great little game!! really enjoyed the writing and the puzzles, all the characters are fun to talk to, the mystery is engaging and everything ties together nicely in the end. the UI felt a little clunky sometimes but it's not a major issue, i think it's only because 1. this game is old, and 2. i played a handful of the even older ND games right before playing this one so i had gotten used to the older version of the interface. overall pretty fun experience and probably my favorite out of the ones i've played recently

It’s less polished that Secret of the Old Clock, but it’s also my second Nancy Drew game so I have a hard time being impartial about this one too. It’s a train mystery! Those are always fun! It's also got a fun batch of character and there’s a good theme in there about how to appreciate what you have. The villain reveal is fun too.

However, there’s a character beat about a police detective trying to frame a black man that’s really HMMMM. I’m also deeply uninterested in its attempts to teach you mining stuff, but that's sort of secondary to the cop racism.

95% of this is platonic ideal Drew Crew stuff, the characters and atmosphere in this game are an absolute delight to experience, I was absolutely giddy when I discovered the steampunk projection mechanism and realized how many pieces would come together to solve it. It's a little too long for my personal taste and some of the puzzles are of the more tedious decoder flavor but those are very minor in the scale of things when you've got flat out iconic stuff like the Cheeseburger moment and Tino Balducci. Also this game says ACAB

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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