So Far the Worst in the Nancy Drew Adventure Game Series

Just as a note - there are major major spoilers herein.

I became addicted to the Nancy Drew adventure game series from HER Interactive about a month and a half ago. I'm 27 years old, and all of the PC games that I grew up playing were games of the genre that the Nancy games fall into. They are puzzle, logic type games that one might align with famous hits like "Myst" or "The 7th Guest".

The Nancy series is clearly intended for a teen female audience (as are the books of the same character,) but it seems so hard these days to find interactive puzzle/logic role playing games that aren't so overwhelmingly difficult I want to jump out the window.

Since my first Nancy purchase I have back-purchased older titled, and I got "Secrets Can Kill" in a bundled 75th Anniversary set with four other Nancy games. I was super exicted because "Secrets" is the only one I have played thus far that comes on two discs, which I assumed meant more detailed content.

Unfortunately "Secrets" has by far been the most boring and disappointing Nancy game yet.

All of the Nancy games follow pretty much the same format. You are Nancy Drew, a teenaged detective who has traveled to some interesting location to visit a family friend, only to discover a mystery! Here is where the first feaux pas of this game occurs. Other games have taken you to deserted beach towns, haunted castles and mansions and even a small country town in the 1940's.

In "Secrets" your setting is...a high school. Not a creepy haunted high school, just a high school. A local teen has been murdered and you are going "under cover" as a student at his high school to find out what happened. This is never really explained very well: you're staying with an Aunt who is absent for the game (a common plot element in Nancy games - usually whoever you are visiting never surfaces but always leaves you notes.)

What unfolds is uncreative, overwhelmingly easy and frightening boring. Usually the Nancy games combined a variety of game play elements. You have a "map" screen with a variety of locations to visit, and at each one there are usually a variety of rooms to explore. You pick up useful objects, and you also examine items for clues.

Frequently the clues provide code cracking secrets. In another Nancy game, you find a magazine article on symbols that local hobos are using to mark territories and give other hobos ideas as to where food and water is available. Later in the game you contact some people on a Ham radio who speak in terms that, using those codes, translate into numbers, etc... etc...

It's these intricate multi-layered unravelings that make the Nancy games interesting. But in "Secrets" there are no such elements. There are about three extremely easy "codes" - one in braile, for instance - which you unlock simply by finding a book on braile in the school library and writing down the key.

Another element missing in this game is the unlocking of secret passageways or interesting before-unfound areas. The layout of this game is overwhelmingly basic, and thus boring.

The Nancy characters have never exactly been brilliantly acted or scripted, but they're excrutiatingly bad in "Secrets". You interact with four other characters, and not a single one of them is particularly likeable. By the time you're halway through the game you've dicovered that they are all criminals in one way or another, and they all begin acting hostile towards you.

A major change from this game to other ones is the way the characters are animated. Whereas they are computer-rendered characters in other games, here they seem to be hand drawn animations that have been edited in. The result makes them look unnatural and unnerving. Also, the drawings are just plain bad - they look like cartoon characters from a feminine hygine product advert.

And the acting! (If you can call it that.) One character, a Japanese exchange student, is borderline offensive in it's stereotype. ("Oh, Nancy, please don't tell my family I cheated on my essay, they will shun me as I want to be a doctor and get a scholarship and I'm such a hard studier!")

Another element missing from this game is Nancy's interactions with her best friends Bess and George, and her boyfriend Ned, by way of a telephone. In each game Nancy can use a phone to call these friends to discuss the case and get insight. After discussing it to the hilt, if she is stuck, she can implore them for a hint. In this version, that's completely eliminated, and instead she just calls and outright asks for a hint. Also, there are completely different actors doing those character's voices from the other games. (In fact I am almost certain the voice of Bess was done by the same actress who plays Nancy; why?!)

This game is a complete mess from top to bottom. It feels rushed and I am left to wonder if they were so busy trying to incorperate the new hand-drawn characters they forgot about plot and writing. I'm trying to recall the puzzles of the game and I can only think of one! - a jewelery box with a tile pattern on the top that you have to slide into the correct places to open and find something inside.

It makes me sad that someone might come across this game and shun all other Nancy games because of the experience. It is truly a poorly executed disaster in all senses. And to add to all of the annoyance: remember that two disc thing I mentioned? You have to keep switching them back and forth over and over and over again! Of your four locations to visit, the school seems to be on Disc 2, but inexplicably the boiler room INSIDE the school is back on Disc 1! Ergo when you go into the boiler room, you have to switch discs like ten times!