portico | nancy drew 2: stay tuned for danger (Reply)

alright, now we're getting to the thing. this is a game with a lot of growing pains (her interactive hasn't QUITE figured out how they want these things to work), but it's headed in the right direction. (nancy does refer to her previous case in all caps on the phone to george, like she would in one of the books. this never happens again.)

nancy has been invited to stay with soap star mattie jenson and investigate the death threats her costar, television heartthrob rick arlen, has been getting. nancy gets this job because mattie lives in nancy's aunt eloise's apartment (who is this woman, who works as a high school librarian in florida and can afford an apartment in a manhattan brownstown??). this game is an artifact of another sort--the late 90s. We've got all the medias here. We've got random little manhattan newspapers, we've got soap opera magazines, we've got cassette players and tapes, and vcr players and tapes. letters! faxes! live checks! truly a dream for the anachronistic technophile (a term i just made up).

HI has committed to cgi characters, but they're still scaling the slope out of the uncanny valley. everyone is very shiny and plastic, and their faces move too much when they speak. to add insult to injury, mattie's apartment is full of photographs of her with other people, and while she appears as she does above, the other people are actual human beings. i can't find any images of this online, presumably because everyone everywhere agreed they should stay safely within the game.

mattie herself is a sweetheart who immediately leaves nancy alone in her apartment, presumably under the misapprehension that nancy is not the sort of person who goes poking around in strangers' drawers. nancy is exactly that kind of person, of course, so quickly you know everything there is to know about the torch that mattie is still carrying for her youthful ex and current costar, rick. as the case goes on and you learn more and more things about rick, mattie's insistence that he's a nice guy, really! just makes it very hard to like mattie.

as you might have gathered, rick: sucks. he's your typical under-talented, ladder-climbing, womanizing white guy which literally everyone except mattie can see. he hits on nancy (remember: 18!) immediately. i think maybe HI intended him to suck in a fun way, and maybe if he experienced any consequences for his actions he might! but he does not (unless continuing to act on a soap opera counts as a consequence).

the rest of the characters (clockwise from rick) millie strathorn, owner of the network who also acts as the propsmistress (for fun?), possibly senile; lillian weiss, director who is also rick's ex and has huuuuge anger management issues; mattie; dwayne powers, mattie's current agent and rick's former agent, kinda a sad sack; and ralph, security guard. don't really know why ralph is here he says like 2 lines and sometimes catches you creeping around at night in the studio if you turn away from your computer to have a conversation with your roommate and forget that you've left nancy standing idle in a place she's not supposed to be.

this game is much sharper in terms of direction, but can still be unclear about the order events should occur in. for example, i was exploded by a bomb in a cassette player multiple times before i gave in and looked up a hint (i should have picked up a tool in the prop room earlier on, but as i hadn't i had no choice but to hide out in the studio until after 5 pm--no way to move that time along, i just played a game on my phone for a while--until millie left and i could break in and get the tool. THEN i could go back to rick's dressing room and defuse the bomb that had been sitting there happily all afternoon.) i also spent about an hour clicking around trying to figure out what conversation i hadn't had in order to trigger the phone call which kicks off the end game.

the end game is intense, in part because the culprit really wants to kill rick, and, when thwarted, REALLY wants to kill nancy. and for sure suceeds, if you run out of time and have to hit the "Second Chance" button. which i did, multiple times. this isn't one that i can whole-heartedly recommend, except as a cultural artifact, but the culprit does show up in a later game--literally the only time HI has ever done that--so it might be worth it for that alone. i don't know what the moral here is. maybe to get in on whatever side hustle eloise drew has got going, because dang.