Nancy Drew: The Model Mysteries Review

To paraphrase, never judge a DS game by its cover. For starters, the Nancy Drew shown on the cover of The Model Mysteries is a pretty, approximately sixteen year-old brunette while the Nancy Drew portrayed in the game is a pretty, approximately sixteen year-old brunette…wearing thick, black glasses. Why the discrepancy? Could it be that THQ marketing feared that putting a four-eyed female dweeb on the cover would negatively impact game sales? Or maybe Nancy had Lasik surgery in time for her cover shoot.

If you’re a huge fan of the wildly successful series of Nancy Drew games from Her Interactive (21 games and still going strong), then THQ’s Nancy Drew: The Model Mysteries is not for you. The game itself is based on a three book Nancy Drew trilogy – Model Crime, Model Menace and Model Suspect and follows the teen sleuth as she serves as a bridesmaid in a wedding between her friend Sydney, a famous model, and Syd’s fiancée Vic, a reality TV star. After Vic is almost poisoned, Nancy begins to question whether someone has a grudge against the engaged couple, or if the reality show producers are just trying to increase their ratings.

But whereas the Her Interactive franchise features a mix of intricate, inventory-based puzzles and location related activities – in Ransom of the Seven Ships, for example, the player can scuba dive for lost treasure or sail around the island and collect bottles with messages in them, but these activities are obligatory and not necessary to solve the mystery – The Model Mysteries is nothing more than a series of casual games strung together by suspect interrogations intended to present the illusion that the player is actually solving the mystery, when nothing could be further from the truth.

Each interrogation is limited to three predetermined questions – total – that can either all be directed towards one person or spread between two or three suspects. The goal is to ask the correct question of the correct suspect. Then, at the end of each chapter, you must accuse one of the suspects of the crime du jour. If your choice is correct, you then move on to the next chapter. But if you choose incorrectly, you must then start over and replay that entire chapter. That’s right, the entire chapter.

Each chapter – there are three total – consists of a series of casual/mini-games with a tenuous link to the story that are incorrectly referred to by the publisher as adventure style: scrambled words puzzles, timed search and find puzzles, spot the difference, a variation of Simon and even a swimming mini-game. None of which are, at least by my definition, adventure style puzzles.

While Nancy Drew: The Model Mysteries might be fine for younger gamers, it is a shame more effort wasn’t made to engage the player’s intellect instead of dumping yet another generic and charmless casual game onto the shelves and at that, one that must leave those unfamiliar with Nancy Drew’s legacy without a clue as to how the heck she has prospered for eighty years.