When I’m writing about a game I try not to say something is just “bad” because bad is one of those words that doesn’t really mean anything. Nobody ever just doesn’t like something for no reason, and part of the reason I even made a backloggd account was because I wanted to challenge myself to write about every single game I play in an effort to become more articulate about how I think about the media I consume. Practice is the best way to get better at anything, after all, and that applies to criticism as much as anything else. So I try not to say something is bad, or at least not let that be the end of the thought, because there’s always gotta be a reason why, right?

Okay so you see a half-star rating at the top of this and I open with the most Film Studies 301-ass explanation of how to conceptualize criticism and this is a very ominous way to start and I really just need you to understand where I’m coming from when I say that The Creature of Kapu Cave is simply a bad game, from top to bottom, in the most mundane and unremarkable ways imaginable.

Typically when I find these games frustrating it’s because they have swung big (either narratively or in some kind of gameplay ambition) and missed hard at whatever lofty ambition or innovation they were reaching for. Not so in Kapu Cave, which has not only the worst qualities of the dregs of Nancy Drews past (tedious puzzles, paper thin narrative threads, characters who are at best uninteresting and at worst annoying to spend time with, bland setting, nonsensical resolutions) but also myriad new features that add to the sense of languid time-wasting that dominates the proceedings.

The plot of this game is so scattershot as to not be worth recapping but I will give the barest hint of a premise because this IS my favorite of the Stock Nancy Drew Setups: Nancy Steals A Presumably Valuable Internship From Someone Who Could Presumably Actually Use It For Their Career. This time it’s to help an entomologist with her research in Hawaii for a month and we’re gonna pause right here for my new favorite recurring segment NANCY DREW CUCK WATCH because literally moments after Nancy’s boyfriend Ned, whom I’ve been joking is a spurned partner who never comes on her adventures and two games ago was looked over for the Hardy Boys, calls Nancy on the phone to see if she arrived safely, Nancy spots the Hardy Boys on the beach and says okay bro I’ll call you later bye and hangs up on him it’s INCREDIBLE.

Yeah, the Hardy Boys are here, they’re fucking annoying, and they’re huge cops, working undercover as tourists for a super rich dude to spy on local a Hawaiian business owner to see if he’s got any skeletons in his closet before the rich white guy invests with him or some bullshit it’s fucking uncomfortable. So Nancy treks into the forest to find her Doctor who is missing, the bridge goes out, and now you switch perspectives between Nancy and the Hardy boys and spend almost the entire game doing literally nothing as either of them, just kind of wandering around doing plant research (the doctor isn’t missing at all, actually, and it’s fine that her camp has been vandalized – she’ll just make Nancy go replicate all of the lost research!), fishing, talking to assholes (but not the fun kind of assholes in these games, just normal ones), and engaging in lighthearted banter as you very slowly uncover an extremely mild and generally harmless Scooby Doo Real Estate Scam so innocuous that even the game says the cops don’t know what to charge the criminals with at the end of the game (you do still make them turn themselves in however! And yes, it IS the indebted Hawaiian business owner and you ARE protecting the white businessman and big pharma science lab! WHAT THE FUCK ELSE WOULD YOU BE DOING IN THIS SERIES LMAO). The game is like four hours long and I honestly couldn’t tell you what happened really besides the fact that you could easily shave off at least an hour of that play time if you removed the first person stealth maze in this point and click adventure game or the fishing “minigame” that involves clicking on the screen and then waiting for a random fish to be caught ten seconds later, which you have to do literally dozens of times. None of the game overs are even super funny in this one.

The whole thing is just a mess, but worse than that it’s a BORING mess, and a RACIST one to boot. This is it, this is the monkey’s paw curling on my wish for one of these games to imply that there are actual genuine supernatural forces at work in the series, which is probably the most noteworthy thing here, and even that is drowned out by being a note of subtle ambiguity in the sea of absurd goofy nonsense that is this game’s climax. It’s really not even enough to get worked up about. It’s just nothing at all.

PREVIOUSLY: DANGER BY DESIGN
NEXT TIME: THE WHITE WOLF OF ICICLE CREEK

ALL NANCY DREW PIECES