Yes, I played the whole thing. All 4 endings. Having played it now, I'm totally unsurprised at the positive reception here (and on the broader internet) due to being written halfway-decently moment to moment, but man, y'all got fuckin psyopped into thinking a game about “fixing" an enby into being your doting submissive wife was good!

Ok, short review out of the way: Snoot Game is a parody/anti-fan-game of Goodbye Volcano High, a game which, as I am writing this review, is still a month or two off from release. GVH looks to be a story-driven graphic adventure game in the same indie niche as games like Night in the Woods and Life is Strange, and despite not being out, has earned quite a lot of ire from places on the net like 4chan. This revulsion is due to the fact... that it's a queer, furry, narrative-heavy game that showed up for a mere 1 minute and 35 seconds in some livestreamed PS5 showcase event. This bitter outrage and derision at something so mundane is nothing out of the ordinary for chanboards, but what followed was, at least in terms of scale.

Enter: Snoot Game. I’m not sure at what point in the development process they decided to focus on the de-transing and courting of Fang over making a “based” version of GVH, but in terms of playtime, this switch seems to happen somewhere about an hour or two into the game. This first section is pretty obviously terrible in a multitude of ways that’re impossible to ignore: the first line of text is a January 6th joke, which is followed up within a minute by the MC (named “Anon”) attempting to troll on a chanboard on his phone, there’s a teacher who speaks with a “comically” over the top Japanese accent (not pictured: the protagonist being like “huh? I can’t understand a single word this guy is saying…”). There is also a lot of blatant trans and enby-phobia on display in this section, from the protagonist accusing Fang of identifying as NB for attention to the constant mental misgendering of Fang with she/her pronouns (a trend which carries across pretty much the entire game, except for a short stint in one of the bad endings). Fang is shown as being short-tempered, rebellious, and is part of a band that sucks at playing music. Their bandmates and Fang’s only other friends at the school are a fentanyl addict, and a manipulative (rolls eyes) SJW Feminazi girl who goes around beating people up to let off her anger. This section also contains probably the single best “gotcha” moment against the writers of this game that I have ever seen within the span of only two textboxes, in the form of the MC complaining about the grammar of using singular “they” while also making two grammatical errors themselves within a single sentence.

But this section is just the opener and is, for the most part, the most spectacularly (read: obviously) bad Snoot Game gets. I think a lot of the people who shit on this game played or saw someone play this section, threw up their hands, and moved on. But not me! However, contrary to popular opinion that the rest of this game is “actually surprisingly heartwarming”, It’s also really bad, but in a much subtler and more insidious way.

There are lots of little things in which the game attempts to force you to accept its worldview to function. I already mentioned the internal monologue only referring to Fang with she/her, but as the story progresses, basically everyone in the game except the most "harmful influences" (Fang's 2 friends I mentioned earlier) switches to using she/her with no fanfare, including Fang's own brother. By the time you meet Fang’s parents everyone’s already switched to it, but they throw in the caveat of deadnaming Fang as well and reiterating that Fang is “just going through a phase” (something that the game later just tells you outright is true).

The sole SJW character from earlier, Trish, is probably the most blatantly propaganda-ish—she is also the only black-coded character, you know, just by happenstance (also Anon says she texts in “ebonics” in ending 1? which just doesn’t make any sense under the worldbuilding here, where species is just a substitute for race mostly? Very odd to fuck up your worldbuilding just to have your MC call something “ebonics”). In a particularly telling sequence of events, she pulls off a heist to embarrass Anon in front of everyone at school for the sole purpose of outcasting him from the band’s friend group, a tactic which succeeds at embarrassing Anon but fails at cleanly removing him from the friend group, as he takes Fang with him, something that Trish is shown at multiple points to be extremely angry about. This cements her (again, probably the only vaguely actively queer-positive main character left in the story at this point) as the “villain”, or at least, the single worst influence on Fang as a person.

There are 4 endings in Snoot Game (Spoilers from here on out! If you care about that, which you shouldn’t.), and only 2 in which Fang remains nonbinary. Of these endings, there is one where Fang shoots up the school, and the other leaves Fang (presumably) depressed, “looking like a junkie”, and with (gasp) tattoos, black lipstick, and a shaved head. During this second ending, which takes place 4 or 5 years after the events of most of the game, Anon thinks to himself that “I couldn’t save her (sic). Why would I save her? In her infinite talent can’t she see she’s a dump?”. Aside from the fact that all of Anon’s conclusions in ending 2 about Fang’s mental state are assumed to be true despite him having only seen them in passing at a restaurant (maybe Fang was just having a bad day or something, you never know), the only 2 endings which allow Fang to be nonbinary are also shown to be the “worst”. Take note of this!

In the other 2 endings, Fang switches back to using their old name (again, this is 4chan-written, so despite everyone else having birthnames like “Naser” and “Trish”, Fang’s birth name is “Lucy”. Real creative.) In these endings, Fang tells you something between that they were pretending to be nonbinary for attention, or that Trish drove them into it. (sidenote: Anon is able to switch almost instantly to calling Fang “Lucy” in both of these endings, despite only ever having known them as Fang. And yet switching names is simultaneously shown as something too confusing and hard for Fang’s parents to do. Interesting.) These are also the “best” endings. In one, Anon reunites with Fang years later and they have settled into a “motherly but still available” role helping out kids at the local church, so basically, the tradwife ending. And in the other one, and also the “best” ending in the game, Anon and Fang date for the rest of the year, break things off temporarily when Anon attends college, reunite after a time-skip and get married. Also, Fang is a schoolteacher in this one, which further reinforces the idea that for Fang to be happy, they need to not only detransition, but they need to take up the “traditionally female” role of being a caretaker. (Also, in one of the endings, you get the context that before Fang “started this whole non-binary deal” they were happier then too, so there’s another data point to correlate, I guess.)

Look—there’s nothing inherently wrong about writing a wish fulfillment romance story about a dominant and self-confident white guy finding his submissive caretaker white wife and living happily ever after. You do you bro. But there is something pretty fucky about presenting a traditional lifestyle as the ONLY path to happiness. And there’s something Extremely fucky about doing this by taking a queer character from someone else’s story, making your story about how de-transing them is the only way they can achieve happiness, and then releasing your story early in the hopes that your fanon interpretation supersedes whatever actually happens in the original source material.

But probably the most fucky is that a lot of this is subtextual and clearly is easily ignored by most, which allows its ideas to spread. Do not take me lightly by my saying that Snoot Game is propaganda, because it is. By word count, most of this game is just standard faire SoL wish fulfillment fantasy. Anon goes stargazing with Fang in one route, he goes to an aquarium with them in another. Normal shit. It’s just coupled with the added caveat of, you know, the whole arc of the game being dependent on the presumption of many of its characters that Fang’s trans-ness is just a phase, and that this presumption is ultimately proven correct. The shot is, (really, any number of bigotries, but most predominantly) transphobia and NB erasure, with SoL romance as a chaser. Again, really insidious shit.

This is why I feel uncomfortable giving this anything more than a 1/10. Snoot Game is generally paced well, has a lot of surprisingly decent music, and a lot of very well-done illustrations, but in service of what? Of fulfilling a delusional fantasy of “solving” someone’s trans-ness? Of spreading the idea that “if I just get them to fall in love with me, I can save them from their wicked ways (being queer)!” And of also spreading the idea that queer people are mentally ill and doomed to loneliness, lest they renounce their ways? Fuck riiiight off.

• this game is chef’s kiss. also it has so many good lines so most of this might just be my favorite ones, lmao.
• also, fun fact! there was an ipad version of this game that eventually got pulled from the app store.
• savannahsavannahsavannah.
• “i fell for her like a black tuesday banker. in the end, the landing was just as rough.”
• “i don’t speak ill of the dead, ‘specially not when they’re staring up at the soles of my boots.”
• “that’s pretty philosophical for a guy wearing boots.”
• why does nancy have the option to ask wade why he went to jail before she actually learns that information?
• “i’ve been running away from the next book, and an empty house that was fillin’ up with chatty ghosts. but who knows, when i’m out of gas maybe i’ll have no choice but to listen to what they have to say.”
• “they’ve dug so many graves on that rock that death himself is on the christmas card list.”
• why is colton so animated? 😭
• “that is just not going to happen since i made the mistake of having friends with personalities.”
• “i wanted to be her when i grew up. but then one day i was older than my older sister, and older still today.”
• overall i really love this game. ; this is the first spooky one since shadow at the water’s edge, and the story of a family destroyed by decades of tragedy was well done and kept my attention the whole way through.
• i wasn’t a huge fan of a majority of the puzzles, but some were easy enough that i was able to complete without the hint system.
• also this game might be the best one in terms of dialogue. ; the characters were fun to listen to and never once did they make me want to use the newly added conversation skip feature.

• nothing like starting things off with a bang! … sorry, couldn’t resist.
• why did they call themselves team danger when they could’ve been the clue crew? it’s right there!
• “i don’t know if i can even get calls in here.” meanwhile all of her friends are able to call her.
• are you even a nancy drew fan if you don’t sit and eat every flavor on the menu at scoop?
• ned’s a real one for not wanting to flirt with deirdre at first, even though it was important to the investigation. <3
• “aren’t you worried about seeing justice done?” “no, i’m a reporter.” oof.
• alexei’s story is so interesting, i would’ve killed to see him in another game.
• all the easter eggs in this one from previous games, namely the phone backgrounds all being covers for the twenty-four other games in the series at that point in time, is so cool.
• i kinda hate how later into the games you get the less descriptive and thorough the task list becomes. :/ maybe that’s just me but i’m dumb and forget what i’m supposed to be doing at times.
• childhood me thought in fifty years the company would reveal what nancy put in the time capsule, similar to what they did for zoey 101. ; how do i tell younger me that the company stopped making regular games and likely won’t be around long enough to do it?
• seeing how much you spent on ice cream at scoop is a cute touch.
• honestly didn’t type much for this post while i was playing because i was high and my husband kept talking in his sleep and knocking my laptop with his long ass legs. 😭
• ANYWHO! overall this is a very homey game, and is surprisingly unapologetic in the way it speaks about politics and justice. ; three of the suspects will outright tell you that those in politics are corrupt, that true justice is rarely important to those in charge, and how everyone is ultimately out for themselves. it’s very well done, especially for a company who’s had several blunders over the years regarding sensitive topics.
• also, exploring a town quickly turning on the heroine they once showered with love and adoration the second she’s accused of something heinous? fascinating.

It’s interesting to find that as we enter a new, what I assume to be essentially final era for the Her Interactive Nancy Drew series, with the slight graphical refresh and completely overhauled UI that goes along with those shifts, Tomb of the Lost Queen spends a lot of time looking back instead of forward. It’s not weird for this series to look back, like, to the past (that’s kind of the whole thing we do around here) but it IS unusual for a game to be in such direct conversation with a previous entry in the series, Secret of the Scarlet Hand. Both games concern themselves with the museum industrial complex, and both games feature Nancy clumsily and indefensibly insulting brown people whose cultures she’s actively participating in the looting of while acting incredibly skeptical of their entirely, factually correct grievances with her organization of the week. Where Scarlet Hand was a stateside story about the inner workings of the museum system, however, Tomb of the Lost Queen centers directly on the archaeological process at a fictional dig site in Egypt (although in an echo of Treasure in the Royal Tower, this fictional tomb contains a very real and famous historical figure in it lol, but they don’t make up a revisionist backstory for her this time so it’s a lot less weird).

And “Nancy is in Egypt at a dig site” is kind of all you get going into it, which is a jarring change of pace after twenty-five entries of booting the game up to a cute little intro or case file to set up the proceedings. Instead there’s an ominous introductory monologue from Nancy about the last crew who came to check out this tomb decades ago all died mysteriously, and then a cutscene of a sandstorm ravaging the dig site and injuring the lead of the American team there. Only it turns out that Jon wasn’t just fucked up by the storm, he was ATTACKED in the commotion of the storm. So most of the crew is gone, leaving only the uptight and secretive American PhD student Lilly, famous and abrasive Egyptologist Abdullah, who is himself Egyptian and in fact the government liaison to this largely American team, and Nancy herself. Now Nancy is left to at first just do some work without getting in trouble with either of these strong personalities before the dig inevitably gets shut down because of the serious injury sustained there, as everyone has a feeling this tomb is the true resting place of Famously Missing Real Life Egyptian Queen Nefertari.

The thing is, none of this is really told to you? You kind of have to just go by the context of the dialogue, get all this information out of these guys as you go, because without the usual framing device and with the story starting in media res, you’re really thrown into a scenario that is not particularly urgent for what feels like not a lot of reason. What we have then is one of the more freeform Nancy Drews in structure, similar to (but imo much more successful than) Curse of Blackmoor Manor, where you have essentially all of the tomb that you’ve opened available to you at all times along with usually more than one ongoing puzzle or series of puzzles that you can kind of work through at your leisure with some degree of nonlinear progression. There are still key moments that flag big status quo changes, but there is certainly less overt direction on what to do next and little urgency to Nancy’s travails. This is because the threat is more subtle than usual. The acts of villainy in this game that are physically violent are all attributed to a supposed Mummy’s Curse, and no one is making explicit threats, but this is a rare Nancy Drew game where the answer to “whodunnit” ends up being a combination of basically everybody? To greater and lesser degrees. There is one ultimate culprit who goes to jail at the end, but for the most part this is a game about building suspense and suspicion, and I think it might be the single most successful Nancy Drew game in that regard.

Around a third of the way through the game, once you’ve hit the first big event flag, the cast is completed when two new people just kind of suspiciously Show Up at the dig site, Ancient Aliens Fanatic Jamil and Suave Tour Guide Dylan, both of whose stories are immediately, obviously suspicious. Dylan is fine, okay, he’s a charming enough red herring character who is taken out of the action first in the game to make the Supposed Curse seem more dangerous.

Jamila is where I start to sweat a little bit. The ancient aliens stuff is not as bad as it could be, I think, because while the game doesn’t grapple even slightly with that fact that every single one of those conspiracies is rooted in intentionally manufactured racist lines of thought predicated on the idea that nonwhite people and for some reason only nonwhite people could not possibly have made big architectural or technological strides without outside intervention, I didn’t really expect it to? That’s pretty explicitly political stuff to get into for these games, and they do not usually think that hard or do a lot of research when they’re trend chasing, which I assume was happening here. They also specify that their stupid made up alien conspiracy (peddled by Until Now Joke Easter Egg Character Sunny Joon whose increasing prominence worries me as someone who finds his bits painfully unfunny) does not involve aliens literally building the pyramids, only uplifting humanity and inspiring them to do it? Which I don’t really think is much better honestly.

The clincher for Jamila though is her true motive for being at the dig site: she is a member of a cult of Egyptian women that has existed for thousands and thousands of years, passed from mother to daughter, who are sworn to the service of Ramses II and whose mission is to find and protect Nefertari’s mummy. Despite thinking this group she’s in is stupid she is willing to both die and kill for it – there is a light implication that if she tries to cut and run she will be killed by her sworn sisters. I just don’t understand what we’re really going for here beyond adding some vague mysticism to the proceedings? It’s goofy, it’s outlandish. She already hates Abdullah, she already has proof that he’s been planting artifacts he already owned in his dig sites to make his career more prestigious and exciting, and her ending has her happily working with Jon, the same man she would ostensibly have also tried to murder had he been present for the events of the game. It’s all just a little much, for me.

Abdullah is his own can of worms. As the resident Guy From The Country We’re In Who Is Rightfully Mad About What America Is Doing Here he is obviously treated like a crazy person by Nancy, and his portrayal as a blustering, buffoonish guy doesn’t help the dignity of his arguments. But his perhaps overacted dialogue prompts are the only place in the game where you’re offered the perspective that not only are the governments of the countries that fund these digs often doing so with irreputable motives, but that the tourism industry that has sprang up around them has also done irreparable harm to Egypt’s cultural legacy by actively, physically destroying it with their millions and millions of feet and breaths inside fragile ancient tombs and eagerness to steal small souvenirs, again by what adds up to the millions. Looting by degrees.

All of this is equivocated though, in the game’s eyes, because Abdullah is in fact Our Guy, he’s playing on fears of the curse to freak people out, he attacked Jon, he has faked a lot of his career successes, at the end of the game he tries to kill Nancy and Lilly (who is also an attempted murderer by the end of this game but who suffers zero consequences for that hmm weird). He’s a criminal! He’s gotta go to jail! Bye! This is not new right, this happens all the time in these games. It’s not reasonable either to expect Nancy Drew, Collegiate Detective to be able to address structural problems like this. It is interesting, though, how often those problems seem to be understood by the developers of the game and even presented within the game – often by people who turn out to be, within the game’s moral purview, Bad. And if that is what we’re bent on doing than these things should at least be motivators, they should be the thing that the game is ultimately About, they should be at the center of it. Instead Abdullah just wants to be more famous than he is; he’s the most successful guy in his field, everyone says so, but he wants to be a CELEBRITY archaeologist, and I guess he just wants full credit for this discovery? It’s kind of unclear, I never got a moment where he actually explained himself. It’s messy.

The actual good reasons he might have wanted to get rid of the Americans, even if he ultimately profited as well, or was otherwise morally compromised (Dylan, for example, is working for some black market people to scope out the tomb before he’s taken out of the game, but is ultimately portrayed as a sympathetic guy). The best Nancy Drew games understand this or even stumble into strong thematic cores by accident. But Tomb of the Lost Queen, like many other lesser entries in this series, is left with something much worse at its center:

Nothing at all.

PREVIOUSLY: ALIBI IN ASHES
NEXT TIME: THE DEADLY DEVICE

ALL NANCY DREW PIECES

• rest in peace to the case file openings. :( truly a lost era.
• i love when they include callbacks to old games.
• i thank the gods of her interactive for the quick translate button.
• fun fact: i only used the quick translate button once, lmao.
• “with that amount of swagger, you’d think he invented sand.”
• “long distance burn, jazz guy.”
• professor hotchkiss is such a fun character, i love it when they bring her back.
• how does nancy not bust her skull trying to hop across those columns?
• overall? i don’t know man… i feel like we as humans need to leave ancient artifacts and mummies and so on in their final resting places, and that we need to stop acting like we know what’s best.
• the puzzles were okay, but i found myself referring to the uhs walkthrough a lot.
• also this game, much like the creature of kapu cave, has plot points that are easily skipped if you aren’t careful, which is never fun.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PREVIOUSLY: SHADOW AT THE WATER'S EDGE
NEXT TIME: ALIBI IN ASHES

ALL NANCY DREW PIECES

• i wanna start this off by saying that i love this game so much and i have such fond memories playing it as a kid.
• frank and nancy forever. ned deserves better by the way.
• i hated raid as a kid but i love it as an adult.
• why am i able to remove a key from a painting with karl in his office? 😵‍💫
• anja is for the girls.
• i need to know the mechanics of the snack machine in this game. ; where is it all stored, is it fresh, how do you keep it all nice and warm?
• markus = sacha baron cohen.
• so renate can call me a liar but when i do it back she gets mad?
• the owl book feels mildly offensive.
• “maybe one day we’ll work together on a case.” “it’d be nice to stumble across a nice mystery now and again.” the foreshadowing in these games can be so good sometimes.
• “thanks for being such a good friend.” “no problem. it’s… good to see you two back together.” FRANCY FRANCY FRANCY.
• “ask us about our wizard discount.” “oh i’m sorry, that’s been discontinued.”
• me listening to the villain explain their reasoning: honestly… i understand.
• okay but how did the villain in this one get so much time behind bars? they didn’t really do anything that catastrophic, and compared to villains of games past this seems a little excessive.
• did we ever get our special surprise?
• overall i think this is such a good game, but that might be because it’s so nostalgic for me.

No matter how deep we get into this series and how many settings we explore there’s one thing Her Interactive will never be able to resist for long, and that’s spooky Rich People Houses. Could be a gothic mansion, or a Victorian castle, or a Victorian MANSION, or an IRISH castle, or a haunted TOWER, doesn’t matter. Every two or three of these they find a way to get back to old, stuffy hallways with elegant wall art, hidden passages, kooky old owners with an inevitably valuable cryptic secret, and lots of room for unsettling creaking noises and trembling shadows leaking in from the windows. And frankly, I applaud them for it. I’ve always said that the art direction and environmental design is the standout element of this series and I’ve also consistently felt that they’re at their best when they’re leaning into the low-key horror elements that are always going to be present in these kinds of locations. Imagine my excitement then when, after an exhaustingly disappointing foray into the Dossier subseries, my first game back with mainline Nancy Drew is set in an old, prestigious, all-girls East Coast boarding school with strong historical ties to Edgar Allan Poe, of all people. Do they lean into this, you may ask me, NAIVELY? Let’s just say that the final puzzle of this game is on a timer, and the timer is Nancy’s impending death at the hands of a fellow student, who has activated a giant pendulum blade trap to decapitate her. IN OTHER WORDS this game FUCKING RIPS.

So there’s this fancy school, right, and kids there are getting absolutely fucked up. There’s this person who is PROBABLY another student, going by the moniker The Black Cat, who leaves threatening notes targeting girls who are in the running to be valedictorian. The first note is always a warning, but if you get a second note, usually a few days later, that always indicates you’re about to run afoul of some kind of specifically targeted event. These aren’t just pranks or standard bullying either, but full on assault - one student is poisoned with nuts she’s severely allergic to and has to be hospitalized; another who suffers from claustrophobia (like, real claustrophobia) is trapped in a very small closet overnight and comes out of the experience scarred. The atmosphere is tense, parents are ready to pull kids out of school, and the most recent victim’s mother is threatening a lawsuit if something isn’t done QUICKLY; so obviously the headmistress gets in touch with TEEN SLEUTH NANCY DREW to go undercover under an alias over winter break to cozy up with the smart kids in the valedictorian dorm and identify The Black Cat before the second term gets started.

Before we really dig into the game I just gotta get something out of the way here: Waverly Academy is the kind of high school that indie directors in the 90s made movies that would accidentally become lesbian cultural touchstones, and then indie directors in the late 90s and early 2000s would purposely make gay movies about, and that turn people trans years before they realize this. The word “sapphic” exists to describe Waverly Academy. If the team at Her Interactive didn’t know what they were doing with the very specific tropes and archetypes they were deploying in this game then this is way funnier than it already is because almost every character you meet is like a laser sharpened gay girl catnip cliché, it’s incredible. Now listen I’m queer, and I almost exclusively associate with people who are women or gender-nonconforming, and almost all of those people are also queer, so maybe my perspective is skewed, that’s possible, I’ll concede that. But I also feel like we are the experts in Types of Girls and there are so many of them here it’s SO funny. How many fifteen-year-olds did Her accidentally make gay here? It’s gotta be like, a notable percentage. HAS to be. Okay.

So this game is an interesting beast because it’s not like…I wouldn’t say that the part where you PLAY it is really hitting the gas in any real way. The puzzles aren’t anything to write home about but there’s only one that really had me going damn I wish this wasn’t here which is like, much better than usual for these. Some classic Nancy Drew stuff makes a comeback here like managing a day/night cycle to solve certain puzzles, and this marks the unexpected return of a much-refined version of Ghost Dogs of Moon Lake’s photography system. Everything just kind of proceeds very smoothly in Waverly Academy which I think is one of its strengths. This is an all atmosphere, all characters Nancy Drew the likes of which I feel has been absent from the series for a long time. A more objective hand might say this means the game is unbalanced but I prefer this for this game. This is a compelling cast with a fun central mystery, and even though that mystery doesn’t really feel like it’s taking center stage, and you do a lot of meandering, getting caught up in the very heightened intensity of the lives of these isolated, unhinged teens who can’t see anything past the confines of their very small, incestuous world (more than normal teens, even) is more than good enough for me.

So you have your awkward roommate who is kind of a bitch but maybe not on purpose but definitely on purpose because she is very very obviously the Black Cat from the very first conversation you have with her; goth teen who is nice; sporty teen who is also basically nice; student body president teen who is a huge bitch; and meek friendly teen who IS meek and friendly but is also doing a Her Story (if you know you know lmao). These guys are all great. I love every single one of them, and they sell this insular world where failing a test and falling out of the race for valedictorian, and getting a death threat, and stealing somebody’s shitty boyfriend who looks like 2010 Justin Bieber but wearing a bowling shirt (incredible) are all the same level of important, and they do it MOOOOOSTLY without leaning on too many LOL TEEN GIRLS AMIRITE comments.

This is a game that mostly takes being a young adult seriously and treats them and their problems with the same degree of respect that it treats any other characters in any other game. Even beyond the obvious contempt that we as a society hold for women (and particularly women around the age of those depicted in this game), I think there’s an additional impulse a lot of the time to dismiss the real anxieties and travails of teens as unimportant, frivolous, and transient. “You have the rest of your life ahead of you” type stuff. And that’s true to some extent, sure; it can be hard to see past stuff when you’re 17 and your world is small and your experiences are limited. But that doesn’t make it NOT shitty when your boyfriend treats you like garbage and you live with the person he cheated on you with, who is not sympathetic at all. The money issues you have thinking about college aren’t gonna go away, they’re gonna get more complex and harder to deal with. This is a game that, on some level, understands that. It takes these kids seriously and treats their problems like they’re real, even the ones that aren’t life and death, and I appreciate that.

It does suck a little bit that Waverly Academy is one of the sleeker, more compact entries in this late stage Nancy Drew Cyberverse, because it does feel like there could be more here. The Intense East Coast Boarding School With Dark Secrets is such rich setting and it does feel like Her was trying to stuff every associated trope into the game regardless of how much time they could spend on it or how well it fit into the narrative. Not the ONLY example of this but by FAR the most egregious is the Blackwood Society, a group of witchy, cloaked figures that Nancy spies on doing a midnight ritual on the school grounds one night who appear in exactly one scene and have literally no bearing on the plot. When you identify one of the members and say hey what the fuck is going on with that she says “shut the fuck up” and other than using it for one small clue later in the game it just doesn’t come up again. It’s wild.

But that’s a small quibble – when my biggest complaint is that there were too many cool bits in the game that I felt should have gotten more screentime, I feel like that’s a solid win for Nancy Drew, lmao. Perhaps the bar is low, but I do think this is a case where a game has an innate charm that, for me at least, leaves me feeling really positive about a work that may end up being greater than the sum of its parts.

PREVIOUSLY: NANCY DREW DOSSIER: RESORTING TO DANGER
NEXT TIME: TRAIL OF THE TWISTER

ALL NANCY DREW PIECES