Nancy Drew: Message in a Haunted Mansion
Articles
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by Randy Sluganski |
Nancy Drew: A Retrospective |
Nancy Drew: Message in a Haunted Mansion
The first Nancy Drew game to appear on both pc and Game Boy Advance, Message in a Haunted Mansion is, probably due to the horror theme, still one of the most popular games in the series.
This outing sees Nancy travel to San Francisco to help out Rose, a friend who’s renovating an old Victorian mansion into a bed and breakfast. Unfortunately for Rose – but lucky for the player – she’s been plagued by problems from the start and now it appears the mansion might be haunted!
JA reviewer Ray Ivey was, to put it mildly, very impressed, ‘There are two main reasons to play this game. The first is the pitch-perfect “Nancy Drew” atmosphere. As in the previous games, Her Interactive has wonderfully captured the feeling of being in one of the classic Nancy Drew books (or movies, for that matter). True to the spirit of the original series, just because everything is very … well, mild doesn’t mean it’s not also intriguing, interesting, and scary. There’s a lot of San Francisco cultural history packed into the game as well.
The second reason is the look of the drop-dead gorgeous pre-rendered graphics. They are seriously yummy, sports fans. The designers at Her Interactive have done their homework in researching old San Francisco Victorians and have pulled out all the stops. There’s not a square inch of this mansion that’s not gorgeous, from Nancy’s elaborately oriental-themed bedroom to the stuffy portraits on the walls to the overstuffed Queen Anne furniture. In one particular room there were two chairs—one deep red, the other a vibrant green—that made me want to crawl into my monitor and curl up with them (with a Nancy Drew book, of course)’.
