No matter how deep we get into this series and how many settings we explore there’s one thing Her Interactive will never be able to resist for long, and that’s spooky Rich People Houses. Could be a gothic mansion, or a Victorian castle, or a Victorian MANSION, or an IRISH castle, or a haunted TOWER, doesn’t matter. Every two or three of these they find a way to get back to old, stuffy hallways with elegant wall art, hidden passages, kooky old owners with an inevitably valuable cryptic secret, and lots of room for unsettling creaking noises and trembling shadows leaking in from the windows. And frankly, I applaud them for it. I’ve always said that the art direction and environmental design is the standout element of this series and I’ve also consistently felt that they’re at their best when they’re leaning into the low-key horror elements that are always going to be present in these kinds of locations. Imagine my excitement then when, after an exhaustingly disappointing foray into the Dossier subseries, my first game back with mainline Nancy Drew is set in an old, prestigious, all-girls East Coast boarding school with strong historical ties to Edgar Allan Poe, of all people. Do they lean into this, you may ask me, NAIVELY? Let’s just say that the final puzzle of this game is on a timer, and the timer is Nancy’s impending death at the hands of a fellow student, who has activated a giant pendulum blade trap to decapitate her. IN OTHER WORDS this game FUCKING RIPS.
So there’s this fancy school, right, and kids there are getting absolutely fucked up. There’s this person who is PROBABLY another student, going by the moniker The Black Cat, who leaves threatening notes targeting girls who are in the running to be valedictorian. The first note is always a warning, but if you get a second note, usually a few days later, that always indicates you’re about to run afoul of some kind of specifically targeted event. These aren’t just pranks or standard bullying either, but full on assault - one student is poisoned with nuts she’s severely allergic to and has to be hospitalized; another who suffers from claustrophobia (like, real claustrophobia) is trapped in a very small closet overnight and comes out of the experience scarred. The atmosphere is tense, parents are ready to pull kids out of school, and the most recent victim’s mother is threatening a lawsuit if something isn’t done QUICKLY; so obviously the headmistress gets in touch with TEEN SLEUTH NANCY DREW to go undercover under an alias over winter break to cozy up with the smart kids in the valedictorian dorm and identify The Black Cat before the second term gets started.
Before we really dig into the game I just gotta get something out of the way here: Waverly Academy is the kind of high school that indie directors in the 90s made movies that would accidentally become lesbian cultural touchstones, and then indie directors in the late 90s and early 2000s would purposely make gay movies about, and that turn people trans years before they realize this. The word “sapphic” exists to describe Waverly Academy. If the team at Her Interactive didn’t know what they were doing with the very specific tropes and archetypes they were deploying in this game then this is way funnier than it already is because almost every character you meet is like a laser sharpened gay girl catnip cliché, it’s incredible. Now listen I’m queer, and I almost exclusively associate with people who are women or gender-nonconforming, and almost all of those people are also queer, so maybe my perspective is skewed, that’s possible, I’ll concede that. But I also feel like we are the experts in Types of Girls and there are so many of them here it’s SO funny. How many fifteen-year-olds did Her accidentally make gay here? It’s gotta be like, a notable percentage. HAS to be. Okay.
So this game is an interesting beast because it’s not like…I wouldn’t say that the part where you PLAY it is really hitting the gas in any real way. The puzzles aren’t anything to write home about but there’s only one that really had me going damn I wish this wasn’t here which is like, much better than usual for these. Some classic Nancy Drew stuff makes a comeback here like managing a day/night cycle to solve certain puzzles, and this marks the unexpected return of a much-refined version of Ghost Dogs of Moon Lake’s photography system. Everything just kind of proceeds very smoothly in Waverly Academy which I think is one of its strengths. This is an all atmosphere, all characters Nancy Drew the likes of which I feel has been absent from the series for a long time. A more objective hand might say this means the game is unbalanced but I prefer this for this game. This is a compelling cast with a fun central mystery, and even though that mystery doesn’t really feel like it’s taking center stage, and you do a lot of meandering, getting caught up in the very heightened intensity of the lives of these isolated, unhinged teens who can’t see anything past the confines of their very small, incestuous world (more than normal teens, even) is more than good enough for me.
So you have your awkward roommate who is kind of a bitch but maybe not on purpose but definitely on purpose because she is very very obviously the Black Cat from the very first conversation you have with her; goth teen who is nice; sporty teen who is also basically nice; student body president teen who is a huge bitch; and meek friendly teen who IS meek and friendly but is also doing a Her Story (if you know you know lmao). These guys are all great. I love every single one of them, and they sell this insular world where failing a test and falling out of the race for valedictorian, and getting a death threat, and stealing somebody’s shitty boyfriend who looks like 2010 Justin Bieber but wearing a bowling shirt (incredible) are all the same level of important, and they do it MOOOOOSTLY without leaning on too many LOL TEEN GIRLS AMIRITE comments.
This is a game that mostly takes being a young adult seriously and treats them and their problems with the same degree of respect that it treats any other characters in any other game. Even beyond the obvious contempt that we as a society hold for women (and particularly women around the age of those depicted in this game), I think there’s an additional impulse a lot of the time to dismiss the real anxieties and travails of teens as unimportant, frivolous, and transient. “You have the rest of your life ahead of you” type stuff. And that’s true to some extent, sure; it can be hard to see past stuff when you’re 17 and your world is small and your experiences are limited. But that doesn’t make it NOT shitty when your boyfriend treats you like garbage and you live with the person he cheated on you with, who is not sympathetic at all. The money issues you have thinking about college aren’t gonna go away, they’re gonna get more complex and harder to deal with. This is a game that, on some level, understands that. It takes these kids seriously and treats their problems like they’re real, even the ones that aren’t life and death, and I appreciate that.
It does suck a little bit that Waverly Academy is one of the sleeker, more compact entries in this late stage Nancy Drew Cyberverse, because it does feel like there could be more here. The Intense East Coast Boarding School With Dark Secrets is such rich setting and it does feel like Her was trying to stuff every associated trope into the game regardless of how much time they could spend on it or how well it fit into the narrative. Not the ONLY example of this but by FAR the most egregious is the Blackwood Society, a group of witchy, cloaked figures that Nancy spies on doing a midnight ritual on the school grounds one night who appear in exactly one scene and have literally no bearing on the plot. When you identify one of the members and say hey what the fuck is going on with that she says “shut the fuck up” and other than using it for one small clue later in the game it just doesn’t come up again. It’s wild.
But that’s a small quibble – when my biggest complaint is that there were too many cool bits in the game that I felt should have gotten more screentime, I feel like that’s a solid win for Nancy Drew, lmao. Perhaps the bar is low, but I do think this is a case where a game has an innate charm that, for me at least, leaves me feeling really positive about a work that may end up being greater than the sum of its parts.
PREVIOUSLY: NANCY DREW DOSSIER: RESORTING TO DANGER
NEXT TIME: TRAIL OF THE TWISTER
ALL NANCY DREW PIECES
So there’s this fancy school, right, and kids there are getting absolutely fucked up. There’s this person who is PROBABLY another student, going by the moniker The Black Cat, who leaves threatening notes targeting girls who are in the running to be valedictorian. The first note is always a warning, but if you get a second note, usually a few days later, that always indicates you’re about to run afoul of some kind of specifically targeted event. These aren’t just pranks or standard bullying either, but full on assault - one student is poisoned with nuts she’s severely allergic to and has to be hospitalized; another who suffers from claustrophobia (like, real claustrophobia) is trapped in a very small closet overnight and comes out of the experience scarred. The atmosphere is tense, parents are ready to pull kids out of school, and the most recent victim’s mother is threatening a lawsuit if something isn’t done QUICKLY; so obviously the headmistress gets in touch with TEEN SLEUTH NANCY DREW to go undercover under an alias over winter break to cozy up with the smart kids in the valedictorian dorm and identify The Black Cat before the second term gets started.
Before we really dig into the game I just gotta get something out of the way here: Waverly Academy is the kind of high school that indie directors in the 90s made movies that would accidentally become lesbian cultural touchstones, and then indie directors in the late 90s and early 2000s would purposely make gay movies about, and that turn people trans years before they realize this. The word “sapphic” exists to describe Waverly Academy. If the team at Her Interactive didn’t know what they were doing with the very specific tropes and archetypes they were deploying in this game then this is way funnier than it already is because almost every character you meet is like a laser sharpened gay girl catnip cliché, it’s incredible. Now listen I’m queer, and I almost exclusively associate with people who are women or gender-nonconforming, and almost all of those people are also queer, so maybe my perspective is skewed, that’s possible, I’ll concede that. But I also feel like we are the experts in Types of Girls and there are so many of them here it’s SO funny. How many fifteen-year-olds did Her accidentally make gay here? It’s gotta be like, a notable percentage. HAS to be. Okay.
So this game is an interesting beast because it’s not like…I wouldn’t say that the part where you PLAY it is really hitting the gas in any real way. The puzzles aren’t anything to write home about but there’s only one that really had me going damn I wish this wasn’t here which is like, much better than usual for these. Some classic Nancy Drew stuff makes a comeback here like managing a day/night cycle to solve certain puzzles, and this marks the unexpected return of a much-refined version of Ghost Dogs of Moon Lake’s photography system. Everything just kind of proceeds very smoothly in Waverly Academy which I think is one of its strengths. This is an all atmosphere, all characters Nancy Drew the likes of which I feel has been absent from the series for a long time. A more objective hand might say this means the game is unbalanced but I prefer this for this game. This is a compelling cast with a fun central mystery, and even though that mystery doesn’t really feel like it’s taking center stage, and you do a lot of meandering, getting caught up in the very heightened intensity of the lives of these isolated, unhinged teens who can’t see anything past the confines of their very small, incestuous world (more than normal teens, even) is more than good enough for me.
So you have your awkward roommate who is kind of a bitch but maybe not on purpose but definitely on purpose because she is very very obviously the Black Cat from the very first conversation you have with her; goth teen who is nice; sporty teen who is also basically nice; student body president teen who is a huge bitch; and meek friendly teen who IS meek and friendly but is also doing a Her Story (if you know you know lmao). These guys are all great. I love every single one of them, and they sell this insular world where failing a test and falling out of the race for valedictorian, and getting a death threat, and stealing somebody’s shitty boyfriend who looks like 2010 Justin Bieber but wearing a bowling shirt (incredible) are all the same level of important, and they do it MOOOOOSTLY without leaning on too many LOL TEEN GIRLS AMIRITE comments.
This is a game that mostly takes being a young adult seriously and treats them and their problems with the same degree of respect that it treats any other characters in any other game. Even beyond the obvious contempt that we as a society hold for women (and particularly women around the age of those depicted in this game), I think there’s an additional impulse a lot of the time to dismiss the real anxieties and travails of teens as unimportant, frivolous, and transient. “You have the rest of your life ahead of you” type stuff. And that’s true to some extent, sure; it can be hard to see past stuff when you’re 17 and your world is small and your experiences are limited. But that doesn’t make it NOT shitty when your boyfriend treats you like garbage and you live with the person he cheated on you with, who is not sympathetic at all. The money issues you have thinking about college aren’t gonna go away, they’re gonna get more complex and harder to deal with. This is a game that, on some level, understands that. It takes these kids seriously and treats their problems like they’re real, even the ones that aren’t life and death, and I appreciate that.
It does suck a little bit that Waverly Academy is one of the sleeker, more compact entries in this late stage Nancy Drew Cyberverse, because it does feel like there could be more here. The Intense East Coast Boarding School With Dark Secrets is such rich setting and it does feel like Her was trying to stuff every associated trope into the game regardless of how much time they could spend on it or how well it fit into the narrative. Not the ONLY example of this but by FAR the most egregious is the Blackwood Society, a group of witchy, cloaked figures that Nancy spies on doing a midnight ritual on the school grounds one night who appear in exactly one scene and have literally no bearing on the plot. When you identify one of the members and say hey what the fuck is going on with that she says “shut the fuck up” and other than using it for one small clue later in the game it just doesn’t come up again. It’s wild.
But that’s a small quibble – when my biggest complaint is that there were too many cool bits in the game that I felt should have gotten more screentime, I feel like that’s a solid win for Nancy Drew, lmao. Perhaps the bar is low, but I do think this is a case where a game has an innate charm that, for me at least, leaves me feeling really positive about a work that may end up being greater than the sum of its parts.
PREVIOUSLY: NANCY DREW DOSSIER: RESORTING TO DANGER
NEXT TIME: TRAIL OF THE TWISTER
ALL NANCY DREW PIECES
3 Comments
they're just witches having a night out let them have a good time.
that is in fact almost exactly what their leader says when confronted
Jamesbuc
2 years ago
I also have to ding this for probably being one of the more unapologetically American Nancy Drew titles in the series. Sure some do come close but theres certain moments that do come off as completely alien to those outside of America... That map puzzle being a rather egregious example of something where the game goes 'Welp you should know this' despite the fact that if you dont happen to be in America, its not something commonly taught (at least its not commonly taught in the UK at any rate).
That said despite those small issues, this is still one of the stronger games thanks to some incredibly fun characters, interesting puzzles and that endgame panic. It good.