If Curse of Blackmoor Manor is an example of a Nancy Drew game stabbing at unconventional, expansive new structural ideas whilst simultaneously spinning its narrative and thematic wheels and ultimately failing at amounting to anything really worthwhile, Secret of the Old Clock is its good-aligned counterpart; I could apply that same description to this game, but here it’s endlessly charming, well-paced, and plain fun in a way that is turning out to be the secret sauce for the best of these games in my estimation, if not always the most interesting of them.

First thing’s first Secret of the Old Clock is a PERIOD PIECE set in 1930 which shares a name and year with the first ever Nancy Drew story, along with some other trappings (certain antique characters take prominence over the usual supporting cast, Nancy’s not really a detective here, she’s aged sixteen rather than her usual “vaguely in college” for these games, etc.), which seems like a strange choice on the face of it? Like, you based your tenth game, Shadow Ranch, on your all-time best seller, sure. You’re gonna pop your golden goose time travel Nancy Drew Number 1 right after that on game 12? Maybe they just hadn’t thought of it before now and couldn’t resist making it once the idea was floated? I get it, this game rules.

THE YEAR is NINETEEN THIRTY. Despite the onset of the Great Depression, some things never change and you know that means Nancy’s dad is still rich as FUCK which means that she is a sixteen-year-old who OWNS A CAR which, at the opening of the game, she is using to drive to the small town of Titusville, Illinois to run an errand for her dad and visit 17-year-old Emily Crandall, the now-owner of the town’s famous Lilac Inn after her mother’s recent passing. Emily’s currently being overseen by her mom’s old pal Jane Willoughby until she comes of age, but it’s not going well because 1. Jane knows nothing about raising teens OR running inns and 2. The Crandalls were told by their eccentric old millionaire neighbor Josaih Crowley that he was gonna leave them a ton of money, but he’s ALSO recently died and seems to have left his fortune entirely to Local Asshole And ESP Teacher/Grifter Richard Topham instead, so it seems like Emily might have to sell the Inn and figure some shit out. So she’s not doing great emotionally, financially, OR, increasingly, mentally. However, NANCY DREW is here and rather than just being a sympathetic ear like most friends would probably be she smells BULLSHIT and she’s ready to POKE HER NOSE WHERE IT DOESN’T BELONG to solve an EXTREMELY OBVIOUS MYSTERY lol. There’s also the guy who executes the will and works at the bank but he’s just here to be a red herring mostly like come on we all know what’s going on here. There are stolen jewels and hidden passages and no fewer than three old clocks actually (!!!), y’know, Nancy Drew shit!

The thing that sets this one apart, more than the period setting (more on this in a minute), is that this game is honest to god as close to an open world experience as I think you could get in a low budget point n click adventure from 2005. Because Nancy is a wealthy heiress who has deigned to take pity upon these poor depression-stricken Midwesterners and help them out in her leisure time, she is equipped with a car, and it’s not just narrative set dressing. For the entire game you have free reign of the town, and you spend a lot of time driving from place to place with charmingly clunky top-down mouse-based controls. Between her typical Cyber Adventure Activities Nancy also finds the time to do odd jobs for the citizens of Titusville, deliver telegrams for modest pay, and embark on a Zelda-esque comically long chain-of-deals quest, all the while balancing a small but important economy of her relatively tight purse and her relatively small gas tank, along with a few other things you can buy throughout the experience. The game’s got driving AND a rudimentary currency system? Beat still my heart the ambition.

Part of what makes these things fun is that they never get in the way of the rest of it. Where Blackmoor Manor, which does feel like it forms something of a pair with this game, had a hard time dolling out its content in a satisfying way, Secret of the Old Clock is paced near perfectly, shuffling you from character to character, event to minigame to puzzle to driving sequence with only the barest amount of friction towards the end, where Nancy goes up to the villain and says (I’m gonna spoil the villain’s identity if you care lol) “here’s essentially undeniable proof that you are gaslighting Emily into thinking she’s crazy so you can make her sell the inn in the very short period of time you’ll still be her guardian so you can make money off of the sale what the fuck” and then Jane says “that’s stupid no I didn’t” and you have to go get more proof via the titular secret from the old clock and there’s a lot of stuff going on in that fifteen minute period that really feels like it could have propped up a perhaps in hindsight saggy middle but YOU KNOW WHAT I was having a good time throughout so MAYBE I am just looking for nits to pick? Who can say.

Another compliment I’ll give the writing is that Her manages to intertwine a lot of disparate and frankly kind of dumb characters and storylines together into something that almost seems coherent at the end if you don’t think about it for too long. I found out after I finished the game that this story is a blend of elements and characters from the first four Nancy Drew novels and knowing this really contextualizes the game’s story for me; I think the patchwork here is done well, but not well enough that it doesn’t show.

If I were to name any REAL gripe with the game it would be that I don’t feel like it takes any element quite as far as I would like. The period setting rules and they do a lot to nail the aesthetics and the dialogue without making them cartoonish, but then a lot of the larger scale puzzles and stuff are so high tech as to border on like, whatever you would call the 30s equivalent of steampunk? I wish we could have committed to the bit a little more! Similarly nobody really seems to treat Nancy like what she is: a child whose presence in a lot of these places and questions about a lot of these topics would be fuckin weird dude. I’m not saying I want like a gritty 1930s misogyny simulator or anything, but there’s even less resistance to Nancy’s sleuthing in this game than there usually is in these, and that struck me as a little weird considering this story takes place in a world where she’s younger than usual AND not yet a semi-famous detective.

Similarly, it feels like there was an opportunity here to talk about the ways young women were mistreated in American society, by systems of power, by adults who should know better, by other women who have experienced the same hardships, and that by utilizing familiar characters in this past setting we could highlight how things are not so different today for vulnerable people as we like to say they are? And there’s a little bit of that for sure. A dude who seems already pretty well off knowingly stealing from two women who actually need the money and an orphaned adult gaslighting and preying upon a recently orphaned young woman at a major turning point in America’s economic history isn’t NOTHING to work with, but it does feel more incidental to this story than Her’s most obviously passionate prior efforts. A bit of a bummer when the soil is this fertile, but like, look at the game immediately prior to this one lmao, this is Pulitzer shit by comparison.

And I really don’t want to end on a down note here. I want to be as clear as I can possibly be: this game is probably the purest straight joy I’ve had with this series so far, just three hours of good-natured fun. Any gripes I have, any minor disappointments, are effortlessly washed away by everything else going on here. They nailed it. An Absolute delight.

PREVIOUSLY: CURSE OF BLACKMOOR MANOR
NEXT TIME: LAST TRAIN TO BLUE MOON CANYON

ALL NANCY DREW PIECES

okay, so, do you remember that bit in metroid prime that everyone hates where the game is about to be over and they make you go retrace your steps and find a bunch of doodads before you can finish the game? nancy drew: hidden in a haunted mansion also does this except there are many chances to get game overs because people catch you snooping through their shit while you're looking for a character from the chinese alphabet and fuckin sorry abby one of them is in your room and who the fuck am i gonna tell your secret to anyway???? i am friends with your business partner i do not want your business to fail, jesus

this game has a lot of opportunities to get game overs, basically all of which are rendered funny instead of frustrating by the game's surprisingly excellent checkpointing for a game from 2000, which means it's a lot more fun to intentionally crawl into a pitch black fireplace passage or untie a chandelier like an asshole just to see what will happen (it turns out only one game over i found leads to a gruesome death in this game lol usually your moral character is insulted and you get kicked out because in this game NOBODY present knows Nancy is undercover).

and that's the rub with this one: you kinda gotta make your own fun? it's not nearly as much of a CHORE to go through as Stay Tuned For Danger, but it suffers from similar core problems like an interminably boring cast (only this time the bad guy sucks too) and really languid sense of pacing. puzzles are better, sort of, in that they're placed more naturally throughout the gamespace AND the narrative (i will miss you, millie the eccentric millionaire prop room manager riddler), but they're also mostly pretty bad lol so who can say if they're better or worse? I can, they're better, but there's PLENTY of room to improve.

similarly the plot seems like it might actually be building to something cool, and there are certainly moments, especially early on, that are legitimately /scary/. there's an excellent buildup of dread immediately after the supernatural element of the game seems like its been established as silly and joking that persists up until it's...casually discarded, and the true stakes of the narrative are revealed to be entirely unrelated to most of what you've been doing. sure, you and the villain are after the same thing, and the historical background of the story is both interesting and sad, but this is a haunted old mansion that's falling apart, and I'M the one creeping around secret tunnels spying on people? the villain doesn't even KNOW about them?????

the consequence for failure during the climax is a guy walks away from you with a suitcase full of money that nobody else even knew about. nobody gets hurt, nobody dies, and the accidents that have been plaguing renovation work on your friend's burgeoning bed and breakfast will stop because the perpetrator got what they wanted and left. This, too, is a microcosm of all of the issues with Message in a Haunted Mansion; at every turn the game goes out of its way to eliminate stakes, to destroy its own carefully cultivated atmosphere, and with nothing to show at the end of it. Legitimately baffling choices throughout.

as much as i've lambasted it though, /i can see it/. fucking around in this mansion is fun as hell. this is a good video game mansion. it's brightly lit, and small, and creepy to inhabit. Her Interactive was playing with the limitations of the point n click fmv format in very cute ways to mess with my expectations of what was possible. one-time custom animations everywhere, just to freak me out; sections of the game where it was unclear if i was under a time limit or not (i was lol, got kicked out of the house whoops). there's ambition here, and the shape of a good formula for these is slowly coming together, bit by bit. hopefully they'll continue to improve (and hopefully the leaps in quality will start getting bigger lol)

PREVIOUSLY: STAY TUNED FOR DANGER
NEXT TIME: TREASURE IN THE ROYAL TOWER

ALL NANCY DREW PIECES

if i were a theatrical murderer who left threatening notes and ticking time bombs and shit in a world where it is considered annoying but not unusual for your coworkers to bar your entrance to rooms that you need access to for your job by making you answer three riddles, i would simply not make my calling card alias an anagram of my real name. (i also probably would not embark on lengthy extremely venomous rants against the guy i was trying to murder with literally no prompting to every single person i spoke to but mostly the puzzle thing). it is however, goofy little bits like the riddles and and killer using a saw voice modulator to say "hello rick, don't try to run away from my bomb please, just let it blow you up that would be really sick for me" that save this game from being a complete waste of time. well, that and the fact that the time wasted amounted to about two hours on the normal difficulty.

while this is still recognizably the funny, semi-laytonesque universe of Secrets Can Kill, all the verve of that game is missing here in favor of a plot that feels a lot more limp and meandering, despite the fact that there are 100% more klieg-light-attempted-murders, literal timebombs, strangulations, and sonic the hedgehog voice actors present (robbie daymond doing an incredible in-universe actor-who-sucks-at-acting performance here in one of his earliest acting credits).

all of these characters are funny or interesting on paper but shallow and boring in game, except for the killer, whose character is entirely carried by a truly unhinged performance by his voice actor, which is entertaining but does lead to the problem of making it easy to finger him as the villain within the first conversation you have with him, which somehow makes a game that could easily wrap in less than two hours feel like it drags longer than it already does. the fact that a lot of this runtime is spent setting up an incredibly unconvincing red herring does not help.

there are very few puzzles in the game and inexplicably almost all of them revolve around trying to figure out how to open up various doors, and when you're not doing that you're usually trying to figure out how to open various doors at night time. that's right, this game has a day night cycle, which affects very little except certain puzzle solutions, and mostly serves to add another layer of tedium; just slapping another set of screens to click through when you realize you know where you need to go but you've hit an arbitrary wall in your progression. this system is emblematic of this game as a whole when you compare it to the first one: simultaneously more ambitious in ideas but unwilling or, more likely, unable to actually follow through with any of the interesting ideas. surely this has less to do with a lack of interest or talent on the dev team's part and more to do with the fact that these things got cranked out twice a year and as far as i am aware never really turned a profit. that's pressure and i understand wanting to try new things but not really being able to achieve what you wanted to with extremely limited time and resources, and ending up with something neutered and unsatisfying.

two final notes that don't fit anywhere else: first, the final puzzle in this game is criminal: a strictly timed, completely randomized, eight part puzzle that resets itself upon failure and results in a game over as the last challenge of your game with no warning or prep time fuckin sucks dude what the hell. Nancy's neck must be sore because she got strangled to death literally four times before i finished the game by complete luck.

Second, where character models in the first game were the very loose bluthy 2d american animation that you see a lot in that mid period of pc adventure games before 3d had taken over but after crude pixel art was considered acceptable, this one moves on to full 3D models for every character and they're hideous and i love them. their torsos are completely still, their mouths GROSSLY overanimate when they talk and to compensate for not being able to move the centers of their bodies their heads and arms gesticulate wildly. ALSO there are PHOTOS EVERYWHERE and for some godforsaken reason HeR thought the move here was to either photoshop a 1999 CG guy into a picture with real dudes or edit 1999 CG dude heads and hands onto real people and both of these look extremely fucked up, it's incredible.

So yeah, the game is obviously an aesthetic joy, Lani Minella still has a bunch of awkward as hell line reads but she's clearly a lot more comfortable as Nancy, the audio quality is all around better and the supporting cast's performances are, for the most part, actually good, unlike the previous game. However, as a story and as an experience this is basically nothing at all, an often irritating and always tedious (and at one point super racist, I KNOW that dude was not voiced by a real indian guy) chore that only kept me on the hook with semi-regular doses of that Nancy Drew CyberAdventure Series absurdity that i love so much. Just uh, not enough to save it. Game sucks shit.

PREVIOUSLY: SECRETS CAN KILL
NEXT TIME: MESSAGE IN A HAUNTED MANSION

ALL NANCY DREW PIECES

• throwback to the handwritten opening letters. <3
• there they go again with those damn awkward pauses. 😭
• daryl flirting with nancy made me lose ten years of my life.
• that first conversation between hulk and nancy is so bad and feels all over the place.
• honestly all the conversations in this game feel very awkward and forced.
• “i’m not talking about air conditioning i’m talking about you threatening me.”
• why is nancy allowed to just waltz on into the employees only section of the diner?
• “i can handle my studies” “i’m behind in my studies and i must get back to the library.”
• love just repeating the same wrong combo and detective beech not saying anything, lol.
• this is a very short game.
• definitely an improvement on the first one regarding graphics and some of the storyline.
• other than that it’s nothing to rave about.
• though i do love all the easter eggs from both past and future games.

Sometimes, revisiting the first game in a series that you've played in full can flip your perspective on how you feel about it. I revisited Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney rather quickly after completing the entire Ace Attorney series, which wrapped up in The Great Ace Attorney 2: Resolve. I wanted to see if all my journey through this series would make me think differently about the one that started it all. But I'm glad to say, even after seeing everything this series had to offer, this game is still absolutely amazing.
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, to me, is a timeless game. 21 years after it's initial release, it still feels as relevant and memorable as ever. Even after NINE more games releasing, this first entry still stands strong in terms of writing, gameplay, and presentation.
Presentation
Talk about a charmingly wonderful game in terms of looks. The way characters are animated takes advantage of the importance of key frames in character animation. The environments and still images for cutscenes are simple, but appealing. There's a certain nostalgic look to this game, it's hard to explain. The strong, but simple art style gives this title such a large appeal in my opinion.
Music
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney is very humble and simple when it comes to the soundtrack, but that isn't a bad thing. Most tunes are rather short, but extremely catchy to compensate. It's a soundtrack I could go back to anyday, it' so charming and lovable.
Gameplay
While later games would add more mechanics to aid in your search of the truth, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney is down to the basics of series gameplay. You can press witnesses and present evidence during witness testimonies, and in some cases, present or answer a question when asked on the spot during an intense moment in a trial. Investigations are simple too, you can examine environments and talk to people related to the crime to gather more information for your case. Coming to the trial with all the evidence you gathered and making use of it never gets old. I love just presenting the (w)right thing and making the witness tick. While it's very basic compared to later entries, it still encapsulates what makes these games fun.
Characters
I love these characters. I love Phoenix, I love Maya, I love Edgeworth, I love Gumshoe, I love Ema, I love almost everyone in this cast. Of course I hate the villains, but that's the point! These characters just feel engaging and deep, and the way they are written is so charming.
Conclusion
I love Ace Attorney. Even nearly 2 years after I've gotten into this series, I have never gotten tired of it. My first review on this site wayyy back in like, March 2021 was actually of this game. I kinda cringe looking back at that review, it felt very stale and lacked personality in my opinion. I wanted to write this review just to show my love for this game and series in general. So I felt making this my 100th review would be appropriate, especially when my last review was on The Great Ace Attorney 2: Resolve. Ace Attorney really helped me during a rough time in my life, as cliche as that sounds, but I do feel it has made me improve as a person. Revisiting this game has made me love it even more, and without a doubt, Ace Attorney is my favorite video game series of all time. That's not even a contest.

A beautifully haunting mess of format, absolutely devastating and personal, but not particularly logical nor linear. An amalgamation of seemingly menial logs, turned into fundamental terror all encapsulated by a odd, alien foray into a mass of taboo and haunted data.

I'd recommend playing this game here: https://laingame.net/ with both the simplified and TSX versions being fantastic though the Simplified being definitely the most cohesive as you can tackle it at your own pace and rewind/skip at your own leisure without the hassle of its obtuse node system.

Gameplay elements included (for TSX), it's a purposefully clunky mess of slow menu choices as you slowly go from log to log, unlocking others, and watching a screen of data move over and over (with chances of things appearing if idle). Overall, not fantastic but serves its purpose. Ultimately outdated.

What makes this media piece so memorable as a "game" is its experience, even in the two modern ways you can play; it's still squeamish and utterly overloading. Not many other games have near the amount of encapsulated phobias and latent trauma that this game handles so well. It's subtle, arguably slow, personal, and painful.