Despite the recent announcement of a thirty-fourth game, Mystery of the Seven Keys, it’s hard not to feel like Her Interactive’s Nancy Drew series as it was is definitively over. The streak of releases they had perhaps erroneously executed for sixteen years will end in 2015 (the game we’re talking about today is the second game for 2012), and beyond the fact that the next game wouldn’t arrive until 2019 and the following one, the aforementioned Seven Keys is still TBD, almost everything is different now. A new engine that leads to a new mode of movement and play, a new voice for Nancy (if you only read these reviews that may not sound huge but Lani Minella is an enormously important part of this series’ identity), almost total staff turnover at Her Interactive. Marketing for Seven Keys has been going hard since the formal announcement and despite seemingly having very little to actually show, the company seems keen to tie this new game to the legacy of its predecessors, evoking visual cues, inventory items, and even things as vague as Setting Tropes that became iconic to this series over the years. Without knowing whether this new game will resemble the tepidly received franchise-reboot-for-mass-appeal-esque Midnight In Salem or something more traditional remains to be seen. It’s hard to know what to take away from the vague advertisements on the official Nancy Drew PC Game social media accounts.
I’ve mentioned this before in passing, but it does make it feel like, regardless of the literal truth of the statement, the Nancy Drew Cyber Mystery Series is rapidly reaching something of a conclusion, and thinking of this last set of games in that context has me reflecting a lot on the past, which is difficult not to do. It happened to me with Megaman too; when a series is dozens of installments that are all kind of riffing on each other, after a certain point it’s hard to not be constantly making internal comparisons, especially if you play them back to back to back to back. I haven’t quite done that with Nancy Drew but cramming 30+ games in less than two years is a different experience than one every six months or so.
With The Deadly Device, I’m specifically thinking about tone. It’s the first game since, if I recall correctly, the literal first game, Secrets Can Kill, to feature a murder as the driving force behind the mystery. In this case, Nancy has been hired by Jeff Bridges From Iron Man 1 to go undercover at his, like, nondescript science lab that happens to be located at the top of a mountain or something equally wild in Colorado in the middle of winter, where a key researcher at whatever they’re doing there which is truly not important has been killed by the giant tesla coil they keep in the middle of their big lab room, which should theoretically not be possible. So all the research has been halted, all the researchers live at this lab and can’t leave, partially because of the investigation and partially because there’s a big snowstorm that’s expected to blow in soon, and Nancy has to find out who the killer is among them while she poses as a different kind of investigator on behalf of like a realtor or something idk her cover story is so flimsy everybody pretty much figures it out right away.
I’ve felt conflicted about really bringing this up in detail across the last few games but Deadly Device offers a perfect encapsulation of the discord I’ve been feeling so here it is: these games have always walked a tightrope between their stated goal of being nominally educational or at least stimulating content for Young Girls, being workable as all ages entertainment that holds the attention and interest of adults, and, increasingly, what feels to me like the growing tension to want to age up with their audience. Which isn’t to say that early Nancy Drew games are for babies and late Nancy Drew games are edgy affairs. These games have always flirted with the kinds of themes you would find in Nancy’s saucier, sleazier affairs from her college age books that they take a lot of direct inspiration from; death and drugs and crimes of nations and even deep personal trauma flits through these games from the beginning, it just usually does so in the distant past, or on the margins of the stories.
Recently though, those elements stick out at the forefront a little more. Shadow at the Water’s Edge putting the commonly-seen historical side of its story only one generation behind us, rippling directly into the lives of the main cast whose inability to process their grief drives the plot is a stark tonal difference even from the similarly themed Haunted Carousel, which tells a story like this one through the comedy stylings of an annoying robot bird who might have spoken in rhyme? The Captive Curse’s standard scooby doo real estate scheme plot is both used to explore the main side character’s lingering grief and also parallel Nancy’s personal problems, the first ones she’s really ever had in the whole series. Are they good? No. But that doesn’t matter for what we’re talking about here. Alibi in Ashes, of course, puts a question to the very idea of Nancy Drew and what life around her would even look like for regular people and, maybe surprisingly, it’s pretty nasty and mean-spirited about it! The game suggests that Nancy gets to live the life she lives and enjoy the success she does almost entirely because of her wealth and privilege, that any moment one bad day could see everything she has and all of her work fall down around her if she only makes the wrong person mad or tries to pull her brand of justice in a town that’s just a little too corrupt. This will never happen, of course, not in our games, but knowing that it’s happened to other people and that it happens in the world she lives in makes everything she does hit a little differently. Tomb of the Lost Queen similarly pulls its past story straight to the lives of pivotal characters in ways that are toxic and destructive and doesn’t try to work around them either; another game that revisits ideas of an early game with, well, not less nuance, but more willingness to let discomfort exist. Lost Queen may end with a conflict resolved and a peace achieved between factions but it is certainly not the offensive idealism of Mexican government employees happily saluting the people looting their country for profit.
Deadly Device is so far I think the pinnacle of this new subtle shift to slipping this shit into otherwise stock standard Nancy Drew affairs, by like, being about a murder. They get around this of course by keeping the details of the death in the margins; Nancy arrives long after the body has been removed, and she’s only interviewing people for the most part. But when you’re interviewing a lot of angry, stressed people whose careers are functionally over who all already suspect that one of their number is a malicious saboteur with killing on the brain? Well. You’re doing all the Nancy Drew Stuff. You’re doing all the same kind of puzzles (for my money the best puzzles in the entire series by far – diagetically satisfying and almost all of them challenging and engaging), the same kinds of social interactions, you have a day/night cycle to manage, you even have the dumbass Hardy Boys on the phone. But it hits weird. A guy’s dead. A murderer is still around.
Point and click adventure games are one of the best gaming vehicles for horror in my opinion, partially because they distill the player agency at the heart of many horror games to its finest solution. You have very little to do in the moment to moment but direct yourself to the next screen. You feel constantly vulnerable but you’re always the one who has to pull the trigger on the transition to whatever you’re going to see next, and in a lot of games, especially older ones, that’s an instant transition. It’s basic but if it’s a feeling that’s catered to it’s really effective. Nancy Drew games often employ this towards their endings, when a culprit is identified but you haven’t caught them yet, where Nancy is doing whatever she needs to do but you know the bad guy is Around. Sometimes this leads to a direct confrontation at the end of the game but sometimes there’s a situation where the villain is clearly Present or even stalking Nancy and as a point and click character who is also a nebulously teenaged girl, it’s very easy to feel vulnerable in these bits.
Deadly Device capitalizes on this really well. A lot of the time you’re sneaking into people’s work areas, or distracting people with alarms in one part of the facility so you can get to somewhere you’re not meant to be that will only be safe for a really unclear amount of time. One of the main ways to get around is a grated elevator that moves soooooooo slooooooowly so there’s almost always a tension of seeing the person you’re afraid of on the other side of that grate as your view comes up or down from the darkness of the space between floors. And finally when you do identify the culprit, you also know that he already knows you know, and is likely to try to kill you. But by now you don’t know where he is. But you do know that he’s a very large man, and prone to angry outbursts, and the team at Her Interactive understands really well that that’s basically the scariest thing in the world to a young woman. Just about the tensest moments of play I can recall from these games since a similar sequence in Shadow Ranch, but I think it’s done better here, because it’s not a chase, it’s just the fear of not knowing where he is or when he might appear.
That said, the game isn’t terribly dour. It mostly just plays out like a normal Nancy Drew mystery, which is what I mean when I talk about that tonal tightrope – the lack of a present corpse and slight removal in time from the murder means Nancy herself is just kind of operating as usual, which for her means extremely insensitively. You get to call the Hardy Boys, which sucks for me every time they show up because they’re fucking cop losers even worse than Nancy and they get impressively more annoying every game. Their thing this time is that one of them is making up new words by mashing together existing words and being really annoying about it, and the other one is really insistent about the importance of grammar and the immutability of the perfect english language, which is itself an enormous red flag. Get these fucking losers out of my games!!!!! Her actually did make one Hardy Boys game on the Nintendo DS so I have to wonder if they have their personalities from this series in that. If they do that might explain why they only got one go at it. Disaster shit.
Don’t worry though everybody Nancy Drew Cuck Watch is alive and well, it’s just from the most unexpected but welcome place in the form of Nancy’s rival Deirdre from Alibi In Ashes. Or, well, I say Rival but what I mean is she is a regular criminology student and all around normal person who doesn’t like Nancy very much because Nancy is the least likable person of all time, and Nancy thinks they’re rivals because she’s unable to understand the concept of someone knowing who she is and being like “I could go for not hanging out with Nancy.” This has flipped somewhat though to Deirdre basically being like a whiny flirt to Nancy nonstop in this game???? Half of the time complaining loudly about having to do anything and the other half of the time seeming very amused that Nancy thinks she doesn’t like her and continues to insist that Deirdre is her enemy even though Deirdre is obviously into her, which Nancy will never catch on to because she doesn’t know about gay people. It’s good. Deirdre continues to be my shining beacon of light even in a game I already enjoy very much. More on this story as it develops. AND IT HAD BETTER DEVELOP.
PREVIOUSLY: TOMB OF THE LOST QUEEN
NEXT TIME: GHOST OF THORNTON HALL
ALL NANCY DREW PIECES
I’ve mentioned this before in passing, but it does make it feel like, regardless of the literal truth of the statement, the Nancy Drew Cyber Mystery Series is rapidly reaching something of a conclusion, and thinking of this last set of games in that context has me reflecting a lot on the past, which is difficult not to do. It happened to me with Megaman too; when a series is dozens of installments that are all kind of riffing on each other, after a certain point it’s hard to not be constantly making internal comparisons, especially if you play them back to back to back to back. I haven’t quite done that with Nancy Drew but cramming 30+ games in less than two years is a different experience than one every six months or so.
With The Deadly Device, I’m specifically thinking about tone. It’s the first game since, if I recall correctly, the literal first game, Secrets Can Kill, to feature a murder as the driving force behind the mystery. In this case, Nancy has been hired by Jeff Bridges From Iron Man 1 to go undercover at his, like, nondescript science lab that happens to be located at the top of a mountain or something equally wild in Colorado in the middle of winter, where a key researcher at whatever they’re doing there which is truly not important has been killed by the giant tesla coil they keep in the middle of their big lab room, which should theoretically not be possible. So all the research has been halted, all the researchers live at this lab and can’t leave, partially because of the investigation and partially because there’s a big snowstorm that’s expected to blow in soon, and Nancy has to find out who the killer is among them while she poses as a different kind of investigator on behalf of like a realtor or something idk her cover story is so flimsy everybody pretty much figures it out right away.
I’ve felt conflicted about really bringing this up in detail across the last few games but Deadly Device offers a perfect encapsulation of the discord I’ve been feeling so here it is: these games have always walked a tightrope between their stated goal of being nominally educational or at least stimulating content for Young Girls, being workable as all ages entertainment that holds the attention and interest of adults, and, increasingly, what feels to me like the growing tension to want to age up with their audience. Which isn’t to say that early Nancy Drew games are for babies and late Nancy Drew games are edgy affairs. These games have always flirted with the kinds of themes you would find in Nancy’s saucier, sleazier affairs from her college age books that they take a lot of direct inspiration from; death and drugs and crimes of nations and even deep personal trauma flits through these games from the beginning, it just usually does so in the distant past, or on the margins of the stories.
Recently though, those elements stick out at the forefront a little more. Shadow at the Water’s Edge putting the commonly-seen historical side of its story only one generation behind us, rippling directly into the lives of the main cast whose inability to process their grief drives the plot is a stark tonal difference even from the similarly themed Haunted Carousel, which tells a story like this one through the comedy stylings of an annoying robot bird who might have spoken in rhyme? The Captive Curse’s standard scooby doo real estate scheme plot is both used to explore the main side character’s lingering grief and also parallel Nancy’s personal problems, the first ones she’s really ever had in the whole series. Are they good? No. But that doesn’t matter for what we’re talking about here. Alibi in Ashes, of course, puts a question to the very idea of Nancy Drew and what life around her would even look like for regular people and, maybe surprisingly, it’s pretty nasty and mean-spirited about it! The game suggests that Nancy gets to live the life she lives and enjoy the success she does almost entirely because of her wealth and privilege, that any moment one bad day could see everything she has and all of her work fall down around her if she only makes the wrong person mad or tries to pull her brand of justice in a town that’s just a little too corrupt. This will never happen, of course, not in our games, but knowing that it’s happened to other people and that it happens in the world she lives in makes everything she does hit a little differently. Tomb of the Lost Queen similarly pulls its past story straight to the lives of pivotal characters in ways that are toxic and destructive and doesn’t try to work around them either; another game that revisits ideas of an early game with, well, not less nuance, but more willingness to let discomfort exist. Lost Queen may end with a conflict resolved and a peace achieved between factions but it is certainly not the offensive idealism of Mexican government employees happily saluting the people looting their country for profit.
Deadly Device is so far I think the pinnacle of this new subtle shift to slipping this shit into otherwise stock standard Nancy Drew affairs, by like, being about a murder. They get around this of course by keeping the details of the death in the margins; Nancy arrives long after the body has been removed, and she’s only interviewing people for the most part. But when you’re interviewing a lot of angry, stressed people whose careers are functionally over who all already suspect that one of their number is a malicious saboteur with killing on the brain? Well. You’re doing all the Nancy Drew Stuff. You’re doing all the same kind of puzzles (for my money the best puzzles in the entire series by far – diagetically satisfying and almost all of them challenging and engaging), the same kinds of social interactions, you have a day/night cycle to manage, you even have the dumbass Hardy Boys on the phone. But it hits weird. A guy’s dead. A murderer is still around.
Point and click adventure games are one of the best gaming vehicles for horror in my opinion, partially because they distill the player agency at the heart of many horror games to its finest solution. You have very little to do in the moment to moment but direct yourself to the next screen. You feel constantly vulnerable but you’re always the one who has to pull the trigger on the transition to whatever you’re going to see next, and in a lot of games, especially older ones, that’s an instant transition. It’s basic but if it’s a feeling that’s catered to it’s really effective. Nancy Drew games often employ this towards their endings, when a culprit is identified but you haven’t caught them yet, where Nancy is doing whatever she needs to do but you know the bad guy is Around. Sometimes this leads to a direct confrontation at the end of the game but sometimes there’s a situation where the villain is clearly Present or even stalking Nancy and as a point and click character who is also a nebulously teenaged girl, it’s very easy to feel vulnerable in these bits.
Deadly Device capitalizes on this really well. A lot of the time you’re sneaking into people’s work areas, or distracting people with alarms in one part of the facility so you can get to somewhere you’re not meant to be that will only be safe for a really unclear amount of time. One of the main ways to get around is a grated elevator that moves soooooooo slooooooowly so there’s almost always a tension of seeing the person you’re afraid of on the other side of that grate as your view comes up or down from the darkness of the space between floors. And finally when you do identify the culprit, you also know that he already knows you know, and is likely to try to kill you. But by now you don’t know where he is. But you do know that he’s a very large man, and prone to angry outbursts, and the team at Her Interactive understands really well that that’s basically the scariest thing in the world to a young woman. Just about the tensest moments of play I can recall from these games since a similar sequence in Shadow Ranch, but I think it’s done better here, because it’s not a chase, it’s just the fear of not knowing where he is or when he might appear.
That said, the game isn’t terribly dour. It mostly just plays out like a normal Nancy Drew mystery, which is what I mean when I talk about that tonal tightrope – the lack of a present corpse and slight removal in time from the murder means Nancy herself is just kind of operating as usual, which for her means extremely insensitively. You get to call the Hardy Boys, which sucks for me every time they show up because they’re fucking cop losers even worse than Nancy and they get impressively more annoying every game. Their thing this time is that one of them is making up new words by mashing together existing words and being really annoying about it, and the other one is really insistent about the importance of grammar and the immutability of the perfect english language, which is itself an enormous red flag. Get these fucking losers out of my games!!!!! Her actually did make one Hardy Boys game on the Nintendo DS so I have to wonder if they have their personalities from this series in that. If they do that might explain why they only got one go at it. Disaster shit.
Don’t worry though everybody Nancy Drew Cuck Watch is alive and well, it’s just from the most unexpected but welcome place in the form of Nancy’s rival Deirdre from Alibi In Ashes. Or, well, I say Rival but what I mean is she is a regular criminology student and all around normal person who doesn’t like Nancy very much because Nancy is the least likable person of all time, and Nancy thinks they’re rivals because she’s unable to understand the concept of someone knowing who she is and being like “I could go for not hanging out with Nancy.” This has flipped somewhat though to Deirdre basically being like a whiny flirt to Nancy nonstop in this game???? Half of the time complaining loudly about having to do anything and the other half of the time seeming very amused that Nancy thinks she doesn’t like her and continues to insist that Deirdre is her enemy even though Deirdre is obviously into her, which Nancy will never catch on to because she doesn’t know about gay people. It’s good. Deirdre continues to be my shining beacon of light even in a game I already enjoy very much. More on this story as it develops. AND IT HAD BETTER DEVELOP.
PREVIOUSLY: TOMB OF THE LOST QUEEN
NEXT TIME: GHOST OF THORNTON HALL
ALL NANCY DREW PIECES
6 Comments
yeah that’s literally exactly what he’s doing and he even explains it in the exact same way
Deidre supremacy.
The entire relationship of Nancy Drew and violence is so fascinating. The violence can never be on-screen, but it makes the very act of violence itself become a boogeyman. A specter around the corner. Violence and murder exists in Nancy Drew, but its form is vague and formless. And in that way, it almost becomes more threatening. There's one more game that really captures that Fear Factor you're describing that this game's culprit exudes and I'm more than a little bit delighted that someone else can understand how intricate that relationship of on-screen and off-screen violence is when it sets in. Its great.
The entire relationship of Nancy Drew and violence is so fascinating. The violence can never be on-screen, but it makes the very act of violence itself become a boogeyman. A specter around the corner. Violence and murder exists in Nancy Drew, but its form is vague and formless. And in that way, it almost becomes more threatening. There's one more game that really captures that Fear Factor you're describing that this game's culprit exudes and I'm more than a little bit delighted that someone else can understand how intricate that relationship of on-screen and off-screen violence is when it sets in. Its great.
This review reminding me I should really actually put proper scores for all the Nancy drew games at some point because right now ive got a ranking list swimming around with QI level scoring where the points don't matter.
I admit I do like this one a lot because its got that right touch of plot vs puzzle that matters oh so much for me. I think having more plots like this and less plots that are basically just 'we took an idea from scooby doo' works so much better for Nancy since it actually feels like theres some stakes involved. Im not saying Nancy should turn into Jessica Fletcher and be surrounded by death at all angles but its nice to not have to do a third/fourth iteration of 'We painted an animal white because sp0o0o0o0oky'.
That said I completely forgot the Hardy bores were part of this game and I will happily forget their existence again.
I admit I do like this one a lot because its got that right touch of plot vs puzzle that matters oh so much for me. I think having more plots like this and less plots that are basically just 'we took an idea from scooby doo' works so much better for Nancy since it actually feels like theres some stakes involved. Im not saying Nancy should turn into Jessica Fletcher and be surrounded by death at all angles but its nice to not have to do a third/fourth iteration of 'We painted an animal white because sp0o0o0o0oky'.
That said I completely forgot the Hardy bores were part of this game and I will happily forget their existence again.
I would like to personally kill a Hardy boy
@Nerdietalk - Its honestly a crime we haven't been allowed to do something horrible to them in a 'Second Chance' thing.
Can we revisit Danger on Deception island and feed them mortifyingly horrible sandwiches?
Can we revisit Danger on Deception island and feed them mortifyingly horrible sandwiches?
MeowPewterMeow
8 months ago