I could be writing about The Game That Famously Turned Fellow Backloggd Nancy Drew Connoisseur Nerdietalk Gay, Warnings At Waverly Academy, which this game has the gall to reference even, but NO we have to waste our time on this shit instead. It’s fine. I’m on a real hotstreak right now, struggling real hard through Ys 1 & 2 Chronicles on one hand, struggling REAL HARD through Nancy Drew Dossier: Resorting To Danger on the other. These games share similar flaws in that they have these really fun, special cores to them that are just caked in layer upon layer of tedium. Unlike the Ys duology though, which has the excuse of being a remake of a PC-88 game from 35 years ago that was blazing trails in its genre and mostly just suffers from inelegant dungeon design, Resorting to Danger is marred with deeeeeep structural flaws that made a game that barely breaks two and a half hours of play time feel like it could have encompassed an entire work day.
The setup is almost identical to that of the previous Dossier game, with Nancy hired by the guy running a fancy resort that caters to the rich and famous to clandestinely investigate and put a stop to a series of “construction accidents” that are actually bombs being sent by somebody for some reason. So Nancy goes around defusing a frankly alarming number of bombs while constantly being interrupted by a series of very rude wealthy people and employees who force her to engage in a bunch of minigames that emulate her doing the menial labor of her cover identity. Eventually she gets enough evidence to identify the bomber, there’s sort of a confrontation about it, the game’s over.
Everything is more or less the same here as in the previous game with some minor tweaks that are clearly designed to make this seem less like a game made on eleven dollars and a prayer. The noir stylings are dialed back a great deal, for one, with cutscenes featuring full color illustrations and generally more animation across the entire game. Gameplay environments for the hidden object segments now feature rigs animated to appear to be 3D models so other characters actually appear on the screen when they would logically be around. The minigames aren’t really more varied in scope but there’s more of an effort to make them fit into the scenario diagetically and the assets are reused creatively sometimes. And there are some cute flourishes here and there, like obviously reusing a voice actor and writing that into the game by having the character be the sister of the character that actor played in the first game. Those kinds of little things are the details that have always made these games charming and feel like they aspire to a higher standard of writing than their place on the bargain shelf would have implied, and it’s nice to see some of that effort rub off here in the spinoff zone.
None of this stuff can save the game from being generally tedious and unpleasant, though. Constantly having to stop the already annoying running of nonstop bomb defusal to do other chores for obnoxious jerks isn’t exactly Super Fun even by the standards of Nancy Drew Chore Games, which Resorting to Danger might be the ultimate nadir of. The biggest problem is that there are three minigames that are returned to CONSTANTLY over the course of the game: bomb defusal, maze navigation, and giving facials, which are all fine in their own way but are repeated so endlessly, often with nothing in between sessions and with so little variation or escalation in difficulty that any pleasure to be derived from them is sapped quickly. The Maze bits are the best in this regard as the objectives are changed every time, from chasing characters to leading them to certain places to solving a puzzle based on writing on statues placed in the maze, but at the end of the day you’re still walking a little Nancy around the same very large maze map doing kind of nothing for no reason. It sucks.
The story elements don’t fare any better. The cast of characters is bigger than in the previous game but they mostly fall under various flavors of “Rich Asshole” and I think boosting the number of people you’re interacting with might have undercut any depth we might have given them, leaving everyone with only one or two scenes to kind of leave you with a bullet points of their unique personality traits and reasons to maybe want to be a bomber (oh yeah and the bombs aren’t like explosion bombs they are all prank bombs this game has basically no stakes). The character you spend the most time with by far is a dog you spend most of the game chasing around and cleaning up after which is as obnoxious as it sounds.
The most interesting thing Resorting to Danger does narratively also feels like a thinly veiled way to paper over how shallow all of the writing is. Something I didn’t know until I was doing some reading after I finished the game was that there isn’t one set villain. At a point roughly two-thirds through, a character asks Nancy who she thinks the bomber is, and whoever she chooses in that moment turns out to be the culprit. Is everyone so shallow and petty because everyone needs a good reason to be able to turn out to be the bomber at the end of the game? Maybe. It definitely feels more to me like some elements were hastily added towards the end of development after this twist was decided to retroactively make it work rather than organically planned from the start, as some of these are certainly more natural than others. The guy who runs the resort milking the publicity and covering it up as construction to overcharge the guests who he graciously lets in anyway while they’re “closed” and then embezzling away the extra money while he receives praise from his bosses for handling the situation so well from both a business and PR standpoint has a much better reason to both commit the bombings and keep them going than the receptionist who is secretly dating one of the resort’s rich actress clients and who also happens to keep some very funny anarcho-communist literature in his desk, or the wealthy woman who is just a bitch and is mad someone who works at the resort recommended a surgeon for her dog who she was unsatisfied with. So sure this is an interesting concept and I think it’s been done well elsewhere (shoutouts to Sherlock Holmes Crimes and Punishments Bay Beeeee) but here it’s a big whiff imo.
And that’s kind of the whole game, and this whole experiment. A lot of interesting ideas that just don’t really add up to anything substantial enough to be compelling. Clearly I am not the only person who thinks so because despite having a teaser at the end for a game with a sick concept that should ABSOLUTELY be repurposed into a mainline game if they ever make one again (HAUNTED CRUISE SHIP ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING MEEEEEE), that third one was canned mid-development and the Nancy Drew Dossier series was quietly forgotten, which, like, yeah. I get it. There’s not much here.
PREVIOUSLY: RANSOM OF THE SEVEN SHIPS
NEXT TIME: WARNINGS AT WAVERLY ACADEMY
ALL NANCY DREW PIECES
The setup is almost identical to that of the previous Dossier game, with Nancy hired by the guy running a fancy resort that caters to the rich and famous to clandestinely investigate and put a stop to a series of “construction accidents” that are actually bombs being sent by somebody for some reason. So Nancy goes around defusing a frankly alarming number of bombs while constantly being interrupted by a series of very rude wealthy people and employees who force her to engage in a bunch of minigames that emulate her doing the menial labor of her cover identity. Eventually she gets enough evidence to identify the bomber, there’s sort of a confrontation about it, the game’s over.
Everything is more or less the same here as in the previous game with some minor tweaks that are clearly designed to make this seem less like a game made on eleven dollars and a prayer. The noir stylings are dialed back a great deal, for one, with cutscenes featuring full color illustrations and generally more animation across the entire game. Gameplay environments for the hidden object segments now feature rigs animated to appear to be 3D models so other characters actually appear on the screen when they would logically be around. The minigames aren’t really more varied in scope but there’s more of an effort to make them fit into the scenario diagetically and the assets are reused creatively sometimes. And there are some cute flourishes here and there, like obviously reusing a voice actor and writing that into the game by having the character be the sister of the character that actor played in the first game. Those kinds of little things are the details that have always made these games charming and feel like they aspire to a higher standard of writing than their place on the bargain shelf would have implied, and it’s nice to see some of that effort rub off here in the spinoff zone.
None of this stuff can save the game from being generally tedious and unpleasant, though. Constantly having to stop the already annoying running of nonstop bomb defusal to do other chores for obnoxious jerks isn’t exactly Super Fun even by the standards of Nancy Drew Chore Games, which Resorting to Danger might be the ultimate nadir of. The biggest problem is that there are three minigames that are returned to CONSTANTLY over the course of the game: bomb defusal, maze navigation, and giving facials, which are all fine in their own way but are repeated so endlessly, often with nothing in between sessions and with so little variation or escalation in difficulty that any pleasure to be derived from them is sapped quickly. The Maze bits are the best in this regard as the objectives are changed every time, from chasing characters to leading them to certain places to solving a puzzle based on writing on statues placed in the maze, but at the end of the day you’re still walking a little Nancy around the same very large maze map doing kind of nothing for no reason. It sucks.
The story elements don’t fare any better. The cast of characters is bigger than in the previous game but they mostly fall under various flavors of “Rich Asshole” and I think boosting the number of people you’re interacting with might have undercut any depth we might have given them, leaving everyone with only one or two scenes to kind of leave you with a bullet points of their unique personality traits and reasons to maybe want to be a bomber (oh yeah and the bombs aren’t like explosion bombs they are all prank bombs this game has basically no stakes). The character you spend the most time with by far is a dog you spend most of the game chasing around and cleaning up after which is as obnoxious as it sounds.
The most interesting thing Resorting to Danger does narratively also feels like a thinly veiled way to paper over how shallow all of the writing is. Something I didn’t know until I was doing some reading after I finished the game was that there isn’t one set villain. At a point roughly two-thirds through, a character asks Nancy who she thinks the bomber is, and whoever she chooses in that moment turns out to be the culprit. Is everyone so shallow and petty because everyone needs a good reason to be able to turn out to be the bomber at the end of the game? Maybe. It definitely feels more to me like some elements were hastily added towards the end of development after this twist was decided to retroactively make it work rather than organically planned from the start, as some of these are certainly more natural than others. The guy who runs the resort milking the publicity and covering it up as construction to overcharge the guests who he graciously lets in anyway while they’re “closed” and then embezzling away the extra money while he receives praise from his bosses for handling the situation so well from both a business and PR standpoint has a much better reason to both commit the bombings and keep them going than the receptionist who is secretly dating one of the resort’s rich actress clients and who also happens to keep some very funny anarcho-communist literature in his desk, or the wealthy woman who is just a bitch and is mad someone who works at the resort recommended a surgeon for her dog who she was unsatisfied with. So sure this is an interesting concept and I think it’s been done well elsewhere (shoutouts to Sherlock Holmes Crimes and Punishments Bay Beeeee) but here it’s a big whiff imo.
And that’s kind of the whole game, and this whole experiment. A lot of interesting ideas that just don’t really add up to anything substantial enough to be compelling. Clearly I am not the only person who thinks so because despite having a teaser at the end for a game with a sick concept that should ABSOLUTELY be repurposed into a mainline game if they ever make one again (HAUNTED CRUISE SHIP ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING MEEEEEE), that third one was canned mid-development and the Nancy Drew Dossier series was quietly forgotten, which, like, yeah. I get it. There’s not much here.
PREVIOUSLY: RANSOM OF THE SEVEN SHIPS
NEXT TIME: WARNINGS AT WAVERLY ACADEMY
ALL NANCY DREW PIECES
5 Comments
Really want to know about the anarcho-communist literature and what Her thinks that would look like
it is a magazine called WORKERS UNITE! whose cover is a soviet propaganda style image of a guy wearing a hard hat and overalls holding a shovel and where a magazine previews what articles it has inside on the cover it says "DOWN WITH THE RICH! Undermining the Wealthy." and under that it says "SMASH THE STATE!"
Nancy asks why he has a magazine that "practically declares war on wealthy people" and he immediately disavows it, saying he subscribed in college when "fighting the man was the It thing to do" but that he "changed my tune as soon as I graduated and had to start fending for myself" (not explained why that would make you more conservative lmao). He says that even though he cancelled his sub they still send it to them and letting them waste the money on him is his way of now sticking it to THEM. Presumably if you choose him as the bomber this is all a smokescreen and he does still hate rich people and that is his reason for doing it, which, King.
Nancy asks why he has a magazine that "practically declares war on wealthy people" and he immediately disavows it, saying he subscribed in college when "fighting the man was the It thing to do" but that he "changed my tune as soon as I graduated and had to start fending for myself" (not explained why that would make you more conservative lmao). He says that even though he cancelled his sub they still send it to them and letting them waste the money on him is his way of now sticking it to THEM. Presumably if you choose him as the bomber this is all a smokescreen and he does still hate rich people and that is his reason for doing it, which, King.
okay i did just look it up and that's exactly what happens
I'm rereading all of these again and listen, we all know what Waverly Academy was about.
Jamesbuc
2 years ago