I’ve been away longer than I’d planned to be but it feels good to get back in the saddle. I’m refreshed and ready to go. I didn’t FEEL burned out on these but sometimes you stop and then damn it’s been six months, time flies. But when the first thing that happens in the game is Nancy won’t be let into the castle she’s taken a case at until she solves a matching puzzles that is pulleyed down to her in a bucket and she just sighs and does it because she knows that she lives in a world that runs on some kind of bizarre transactional puzzle economy, I felt like I was pulling into the driveway after a long time away. When the second thing that happened in the game was Nancy gets a call from her boyfriend and treats him like absolute shit, I felt like I was HOME.

Our previous adventure took place in Japan and on her way home from that adventure Nancy decides on a whim to take a case from a rich man named Markus whose castle/hotel and its surrounding town are being terrorized by a legendary monster that supposedly kidnaps girls when it appears but has yet to actually really do anything lol. This aggravates Nancy’s long-suffering boyfriend Ned, who was planning a romantic reception for her homecoming which he put a lot of effort into, and whom she did not tell about this detour. Anyone who has read my Nancy Drew stuff knows that I love Ned, the most shat-upon boy in the world. He has done nothing to deserve the nonstop contempt Nancy treats him with, nor the patronizing comfort she offers him whenever he has the audacity to act a little put out.

This game is different though because THIS time Ned seems like he’s finally had enough. Not even that actually he’s just like a little bit annoyed and pouty that she has ditched him again for some random case with no notice and she’s immediately like WELL SORRY MY LIFE DOESN’T REVOLVE AROUND YOU NED SORRY YOU’RE NOT HAVING A BETTER TIME IF YOU’RE NOT HAVING FUN WHY DON’T YOU GO OUT BY YOURSELF which is like very clearly not the point he’s trying to make but that IS enough to get them to part on bad terms, which is an interesting twist to this game, there’s not usually a lot of interpersonal conflict on Nancy’s side of things, she’s typically an impartial observer to other people’s problems, a bizarre avatar for the writers to voice their awful views on justice.

It’s fun, then, to see this personal trouble leak into Nancy’s handling of the case and for some small parallel to be drawn between her and this game’s obvious culprit. I’ll go ahead and list all the guys in this game and you just think about who might be dressing up as a Frankenstein to get the place to go out of business. A middle aged man who suffered a tragedy and uses his position as the manager of the castle to not venture into the outside world and who loves to make board games. An old old woman who physically cannot stay awake if she eats ANY food. A nine year old. A woman who is the ex-girlfriend of the now-extremely wealthy man who owns the castle and gets visibly angry when you bring that up to her but swears it’s no big deal but god she hates that guy and thinks he wouldn’t be where he is today without her but don’t worry she’s working here at his castle by complete coincidence. Okay? We’re all just gonna sit with that for a second. Cool.

It’s fine though because the game isn’t about a real mystery as much as it’s about Nancy’s relationship troubles, and it’s very funny to see her go to this woman who is clearly behind everything and ask for advice and RECEIVE completely genuine, sound advice from this person who has absolutely no perspective on healthy romance and also is planning to murder Nancy later. She’s a comically inept villain in general, with the first monster encounter really being more of a prank, where she sets fire to a single potted plant in a stone courtyard, and the second being to try to make nancy’s clothes look slashed up but even the CG render makes it obvious that someone cut them with scissors. It’s possibly the least effective performance by a villain to date in the series and it makes Anja a really charming character, bolstered by a very fun voice performance.

Less fun is the resolution to the BF Fight story. Throughout the game you get calls from the Hardy boys who are consoling Ned after he goes on a PG bender post-argument, and in the end NED apologizes to NANCY and frames it as a thing where he’s jealous of her cool life? Which is not the tenor of the actual fight at all, and Nancy gives him NOTHING on her end. She tells him “you know I would rather you were here with me than not” which is BULLSHIT lmao I was so mad.

I’m basically always mad at Nancy thought so this feels right. Never more than when she’s being the world’s biggest cop which also happens in this game. Long before she knows she’s the villain Nancy finds out that Anja faked her resume to get her position at the castle, a completely harmless crime, but a CRIME NONETHELESS so even though Anja was well-liked and unjustly passed over for work in favor of people with more connections and more privileged backgrounds and Nancy takes this at face value and believes it, AND nobody cares who knows about this AND it’s a completely victimless crime as far as anyone knows, Nancy still blackmails her into confessing under threat that Nancy herself will rat on her if she doesn’t, simply because it was a crime to do this. Mind your fucking business Nancy jesus fuckin christ who cares! The worst person alive I swear to god.

It may sound like I didn’t like this game but actually I had a great time with it. These things are comforts, the kinds of consistencies that you want to see in a series as venerably entrenched as any can be in its twenty-fourth installment. I WANT Nancy to be culturally insensitive (TO WHITE PEOPLE ONLY THANK YOU) I ASSUME she will be the dirt worst pig in the world, I love when the villains are goofy losers, I love when Ned is the world’s (and Nancy’s) punching bag. That’s what these games are! To expect them to be anything else, NOW, would be folly. That’s not to say they’re not worth talking about or criticizing but y’know we take some comfort.

The actual play of the game is pretty excellent too. This series tends to run in cycles of puzzle elements where every once in a while you get a big burst of fresh ideas and stuff and that’s not QUITE what’s happening here but I think there is a strong variety of puzzles on display, none of the ones that are present are bad versions of their format, and nothing breaks the pace. On a similar note this might be the best batch of minigames Nancy Drew has ever seen? Legitimately only winners this time, it’s shocking. And while I don’t think this is a SPOOKY game partially because the threat is so underplayed, it is a very BEAUTIFUL one. The art direction throughout the castle and its dungeon area that you traverse freely late in the game is superb, and while it’s kind of a shame they don’t really cultivate any particularly strong atmosphere with it, it’s good to look at nonetheless.

I’m glad this was the one I took a break on because it’s an excellent cyber mystery to come back to! It’s not a huge shake up game and the stakes are about as low as they get in this series. Real nice hangout vibes. Charming characters, pretty to look at, nice music, rock solid gameplay. It’s all here. The Captive Curse easily goes on that pile with games like Shadow Ranch and Blue Moon Canyon of games that aren’t gonna reinvent the wheel or nothin’ but are nonetheless rollicking good times, and in a series like this you honestly want more of those than anything else.

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