It’s been a mixed bag with anniversary games in the Nancy Drew Cyber Mystery series so far; game ten, Secrets of Shadow Ranch was a relative high point at the time of its release that in retrospect shores itself more firmly in the middle of the pack, quality-wise, while game twenty, Ransom of the Seven Ships, is an unmitigated disaster from top to bottom, easily bottom two in the series in terms of gameplay, a story so boring it features precisely one character in it, and racism so overt even by the standards of both its time and this series that Her has since removed it from sale. Luckily for them, we celebrate 25 as readily as we celebrate increments of ten, it’s even a little more special than a twentieth or thirtieth thing in a list might be, so Her got another shot at doing something special for an anniversary project and god damn did they take it.
Her’s Nancy Drew games settled their formula really quickly, as early as the third game and with the core elements in place since arguably the second, so when a game DOES break some element of that formula in a significant way, you do tend to feel like Something Is Happening. In The Final Scene it’s an urgent hostage situation; in Secret of the Old Clock it’s an alternate universe where you’re experiencing the kind of history you might investigate in any other game; in The Phantom of Venice you’re doing uhhh, international espionage sort of?? HERE, things go off the rails IMMEDIATELY, and they stay off the rails for almost the entire game.
In the first twist, the game actually takes place in Nancy’s home town of River Heights. No vacation, no weird internship, no international employers whisking her away to have wacky, garrulous, possibly racist adventures. Nancy is actually, for once, just hanging out with her friends, participating in a town-sponsored team-based clue-hunting event (which seems like an unfair thing to put on when you have a literally world famous consulting detective hanging around like at least ban Nancy guys come on) when she is lured by a mysterious note to town hall one night. Once she’s inside, town hall immediately burns down, and Nancy is framed for the arson, and in the second twist, she’s immediately arrested and spends a good 80? 85? percent of the game in the police station while her trio of Best Buds team up to clear her name on the outside.
you’ll note that I said in the police station and not in a jail cell, because of course, Nancy is on very good terms with the local chief of police, and it takes very little poking to convince him to let Nancy out of her holding cell and roam the station entirely unattended, where she quickly recovers access to her personal cell phone and lock picking tools, breaks into multiple desks and file cabinets, generally commits many crimes, and comes out completely rosy in perhaps Nancy’s greatest flex of power and privilege in the series so far.
The third way that this game is markedly different from usual is in objective. Alibi in Ashes is much more overtly a whodunnit than most of its predecessors. While the “villain” of each game is always one of the characters you interact with throughout, the degree to which they give a shit about Nancy varies wildly, and most of the time they would be entirely content to do their scooby doo real estate scheme or thievery or whatever and leave – Nancy’s meddling is incidental to their schemes and their inevitable confrontations are rarely personal beyond the character being a general asshole who’s smug about murdering her. Here, though, Nancy’s been directly framed for a pretty bad crime, there are four possible suspects, and Nancy’s friends are directly working to both clear her name and finger the actual perp.
To this end there’s a lot of good stuff going on. You can swap perspectives at almost any time between Nancy in the police station, who collects and organizes the group’s aggregate evidence, steals useful police information and documents for them, and within the story is directing the course of the others’ investigations, and any of her friends, each of whom share special relationships with the suspects. Cheerful, feminine Bess is the perpetual enemy of Nancy’s preppy rival Deirdre, gets on great with ice cream parlor owner and councilperson Toni, and immediately gets kicked out of cynical antique shop owner Alexei’s store because upon entering it she breaks a valuable vase, so he won’t even SPEAK with her. Wise tomboy George is more mature than her friends, and gets more out of Alexei than they can because she’s better at manipulating him. POOR FUCKIN NED is an object of desire for Deirdre (just one of many reasons she hates Nancy), and more than once throughout the game he’s forced by Nancy to take advantage of Deirdre’s crush on him to manipulate her, something he’s very uncomfortable with and is ultimately fruitless lmao. This guy is the only person who is physically present in the game who doesn’t get a character model either. You can visit Bess and George when you’re not playing as them, they’re doing specific jobs for the mission. Ned just disappears, it’s wild. The boy stays losing. I love this guy he sucks.
So obviously there’s a lot going on in this game, and from a play perspective it’s maybe a little TOO much? There are a LOT of THINGS to be done here, and juggling three characters who all have unique dialogue puzzles to wade through and each carrying different inventories and more than one puzzle that’s just like “go find me a battery” where’s a battery? Fuck you that’s where, it’s just like, there’s a lot of space in this game and there are a lot of ways to navigate it. Easy to get mixed up, easy to lose track of objectives. But none of that really matters, right, because the novelty of the experience more than makes up for it. Bess and George and to a significantly lesser extent Ned (I write about him a lot because I think the way these games treat him is fascinating but he is undoubtedly the most thinly drawn recurring character in a series where the Hardy Boys have only made like five appearances) are fun characters who never quite feel like they get enough to do, so getting a chance to really shine a spotlight on them in a game that is in large part celebrating the history of this branch of the franchise does feel earned.
The thing that puts Alibi in Ashes over the top, though, is how mean-spirited it is. Something that has emerged from this block of Nancy Drew games (what I’d think of as the third distinct era of the series, games 16 through 25, but especially emerging during the ongoing hotstreak since 21, Waverly Academy) that I feel has done them a great deal of credit, and that’s a willingness to engage in a level of mundane adult emotion that lends an air of Maturity to the proceedings, even as they retain their goofy elements. This incarnation of Nancy Drew has always existed in a weird space of adaptation; one one hand the character’s ages and often the subject matters dealt with are clearly rooted in the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys young adult novels of the 80s and 90s which were aimed squarely at older teens and whose edge could border on too sharp (never let the world forget “Joe! Hand me the Uzi!”). On the other, characters’ actual personalities and dispositions and worldviews, the tendency towards overt educational content, and a lot of the weird, often childish humor that strongly characterizes these games is rooted deeply in the earlier Nancy Drew works through the 1970s and the later Nancy Drew Notebooks series that were aimed squarely at children. It lends the series a distinctly all-ages vibe, something I’ve praised and chided in the past.
But while the darker series has always had dark pasts and spooky locales and the occasional attempted murder, I think these last few have gone for something a little more daring (at least, in the context of this series and its framework), in choosing to include and often center a lot of just kind of normal, mundane ugliness. It could be the myriad ways high school kids are beaten down by each other and the systems that govern them, or social norms precluding a family from properly coming together in the wake of a tragedy, or a man letting fear of vulnerability steal years of his life from him – each of the recent games seems interested in letting the quiet sadnesses that everyone collects naturally as part of living weave in and out of their standard Nancy Drew games, along with more of the complexities of adult life in general.
Never is this more apparent than in Alibi in Ashes, where Nancy’s own sterling All-American hometown of River Heights is revealed to be a nest of vipers ready to eat her alive at the very first sign of disharmony. The news people hate her for scooping their hottest stories, the politicians hate her for the weird attentions she brings and for how her successes negatively impact the reputation of the police, who are shown to be as lazy and corrupt as an other police office anywhere else. When Nancy is very obviously framed for a crime that’s wildly out of character and evidence is quickly found to put doubt on her guilt, she’s given no quarter because the people with the power to help her don’t really care and the people who are actually in power have a vested interest in seeing her go down regardless of whether she’s guilty or not.
This isn’t even the first time this has happened – insofar as this game has a “historical subplot,” it’s about Alexei the antique shop owner, who was once a famous teen detective like Nancy, busted for a crime he swears he didn’t commit. Nancy doesn’t lose her characteristic pep or her faith in the system, her belief that if she and her friends can just find the right combination of evidence that she’ll be cleared and the real arsonist brought to justice, nor does she ever doubt that this will happen, but Alexei was broken by his experience. As he puts it himself, he spoke truth to power and was swiftly and brutally destroyed for it. Now he’s a pariah, eking out a solitary, bitter existence running a store he hates in a town that hates him. And for what? For allegedly stealing one thing, one time, thirty years ago?
That’s the kind of All-American Town that River Heights is, under the sunny facades and ice cream parlors and colonial architecture. A town where people’s memories are long, and there’s no room for forgiveness, no room for generosity, no room for grace. Where altruism and charity are met, privately, with resentment. Where you can’t rock the boat. Where local town politics are the supreme power. Where your neighbors who were your friends yesterday will throw rocks through your windows and leave threats at your doorstep before you’re even tried for a crime, and once you’re exonerated will act like they were on your side all along. In a way, Deirdre is one of the only real friends Nancy has, because while she doesn’t like Nancy and doesn’t want much to do with her, she’s open about her problems with Nancy, and equally open about being a normal person who just wants Nancy to shut the fuck up and maybe break up with her boyfriend and not like, rot in prison for 10-20 years for a crime she didn’t commit and/or die.
And maybe the most damning thing about Nancy herself is that, as usual, she doesn’t understand any of this is happening to her. It’s bad apples all the way down in her eyes. She’s quite happy to be back in her neighbors’ good graces when all is said and done; quite happy to simply ruin the popularity of one shitty politician in a system that she knows is historically ingrained into the fabric of her town; quite happy to use her own connections to the police and her father’s position as an important and wealthy judge to get her out of a situation that would ruin and has ruined anyone else. This is the dichotomy right? Ever-present in the series and as strong as ever here now that a lot of these disparities and injustices are being brought back to the forefront as explicit text.
There’s a lot to chew on in Alibi in Ashes generally but it IS the Big Twenty-Fifth Game in the series and I do want to note before we end that it works really well in that capacity. The game is chock full of little easter eggs (not counting the literal hidden easter egg items you can be rewarded with for doing weird shit in these, which I didn’t find this time) like all the playable characters having box art for previous games as their phone backgrounds (deep cuts too), or Nancy’s desk drawer having a picture of her friend from The Final Scene in it, or the town map for the game being an exact replica of the map for Secret of the Old Clock, except with many small changes to reflect the modernizations that have been implemented over the intervening 100 years.
Those bits of fanservice are littered throughout and LIBERALLY and that shit matters in a series as long as this one. There’s a real sense of mythology to it, it’s fun to celebrate on a milestone, and it’s frankly a relief to finally have a milestone game worth celebrating. As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been generally pleased with this run of Nancy Drew games, a lot of series highs lately imo, and Alibi in Ashes still stands out among what already felt like the cream of the crop. It’s a little bittersweet too – my understanding is that this game closes out this third era of Her Interactive’s Nancy Drew series, and with the series kind of perpetually stalled after its ill-fated retool in 2019, it seems likely that the next one will be the beginning of their final stretch. If that’s the case, I can only hope they keep up the pace they’ve set so far in the twenties. I would love to see this series close out strong.
PREVIOUSLY: THE CAPTIVE CURSE
NEXT TIME: TOMB OF THE LOST QUEEN
ALL NANCY DREW PIECES
Her’s Nancy Drew games settled their formula really quickly, as early as the third game and with the core elements in place since arguably the second, so when a game DOES break some element of that formula in a significant way, you do tend to feel like Something Is Happening. In The Final Scene it’s an urgent hostage situation; in Secret of the Old Clock it’s an alternate universe where you’re experiencing the kind of history you might investigate in any other game; in The Phantom of Venice you’re doing uhhh, international espionage sort of?? HERE, things go off the rails IMMEDIATELY, and they stay off the rails for almost the entire game.
In the first twist, the game actually takes place in Nancy’s home town of River Heights. No vacation, no weird internship, no international employers whisking her away to have wacky, garrulous, possibly racist adventures. Nancy is actually, for once, just hanging out with her friends, participating in a town-sponsored team-based clue-hunting event (which seems like an unfair thing to put on when you have a literally world famous consulting detective hanging around like at least ban Nancy guys come on) when she is lured by a mysterious note to town hall one night. Once she’s inside, town hall immediately burns down, and Nancy is framed for the arson, and in the second twist, she’s immediately arrested and spends a good 80? 85? percent of the game in the police station while her trio of Best Buds team up to clear her name on the outside.
you’ll note that I said in the police station and not in a jail cell, because of course, Nancy is on very good terms with the local chief of police, and it takes very little poking to convince him to let Nancy out of her holding cell and roam the station entirely unattended, where she quickly recovers access to her personal cell phone and lock picking tools, breaks into multiple desks and file cabinets, generally commits many crimes, and comes out completely rosy in perhaps Nancy’s greatest flex of power and privilege in the series so far.
The third way that this game is markedly different from usual is in objective. Alibi in Ashes is much more overtly a whodunnit than most of its predecessors. While the “villain” of each game is always one of the characters you interact with throughout, the degree to which they give a shit about Nancy varies wildly, and most of the time they would be entirely content to do their scooby doo real estate scheme or thievery or whatever and leave – Nancy’s meddling is incidental to their schemes and their inevitable confrontations are rarely personal beyond the character being a general asshole who’s smug about murdering her. Here, though, Nancy’s been directly framed for a pretty bad crime, there are four possible suspects, and Nancy’s friends are directly working to both clear her name and finger the actual perp.
To this end there’s a lot of good stuff going on. You can swap perspectives at almost any time between Nancy in the police station, who collects and organizes the group’s aggregate evidence, steals useful police information and documents for them, and within the story is directing the course of the others’ investigations, and any of her friends, each of whom share special relationships with the suspects. Cheerful, feminine Bess is the perpetual enemy of Nancy’s preppy rival Deirdre, gets on great with ice cream parlor owner and councilperson Toni, and immediately gets kicked out of cynical antique shop owner Alexei’s store because upon entering it she breaks a valuable vase, so he won’t even SPEAK with her. Wise tomboy George is more mature than her friends, and gets more out of Alexei than they can because she’s better at manipulating him. POOR FUCKIN NED is an object of desire for Deirdre (just one of many reasons she hates Nancy), and more than once throughout the game he’s forced by Nancy to take advantage of Deirdre’s crush on him to manipulate her, something he’s very uncomfortable with and is ultimately fruitless lmao. This guy is the only person who is physically present in the game who doesn’t get a character model either. You can visit Bess and George when you’re not playing as them, they’re doing specific jobs for the mission. Ned just disappears, it’s wild. The boy stays losing. I love this guy he sucks.
So obviously there’s a lot going on in this game, and from a play perspective it’s maybe a little TOO much? There are a LOT of THINGS to be done here, and juggling three characters who all have unique dialogue puzzles to wade through and each carrying different inventories and more than one puzzle that’s just like “go find me a battery” where’s a battery? Fuck you that’s where, it’s just like, there’s a lot of space in this game and there are a lot of ways to navigate it. Easy to get mixed up, easy to lose track of objectives. But none of that really matters, right, because the novelty of the experience more than makes up for it. Bess and George and to a significantly lesser extent Ned (I write about him a lot because I think the way these games treat him is fascinating but he is undoubtedly the most thinly drawn recurring character in a series where the Hardy Boys have only made like five appearances) are fun characters who never quite feel like they get enough to do, so getting a chance to really shine a spotlight on them in a game that is in large part celebrating the history of this branch of the franchise does feel earned.
The thing that puts Alibi in Ashes over the top, though, is how mean-spirited it is. Something that has emerged from this block of Nancy Drew games (what I’d think of as the third distinct era of the series, games 16 through 25, but especially emerging during the ongoing hotstreak since 21, Waverly Academy) that I feel has done them a great deal of credit, and that’s a willingness to engage in a level of mundane adult emotion that lends an air of Maturity to the proceedings, even as they retain their goofy elements. This incarnation of Nancy Drew has always existed in a weird space of adaptation; one one hand the character’s ages and often the subject matters dealt with are clearly rooted in the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys young adult novels of the 80s and 90s which were aimed squarely at older teens and whose edge could border on too sharp (never let the world forget “Joe! Hand me the Uzi!”). On the other, characters’ actual personalities and dispositions and worldviews, the tendency towards overt educational content, and a lot of the weird, often childish humor that strongly characterizes these games is rooted deeply in the earlier Nancy Drew works through the 1970s and the later Nancy Drew Notebooks series that were aimed squarely at children. It lends the series a distinctly all-ages vibe, something I’ve praised and chided in the past.
But while the darker series has always had dark pasts and spooky locales and the occasional attempted murder, I think these last few have gone for something a little more daring (at least, in the context of this series and its framework), in choosing to include and often center a lot of just kind of normal, mundane ugliness. It could be the myriad ways high school kids are beaten down by each other and the systems that govern them, or social norms precluding a family from properly coming together in the wake of a tragedy, or a man letting fear of vulnerability steal years of his life from him – each of the recent games seems interested in letting the quiet sadnesses that everyone collects naturally as part of living weave in and out of their standard Nancy Drew games, along with more of the complexities of adult life in general.
Never is this more apparent than in Alibi in Ashes, where Nancy’s own sterling All-American hometown of River Heights is revealed to be a nest of vipers ready to eat her alive at the very first sign of disharmony. The news people hate her for scooping their hottest stories, the politicians hate her for the weird attentions she brings and for how her successes negatively impact the reputation of the police, who are shown to be as lazy and corrupt as an other police office anywhere else. When Nancy is very obviously framed for a crime that’s wildly out of character and evidence is quickly found to put doubt on her guilt, she’s given no quarter because the people with the power to help her don’t really care and the people who are actually in power have a vested interest in seeing her go down regardless of whether she’s guilty or not.
This isn’t even the first time this has happened – insofar as this game has a “historical subplot,” it’s about Alexei the antique shop owner, who was once a famous teen detective like Nancy, busted for a crime he swears he didn’t commit. Nancy doesn’t lose her characteristic pep or her faith in the system, her belief that if she and her friends can just find the right combination of evidence that she’ll be cleared and the real arsonist brought to justice, nor does she ever doubt that this will happen, but Alexei was broken by his experience. As he puts it himself, he spoke truth to power and was swiftly and brutally destroyed for it. Now he’s a pariah, eking out a solitary, bitter existence running a store he hates in a town that hates him. And for what? For allegedly stealing one thing, one time, thirty years ago?
That’s the kind of All-American Town that River Heights is, under the sunny facades and ice cream parlors and colonial architecture. A town where people’s memories are long, and there’s no room for forgiveness, no room for generosity, no room for grace. Where altruism and charity are met, privately, with resentment. Where you can’t rock the boat. Where local town politics are the supreme power. Where your neighbors who were your friends yesterday will throw rocks through your windows and leave threats at your doorstep before you’re even tried for a crime, and once you’re exonerated will act like they were on your side all along. In a way, Deirdre is one of the only real friends Nancy has, because while she doesn’t like Nancy and doesn’t want much to do with her, she’s open about her problems with Nancy, and equally open about being a normal person who just wants Nancy to shut the fuck up and maybe break up with her boyfriend and not like, rot in prison for 10-20 years for a crime she didn’t commit and/or die.
And maybe the most damning thing about Nancy herself is that, as usual, she doesn’t understand any of this is happening to her. It’s bad apples all the way down in her eyes. She’s quite happy to be back in her neighbors’ good graces when all is said and done; quite happy to simply ruin the popularity of one shitty politician in a system that she knows is historically ingrained into the fabric of her town; quite happy to use her own connections to the police and her father’s position as an important and wealthy judge to get her out of a situation that would ruin and has ruined anyone else. This is the dichotomy right? Ever-present in the series and as strong as ever here now that a lot of these disparities and injustices are being brought back to the forefront as explicit text.
There’s a lot to chew on in Alibi in Ashes generally but it IS the Big Twenty-Fifth Game in the series and I do want to note before we end that it works really well in that capacity. The game is chock full of little easter eggs (not counting the literal hidden easter egg items you can be rewarded with for doing weird shit in these, which I didn’t find this time) like all the playable characters having box art for previous games as their phone backgrounds (deep cuts too), or Nancy’s desk drawer having a picture of her friend from The Final Scene in it, or the town map for the game being an exact replica of the map for Secret of the Old Clock, except with many small changes to reflect the modernizations that have been implemented over the intervening 100 years.
Those bits of fanservice are littered throughout and LIBERALLY and that shit matters in a series as long as this one. There’s a real sense of mythology to it, it’s fun to celebrate on a milestone, and it’s frankly a relief to finally have a milestone game worth celebrating. As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been generally pleased with this run of Nancy Drew games, a lot of series highs lately imo, and Alibi in Ashes still stands out among what already felt like the cream of the crop. It’s a little bittersweet too – my understanding is that this game closes out this third era of Her Interactive’s Nancy Drew series, and with the series kind of perpetually stalled after its ill-fated retool in 2019, it seems likely that the next one will be the beginning of their final stretch. If that’s the case, I can only hope they keep up the pace they’ve set so far in the twenties. I would love to see this series close out strong.
PREVIOUSLY: THE CAPTIVE CURSE
NEXT TIME: TOMB OF THE LOST QUEEN
ALL NANCY DREW PIECES
4 Comments
This might be something of a surprise coming from me my friend but I would like to see you play it
I just truly adore this game. Even if I think I might love the vibe of Final Scene or Secret of the Old Clock more, the huge swings this game takes is just inspired. The way it tears apart Nancy's liberal life in this awful little Americana town, how fragile her hero status really is, and how maybe its for the best that she does her mystery solving abroad rather than stay near these miserable fucks.
The old historical tragedies are all kind of hit or miss for me in this franchise and I think you really nail why Alexei's tragedy works so well. As much as his tragedy is set in the past, you get to see the real repercussions of it today. The way it destroys a man, tears at his soul and optimism, the way the bitterness and pain sets in. There's a lot of reasons to suspect Alexei might want to hurt Nancy out of resentment. Which is why, out of all moments in the game, the thing I always come back to is Alexei's first real meeting with Nancy. After hours of being a grumpy old man, he's immediately so instantly kind and gentle with Nancy. He's seen what this town can do. He doesn't want it to happen again. He wants Nancy to WIN because he would never want someone to go through what he went through. Its just such a beautiful little story and I wish he came back as an advice phone call or something.
Okay now time for some Nancy Drew Nerd Rambling.
The books have gone through different "generations" so to speak, with different supporting casts switching out here and there. Deidre is a modern addition, appearing in the Girl Detective books of the 2004 series onward. Deidre's a great bully character, who can naturally switch between ally or rival depending on the situation. She has a few more appearances in later games and its great to see a connective tissue between the books and the games like that.
But in the 70s, before the Girl Detective generation, Brenda Carlton was the rival for the Files books. Brenda aimed to join her father's paper and would often use underhanded tactics to smear people or solve mysteries before Nancy. Deidre owes a lot of the same bully DNA as Brenda, but its a little hard to balance two bully characters. You'd expect one of them would have to go. But by aging up Brenda and turning different knobs on her personality, they really found a perfect way to ode different parts of the Nancy history in such unique ways. Its an excellent angle that really shows how much the team cared about getting this anniversary game right and doing something truly special with their work. Its brilliant. I adore it. I fucking adore this game.
The old historical tragedies are all kind of hit or miss for me in this franchise and I think you really nail why Alexei's tragedy works so well. As much as his tragedy is set in the past, you get to see the real repercussions of it today. The way it destroys a man, tears at his soul and optimism, the way the bitterness and pain sets in. There's a lot of reasons to suspect Alexei might want to hurt Nancy out of resentment. Which is why, out of all moments in the game, the thing I always come back to is Alexei's first real meeting with Nancy. After hours of being a grumpy old man, he's immediately so instantly kind and gentle with Nancy. He's seen what this town can do. He doesn't want it to happen again. He wants Nancy to WIN because he would never want someone to go through what he went through. Its just such a beautiful little story and I wish he came back as an advice phone call or something.
Okay now time for some Nancy Drew Nerd Rambling.
The books have gone through different "generations" so to speak, with different supporting casts switching out here and there. Deidre is a modern addition, appearing in the Girl Detective books of the 2004 series onward. Deidre's a great bully character, who can naturally switch between ally or rival depending on the situation. She has a few more appearances in later games and its great to see a connective tissue between the books and the games like that.
But in the 70s, before the Girl Detective generation, Brenda Carlton was the rival for the Files books. Brenda aimed to join her father's paper and would often use underhanded tactics to smear people or solve mysteries before Nancy. Deidre owes a lot of the same bully DNA as Brenda, but its a little hard to balance two bully characters. You'd expect one of them would have to go. But by aging up Brenda and turning different knobs on her personality, they really found a perfect way to ode different parts of the Nancy history in such unique ways. Its an excellent angle that really shows how much the team cared about getting this anniversary game right and doing something truly special with their work. Its brilliant. I adore it. I fucking adore this game.
I didnt even realise this review was up and oh lawd I am so far behind on everything. Im sadly on the side of the fence who found this particular game to be a little... Underwhelming? I mean if im just going to stick to whats going on plot and character wise, its probably a high point for the series thanks to some really fun and interesting characters and I generally like it when games and films centre around a town being as much a character as the people who inhabit it. Theres always a reason why I enjoy Murder she Wrote more when its messing around in Cabot Cove, Marple when shes in St Mary Mead and the Halloween series when Haddonfield feels like its reacting or overreacting to tragedy.
That said I cannot get past how clunky the character switching mechanics feel. On more than one occasion I stumbled across moments where the game boldfaced just went 'NOPE' and wouldn't let me make progress unless I changed around. In some cases it made sense plot wise but then occasionally the game would just go 'Ok so Bess can do this but Ned cant. Because. Random'.
The series insistence of never actually showing who Nancy is also makes up part of this with item switching in the drop box, why cant I just talk to Bess/George/Ned and hand shit over? Its also probably why I spent most of my time as Ned because while Bess and George were laid around chilling, Ned is never to be found. I assume its because Her Interactive actually don't have a Ned model (actually correct me if I'm wrong but I don't remember EVER seeing Ned in any of the Nancy games outside of a profile pic). I headcanon that while not playing Ned, he's back at home stress-eating an entire chocolate gateau and reminding himself to never ask Nancy to let him join an adventure ever.
That said I cannot get past how clunky the character switching mechanics feel. On more than one occasion I stumbled across moments where the game boldfaced just went 'NOPE' and wouldn't let me make progress unless I changed around. In some cases it made sense plot wise but then occasionally the game would just go 'Ok so Bess can do this but Ned cant. Because. Random'.
The series insistence of never actually showing who Nancy is also makes up part of this with item switching in the drop box, why cant I just talk to Bess/George/Ned and hand shit over? Its also probably why I spent most of my time as Ned because while Bess and George were laid around chilling, Ned is never to be found. I assume its because Her Interactive actually don't have a Ned model (actually correct me if I'm wrong but I don't remember EVER seeing Ned in any of the Nancy games outside of a profile pic). I headcanon that while not playing Ned, he's back at home stress-eating an entire chocolate gateau and reminding himself to never ask Nancy to let him join an adventure ever.
Woodaba
1 year ago