Nancy Drew®: The Captive Curse
This was my first ever Nancy Drew game and now I’m hooked! I thought this game was going to be really corny and the characters looked silly, but i was intrugued by the German castle setting and i love point and click puzzle games which are so hard to find! I wasn’t expecting much from the game and i was very pleased. Some of the puzzles i ended up looking up clues for online, but found if i would of just tried a little more i would of gotten them. But overall i found them challenging and fun. I liked many aspects of the game, which i think really sold it to me.
– Real player with 23.9 hrs in game
Read More: Best Cult Classic Exploration Games.
♥ Spooky spooky.
The first time I played Captive Curse, I was absolutely terrified.
Though the game firmly keeps with being family friendly, it does an excellent job of conveying the castle and its array of characters fear. From the dark atomsphere to the animal skull in the dungeon to the monster lurking outside the castle walls, replaying it gave me the shivers!
If you’d like to play a spookier Nancy Drew game, this one makes for a great choice.
♥ Love the mini games.
Usually I tend to skip the mini games unless they’re directly related to clearing a task or two. Playing Raid? Killing cows in search of the hidden monster? Loved them! The two mini games added a great amount of replay value to the game. Admittedly I wouldn’t mind if they made more of the mini games as fun as those two!
– Real player with 20.1 hrs in game
Nancy Drew®: Labyrinth of Lies
it’s okay! i probably would’ve given it a thumbs down if i’d played it before midnight in salem, but it’s definitely better than midnight in salem.
my main complaint is the pacing and the amount of spoon-feeding. there are a lot of nd games where you are sort of led gently through the story, but this one feels less like you’re driving it and more like it’s being told to you with puzzles. most of the major breakthroughs don’t feel like things that you did yourself, but that might just be me. that being said, the sets are pretty, if a little immersion-breaking. the characters vary in quality imo.
– Real player with 44.3 hrs in game
Read More: Best Cult Classic Female Protagonist Games.
This morning I was fired from my job after 25 years of working there. My boss had retired and let this POS college grad with $200,000 in student debt and an ego the size of Texas take over, firing everyone over the age of 35 in order to “progress the company into the next century.” FCK YOU, CHAD! FCK YOU AND YOUR PORSCHE YOUR DAD BOUGHT YOU! Have fun looking for the huge sh*t I took in your wiper fluid container!!!
TlDr Nancy Drew 8/10 Would recommend
– Real player with 17.1 hrs in game
Nancy Drew®: Ghost of Thornton Hall
I am a huge fan of Nancy Drew Games, having played them for almost 16 years. I’ve played almost all of them. (haven’t played 7 Ships, Trail/Twister, Deadly Device)
Right from the original Secrets Can Kill with its original 2 CDs (yup 2 of them were needed to hold a whopping 16 mb of RAM :D ) up to Thornton Hall. I am a huge fan of the earlier ND games so I wasn’t sure if I’d like the newest ones
I must say that HI has outdone itself with this game.
This was one of the best ND games I’ve played in quite awhile. I wasn’t sure if HI was able to pull it off after Waverly Academy (seriously had my doubts about that one too but HI proved me wrong there as well!) but they did it again!
– Real player with 36.9 hrs in game
Read More: Best Cult Classic Female Protagonist Games.
This review will contain spoilers.
I’ve been a fan of the nancy Drew series since Message In A Haunted Mansion. I’ve played most of the games (had to stop just before Silent Spy, It’s tradition for me to play them in chronological order and I don’t have that one yet) and, save one, loved them all in their own ways. But GHost of Thornton Hall takes the cake. It is definitely my all-time favorite in the entire series. The atmosphere is spooky, the viuals are wonderful, the voice axcting is very good, and the story is compelling. I’ve played it through many times, and will do so again in the future. I have only one complaint, and this is where the spoilers come in: carbon monoxide poisoning doesn’t work that way. And even if it did, Nancy was seeing supernatural things well before it would have taken effect. My theory is that Nancy truly did find something supernatural this time. Charlotte’s ghost was real, and Nancy is grasping at whatever straws she can to maintain her skepticism.
– Real player with 18.3 hrs in game
YU-NO: A girl who chants love at the bound of this world
Story time : The first time I’ve heard about this game was actually in the form of an anime around autumn 2019. Ironically, I happened to come across a game sharing the same title as the anime so I decided to play the game instead of watching the anime. No I didn’t play it directly but few months after, around April 2020 I was so bored and looking for a new game to spend my lockdown better. That’s when steam recommended this game to me and I remembered about buying it the previous year. It was just out of coincidence that I launched the game due to my pc not being able to run others I was planning to play. I came in knowing nothing about the game and thought it was just a meh Visual novel. However, the reviews on steam were pretty good. My first impressions when launching the game were kinda disappointing but that changed rather quickly when the fan service was introduced pretty fast. At that time I didn’t know what was going to happen and I for sure didn’t for see it becoming my best game of all time.
– Real player with 103.2 hrs in game
Yu-No is a excellent visual novel that is a must play.
Yu-No is a excellent visual novel. The story had me interested from start to finish. You play as a man named Takuya. Your father passes away in a rockslide incident prior to the start of the game. Shortly after, Takuya gets a package in the mail from his supposedly deceased father. The letter tells Takuya of history and the flow of time and about a gift to Takuya. In the box Takuya finds a device called the Reflector Device. Using the Reflector Device Takuya is able to transfer between time, space and parallel dimensions. After this happens, many mysterious things begin happening in the town the game takes place in called Sakaimachi. People begin getting killed by lightning bolts on the coastline, a construction company has begun a operation and rumors are spreading safety regulations are not being followed leading to people dying. Near Sakaimachi is a triangular mountain called Sword Cape that seems to be thousands of years old possibly holding secrets to the origin of the human species and world, a rumor of a curse is going around about a samurai mansion being haunted, rumors that the mayor of Sakaimachi is corrupt and much more.
– Real player with 86.9 hrs in game
Nancy Drew®: Sea of Darkness
This game hands-down has the best graphics I’ve ever seen in a Nancy Drew game- from the gorgeous northern lights in the sky to the stunning ice caves to the characters themselves, the graphics were absolutely beautiful in my opinion. I found all of the characters to be likeable/ could sympathize with them to some extent as well. If anything, I wish there was even more dialogue so I could have spent more time getting to know some of the characters. This game was chock-full of puzzles and I found them to be quite challenging on Master sleuth level. Something that surprised/ disappointed me was how few “fatal errors” there were to make in this game- I’ve heard there were only three total. I weirdly enjoy the deaths in these games and was a little disappointed to have so few. All in all, an awesome game which I would strongly recommend. It took me 15 hours to complete.
– Real player with 15.2 hrs in game
Not bad as far as Nancy Drew games go…
I’ve been loyally playing these since ‘Secrets can Kill’ first came out back in the 90s so I can assure you this is better than the atrocity which was ‘The Creature of Kapu Cave’ or the utter nonsense which was ‘Ransom of the Seven Ships’. This game was a much better ‘ship’ game that’s for certain and the ‘ship facts’ were fun to listen to.
It definitely ranks below the kings of the saga, but it is still enjoyable. The puzzles are not bad, though some of them use common themes and it feels a tad repetitive. The mini games are fun though and I enjoyed making enough money to purchase everything in the gift shop (because I can). Plus the Iceland scenery is nice. In general the plot was… a bit more mediocre than some of the other games - I suspected the guilty party immediately and the climax felt a bit stunted.
– Real player with 14.7 hrs in game
Nancy Drew®: Shadow at the Water’s Edge
Staying in a Japanese inn you find out its haunted meaning theres a mystery afoot, Nancy Drew takes the case! The music is very fitting with a Japanese poppy kind of sound. The game has TONS of stuff to do from puzzles to playing pachinko and making Bento. This game has ALOT of content, it can be as short or as long as you want. There are all kinds of puzzles like Nanograms, where you make a picture out of boxes, to Renograms, and Soduku. There are 10 of each of those puzzles, but fear not there is only a few soduku things that need solving, having never done soduku before, I thought it was fun but not impossible. Some of the puzzles made no sense, like one where your underwater and cut some ropes, the pattern for cutting them is just strange.
– Real player with 24.4 hrs in game
Nancy Drew: Shadow at the Water’s Edge is a mystery sleuthing game that tells the story of Nancy’s time in Japan staying at a ryokan with a reputation for being haunted. Nancy decides to investigate the mystery to figure out what is going on and who is causing all the mysterious turmoil about the place.
This was… not an enjoyable experience. For one thing, it felt really insensitive, like replace all of the ls in a word with the r sound to give them an accent kind of insensitive. I’m not Japanese, so I can’t comment on the authenticity of the game, but it definitely used the popular cultural elements to its advantage, unfortunately, it didn’t really seem to benefit the game, or highlight the reason those elements would be enjoyable to play with in a game, so every time a task came up where you had to do something that was culturally significant, it felt tedious and underused rather than enjoyable and charming like I hoped it would be.
– Real player with 14.0 hrs in game
Nancy Drew®: The Deadly Device
It was a good Nancy Drew game but I thought a few of the puzzles required a big leap to make connections between materials/clues. i.e. certain machines are available for the entire game - some are used eventually, some aren’t and sometimes it’s a stretch to figure out the next step so you’re left wandering and re-exploring. But good story, good dialogue, and the logic puzzles in this one were the best I’ve played in a long time.
– Real player with 17.1 hrs in game
This ND game was different to others I have played, i enjoyed the science-theme and the fact that it was a murder case. The pace was good and the characters keep you guessing till the end. I must admit that I found some puzzles very difficult on Master Sleuth! If you’re up for a challenge I would give it a try :)
– Real player with 15.4 hrs in game
Nancy Drew®: The Phantom of Venice
Probably one of my favorite Nancy Drew games. Most of the puzzles, save two monstrous ones, are enjoyable and fairly straightforward to solve. The environments in this particular game are quite something to behold as well.
This game isn’t perfect, however; the characters all have promise but wind up feeling a tad underdeveloped, and the phantom himself definitely doesn’t live up to the hype. And then of course, you have the Scopa minigame. (I actually really enjoy it, but I imagine that if you don’t like it as much, it must be agonizing to have to play a minimum two games of it to progress the story.)
– Real player with 20.0 hrs in game
My second Nancy Drew game since I got back to them recently after a decade. I really liked this one. It is set in Venice, Italy and really has a fantastic scenery and appeal about it. I also really liked the voice acting. The story is interesting and there is quite a few more locations and characters involved than the previous game I finished (Legend of the Crystal Skull). I went for a senior detective level this time and I must say the puzzles were great and managable and super interesting (I played Legend of the Crystal Skull on junior mode and it was probably 2x harder). There are two puzzles at the very end of the game which are super intense though. There’s a bunch of stuff I learned (from italian phrases to sending encoded messages in both binary code and chess positions to kanji characters). The game feels consistent overall and I highly recommend it. If not else just for the scopa simmulator game. That was fun as hell. I know how to play it now.
– Real player with 18.1 hrs in game
Nancy Drew®: Trail of the Twister
One of the weakest ND games I’ve played (I’ve played around of third of them, mostly the older titles) so it would not be one I would ever recommend to someone new to the series. It does have some bright spots though that keep me from giving it the thumbs down.
The puzzles were numerous and varied. Many were of a similar type, but there was a nice and natural progression in difficulty I didn’t really notice until far along in the game. I particularly enjoyed the camera puzzle, despite it taking me the longest to complete. The mouse trap chore/puzzle appeared a few times too many; it was one of the easier and more tedious puzzles so it was annoying that it appeared so often. The tv puzzle was nauseating and I hate it.
– Real player with 21.1 hrs in game
This game is fantastic! I didn’t even get bored once playing this game, it kept me entertained the whole way through! :) As usual, though, just about all the puzzles were too hard. Disappointed in Her Interactive’s puzzle-making again, they hardly ever come up with ones that are enjoyable :( There are 2 that are extremely fun to do, and are easy enough to figure out without the walkthrough (like when you have to catch the mice, and fix Scott’s phone) but the majority of the puzzles, were just, BLECGH!
– Real player with 20.3 hrs in game
Nancy Drew®: The Shattered Medallion
I don’t really get why the reviews on this weren’t great. There was lots of puzzles and gorgeous art. I thought the reality show setting was a plausible explanation for needing to do a puzzle for every mundane task (other Her games are…a little less plausible). There was some re-use of puzzles and mini-games from previous Nancy Drew games, but that’s not the worst thing in the world. After all, there’s only so many good puzzles, and it’s much better than having barely any puzzles at all (looking at you, Midnight in Salem). Only three things bugged me. First, some of the activities were a bit repetitive (the submarine, the dial at the end). Second, a whole lot of the dialog was inscrutable. I know that it’s part of Sonny’s and Patrick’s characters to be goofballs, but it was a little too disorienting. Third, I wish there had been a Maori character, and more background on Maori culture.
– Real player with 13.2 hrs in game
I personally enjoyed this game for all of the puzzles. They come one after another, so be prepared to do a lot of puzzle-solving and exploration. Even though I played on the Master level, the puzzles aren’t too crazy. I did notice that most of the puzzles don’t necessarily fit in the theme of a reality show (which is the game’s main plot line), but they fit in the traditional “educational” angle of the Nancy Drew games.
There are some kooky conversations with the characters and a lot of references to past games. If you’re new to Nancy Drew, all of the references may sound strange. If you don’t take the story or characters too seriously, and just in it for the puzzles, I would recommend this game (especially over Midnight in Salem).
– Real player with 9.6 hrs in game