nancy drew 14: danger by design
Feb. 1st, 2024 11:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
porticoi think this is the first of these i've replayed that has really aged poorly for reasons unrelated to tech limitations at the time. the trouble was they made a video game about fashion in the early 2000s, objectively the least fashionable period in history. get ready.
the premise of danger by design is that nancy has been asked by a person called amy grunhild--probably a friend of nancy's dad but i honestly can't remember--who is one of the fashion designer minette's financial backers to look into why minette has been falling so behind. nancy is placed as an intern in minette's paris studio, which nobody looks askance at because minette is so notoriously a terrible person to work for that her assistants are quitting all the time. so this is the atmosphere that nancy arrives in.
this is a weird game. one of the weirdest things about it is that, despite the game being set in paris, only one of the main characters is actually french. minette (top left) is american, and so is her assistant heather (below her, wearing the ugliest outfit ever devised). jj ling (top right) is australian, below her is dieter von schwesterkrank (german), and the lone french person is jean-michel traquenard. nancy tells us at the outset that she took two years of french in high school, but she still makes jean-michel repeat himself repeatedly when he pronounces heather "ezair" and jj "gigi." mortifying conversation. (then, at the end, nancy easily reads a letter entirely written in french. girl what is the truth)
more strange things in this game: we're told that minette is obsessed with curves, which is why her studio is in an old windmill, and why she designs clothes for fat women. i appreciate that her interactive was making this game with impressionable young girls in mind, but the explanation of "thin designer makes clothes for fat people because she loves curves (aesthetically)" is. weird. you can just say it's okay to be fat or that fat people like to wear clothes too. but maybe you couldn't in 2006. also nancy randomly finds books about electrical engineering in jj's kitchen, comments that it's strange, and then it literally never comes up again.
anyway, the plot of the game is a bit scattered. you've got nancy spying on minette, which mostly involves intercepting the various threatening messages she's receiving. then, there's the windmill, which previously belonged to noisette tornade, a codebreaker in WWII. she's our puzzle-leaving character, although sadly she's dead. nancy can't resist a puzzle so she starts running around solving them just for the hell of it, which naturally comes around and enables her to solve the minette mystery at the end. most of the puzzles relate to codes in some way, so they are my enemies. this is just all around not a fun game to play for me. if you like codes and breaking them then you will have a blast.
there are a few new developments in this game. the first is the introduction of nancy's desk. from now on, the games open with nancy entering her bedroom and standing at her desk. the desk holds a guide to how the games work, a portfolio where you can look at nancy's past cases (including secret of the old clock with no explanation for why nancy was briefly alive in 1930), a case file for the current case, and a plane ticket (in this case to france). you click on the ticket to start the game. there's also an array of items relating to nancy's past cases, which change in each game. i loved that element the most when it was introduced. also someone is outside mowing their lawn, in case you need a reminder that nancy lives in the suburbs. the other new element is the FONT. scroll back up to the game title and compare nancy's name font with any previous game. we're in the future now, kids. OH, i almost forgot! this game ends with COMBAT. god forbid nancy throw a punch, but she gradually wears her opponent down with skillful blocking.
there are a couple of major callbacks in this game. first, we have sonny joon (late of the beech hill museum) in his second appearance. as before, he was the intern before nancy, and as before his notes and doodles provide nancy with helpful hints. sadly, she cannot eat his leftover stash of koko kringle chocolate bars. second, we have prudence rutherford, also from secret of the scarlet hand. in this game, she is a couture client of minette's. nancy speaks with her over the phone (prudence remembers who nancy is, unlike charleena purcell), and then assists in creating a very very strange wardrobe for her. we can call bess & george and the hardy boys on the phone (laboriously, using a pre-paid phone card), but the only fun detail is joe hardy's big crush on jj ling. like in blackmoor manor, time zones don't exist for nancy so you don't have to worry about waking somebody up.
and that's danger by design! the moral of this one is don't make a game about fashion design in 2006.
the premise of danger by design is that nancy has been asked by a person called amy grunhild--probably a friend of nancy's dad but i honestly can't remember--who is one of the fashion designer minette's financial backers to look into why minette has been falling so behind. nancy is placed as an intern in minette's paris studio, which nobody looks askance at because minette is so notoriously a terrible person to work for that her assistants are quitting all the time. so this is the atmosphere that nancy arrives in.
this is a weird game. one of the weirdest things about it is that, despite the game being set in paris, only one of the main characters is actually french. minette (top left) is american, and so is her assistant heather (below her, wearing the ugliest outfit ever devised). jj ling (top right) is australian, below her is dieter von schwesterkrank (german), and the lone french person is jean-michel traquenard. nancy tells us at the outset that she took two years of french in high school, but she still makes jean-michel repeat himself repeatedly when he pronounces heather "ezair" and jj "gigi." mortifying conversation. (then, at the end, nancy easily reads a letter entirely written in french. girl what is the truth)
more strange things in this game: we're told that minette is obsessed with curves, which is why her studio is in an old windmill, and why she designs clothes for fat women. i appreciate that her interactive was making this game with impressionable young girls in mind, but the explanation of "thin designer makes clothes for fat people because she loves curves (aesthetically)" is. weird. you can just say it's okay to be fat or that fat people like to wear clothes too. but maybe you couldn't in 2006. also nancy randomly finds books about electrical engineering in jj's kitchen, comments that it's strange, and then it literally never comes up again.
anyway, the plot of the game is a bit scattered. you've got nancy spying on minette, which mostly involves intercepting the various threatening messages she's receiving. then, there's the windmill, which previously belonged to noisette tornade, a codebreaker in WWII. she's our puzzle-leaving character, although sadly she's dead. nancy can't resist a puzzle so she starts running around solving them just for the hell of it, which naturally comes around and enables her to solve the minette mystery at the end. most of the puzzles relate to codes in some way, so they are my enemies. this is just all around not a fun game to play for me. if you like codes and breaking them then you will have a blast.
there are a few new developments in this game. the first is the introduction of nancy's desk. from now on, the games open with nancy entering her bedroom and standing at her desk. the desk holds a guide to how the games work, a portfolio where you can look at nancy's past cases (including secret of the old clock with no explanation for why nancy was briefly alive in 1930), a case file for the current case, and a plane ticket (in this case to france). you click on the ticket to start the game. there's also an array of items relating to nancy's past cases, which change in each game. i loved that element the most when it was introduced. also someone is outside mowing their lawn, in case you need a reminder that nancy lives in the suburbs. the other new element is the FONT. scroll back up to the game title and compare nancy's name font with any previous game. we're in the future now, kids. OH, i almost forgot! this game ends with COMBAT. god forbid nancy throw a punch, but she gradually wears her opponent down with skillful blocking.
there are a couple of major callbacks in this game. first, we have sonny joon (late of the beech hill museum) in his second appearance. as before, he was the intern before nancy, and as before his notes and doodles provide nancy with helpful hints. sadly, she cannot eat his leftover stash of koko kringle chocolate bars. second, we have prudence rutherford, also from secret of the scarlet hand. in this game, she is a couture client of minette's. nancy speaks with her over the phone (prudence remembers who nancy is, unlike charleena purcell), and then assists in creating a very very strange wardrobe for her. we can call bess & george and the hardy boys on the phone (laboriously, using a pre-paid phone card), but the only fun detail is joe hardy's big crush on jj ling. like in blackmoor manor, time zones don't exist for nancy so you don't have to worry about waking somebody up.
and that's danger by design! the moral of this one is don't make a game about fashion design in 2006.
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