Nancy Drew Sea of Darkness was released in May 2015. The 32nd game in this quiet little franchise, publishing two games a year to a niche crowd, not making much in profits. There’s a whole mystery to untangle about how this company even survived for twenty years. Anonymous reports from people who left Her company reported that they received funding from an outside investor who just felt it was the right thing to do to support “educational games for young girls.” Future attempts to gain investors or gimmicks to boost sales failed handily. Even so, there was no reason to suspect anything about the company’s structure would change.

At the end of 2014, just before the release of Sea of Darkness, former Disney marketing director Penny Milliken was installed as the new CEO of HerInteractive. Under Millikin, the entire structure of the company changed. Half of the staff was fired. Several quit in frustration. The remaining crew was given the job of making a new Nancy Drew game in Unity, compared to the previous engine the franchise used. Communication from the company died down. Lani Minelli was replaced with a new Nancy Drew voice. There was a weird announcement that MIdnight in Salem would be a “VR game,” which went nowhere. The game released in 2019, to poor reviews. It's unlikely another Nancy game is on the horizon. Sea of Darkness is sort of the last hurrah of the franchise.

As much as it's tempting for me to lay all the blame on Milikin, I will reluctantly grant that her decision to port all the games to Steam was the correct move. Previously, the games could only be bought in-stores or on HerInteractive’s website. The website is… bad. Games you bought can just up and vanish. Wanna play it again? Better pay up a second time. And the fact of the matter was, HerInteractive was unmistakably in the red. These games do not turn a profit. It gained a diehard (but tiny) fanbase that was basically content to accept anything, myself obviously included. But these are not “exciting” games. They’re goofy. They’re silly. Comfortable Bs. If the company wanted to really thrive, I can understand to an extent why shaking things up seemed necessary.

On the other hand, she also signed a big petition a bunch of rich fucks in California wrote to protest a potential bill that would taxing big companies more. The structure of the bill probably would have resulted in mass firings so companies could pay less taxes, but the threat towards the workforce clearly wasn’t the motives of the business people protesting that “this is hurting the poor innocent companies that are helping California thrive :( :( :( how could they bully us like this :( :( :(“ So with all that in mind, I don’t feel too bad about calling her a corporate monster.

I’ve put off playing this game for a long time. The Nancy Drew games are a huge part of my childhood and saying goodbye always feels… weird. I still haven’t even touched Midnight in Salem yet, even as it sits in my Steam library taunting me. Maybe it's actually good. Who could say. But all the things that defined the franchise as Nancy Drew are in THIS game, not Midnight in Salem. Yeah, the system’s clunky and Minelli’s acting is always a little stiff. But that’s kind of part of the charm, you know? And I think the devs knew that. People like to pretend the point and click genre “died”, but I think it mostly just started marketing to girls more than men, and gaming culture hated that. So for newer generations this was one of the best ways to get into the genre. I’m sure the newest gen have enough great indie point and clicks that I’m not too worried about the genre vanishing. But its still hard to see.

Maybe part of what’s so devastating is the sense that Nancy Drew’s legacy and cultural importance has been virtually abandoned. I’m not going to claim the franchise didn’t have problems from the onset. It's always been about a rich white teen who inspired people like Hilary Clinton. The original versions of the texts had major problems depicting race, and then the revisions of those books chose to whitewash all the characters and erased much of Nancy’s sassiness in favor of a girl with devotional loyalty to cops and authority. Both versions of those books are, as hard as it is for me to admit, bad! But I truly believe there’s something in this universe that hasn’t been fully utilized yet. Nancy had to answer the 1930s question of a "proper" female heroes by basically being loose enough to fill any ideal. But this results in something interesting. Because her character is written to be so thin, Nancy Drew can represent anything. Her potential is infinite. She can fly planes. She can solve murder by Tesla electrocution. There can be a jetpack homeless woman. She can do anything, BE anything.

But no one’s willing to give Nancy that chance. Simon and Schuster never advertised these games, leaving HerInteractive to foot the marketing bill. The 2008 movie is 90% great, but also shows embarrassment over the franchise’s supporting cast and spends too much time focusing on Ned’s romantic drama. The tv show is an attempt to rip off Riverdale without having any of the things that make Riverdale or Nancy Drew work. (“work”). Shit like Ready Player One take jabs a villain for liking Nancy Drew, because that’s the only kind of nerd franchise that’s not “important” I suppose. The last really great Nancy Drew work was a 2018 comic by Kelly Thompson. It took a noir approach to the character, wringing out some edgy character drama out of Nancy’s relationship with her friends and how her snooping has helped or hindered them in life. It's genuinely amazing. Ended on a cliffhanger that hasn’t been followed up on.

For Nancy’s 90th Anniversary, they announced a sequel to a Hardy Boys comic instead. The Hardy Boys in “The Death of Nancy Drew.”

How appropriate.

Anyway, now that I’m done having an existential crisis about my childhood hero for eight paragraphs, this game’s pretty alright.

The franchise’s formula has often tried to write some kind of tragedy set in the past and I’ve generally tuned it out. I’ve seen it before, you know? But at some point, I genuinely think the writing became something special. They nailed down giving characters unique voices and personality. The suspects particularly charming this time around. Gunnar, the boisterous drunkard who can’t tell a lie. The grumpy Lisabet who seems to teleport around town trying to keep some measure of peace in the town’s chaos. The girlboss lesbian Dagny, who’s such the stand-out of an already great cast. Her lines are constantly peppered with mean-spirited jabs so over the top that you can’t help but adore her. At one point, Nancy catches Dagny doing something shady and Dagny starts crafting a cover story. When Nancy acts like she buys it, Dagny immediately drops the lie on her own accord to lecture Nancy on being too trusting, before revealing the truth of the situation just for kicks. She’s a bitch and I love her.

But the writing also gives these characters a real tragedy to their lives. Dagny’s recently divorced and she still has her ex-wife’s last name in a lot of her paperwork, even years after the separation. Lisabet is grappling with a messy break-up and a messier financial struggle. Gunnar is irritable towards outsiders and over-the-top in his antics, but he keeps talking to someone as nosy as Nancy just because she looks like his lost daughter. Everyone’s struggling through these messy parts of their lives and the care to give them that depth highlights just how far the series has changed since the plot beat about the Trauma Therapy Robot back in the Haunted Carousel.

The game also takes a genuine swing at dealing with some more Nancy/Ned relationship drama, with the usual oddly paced writing decisions that entails. I've never been a Ned fan, but there's an attempt at tenderness here that truly feels warm and fresh in ways it hasn't been before.

Of course, it's still got the usual Drew problems. Some motivations and plots go nowhere, there’s a lot of red herrings that don’t quite line up, puzzles that barely make sense within the world’s setting, and this is probably the thirtieth treasure hunt plot these games have had. But those aren’t bugs per se. Those are features. That’s what you’re here to see.

Among the staff on Sea of Darkness were three notable writers. Nik Blahunka, Cathy Roiter, and Katie Chironis. The former two became the main Her writers for a good eight years and I think churned out some of its strongest swings of the franchise. Nik Blahunka is currently one of the staff on Fortnite while Cathy Roiter I couldn’t track down.

But I want to give special attention to Katie Chironis, a new hire at Her at the time.In between this game and being overworked for MiS and the dozens of other projects in between, Chironis spent 2013 to 2019 writing Elsinore, one of my favorite games of all time. I didn’t know about this connection until I was browsing the Elsinore website on a whim. It's one of the most touching, beautiful stories on narrative and the terror of an inevitable tragedy. Even while under the nightmare conditions of Midnight in Salem, she was making something truly personal and well-crafted.

And I think that’s where I really come down to with Nancy Drew. It's goofy, it's contrived, the writing isn’t always good, and you can really wander around for hours without a clue of what’s going on. There’s some copaganda aspects that come up here and there. But goddamn, you can feel the heart. There’s a genuine desire to just look around a new locale, teach some history, and maybe have some fun along the way. It was a franchise so comfortably in its groove, it kept finding new ways to expand and experiment, even within its formula. You got to see the team grow and change over the course of the years and make something really, truly sincere. Even 32 games in, I still wanted to see them do more.

But at the end of the day, I have no right to complain. 32 games in any franchise is a miracle. It was there for as long as it could be. And it really did make something wonderful in the process.