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portico
last train to blue moon canyon marks the end and the beginning of a number of things in these games. it's notably bigger than previous games--the first to come on 2 cd-roms, a trend which would continue until the most recent game. it's also the first time where you can play as a character other than nancy. and! the hardy boys are here. that's right, after teasing us with phone conversations for years, her interactive finally let us see some of nancy's pals. just don't get used to what they look like (more on that later).
the premise of last train to blue moon canyon is that lori girard, a paris hilton clone, has gathered a group of people on an old steam train which once belonged to a man called jake hurley. he had a mine which he would never reveal the location of, but the train was fitted out to take him and his tragically short-lived wife, camille, across the country in comfort. lori's plan is to take the train out towards where he was last seen to give the group time to solve how to find the mine and ideally what happened to him. naturally, everyone except for nancy and the hardys are immediately uninterested in solving those mysteries, but the hardys can't be going about getting underfoot, so they post up at the dining table and offer encouragement. nancy does all the work.
aside from lori, who has a reputation for being not bright but extremely attention hungry; there's john grey (or gary dourdan?), host of a paranormal investigation show and only interested in finding proof of camille's ghost; tino balducci, extremely new york cop who shot to fame after apprehending some bank robbers, actual skill as an investigator is unclear; and--get ready for it--our old friend charleena purcell. frank and joe hardy aren't the only voices who get physical form in this game, the romance novelist and research specialist we first met at shadow ranch is here. charleena is on a deadline, and only agreed to come along on the off-chance that there's a book in it, so she spends all her time at her laptop. charleena does NOT come off well in this game. i rescind my earlier excitement at having a romance writer represented. she's not even helpful as a researcher!
jake hurley is yet another her interactive character who has completely underestimated his heirs' interest in solving a complex series of puzzles. when lori first boarded the train (her father bought a transport company which had had it sitting in a warehouse for a century), she found a letter jake had sent his niece (in which he insists everything she needs to find the mine is on the train) in a trash bin. she was not interested, and frankly i can't really blame her (also he sorta lied in the letter). at this point, however, nancy is an expert at these sorts of puzzles. the only real challenge is the fact that she's solving it 100 years after jake meant someone to, so some pieces of information are lost to time. or would be, if nancy drew did not exude some sort of field which causes no materials to disintegrate at the rate they should. the puzzles are fun, and even fairly unique! not a single slider to be seen. i hope you like dolls, though.
the real appeal for me in replaying this game is (unsurprisingly) the train. this train FUCKS. and while i understand the game's reasons, i will never forgive it for not showing me the interior of the sleeping cabins.
the moral of the story is show me the sleeping cabins.
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Date: 2024-01-29 01:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-29 02:25 pm (UTC)