Eighteen entries into this series it’s safe to say that the Nancy Drew games aren’t really able to do a whole lot that feels genuinely new or surprising. They’re not totally stagnant, of course – there’s a slow, steady innovation to them, and those incremental changes add up to a series that does look pretty different in installment eighteen than installment eight, even if the core of the gameplay is basically identical (and hopefully will remain so!). At this point, each game is for the most part shuffling around a stock of tropes, character archetypes, and scenarios, just kind of pasting them into unique settings every time. And even though I’m often pointing this out in these writeups, it’s cool, I’m good with it. I do like these games. I have, and I cannot stress this enough, played eighteen of them in three months (nineteen actually I did two back to back today, the bug is fuckin BACK bay beeeeeeeee). But if there’s one common feature of these games that I feel has taken a back seat lately it’s the Obvious Dev Team Political Passion Project, something I was happy to see make it’s triumphant return, sort of, in Phantom of Venice, my favorite one of these in a long while.

Alright, so you’re the Agenzia Informazioni e Sicurezza Esterna, the Italian FBI. There’s a dude running around Venice stealing all kinds of super expensive artwork from the city’s wealthy elite. He has been dubbed The Phantom by the media, he insists on wearing a mask and a cape, and his gentleman thief antics are making you look like a real bunch of assholes. How do you fix this ongoing shame? Why, you take a really unpopular socialite’s advice and contract out for a nineteen-year-old American amateur detective and just kind of give her cart blanche and unlimited resources, see if she can’t crack the case for you. OBVIOUSLY.

Now I don’t need to tell you that this is one of the funniest Nancy Drew setups of all time, maybe the best one period, and I’m happy to report that the game 100% delivers. But we’ll get to it we’ll get to it. Back to the politics for a second. The most interesting and disappointing part of the game. As soon as Nancy arrives she’s bombarded by local political issues and people spilling their ideologies completely unprompted, as is wont to happen to Nancy. She has one of those faces, I guess. She’s staying at Casa Noscostra, the estate of a wealthy socialite worried she’ll soon be targeted by The Phantom, and everyone there has plenty to say about the ongoing gentrification of Venice. There’s Colin, the Oxford-educated mosaicist who’s been hired to restore the tilework around the ca’. He loves Venice, its history, its culture, and most importantly its art, but he’s also well aware that his presence and that of people like him is what’s driving up real estate prices and driving out actual locals. He knows it’s fucked up but he also knows this is the best place for him to practice his very specialized passions so his self-professed “guilt” isn’t going to stop him from doing it! Even if it did, it would stop the tide.

The ca’s owner, Margherita, is a wealthy widow who purchased the estate to cement her status as a high profile member of the exclusive Venetian social scene. She’s pissed that she has to pay for the upkeep and restoration on the historic land and building she’s recently taken possession of, pissed that the city’s restoration committee won’t help with that, wasting their cash on people and places that presumably aren’t independently rich, pissed that she has to board plebs like Nancy and her Austrian roommate Helena (a social climbing journalist reporting on the recent crimes) to cover her costs.

The only actual non-wealthy Italian person Nancy interacts with outside of criminals (again, MORE ON THAT LATER, this game has so much to talk about) is her AISE contact Sophia, who isn’t really a character at all, a pure expression of the Spy Handler character archetype who only exists to be a voice on the other end of a very funny spy phone that supplies you with orders, gadgets, and occasional explanations about Italian culture. So what we have here is a situation where Nancy is quite explicitly being used as a tool of the state to protect the interests of the hyper wealthy elite to solve a PR nightmare that has essentially no material effect on the average people of Venice. None of this is new for this series – Nancy has always been terminally cop brained – but this is the most open and highest stakes form this conflict has taken so far, which makes it all the more disappointing and baffling that the game is not even slightly interested in actually exploring these conflicts. None of this is what the game is about. I spent 800 words building up to this anticlimax so you would understand that this is what the game did to me. What the fuck? Now obviously I don’t need or want art to pat me on the head and affirm my politics while I nod along like a Smart And Moral Girl, and I’ve long accepted that Nancy Drew’s world view is a nightmarish and neoliberal one. So I’m not too busted up about the speed with which we drop any pretense of this game having themes at all and I’m mostly just happy that this framing is here to chew on during one of the most wild and fun Nancy Drew game experiences I’ve had so far. The game is simply a delight. Nancy sees these themes, decides she doesn’t want to engage with them, literally says to someone out loud “I just like to solve mysteries,” and that’s it, book closed, it does not come up again. Incredible.

Instead, we get, uh, This: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41PPUHzlNuE&t=4128s

I’m not gonna explain that but that catsuit is VITALLY important to multiple sequences of this game.

So yeah, this isn’t actually the Nancy Drew Italy game, this is the Nancy Drew Spy Game Which Happens To Be Set In Italy, and it gives you pretty much everything you want out of that premise. Goofy Brosnan-era James Bond pastiche shit, planting bugs, intercepting carrier pigeons, hiding in closets, hacking computers, a pretty good lockpicking minigame, infiltrating a high profile thievery ring, adapting your outfits to fit various situations, impersonating OTHER spies and criminals, doing a super cool heist (this minigame sucks ass), daring tete a tetes with masked crime lords who force you into high stakes rounds of niche Italian card games, falling for obvious poisonings. It rules. It’s a mess, there’s nothing really to it, but everything here is so much silly fun it’s just impossible not to like it. The cast is full of winning characters, and almost had a genuine sense of mystery to it until it tips its hand WAY too much about 2/3rds through but that’s still better than these usually do. There are fewer shit puzzles than usual and only one sequence that I think goes too long so all told I’m very high on this one.

Finally I must leave you all on a solemn NANCY DREW CUCK WATCH, where it seems Nancy and Ned are on the up and up! She spends the whole game wearing a locket he gave her just before she left for Italy (until it too is stolen by The Phantom lmao), and a LOT of your interaction with Colin is Nancy rebuking his AGGRESSIVE and pathetic flirting. He is a real sadsack and every new thing you learn about him makes him suck worse he’s so funny. Anyway that’s the only Ned News but things seem less tense than usual. Perhaps this is only because I did not actually speak to him lol. WE SHALL SEE.

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NEXT TIME: THE HAUNTING OF CASTLE MALLOY

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