Articles
|
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)’.
