#mignight in salem

[netscapenavigator-official]

Okay, I finally finished Nancy Drew: Midnight in Salem, and thus the entire franchise (as of yet). The OG fandom hyped this game up to be the worst of the worst. However, in my opinion, it placed 15/34 in my ranking spreadsheets, below Secret of Shadow Ranch, and above Secrets Can Kill (OG Version).

The game's graphics are abysmal. I mean, I genuinely, unironically, think that Stay Tuned for Danger (the first 3D Nancy Drew game) had better graphics than this. In that game, all the character's looked like plastic mannequins... but at least they had some charm/character to them. The character models in Midnight in Salem felt like The Sims 3 graphics. As in, the character's faces were only barely different from one another, and the hair... oh the hair... it was so bad. No to mention, the world just wasn't that pretty either. It's crazy just how barren and sterile Salem felt compared to Skipbrot from Sea of Darkness.

I honestly wouldn't even be that mad at the live-rendered graphics... if the game wasn't so fucking inefficient. A game that looks like that shouldn't be able to make my M1 iMac sweat like that, but it did. I even had to turn Anti-Aliasing down and set the Resolution to 1080p just to play without lag. Not to mention, the Mac version seems to have a lot of graphical glitches (that admittedly might be caused by running the game through Rosetta 2 on an ARM Machine, but I don't know). Specifically, the worst was in the final cutscene, where a bright white light was rapidly flashing across the entire scene until the camera finally moved. It then returned once the camera return to Nancy's perspective. It was genuinely awful. For a game that took 5 years to make, and that is running the latest and greatest gaming engine, this game's graphics are hot garbage, especially compared to the previous game which was the most beautiful in the entire series. It honestly felt like I was playing one of those Unity Asset store games like House Flipper or House Party.

The animations were choppy, characters didn't stay planted on the ground and would slide around, the textures looked crusty and blurry, while simultaneously overly-sharp. In fact, the animations also felt like Unity default assets. Character's rarely, if ever, made specific motions for their words. They just stood there and played idle animations over and over. It made it feel like they weren't even talking to Nancy. Also, I noticed (at least once or twice, idk about the whole game) that the characters don't blink. Not to mention their awful, uncanny at times, mouth movements when speaking.

The plant textures were FLAT. There was no 3D effect to them at all. You could walk up to any plant, and it was as flat as a JPEG. It's crazy to me how resource inefficient this game is. A game with that graphic quality shouldn't be hard to run on a computer that can run BeamNG Drive at medium graphics through Wine and Rosetta translations layers with decent performance. I mean, I honestly think Yandere Simulator might perform better than this game.

The navigation was also horrible. You can really tell that this game was last minute switched from being free-roam to point-and-click. In perhaps a controversial opinion, I kinda wish this game would've just been free roam. It was clear that the point-and-click thing was an afterthought, and it made it so difficult to navigate around the world. Not to mention, the hit-boxes for the point-and-click system were majorly regressed. One of my biggest complaints with the early Nancy Drew games was that the hit-boxes for the click-points were small, and there was often just a bunch of dead space that made it difficult to navigate rapidly and reliably. This was fixed somewhere along the line, but in this game, the issue returns once more. The slow hover animation combined with horrible click-point hit-boxes made this a tediously slow game to navigate.

And don't even get me started on the cars. It's difficult to make good, realistic-looking 3D car models because they require more detail than most people think, but the car models in this game were awful. Hell, one of them was literally a BMW stock model without its badge.

This graphical quality of this game is just shocking, given it took 5 years to make this game (4 after the engine switch), and previous games were made in a fraction of that. Not to mention, this doesn't feel like a game that was made by a dev-team by a game studio. It feels like an Indie game that was made by one person using Unity Store assets. The visual quality is insanely bad.

My final critique is about Nancy's voice actor. Now, I'm not here to rag on Brittany Cox. Nancy's previous voice actor was icon because she literally voices her in 33 (34 counting SCK Remaster) previous games. I just got used to her. However, knowing now what I know about Lani, I can't say I'm upset that she's gone. Brittany sounds like she has a lot of potential, and if I'm being honest, my problems with how she voiced Nancy probably aren't her fault. She sounded pretty monotonous and unemotional compared to prior renditions. However, we also know HeR laid off a lot of people between this game, and its predecessor. As a result, I think it's safe to say whoever directed Lani did not direct Brittany. Brittany's portrayal honestly sounded like the voice you hear at the supermarket over the income trying to sell you rotisserie chickens at 20% off. I think Brittany has a lot of potential, and I hope her director does a better job in Mystery of the Seven Keys, but for now, I just didn't like her portrayal. It is her first game, however! If you go back and listen to Lani in Secrets Can Kill (OG) and Stay Tuned for Danger, she too sounds very different to what she eventually settled into. I hope Brittany finds a better groove with Nancy, and I'm hoping the series lives long enough for her to do so.

Now onto the positive. After all the aforementioned bullshit, what on Earth could sway me to giving this game a 19/34? The plot. I honestly feel like this is one of, if not THE best plots we've ever gotten in a Nancy Drew game. The drama was so juicy, and the foreshadowing was off the charts. I was concocting crack conspiracy theories before I even met half the cast. It was amazing to follow and so rewarding to watch play out. The Deirdre redemption arc was crazy, and I loved every minute of it.

However, I do have two notes when it comes to the Plot:

1: What tf did they do to Ned in this game?? Sea of Darkness was incredible. It honestly felt like a series finale because of how emotionally and solidly Nancy and Ned were wrapping things up. I'd never understood the Ned haters in the fandom, and by the end of Sea of Darkness I was at the peak of Ned Nickerson Apologist Mountain. However, in this game, everything is just uprooted. All the drama that is built through Ned's phone calls is never properly resolved. It was so unsatisfying watching Nancy brush it off in the end scene. Not to mention (maybe this was another Mac-only bug, but I doubt it), they didn't even bother giving Ned voiced lines in the end. It almost felt like they kept building all this relationship tension, finished up the game, and then realized that "OH SHIT! We forgot to wrap up the Ned drama" and slapped it in, last minute. It was genuinely awful. Some people often call Sea of Darkness the conclusion of the original game series and Midnight in Salem the rebooted series. This is obviously wrong because Salem was teased in the end of Darkness... but tbh, for the Ned storyline alone, I'm willing to headcanon that and believe it.

2: The ending was kinda weird. If Alicia had kept her mouth shut (which she was doing a very good job of doing), she probably could've gotten away with it. Hathorne House wouldn't have been hers, but there really wasn't any hard evidence against her for anything else. She had an excuse and alibi for everything, and she genuinely had covered all of her tracks. Maybe Jason could've gotten a plea deal and testified against her; or with Nancy, Frank, Joe, Deirdre, and Mei all knowing what they knew, she could've been successfully convicted in a court... but by the ending scene, I was fully convinced she was going to get away with it and get Nancy in trouble for breaking and entering... but then all of a sudden... out of nowhere, she just starts blabbering about everything... IN FRONT OF A FUCKING JUDGE. It felt really out of character, given how intelligent she previously was when it came to the law, and, just like the Ned wrap-up situation, this felt like an "OH SHIT!" moment where the team realized they'd gotten themselves into a corner and needed to get out of it, but didn't have time to go back and redo major story aspects, so they settled on this.

Overall, the plot is a very rewarding plot to experience, but would I play this game again? No. The graphics are awful, and even getting the game to run stably was a chore. It crashed multiple times (literally any time I took my wireless headphones out to go to the bathroom). Sometimes it even crashed at random, without warning. (Thank god this game introduced an auto-save feature.) The navigation controls were also just plain awful. While a lot of the early games were just as tedious to click on, their navigation scenes were much more predictable. In addition, those games have neo-nostalgic flare that this game just doesn't. As a result, it ranked slightly above average in my spreadsheet, but that's mainly for the plot. I, honestly, think this is the first Nancy Drew game with zero replay value because of how plot-reliant the enjoyability is. Maybe I'll come to love it. The characters were fun, but I don't know. My feelings about Nancy Drew games change as they age within my head, so maybe I'll slowly want to play this game again. For now, though, I'm glad I played it, but I'm also glad it's over, and I never have to play it again.

[la-di-doodles]

There’s only two kinds of people out there and that is Frank and Joe