nancy drew 15: creature of kapu cave
Feb. 4th, 2024 12:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
porticothis is a game that's really more like 2 games in that i actually remembered that there were 2 different games where nancy went to hawaii. i was wrong!
the creature of kapu cave sees nancy going to a jungle on the big island to assist an entomologist. is nancy a bug expert? at all interested in science? is she or someone she knows acquainted with the researcher? no! a friend of her dad's literally saw an ad for a research assistant in an alumni journal and passed it along as nancy is canonically and eternally in some sort of gap year. the funny thing about this game is that nearly all of the mystery solving nancy does is wholly related to her internship, beginning with "where is dr. kim" and leading to "how do i analyze the contents of these frass jars." even the one bit of breaking and entering is in service of dr. kim's research! it's especially funny because you get the sense that nancy is NOT having a good time. the REAL mystery is down to the hardy boys.
that's right! the hardys are here again and--wait. ARE they??
they are. it's unclear why her interactive felt the need to redesign the boys after their only previous outing, a mere...2 games ago...but they did! and as i recall, nobody liked that. at least in the nancy circles on tumblr that still seems to be the case. fortunately, you don't spend much time looking at them because you're mostly playing as them. after nancy heads into the jungle to do her fieldwork, a critical bridge washes out and joe and frank, who are staying at the excursion place which provided nancy with her rental jeep (completely coincidentally, they're actually on a case rather than looking at bugs for lack of anything else to do), become nancy's only connection to the outside world. you switch between playing as nancy and playing as one of the boys by calling them.
the rest of the cast are (clockwise) dr. quigley kim (aforementioned entomologist), pua mapu (rising surf star and daughter of the excursion center's owner), dr. malachi craven (head of the hilihili research center, also in the jungle, leaning into the supervillain name), and mike mapu (or "big island mike"). nancy is mainly dealing with the scientists, while the boys are on mapu duty.
i'll be honest. this game...doesn't really make sense to me. nancy's part in it is helping quigley prove that something odd is happening to a species of moth which proves that something weird is going on further up their food chain (quigley is convinced that solving this will bring her fame and riches, which is very funny). everyone suspects dr. craven and hilihili of doing mutations to plants, which would be...bad? i guess? this game came out in 2006, which feels to me like it was before the big gmo scare got started, but maybe they were ahead of the times. her interactive: anti-gmo. apparently.
aside from feeling like nancy isn't really the one solving a mystery here, i do enjoy the playing of the game. i remembered the fieldwork as being extremely frustrating, but this time it was a breeze, so i don't know. past door was a dummy maybe. the hardys (frank, mostly, after joe receives an incapacitating bonk on the head) spend their time fishing (so they can sell the fish to the mapus and receive "big island bucks"), hunting for shells (which they in turn use to make necklaces which can be sold to the mapus for "big island bucks"...you see the racket mike has going here), and eventually snorkeling. the activities are fun!
what i don't super love is how the game concludes. not only is the endgame wildly frustrating and entirely based on luck and not skill, but the optics of the culprit and why they did it...are bad! i take back what i said about the last game. this one has aged worse. even aside from what they did to poor joe's face. the moral of the story is the anti-tourism people are right, actually.
the creature of kapu cave sees nancy going to a jungle on the big island to assist an entomologist. is nancy a bug expert? at all interested in science? is she or someone she knows acquainted with the researcher? no! a friend of her dad's literally saw an ad for a research assistant in an alumni journal and passed it along as nancy is canonically and eternally in some sort of gap year. the funny thing about this game is that nearly all of the mystery solving nancy does is wholly related to her internship, beginning with "where is dr. kim" and leading to "how do i analyze the contents of these frass jars." even the one bit of breaking and entering is in service of dr. kim's research! it's especially funny because you get the sense that nancy is NOT having a good time. the REAL mystery is down to the hardy boys.
that's right! the hardys are here again and--wait. ARE they??
they are. it's unclear why her interactive felt the need to redesign the boys after their only previous outing, a mere...2 games ago...but they did! and as i recall, nobody liked that. at least in the nancy circles on tumblr that still seems to be the case. fortunately, you don't spend much time looking at them because you're mostly playing as them. after nancy heads into the jungle to do her fieldwork, a critical bridge washes out and joe and frank, who are staying at the excursion place which provided nancy with her rental jeep (completely coincidentally, they're actually on a case rather than looking at bugs for lack of anything else to do), become nancy's only connection to the outside world. you switch between playing as nancy and playing as one of the boys by calling them.
the rest of the cast are (clockwise) dr. quigley kim (aforementioned entomologist), pua mapu (rising surf star and daughter of the excursion center's owner), dr. malachi craven (head of the hilihili research center, also in the jungle, leaning into the supervillain name), and mike mapu (or "big island mike"). nancy is mainly dealing with the scientists, while the boys are on mapu duty.
i'll be honest. this game...doesn't really make sense to me. nancy's part in it is helping quigley prove that something odd is happening to a species of moth which proves that something weird is going on further up their food chain (quigley is convinced that solving this will bring her fame and riches, which is very funny). everyone suspects dr. craven and hilihili of doing mutations to plants, which would be...bad? i guess? this game came out in 2006, which feels to me like it was before the big gmo scare got started, but maybe they were ahead of the times. her interactive: anti-gmo. apparently.
aside from feeling like nancy isn't really the one solving a mystery here, i do enjoy the playing of the game. i remembered the fieldwork as being extremely frustrating, but this time it was a breeze, so i don't know. past door was a dummy maybe. the hardys (frank, mostly, after joe receives an incapacitating bonk on the head) spend their time fishing (so they can sell the fish to the mapus and receive "big island bucks"), hunting for shells (which they in turn use to make necklaces which can be sold to the mapus for "big island bucks"...you see the racket mike has going here), and eventually snorkeling. the activities are fun!
what i don't super love is how the game concludes. not only is the endgame wildly frustrating and entirely based on luck and not skill, but the optics of the culprit and why they did it...are bad! i take back what i said about the last game. this one has aged worse. even aside from what they did to poor joe's face. the moral of the story is the anti-tourism people are right, actually.