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I mentioned above that Secrets Can Kill, for all its flaws, manages to move its story from point A to point B fairly simply and clearly. MED earns the honor of last place because it actively sucks, by which I mean it is not at all hemmed in by the limitations of ’90s technology or a company on its first game, and yet it still is a mess. That’s pretty much all I can say about it. The ’90s were such a dark time for technology that actually ranking it last seems unfair, but the game still isn’t good enough to be worth the effort of replaying and evaluating it on its own merits. What I remember from the one and only time I’ve played this game was that it was okay, but the disc-switching killed (ha ha) my desire to ever even attempt to play it again.
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I want to forgive most of that because those seem like inevitable pitfalls for an introductory game released in 1998, and the game itself is solidly mediocre. The plot is really weird and the puzzles aren’t integrated well, but overall the game makes it from start to finish without too much convoluted weirdness or face-stabbing frustration - with the exception of the disc-switching, which again, I want to forgive because of the 1998-ness of it all. This feels more like a Carmen Sandiego or Cluefinders game, where the puzzles are put in the environment, and the characters don’t notice or comment on them, and the player isn’t necessarily supposed to think that the puzzle-filled environment has anything to do with the story. They don’t show up in realistic places at all instead, you do things like spell Nancy’s name out in a jukebox or notice different colored letters on a diner sign. The puzzles are okay, but get a special mention for being integrated very oddly. Like, if we’re not close enough for the culprit to strangle us with their bare hands, is it even a Nancy Drew game?
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The culprits are cartoonishly incompetent - and ultimately the real villain isn’t even one of our suspects - and the whole thing is resolved in a deus ex machina revelation that ends with Nancy watching the police tackle the culprit from afar. This game treats Jake Rogers’s death with absolutely zero gravitas - everyone spends all their time talking about how much they hated this guy who just got brutally murdered, and the game never bothers to convey the danger Nancy’s in through its music or environment.
BEST NANCY DREW GAME SERIES
The plot is tonally very different from the rest of the series - Nancy doesn’t touch murder again until 2012, in The Deadly Device, and when she does, it’s with a very different take on the subject. They hadn’t established - or considered establishing - a personality for Nancy yet, so all of the dialogue is really stiff and robotic, and none of her questions are woven into any kind of conversational format with the suspects. Even you.Īlso, watch out for spoilers, if you care about that sort of thing.ĭoes this even count as a game? Really, I don’t think it’s fair to rank this one against the other games in the series because it is just so clearly HER’s first effort. I should probably mention, too, that with the exception of like The Shattered Medallion, I enjoy all the games in this series. This is purely subjective - I mean, I tried to take shit like nonsensical plotting or bad dialogue into account, but overall, this is really just a list of the games in the order that I like them best. So! Let’s conclude with an overall listing of these games and how I rank them. I have the Dossier games but never installed them, and I intend to do them some day, but not today. So it took me seven years, a college degree, and two jobs, but - I finished recapping the Nancy Drew games.