Silent Hill 3 finds itself in the deeply unenviable position of being the first Silent Hill game to not really have an identity of its own. When you’re following a game as titanic as Silent Hill 2 I think it would be easy to be destroyed by the question of what the fuck you do next and I’m extremely glad that Team Silent had the good sense to make the answer “not that again.” Conceptually I think there’s something interesting in the idea of returning to a lot of the aesthetics and narrative ideas of the original game, as the unbelievable technical mastery over the PS2 that’s on display here definitely affords them a little bit of victory lapping that warrants such a thing. Still though, I’m glad that this game manages to firmly stake its own atmospheric identity even if I think ultimately it doesn’t all come together quite as well as its predecessors.

A big part of that is the overarching narrative of the game. At first I was kind of put off by the structure. Where previous Silent Hills stuck to the same formula of dropping your character in the titular town and making those foggy streets the hub world of sorts between the “dungeon” locations of municipal buildings and hospitals and stuff, 3 is a very linear game that shuttles you from dungeon to dungeon to dungeon with very little narrative tissue as Heather Mason just tries to go from the mall back to her apartment with very little understanding of what the fuck is happening to her.

And that’s kind of all you get! For a long while! Initially I was fatigued by this gauntlet of what in previous games would be considered set piece dungeon areas back to back to back to back but I came around. Partly this is because all of these areas are just good – Silent Hill 3 really is all killer no filler. Partly, though, it’s because I don’t find the actual narrative of the game particularly interesting. There is a renewed focus on the cult from Silent Hill 1 and they’re back to their old hijinks some seventeen years later. There are seeds of good shit here – conflicts between three emergent factions with differing philosophies about the purpose of their dark god and how best to weaponize it against the world, implications of what the lives of surviving characters from the original game (and at least one who didn’t) looked like in the intervening time – but none of that stuff is really given any time to be developed into anything more than cool seasoning sprinkled over something that feels disappointingly seen-before for this series. I’m conflicted about it though, right, because the REASON this stuff is so underbaked is because almost all of it is squished into the back half of the game to make room for The World’s Most Stressful Walk Home, which is sick! Also, I’m about to get into MORE shit that is very cool in this game, and that stuff persists into that second half as well along with these things that don’t work as well, it just sucks that the thing that was sacrificed here is, ostensibly, the primary narrative of the game haha.

Who even CARES though because the TRUE focus of the game is Heather Mason, perhaps the best video game protagonist of all time? She’s a delight, an absolute pleasure to inhabit and spend time with. She faces a gauntlet of intensely physical and increasingly targeted psychological horror and meets almost every challenge with annoyance and fury. Eye rolls and ughs and a brandished katana rather than fear. Even in her relationship with the game’s one other overtly cool character (something this series has never REALLY had and it’s nice! I really like Douglas – SH1 contrived a lot of situations to keep Cybil and Harry off the same page) who is a fifty-something year old man she is the clear leader, and she never lets any of the villains get in her head. She’s goofy, she’s angry, and always ready to fuck up some asshole cultists who don’t understand who they’re dealing with. A Queen.

And fitting this protagonist who is much more self-assured and much less susceptible to bullshit than the ones we’ve previously seen in the series, the game’s atmospheric dials have been adjusted accordingly. Of course the heavy symbolism and psychologically specific nature of the monsters and locations is still there, but it’s less intense than in either game, and it does seem to roll off Heather’s back a bit, like water off a duck’s. She’s not a scared, traumatized kid and she’s not committed any great sins; she’s not in a place where this stuff is gonna just work on her automatically. To compensate, everything else is dialed up. The fidelity offered by the PS2 is taken full advantage of in a different direction than it was in Silent Hill 2, and only two years later Team Silent is squeezing every polygon out of the machine. It’s a technical marvel, maybe the most photoreal game on the console, and every nasty, gritty detail is dialed to eleven here. Things are grimier, rustier, flakier, bloodier than they’ve ever been, a real sicko grungefest. Monsters are more varied and more aggressive, but Heather is more mobile and has better tools for dealing with them at her disposal than her forebears. The sound design is at a series high, leaning harder than ever into the industrial crunches and whines and pounding clanks. The appearance of any enemy is not just a threat to Heather’s health but now a jarring assault on the senses in a much more visceral way than ever before.

There’s also the introduction of a lot more General Horror stuff in a way that I think really works for the game. Each Silent Hill game has progressively flirted more and more with the idea that the town and the otherworld are just kind of Normal Haunted, by, like, ghosts and shit, and 3 takes this and runs with it, leaning into Haunted House Bullshit in a way that I could never get enough of. Be it a ghost pushing me onto the train tracks, getting scary messages in the hospital, or the literal haunted house sequence you run through in the amusement park late in the game, it was ALWAYS scary and ALWAYS fun. The game’s sense of humor is a lot more overtly goofy than Silent Hill 1’s but it works completely, never kills the vibe, and always contributes to a scare even as it’s making me smile. It’s a hard thing to balance but Silent Hill 3 makes it look easy.

I feel like this review has bounced around a lot, like I’m describing a lot of disparate things that maybe sound weird on paper and that’s because Silent Hill 3 feels like that, a bit. A mish mash of a lot of really different elements that I wouldn’t have expected to work as well together as they did, and in fact it did take a couple hours to start winning me over. But despite what I personally found to be a somewhat unsatisfying main plot (that is, admittedly, buoyed by its focus on a character who has quickly become one of my personal favorites in any game), everything here just kind of clicks. It’s just fun. A Silent Hill game that’s not as focused and cohesive is, it turns out, still a game made by a team of master craftsmen at the absolute top of their game, at least at this point in time. It really seems like they can’t go wrong!

Content Warning for Attempted Suicide, Terminal Illness, Death, and Chronic Illness

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It’s September 2011 and I’m seventeen years old when I try to kill myself. There are two ponds near my parent’s house. It’s like 4 AM. I like to be out this early. Nobody else is awake, and they won’t be for a while. It’s like the whole world belongs to me. I wander around between the neighborhoods, along the roads, and in the fields. In ten years these will be fresh real estate properties but today they’re still farmland. This hour and a half is the only time the anxiety quells. The real world never knows peace. There’s a dread that accompanies every action and every moment; living in that house, going to school, hanging out with my friends (are they my friends? They are but I won’t be able to understand that until I’m healthier). I’ll always have to go back home. I’ll never be able to articulate what’s happening to me. The pressure is too intense. I don’t plan it, but, the pond is right there, and it’s deep enough, and early enough that no one will hear me. Not having a plan is what saves my life. Turns out impromptu self-drownings are difficult to pull off when the water is still and not THAT deep. So, it doesn’t work, and I’m soaked, and grateful to get home and hide the evidence before my parents wake up, but I don’t feel BETTER. I feel despair, still. There’s no way out. I wish I could just climb up the stairwell, out of this. I wish I had the clarity to understand what was wrong with me.

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What do you even say about Silent Hill 2? To say that it’s one of the best video games ever made feels simultaneously obvious and like I’m underselling it, right? Fuckin, uhhhh, Resident Evil 2 is one of the best video games ever made. Ace Attorney 3 is one of the best games ever made. Come on! When we see people talk about old games that they like they’ll so often say stuff like “it holds up really well for its age” or some similar comment that implies that progress is the same as quality. This is, of course, nonsense. I wouldn’t say video games are better as a medium in 2021 than they were in 2001; on the whole and in the mainstream I would say they’re demonstrably worse in almost every way – how they look, how they sound, how they feel. Silent Hill 2 was a AAA game. What do we get now instead? Far Cry 6? The fuckin, THE MEDIUM? We’ve lost everything in pursuit of bad lighting and looking like a mediocre episode of whatever was popular on HBO three years ago. Silent Hill 2 looks great and sounds great and fuck you it plays great too it feels good and even the puzzles are MOSTLY FINE. MOSTLY. Listen I’m saying this is the all time best video game I’m not saying it fuckin ended world hunger.

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It’s October 2012, I’m nineteen and I’m sitting in a business communications class when I get the text confirmation that Sam’s brain tumor is back, again. It’s not the first time, and I know that there’s nothing left to do, he’s going to die. It’s fast, untreated. He’s one of my best friends, and the only person I know from home who went to the same college as me, but we live really far apart on a big urban campus and I haven’t seen him as much as I’d have liked to. Now he’s gonna spend the rest of his time with his family back home. When I see him next it’s at a hometown charity event for his family in December. He’s unrecognizable physically, and he can’t speak. The event is at our old catholic elementary school, in the gym, where in the years since we graduated they’ve painted a giant tiger on the wall. It’s the school mascot. I feel incredibly awkward around him and spend most of the time away with our other friends. I only speak to him briefly, and when I do it’s a stupid joke about the tiger mural. These will be my last words to him. I do know this will be the case, I think. Later that month I’ll be one of his pallbearers. I spend a lot of time angry and ashamed of myself for not being better to him, not knowing how to act or what to say. I’m about to drop out of school for reasons financial and related to my mental health.

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So what DO you say about Silent Hill 2? That it’s a masterpiece? That it’s the most well-conceived and executed video game ever made? That every detail of it dovetails into every other in a legitimately perfect cocktail story, presentation, and play? That the performances, cinematography, soundscape, all of it are untouchably top of their class? That when Mary reads the letter at the end I WEEP because it’s one of the best pieces of acting I’ve ever heard? That if I ever meet Troy Baker it’s ON SIGHT? These things are all true. We all know it. Everybody knows this. It’s Silent Hill 2.

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It’s August 2019, I’m twenty-five and I’ve just managed to graduate college in time to move to a new city with my partner as she enters her third year of medical school. That’s the year they kick you out of the classroom and you start going to the hospitals to do your real hands-on training month to month. I’m job hunting unsuccessfully and we’re living exclusively off her loans, when what seems at first like a pulled lower back muscle becomes a fruitless early morning ER trip (five hours, no results, not seen by a doctor) becomes an inability to get out of bed becomes a forced leave of absence. Without a diagnosis she can’t get disability accommodations. While on a leave of absence we can’t have her loans, and in fact we have to pay them back. We’re getting desperate, thousands of dollars in debt, and I take the first soul sucking job I can find. It takes almost a full year of visits to increasingly specialized physicians but eventually my partner is diagnosed with non radiographic axial spondyloarthritis, an extremely rare condition that culminates in the fusion of the spinal column. We can treat the pain, sort of, but it’s only a matter of time until it’s likely to evolve into a more serious condition, she’ll never have the strength or stamina she had before, and the treatment options are expensive and difficult. Her diagnosis doesn’t even officially exist as a recognized condition that people can have until September 2020.

Suddenly I am a caretaker and everything is different now. Obviously our mood is stressed from the financial dangers, but she’s in pain, terrible pain, constantly for months. She can’t sleep, she can’t eat. There’s nothing I can do. It’s exhausting to live like that. She’s depressed. On good days we try to walk outside but good days are few and far between, and grow fewer over time, and her body makes her pay for the walks. She’s on drugs, a lot of them. Do they help? It’s unclear. They don’t make her feel BETTER. Nobody knows what’s wrong with her. Her school thinks she’s faking, they’re trying to concoct ways to get her kicked out. She wants to die. It breaks my heart. She’s everything to me, all that there is. She has literally saved my life. And I can’t help her. But it’s exhausting for me too. I don’t want to admit this, not even privately, to myself. It is hard to be the person who is leaned on, especially when the person you love can’t give anything back. I’m tired. I’m not angry, and I don’t think I’m resentful. But I’m tired. I feel shame for thinking about it, for acknowledging it. I know it’s silly to feel the shame but it’s there. I do find a job eventually, thankfully, but it’s still a long time before we get a diagnosis, much less an effective treatment. Even after things settle somewhat, it’s a hard year. And there are hard times to come.

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Ever since I first played it as a teen, Silent Hill 2 is a game that has haunted me through life, like a memory. It struck a deep chord with me when I was too young for that to be fair, too young to identify why I could relate to these people and their ghosts. I used to think this was a special relationship that I had with the game, the way you kind of want to think you have these when you’re younger, but the older I get the more I recognize this as part of growing up. Silent Hill 2 doesn’t resonate with me because I’ve encountered situations in life that closely mirror that of the protagonist. I mean, Angela’s story resonates deeply with me despite little overlap in the specifics of our family traumas. Silent Hill 2 touches me – and most of us – so deeply, because it has such a keen understanding of what it feels like to be Going Through It. It is a game that knows what it is to grieve, to despair, to soak in the fog, and also, maybe, to feel a catharsis, if you’re lucky, and you do the work.

I’ve been Angela, parts of her. I’ve been Laura too. I’ve had more James in me than I would prefer. I suspect all of us have these people, these feelings in us, to some degree or another. We collect them as we get older. That’s just part of it. Silent Hill 2 isn’t a happy game, but it’s one that Gets It, and lets us explore those spaces in a safe and cathartic way. It does this about as well as any piece of media I’ve encountered, on top of being so excellent at all the cinematic and video game stuff. But that’s really what makes it what it is. The empathy, and the honesty. I think it’s beautiful.

There’s nothing new to say about the story of these games except that x and zero are absolutely the flavor of cis gay white dudes that wanna be accepted by the mainstream so badly that they’ll slip a knife between the ribs of any and every other marginalized group at any moment to get even the obviously false façade of that.

Anyway Mega Man X2 rules. If X1 is an immediate, obvious, stone cold classic, where every level and character design and upgrade and hidden collectible placement is tightly designed and meticulously placed for maximum effectiveness, X2 is simultaneously scrappier and more ambitious, leaning harder on spectacle and gimmicks to decidedly more mixed success, and it’s a better game in my eyes for it.

Where X1 has a tutorial level so famous even I, a girl who thought until like a month ago that Mega Man and Mega Man X were the same guy, knew about it, X2 eschews the elegant intro for something that feels a lot more at home in the 90s – gritty and cool, our war hardened hero making a bombing run on a giant warbot factory, his adorable partner getting sniped off of his sick hover-motorcycle in an unintentionally hilarious opening cutscene. The difficulty is amped up here compared to the opening of the first game, the graphics noticeably more complex, with lots of background layers and big, fluidly animated sprites, and everything caps off with a boss that isn’t a test of skill so much as the kind of wowza look what we can do that is less about showing off what kind of GAMEPLAY is possible now and more about showing off what kind of COOL LOOKING SHIT is possible now. And it worked on me its rad.

This is an ethos that permeates the entire game. Levels aren’t as consistently fun and they’re certainly not as tight as X1 but they ARE consistently beautiful and I think the score is better to. It’s still goofy, fuzzy SNES soundchip buttrock but it’s more sonically varied, more likely to switch up the sound even outside of obvious level-theme-dependent musical cues.

The bosses here, too, are just a straight upgrade to X1. I appreciate that we’re taking advantage the SNES’ power to vary what the bosses are able to do, something that this team dabbled in a little bit last time with the likes of Storm Eagle’s open arena but you see a LOT more of here. You get arenas with unlimited vertical space, bosses who don’t populate the arena at all, bosses that don’t HAVE arenas. Overdrive Ostrich is a king and I will not hear otherwise. The endgame, too is a flat upgrade over the first game. Better levels and better bosses. I saw that final form of the final guy and my jaw hit the floor, utterly joyful.

Mega Man X is a series in an interesting place, at this point in its life. It doesn’t feel like it quite has its own identity. It seems like it wants to be distinct from Mega Man proper, what with the emphasis on movement tech and secret upgrades hidden in all the levels, expanded here with the addition of hidden boss fights to unlock an alternate ending. At the same time though, it’s clinging to convention in a way that I don’t think is helpful. Like, the X games have enough going on in them, with much more incentive to revisit levels and thoroughly explore levels, to lengthen the games enough that having me refight the first eight bosses at the end of the game feel like an exhaustive exercise in padding rather than an exciting road to the endgame. Even though I don’t think this game is as consistently excellent as X1, I appreciate the intensity of its ambition, and I think it hits higher highs, especially when it pushes against the boundaries of what Mega Man is allowed to look like. I hope the X series finds it in itself to keep exploring that space, and find a more unique identity in Mega Man’s legacy.

I spent a lot of my life overlooking Silent Hill 1, and I don’t think I’m alone in that as a Silent Hill fan, as a general Gamer, and having played a few of the later ones of these I KNOW that’s true of later Silent Hill developers lol.

The second game in the series is well known for being in the weird position of being the odd duck that diverges the most from what would become the norms of the original set of Silent Hillses and also the one that most pierced public consciousness, but I think a lot of what’s here to ground the first game really strengthens it as an actual video game that you play? I promise this is a segue I’m gonna stop comparing this game to 2 now.

The town of Silent Hill as presented in the game Silent Hill feels the most like a real place that it ever will in this entire series, even as it retains the bizarre qualities that instantly mark it as something suspicious and hostile. Yes, the streets are too wide and in a weird twist on normal video game logic a lot of the buildings you enter feel too big on the outside compared to the inside, and these inconsistencies lend themselves to the persistent feeling of offness that is aided by, y’know, the monsters and the fog and the static hiss from your radio. But these weird inconsistencies of the town’s anatomy WOULD just feel like normal quirks of video game geography if such close attentiveness wasn’t paid to the mundane details of normal townie life that so many modern games can’t find in themselves. The signage in this game is out of this world good. Silent Hill is a sleepy beach town in Michigan or Pennsylvania with a population of like 800 and one school and I know this because I’ve been there, I’ve been to this bar, I’ve been to this pier, I’ve seen that chainsaw in that window, I’ve seen that bowling alley named after that lady whose name is not super well-suited to naming stuff after. And having such a tangible reality to the locations you visit grounds everything; this game predates the conception of Silent Hill as a purgatorial space for people to work out there own demons, and instead is – and feels – like a real place that something awful has happened to.

This is reflected everywhere: in the state of the world, in the way characters respond to each other and to the events they’re perceiving, in the actors’ performances, even in the flow of the story. There is the expected dreaminess to the plotting and mechanics of getting from place to place. Occasionally Harry will black out and wake up across town or with people mysteriously flitting in and out of his presence. But the sequence of events, the actual A to B to C of the story being told here is extremely straightforward. The game goes pretty far out of its way to make sure you know exactly what’s going on and when and why and how, and I think that’s to its benefit. A very wise friend of mine once said that a lot of horror just boils down to what if a fucked up guy looked at you and Silent Hill 1 might have the least amount of fucked up guy looks at you in the entire series but it has the ETHOS of it down pat. The scares are straightforward too: a kid crying in a bathroom but no one is in there; a corpse nailed to a wall; a scary little kid with a knife and oh no there’s a fence where there wasn’t one! These things are immediate and in your face and rarely subtextual but that doesn’t make them not scary.

And that’s also not to say that Silent Hill 1 isn’t rife with psychological horror and subtext, it’s just, like, actual subtext. People say Silent Hill 2 has psychological subtext and symbolism but those are very loose uses of those words; that’s just, like, regular text! It’s a great game, not a subtle one lmao. Silent Hill 1 has a lot to say about the anxiety of parenthood, our responsibilities to our children, the violence of isolation. It just ALSO says AHH AHH WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT A GIANT MOTH AHHH, which is also good.

Aesthetically, I don’t think Silent Hill has ever looked better and possibly never could have looked better than on the PS1. The grit and the grunge is perfectly at home in the jaggy polys and muddy texture work, even as you can see the console pushing to its limits to render some of the most gorgeous environments and interiors it will ever produce. Set pieces are visual feasts, with the two onscreen nightmare world transitions being actual marvels, particularly the one at the beginning of the game that happens during live gameplay. There are standout visual moments littered throughout this game from start to finish, despite a relatively small suite of areas and a really limited color pallet. Its short length surely helps.

One other thing that CANNOT be understated about this game is that it is highkey hilarious, one of the funniest games of all time. Horror and Comedy trade on the exact same impulses of tension and release, and while bad horror often veers into comedy, a good horror game is just as capable of having fun as it is at scaring you and Silent Hill is truly masterful at both. There are some goofs that clearly aren’t intentional, like characteristic bad PS1 line reads. BUT there’s also stuff that feels winking, and scares so fun that I refuse to believe they’re anything but intentional gotchas. Take the infamous cat scare. Pretty funny. They got you. Then later it happens again, but there’s no cat, then you get control again, and like two seconds after you’re relaxed a corpse falls out of a locker. ICONIC, incredible scare. ALSO very funny, they fuckin got me dude, good one. Or the late game moment where a random refrigerator has a random tentacle monster that randomly eats you out of nowhere if you don’t solve an extremely simple puzzle out of the blue with a bespoke cutscene and everything in a moment unlike any other in the game. Fuck you, absolutely owned, hope you saved recently asshole! OR or or, what about the game’s one (1) sidequest, which has you running all over town for like an HOUR AND A HALF, finding keys and opening safes and constantly making you think you’re gonna find useful items and stuff and you never do never do never do until at the very end you find what seems to be a very important item and then a character you met one time at the very beginning of the game comes in threatens to kill you takes the item and leaves, and Harry literally just shrugs and goes “well THAT was a waste of time.” OWNED. OWNED. LMAO. Funniest game ever made.

And that’s not even talking about the big man Harry Mason himself, a truly wonderful video game himbo, the ur video game dad and the greatest of them, one of the stupidest guys ever to do it but we love him! He has committed no great sins, he has no deep guilt, he is simply a guy who wants to find his daughter, even as things spin more and more wildly out of his control. Always three steps behind everyone else, never able to articulate himself properly when it counts, but nevertheless an extremely good dude who is just trying his best, I sincerely love this guy.

I didn’t really talk about the part where you play this game but it’s really good! It’s short, the puzzles are all actually good unlike in its sequel, and you can mostly just like run past the enemies which is nice. I had a good time running around but I wasn’t so empowered as to just like, feel cool and invincible the whole time.

Great game!

If you were to look at it through a 2004 Gamespot Reviewer lens where you evaluated it based on a range of Objective Qualities like Graphics and Gameplay or whatever, White Wolf of Icicle Creek would appear on paper to be a pretty average Nancy Drew Cyber Mystery. In terms of the core elements we’ve come to expect from this series, we’re going through the motions a little bit with this one. But as we’ve seen with past entries like Shadow Ranch or Last Train, just being a Normal Nancy Drew Game isn’t a bad thing – done well, they’re just satisfying little mystery adventures and I’m happy to have those. No, it’s when you start to dig into the moment-to-moment act of playing Icicle Creek that the game truly reveals itself to you, and you can truly start to weigh it against itself, to reveal another game that seems to want to push the series forward while also indulging in some welcome nostalgia for this particular sub-franchise’s goofy roots.

In this game Nancy has been asked by the owner of the Icicle Creek Lodge in Alberta Canada to come investigate a series of mysterious accidents that have led to a loss of business and staff and now potential lawsuits. Nancy is, I guess, taking her second gap year (seeing as this is her second consecutive winter adventure) and agrees to go undercover as a maid/chef at the lodge in order to be able to easily enter guest spaces and go through their shit without suspicion which is very cool of course you go girl. That’s not the only weird thing going on, though – at the scene of every accident is a white wolf, which ominously appears before or during every incident, only to vanish before authorities can arrive. And this is where things take a turn for the hilarious in this game.

So the cast of this game aside from Nancy is Ollie, the owner’s handy man who is actually physically present and running the lodge while she’s away dealing with their legal troubles, his kid daughter, Olympic cross-country skier from a fake Eastern European country Yanni, college metal working student Lou, stereotypical Canadian guy Bill, and snooty birdwatching enthusiast Lupe. EVERYBODY is losing their minds over this wolf and it is AMAZING. Crediting not just physical acts to the wolf but actual literal crimes to her with complete seriousness. “The wolf made me slip down the stairs even though they were cleared of ice earlier that day!” “The wolf blew up the bunkhouse!” “The wolf slashed my tires!” What the FUCK are you people TALKING about. Then there’s fucking Lou who is sitting in the corner like “hey you guys know that wolves don’t like…wield knives or dynamite or hunt humans right maybe we should just leave it alone” and everyone else is like “FUCK OFF LOU WE HAVE TO HUNT DOWN THE BEAST” it’s WILD. The best part is that Nancy discovers almost immediately that the wolf is completely tame and chill, her name is Isis, she’s my best friend, and she helps you solve puzzles, and yet she does not tell anyone. Just allows this hysteria to proceed. So that’s pretty funny.

And speaking of the wolf, she’s just one of a smattering of mechanics unique to Icicle Creek that make this game stand out compared to others in the series, to what I would call mixed success this time. Many of the late game puzzles are designed around the wolf, who you cannot pet (rip nancy drew, cancelled by cloying clickbait headlines everywhere) but who you do have an elaborate menu of commands you must combine into extensive combinations for several applications across the last hour of play. This is pretty cool and a fun way to spice up the usual routine of exploring an old ruin and fucking around with old timey journals or whatever in pursuit of a nebulous goal. She’ll also use her Dog Nose to identify scents and help you figure out who’s been blowing shit up for the entire game, which leads to our next point.

The other Big Addition to the gameplay, if you want to call it that, is the part of this plot where Nancy is Undercover as a maid and chef, and so you do have to keep to a schedule of doing maid and chef duties. Every day you have to grab your laundry basket, go to every guest’s room, make their beds and gather their dirty clothes and towels. At noon and 6 every day you must go to the kitchen and do a Burger Time-esque food prep minigame until everyone has been fed to their satisfaction. I’ve got mixed feelings about this. On one hand, it IS tedious busywork, particularly the cooking minigame. On the OTHER, I’ve always been a fan of diagetic busywork. Personal gripes with swery aside (sincerely fuck that guy tho), pulling out my manual map in deadly premonition as I drove my stupid shit car that I had to constantly gas up with my limited funds as I drove to hit very strict scheduling deadlines unlocked something in my brain that I’ve never been able to put back in the box and a lot of that applies just as well to this game.

Plus, it works well with the way the mystery unfolds. Nancy’s cover DOES give her access to everyone’s rooms, and you DO make multiple revelations about the guests’ motivations by snooping around in them. They even managed to subvert my expectations at one point, where I tried to steal an essential item from a guest and was caught on my way out, a moment of fear and a hubris-check where the game reminded me I wasn’t smarter than it was, and while this wasn’t a game-over, I did have to figure out a different way to solve the puzzle I was hoping to use that item for, which led to a completely different set of interactions. This factors into the Wolf mechanics too, as stealing innocuous items from the guests and having Isis match their scents to the culprit’s belongings is a key part of the endgame.

Finally I want to mention the fact that the snooping becoming a formalized part of your daily routine by the enhanced commitment to the ever-present clock-based mechanics in this series is a perfect fit for this game because this is I think the first cast where every single character has something to hide, and all of those things are both interesting and effective. Lupe isn’t a snooty bird watcher, she’s actually an eco-terrorist who’s trying to save the wolf (I don’t know how she heard about it lol it’s fine). Lou isn’t just a funny college bro with a good head on his shoulders, he’s also an amateur paleontologist who sells dinosaur bones on the black market (??????????) and came to the lodge because he found out that it was a hotbed of fossil findings. Bill isn’t some random Canadian guy, he’s some random Canadian guy whose grandmother was swindled out of ownership of the lodge, and who is bitterly angry about losing his family’s legacy. Yanni isn’t just a cross country Olympic skier training for a forthcoming event in the Albertan wilderness, he’s a cross country Olympic skier training for a forthcoming event in the Albertan wilderness and ALSO spying for his fake Russian government to search out the uranium deposits that they believe are located near the lodge for unknown shady government purposes! I FUCKING LOVE when these games do last second international espionage twists with no warning it is funny every time. And while Yanni of course ends up being the guy blowing shit up and trying to scare people away, everybody here has dirt and it really does feel like things are closing in and there’s a strong element of uncertainty as you make the final reveals and realize there are still three possible suspects for who could be doing this stuff, even until about five second before you realize one of them just set a bomb to kill you in five seconds. It’s the first and only time one of these games has really kept me guessing about the identity of the villain and that was honestly a pleasant surprise!

White Wolf of Icicle Creek feels like a turning point in some ways. There’s a huge graphical overhaul here, for one. Character models are more expressive and articulate than they’ve ever been, the resolution has been bumped up a few hundred pixels this time around, and the UI has been completely overhauled again to take up even less room on the now much-larger screen. It’s all very sleek and while I personally don’t like it aesthetically or functionally (small text, no personality vs what came before), it feels like a statement. There’s a very intense sense of atmosphere to the game too; screen transitions are slow and deliberate, as the camera locks Nancy’s perspective and the soundscape focuses on the crunch of the snow underfoot as she hesitantly walks into a white fadeout towards the next screen. There’s more ability to put care into these flourishes now, clearly, and I’m glad to see Her Interactive taking full advantage of them.

I hope this ambition and artfulness is carried through to future games as well!

PREVIOUSLY: THE CREATURE OF KAPU CAVE
NEXT TIME: LEGEND OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL

ALL NANCY DREW PIECES

When I’m writing about a game I try not to say something is just “bad” because bad is one of those words that doesn’t really mean anything. Nobody ever just doesn’t like something for no reason, and part of the reason I even made a backloggd account was because I wanted to challenge myself to write about every single game I play in an effort to become more articulate about how I think about the media I consume. Practice is the best way to get better at anything, after all, and that applies to criticism as much as anything else. So I try not to say something is bad, or at least not let that be the end of the thought, because there’s always gotta be a reason why, right?

Okay so you see a half-star rating at the top of this and I open with the most Film Studies 301-ass explanation of how to conceptualize criticism and this is a very ominous way to start and I really just need you to understand where I’m coming from when I say that The Creature of Kapu Cave is simply a bad game, from top to bottom, in the most mundane and unremarkable ways imaginable.

Typically when I find these games frustrating it’s because they have swung big (either narratively or in some kind of gameplay ambition) and missed hard at whatever lofty ambition or innovation they were reaching for. Not so in Kapu Cave, which has not only the worst qualities of the dregs of Nancy Drews past (tedious puzzles, paper thin narrative threads, characters who are at best uninteresting and at worst annoying to spend time with, bland setting, nonsensical resolutions) but also myriad new features that add to the sense of languid time-wasting that dominates the proceedings.

The plot of this game is so scattershot as to not be worth recapping but I will give the barest hint of a premise because this IS my favorite of the Stock Nancy Drew Setups: Nancy Steals A Presumably Valuable Internship From Someone Who Could Presumably Actually Use It For Their Career. This time it’s to help an entomologist with her research in Hawaii for a month and we’re gonna pause right here for my new favorite recurring segment NANCY DREW CUCK WATCH because literally moments after Nancy’s boyfriend Ned, whom I’ve been joking is a spurned partner who never comes on her adventures and two games ago was looked over for the Hardy Boys, calls Nancy on the phone to see if she arrived safely, Nancy spots the Hardy Boys on the beach and says okay bro I’ll call you later bye and hangs up on him it’s INCREDIBLE.

Yeah, the Hardy Boys are here, they’re fucking annoying, and they’re huge cops, working undercover as tourists for a super rich dude to spy on local a Hawaiian business owner to see if he’s got any skeletons in his closet before the rich white guy invests with him or some bullshit it’s fucking uncomfortable. So Nancy treks into the forest to find her Doctor who is missing, the bridge goes out, and now you switch perspectives between Nancy and the Hardy boys and spend almost the entire game doing literally nothing as either of them, just kind of wandering around doing plant research (the doctor isn’t missing at all, actually, and it’s fine that her camp has been vandalized – she’ll just make Nancy go replicate all of the lost research!), fishing, talking to assholes (but not the fun kind of assholes in these games, just normal ones), and engaging in lighthearted banter as you very slowly uncover an extremely mild and generally harmless Scooby Doo Real Estate Scam so innocuous that even the game says the cops don’t know what to charge the criminals with at the end of the game (you do still make them turn themselves in however! And yes, it IS the indebted Hawaiian business owner and you ARE protecting the white businessman and big pharma science lab! WHAT THE FUCK ELSE WOULD YOU BE DOING IN THIS SERIES LMAO). The game is like four hours long and I honestly couldn’t tell you what happened really besides the fact that you could easily shave off at least an hour of that play time if you removed the first person stealth maze in this point and click adventure game or the fishing “minigame” that involves clicking on the screen and then waiting for a random fish to be caught ten seconds later, which you have to do literally dozens of times. None of the game overs are even super funny in this one.

The whole thing is just a mess, but worse than that it’s a BORING mess, and a RACIST one to boot. This is it, this is the monkey’s paw curling on my wish for one of these games to imply that there are actual genuine supernatural forces at work in the series, which is probably the most noteworthy thing here, and even that is drowned out by being a note of subtle ambiguity in the sea of absurd goofy nonsense that is this game’s climax. It’s really not even enough to get worked up about. It’s just nothing at all.

PREVIOUSLY: DANGER BY DESIGN
NEXT TIME: THE WHITE WOLF OF ICICLE CREEK

ALL NANCY DREW PIECES

This kind of feels like you’re playing a secret unlicensed knockoff Mario game by a really talented third party developer. Everything is technically here but it just doesn’t have quite the right vibes? The jump feels good but it’s not a MARIO jump. The music is top of the pop but it’s not MARIO music. The enemy designs are sick but they’re not MARIO enemies, or when they are they’re like fucked up weirdo Mario enemies, like turtle shells turning into timed explosives instead of projectiles. There’s a distinct sense of actual geography to the level progression in this game as you track through obvious recreations of real life Africa and Asia. Worlds end in rail shooter levels, and this is the final boss as well?

And all of this stuff fucking slaps this game was made by some of the all time great Nintendo legends and it shows but it’s interesting to compare its unique vibe to that of its sequel, which is a slavish recreation of the look and feel of Super Mario World, or as close as you could match that on a Gameboy.

My dad’s side of the family has an annual reunion on Christmas Eve and I occupy a weird position in the family timeline as the youngest son of the youngest son where I’m a generation younger than my next-oldest brother and cousins but a generation older than my next-youngest, so as a kid I often spent these parties in a corner somewhere on a Gameboy, and I very distinctly remember the year that I finally beat this game for the first time, and upon realizing that the game was extremely short and the only one I had brought that evening, just played it over and over and over (we would be at my aunt’s house from like 5 to 11 PM) until I was beating it in what I have today realized was times rivalling modern world record speedruns. I did not do that today but I did have a blast running through it. My fingers remembered exactly what to do, all the little nooks and crannies you can force Mario into, the secret blocks.

Feels good to revisit, but even if it was my first time I’m pretty sure I would still think this game was sick.

I’m sure this isn’t anything remotely approaching an original thought but I’ve never played Mega Man before or been exposed to it really through cultural osmosis so please forgive my rote observations when I say that Mega Man’s backstory was already weird but I truly did not expect it to become just like, exactly Blade Runner, but with “deckard’s a replicant” just being overtly canon instead of an asinine nerd theory.

X1 gives you very little to work with narratively but the aesthetic upgrade doesn’t do anybody any favors here. Going from charming Tezuka-inspired Saturday Morning superhero vibes to something closer to genuinely cool looking action just makes it all the clearer that X is a cop who is hunting down his fellows for, what, wanting to live free? Sure, Sigma and Vile are cardboard cutout evil cartoon villains, but the limitations of the early SNES mean there’s precious little actual dialogue to go around here, so the motivations of the rest of the cast remain a mystery. How were they convinced to turn, ALL of them? They were the cops who killed off robots who elected to use their free will, and suddenly all of them see the light at once? There aren’t a lot of reads I can think of that are generous towards the humans who own them. There aren’t a lot of versions of this world I can imagine based on what little we’re given that suggest this society is worth protecting. Gotta wonder what X sees in it, whether he’s thought about this stuff. Doesn’t seem like he has.

The portrayal of these robots is fucked, dude. It’s colder than Blade Runner even. There, at least Deckard has enough empathy to hesitate. At least he’s punished for what he does, for his participation. At least when he kills that woman in the middle of the film and the crowd moves on and he shakes it off and goes off to kill the rest of her friends it can be read as something of an indictment.

X is, ironically, a killing machine. The first robot capable of choice, the first one truly able to say no, said to be the progenitor of all these others, and he never once considers any other course of action but murder. He doesn’t talk to any of them. He doesn’t even try. He’s a gun. What a waste.

In 2006 Her Interactive finally caved to the ravenous and unquenchable bloodthirst of gamers everywhere and added combat to Nancy Drew. The context of this is a joke but the fact that this game has a final boss fight is not, it is one its few redeeming qualities.

In Danger By Design Nancy finds herself in Paris working undercover as an assistant to an up-and-coming haute couture designer who has a reputation for being difficult to work with and has been acting particularly unstable lately, flying into terrible moods at the drop of a hat, making extremely unreasonable demands like to only work out of an antique windmill and refusing to remove a porcelain mask that she recently took to wearing at all times. Her investor, a friend of Nancy’s RICH DAD OBVIOUSLY, is worried that she won’t get a return on her investment and is considering pulling her funding and has asked Nancy to check in and see if the designer (whose name is Minette) can be trusted to finish her work at all, much less deliver a product that will sell. Nancy is absolutely down to clown because she loves narcing on people and taking unpaid vacations, so this shit is right up her alley.

This is easily one of the worst games in the series so far, a nonsensical mish mash of garbage elements, nothing characters, puzzles that are JUST okay, a truly baffling aversion to the use of the word nazi, and a complete failure to stitch any of many disparate elements at play into anything remotely resembling a coherent narrative between or across either of the two main plots on a character or thematic level. TRULY weak shit all around.

I believe I’ve mentioned once or twice that Nancy Does Chores is my least favorite default mode for these games to lock into, but I’ve accepted that Chores are a core part of these games’ DNA, and I really don’t mind them under a few circumstances. When they’re brief detours, the associated minigames are fun, or they’re well-integrated into the story or vibe, it’s fine I’ll deal with it. UNLESS of course the story is flimsy shit like “you are a professional gopher” and the chores are literally the entire first half of the game in an unbroken chain before anything else happens. Typically no matter what else is going on, these sequences still find ways to weave in foreshadowing, clues, important interactions, soooomething. In the first hour and a half of Danger By Design I made tea, went shopping, baked cookies, fetched a model, went to retrieve prints and then printed them when it turned out the guy hadn't had time to do it, and gossiped with several people about the high fashion industry but at no point in any of that did anything really happen that would come up later beyond “I met some people I would have to talk to again.” It’s just so out of step with a series that, even at its worst, is usually pretty good about this.

As is the norm, the game splits time between two plots, a present day and a historical, although unusually they half basically nothing at all to do with each other except for one very small and entirely coincidental connection that, like everything else in this game, just does not matter. One guy in the modern day storyline is the great nephew of the Sympathetic Nazi from the historical story (lmao yeah dude I know) and he has a clue you need to uncovering the obligatory treasure but he’s so far removed from the actual action of that plot that even when you discover a literal secret passageway in his personal office leading to further clues only minutes after he gifts you the puzzle necessary to uncover it, he’s so disinterested that he doesn’t even come out of his dark room to check it out. He just keep developing his photos and says “yeah man poke around all you want I literally do not care.”

So literally all of the actual puzzle solving and adventuring and stuff is siloed off into that story chunk, while over in Nancy Drew Is An Unpaid Intern Town nothing after nothing continues to happen. Every once in a while someone will leave a bomb at the door of the windmill workshop or you’ll get a threatening phone call but it doesn’t amount to anything, and Nancy herself doesn’t even seem to care! She doesn’t tell Minette, she doesn’t call the police, she doesn’t even investigate things herself, she literally defuses a bomb and then just continues to go about her day until she gets a free enough moment to fuck around in the catacombs in pursuit of her own personal quest for historical loot.

When things finally DO “come together,” as generously as you could describe that to be what happens at the end of this game, it’s literally only because the treasure is located in a secret basement of the Windmill where Minette works, and Nancy happens to be in there when two German spies come in to loudly reveal that they’ve both paid Minette to put surveillance technology in the dress she’s making for the German First Lady AND that they’re the people who have been threatening her as “incentive” for her to finish her work on time. When Nancy exits the basement the men have gone, but Minette is still there, and she attacks Nancy in an indescribably baffling action sequence where you…guess where she’s going to hit you and click on one of the nine squares the screen has been divided into with the correct timing, until she gets too tired to keep wailing on you and gives up? I think that’s the best way to describe it but you should look it up, people have played through this game on youtube it’s fucking wild man. And that’s it the game’s over Nancy thwarted perhaps the most high profile crime she ever will in this series and she did it completely by accident, it’s very funny.

Also we need to finally have the return of my least favorite feature for these reviews, the NANCY DREW COP WATCH:

1. Nancy agrees to spy on Minette, who she doesn’t know and who hasn’t done anything actually wrong besides be kind of a weirdo, for FREE, because a rich person asked her to

2. At one point in the game you find out that one of the threatening letters Minette receives was fake and came from Heather, her actual non-spy assistant, who is sick of working for this asshole and is venting frustration. Nancy can RAT HER OUT and I don’t know what happens if you do because I’m NOT A FUCKING COP but in my heart of hearts I know it’s Nancy’s true character to do it.

So that’s it this game is a mess. I actually had a good time with a lot of the puzzles here and I like that they brought back the free exploration and money management from Secret of the Old Clock, but the actual spaces you have to navigate kind of suck shit and despite some fun characters at play they’re just not here in service of anything. I like talking to a lot of these guys but at the end of it all there’s not a story here to support them and it blows. Bad game!

PREVIOUSLY: LAST TRAIN TO BLUE MOON CANYON
NEXT TIME: CREATURE OF KAPU CAVE

ALL NANCY DREW PIECES

I am beginning to think that Nancy Drew hates her boyfriend. Not only is she always actively jet setting around the world having adventures and vacations, sometimes with her friends but rather conspicuously never with him, but the first time she gets invited on a remote trip with the Hunky Hardy Boys, she doesn’t even tell him! Now I’m not one of those people who thinks couples need to keep tabs on each other or nothin’ like that BUT it’s unusual for the precedent set by this series and here’s why: these games all have a framing device where they begin and end with Nancy writing a letter that will set up the premise of the story and then at the end of the game she’ll write another one that kind of wraps things up and tells you what happened to all the characters (which is weird because she’s almost never in a place where she could mail something and she’ll almost certainly always just see the person she’s writing to again before either letter could be delivered but it’s fine don’t worry about it they’re cute). ALMOST ALWAYS these are addressed to Ned. Once or twice her dad or other relative, 90% of the time Ned. TODAY THO it’s HANNAH, her HOUSEKEEPER, seemingly specifically so Nancy can enclose a pic of Da Boys with a comment about how HOT they are like I s2g if this game had let me make her cheat on Ned I would do it. He’s always too tired from taking exams and shit to help me with mysteries I’m convinced he and Nancy are actually in a passive aggressive loveless thing and this is why she never goes home. Idk which Hardy Boy is Frank and which is Joe but the older one can get it, this is simply the way I feel.

Anyway this is a good game I had a lot of fun with it. Nancy has been invited – well okay that isn’t right, let me start over. There’s a Fake Paris Hilton is in this game, and her dad recently bought a company that owns a mysterious train. One day in 1903, the train was found in Blue Moon Canyon with no one on board but the now-dead engineer, and the actual owner, Jake Hurley, mysteriously disappeared and was never seen or heard from ever again. Now that she semi-owns the train, Fake Paris Hilton (Lori) has recruited people she considers the country’s foremost mystery-solvers to figure out what the fuuuuuuck happened because she thinks it would be cool, mostly, I guess.

You know this game came out in Two Thousand Five because in addition to Lori Being a fake Paris Hilton you also have Famous Airport Novelist Charleena, Famous Hero Cop Tino, and Famous Ghost Hunter TV Show Host John as Lori’s selections for her rag tag team of mystery solvers, along with Famous Teen Detectives The Hardy Boys, who somewhat rudely also invited apparently significantly less famous Teen Detective Nancy Drew, who showed up and comically gets no respect from anybody. Unfortunately things immediately go awry when literally seconds after Lori lays out the plan, the lights go out and she disappears! Wowza! A mystery! A kidnapping! Probably another secret treasure! That’s fuckin crazy bro!

I feel like, with the set up they’ve given themselves here, it would have been really difficult for Her to fuck this up too badly. The flavor of mystery story that these Nancy Drew games most often conform to couldn’t be better suited to the train mystery mold, and this is a completely stacked cast as far as this series goes. Each of them an idiosyncratic weirdo in their own way, be it Charleena’s complete contempt for anyone and anything but her work, Tino’s obvious bluster and desperation to cling to the fame that came along with a blockbuster criminal enterprise he solved completely by accident, or John just like, being a regular ghost hunter guy and seeming to actually believe in the façade of tv ghost hunter bullshit. Even the people in Blue Moon Canyon, once you arrive there around the midpoint of the game, are marked by extreme quirks, like Fatima the Taffy Shop employee with a vaguely threatening aura who never removes her cartoon miner costume, or the elderly descendent of Jake Hurley who is pavlov conditioned to recite his family history in response to the order-up bell at the local diner? The thing that unites all of the supporting characters with the exception of John (more on this in a second) is that they are all humungous jerks, and I DO love when a Nancy Drew game pits her against a menagerie of assholes.

The game is pretty, fun, well-paced, well-written, the characters are undeniably good to chat with across the board, the minigames are solid and there aren’t too many of them, the puzzles are pretty good, the edutainment aspect (late 19th century mining) is inoffensive. Looking at these elements individually it seems like this game is doing everything right, but when they come together into a cohesive whole it starts to feel to me like things get a little bit thematically stinky.

So Lori fakes her own disappearance. This is a cute first act twist, as you find her about thirty minutes into the game, hiding out in the caboose of the train, where she reveals this was a skill check, essentially, and rewards you with the actual mission to solve the real train mystery and find a treasure and all that jazz. It’s also a pretty good attempt at a misdirect, which, coupled with the fact that Tino is an actual despicable person who at least once tries to frame John (the only black person in the game in a move that surely only looks worse over time) intentionally and later maybe tries intentionally to kill him (at worst, at best he foolishly risks John’s life in an effort to look smart), makes it almost not quite completely obvious that she is actually the final villain of the game.

There’s a running theme with all of the potential suspects of a desire for respectability. John’s show has recently been cancelled and this fact is used as evidence against him when Tino tries to frame him for a dangerous act that Tino himself actually committed. However, John is actually fully confident in the truth of his work AND he’s already found another network in his show; in this confidence he absolves himself of scrutiny. Charleena is the same way; she sucks and she’s mean and she’s worried about deadlines, but she’s the least likely suspect the whole time because she doesn’t really have anything to gain – she already has what everybody else wants, and she’s just working to do what she knows will maintain it.

The two people who actually commit immoral acts in the game, Tino and Lori, both feel like they need this external validation from a society that they’re afraid will deny it from them, but the game frames them as the same in a way that I don’t really think is fair.

Tino is a police officer. He’s a big, physically powerful man, who is currently famous because he put an end to a group of serial bank robbers who had been plaguing Chicago in the middle of a heist. Tino loves the attention and prestige that his fifteen minutes have brought him but he also knows that he rear ended the robbers’ car entirely by accident and that he’s embellished his report of how dangerously armed they were. He knows he’s an inept fool, and we see him act out in an attempt to capture a new glory to maintain his gravy train, all while maintaining a condescending façade. He behaves cruelly in both petty and serious ways. He ended a prior romantic relationship with Lori out of fear that her bad reputation for stupidity and promiscuity would mar his own image, but he also openly brags about abusing his power as a police officer, threatens people, and twice tries to pin his own crimes and irresponsibilities off on the nearest black man, seemingly just because he’s there and at one point nearly at the cost of John’s life. Tino is a man who at every turn displays nastiness and inhumanity in a desperate bid to keep up the false respect he knows he doesn’t even really have – even before he start s revealing himself to be a shit heel, almost everybody is making fun of him behind his back and he knows this.

Meanwhile Lori, who I’ve mentioned is a thinly veiled analogue for Paris Hilton, already has fame. What she wants is respect. She has that scandalous mid-00s socialite reputation and hates the way it’s limited who she is, who she can be defined as. She’s made several attempts to fix her image but they’ve all been ill-advised publicity stunts and they’ve all backfired. The plot of this game actually seems like it’s going to work out for her, culminating in the discovery of a hitherto unknown piece of writing from Abraham Lincoln, perhaps the last thing he ever wrote, and largely made possible by her interest, effort, and resources. This is ruined, of course, when she figures she can get even MORE attention and respect if she murders Nancy in the mine and acts like she made the discovery herself, painting Nancy as a fool who she couldn’t save rather than the person who really did all the work. This is her final parallel to Tino, where both characters refuse to be satisfied with what they could have and instead overreach, ruining everything in the process, but it’s not that simple is it?

Lori is a rich piece of shit, absolutely, hate her fuckin guts, one of the first to the guillotine etc etc we all know where I’m at vis a vis the uber-rich and that includes children of shipping magnates. HOWEVER, I think we all know that her position in society is extremely different from Tino’s. She could do anything and it wouldn’t help; young women who don’t conform to social expectations for what a demure role model should be are torn apart by the media, and this was especially true in 2005. Tino’s a fucking hero cop, the media fall all over themselves to valorize them every day, even when they are openly evil, which they are all the time. The social circumstances that create people like Lori and people like Tino are completely different, and their motivations for behaving the way they do are completely different. I definitely think that being rich overrides being a young woman in a lot of ways and it certainly doesn’t excuse being a murderer, but to equivocate these people seems…seems weird. Seems wrong to me. Feels like we’re almost bordering on this game is doing a “nancy drew is good because she likes books, lori is bad because she likes partying” kind of thing.

And then of course neither of these people are even reported for their crimes, Lori basically just gets her allowance cut off and Tino suffers literally no consequences for any of her actions! Happy ending! What the fuck!
DESPITE THIS BAFFLING DECISION TO LET TWO ATTEMPTED MURDERERS JUST GET AWAY WITH IT and the otherwise murky politics of its villains, I do think this game is simply a boatload of fun and I would strongly recommend it as a great one of these if you were looking for one that’s just like, A Good Solid Nancy Drew Cyber Mystery. Sometimes you’re just on a train, solving a puzzle, y’know? Sometimes that’s just a good time. It’s fine!

PREVIOUSLY: SECRET OF THE OLD CLOCK
NEXT TIME: DANGER BY DESIGN

ALL NANCY DREW PIECES

If Curse of Blackmoor Manor is an example of a Nancy Drew game stabbing at unconventional, expansive new structural ideas whilst simultaneously spinning its narrative and thematic wheels and ultimately failing at amounting to anything really worthwhile, Secret of the Old Clock is its good-aligned counterpart; I could apply that same description to this game, but here it’s endlessly charming, well-paced, and plain fun in a way that is turning out to be the secret sauce for the best of these games in my estimation, if not always the most interesting of them.

First thing’s first Secret of the Old Clock is a PERIOD PIECE set in 1930 which shares a name and year with the first ever Nancy Drew story, along with some other trappings (certain antique characters take prominence over the usual supporting cast, Nancy’s not really a detective here, she’s aged sixteen rather than her usual “vaguely in college” for these games, etc.), which seems like a strange choice on the face of it? Like, you based your tenth game, Shadow Ranch, on your all-time best seller, sure. You’re gonna pop your golden goose time travel Nancy Drew Number 1 right after that on game 12? Maybe they just hadn’t thought of it before now and couldn’t resist making it once the idea was floated? I get it, this game rules.

THE YEAR is NINETEEN THIRTY. Despite the onset of the Great Depression, some things never change and you know that means Nancy’s dad is still rich as FUCK which means that she is a sixteen-year-old who OWNS A CAR which, at the opening of the game, she is using to drive to the small town of Titusville, Illinois to run an errand for her dad and visit 17-year-old Emily Crandall, the now-owner of the town’s famous Lilac Inn after her mother’s recent passing. Emily’s currently being overseen by her mom’s old pal Jane Willoughby until she comes of age, but it’s not going well because 1. Jane knows nothing about raising teens OR running inns and 2. The Crandalls were told by their eccentric old millionaire neighbor Josaih Crowley that he was gonna leave them a ton of money, but he’s ALSO recently died and seems to have left his fortune entirely to Local Asshole And ESP Teacher/Grifter Richard Topham instead, so it seems like Emily might have to sell the Inn and figure some shit out. So she’s not doing great emotionally, financially, OR, increasingly, mentally. However, NANCY DREW is here and rather than just being a sympathetic ear like most friends would probably be she smells BULLSHIT and she’s ready to POKE HER NOSE WHERE IT DOESN’T BELONG to solve an EXTREMELY OBVIOUS MYSTERY lol. There’s also the guy who executes the will and works at the bank but he’s just here to be a red herring mostly like come on we all know what’s going on here. There are stolen jewels and hidden passages and no fewer than three old clocks actually (!!!), y’know, Nancy Drew shit!

The thing that sets this one apart, more than the period setting (more on this in a minute), is that this game is honest to god as close to an open world experience as I think you could get in a low budget point n click adventure from 2005. Because Nancy is a wealthy heiress who has deigned to take pity upon these poor depression-stricken Midwesterners and help them out in her leisure time, she is equipped with a car, and it’s not just narrative set dressing. For the entire game you have free reign of the town, and you spend a lot of time driving from place to place with charmingly clunky top-down mouse-based controls. Between her typical Cyber Adventure Activities Nancy also finds the time to do odd jobs for the citizens of Titusville, deliver telegrams for modest pay, and embark on a Zelda-esque comically long chain-of-deals quest, all the while balancing a small but important economy of her relatively tight purse and her relatively small gas tank, along with a few other things you can buy throughout the experience. The game’s got driving AND a rudimentary currency system? Beat still my heart the ambition.

Part of what makes these things fun is that they never get in the way of the rest of it. Where Blackmoor Manor, which does feel like it forms something of a pair with this game, had a hard time dolling out its content in a satisfying way, Secret of the Old Clock is paced near perfectly, shuffling you from character to character, event to minigame to puzzle to driving sequence with only the barest amount of friction towards the end, where Nancy goes up to the villain and says (I’m gonna spoil the villain’s identity if you care lol) “here’s essentially undeniable proof that you are gaslighting Emily into thinking she’s crazy so you can make her sell the inn in the very short period of time you’ll still be her guardian so you can make money off of the sale what the fuck” and then Jane says “that’s stupid no I didn’t” and you have to go get more proof via the titular secret from the old clock and there’s a lot of stuff going on in that fifteen minute period that really feels like it could have propped up a perhaps in hindsight saggy middle but YOU KNOW WHAT I was having a good time throughout so MAYBE I am just looking for nits to pick? Who can say.

Another compliment I’ll give the writing is that Her manages to intertwine a lot of disparate and frankly kind of dumb characters and storylines together into something that almost seems coherent at the end if you don’t think about it for too long. I found out after I finished the game that this story is a blend of elements and characters from the first four Nancy Drew novels and knowing this really contextualizes the game’s story for me; I think the patchwork here is done well, but not well enough that it doesn’t show.

If I were to name any REAL gripe with the game it would be that I don’t feel like it takes any element quite as far as I would like. The period setting rules and they do a lot to nail the aesthetics and the dialogue without making them cartoonish, but then a lot of the larger scale puzzles and stuff are so high tech as to border on like, whatever you would call the 30s equivalent of steampunk? I wish we could have committed to the bit a little more! Similarly nobody really seems to treat Nancy like what she is: a child whose presence in a lot of these places and questions about a lot of these topics would be fuckin weird dude. I’m not saying I want like a gritty 1930s misogyny simulator or anything, but there’s even less resistance to Nancy’s sleuthing in this game than there usually is in these, and that struck me as a little weird considering this story takes place in a world where she’s younger than usual AND not yet a semi-famous detective.

Similarly, it feels like there was an opportunity here to talk about the ways young women were mistreated in American society, by systems of power, by adults who should know better, by other women who have experienced the same hardships, and that by utilizing familiar characters in this past setting we could highlight how things are not so different today for vulnerable people as we like to say they are? And there’s a little bit of that for sure. A dude who seems already pretty well off knowingly stealing from two women who actually need the money and an orphaned adult gaslighting and preying upon a recently orphaned young woman at a major turning point in America’s economic history isn’t NOTHING to work with, but it does feel more incidental to this story than Her’s most obviously passionate prior efforts. A bit of a bummer when the soil is this fertile, but like, look at the game immediately prior to this one lmao, this is Pulitzer shit by comparison.

And I really don’t want to end on a down note here. I want to be as clear as I can possibly be: this game is probably the purest straight joy I’ve had with this series so far, just three hours of good-natured fun. Any gripes I have, any minor disappointments, are effortlessly washed away by everything else going on here. They nailed it. An Absolute delight.

PREVIOUSLY: CURSE OF BLACKMOOR MANOR
NEXT TIME: LAST TRAIN TO BLUE MOON CANYON

ALL NANCY DREW PIECES

In this game I intentionally killed a parrot with poison and there’s not a jury on Earth that would convict me.

For as much as the Nancy Drew Cyber Mysteries have a reputation for being formulaic, actually playing through them in release order has so far revealed a series that is constantly pushing and pulling at the boundaries of its identity, always exploring new ideas, settings, and gimmicks. We’re deep enough in it now to have identified a comfortable stable of puzzles and premises, but I think its safe to say that Her Interactive is still interested in tugging at the thread of what these games can be, in both writing and in conventional gameplay, and more boldly in some games than in others. Curse of Blackmoor Manor falls firmly into the camp of games that are trying new things, this time an admirable attempt to expand the scope of the play style, but as with many first tries in these games I think it’s largely clumsy and comes at the expense of the other elements of the game. It’s a particular shame this time because this could easily have been a story about some interesting stuff, but in the game we got there’s just no room for any actual plot or characters.

Let’s get to that plot then because it’s possibly the flimsiest premise so far in the franchise (complimentary/derogatory). Okay hang on I gotta remember the correct sequence of words here…Nancy’s…Dad’s…Neighbor’s…Friend, Linda, has recently married a rich dude and moved in with him at his ancestral home, the titular Blackmoor Manor in England, but she has been sick for a while, and I guess this is concerning enough to the neighbor lady to for some reason ask Nancy to look into it? And the husband, who is actually away on business and never appears or is heard from throughout the game is like “oh sure this delinquent 18-year-old can come hang out at my house with my ailing second wife who I personally believe is faking her illness while I’m not there with the express purpose of investigating what’s going on why not?” It’s fucking weird, bro.

We only kind of get to meet Linda, who is bedridden and mysteriously hiding behind her bedcurtains for the entire game, and otherwise we spend most of the story interacting with her new step-daughter Jane, the manor’s caretaker whose name I’ve already forgotten, and Jane’s extremely creepy tutor Ethel, who is descended from a long line of attendant type people who have served the Pevellyn family for generations. I’ve written at length about how these games tend to split time between modern day stories and what I’ve been calling “historical plots” which usually intertwine with the villain’s plans in the form of some sort of buried treasure or historically important document or whatever, and in this game it’s a bit looser but the niche is filled by the Pevellyn family legacy, its rumored hidden treasure, and its supposed ancestral curse.

See, Linda thinks she’s been victimized by the curse somehow as a rejection of her marriage into the family, while Jane is fascinated with the house’s secrets and hidden passageways and weird puzzles, largely because she’s a bored 12-year-old who lives alone with three adult women and has nothing else to do all day (or so it seems at first). Nancy, being the unsatiable puzzle guzzler that she is, also starts solving the Blackmoor Manor secret puzzles immediately, more out of a lack of really anything else to do than any particular driving force? And that’s kind of the biggest problem I have with the game.

The structure here is different from previous Nancy Drews in that instead of a linear mystery and set of puzzles, this game is presented as a borderline open-world puzzlebox, where you’re basically free to wander about the manor and poke at any puzzles you have access to at any given time. It’s certainly an ambitious shakeup to the formula, and I appreciate the idea of a more freeform approach to a space (the manor is well-designed for the most-part, too – lots of little connective tissues across the areas to keep things flowing well MOST of the time). But I think there are two huge flaws that shoot this new structure in the foot and really make me wary of adopting it as the default style moving forward.

First is that there’s just like…toooooo much gameplay here? This sounds like a weird criticism to have but hear me out. The ratio is off. There are SO many more puzzles and minigames in Curse of Blackmoor Manor than your average one of these and way less plot propping them up. This might be fatiguing on it own, but the second flaw is that many of these puzzles are poorly designed time sinks on top of this.

Take, for example, my mortal enemy, Lou Lou the Parrot. There comes a point fairly early in the game where you have to twist the many hands on a dragon statue into the correct configuration to open a false wall to descend a secret staircase until you find a door with a word inscribed upon it, under which is a space for you to enter a related word. Your possible configurations are mathematically enormous, and the presentation makes them very difficult to guess. Helpfully, though, there’s a carving of a parrot over the door, so sussing out that you need to get Lou Lou the octogenarian parrot to tell you the word to enter, you go to talk to her. She refuses to speak to you. Okay, you go around asking people how to communicate with Lou Lou. Two conversations later you’ve got her password. Lou Lou will talk to you but she won’t give you the code unless you first feed her a cake. So you walk to her special bird kitchen and do a little minigame where you bake her a bird cake, take it back, watch her eat it, THEN she’ll give you the word, you walk back to the hidden passage, complete the dragon puzzle again, go back down the secret stairs, enter the codeword, and are presented with another word. So you go back to Lou Lou, who will happily tell you the next word, if you go make her another cake. Once you have it, you’ll return to the hidden passage, complete the dragon puzzle again, go back down the secret stairs enter the codeword, and oh my god a third one.

You repeat this sequence four times, all the while enduring Nancy’s own voice actor pulling double duty as the bird, obnoxiously screeching some of the most painfully drawn out parrot dialogue I’ve ever heard, tormenting me with unfunny references and bizarre non sequiturs. By the end of it could you possibly blame me for intentionally poisoning her?

This is only one example of needless, bizarre padding in a game that’s already competing for the longest playtime of the series so far. There’s an endless cavalcade of minigames here too, most of which are recycled from previous entries, all of which are forced on you two or even three times over the course of the game (more, if you fuck them up). Perhaps most offensively, two of these are variations on go fish? Why?? Why do we need two go fishes?? This is true excess.

It even applies to the good puzzles. The relentless gauntlets of nonstop solves led me to a feeling of fatigue, even when on an individual basis I was having a grand old time. It turns out that balancing all the different parts of these games is really important, and the guided experience of a linear structure maybe works for the kinds of narratives Nancy Drew games have thus far established themselves to be. I’m not saying that this is prescriptive – I would never do that – I think I’m just reacting particularly harshly here because there is SUCH potential in these characters and this narrative setup and none of it gets paid off.

So let’s talk about where this all ends up, and what it could have been. Curse of Blackmoor Manor, is, unfortunately, not the Nancy Drew game where we commit full on to some sort of supernatural thing, despite the CRUEL TEASE halfway through that Linda has been cursed to become a werewolf. Instead, at the end of all this, it turns out that Jane has used a combination of other people’s prescription drugs ground into her food to make her sick, hair growth formula mixed into her moisturizer to make her “grow fur,” and insistence on have Linda read her bedtime stories about monsters and shit to essentially incept the idea that she has been cursed into her brain and placebo her into thinking she’s a werewolf, because Jane is mad that her parents are divorced. Simultaneously but COMPLETELY separately Ethel has been training Jane in secret to solve the Manor’s hidden puzzle box elements herself and claim the treasure at the end, which turns out to be essentially worthless, and it’s suggested that Nancy has in fact ruined an old family tradition by coming in and solving things herself unwittingly. It’s suggested that Ethel is involved in the werewolf plot too because there’s some technology involved that’s used to scare Nancy away separately from Linda’s whole thing, but largely these two plots seem to be wholly unrelated. Everybody laughs, there was never any danger, this kid spent months psychologically torturing her stepmom but everybody’s gonna make it work! It’s 2004 bud and we do NOT talk about therapists.

Perhaps this all sounds fucking insane to you, and let me assure, you, it is, but what might be more surprising is that almost everything I just wrote actually comes out in literally the last like two minutes of the game. There is SO little happening with ANY of these characters for the preceding three and a half to four hours. Ethel doesn’t even appear outside of cutscenes. And there’s so much potential here. For a relationship between Jane and Linda, a real one. To explore the culture of dedicated generational master/servant relationships in noble houses; the loneliness and burdens that must come with the privileges and weird rituals of being a kid in the ever-dwindling mega-upper class of old British society. There is SO much shit here and it’s the kind of shit that the team at Her would normally eat the fuck up, which is why it’s so much more frustrating than usual to see it squandered in exchange for, essentially, nothing?

That’s not to say the game is without its upsides. I’ve talked about the bevy of new puzzles in the game, and how it seems like Her was making a conscious effort to kind of shake up their standard book of tricks (even if they also included all of the old ones, leading to a weird bloated mess), and that effort is certainly appreciated. And there’s a TON of the classic Nancy Drew Cyber Mystery Charm in this one, just a ton of goofy bullshit that I absolutely love to see, which I will be listing now:

1. Like, three different times in the game Ethel just APPEARS when Nancy turns around in the most effective scares in series so far.

2. There’s a point where you’re talking to Ned on the phone and he seems to legitimately not know what a picture book is, and to be confused by the very idea of one.

3. It’s extremely clear that nobody in this cast is actually British (the three main blood relatives you meet don’t even have remotely similar accents lol), but in particular the guy Nancy orders food from has the worst cockney accent I’ve ever heard, like Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins but not one of Golden Age Hollywood’s most beloved character actors backing it up with charm. This character was also written so bafflingly that I had to enlist your friend and mine Woodaba to tell me if he was using actual British slang or if the game was making fun of me and/or British people before we realized that they were using cockney rhyme slang, which the book also comically provides you a very dry in-game dictionary for eventually.

4. There’s a guy in this whose computer you have to borrow a couple times and his desktop background is a picture of himself doing a cool pose, which is definitely like, you never see this guy stand up but that’s short king energy imo

5. One of the game overs in this game involves being eaten by a gigantic carnivorous plant and context won’t make that any more or less funny

So yeah I dunno this game is fine, it really tried some stuff that I personally think mostly didn’t work and I think it had some STELLAR opportunities that it completely failed to jump on but what is here isn’t the worst, it’s just littered with small annoyances and disappointments throughout. A real death of a thousand cuts, this game.

PREVIOUSLY: THE SECRET OF SHADOW RANCH
NEXT TIME: SECRET OF THE OLD CLOCK

ALL NANCY DREW PIECES

Magic Knight Rayearth is a show that has lofty thematic goals and ambitious depths to its characterization, but as much as it's interested in the self-actualization of queer youth and the horrific consequences of self-sacrifice in the name of provision for friends and family, the first season especially is equally interested in emulating the vibes of fucking around in a generic 16/32 bit JRPG, so it makes sense that this is the format that every video game adaptation of it would take.

I don't have a way to play Saturn games so my first Rayearth game was this lesser known SNES little brother, but I'm not sure that matters all that much because I believe every Rayearth game is an adaptation of the the first chunk of manga/season 1 of the anime. This too makes sense, as this is the most straightforward period of the narrative, and what's here is adapted with charm and gusto. Even the middle episodes of the season which do veer slightly more conceptual are adapted somewhat admirably in the form of fun gimmick fights that work really well for me.

The game itself is about par for what I'd expect from a budget licensed game of the era. It's fairly barebones in terms of play, with a very standard set of equipment and spells across characters (everybody uses all types of magic and Fuu has a sword instead of a bow? seems weird!) that definitely betrays what kind of game this is at its core, but for an experience that is actually probably shorter than watching the first season of the show it's hard to REALLY fault it much for these things.

Everything moves quickly; there's very little friction here. Battles are frequent but quick - you're always levelling up, always moving forward, always humming towards the next cutscene. This is good because the audiovisual presentation is where the game really shines. The spritework is beautiful in this game, even as clearly limited as a lot of it is, and they obviously put the extra effort into the most important places, like making sure that the main character sprites that you spend the most time with could be as expressive and posable as possible. All the music absolutely slaps too, which is a hugely important part of the Rayearth experience imo. Some of the best SNES drum sounds I've ever heard in this game, lowkey all timers, check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjU49AiCMV8&list=PLuGdUcbPv0j8TY0qiFyFhNQRSAfcMr7t_&index=33

The biggest place the game stumbles is where you might expect it to: right at the end, where the JRPG shenanigans are pulled out from under us in favor of some harsh reveals about the nature of the world and the psychology of the key players of the cast, which are sort of glossed over in between final boss fights and a rushed ending. This is played similarly in the show, but where there are literally 30 more episodes following to unpack things there, here the game is over that's it! Nothing to follow up on.

I can't help but wonder what a Magic Knight Rayearth game might look like today, one that tried to retell this story in its entirety instead of only going as far as the obvious and easy part of the story to adapt. To take the part of the story that Rayearth is directly subverting and just like, play it completely straight is kind of an embarrassing mission statement, and one I don't know would be easy to fix today. Could you do season 2 of Rayearth, largely concerned with introspection, politics, and pacifism, as a JRPG? Could you switch a game's genre less than halfway through? How would you adapt these new scenarios to a video game environment without just converting them to a visual novel kind of deal?

I dunno! The easiest answer is probably that you don't, that some stories aren't well-suited to all mediums and it's fine to leave them alone, but I think it's an interesting exercise to consider. I'd love to see it, if Rayearth were to someday get an inexplicable second life someday.