Nancy Drew and the Puzzle of the Mysteriously Tedious Farm Chores

For the first hour or
so, as I began playing Nancy Drew: The Secret of Shadow
Ranch,
the tenth digital outing for the perky teen sleuth
from HerInteractive, I thought, “I really shouldn’t
be allowed to review the games in this series anymore. I’ve
lost all distance. Starting a new Nancy Drew game
is like sinking down into a big, old, soft, friendly easy chair.
I have such a
good time playing them, and the development team does such a good
job, and they’re such nice people . . . someone else should
be writing about them.”

The game started promisingly enough.

It has a fun western setting
on an old ranch in Arizona. It’s
got the usual colorful (albeit small) group of characters. Speaking
of colorful, the artwork employs a lovely pastel palette that’s
very pleasing and appropriate for the western setting. It’s
got good music, including some lively western swing (not enough of
that in games!). The voice work is excellent. The art is dependable
and effective as always. And the various bits of the story Nancy
begins to uncover are actually terrific.

Unfortunately, I hit a real roadblock this time around. With what?
The puzzles.

In the past I have praised this series for frequently creating puzzles
that arose organically out of the situations Nancy finds herself
in. I feel this was the most successful in the museum setting of
The Secret of the Scarlet Hand.

This time around, however, the puzzles are a little too organic.
Or, rather, a little too literal. Mostly based on farm chores, they
quickly become . . . well, chores for the player as well.

If I Knew You
Were Coming, I’d Have Baked a Cake. And Baked
a Cake. And Baked a Cake. And Baked a Cake . . .

Nancy has to accomplish
tasks such as pick vegetables, feed livestock, and bake a cake.
What, those activities don’t sound incredibly
fun? Well, they aren’t. What’s worse is that the clues
are mediocre at best, so you end up having to do a lot of time-consuming
trial and error, which means you end up having to listen to the same
tedious “failure scenario” audio scenes over and over.
And speaking of failure scenarios, is it really that realistic to
think that you’d be sent packing for picking a slightly unripe
tomato? Hmm.

It gets particularly bad when Nancy has to bake a cake. The game
provides perfectly good instructions for the ingredients, but virtually
no clues about dealing with the oven. This means that every time
you get one of the variables wrong (pan size, oven temperature, baking
time), you have to start over from scratch.

All computer and video game designers should work with the following
two placards hanging visibly in their workplaces:

GAMES ARE SUPPOSED TO BE FUN

IS THE PART I’M
WORKING ON NOW MAKING THE GAME MORE OR LESS FUN?

Is baking a virtual cake
fun? Well, perhaps the question is debatable. But I can tell you
with full confidence that baking a virtual cake
eleven times most definitely isn’t fun.

The worst offender comes
fairly late in the game, when Nancy is required to collect ten
arrowheads from the various game environments.
If, like me, you gasp in painful memory when you think about the
dreaded “pick up the stars off of the ground” puzzle
from Beyond Atlantis, then you’ll know what I mean when I say
that looking for stuff on the ground isn’t fun. It’s
particularly Not Fun when the entire game comes to a screeching halt
if you can’t find the tenth one. It’s definitely Not
Fun bouncing from location to location, painting the screen with
your mouse pointer over the same patch of yellow ground for the fifteenth
time. That’s work, not fun.

And this is a shame, because
as I mentioned before, every other dependable element that has
made the Nancy Drew series so successful
and enjoyable is here in the game. Someone just fell asleep at the
wheel in the puzzle design department. I never thought I’d
say this, but I can’t recommend this particular Nancy Drew
game.

Final Grade: C

System Requirements:

• 400Mhz Pentium
• 64MB
  RAM
• 300 MB hard drive space
• 16-bit
  color graphics video card with at least 16MB of VRAM
• 16-bit
  Window-compatible
  stereo sound card
• 12X CD ROM
• Mouse
  and Speakers

This
review is copyright Ray Ivey and Just Adventure and
may not be republished elsewhere without the express written consent
of the author. Republication of said review must also contain a link
back to Just Adventure.