the do it for her screenshot from the Simpsons but it’s for the dead guy from the first screen of this game whose name is slang for penis
It’s a common joke that Samus Aran never hunts bounties. She’s always either stumbling into heroics for free by accident or hired for, essentially, mercenary work by Da Army. The only game where Samus’ work could I think be conceivably considered actual Bounty Hunting is Metroid II: Return of Samus. She’s given her hit list and she trudges down into the depths to do her job.
And what we get out of it is arguably the most ambitious Metroid game to date, clearly pushing the limits of its hardware in terms of delivering a gameplay experience that, similar to its predecessor with the NES, is just clearly beyond the ken of the Gameboy but also accidentally in terms of themes and mood. It’s not a secret that Metroid 2 has gotten the coolguy art gamer reevaluation over the years as a secret death of the author gem but that doesn’t make it work any less well as one.
Samus takes up a huge chunk of the screen. You can barely see where you’re going. You can barely remember where you’ve been. The world isn’t hostile, necessarily; how could it be hostile when you dominate it so powerfully from the very beginning? Samus is untouchable – more agile and powerful than anything she’ll face from the first second to the last as she trudges down, down, ever downward, through endless twisting corridors as she practices the tedious chore of genocide. She only becomes more durable and more powerful as her targets become fewer and more vulnerable to her weaponry.
No, the only resistance is from the world’s indifference, its ambivalence to Samus and her violence, and even then only in the few places where she cannot enforce herself upon it. The only dangers on SR388 are momentary environmental hazards, getting frustrated by disorientation, being frightened by surprise or by unknown sounds. But never by anything remotely similar to what Samus herself brings to the Metroids, to the other fauna she might encounter.
Atmosphere is king in Metroid, and narrative – explicit and implicit – is rarely given much heft in these games, especially early in the series. It’s hard to imagine that Samus, given what we know of her (with her military background, her most frequent contractor being the Federation marines, literally spending all her time with one of her hands replaced with a gun) has spent a lot of time considering the morality of her place in the galactic landscape. She probably doesn’t have to think much about it, since she mostly seems to fight, like, animals and the Space Pirates who do seem like assholes (I don’t have time to go into the absolutely batshit colonialism allegories happening in Prime 2 but that game is a weird can of worms). So I really have to wonder what’s going through her head when she’s struck by the burst of compassion that leads her to spare the last metroid. What’s she thinking about as she makes that long ascent back to the surface with a little buddy who doesn’t know that its mom just butchered its race. Does she think she’s done a kindness? Is she considering the enormity of the act she’s just failed to complete? Are these things she thinks about at all?
I don’t know. Metroid 2 is a masterpiece.
And what we get out of it is arguably the most ambitious Metroid game to date, clearly pushing the limits of its hardware in terms of delivering a gameplay experience that, similar to its predecessor with the NES, is just clearly beyond the ken of the Gameboy but also accidentally in terms of themes and mood. It’s not a secret that Metroid 2 has gotten the coolguy art gamer reevaluation over the years as a secret death of the author gem but that doesn’t make it work any less well as one.
Samus takes up a huge chunk of the screen. You can barely see where you’re going. You can barely remember where you’ve been. The world isn’t hostile, necessarily; how could it be hostile when you dominate it so powerfully from the very beginning? Samus is untouchable – more agile and powerful than anything she’ll face from the first second to the last as she trudges down, down, ever downward, through endless twisting corridors as she practices the tedious chore of genocide. She only becomes more durable and more powerful as her targets become fewer and more vulnerable to her weaponry.
No, the only resistance is from the world’s indifference, its ambivalence to Samus and her violence, and even then only in the few places where she cannot enforce herself upon it. The only dangers on SR388 are momentary environmental hazards, getting frustrated by disorientation, being frightened by surprise or by unknown sounds. But never by anything remotely similar to what Samus herself brings to the Metroids, to the other fauna she might encounter.
Atmosphere is king in Metroid, and narrative – explicit and implicit – is rarely given much heft in these games, especially early in the series. It’s hard to imagine that Samus, given what we know of her (with her military background, her most frequent contractor being the Federation marines, literally spending all her time with one of her hands replaced with a gun) has spent a lot of time considering the morality of her place in the galactic landscape. She probably doesn’t have to think much about it, since she mostly seems to fight, like, animals and the Space Pirates who do seem like assholes (I don’t have time to go into the absolutely batshit colonialism allegories happening in Prime 2 but that game is a weird can of worms). So I really have to wonder what’s going through her head when she’s struck by the burst of compassion that leads her to spare the last metroid. What’s she thinking about as she makes that long ascent back to the surface with a little buddy who doesn’t know that its mom just butchered its race. Does she think she’s done a kindness? Is she considering the enormity of the act she’s just failed to complete? Are these things she thinks about at all?
I don’t know. Metroid 2 is a masterpiece.
1986
There’s maybe something to be said here for a game as obviously ambitious as Metroid. It seems clear to me that they were trying to make something a lot closer to what we would get later in Super Metroid and the tech just wasn’t here to support it yet.
No map and no room for real background graphics means very little ambient personality as you trudge through endless identical corridors fitting endless identical enemies, getting lost in the galaxy’s most boring maze, your only atmospheric thermometer the game’s admittedly excellent music, a clear high point.
The play isn’t here either. Controls are stiff and wonky and the NES doesn’t feel equipped to give Sami’s enough of a verb set to support the kind of exploration you feel like you should be capable of (though as Metroid 2 will later prove this is as much a failing of environmental design as it is of controls). There’s just not enough here.
At the same time though the NES and your tv are too powerful a combination to lead to the surely accidental artistic highs that Metroid 2 would eventually hit on the Gameboy. Metroid is really stuck in an awkward middle ground of not really being very fun to play and also not really having anything else going on to prop up the monotony.
It’s by no means the worst game I’ve ever played and I’m glad it was given the chance to be iterated upon because unlike, say, Mega Man 1, another first outing that I think almost completely whiffs the fun element, I really don’t know if it feels earned here on artistic merit alone. A testament to the strength of the idea, I suppose!
No map and no room for real background graphics means very little ambient personality as you trudge through endless identical corridors fitting endless identical enemies, getting lost in the galaxy’s most boring maze, your only atmospheric thermometer the game’s admittedly excellent music, a clear high point.
The play isn’t here either. Controls are stiff and wonky and the NES doesn’t feel equipped to give Sami’s enough of a verb set to support the kind of exploration you feel like you should be capable of (though as Metroid 2 will later prove this is as much a failing of environmental design as it is of controls). There’s just not enough here.
At the same time though the NES and your tv are too powerful a combination to lead to the surely accidental artistic highs that Metroid 2 would eventually hit on the Gameboy. Metroid is really stuck in an awkward middle ground of not really being very fun to play and also not really having anything else going on to prop up the monotony.
It’s by no means the worst game I’ve ever played and I’m glad it was given the chance to be iterated upon because unlike, say, Mega Man 1, another first outing that I think almost completely whiffs the fun element, I really don’t know if it feels earned here on artistic merit alone. A testament to the strength of the idea, I suppose!
1993
In a way I appreciate what Mega Man 6 was trying to do here. It’s got a lot in common with 3, where it sees the need to shake some things up, but the danger is so much more severe after 5 of these than two, and unfortunately, also like 3, I think it’s almost entirely unsuccessful.
Where 3 radically changed the entire structure of Mega Man to essentially double the length of every game, 6’s Big Innovation is a relatively more reserved thing: another iteration on the series’ constant tinkering with the Rush powers, albeit the most extreme one so far. Instead of temporary single use weapons, they’re now equippable power armors with EXTREMELY useful gifts of either extremely powerful close range attacks or the ability to literally fly for a few seconds with OUTRAGEOUSLY generous recharge times, at the relatively minor tradeoff of not being able to slide or use the charge beam while they’re equipped. Immediately, these are fun to use; they look goofy (complimentary), they feel good, they’re powerful…maybe…TOO powerful? Oh nooooooooooooooooooooo
So these two upgrades impact the gameplay in two ways: the ways the levels are designed around them and the ways they’re not, both of which I think affect the experience really negatively.
Previous Mega Mans have squirrelled a fair number of little secrets, usually in the form of extra lives and similar but in later games also little bonus stuff that leads to powerful secret weapons. It’ll be things like false walls, hidden paths, typical NES game stuff. Now though, with the additions of these armors, all of that is gone. It’s been replaced with either a large conspicuous block that needs to be punched by the punch armor or a large conspicuous ladder that needs to be reached with the jetpack. They’re always right there, it’s never hard to reach, it’s never hard to notice, it always leads to full health recharges, etanks, extra lives, power refills, and shortcuts through huge swathes of the level. What’s the point of this? It’s a reward for nothing, AND I get to play less game. Weird choice! So that’s how levels have changed to incorporate the armors.
The way the haven’t is equally baffling. Once you have the jetpack there are very few scenarios where you can’t just use it to completely bypass any enemy or platforming challenge almost completely unscathed. It’s technically limited in use, but you get maybe four or five seconds of flight and it takes maybe one or two to recharge once you’ve touched the ground, and both of these are more than ample to overcome every single challenge in the game.
I want to be clear that I’m not a git gud games have to be hard kind of person, and I love accessibility options in general and I think games that let you just power the fuck up and mow through them rule and having that option should be the norm in every game, but here that doesn’t seem to be the intent. It just feels like bad level design, like they had an idea to expand and flesh out part of the play experience that’s super undercooked and only made it in for the sake of having something different in Mega Man 6 because shit dude the SNES is already out and Mega Man X already came out and you want us to make another Mega Man? How the fuck are we supposed to do this we need SOMETHING. And the something was this and it sucks lol
Otherwise everything else is like, aggressively middling. The premise to this one is a cute riff on the Astro Boy strongest robot in the world story arc, an appropriate story to adapt to a series that owes basically everything it has to Tezuka’s OG sweet little killer, and, I can’t believe I’m saying this, this game manages to somehow be even more racist than your average Tezuka book (everyone likes to laugh about Tomohawk Man but he is really only the most obvious tip of this iceberg). The music is par for the series which is to say generally very good. The graphics are fine, they’re what you’d expect for a late NES game at this point, although the only level that even comes close to anything in 5 is Centaur Man’s and HEY can we TALK about CENTAUR MAN for a second
What the fuck is up with that guy??? He’s a centaur okay cool. He’s in the Greece level I think, this tracks. This is also the water level. Okay, you’re losing me a bit. He turns invisible. Weird! He ALSO stops time?? What is this guy’s deal! Centaur man wearing too many hats. Fucked up.
Anyway Mega Man 6 sucks I didn’t like it very much.
Where 3 radically changed the entire structure of Mega Man to essentially double the length of every game, 6’s Big Innovation is a relatively more reserved thing: another iteration on the series’ constant tinkering with the Rush powers, albeit the most extreme one so far. Instead of temporary single use weapons, they’re now equippable power armors with EXTREMELY useful gifts of either extremely powerful close range attacks or the ability to literally fly for a few seconds with OUTRAGEOUSLY generous recharge times, at the relatively minor tradeoff of not being able to slide or use the charge beam while they’re equipped. Immediately, these are fun to use; they look goofy (complimentary), they feel good, they’re powerful…maybe…TOO powerful? Oh nooooooooooooooooooooo
So these two upgrades impact the gameplay in two ways: the ways the levels are designed around them and the ways they’re not, both of which I think affect the experience really negatively.
Previous Mega Mans have squirrelled a fair number of little secrets, usually in the form of extra lives and similar but in later games also little bonus stuff that leads to powerful secret weapons. It’ll be things like false walls, hidden paths, typical NES game stuff. Now though, with the additions of these armors, all of that is gone. It’s been replaced with either a large conspicuous block that needs to be punched by the punch armor or a large conspicuous ladder that needs to be reached with the jetpack. They’re always right there, it’s never hard to reach, it’s never hard to notice, it always leads to full health recharges, etanks, extra lives, power refills, and shortcuts through huge swathes of the level. What’s the point of this? It’s a reward for nothing, AND I get to play less game. Weird choice! So that’s how levels have changed to incorporate the armors.
The way the haven’t is equally baffling. Once you have the jetpack there are very few scenarios where you can’t just use it to completely bypass any enemy or platforming challenge almost completely unscathed. It’s technically limited in use, but you get maybe four or five seconds of flight and it takes maybe one or two to recharge once you’ve touched the ground, and both of these are more than ample to overcome every single challenge in the game.
I want to be clear that I’m not a git gud games have to be hard kind of person, and I love accessibility options in general and I think games that let you just power the fuck up and mow through them rule and having that option should be the norm in every game, but here that doesn’t seem to be the intent. It just feels like bad level design, like they had an idea to expand and flesh out part of the play experience that’s super undercooked and only made it in for the sake of having something different in Mega Man 6 because shit dude the SNES is already out and Mega Man X already came out and you want us to make another Mega Man? How the fuck are we supposed to do this we need SOMETHING. And the something was this and it sucks lol
Otherwise everything else is like, aggressively middling. The premise to this one is a cute riff on the Astro Boy strongest robot in the world story arc, an appropriate story to adapt to a series that owes basically everything it has to Tezuka’s OG sweet little killer, and, I can’t believe I’m saying this, this game manages to somehow be even more racist than your average Tezuka book (everyone likes to laugh about Tomohawk Man but he is really only the most obvious tip of this iceberg). The music is par for the series which is to say generally very good. The graphics are fine, they’re what you’d expect for a late NES game at this point, although the only level that even comes close to anything in 5 is Centaur Man’s and HEY can we TALK about CENTAUR MAN for a second
What the fuck is up with that guy??? He’s a centaur okay cool. He’s in the Greece level I think, this tracks. This is also the water level. Okay, you’re losing me a bit. He turns invisible. Weird! He ALSO stops time?? What is this guy’s deal! Centaur man wearing too many hats. Fucked up.
Anyway Mega Man 6 sucks I didn’t like it very much.
2018
this game’s got my number dude, i AM a funky little lesbian and i DID get what i paid for
2021
This is the Inkle game I always wanted.
I’ve always been an 80 Days Respecter but I’ve always found that game a little too random, a little too oblique, and a little too big to truly love. Just a tad too unwieldy to make me want to explore its nooks and crannies, and with not enough substance to those nooks and crannies to make the searches worthwhile (this isn’t a problem for a lot of people but I’m a spectacularly unimaginative person – this sucks about me and I hate it but it’s just true!).
So to get something very similar in format but condensed down to a TIGHT fifteen minute loop, with very few characters and locations and key items to interact with that nonetheless spiral into a complicated web of information and time management? AND one that never loses sight of a core story of two people who seem, y’know, basically decent and good and warm getting, if not quite justice then at least what’s theirs, and getting it best together in a way that feels satisfying and deserved? Beat still my heart dude, this game was made for me.
Showing you just enough of the outline of a character to let you know exactly who they are and what they’re about has always been Inkle’s bread and butter, from Sorcery to 80 Days (I still haven’t played Heaven’s Vault I’m sorry I know I’m Part Of The Problem), but this is their peak with this for sure. I love Veronica, I would kill for her, and I would absolutely help her assist in the coverup for murdering her husband she wouldn’t even have to tiptoe around it. Anders to, that dude could tell me to do anything I would do it. I’m easy.
Something that I think is especially nice about this game from a play perspective is that finally arriving at the Golden Ending where I hit all three kind of checkboxes the game asks you to in one run really felt like the ending of an extended tutorial. Now that I had satisfyingly concluded the story and gotten the closure I wanted, it was time for the real shit: hijinks. Can I…kill everybody else on the ship in one go? Frame this guy? What about this guy? Break into this guy’s room? See if this lady has any dirt on her? I’ve been routinely doing this action at this time, what if I mix it up and fuck around right at the start, just to see what happens. Not feeling the pressure to play optimally is as freeing as trying to play in a hyperspecific way. It’s a surprisingly flexible system that I’m still poking around with a couple hours after clearing the game.
I had originally settled on one rating in my head before I had started writing today but I think I talked myself up, I just really love this game, positively uplifting for me.
I’ve always been an 80 Days Respecter but I’ve always found that game a little too random, a little too oblique, and a little too big to truly love. Just a tad too unwieldy to make me want to explore its nooks and crannies, and with not enough substance to those nooks and crannies to make the searches worthwhile (this isn’t a problem for a lot of people but I’m a spectacularly unimaginative person – this sucks about me and I hate it but it’s just true!).
So to get something very similar in format but condensed down to a TIGHT fifteen minute loop, with very few characters and locations and key items to interact with that nonetheless spiral into a complicated web of information and time management? AND one that never loses sight of a core story of two people who seem, y’know, basically decent and good and warm getting, if not quite justice then at least what’s theirs, and getting it best together in a way that feels satisfying and deserved? Beat still my heart dude, this game was made for me.
Showing you just enough of the outline of a character to let you know exactly who they are and what they’re about has always been Inkle’s bread and butter, from Sorcery to 80 Days (I still haven’t played Heaven’s Vault I’m sorry I know I’m Part Of The Problem), but this is their peak with this for sure. I love Veronica, I would kill for her, and I would absolutely help her assist in the coverup for murdering her husband she wouldn’t even have to tiptoe around it. Anders to, that dude could tell me to do anything I would do it. I’m easy.
Something that I think is especially nice about this game from a play perspective is that finally arriving at the Golden Ending where I hit all three kind of checkboxes the game asks you to in one run really felt like the ending of an extended tutorial. Now that I had satisfyingly concluded the story and gotten the closure I wanted, it was time for the real shit: hijinks. Can I…kill everybody else on the ship in one go? Frame this guy? What about this guy? Break into this guy’s room? See if this lady has any dirt on her? I’ve been routinely doing this action at this time, what if I mix it up and fuck around right at the start, just to see what happens. Not feeling the pressure to play optimally is as freeing as trying to play in a hyperspecific way. It’s a surprisingly flexible system that I’m still poking around with a couple hours after clearing the game.
I had originally settled on one rating in my head before I had started writing today but I think I talked myself up, I just really love this game, positively uplifting for me.
2020
Sometimes you’re playing a game and the gears start turning on themes and allegory and you start thinking about things like wholesome discourse and the responsibility queer people are pressured to have when talking about themselves and their communities and how that sucks and you hate it and then you think about the couple of weeks where there was a flyer in the lobby of your apartment building letting everyone know that a couple of trans people in the neighborhood had been assaulted by a guy who had just gotten out of prison for targeting and beating trans people in particular and how you don’t pass at all and how your assigned parking space is literally the furthest one from the building and sometimes you just want to play a game by someone who gets you featuring people who get you hanging out and being cool and maybe that’s fine once in a while? I don’t know.
I think npckc has been somewhat unfairly defined as a creator who makes games that are treacly and unchallenging when their most famous work, the year of springs trilogy, I think strives to be educational and affirming without shying away from stresses and difficulties and hardships that go along with various aspects of queerness and allyship. I think the things that makes this maybe hard to identify are that exactly how much of the toughest stuff in those games you see is up to you the player via choices, and that they DO focus on positivity and affirmation over tragedy, melodrama, and the more brutal realities a lot of queer people do live. Which is cool with me! I think there’s room for this. There’s gotta be a line between criticizing games that infantilize us and try to iron out everything that is scary and abnormal and challenging to the hegemony about queerness and ones that just like, don’t want to be bummers all the time, and I think these games generally err closer to the latter camp than the former.
I don’t PARTICULARLY want to organize my thoughts and make this a whole thing because I find wholesome discourse generally annoying so I’m gonna cut myself off before I start really thinking about this and feel the need to reorganize the earlier paragraphs (EDITING IS FOR NERDS), just recommend everybody read Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity by José Muñoz and leave it at that haha.
Tomato Clinic certainly leans MORE in the direction of cutesy edutainment than other works by this creator, but I think it’s a testament to kc’s skill as a writer that the allegory works as well as it does. In a very brief window of time they create a couple of really well-sketched characters, a fun spin on commonly found urban fantasy tropes, and juuuuust enough depth in both to impress me considering the whole thing is over in twenty minutes. I would do anything Marie told me to. I want her and I want to be her, mission accomplished, and Gakuto is my friend. I will come back to the Tomato Clinic and hang out with these guys. They are cute, and they are sweet. The whole game is. I like it!
I think npckc has been somewhat unfairly defined as a creator who makes games that are treacly and unchallenging when their most famous work, the year of springs trilogy, I think strives to be educational and affirming without shying away from stresses and difficulties and hardships that go along with various aspects of queerness and allyship. I think the things that makes this maybe hard to identify are that exactly how much of the toughest stuff in those games you see is up to you the player via choices, and that they DO focus on positivity and affirmation over tragedy, melodrama, and the more brutal realities a lot of queer people do live. Which is cool with me! I think there’s room for this. There’s gotta be a line between criticizing games that infantilize us and try to iron out everything that is scary and abnormal and challenging to the hegemony about queerness and ones that just like, don’t want to be bummers all the time, and I think these games generally err closer to the latter camp than the former.
I don’t PARTICULARLY want to organize my thoughts and make this a whole thing because I find wholesome discourse generally annoying so I’m gonna cut myself off before I start really thinking about this and feel the need to reorganize the earlier paragraphs (EDITING IS FOR NERDS), just recommend everybody read Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity by José Muñoz and leave it at that haha.
Tomato Clinic certainly leans MORE in the direction of cutesy edutainment than other works by this creator, but I think it’s a testament to kc’s skill as a writer that the allegory works as well as it does. In a very brief window of time they create a couple of really well-sketched characters, a fun spin on commonly found urban fantasy tropes, and juuuuust enough depth in both to impress me considering the whole thing is over in twenty minutes. I would do anything Marie told me to. I want her and I want to be her, mission accomplished, and Gakuto is my friend. I will come back to the Tomato Clinic and hang out with these guys. They are cute, and they are sweet. The whole game is. I like it!
Is there a show whose imagery is better suited to the blotchy, jagged style of early 32-bit graphics or whose score is so appropriately composed for adaptation to plonky midi instruments than Neon Genesis Evangelion? This game is breathtaking, easily my favorite piece of extended Eva media right after the show itself, based almost entirely on the strength of its aesthetics. Everything here is an obvious result of hardware limitations – the things that LOOK at first like compressed show clips but then are clearly just jpegs with awkward lip flaps, the marriage of EXTREMELY chunky sprite work with excellently modeled and animated 3D figures; it all just sings together in a way that only could have happened in 1999 and I suspect only with a low budget and a strict deadline, but the result sings.
This extends to the gameplay too. Shit’s basic as hell, in a good way. Foregoing the route of most similar adaptations, NGE64 doesn’t expand on the show or add any fluff to give you more to do, but the opposite – it significantly trims down the experience to the most essential and cinematic action beats and acclimates the gameplay style of each mission to best suit the corresponding action from the show. This leads to what Wikipedia classifies as a fighting game having, generously, only half of its levels features what you might call fighting gameplay. One level is a 30-second-long targeting sequence; another is obviously a rhythm game. It’s all killer no filler here, and I appreciate that about it.
The whole thing is over and done within two hours, and that’s okay. It looks and sounds absolutely incredible, it’s a fun spin on some classic beats that you already know inside and out if you’re playing it, and if you’re like me and you’re an American who doesn’t speak Japanese and is for some reason accessing this game, then anything that might have dissuaded you prooooooobably isn’t really that big of a deal to begin with haha. Certainly wasn’t for me.
This extends to the gameplay too. Shit’s basic as hell, in a good way. Foregoing the route of most similar adaptations, NGE64 doesn’t expand on the show or add any fluff to give you more to do, but the opposite – it significantly trims down the experience to the most essential and cinematic action beats and acclimates the gameplay style of each mission to best suit the corresponding action from the show. This leads to what Wikipedia classifies as a fighting game having, generously, only half of its levels features what you might call fighting gameplay. One level is a 30-second-long targeting sequence; another is obviously a rhythm game. It’s all killer no filler here, and I appreciate that about it.
The whole thing is over and done within two hours, and that’s okay. It looks and sounds absolutely incredible, it’s a fun spin on some classic beats that you already know inside and out if you’re playing it, and if you’re like me and you’re an American who doesn’t speak Japanese and is for some reason accessing this game, then anything that might have dissuaded you prooooooobably isn’t really that big of a deal to begin with haha. Certainly wasn’t for me.
Well this is just about exactly what you like to see, huh?
Perhaps fittingly for a tenth entry, which feels like something of a milestone, Secret of Shadow Ranch is without a doubt the most perfect game in the Nancy Drew Cyber Mystery series to this point. Which is not to say it’s a perfect game in general because it sure isn’t, just that it’s the most representative of everything that makes these Nancy Drew games recognizably themselves, for good and for ill (mostly good though!).
I will be identifying the bad guy in this rundown, if you care!
Nancy’s two best friends, cousins Bess and George, are taking a trip to visit their aunt and uncle at the titulat ranch they own in Arizona to have a week’s worth of horse girl adventures in the desolate southwestern desert I guess, but unfortunately for the two of them they’ve also invited Nancy Drew on the expedition. At this point in the series we the audience all know that Nancy is cursed specifically to not be allowed to take vacations, so naturally Bess n George’s flights get held up for the entire length of the game in Nebraska AND their uncle gets bitten by a rattlesnake (in a funny twist this does turn out to be a complete coincidence and not a part of the villain’s scheme) and is hospitalized, accompanied by his wife, in the distant city for several days, which leaves Nancy alone at the ranch with no one around for miles but one store owner and the three ranch employees whom I can only describe as a group of nasty little freaks.
There’s DAVE who seems like the most normal guy but is so fucking horny it’s obscene, you gotta beat this dude away with a stick until Nancy tells him she has a boyfriend (dubious, hasn’t even mentioned Ned this game). There’s TEX, who should not be allowed to be named that if he lives in Arizona and who is in charge of all the horse stuff at the ranch. He is very funny because he’s supposed to be like the gruff cranky asshole character with a hidden dad-ish heart of gold who only talks in a hoarse, Eastwood-esque snarl, but he’s also the conduit through which almost all of the game’s SUBSTANTIAL edutainment content is channeled so he’s doing this terse tough guy act but he’s ALSO like “okay before you can take this horse out riding around you have to answer my ten randomized horse trivia questions that are mostly not practical riding information and also would you like to learn how to lasso.” Love this guy he rules. Then there’s SHORTY, the chef, who definitely has the most overt nasty little guy energy but whom I also hate with every fiber in my being for giving me like 10,000 game overs. We will return to this later.
At first Nancy thinks it’s fishy that Mr Uncle was attacked in his bedroom by a rattlesnake and starts poking around about that, but quickly the game’s historical plot, about the star-crossed love between a cowboy robber and the county sheriff’s daughter and the scavenger hunt he left her for the stock on his hidden treasure before he died, takes center stage. OH and also every night a spectral horse runs by the ranch and destroys something essential to life in the desert; a water pump, power lines, etc. That’s a big deal. Clearly something strange is going on, and Nancy, despite insisting that she’s an amateur (presumably because the number of crimes she’s thwarted while on vacation outnumber the crimes she’s actually been hired to solve like four to one, so, fair I guess) is the only person who immediately realizes this is a Scooby Doo scheme to scare everyone off the land and that this needs to be investigated.
Here’s where we come back to fuckin Shorty and how if I ever see this dude on the street it’s on sight, motherfucker. Without the two owners at the ranch and with an ever-increasing number of important facilities being incapacitated, Mrs Aunt and Mr Uncle (I forgot their names I’m sorry I usually take better notes) ask Nancy to help out with chores that might need doing around the ranch. And you do! It’s another Nancy Drew Does Chores game! Surprise! I said every defining aspect of the series was here and I meant it. They’re really bad in this one too, extremely tedious, easy to fail, they trigger game overs, AND almost all of them have to be REPEATED during all three full days that you play in-game. Shorty is the most annoying chore-giver and the one most likely to give you extra work (which is weird considering he turns out to be the bad guy who is relying on Nancy to solve the treasure hunt so presumably he would not want to waste her time but he’s deep undercover I guess). At the end of the game I thought Nancy was gonna leave him to die of dehydration or heat stroke in the desert but unfortunately she’s not cool enough to do this and I guess also he didn’t really commit any crimes severe enough to warrant such a harsh punishment except try to kill her right at the end of the game, but Nancy is too square to go eye for an eye on that shit.
Anyway these chores aren’t a death knell to the game like they have been to past Chore Games because this isn’t really a Chore Game, it’s just a game that Has Chores? Part of this is just scope; Secret of Shadow Ranch is BIGGER than any previous game by a wide margin. I’ve never really gone over two and a half hours playing one of these, but here my time was bumping up against 4, and it feels like that’s precisely because this is the Nancy Drew that really has it all. Every kind of puzzle you see in these games is here. Lots of fun characters to hang out with and chat with, even if none of them are particularly interesting, well-written, or performed. The hunt for the treasure is sprawling and every stage of it is fun and interesting to work through. Just after I was complaining about it a game or two ago, I think this one finally hit the perfect sweet spot of spotlighting the historical story with the modern day plot of the game, in terms of both the mystery and the thematic parallels (the former more gracefully than the latter but it’s cute anyway). It would be cooler if that happened in one of the Nancy Drew games that was actually About Something, but these games don’t need to be issues games to be likeable.
Being an entertaining and pleasant mystery puzzler is enough, and Secret of Shadow Ranch is that to a T. Far from perfect but honestly after the last one, just doing everything I want the minimum amount I consider acceptable with the most friction I’ll tolerate feels like ecstasy. I love it when I like these.
PREVIOUSLY: DANGER ON DECEPTION ISLAND
NEXT TIME: CURSE OF BLACKMOOR MANOR
ALL NANCY DREW PIECES
Perhaps fittingly for a tenth entry, which feels like something of a milestone, Secret of Shadow Ranch is without a doubt the most perfect game in the Nancy Drew Cyber Mystery series to this point. Which is not to say it’s a perfect game in general because it sure isn’t, just that it’s the most representative of everything that makes these Nancy Drew games recognizably themselves, for good and for ill (mostly good though!).
I will be identifying the bad guy in this rundown, if you care!
Nancy’s two best friends, cousins Bess and George, are taking a trip to visit their aunt and uncle at the titulat ranch they own in Arizona to have a week’s worth of horse girl adventures in the desolate southwestern desert I guess, but unfortunately for the two of them they’ve also invited Nancy Drew on the expedition. At this point in the series we the audience all know that Nancy is cursed specifically to not be allowed to take vacations, so naturally Bess n George’s flights get held up for the entire length of the game in Nebraska AND their uncle gets bitten by a rattlesnake (in a funny twist this does turn out to be a complete coincidence and not a part of the villain’s scheme) and is hospitalized, accompanied by his wife, in the distant city for several days, which leaves Nancy alone at the ranch with no one around for miles but one store owner and the three ranch employees whom I can only describe as a group of nasty little freaks.
There’s DAVE who seems like the most normal guy but is so fucking horny it’s obscene, you gotta beat this dude away with a stick until Nancy tells him she has a boyfriend (dubious, hasn’t even mentioned Ned this game). There’s TEX, who should not be allowed to be named that if he lives in Arizona and who is in charge of all the horse stuff at the ranch. He is very funny because he’s supposed to be like the gruff cranky asshole character with a hidden dad-ish heart of gold who only talks in a hoarse, Eastwood-esque snarl, but he’s also the conduit through which almost all of the game’s SUBSTANTIAL edutainment content is channeled so he’s doing this terse tough guy act but he’s ALSO like “okay before you can take this horse out riding around you have to answer my ten randomized horse trivia questions that are mostly not practical riding information and also would you like to learn how to lasso.” Love this guy he rules. Then there’s SHORTY, the chef, who definitely has the most overt nasty little guy energy but whom I also hate with every fiber in my being for giving me like 10,000 game overs. We will return to this later.
At first Nancy thinks it’s fishy that Mr Uncle was attacked in his bedroom by a rattlesnake and starts poking around about that, but quickly the game’s historical plot, about the star-crossed love between a cowboy robber and the county sheriff’s daughter and the scavenger hunt he left her for the stock on his hidden treasure before he died, takes center stage. OH and also every night a spectral horse runs by the ranch and destroys something essential to life in the desert; a water pump, power lines, etc. That’s a big deal. Clearly something strange is going on, and Nancy, despite insisting that she’s an amateur (presumably because the number of crimes she’s thwarted while on vacation outnumber the crimes she’s actually been hired to solve like four to one, so, fair I guess) is the only person who immediately realizes this is a Scooby Doo scheme to scare everyone off the land and that this needs to be investigated.
Here’s where we come back to fuckin Shorty and how if I ever see this dude on the street it’s on sight, motherfucker. Without the two owners at the ranch and with an ever-increasing number of important facilities being incapacitated, Mrs Aunt and Mr Uncle (I forgot their names I’m sorry I usually take better notes) ask Nancy to help out with chores that might need doing around the ranch. And you do! It’s another Nancy Drew Does Chores game! Surprise! I said every defining aspect of the series was here and I meant it. They’re really bad in this one too, extremely tedious, easy to fail, they trigger game overs, AND almost all of them have to be REPEATED during all three full days that you play in-game. Shorty is the most annoying chore-giver and the one most likely to give you extra work (which is weird considering he turns out to be the bad guy who is relying on Nancy to solve the treasure hunt so presumably he would not want to waste her time but he’s deep undercover I guess). At the end of the game I thought Nancy was gonna leave him to die of dehydration or heat stroke in the desert but unfortunately she’s not cool enough to do this and I guess also he didn’t really commit any crimes severe enough to warrant such a harsh punishment except try to kill her right at the end of the game, but Nancy is too square to go eye for an eye on that shit.
Anyway these chores aren’t a death knell to the game like they have been to past Chore Games because this isn’t really a Chore Game, it’s just a game that Has Chores? Part of this is just scope; Secret of Shadow Ranch is BIGGER than any previous game by a wide margin. I’ve never really gone over two and a half hours playing one of these, but here my time was bumping up against 4, and it feels like that’s precisely because this is the Nancy Drew that really has it all. Every kind of puzzle you see in these games is here. Lots of fun characters to hang out with and chat with, even if none of them are particularly interesting, well-written, or performed. The hunt for the treasure is sprawling and every stage of it is fun and interesting to work through. Just after I was complaining about it a game or two ago, I think this one finally hit the perfect sweet spot of spotlighting the historical story with the modern day plot of the game, in terms of both the mystery and the thematic parallels (the former more gracefully than the latter but it’s cute anyway). It would be cooler if that happened in one of the Nancy Drew games that was actually About Something, but these games don’t need to be issues games to be likeable.
Being an entertaining and pleasant mystery puzzler is enough, and Secret of Shadow Ranch is that to a T. Far from perfect but honestly after the last one, just doing everything I want the minimum amount I consider acceptable with the most friction I’ll tolerate feels like ecstasy. I love it when I like these.
PREVIOUSLY: DANGER ON DECEPTION ISLAND
NEXT TIME: CURSE OF BLACKMOOR MANOR
ALL NANCY DREW PIECES
I really thought that Stay Tuned For Danger or maybe Ghost Dogs were competing for bottom of the barrel but I failed to account for the barnacles clinging to the underside of the barrel, which constitute the start to finish unmitigated disaster that is Nancy Drew: Danger on Deception Island.
In this game, Nancy is off on another ill-fated vacation attempt to hang out with George’s friend Katie on her fishing boat off the coast of Oregon. Instead, she finds herself embroiled in the politics (sort of! they are barely touched upon really) of a financially struggling fishing town/tourist trap because there’s a seemingly orphaned orca that’s taken up residence near the island and Katie has reported its presence to the government who are evaluating the situation and in the meantime none of the fisherman can work because they might be a danger to the whale. Seemingly in response to her activism, Katie’s boat, which she lives in, is horribly vandalized right after Nancy arrives and our mystery is afoot.
Or, is it? I mean like, ostensibly yes that is what you start out doing but Nancy pretty quickly veers off into investigating a lot of other things, like the mysterious puzzles in the lighthouse basement, the 100 year old rumors that the island used to be the base of operations for a kidnapping/smuggling ring, trying to find out what happened to an old old shipwreck that nobody knows or cares about for no real reason, figuring what happened to the eccentric millionaire couple that used to live on the island before they mysteriously disappeared (the wife just moved away after the husband died you morons it’s not that hard to puzzle out – though I guess most of the game’s actual puzzles are explicitly set up in-universe by this character, it’s weird) and mostly, walking around a gigantic island and its underground tunnel system doing chores for a bunch of rude assholes who hate her, including the woman she is ostensibly there to live with!
It’s another Nancy drew game where instead of solving puzzles and actively working on mysteries you are explicitly just doing chores for people, the worst manifestation of busywork in this series. I know that these tasks don’t differ ALL that much from the kinds of puzzles that open up secret passages or old timey letters about jewel heists or whatever, but that’s precisely why the framing is so important. I’ve played nine of these games now in nearly as many days and I’m not tired of them yet, but they locked in a formula pretty quickly. That’s okay, but it does mean that the flavor is everything, and there’s a feeling of laziness to this one that permeates the entire thing. For example, at one point in the middle of the game you return to a guy you’ve already interacted with a lot. He’s gruff, conservative, cares a lot about the island and its community’s welfare, does not care for this orca shit, and wants to get back to work as a fisherman. He’s extremely no nonsense and he’s running for local office to protect what he views as the interests of the working people. He’s an asshole. So you return to him and ask him for a favor and he says “hey sure thing, just solve this CHESS PUZZLE for me” and then he pulls out a piece of paper and gives you a hand written “how would you win a chess game with this board configuration in two moves” puzzle and it’s like fuckin what?? Why would this character have this? Did he make it? Does he do these for fun? I don’t fuckin know, and neither does the game, but I guess we were in kind of a dry spell of activities that weren’t walking around and talking to people so we’re gonna take a break for Holt’s chess puzzle real quick, it doesn’t MATTER.
The entire GAME is like this. Fellow backloggd user and Nancy Drew Cyber Adventure connoisseur Nerdietalk commented on my last review of Haunted Carousel to point out that some of the weird inconsistencies in that game are almost certainly byproducts of the fact that these games are products of absolutely brutal six-month dev cycles, by a team that at its peak had maybe 30 employees from top to bottom. She said, “the whole two games a year format is not doing the franchise any favors at this particular point” and this HAS to be what’s going on here right? The game is a mess. It feels fatigued, incomplete, and incoherent.
The actual plot of the game, so to speak, doesn’t even emerge until maybe twenty minutes from the end, and involves, and I’m going to use direct quotes from Nancy’s summary monologue at the end, word for word here: a “plan cooked up to recover smuggled animal furs” using “an orca that the Russians had trained for covert military operations.” If you’re wondering why you got to the very end of this review before I gave you that little nugget, come to my apartment and pat me on the back because I’ve successfully communicated the feeling of playing this game.
It includes an ORCA that the RUSSIANS had trained for COVERT MILITARY OPERATIONS being used to secretly dive into shipwrecks and smuggle shit out of an island in secret wearing a goofy little backpack harness thing and yet, somehow, it’s still the worst one in the series and maybe one of the worst games I’ve ever played. It’s a tragedy.
PREVIOUSLY: THE HAUNTED CAROUSEL
NEXT TIME: THE SECRET OF SHADOW RANCH
ALL NANCY DREW PIECES
In this game, Nancy is off on another ill-fated vacation attempt to hang out with George’s friend Katie on her fishing boat off the coast of Oregon. Instead, she finds herself embroiled in the politics (sort of! they are barely touched upon really) of a financially struggling fishing town/tourist trap because there’s a seemingly orphaned orca that’s taken up residence near the island and Katie has reported its presence to the government who are evaluating the situation and in the meantime none of the fisherman can work because they might be a danger to the whale. Seemingly in response to her activism, Katie’s boat, which she lives in, is horribly vandalized right after Nancy arrives and our mystery is afoot.
Or, is it? I mean like, ostensibly yes that is what you start out doing but Nancy pretty quickly veers off into investigating a lot of other things, like the mysterious puzzles in the lighthouse basement, the 100 year old rumors that the island used to be the base of operations for a kidnapping/smuggling ring, trying to find out what happened to an old old shipwreck that nobody knows or cares about for no real reason, figuring what happened to the eccentric millionaire couple that used to live on the island before they mysteriously disappeared (the wife just moved away after the husband died you morons it’s not that hard to puzzle out – though I guess most of the game’s actual puzzles are explicitly set up in-universe by this character, it’s weird) and mostly, walking around a gigantic island and its underground tunnel system doing chores for a bunch of rude assholes who hate her, including the woman she is ostensibly there to live with!
It’s another Nancy drew game where instead of solving puzzles and actively working on mysteries you are explicitly just doing chores for people, the worst manifestation of busywork in this series. I know that these tasks don’t differ ALL that much from the kinds of puzzles that open up secret passages or old timey letters about jewel heists or whatever, but that’s precisely why the framing is so important. I’ve played nine of these games now in nearly as many days and I’m not tired of them yet, but they locked in a formula pretty quickly. That’s okay, but it does mean that the flavor is everything, and there’s a feeling of laziness to this one that permeates the entire thing. For example, at one point in the middle of the game you return to a guy you’ve already interacted with a lot. He’s gruff, conservative, cares a lot about the island and its community’s welfare, does not care for this orca shit, and wants to get back to work as a fisherman. He’s extremely no nonsense and he’s running for local office to protect what he views as the interests of the working people. He’s an asshole. So you return to him and ask him for a favor and he says “hey sure thing, just solve this CHESS PUZZLE for me” and then he pulls out a piece of paper and gives you a hand written “how would you win a chess game with this board configuration in two moves” puzzle and it’s like fuckin what?? Why would this character have this? Did he make it? Does he do these for fun? I don’t fuckin know, and neither does the game, but I guess we were in kind of a dry spell of activities that weren’t walking around and talking to people so we’re gonna take a break for Holt’s chess puzzle real quick, it doesn’t MATTER.
The entire GAME is like this. Fellow backloggd user and Nancy Drew Cyber Adventure connoisseur Nerdietalk commented on my last review of Haunted Carousel to point out that some of the weird inconsistencies in that game are almost certainly byproducts of the fact that these games are products of absolutely brutal six-month dev cycles, by a team that at its peak had maybe 30 employees from top to bottom. She said, “the whole two games a year format is not doing the franchise any favors at this particular point” and this HAS to be what’s going on here right? The game is a mess. It feels fatigued, incomplete, and incoherent.
The actual plot of the game, so to speak, doesn’t even emerge until maybe twenty minutes from the end, and involves, and I’m going to use direct quotes from Nancy’s summary monologue at the end, word for word here: a “plan cooked up to recover smuggled animal furs” using “an orca that the Russians had trained for covert military operations.” If you’re wondering why you got to the very end of this review before I gave you that little nugget, come to my apartment and pat me on the back because I’ve successfully communicated the feeling of playing this game.
It includes an ORCA that the RUSSIANS had trained for COVERT MILITARY OPERATIONS being used to secretly dive into shipwrecks and smuggle shit out of an island in secret wearing a goofy little backpack harness thing and yet, somehow, it’s still the worst one in the series and maybe one of the worst games I’ve ever played. It’s a tragedy.
PREVIOUSLY: THE HAUNTED CAROUSEL
NEXT TIME: THE SECRET OF SHADOW RANCH
ALL NANCY DREW PIECES
I wish that this was a game about trauma. I mean, it sort of is. Every Nancy Drew is split between at least two identities that often feel like they’re meant to synergize into a thematic whole, but they so rarely find the balance. Most commonly this takes the form of a modern day mystery plot and its historical roots, and the issue comes from finding a way to make enough time for both, or making sure the weight of one side is appropriately felt in the other.
Nancy Drew: The Haunted Carousel seems initially like it might nail this element – with its historical intrigue about a guy who carved the horses for a carousel in the titular amusement park which are now considered extremely valuable for some reason (there is a historical heist involved, these games LOVE historical heists and listen man SO DO I so I will NOT be taking them to task for this), and his modern-day descendent, Joy, who is RATHER IRONICALLY a very sad woman who works at the park today. See, Joy’s whole life has revolved around the park; everybody in her family works or worked there going back generations, her mom died in a car crash that feels responsible for during a park-related incident when she was four years old that led to her repressing all of her early childhood memories as a coping mechanism, normal precocious kid shit.
Another very normal thing about Joy is that her dad, who used be like, an attraction designer for the park, eventually realized that helping his extremely young child essentially condition herself to forget her entire early development instead of dealing with her grief was an extremely fucked up thing to do (hindsight is 20/20) and talking to her about it, waited until he was on his deathbed and then invented a wacky little robot guy to give her riddles in hopes that solving them would prompt her to resurface park-related memories of her mother. Most of the game’s story ostensibly involves solving these riddles for Joy, and helping her push through her shit and come to terms with some real ugly feelings, in ways that I have gripes with but are clearly the emotional core of the game and also by far the most interesting stuff here. It’s just that this is where we come back to my tragic thesis for this review: this SHOULD be what this game is about, and although it’s certainly the EMOTIONAL center, and you do spend a lot of the middle portion of the game working towards the few key scenes where Joy gets to have these moments, the moments themselves are few and brief. The best, most interesting, most resonant content in the game, and the content that’s most directly tied to the Traditional Nancy Drew Historical Storyline, is FIRMLY the b-plot of the game, only given slightly more time and weight than “what’s the wacky new age engineer up to” and “hmm the security guard seems kind of cagey about his past.” I would have much rather seen Joy have to reckon with her father’s role in all of this than learn about fucking Ingrid’s secretly selling rollercoaster blueprints to a friend or whatever the fuck she was up to.
The tone of it all doesn’t help? These games do have a history of playfulness to them, but I mark mood-setting as maybe their greatest and most consistent strength normally, which is why it feels so weird to have this complaint. The scenes with Joy feel very grounded, very real. A woman finding catharsis by embracing grief is a powerful thing, especially when the circumstances of the whole situation lead to a lot of murkiness in the way she must feel retroactively about a lot of what came after and people she thought she knew growing up in a relatively closed and tight-knit environment. So to have these scenes always end with Joy and Nancy turning to see a funny little robot guy literally cough up a new clue and piddle out a little rhyming riddle to hunt down the next piece of this deeply sad trauma puzzle feels deeply inappropriate. Like yeah man it IS super funny but this is the one moment in the game I don’t want to be laughing?
Although these are my only REAL complaints with this one they do feel big enough to sour what is otherwise a perfectly fun Nancy Drew Cyber Adventure. The amusement park (which is not even slightly haunted and nobody acts like it is so the title of this game is a fuckin TEASE AND A HALF) is a cute setting that lends itself really well to puzzles and I think they make the most of it. Plenty of fucking around with rides, going behind the scenes, working in the offices, playing minigames based on attractions around the park; everything you would want to see out of this kind of setting is here.
The characters are all pretty good too, if a little underwritten. This game is a little shorter than the last few have been, and leans more heavily on puzzles than narrative, but it also has the most characters to speak with of any of the games so far and I think the surplus of content crammed into a barely two hour runtime really shows. I do like everyone. Joy is obviously the one with the most meat on her bones, but I also really enjoy the very sensitive jersey accented beefcake security guard Harlan and the person who turns out to be the villain, who is not a particularly deep or interesting character but who is lifted up by a much higher-than-usual-quality performance for these games by their voice actor.
Also I’m starting a new segment that I expect will recur at the end of many of these reviews moving forward called Nancy Drew Cop Watch, to catalogue all the times Nancy needlessly acts like a huge asshole cop for no reason when she could just leave the fuck alone and be cool instead.
Today she finds out that Harlan the security guard used to be incarcerated when she accidentally contacts someone who turns out to be a parole officer, and immediately runs to his boss to tattle on him, framing it as “disturbing information.” When his boss is like “yeah I know I hired him anyway he’s cool he told me up front and I trust him” Nancy STILL tries to finger him for some extremely petty harmless shit he did to get him in trouble, JUST because she doesn’t trust him for being in jail when he was younger! He gets mad and won’t talk to her for a while, and then later, HE apologizes to HER for getting mad about this!
Additionally she finds out that Ingrid the engineer is doing an actual criminal act of stealing the park’s roller coaster blueprints and giving them to her friend to copy so they can make their own roller coaster out of them but Nancy doesn’t care about this, presumably because Ingrid is not already a felon, who knows, she contains multitudes.
So anyway I am impressed that this series continues to press up against the edges of the kinds of subject matter they want to try to tackle, and that despite not doing it in the MOST graceful ways, the stories they try to tell so far have been pretty respectful and not really embarrassing. It’s a better track record than any AAA game series I can think of, and I look forward to them continuing to broaden their horizons.
PREVIOUSLY: GHOST DOGS OF MOON LAKE
NEXT TIME: DANGER ON DECEPTION ISLAND
ALL NANCY DREW PIECES
Nancy Drew: The Haunted Carousel seems initially like it might nail this element – with its historical intrigue about a guy who carved the horses for a carousel in the titular amusement park which are now considered extremely valuable for some reason (there is a historical heist involved, these games LOVE historical heists and listen man SO DO I so I will NOT be taking them to task for this), and his modern-day descendent, Joy, who is RATHER IRONICALLY a very sad woman who works at the park today. See, Joy’s whole life has revolved around the park; everybody in her family works or worked there going back generations, her mom died in a car crash that feels responsible for during a park-related incident when she was four years old that led to her repressing all of her early childhood memories as a coping mechanism, normal precocious kid shit.
Another very normal thing about Joy is that her dad, who used be like, an attraction designer for the park, eventually realized that helping his extremely young child essentially condition herself to forget her entire early development instead of dealing with her grief was an extremely fucked up thing to do (hindsight is 20/20) and talking to her about it, waited until he was on his deathbed and then invented a wacky little robot guy to give her riddles in hopes that solving them would prompt her to resurface park-related memories of her mother. Most of the game’s story ostensibly involves solving these riddles for Joy, and helping her push through her shit and come to terms with some real ugly feelings, in ways that I have gripes with but are clearly the emotional core of the game and also by far the most interesting stuff here. It’s just that this is where we come back to my tragic thesis for this review: this SHOULD be what this game is about, and although it’s certainly the EMOTIONAL center, and you do spend a lot of the middle portion of the game working towards the few key scenes where Joy gets to have these moments, the moments themselves are few and brief. The best, most interesting, most resonant content in the game, and the content that’s most directly tied to the Traditional Nancy Drew Historical Storyline, is FIRMLY the b-plot of the game, only given slightly more time and weight than “what’s the wacky new age engineer up to” and “hmm the security guard seems kind of cagey about his past.” I would have much rather seen Joy have to reckon with her father’s role in all of this than learn about fucking Ingrid’s secretly selling rollercoaster blueprints to a friend or whatever the fuck she was up to.
The tone of it all doesn’t help? These games do have a history of playfulness to them, but I mark mood-setting as maybe their greatest and most consistent strength normally, which is why it feels so weird to have this complaint. The scenes with Joy feel very grounded, very real. A woman finding catharsis by embracing grief is a powerful thing, especially when the circumstances of the whole situation lead to a lot of murkiness in the way she must feel retroactively about a lot of what came after and people she thought she knew growing up in a relatively closed and tight-knit environment. So to have these scenes always end with Joy and Nancy turning to see a funny little robot guy literally cough up a new clue and piddle out a little rhyming riddle to hunt down the next piece of this deeply sad trauma puzzle feels deeply inappropriate. Like yeah man it IS super funny but this is the one moment in the game I don’t want to be laughing?
Although these are my only REAL complaints with this one they do feel big enough to sour what is otherwise a perfectly fun Nancy Drew Cyber Adventure. The amusement park (which is not even slightly haunted and nobody acts like it is so the title of this game is a fuckin TEASE AND A HALF) is a cute setting that lends itself really well to puzzles and I think they make the most of it. Plenty of fucking around with rides, going behind the scenes, working in the offices, playing minigames based on attractions around the park; everything you would want to see out of this kind of setting is here.
The characters are all pretty good too, if a little underwritten. This game is a little shorter than the last few have been, and leans more heavily on puzzles than narrative, but it also has the most characters to speak with of any of the games so far and I think the surplus of content crammed into a barely two hour runtime really shows. I do like everyone. Joy is obviously the one with the most meat on her bones, but I also really enjoy the very sensitive jersey accented beefcake security guard Harlan and the person who turns out to be the villain, who is not a particularly deep or interesting character but who is lifted up by a much higher-than-usual-quality performance for these games by their voice actor.
Also I’m starting a new segment that I expect will recur at the end of many of these reviews moving forward called Nancy Drew Cop Watch, to catalogue all the times Nancy needlessly acts like a huge asshole cop for no reason when she could just leave the fuck alone and be cool instead.
Today she finds out that Harlan the security guard used to be incarcerated when she accidentally contacts someone who turns out to be a parole officer, and immediately runs to his boss to tattle on him, framing it as “disturbing information.” When his boss is like “yeah I know I hired him anyway he’s cool he told me up front and I trust him” Nancy STILL tries to finger him for some extremely petty harmless shit he did to get him in trouble, JUST because she doesn’t trust him for being in jail when he was younger! He gets mad and won’t talk to her for a while, and then later, HE apologizes to HER for getting mad about this!
Additionally she finds out that Ingrid the engineer is doing an actual criminal act of stealing the park’s roller coaster blueprints and giving them to her friend to copy so they can make their own roller coaster out of them but Nancy doesn’t care about this, presumably because Ingrid is not already a felon, who knows, she contains multitudes.
So anyway I am impressed that this series continues to press up against the edges of the kinds of subject matter they want to try to tackle, and that despite not doing it in the MOST graceful ways, the stories they try to tell so far have been pretty respectful and not really embarrassing. It’s a better track record than any AAA game series I can think of, and I look forward to them continuing to broaden their horizons.
PREVIOUSLY: GHOST DOGS OF MOON LAKE
NEXT TIME: DANGER ON DECEPTION ISLAND
ALL NANCY DREW PIECES
At the end of my last review I was wondering what these games might look like in a post-9/11 world, what their political ambitions might be, whether the steadily increasing fire that had been building in the belly of this series for four games in a row would continue to grow or be stifled by the sudden weight of America in those months and years of cultural transformation following the event. If you’re new to my Nancy Drew project I promise that this makes sense to ask about these games, but it won’t seem like it based on everything we’re about to talk about because the answer is no this game is Not About Anything so hard that at first I was thinking wow this is kind of nice, kind of refreshing to just have a chill cozy mystery, but by the end I think I have settled on this being firmly at the bottom of the barrel.
Nancy’s got a friend named Sally who bought a remote cabin that used to be owned by Fake Al Capone on a lake on the edge of a nature preserve, with nobody around for several miles except the local ranger, a weird old man obsessed with bird watching, and the woman who runs the small store on the other side of the lake. Unfortunately for Sally, who was really looking forward to fixing up this old rotting lake house and doing photography there or something, it’s haunted by the ghosts of Malone’s four dogs who attack her every night! Well, they kind of run around in her yard and then get up by the window and bark a little bit and then leave every night, but that’s scary enough for Sally to freak out and leave AFTER calling Nancy in to help her look into it, so it’s up to Nancy to figure this shit out on her own, of course.
Sounds like a cool setup for a creepy campfire sort of mystery, right? But the reality of the game is anything but frightening. This game, like most of the prior ones, heavily features a day/night cycle that you control by adjusting the time of day in your bedroom, but despite the premise of the game involving near-nightly attacks by the titular ghost dogs, they only make one, comically unthreatening appearance on Nancy’s first or second night there and never again, no matter how many times you find yourself needing to swap the times because x character only shows up at night or y bird you need a picture of will only appear on this particular branch between 4 and 6 AM.
There’s a feeling that this game was an attempt by Her Interactive to give the impression of stretching their legs a bit after pretty much only setting their games in relatively restrictive urban and domestic environments. This is easily the largest map in the series to date and the Great Outdoorsiness of the main chunk of it is deceptively impressive at first glance, until you realize that it’s mostly taken up by very long paths to and from an actually smaller number of areas than is usual for these games plus a large forest maze that you will return too TOO MANY TIMES over the course of SEVERAL quests in search of MULTIPLE different species of animals. During this game you will track down dogs, bugs, and birds almost entirely in place of clues, which mostly just kind of fall into Nancy’s lap by chance right at the end of the game where the bulk of the actual puzzle solving is done, after two hours of rote busywork and fetch questing.
These puzzles are, to their credit, related to this game’s historical curiosity, What If We Made Up A Fake Al Capone But He Was Obsessed With Dogs And Also Obtuse Puzzles which is actually a great character idea that goes sorely underutilized, and I think once you do literally get his 100-year-old ex-girlfriend to mail you the key to his secret speakeasy so you can start actually working on the plot of the game IMMEDIATELY before the game ends things really pick up, and the climax is good and fun! It’s a very stimulating 15 minutes, and the villain of this one is pretty fun. Terrible game that I hate, nothing interesting happening, but it goes out on a high note, I’ll give it that.
At some point they started putting teasers at the end of these games for the next release and in a bold move they are doing two Haunted Whatever ones in a row so HOPEFULLY “haunted amusement park” will turn out better than “haunted secret lakeside basement gambling den and also the ghosts are dogs” which is something that fucking sucks to have to say, but, it almost couldn’t be worse!
PREVIOUSLY: SECRET OF THE SCARLET HAND
NEXT TIME: THE HAUNTED CAROUSEL
ALL NANCY DREW PIECES
Nancy’s got a friend named Sally who bought a remote cabin that used to be owned by Fake Al Capone on a lake on the edge of a nature preserve, with nobody around for several miles except the local ranger, a weird old man obsessed with bird watching, and the woman who runs the small store on the other side of the lake. Unfortunately for Sally, who was really looking forward to fixing up this old rotting lake house and doing photography there or something, it’s haunted by the ghosts of Malone’s four dogs who attack her every night! Well, they kind of run around in her yard and then get up by the window and bark a little bit and then leave every night, but that’s scary enough for Sally to freak out and leave AFTER calling Nancy in to help her look into it, so it’s up to Nancy to figure this shit out on her own, of course.
Sounds like a cool setup for a creepy campfire sort of mystery, right? But the reality of the game is anything but frightening. This game, like most of the prior ones, heavily features a day/night cycle that you control by adjusting the time of day in your bedroom, but despite the premise of the game involving near-nightly attacks by the titular ghost dogs, they only make one, comically unthreatening appearance on Nancy’s first or second night there and never again, no matter how many times you find yourself needing to swap the times because x character only shows up at night or y bird you need a picture of will only appear on this particular branch between 4 and 6 AM.
There’s a feeling that this game was an attempt by Her Interactive to give the impression of stretching their legs a bit after pretty much only setting their games in relatively restrictive urban and domestic environments. This is easily the largest map in the series to date and the Great Outdoorsiness of the main chunk of it is deceptively impressive at first glance, until you realize that it’s mostly taken up by very long paths to and from an actually smaller number of areas than is usual for these games plus a large forest maze that you will return too TOO MANY TIMES over the course of SEVERAL quests in search of MULTIPLE different species of animals. During this game you will track down dogs, bugs, and birds almost entirely in place of clues, which mostly just kind of fall into Nancy’s lap by chance right at the end of the game where the bulk of the actual puzzle solving is done, after two hours of rote busywork and fetch questing.
These puzzles are, to their credit, related to this game’s historical curiosity, What If We Made Up A Fake Al Capone But He Was Obsessed With Dogs And Also Obtuse Puzzles which is actually a great character idea that goes sorely underutilized, and I think once you do literally get his 100-year-old ex-girlfriend to mail you the key to his secret speakeasy so you can start actually working on the plot of the game IMMEDIATELY before the game ends things really pick up, and the climax is good and fun! It’s a very stimulating 15 minutes, and the villain of this one is pretty fun. Terrible game that I hate, nothing interesting happening, but it goes out on a high note, I’ll give it that.
At some point they started putting teasers at the end of these games for the next release and in a bold move they are doing two Haunted Whatever ones in a row so HOPEFULLY “haunted amusement park” will turn out better than “haunted secret lakeside basement gambling den and also the ghosts are dogs” which is something that fucking sucks to have to say, but, it almost couldn’t be worse!
PREVIOUSLY: SECRET OF THE SCARLET HAND
NEXT TIME: THE HAUNTED CAROUSEL
ALL NANCY DREW PIECES
the premise of nancy drew: the secret of the scarlet hand is that nancy’s wealthy and powerful father has pulled strings with a personal friend on the board of directors to get nancy an internship as the deputy curator of a prestigious washington DC museum entirely based on her fleeting curiosity about how archaeologists and historians do their jobs, and in doing so presumably takes an extremely valuable learning opportunity/resume builder from someone who actually wants to work in the field or any adjacent one.
the beech hill museum is currently closed, nearly ready to open an museum-wide exhibition on Mayan culture. nancy’s first task as deputy curator is to go down to the Mexican consulate and have one of the ambassadors there sign some paperwork for the exhibit. after nancy greets this man, Alejandro, with an extremely condescending “BWAYNOSE DEEYEZ, MAY YAHHMO NANCY DREW” he jokes that she must be the museum’s newest pirate, and when nancy is offended by this, he must explain what colonialism is to her. when she says well hey man that was hundreds of years ago idk what you’re so mad about he must also explain to her what museums actually do and how they get their shit. nancy’s response to having the united states’ and many other mostly European countries’ ongoing systematic dismantling of dozens of other countries’ histories and cultures for profit, almost always at the additional violent expense of their peoples revealed is to say “i see, well, i need you to sign this new loan agreement that’s been edited by the museum so they’re only gonna pay your government 1 million dollars instead of 5 million for the monolith they stole from you now.”
this is the eternal push and pull of the politics of this game, and i suspect it will be for all of them, when they choose to engage in such overtly political topics as this. it’s clear that someone on the dev team really cares about this issue; we get REALLY nitty gritty on some of this shit like, edutainment game levels of detailed about some of the processes of the legal and political sides of archaeology, like the duties of government representatives in the transfer processes, the roles provenance documents play in the lives of curators, dealers, and excavators, and how basically none of these rules apply to you if you’re from the united states and you have enough money or clout to get the government to be on your side, because on what level is Mexico gonna pick a fight with you at that point and win? this stuff is all in the game and it’s all clearly Bad right like nobody is on the side of the scummy art dealer who unsurprisingly turns out to be the villain and tries to murder nancy in a VERY FUNNY turn towards maybe the single most horrific thing that’s happened in any of these games so far after two and a half hours of, basically, shenanigans (most of this game involved helping a guy recover from amnesia after he falls down a staircase that is like three steps big and bonks his head and I’m not kidding).
at the same time though the only way they either know how to communicate this stuff or were allowed to sneak it in there is by having it explained to nancy by other people, which has the side effect of framing nancy as the most defensive liberal white asshole imaginable. she’s always going to bat for the worst takes so someone can explain the good opinion to her, and either because she can never express an opinion considered to be Overt Politics or she’s supposed to be something of a blank slate (i suspect it’s more the former?) she never ends up disagreeing with an argument or ceding any ground. she just says or implies that she thinks awful things and then never reassesses in either direction.
and to some degree this is fine, i think it IS just part of nancy’s character at this point that she just desperately dreams of that harris/buttigieg 2024 ticket, it’s just who she is. where i start to chafe, and where these games are ultimately held back is that their overall worldview always warps to accommodate her too. see, it turns out at the end of the game that working with the shitty art dealer was the museum curator’s only real crime, she said she was sorry and now everything with her is good! the US government is actually happy to cooperate with the Mexican government in their archaeological work, AND to compensate them fairly! the entire museum industry and the culture it has created and the systems that support it aren’t evil after all, it was all literally just this one bad guy making everything fucked up in this particular scenario! probably there are some other individual bad guys doing shit like this but it sure seems like colonial oppression is a thing of the distant past after all.
of course, we know better, we don’t need media to tell us what our political beliefs should be or to be our sources of information on the ills of the world. but it’s frustrating to see these games be so bold and tackle such thorny themes head on only to waffle them at the finish line, especially when this one had been so successful until then. then again i’m like, pretty sure these games are for twelve-year-olds? AND this came out in August of 2002 so honestly the fact that it’s even willing to be as critical of US government structures as it is in a post-9/11 cultural climate is a minor miracle.
oh, extra half star for being the first one the hardy boys have been in, i know even less about them than i do nancy drew but they are also famous
PREVIOUSLY: THE FINAL SCENE
NEXT TIME: GHOST DOGS OF MOON LAKE
ALL NANCY DREW PIECES
the beech hill museum is currently closed, nearly ready to open an museum-wide exhibition on Mayan culture. nancy’s first task as deputy curator is to go down to the Mexican consulate and have one of the ambassadors there sign some paperwork for the exhibit. after nancy greets this man, Alejandro, with an extremely condescending “BWAYNOSE DEEYEZ, MAY YAHHMO NANCY DREW” he jokes that she must be the museum’s newest pirate, and when nancy is offended by this, he must explain what colonialism is to her. when she says well hey man that was hundreds of years ago idk what you’re so mad about he must also explain to her what museums actually do and how they get their shit. nancy’s response to having the united states’ and many other mostly European countries’ ongoing systematic dismantling of dozens of other countries’ histories and cultures for profit, almost always at the additional violent expense of their peoples revealed is to say “i see, well, i need you to sign this new loan agreement that’s been edited by the museum so they’re only gonna pay your government 1 million dollars instead of 5 million for the monolith they stole from you now.”
this is the eternal push and pull of the politics of this game, and i suspect it will be for all of them, when they choose to engage in such overtly political topics as this. it’s clear that someone on the dev team really cares about this issue; we get REALLY nitty gritty on some of this shit like, edutainment game levels of detailed about some of the processes of the legal and political sides of archaeology, like the duties of government representatives in the transfer processes, the roles provenance documents play in the lives of curators, dealers, and excavators, and how basically none of these rules apply to you if you’re from the united states and you have enough money or clout to get the government to be on your side, because on what level is Mexico gonna pick a fight with you at that point and win? this stuff is all in the game and it’s all clearly Bad right like nobody is on the side of the scummy art dealer who unsurprisingly turns out to be the villain and tries to murder nancy in a VERY FUNNY turn towards maybe the single most horrific thing that’s happened in any of these games so far after two and a half hours of, basically, shenanigans (most of this game involved helping a guy recover from amnesia after he falls down a staircase that is like three steps big and bonks his head and I’m not kidding).
at the same time though the only way they either know how to communicate this stuff or were allowed to sneak it in there is by having it explained to nancy by other people, which has the side effect of framing nancy as the most defensive liberal white asshole imaginable. she’s always going to bat for the worst takes so someone can explain the good opinion to her, and either because she can never express an opinion considered to be Overt Politics or she’s supposed to be something of a blank slate (i suspect it’s more the former?) she never ends up disagreeing with an argument or ceding any ground. she just says or implies that she thinks awful things and then never reassesses in either direction.
and to some degree this is fine, i think it IS just part of nancy’s character at this point that she just desperately dreams of that harris/buttigieg 2024 ticket, it’s just who she is. where i start to chafe, and where these games are ultimately held back is that their overall worldview always warps to accommodate her too. see, it turns out at the end of the game that working with the shitty art dealer was the museum curator’s only real crime, she said she was sorry and now everything with her is good! the US government is actually happy to cooperate with the Mexican government in their archaeological work, AND to compensate them fairly! the entire museum industry and the culture it has created and the systems that support it aren’t evil after all, it was all literally just this one bad guy making everything fucked up in this particular scenario! probably there are some other individual bad guys doing shit like this but it sure seems like colonial oppression is a thing of the distant past after all.
of course, we know better, we don’t need media to tell us what our political beliefs should be or to be our sources of information on the ills of the world. but it’s frustrating to see these games be so bold and tackle such thorny themes head on only to waffle them at the finish line, especially when this one had been so successful until then. then again i’m like, pretty sure these games are for twelve-year-olds? AND this came out in August of 2002 so honestly the fact that it’s even willing to be as critical of US government structures as it is in a post-9/11 cultural climate is a minor miracle.
oh, extra half star for being the first one the hardy boys have been in, i know even less about them than i do nancy drew but they are also famous
PREVIOUSLY: THE FINAL SCENE
NEXT TIME: GHOST DOGS OF MOON LAKE
ALL NANCY DREW PIECES
it’s just, pure joy
1992
protoman is certainly not the only character with nothing to him who became extremely popular only by looking cool but he might be the funniest? dude is just not in these games but we all love him. and rightfully so! look at him! he rules! i love protoman!
and i love mega man 5? this one is sick idk what everybody else is talking about??? i mean sure idk that anything here is series high outside of the visuals (this is easily one of the best looking NES games i've ever seen), but it's really consistent, which i think is fffffffine.
people say the mega buster is too powerful in this game and this is true but i would prefer that to weapons being underpowered and bad-feeling, which has been the case in previous games. i think the boss weapons are pretty good too, another consistent spread, maybe my favorite in the series so far. we're definitely at a point in this series where it's hard to come up with new stuff, and there's a mix of old standbys and fresh shit that uhhhh, well, some are better than others, but a valiant effort for this deep in the series.
anyway this game is unfairly maligned i think, i had a great time. it's got fuckin charge man dude! charge man rules. you see that guy? get outta town. love charge man.
and i love mega man 5? this one is sick idk what everybody else is talking about??? i mean sure idk that anything here is series high outside of the visuals (this is easily one of the best looking NES games i've ever seen), but it's really consistent, which i think is fffffffine.
people say the mega buster is too powerful in this game and this is true but i would prefer that to weapons being underpowered and bad-feeling, which has been the case in previous games. i think the boss weapons are pretty good too, another consistent spread, maybe my favorite in the series so far. we're definitely at a point in this series where it's hard to come up with new stuff, and there's a mix of old standbys and fresh shit that uhhhh, well, some are better than others, but a valiant effort for this deep in the series.
anyway this game is unfairly maligned i think, i had a great time. it's got fuckin charge man dude! charge man rules. you see that guy? get outta town. love charge man.