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

It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that my (slight) discomfort when playing the Sims comes from the fact that I constantly boot it up expecting a different experience than the developers are willing to provide. The Sims contains a truly insane range of activities, hobbies, etc. that you probably wish you had the time/money to master IRL - as things are in the Sims 4 right now, you could go to your day job (President of whatever country this is), come home, learn how to bring a ghost back to life, go skiing, build a relationship with your pet llama, and write a hit song before you have to go to work again the next day. Honestly, it's kinda rad! I like that there's a huge variety of things for your Sims to dabble in and improve at. It's nice hopping between activities and watching your Sim grow, watching them rack up a truly silly number of life achievements. Despite this, playing the Sims feels like I'm constantly speedrunning activities and careers without really getting to enjoy any of them, and it took playing Project Zomboid and a couple major Sims mods to understand why.

The Sims games are very good at simulating social interactions, to the point where just clicking someone and selecting "Friendly" gives you a downright overwhelming number of conversation choices, from telling knock-knock jokes, to trying to console them, to just unloading on the poor fucker about every hobby you have (I think the "sentiment" system is one of the best things the Sims has ever added and I really want to praise them for that, but that's a topic for another day). Improving skills, on the other hand, seems to be less about playing out the fantasy of building expertise and more about providing opportunities to socialize, acquire money, or smooth out other inconveniences (e.g. becoming so good at repairing something that you can make items unbreakable). Bringing your Do Things Level from 1 to 5 mostly looks like clicking the "Do Things" or "Research Doing Things" buttons over and over until you unlock the ability to "Do Things Quickly".

To be clear, I don't think this is a problem, I just think it's a mismatch between developer focus and what I want in a life sim. But it's clear that the Sims is capable of more, because some of the most fun I've had with the game comes from the skills that change how you interact with the game, or ones that link with other skills. Cooking is already one of the more interesting skills because it's split into 3 different types of cooking - cooking, baking, and gourmet cooking, where you have to choose portion sizes and account for the dietary preferences of the sims eating the food. Acquiring the DLC that lets you grow a garden means you can try to live entirely off your own home-grown food, and when you have virtually no money and no recipes to cook at the start, the challenge it provides was enough to single-handedly renew my interest in the game.

This is what I want more of! I think the Sims would truly ensnare players to a dangerous degree if there were more of these skills that allow you to really dedicate your attention to improving them and working with their systems. There are mods that allow you to use the systems present in the game to grow and sell drugs, interfacing with the cooking system (making edibles), the social system (can discuss/share drugs), and the aging/family system (parents can search their teens' furniture for hidden drugs). I mentioned Project Zomboid earlier, and I think the Sims could learn a lot from Zomboid's approach - the way that many skills are still primarily performed through menus, but there are additional layers of investment required to interact with them. Cooking requires that you have the correct utensils (and is done by selecting a recipe template and filling it with compatible ingredients); repairing a car requires that you have the replacement parts, the tools to remove/install said parts, and also the tools to remove/reinstall any parts that are in the way of whatever you're working on. This is a bit technical, and I think it works for Zomboid, but it would definitely require some tuning to work in the context of the Sims, which is a far more casual game with a more casual audience.

I'm asking for a lot here, because I think the Sims is at its best when it offers players the option to really get lost in a fantasy, instead of skimming the surface of twenty different fantasies. Other games will always do this better if you want to go play a dedicated Lumberjack Simulator or MouthSimulater [sic], but by adding like 20% more depth to the skills and/or changing the ways they interact with each other, the Sims may just start consuming the souls of unsuspecting players.

Not particularly enamored with this one although I can certainly understand why many are, since it allows for those kinds of conversations that frequently feel impossible in 2023, the kind where you and your friends or coworkers come together to talk for hours about the choices you made at a particular juncture and what happens if you pick option C instead of option B, you know what I mean - conversations that are much rarer when a modern game's sense of mystery can be completely dispelled within 10 hours by front page reddit posts and scores of "articles" reducing each dialogue prompt to Baldur's Gate 3: How To Get THE BEST Companion Cutscenes. The #general chat in my Discord server has people I haven't spoken to in years coming out of the woodwork to talk about the results of character creation, about the companions they've romanced and killed, about all the ways their characters lost an eye, and they all seem pretty content with the breadth of discoveries that this game enables.

For my first 20 hours, I was basically the same - there's a lot of fun to be had in poking around these early areas with the horniest party of all time (despite that fact) and chatting with rats, cats, and dead guys. In these early chapters the game best supports my preferred playstyle: a big circuitous route around the map, looking at everything as I drive past but only stopping to drink deeply from a select few side stories. Push further into the main story, though, and find yourself woefully underleveled because you grew tired of these fights 10 hours ago. It's never so difficult as to completely block you from progressing, but it's easy to feel that your punishment for not seeking out each and every side quest is being forced to initiate every fight from the (admittedly cumbersome) stealth or spend the whole fight herding enemies into a big circle so you can use your Level 3 AOE Spell of choice to meme the encounters until they're finished. I have no experience with D&D or this particular ruleset aside from other video games, but the adherence to such a system and its limits are obvious when you spend forty hours playing this game just to unlock a single cast of a spell that these developers would've given you immediately in their last game. It's a pace that works pretty well for weekly tabletop adventures with a group of IRL friends, but feels a bit too slow and unrewarding when I'm sitting alone, staring at a menu of unappetizing "roll advantage"/"create difficult terrain" spells as a reward for my once-nightly level-up.

What's kept me playing are the settings and companions - the mind flayers are arguably the least interesting part of this whole deal, so while it sucks that the main plot so prominently revolves around them, the side quests are generally well-crafted enough that one or two of them would be a satisfying enough adventure to fill the entire night on their own. I do wish that the companions would Talk Normally for five minutes but they've done well enough in telling some of the companion stories (Gale is a particular standout) that they can create genuinely affecting moments if you look in the right places. Not all of them are told so well, and some of the companions feel deeply artificial as a result, but generally speaking I can understand why a player might recruit any given companion not named Lae'zel to their party. For the most part, I'm also fond of the party chatter - every once in a while you'll get a nice bit of banter that feels like the result of actual role-playing with friends, whether it's a joke or a short flavorful exchange revealing how two companions interact or a story that fleshes out someone's background. It's not as personal as it could be if it were your real friends bantering with you, but it's a fun approximation and it's deployed tastefully.

Ultimately my grade for the experience is a big ol' shrug and the word "Sure?" written exactly like so. I think the lipstick looks fantastic even if it fails to produce miracles for the pig that is 5th edition rules, with its awkward magic system and glacial level progression and a litany of boring buffs. Compared to the average person I'd be considered a "hater" of Divinity Original Sin 2 but it felt so colorful compared to this! I love killing bosses by shoving them into a pit as much as the next guy, but much of this experience feels like the developers are skillfully wringing every drop of charisma that they can from the source material and hoping that the player doesn't notice that "the chill druid left and now the mean druid is being mean, go fetch the chill druid" feels a little trite. I'll be doing my best to hit the end credits, but if I don't make it, know that I'm probably out there starting a new save on Tyranny instead.

I considered strongly putting together a long-form critique of this game, but the most damning statement I could possibly make about Final Fantasy XVI is that I truly don't think it's worth it. The ways in which I think this game is bad are not unique or interesting: it is bad in the same way the vast majority of these prestige Sony single-player exclusives are. Its failures are common, predictable, and depressingly endemic. It is bad because it hates women, it is bad because it treats it's subject matter with an aggressive lack of care or interest, it is bad because it's imagination is as narrow and constrained as it's level design. But more than anything else, it is bad because it only wants to be Good.

Oxymoronic a statement as it might appear, this is core to the game's failings to me. People who make games generally want to make good games, of course, but paired with that there is an intent, an interest, an idea that seeks to be communicated, that the eloquence with which it professes its aesthetic, thematic, or mechanical goals will produce the quality it seeks. Final Fantasy XVI may have such goals, but they are supplicant to its desire to be liked, and so, rather than plant a flag of its own, it stitches together one from fabric pillaged from the most immediate eikons of popularity and quality - A Song of Ice and Fire, God of War, Demon Slayer, Devil May Cry - desperately begging to be liked by cloaking itself in what many people already do, needing to be loved in the way those things are, without any of the work or vision of its influences, and without any charisma of its own. Much like the patch and DLC content for Final Fantasy XV, it's a reactionary and cloying work that contorts itself into a shape it thinks people will love, rather than finding a unique self to be.

From the aggressively self-serious tone that embraces wholeheartedly the aesthetics of Prestige Fantasy Television with all its fucks and shits and incest and Grim Darkness to let you know that This Isn't Your Daddy's Final Fantasy, without actually being anywhere near as genuinely Dark, sad, or depressing as something like XV, from combat that borrows the surface-level signifiers of Devil May Cry combat - stingers, devil bringers, enemy step - but without any actual opposition or reaction of that series' diverse and reactive enemy set and thoughtful level design, or the way there's a episode of television-worth of lectures from a character explaining troop movements and map markers that genuinely do not matter in any way in order to make you feel like you're experiencing a well thought-out and materially concerned political Serious Fantasy, Final Fantasy XVI is pure wafer-thin illusion; all the surface from it's myriad influences but none of the depth or nuance, a greatest hits album from a band with no voice to call their own, an algorithmically generated playlist of hits that tunelessly resound with nothing. It looks like Devil May Cry, but it isn't - Devil May Cry would ask more of you than dodging one attack at a time while you perform a particularly flashy MMO rotation. It looks like A Song of Ice and Fire, but it isn't - without Martin's careful historical eye and materialist concerns, the illusion that this comes even within striking distance of that flawed work shatters when you think about the setting for more than a moment.

In fairness, Final Fantasy XVI does bring more than just the surface level into its world: it also brings with it the nastiest and ugliest parts of those works into this one, replicated wholeheartedly as Aesthetic, bereft of whatever semblance of texture and critique may have once been there. Benedikta Harman might be the most disgustingly treated woman in a recent work of fiction, the seemingly uniform AAA Game misogyny of evil mothers and heroic, redeemable fathers is alive and well, 16's version of this now agonizingly tired cliche going farther even than games I've railed against for it in the past, which all culminates in a moment where three men tell the female lead to stay home while they go and fight (despite one of those men being a proven liability to himself and others when doing the same thing he is about to go and do again, while she is not), she immediately acquiesces, and dutifully remains in the proverbial kitchen. Something that thinks so little of women is self-evidently incapable of meaningfully tackling any real-world issue, something Final Fantasy XVI goes on to decisively prove, with its story of systemic evils defeated not with systemic criticism, but with Great, Powerful Men, a particularly tiresome kind of rugged bootstrap individualism that seeks to reduce real-world evils to shonen enemies for the Special Man with Special Powers to defeat on his lonesome. It's an attempt to discuss oppression and racism that would embarrass even the other shonen media it is clearly closer in spirit to than the dark fantasy political epic it wears the skin of. In a world where the power fantasy of the shonen superhero is sacrosanct over all other concerns, it leads to a conclusion as absurd and fundamentally unimaginative as shonen jump's weakest scripts: the only thing that can stop a Bad Guy with an Eikon is a Good Guy with an Eikon.

In borrowing the aesthetics of the dark fantasy - and Matsuno games - it seeks to emulate, but without the nuance, FF16 becomes a game where the perspective of the enslaved is almost completely absent (Clive's period as a slave might as well not have occurred for all it impacts his character), and the power of nobility is Good when it is wielded by Good Hands like Lord Rosfield, a slave owner who, despite owning the clearly abused character who serves as our introduction to the bearers, is eulogized completely uncritically by the script, until a final side quest has a character claim that he was planning to free the slaves all along...alongside a letter where Lord Rosfield discusses his desire to "put down the savages". I've never seen attempted slave owner apologia that didn't reveal its virulent underlying racism, and this is no exception. In fact, any time the game attempts to put on a facade of being about something other than The Shonen Hero battling other Kamen Riders for dominance, it crumbles nigh-immediately; when Final Fantasy 16 makes its overtures towards the Power of Friendship, it rings utterly false and hollow: Clive's friends are not his power. His power is his power.

The only part of the game that truly spoke to me was the widely-derided side-quests, which offer a peek into a more compelling story: the story of a man doing the work to build and maintain a community, contributing to both the material and emotional needs of a commune that attempts to exist outside the violence of society. As tedious as these sidequests are - and as agonizing as their pacing so often is - it's the only part of this game where it felt like I was engaging with an idea. But ultimately, even this is annihilated by the game's bootstrap nonsense - that being that the hideaway is funded and maintained by the wealthy and influential across the world, the direct beneficiaries and embodiments of the status quo funding what their involvement reveals to be an utterly illusionary attempt to escape it, rendering what could be an effective exploration of what building a new idea of a community practically looks like into something that could be good neighbors with Galt's Gulch.

In a series that is routinely deeply rewarding for me to consider, FF16 stands as perhaps its most shallow, underwritten, and vacuous entry in decades. All games are ultimately illusions, of course: we're all just moving data around spreadsheets, at the end of the day. But - as is the modern AAA mode de jour - 16 is the result of the careful subtraction of texture from the experience of a game, the removal of any potential frictions and frustrations, but further even than that, it is the removal of personality, of difference, it is the attempt to make make the smoothest, most likable affect possible to the widest number of people possible. And, just like with its AAA brethren, it has almost nothing to offer me. It is the affect of Devil May Cry without its texture, the affect of Game of Thrones without even its nuance, and the affect of Final Fantasy without its soul.

Final Fantasy XVI is ultimately a success. It sought out to be Good, in the way a PS5 game like this is Good, and succeeded. And in so doing, it closed off any possibility that it would ever reach me.

It doesn’t really surprise me that each positive sentiment I have seen on Final Fantasy XVI is followed by an exclamation of derision over the series’ recent past. Whether the point of betrayal and failure was in XV, or with XIII, or even as far back as VIII, the rhetorical move is well and truly that Final Fantasy has been Bad, and with XVI, it is good again. Unfortunately, as someone who thought Final Fantasy has Been Good, consistently, throughout essentially the entire span of it's existence, I find myself on the other side of this one.

Final Fantasy XV convinced me that I could still love video games when I thought, for a moment, that I might not. That it was still possible to make games on this scale that were idiosyncratic, personal, and deeply human, even in the awful place the video game industry is in.

Final Fantasy XVI convinced me that it isn't.

Wholly uncompromising in its grandiose, buckling vision. Crumbling under the weight of its world of ideas. Breakneck and glacial, confused and confusing. To call it a flawed masterpiece is an admission that it is a masterpiece all the same.

The plot is frequently limp, characters incensed by seemingly random motivations. The world folds out into eternity while railroading the Regalia to a two lane highway. The ache for reprieve from ballooning stakes goes eternally unanswered. What starts as a granting of ever more freedoms becomes a collapse of everything being taken away from the player bit by bit. An unceasing tide of fetch quests forgotten in a shift to eternal linearity. Yet none of this takes away from the experience, it only reinforces a consistent theme of loss and trade-offs.

The first playable moments bring this into laser focus. The iconic Regalia, a literal symbol of freedom carries nothing but unfulfilled promises as it is laboriously pushed across the desert. When it is repaired, Noctis receives a single opportunity to drive his steed, only to discover he is no more in control of it behind the wheel than he is as a passenger. It is often a hindrance, barely moving at night, unable to ever meaningfully approach points of interest, as manoeuvrable as a train on the tracks. Yet each time it is taken away, the notion of freedom dissipates, eventually passing forever into history. Similarly, the temporary departure of party members makes what were once mechanical nothings into tangible absence; Gladio, Prompto and Ignis all bringing something crucial yet invisible to the dynamics of the party and combat.

This typifies what the Final Fantasy XV experience is; one of dashed expectation. Chase down your MacGuffin of a betrothed only for her to fade away. Collect a litany of ingredients, lures, paint jobs, CDs, quests, hunts, medals all for it to become meaningless in an instant, no indication that the time for a relaxed approach has drawn to a close. The only fragment of a 'road trip with the boys' being memories made concrete through Prompto's photographic documentation of the journey. Much as one might scoff at an overabundance of filters, selfies, extreme angles, and inadvertent captures of Gladio's ass, these joyful glimmers of what was and could have been resonate with nostalgic depression. When our story draws to a close, all we have to remember it by are our memories. Wishes that it had gone better, not just for ourselves, but for those who would walk a doomed path.

Far too early to speak on this with any authority, but some early thoughts:

• As with Divinity: Original Sin 2 the potential for roleplay immediately crumbles if not playing as an origin character. Especially damning since they are all locked into a specific class and race except for the Dark Urge.

• Dialogue options being marked by skill checks and background tags deflates them. It would be more fitting for certain options to have the checks/tags but not convey this to the player until it is time to roll. If I see an option tied to my one-of-like-six background choices, I effectively have to pick it so I can get Inspiration. As for the checks, I can prep the face of the party with Guidance, Charm Person, Friends, what have you. Which itself leads into...

• Despite being a four-member party game, the other three characters might as well not exist for the purposes of dialogue. If you're lucky you'll see one of the origin characters milling about in the background of a conversation, but the person/people I'm playing with are forced to listen and suggest options. So just like with real 5E, it's best to have one person do all the talking since only one person can anyways, further displacing non-faces from the story they are meant to be involved in.

• Origin characters all talk like they're YouTubers, falling into a pillow at the end of a sentence, a permanent vocal sneer tainting each word (except for Gale). There is no space for subtlety in their characterisation either, their MacGuffins and driving purposes laid so bare like the Hello Neighbour devs trying to get MatPat's attention.

• Without a DM to actually intervene, to interpret the players' wishes, anything requiring interpretation is simply gone. Nearly every spell that isn't a very simple effect or damage dealer? Absent. This leaves players with options for what colour of damage they want to do, or what one specific action they might like to take. Creativity spawning from these bounds is incidental, not intentional.

• The worst part of 5E, its combat, is not improved in the slightest here, and if anything is actively worse. One of the great benefits of the tabletop setting is that the numbers are obfuscated. Statblocks need not be adhered to. Players typically don't know the raw numbers of a creature's health or saves unless they clue in through what rolls succeed for saves, or keep a mental tally of damage done before the DM says they are bloodied. The DM has the option of disclosing information, but here the player is forced to know everything. Every resistance. Every hit point. Every stat point. Every ability. Combat cannot be creative as a result because the whole of its confines are known the entire time. You even know the percentage chance you have to hit every spell and attack. It makes it all hideously boring.

• If spells are going to be one and done boring nothingburgers, the least Larian could have done was not have some of them, like Speak with the Dead, be tied to a cutscene that tells me a corpse has nothing to say. I get it, the random goblin body I found probably isn't a font of lore, but do you need to take me into a scripted sequence of my character making a concerned face with their fingers to their temple as I am told for the eighteenth time that it has nothing for me.

• When spells are being learned, there is no indication as to which are rituals and which are not, nor are there options to sort or filter choices. With so few choices maybe it doesn't matter.

• Despite a bevy of supplementary sourcebooks giving players countless options for their characters, you're stuck with primarily the base text. Perhaps it would be unrealistic to wish for every subclass, every spell, every feat, but not knowing this narrow scope beforehand meant my hopes for, for example, a College of Glamour Bard or a Hexblade Warlock were dashed. Without the spells that make those subclasses interesting, however, I suppose they might as well be absent.

• The 'creative solutions' of stacking boxes to climb a wall or shooting a rope holding a rock over someone's head are not creative, they are blatantly intended and serve only to make the player feel smart for being coerced by the devs into a course of action.

• The folks eager to praise Larian for not including DLC seem to have missed the Digital Deluxe upgrade that gives you cosmetics and tangible benefits in the form of the Adventurer's Pouch.

• As touched upon by others, the devs are clearly more invested in giving players the option to make chicks with dicks and dudes with pussies than they are in actual gender representation. This binarism only exacerbates how gendered the characters are. With no body options besides "Femme, Masc, Big Femme, Big Masc" and whether you're shaven and/or circumcised, the inclusion of a Non-Binary option becomes laughable if not insulting. Gender is expressed and experienced in countless ways, but here it comes down to your tits (or lack thereof) and your gonads. No androgynous voice options. No breast sizes. No binders. No gaffs. No packing. The only ways for me to convey to fellow players that my character is anything besides male or female are my outright expression of my gender, to strip myself bare, or hope the incongruity between my femme physique and masc voice impart some notion of gender queering. Maybe this is great for binary trans men and women, but as a non-binary person it comes across as a half-measure that seeks to highlight my exclusion from this world. More cynically, this, alongside Cyberpunk 2077 read as fetishistic, seeing the trans body as something for sexual gratification, rather than just that, a body.

I'll keep playing it, but damn if my eyes aren't drifting towards playing a real CRPG for the first time.

in the first dungeon of pillars of eternity, there's a moment that really stuck with me. you encounter a xaurip - a classic fantasy racism beastman that trades in aesthetics uncomfortably pulled from indigenous american stereotypes. it indicates that you go no further, that you do not follow it down a path into it's territory. there's no option to convince it to step aside and let you past: you either respect it's wishes, turn around and find another path, or you walk forward and kill it as an enemy. it's a moment with, i think genuine nuance, where the agency of the xaurip is respected, a moment that actually asks the player to respect the culture of this people or defy it, preventing them from taking a empowering middle road where they can do whatever they want if they have high enough numbers.

anyway, in the very next area you immediately encounter a bunch of them that attack on sight and that you have no recourse but to slaughter.

this moment is pillars of eternity in microcosm. on every level of it's construction, it is a game that feels simultaneously genuinely aware of the fraught nature of many of the images it is evoking and the things it is doing, aware of the stain left by games of this ilk in the past, and also resignedly committed to doing those things anyway without the brazen dumb confidence of a game like divinity: original sin 2. progressive and regressive, inventive and derivative, evolutionary and counter-evolutionary, pillars of eternity is the fascinating attempt to harken back to bioware's baldur's gate and the crpgs of it's era made by a game that doesn't wholly see the value in going back there.

i won't speculate on director je sawyer's intent any more than the man has directly said himself, as he has shown real discomfort towards people suggesting his opinions on certain games, but i know from my mercifully brief visits to the fascist haven that is the rpgcodex forums that sawyer is a quite strong critic of how the classic infinity engine games actually played, and despite my fondness for RPGs of that style, i find myself very much on his side. there's a reason these games struggle to find new fans that aren't just going to turn the games down to the lowest difficulty to sidestep most of the actual playing of it as much as possible: advanced dungeons and dragons is not, by any metric, an elegant or intuitive system at the best of times, and while real-time with pause was an elegant solution to just how long combat in d&d can go on for (larian's proud statements that BG3 has an authentic, turn-based translation of 5E rules should absolutely terrify any prospective players), it only raises the barrier to entry for those not already au fe with ad&d's eccentricities.

pillars of eternity feels utterly unique in that it is a real-time with pause CRPG based on rules that were designed for a video game, and not for a very different medium, and as a result it is...actually good and fun. the rules and statistics are far clearer, the resource game is far more sensical, and the pace of encounters is such that individual moves are less frequent but far more impactful, maintaining the weighty impact turns have in a traditional turn-based game at a speed far more under your own control. experientially, pillars of eternity feels closer to FF12 than it does baldur's gate, with a sliding scale of playstyles ranging from making each move with care and precision, to writing full AI scripts for each member of the party and letting battles play out automatically at hyperspeed.

when i play games in this genre, i usually keep the difficulty low and drop it even lower if i encounter friction. but with pillars, i kept the difficulty on normal the entire way through because I genuinely enjoyed the gameplay and tactical puzzles it presented. it helped me to see, for the first time, why someone might prefer rtwp over turn-based, and when i started a pillars of eternity 2 playthrough shortly after playing this, i decided to stick to real-time rather than playing the game's new turn-based mode, because i became genuinely enamoured with this system.

pillars of eternity is in the unique position of being a baldur's gate homage that doesn't feel like it holds any particular reverence or great love for baldur's gate, and makes good on that position by well and truly killing bg's darlings where the system design is concerned. this isn't exactly uncharted territory for obsidian: but despite it's progressive approach to it's combat, it feels much more burdened by it's legacy than either kotor 2 or neverwinter nights 2, neither as caustic as the former nor as quietly confident as the latter. it sits uncomfortably among many of the things it does, inherited and otherwise.

to demonstrate: this is, in many ways, a d&d-ass setting. it's a roughly-medieval setting in a temperate forested coastal region, and yet the dyrwood is not medieval france/britain like the sword coast is, it's far closer to colonial canada both in terms of regional politics and technology. you have humans, you have elves, you have dwarves, and things that are kinda like gnomes but with the serial numbers filed off, you have the godlike, which are a twist on the aasimar/tieflings of d&d, each with their own gygaxian race science bonuses to stats, but aside from the aforementioned fantasy racism with the beastmen, these fantasy races matter less in the actual story than national identities and cultures, which makes one question why the race science stuff is even here. even stepping into the mechanical dimension, most of the classes are reasonably interesting interpretations of classic stock d&d archetypes like fighter, wizard, paladin, etc, but the two unique classes, chanter and cipher, are so obviously the design highlights and work in a way that would be incredibly difficult in a tabletop game but are beautiful in a video game. they eagerly invite the question of what this game would look like if it wasn't obligated to include the d&d obligations within it.

while i can't speak for every member of the development team, i know that for je sawyer, pillars of eternity was not necessarily a game he wanted to make - at least not in the way that it ended up being made. elements like the traditional fantasy setting, the real-time with pause gameplay, and even the presence of elves, were all things that were there to fulfil the demands of a kickstarter promising a baldur's gate throwback from a company that had fallen on difficult times. these things that feel like obligations feel like that because they are obligations: concessions to appeal to expectations and desires forged by nostalgia for a game that obsidian didn't actually make. these aren't the only visible compromises that mark the game - "compromise" being perhaps a generous word to describe the game's obnoxious kickstarter scars - but it is this tug of war between the parts of itself that wish to remain within the walls of baldur's gate, and the parts that cry out for escape, that ultimately defines pillars of eternity.

while maddening dreams and an epidemic of children born without souls is what drives the plot of pillars of eternity, the story is really in the conversations between tradition and very colonialist notions of progress, and the very opinionated characters you converse with along the way. likeable characters will hold quietly conservative worldviews that feel natural for them, people will say the right things for the wrong reasons, or the wrong things for the right reasons. friendly characters will have beliefs that are extremely distasteful to you but are so deeply held that there is no way to use the power granted to you by being the player character to dissuade them from their belief system with a few honeyed words. this is not a game where each element works towards a clear thematic conclusion, one that confidently knows what is right and what is wrong when discussing the things it brings up. it is a messy world filled with ugliness and argument and contradiction, and no clear definitive statement on its themes. it has a perspective, but it is not one held with immense confidence. it is a perspective mired with doubts and second-guessing that feels very conscious and deliberate. in particular, the final hour of the game has a twist that recontextualises the nature of the setting, but it's noticeable just how much of the cast, both in this game and in the sequel. find this not to be a redefining moment of their lives, but simply something they have to let sit in their gut like a millstone. it lets them see with new light things they once valued, but they feel unable to simply cast those things aside.

i have a particular distaste for critiques in geek circles narrow their focus on what a work is saying to only the series or genre the work finds itself in, and ignoring whatever resonance it might have to the world outside the fiction, subconsciously because the author has little experience of that world. and yet, it's difficult to read pillars of eternity without looking at it's relationship to baldur's gate and it's ilk, especially given how it kickstarted (lol) the late 2010s CRPG revival that led to breakout hits like divinity: original sin 2 and disco elysium. it walks in the meadows of the past with an uneasy rhythm, constantly expressing it's discomfort with being there but never quite being able to find the way out. even at the end of the game, there is delightfully scarce resolution to the weighty philosophical questions raised by the final act - the immediate crisis dealt with, certainly, but the game ends on a world that has raised questions rather than answered them, and while you may have your own thoughts and perspectives, there is no great victory of ideologies to be found, no grand, world-defining choice about what to do with the wisdom of the past. it's a game that simply ends with you emerging back into a world that is materially largely unchanged but colored so different by the new perspective you have on it. it is a game that is deliriously inconclusive.

one could word that as a criticism - and indeed, a strict formalist lens would probably find it as such - but honestly, it's what i find delightful and resonant about pillars of eternity. i'm someone who thinks generally very poorly about d&d as a game, but my intermittently weekly d&d games with my friends that have been going on since the first lockdown have made some incredible memories, a world and story and cast that i find myself hugely invested in. despite my disdain for a lot of the recurring cliches and tropes of the genre, some of my favorite stories are fantasy stories. and despite my active distaste for a lot of the decisions pillars either makes or is stuck with, and indeed for some of the creative minds involved in it's production (chrs avellne's characters were substantially rewritten after his departure from obsidian to such an extent that neither he nor je sawyer recognize them as "his characters" but whoever was behind durance specifically is doing such a conscious avellone impression that i would be remiss not to note that his presence is certainly felt) i still enjoy it immensely regardless.

frequently, engagement with art is a negotiation with the parts about it that speak to us and the parts that fail to do so, where we may be able to excuse or enjoy parts that others find to sink the entire work for them, and it's unexpectedly moving to find a game that was so visibly having that conversation with itself as i played it, and rang so true for the relationship i have with the things that inspired it.

it's a game that embodies the sticky and troubling way all the games and stories of it's ilk sit in my mind and expresses them emotively through a story that, in fits and starts, writes quite powerfully on the unique pains and sensation of memory and tradition and progress. it's a game that feels all the more true, all the more real, for it's contradictions, compromises, and conversations capped off with trailing ellipses, leading down two roads to an uncertain future and a depressingly familiar past.

It’s been a mixed bag with anniversary games in the Nancy Drew Cyber Mystery series so far; game ten, Secrets of Shadow Ranch was a relative high point at the time of its release that in retrospect shores itself more firmly in the middle of the pack, quality-wise, while game twenty, Ransom of the Seven Ships, is an unmitigated disaster from top to bottom, easily bottom two in the series in terms of gameplay, a story so boring it features precisely one character in it, and racism so overt even by the standards of both its time and this series that Her has since removed it from sale. Luckily for them, we celebrate 25 as readily as we celebrate increments of ten, it’s even a little more special than a twentieth or thirtieth thing in a list might be, so Her got another shot at doing something special for an anniversary project and god damn did they take it.

Her’s Nancy Drew games settled their formula really quickly, as early as the third game and with the core elements in place since arguably the second, so when a game DOES break some element of that formula in a significant way, you do tend to feel like Something Is Happening. In The Final Scene it’s an urgent hostage situation; in Secret of the Old Clock it’s an alternate universe where you’re experiencing the kind of history you might investigate in any other game; in The Phantom of Venice you’re doing uhhh, international espionage sort of?? HERE, things go off the rails IMMEDIATELY, and they stay off the rails for almost the entire game.

In the first twist, the game actually takes place in Nancy’s home town of River Heights. No vacation, no weird internship, no international employers whisking her away to have wacky, garrulous, possibly racist adventures. Nancy is actually, for once, just hanging out with her friends, participating in a town-sponsored team-based clue-hunting event (which seems like an unfair thing to put on when you have a literally world famous consulting detective hanging around like at least ban Nancy guys come on) when she is lured by a mysterious note to town hall one night. Once she’s inside, town hall immediately burns down, and Nancy is framed for the arson, and in the second twist, she’s immediately arrested and spends a good 80? 85? percent of the game in the police station while her trio of Best Buds team up to clear her name on the outside.

you’ll note that I said in the police station and not in a jail cell, because of course, Nancy is on very good terms with the local chief of police, and it takes very little poking to convince him to let Nancy out of her holding cell and roam the station entirely unattended, where she quickly recovers access to her personal cell phone and lock picking tools, breaks into multiple desks and file cabinets, generally commits many crimes, and comes out completely rosy in perhaps Nancy’s greatest flex of power and privilege in the series so far.

The third way that this game is markedly different from usual is in objective. Alibi in Ashes is much more overtly a whodunnit than most of its predecessors. While the “villain” of each game is always one of the characters you interact with throughout, the degree to which they give a shit about Nancy varies wildly, and most of the time they would be entirely content to do their scooby doo real estate scheme or thievery or whatever and leave – Nancy’s meddling is incidental to their schemes and their inevitable confrontations are rarely personal beyond the character being a general asshole who’s smug about murdering her. Here, though, Nancy’s been directly framed for a pretty bad crime, there are four possible suspects, and Nancy’s friends are directly working to both clear her name and finger the actual perp.

To this end there’s a lot of good stuff going on. You can swap perspectives at almost any time between Nancy in the police station, who collects and organizes the group’s aggregate evidence, steals useful police information and documents for them, and within the story is directing the course of the others’ investigations, and any of her friends, each of whom share special relationships with the suspects. Cheerful, feminine Bess is the perpetual enemy of Nancy’s preppy rival Deirdre, gets on great with ice cream parlor owner and councilperson Toni, and immediately gets kicked out of cynical antique shop owner Alexei’s store because upon entering it she breaks a valuable vase, so he won’t even SPEAK with her. Wise tomboy George is more mature than her friends, and gets more out of Alexei than they can because she’s better at manipulating him. POOR FUCKIN NED is an object of desire for Deirdre (just one of many reasons she hates Nancy), and more than once throughout the game he’s forced by Nancy to take advantage of Deirdre’s crush on him to manipulate her, something he’s very uncomfortable with and is ultimately fruitless lmao. This guy is the only person who is physically present in the game who doesn’t get a character model either. You can visit Bess and George when you’re not playing as them, they’re doing specific jobs for the mission. Ned just disappears, it’s wild. The boy stays losing. I love this guy he sucks.

So obviously there’s a lot going on in this game, and from a play perspective it’s maybe a little TOO much? There are a LOT of THINGS to be done here, and juggling three characters who all have unique dialogue puzzles to wade through and each carrying different inventories and more than one puzzle that’s just like “go find me a battery” where’s a battery? Fuck you that’s where, it’s just like, there’s a lot of space in this game and there are a lot of ways to navigate it. Easy to get mixed up, easy to lose track of objectives. But none of that really matters, right, because the novelty of the experience more than makes up for it. Bess and George and to a significantly lesser extent Ned (I write about him a lot because I think the way these games treat him is fascinating but he is undoubtedly the most thinly drawn recurring character in a series where the Hardy Boys have only made like five appearances) are fun characters who never quite feel like they get enough to do, so getting a chance to really shine a spotlight on them in a game that is in large part celebrating the history of this branch of the franchise does feel earned.

The thing that puts Alibi in Ashes over the top, though, is how mean-spirited it is. Something that has emerged from this block of Nancy Drew games (what I’d think of as the third distinct era of the series, games 16 through 25, but especially emerging during the ongoing hotstreak since 21, Waverly Academy) that I feel has done them a great deal of credit, and that’s a willingness to engage in a level of mundane adult emotion that lends an air of Maturity to the proceedings, even as they retain their goofy elements. This incarnation of Nancy Drew has always existed in a weird space of adaptation; one one hand the character’s ages and often the subject matters dealt with are clearly rooted in the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys young adult novels of the 80s and 90s which were aimed squarely at older teens and whose edge could border on too sharp (never let the world forget “Joe! Hand me the Uzi!”). On the other, characters’ actual personalities and dispositions and worldviews, the tendency towards overt educational content, and a lot of the weird, often childish humor that strongly characterizes these games is rooted deeply in the earlier Nancy Drew works through the 1970s and the later Nancy Drew Notebooks series that were aimed squarely at children. It lends the series a distinctly all-ages vibe, something I’ve praised and chided in the past.

But while the darker series has always had dark pasts and spooky locales and the occasional attempted murder, I think these last few have gone for something a little more daring (at least, in the context of this series and its framework), in choosing to include and often center a lot of just kind of normal, mundane ugliness. It could be the myriad ways high school kids are beaten down by each other and the systems that govern them, or social norms precluding a family from properly coming together in the wake of a tragedy, or a man letting fear of vulnerability steal years of his life from him – each of the recent games seems interested in letting the quiet sadnesses that everyone collects naturally as part of living weave in and out of their standard Nancy Drew games, along with more of the complexities of adult life in general.

Never is this more apparent than in Alibi in Ashes, where Nancy’s own sterling All-American hometown of River Heights is revealed to be a nest of vipers ready to eat her alive at the very first sign of disharmony. The news people hate her for scooping their hottest stories, the politicians hate her for the weird attentions she brings and for how her successes negatively impact the reputation of the police, who are shown to be as lazy and corrupt as an other police office anywhere else. When Nancy is very obviously framed for a crime that’s wildly out of character and evidence is quickly found to put doubt on her guilt, she’s given no quarter because the people with the power to help her don’t really care and the people who are actually in power have a vested interest in seeing her go down regardless of whether she’s guilty or not.

This isn’t even the first time this has happened – insofar as this game has a “historical subplot,” it’s about Alexei the antique shop owner, who was once a famous teen detective like Nancy, busted for a crime he swears he didn’t commit. Nancy doesn’t lose her characteristic pep or her faith in the system, her belief that if she and her friends can just find the right combination of evidence that she’ll be cleared and the real arsonist brought to justice, nor does she ever doubt that this will happen, but Alexei was broken by his experience. As he puts it himself, he spoke truth to power and was swiftly and brutally destroyed for it. Now he’s a pariah, eking out a solitary, bitter existence running a store he hates in a town that hates him. And for what? For allegedly stealing one thing, one time, thirty years ago?

That’s the kind of All-American Town that River Heights is, under the sunny facades and ice cream parlors and colonial architecture. A town where people’s memories are long, and there’s no room for forgiveness, no room for generosity, no room for grace. Where altruism and charity are met, privately, with resentment. Where you can’t rock the boat. Where local town politics are the supreme power. Where your neighbors who were your friends yesterday will throw rocks through your windows and leave threats at your doorstep before you’re even tried for a crime, and once you’re exonerated will act like they were on your side all along. In a way, Deirdre is one of the only real friends Nancy has, because while she doesn’t like Nancy and doesn’t want much to do with her, she’s open about her problems with Nancy, and equally open about being a normal person who just wants Nancy to shut the fuck up and maybe break up with her boyfriend and not like, rot in prison for 10-20 years for a crime she didn’t commit and/or die.

And maybe the most damning thing about Nancy herself is that, as usual, she doesn’t understand any of this is happening to her. It’s bad apples all the way down in her eyes. She’s quite happy to be back in her neighbors’ good graces when all is said and done; quite happy to simply ruin the popularity of one shitty politician in a system that she knows is historically ingrained into the fabric of her town; quite happy to use her own connections to the police and her father’s position as an important and wealthy judge to get her out of a situation that would ruin and has ruined anyone else. This is the dichotomy right? Ever-present in the series and as strong as ever here now that a lot of these disparities and injustices are being brought back to the forefront as explicit text.

There’s a lot to chew on in Alibi in Ashes generally but it IS the Big Twenty-Fifth Game in the series and I do want to note before we end that it works really well in that capacity. The game is chock full of little easter eggs (not counting the literal hidden easter egg items you can be rewarded with for doing weird shit in these, which I didn’t find this time) like all the playable characters having box art for previous games as their phone backgrounds (deep cuts too), or Nancy’s desk drawer having a picture of her friend from The Final Scene in it, or the town map for the game being an exact replica of the map for Secret of the Old Clock, except with many small changes to reflect the modernizations that have been implemented over the intervening 100 years.

Those bits of fanservice are littered throughout and LIBERALLY and that shit matters in a series as long as this one. There’s a real sense of mythology to it, it’s fun to celebrate on a milestone, and it’s frankly a relief to finally have a milestone game worth celebrating. As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been generally pleased with this run of Nancy Drew games, a lot of series highs lately imo, and Alibi in Ashes still stands out among what already felt like the cream of the crop. It’s a little bittersweet too – my understanding is that this game closes out this third era of Her Interactive’s Nancy Drew series, and with the series kind of perpetually stalled after its ill-fated retool in 2019, it seems likely that the next one will be the beginning of their final stretch. If that’s the case, I can only hope they keep up the pace they’ve set so far in the twenties. I would love to see this series close out strong.

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NEXT TIME: TOMB OF THE LOST QUEEN

ALL NANCY DREW PIECES