommend somebody cold on these games for the sake of having a good time and not enjoying unintentionally planted communist reads on girl games from the early 2000s, these would probably be the most solid ones of the first sixteen (jesus) Her Interactive Titles. At first glance Legend of the Crystal Skull seems like it’s checking all the right boxes: a cool setting, a winning cast, an attempt at being SCARY (something these games are consistently good at!), inventive puzzles, a second playable character which is a mechanic I’m happy to see return after it was deployed DISASTROUSLY in Kapu Cave…and yet the whole thing feels just a little bit off?

This is not what I would call a Ned Nickerson Cuck Watch Game, exactly but it definitely adds another wrinkle to the bizarre psychosexual battle that is their romance. The premise is thus: NED has a friend (IMPORTANT TO NOTE HERE THAT NANCY DOES NOT KNOW THIS GUY) named Henry Bolet Jr. who was raised by his eccentric and reclusive uncle in their New Orleans mansion which is conveniently attached to a cemetery and crypt system. This uncle guy just died, leaving Henry as the arbitrator of his estate in addition to one of his primary inheritors, and Ned think he might be bummed, but rather than visit Henry himself, or take Nancy to go visit with him, he…sends Nancy to go visit this guy she’s never met? And Nancy’s like yeah I GUESS I will do this but she wisely decides to make this a whole separate vacation with her best friend Bess which will just happen to include Nancy popping in on this sad goth dude in his creepy mansion. Maybe it IS cuck watch, and this is a new wrinkle, like maybe this is the reveal that this is actually a cuckoldry fetish and not an involuntary thing? Much to think about.

So Bess goes directly to their hotel like a normal person and Nancy goes to this gothic mansion where she is literally immediately attacked by a dude dressed like Baron Samedi just as a storm knocks the electricity out of the building, leaving her in a powerless mansion with the surly goth king Henry and his late uncle’s eccentric housekeeper Renee, who seems really into hoodoo stuff in a way that seems more than a little collar-tugging uh oh for a white lady, but more on that later. Despite Henry very openly not really needing or wanting her around (and unlike usual for this series it’s clearly not because he has a dark secret but because he’s busy and stressed like a normally 20 year old left in charge of managing the fortune of an eccentric millionaire with bad recordkeeping would be) Nancy decides she’s not leaving this mansion until she figures out why there was a guy in a skeleton costume (her words) attacking people in the foyer, which, y’know, is fair enough, I guess.

Like I said, it’s a neat set up, and all the pieces are here for this to be a standout entry in the series, but nothing really comes together properly in this one. Henry, ostensibly the central character of the game, is one of the most sympathetic characters in the series so far, a guy who tragically misunderstood his relationship with his uncle while he was alive because the man wasn’t able to communicate his feelings, who is so desperate for the feeling of love he always had but never felt from his family that he’ll take even that shadow of it from a woman he knows is using him for his money over being alone, and yet he’s the least consequential character to the actual plot and the one I interacted with the least over the course of Nancy’s investigation.

The game is set in New Orleans and spends a lot of time talking about the local culture and politics (MORE ON THIS LATER) and yet the setting limits itself to yet another mansion for the series and literally ONE storefront area in the city itself? You can’t even look around. It’s the store, the storefront, and the food truck outside. That’s New Orleans. Seems like wasted potential, I dunno! The bit that IS really fleshed out is the cemetery next door to the mansion which to be fair is a famous New Orleans thing but the stuff they have you doing in there is a lot of wandering around. Multiple puzzles that all boil down to backtracking back and forth through the mazelike interior, each time looking for different granular details to jot down and record in a different location. The number of times this pattern repeats does a lot to kill the genuinely good atmosphere built up by the excellent presentation on display here in choices of camera angles, lighting, scene transitions. The stuff Her is reliably good at is just about the best it’s ever been, so it’s a shame to see a lot of that presentational strength squandered on a lot of tedious drudgery mixed in with the fun puzzles.

So let’s talk about the More On This Later that’s been hanging over this review which is the White Lady Who Is Obsessed With “Hoodoo” and while I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a white woman from the northern-midwest (lol American geography is ridiculous) and I am far from educated about the topics I’m about to lightly discuss, I AM pretty sure that 1. this game seems to mix up a lot of stuff between hoodoo and voodoo and 2. Hoodoo is a spiritual practice VERY SPECIFIC to the African diaspora and it’s a bad look to make Renee the character who’s super into it. And I think I know why they did it: Renee is the villain of the game, something that’s obvious very quickly when you’re playing it, and the climax involves her sailing away on a boat with the titular crystal skull in hand rambling about how the Skull will help her convene with the other crystal skulls in the world and show her all the mysteries of the universe. While this is a separate thing from her spiritual and rootwork practices, (which Henry, another white person, disparages early in the game btw) I can understand the impulse to think that it would be uncomfortable to make the raving lunatic murderer ALSO a black person who practices a niche religion specific to black people, but the answer to this is not to keep all of these details and make the character white! The whole thing feels misguided at absolute best, and much more obviously negligent, especially given the high level of research that obviously goes into the cultural/historical side of these games most of the time. It’s disappointing to see them drop the ball this hard on a part of American culture that is so often not only treated in the same way this game does, but weaponized against vulnerable peoples. Fuckin sucks dude.

The game on the whole however is not without its bright spots and those come mostly from Bess Marvin, one of the franchises prominent recurring characters. Nancy has two best friends who are always just a phone call away: Bess n George. Bess is a stereotypical girlie girl and George is a tomboy. I think they’re cousins? That’s their whole thing, they’re always hanging out. Bess is along for the right and you assume her POV several times throughout the game as Nancy finds herself in need of information from the city proper and enlists Bess’ help. She’s truly a delight, a cowardly lion who loves to HEAR about mysteries but is terrified to participate in them. Where Nancy is a sociopath who has no problem breaking and entering, snooping through personal belongings and private documents in search of clues, Bess feels tremendous guilt and trepidation for the amount of lying, cheating, and stealing she’s tasked with in this game and it’s endlessly funny. One particularly inspired running gag, and my favorite series of puzzles in the game, involves her interactions with Lamont, who runs a curio shop that Nancy needs private information from no fewer than three times. Lamont is an extremely nice guy who is unfortunately riddled with mild health problems and every time Bess interacts with him is an increasingly convoluted method of tricking and physically tormenting this poor nice man into activating his severe allergies or getting terrible diarrhea just so she can like steal a receipt or look through a box in the back room. The fact that Bess is so utterly normal accidentally highlights the video gameyness that colors Nancy’s characterization and it makes the whole thing better and better. There’s another bit where she infiltrates a fraternal order’s secret meeting and they catch and try to intimidate her and she’s like what the fuck are you gonna do FRANCIS it’s like 2007 you guys are whining about not being allowed to have a parade you’re not gonna KILL me and they just let her go it’s super funny.

So that’s kind of the game in a nutshell. The series as a whole is wildly inconsistent but I do think the games tend to be pretty consistent internally within each entry, so to have one where the highs are very high and the lows are very low does stand out a bit. I just wish the lows didn’t stand out SO much because of, like, y’know, racism.

PREVIOUSLY: THE WHITE WOLF OF ICICLE CREEK
NEXT TIME: THE PHANTOM OF VENICE

ALL NANCY DREW PIECES