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
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
4 Comments
OH LMAO 75TH anniversary of Nancy Drew in general that makes SO much sense yes this branding has not been preserved in modern digital releases haha.
And yeah this would be a GREAT first game. I'm not actively thinking about ranking them but it's up there for me for sure on gut feeling, just on vibes. A rowdy fun time is a great way to describe it.
And yeah this would be a GREAT first game. I'm not actively thinking about ranking them but it's up there for me for sure on gut feeling, just on vibes. A rowdy fun time is a great way to describe it.
I feel I'm in the minority with this game. I don't hate it but I also find it hard to click with the setting and plot like others do and I wonder if that's down to the fact that I had no idea who Nancy drew was until I began with the games? It feels like there's a lot of historical context and references to Nancy Drew book lore that goes right over my head as a Brit.
So as such the game is a bit on the shrug worthy side for me. It's not horrible by any sense and it's still worth playing through thanks to some good puzzling and interesting and cozy enough characters/plot but my total disconnect with the theming does mean a lot of stuff goes by in a sepia filtered haze at times.
So as such the game is a bit on the shrug worthy side for me. It's not horrible by any sense and it's still worth playing through thanks to some good puzzling and interesting and cozy enough characters/plot but my total disconnect with the theming does mean a lot of stuff goes by in a sepia filtered haze at times.
Actually as a note I do think this is something the Nancy Drew games do have issue with throughout the series. Whenever the game is describing any historical context outside of America, it's quite good at filling in blanks but whenever its a US centric story or the puzzle revolves around america-centric history and geography, it leaves large gaps and presumes you already have this information/knowledge to hand. It can be a little disorienting.
Nerdietalk
2 years ago
Looking at the Steam release and the boxart and so on, it does suddenly strike me how weird and out of nowhere this game is when you aren't looking at a big sticker on the box that says "75TH ANNIVERSARY OF NANCY DREW CELEBRATION"