nancy drew 1: secrets can kill

[portico]

 

ok. nancy drew number one. i did not finish this play through, for two reasons. first: it is a bad game. second: i thought i was playing the remastered version, which i know i have and just assumed was first in my nancy drew binder (a real thing i have) but must be further in. this is relevant because when i got frustrated and looked up hints, i was looking at the wrong game. by the time i gave up in a huff, i was not in a place to investigate just which game i was playing, so i did not realize my mistake until....right now. perhaps i'll attempt to come back to the remastered game. not today, though.

finished or not, this is interesting as an artifact, simply because it's so drastically different from the later games (and the formula which they had pretty much settled on by game 3). first--there's a death! her interactive pretty quickly moved away from murders and attempted murders (except attempts on nancy's life ofc), so the gleeful tone of this game wherein a teenage boy has died is jarring, to say the least. there's also very little in the way of direction from the game itself, so you're sort of clicking aimlessly around, which would be less irritating if you didn't have to switch to a different CD-ROM just to go to the high school. lastly, so much of the game involves code-breaking, and there isn't anything actually in the game that gives you information about ciphers. so you either need to already know various ciphers or look them up online. which feels like it's not in the spirit of the game, and furthermore just isn't fun for me, a person who does not enjoy codes and ciphers. (also the codes are often messages FROM the game TO nancy, which is too meta for me, and also very different from the rest of the games.) so i stopped playing, because a game should be fun.

that said, this game is probably the closest to a nancy drew book in a lot of ways.* one, nancy makes a point of naming her case, which makes sense when you want your readers to make sure they didn't miss one of the many, many nancy drew volumes out there, but feels strange in this context. two, nancy is staying with her aunt eloise, who makes a number of appearances in the books, but vanishes from the games after the next one. eloise, a high school librarian, suggested to her boss that her niece, the 18-year-old amateur detective, could go undercover at the school and crack the mystery. for some reason, the principal goes along with this. this also feels very in keeping with the books, wherein nancy is perpetually 18, post-secondary school and presumably uninterested in attending university (that's for ned and their guy friends, naturally). she is forever poised on the cusp of womanhood. as the games continue, her age is less clear and she becomes more of a vaguely mid-20s wealthy white girl, able to travel where she wishes as her whims take her.

one of the major differences is the character art. while the backgrounds look the same as the later games will, the characters look like hand-drawn cartoons. which isn't bad! but HI clearly decided to go in a more cgi direction, so this is the only game where they appear like this.



I frankly don't remember who the culprit is or what the mystery is about (drug dealing maybe? steroids?), so no insights there. I will say that I don't have much respect for eloise drew as a librarian--her stacks are a mess. the fact that the school mascot is the manatee, however, is very funny. (GO FIGHTING MANATEES)

*many of the games are adaptations of nancy drew books, but most take a great deal of license in the adaptation. some of them only have place names and some character names in common.