I fucked up! Her Interactive wasn’t the only studio out there making Nancy Drew games in the 00s. Majesco and THQ each took a stab at a couple Nancys each, all on the Nintendo DS, and I intend to cover these along with any Hardy Boys games I can dig up once I’ve caught up to (finished?) Her’s output. The other night I was poking around to make sure I had secured copies of all of these Other Nancy Drew games when I made a terrible discovery: I had missed some from Her. Nancy Drew Cyber Mysteries must have been flying off the shelves or something because for a brief window at the end of the 00s Her Interactive tried unsuccessfully to launch a second series of Nancy Drew games in an entirely different style from their mainline games: The Nancy Drew Dossiers. Luckily for me these are right around the point we’re at in the main series; this one came out in between The Haunting of Castle Malloy and Ransom of the Seven Ships, and the next one is right after Ransom, so really I only skipped one game, and we’ll just go ahead and do these weird little experiments together back to back. If you're reading these reviews in the order they're linked together based on their release dates, which is something I didn't start doing until very late in this project, you wouldn't have even known anything was wrong at all! So back to these lil experiments.
And what weird little experiments they are! Lights, Camera, Curses! (LCC from here, I’m not fuckin typing that every time bro) sets itself apart from mainline Nancy Drew immediately in just about every way possible. Gone are the increasingly lavish opening cinematics, character animations, and scene transitions – they’ve been traded for stylish (well, hmm, “stylish”) motion comic cutscenes and largely static character portraits in rigid conversation boxes. Everything has a sepia toned, sketchy comic book art style (except the jarringly cartoonish 3D character portraits, think Civilization Revolution or any modern app store game and you’re not far off) and while this is clearly an artistic choice attempting to somewhat cover this game’s shoestring budget with a smoky, throwback Hollywood noir style, it does end up making everything look a little cheaper than maybe it would have with normal inking and coloring. This stuff is really inconsistent, too, reserved for cutscenes and contrasting the deeo, lush colors of the actual interactive gameplay environments. Rather than a contiguous first person experience with an aim towards immersion, LCC divides itself into chapters, and keeps a running score of your progress based on most all of your actions, be they puzzles solved or dialogue checks in conversation, letting you know in a summary at the end of every chapter how far you are from the tantalizing reward you get if you hit the threshold at the maximum rank by the end of the game.
The stuff that you’re DOING is really different too. The Nancy Drew Dossier games are obviously swinging for a more casual audience in the way those were understood to exist in 2008 (namely, I guess, via browser games, Nancy Drew’s own competition in the Walmart budget rack, and the emerging Facebook gaming market) and that means this is firstly a hidden object game and secondly a minigame collection. My experience with hidden object type puzzlers is pretty limited so forgive me if I sound like an asshole here to anyone more knowledgeable but this one DOES have a pretty clean presentation and difficulty curve. You are, of course, ultimately just clicking around detailed environments for interactable stuff and occasionally putting items together to solve light puzzles, but over the course of the maybe two and a half hours it took to get through the entire game LCC does a good job of ramping up the complexity of the environments and the sequences of events and combinations necessary to progress. That said, I still don’t know if there’s enough here to really keep me engaged. The game as it is is well-designed, but while it’s not taxing or frustrating, it’s never particularly engaging either. I found myself trudging monotonously through a lot of this game, mostly perking up in response to how it differentiated itself from its sister series rather than because the game itself was doing anything particularly clever or exciting. At the very least, the other half of the Casually Accessible coin is that this game is positively BURSTING with minigames of varying quality, which is not in itself very different from the main series. The presentation is where you feel it; things are less puzzley and more arcadey, more willing to divorce themselves from the context of the scenario, more generally MINIGAMEY, y’know? It’s a slightly ineffable quality but one I think anybody would recognize. There’s very little façade about what we’re doing here. Every chapter ends in a bonus round matching game that only exists to pump up your score. It kind of rules.
Despite all of these changes, the actual narrative of LCC is CLASSIC Nancy Drew shit, and more impressive to me because it’s the first Her Interactive game that as far as I can tell isn’t based on a Nancy Drew novel. Trouble’s afoot on the set of Pharaoh, the modern remake of beloved classic swords n sandals epic movie PHARAOH! From the 1930s, which partly owed its huge success to the fact that its lead actor, Lois Manson, died on the set, necessitating an alternate ending, and a famous jewel that was being used in the production disappeared. Now, this modern remake has a lot riding on it, and a series mysterious accidents and unfortunate press leaks have sparked rumors of a curse related to Manson’s ghost, or the jewel, or maybe both? Nancy’s brought in undercover as a production assistant to GET TO THE BOTTOM of this before several rich and powerful people’s careers go down with the movie, and take the studio with them.
It’s a pretty sick setup, and one that I don’t think the game really delivers on despite, surprisingly, having some key presentational advantages over the mainline series. Like most Her games, you have a small cadre of people working on the movie who make up the main cast and suspect pool for the uh, expensive pranks, I guess, that are happening, but UNLIKE most of the other Nancy Drews, this game’s completely separate, boxed off conversation window and static character portraits lets them have all of those people be in conversations together and interact separately from Nancy, which helps flesh out their relationships and gives them a lot more character. It’s not that this is impossible to do in the main series or that it never happens, but the no frills presentation here makes the actual just like, ability to play a few voice clips over each other or back and forth a lot more organic, and they can go a lot longer without the constraints of animation leeching time and money away from the script. Unfortunately, these scenes are few, and the chapter structure of the game means you’re not really investigating a mystery so much as watching Nancy figure it out herself while you’re occasionally quizzed on whether you’ve been paying attention to dialogues. See, all of the actual dialogue choices in this game are opportunities for you get points, so every time Nancy interjects in a conversation, it’s to repeat something that was told to her in the last couple of minutes – usually really innocuous, obvious things too, like what she should be doing or a detail of what her conversational partner was just talking about. It makes Nancy come off as extremely unnatural, especially given she’s still being voiced by Lani Minella, trying her honest best to make this shit not sound insane and failing admirably. So what we have is a system that lets us do unprecedented inter-cast interactions that is sorely underutilized, strapped to a game that is structured to silo each cast member into separate interactive scenarios and remove the overarching investigative element of the story in favor of much more immediate hidden object puzzles and player memory checks. Would you also believe that the premise is largely squandered, with the plot not kicking un until well after the halfway point of the game? I spent my first hour or so piddling around the film lot and set doing odd jobs and meeting people. Surely there’s a better way to do this. You’ve done so many of these! Pardon me for revealing the villain to people who remember, but the climax is even pulled almost beat for beat from the ending of Last Train to Blue Moon Canyon, which struck me as an obvious and boring place to take this narrative that was so full of potential for real mystery and villainy.
It’s a real shame too, because this is a winning cast if I’ve ever seen one. We’ve got the overworked, overstressed set supervisor, ready to snap as her set flies out of control over stupid bullshit; and up and coming actress poised for her big break as the star of an almost surefire hit blockbuster; the movie’s producer and financier who hired Nancy, collecting insurance money on the accidents that keep happening but poised to lose WAY more if this movie doesn’t take off and launch the theme park he’s planning to build off its success; and mother fuckin JORGE JACKSON, the cowboy hat wearing Australian blockbuster director who 100% genuinely believes that the curse is real, hates everybody else in the production (because TO BE FAIR they are all assholes to him but TO BE FAIR TO THEM this is mostly because he seems like a terrible director lol) and who is OBSESSED with the studio café’s orange-blueberry-peanut butter smoothies to the point this is well known to be one of his defining personality traits. DUDES ROCK. This is one of those Nancy Drew games where basically everyone you talk to is a huge fucking prick but unlike most of the ones where that happens this is balanced pretty well and most of these guys aren’t like, The Worst, they’re just jerks who are stressed out for understandable reasons. It’s a shame the story they’ve found themselves in is so shallow.
Shallow is the name of the game here, really. It’s clear what Her was going for with this; a game on an even lighter budget than their average Nancy Drew aimed at an even broader audience than their usual – one that aimed to deliver similar thrills and mystery without asking you to keep a notebook handy or direct your own investigation. It’s much more of a ride, and it gives much more visceral Video Game Serotonin Hits like the point rewards (I’m reminded of old point n click adventure games which kept points as a holdover from their forebears and contemporaries, though even those used points to measure completion and investigation vs a static marker of progression). For me, though, they overshot it. There’s just too little meat on this bone. It’s possible that I’m too far gone, too Nancy Drew pilled to really appreciate what’s here for what it is, and I get that! But I like to think I’m pretty open minded about casual games generally and I really tried with this one. It’s not just that it’s Casual; it’s that it feels empty on top of that.
PREVIOUSLY: HAUNTING OF CASTLE MALLOY
NEXT TIME: RANSOM OF THE SEVEN SHIPS
ALL NANCY DREW PIECES
And what weird little experiments they are! Lights, Camera, Curses! (LCC from here, I’m not fuckin typing that every time bro) sets itself apart from mainline Nancy Drew immediately in just about every way possible. Gone are the increasingly lavish opening cinematics, character animations, and scene transitions – they’ve been traded for stylish (well, hmm, “stylish”) motion comic cutscenes and largely static character portraits in rigid conversation boxes. Everything has a sepia toned, sketchy comic book art style (except the jarringly cartoonish 3D character portraits, think Civilization Revolution or any modern app store game and you’re not far off) and while this is clearly an artistic choice attempting to somewhat cover this game’s shoestring budget with a smoky, throwback Hollywood noir style, it does end up making everything look a little cheaper than maybe it would have with normal inking and coloring. This stuff is really inconsistent, too, reserved for cutscenes and contrasting the deeo, lush colors of the actual interactive gameplay environments. Rather than a contiguous first person experience with an aim towards immersion, LCC divides itself into chapters, and keeps a running score of your progress based on most all of your actions, be they puzzles solved or dialogue checks in conversation, letting you know in a summary at the end of every chapter how far you are from the tantalizing reward you get if you hit the threshold at the maximum rank by the end of the game.
The stuff that you’re DOING is really different too. The Nancy Drew Dossier games are obviously swinging for a more casual audience in the way those were understood to exist in 2008 (namely, I guess, via browser games, Nancy Drew’s own competition in the Walmart budget rack, and the emerging Facebook gaming market) and that means this is firstly a hidden object game and secondly a minigame collection. My experience with hidden object type puzzlers is pretty limited so forgive me if I sound like an asshole here to anyone more knowledgeable but this one DOES have a pretty clean presentation and difficulty curve. You are, of course, ultimately just clicking around detailed environments for interactable stuff and occasionally putting items together to solve light puzzles, but over the course of the maybe two and a half hours it took to get through the entire game LCC does a good job of ramping up the complexity of the environments and the sequences of events and combinations necessary to progress. That said, I still don’t know if there’s enough here to really keep me engaged. The game as it is is well-designed, but while it’s not taxing or frustrating, it’s never particularly engaging either. I found myself trudging monotonously through a lot of this game, mostly perking up in response to how it differentiated itself from its sister series rather than because the game itself was doing anything particularly clever or exciting. At the very least, the other half of the Casually Accessible coin is that this game is positively BURSTING with minigames of varying quality, which is not in itself very different from the main series. The presentation is where you feel it; things are less puzzley and more arcadey, more willing to divorce themselves from the context of the scenario, more generally MINIGAMEY, y’know? It’s a slightly ineffable quality but one I think anybody would recognize. There’s very little façade about what we’re doing here. Every chapter ends in a bonus round matching game that only exists to pump up your score. It kind of rules.
Despite all of these changes, the actual narrative of LCC is CLASSIC Nancy Drew shit, and more impressive to me because it’s the first Her Interactive game that as far as I can tell isn’t based on a Nancy Drew novel. Trouble’s afoot on the set of Pharaoh, the modern remake of beloved classic swords n sandals epic movie PHARAOH! From the 1930s, which partly owed its huge success to the fact that its lead actor, Lois Manson, died on the set, necessitating an alternate ending, and a famous jewel that was being used in the production disappeared. Now, this modern remake has a lot riding on it, and a series mysterious accidents and unfortunate press leaks have sparked rumors of a curse related to Manson’s ghost, or the jewel, or maybe both? Nancy’s brought in undercover as a production assistant to GET TO THE BOTTOM of this before several rich and powerful people’s careers go down with the movie, and take the studio with them.
It’s a pretty sick setup, and one that I don’t think the game really delivers on despite, surprisingly, having some key presentational advantages over the mainline series. Like most Her games, you have a small cadre of people working on the movie who make up the main cast and suspect pool for the uh, expensive pranks, I guess, that are happening, but UNLIKE most of the other Nancy Drews, this game’s completely separate, boxed off conversation window and static character portraits lets them have all of those people be in conversations together and interact separately from Nancy, which helps flesh out their relationships and gives them a lot more character. It’s not that this is impossible to do in the main series or that it never happens, but the no frills presentation here makes the actual just like, ability to play a few voice clips over each other or back and forth a lot more organic, and they can go a lot longer without the constraints of animation leeching time and money away from the script. Unfortunately, these scenes are few, and the chapter structure of the game means you’re not really investigating a mystery so much as watching Nancy figure it out herself while you’re occasionally quizzed on whether you’ve been paying attention to dialogues. See, all of the actual dialogue choices in this game are opportunities for you get points, so every time Nancy interjects in a conversation, it’s to repeat something that was told to her in the last couple of minutes – usually really innocuous, obvious things too, like what she should be doing or a detail of what her conversational partner was just talking about. It makes Nancy come off as extremely unnatural, especially given she’s still being voiced by Lani Minella, trying her honest best to make this shit not sound insane and failing admirably. So what we have is a system that lets us do unprecedented inter-cast interactions that is sorely underutilized, strapped to a game that is structured to silo each cast member into separate interactive scenarios and remove the overarching investigative element of the story in favor of much more immediate hidden object puzzles and player memory checks. Would you also believe that the premise is largely squandered, with the plot not kicking un until well after the halfway point of the game? I spent my first hour or so piddling around the film lot and set doing odd jobs and meeting people. Surely there’s a better way to do this. You’ve done so many of these! Pardon me for revealing the villain to people who remember, but the climax is even pulled almost beat for beat from the ending of Last Train to Blue Moon Canyon, which struck me as an obvious and boring place to take this narrative that was so full of potential for real mystery and villainy.
It’s a real shame too, because this is a winning cast if I’ve ever seen one. We’ve got the overworked, overstressed set supervisor, ready to snap as her set flies out of control over stupid bullshit; and up and coming actress poised for her big break as the star of an almost surefire hit blockbuster; the movie’s producer and financier who hired Nancy, collecting insurance money on the accidents that keep happening but poised to lose WAY more if this movie doesn’t take off and launch the theme park he’s planning to build off its success; and mother fuckin JORGE JACKSON, the cowboy hat wearing Australian blockbuster director who 100% genuinely believes that the curse is real, hates everybody else in the production (because TO BE FAIR they are all assholes to him but TO BE FAIR TO THEM this is mostly because he seems like a terrible director lol) and who is OBSESSED with the studio café’s orange-blueberry-peanut butter smoothies to the point this is well known to be one of his defining personality traits. DUDES ROCK. This is one of those Nancy Drew games where basically everyone you talk to is a huge fucking prick but unlike most of the ones where that happens this is balanced pretty well and most of these guys aren’t like, The Worst, they’re just jerks who are stressed out for understandable reasons. It’s a shame the story they’ve found themselves in is so shallow.
Shallow is the name of the game here, really. It’s clear what Her was going for with this; a game on an even lighter budget than their average Nancy Drew aimed at an even broader audience than their usual – one that aimed to deliver similar thrills and mystery without asking you to keep a notebook handy or direct your own investigation. It’s much more of a ride, and it gives much more visceral Video Game Serotonin Hits like the point rewards (I’m reminded of old point n click adventure games which kept points as a holdover from their forebears and contemporaries, though even those used points to measure completion and investigation vs a static marker of progression). For me, though, they overshot it. There’s just too little meat on this bone. It’s possible that I’m too far gone, too Nancy Drew pilled to really appreciate what’s here for what it is, and I get that! But I like to think I’m pretty open minded about casual games generally and I really tried with this one. It’s not just that it’s Casual; it’s that it feels empty on top of that.
PREVIOUSLY: HAUNTING OF CASTLE MALLOY
NEXT TIME: RANSOM OF THE SEVEN SHIPS
ALL NANCY DREW PIECES
3 Comments
You can really feel the desperation to expand the HerInteractive operations here, with the same sort of problems that emerged when doing things like putting White Wolf on Wii or Shadow Ranch on iPads. These experiments just never quite turn a profit and this was another one of them
It’s starting to look like Shadow Ranch on iPads is gonna be the only Her game I won’t be able to get my hands on which is a huge bummer because it looks like it might be super different actually
Jamesbuc
2 years ago