#sck and twisted little guy

[othercrossee]

Actually, sinner was found after the whole rift ordeal and people thought they were some sort of weird zoroark until they called the survey corp to see what the fuck is up and mc was like hey this ain't a pokemon 💀

[blackjack-15]

The Weight of Living — Thoughts on: The Deadly Device (DED)

Previous Metas: SCK/SCK2, STFD, MHM, TRT, FIN, SSH, DOG, CAR, DDI, SHA, CUR, CLK, TRN, DAN, CRE, ICE, CRY, VEN, HAU, RAN, WAC, TOT, SAW, CAP, ASH, TMB

Hello and welcome to a Nancy Drew meta series! 30 metas, 30 Nancy Drew Games that I’m comfortable with doing meta about. Hot takes, cold takes, and just Takes will abound, but one thing’s for sure: they’ll all be longer than I mean them to be.

Each meta will have different distinct sections: an Introduction, an exploration of the Title, an explanation of the Mystery, a run-through of the Suspects. Then, I’ll tackle some of my favorite and least favorite things about the game, and finish it off with ideas on how to improve it. For this meta, like TMB, there will be an extra section entitled “The Theme” between The Mystery and The Suspects.

If any game requires an extra section or two, they’ll be listed in the paragraph above, along with my list of previous metas.

These metas are not spoiler free, though I’ll list any games/media that they might spoil here: DED, TMB; brief mentions of FIN, SSH, and ICE; brief mention of Iron Man (2008).

The Intro:

First off, this meta was supposed to be uploaded well over a week ago, and I apologize; life and health kind of got in the way, but it should be more constant for these last 3 metas.

I hope.

Like I mentioned with the last meta, this will be kind of a companion/two-piece meta with TMB. Where TMB focused on the effects of the dead on the living, DED instead focuses on the living’s effects on the dead — the dead in this case being Niko Jovic, of course. Let’s dive into that, shall we?

Just like how everything in TMB was dead, everything (other than Niko, rest in peace) in the lab is alive. The lab is full of people, of research — “living knowledge” in other words — of live wires and electricity, and is constantly growing and changing, just like a living organism does. With all this life present, the game is mostly concerned with how the living affect Niko.

What’s left of Niko after his death is his legacy — his work, his personality, his relationships (or lack thereof) with others, and it’s fascinating to see how our characters deal with and affect that. Grey is dedicating to curating Niko’s legacy (at Niko’s request, it should be noted), Ryan lives in awe of it, and Mason and Ellie are more pragmatic, wanting to use his legacy and work to improve their own lives. Victor, on the other hand, wants Niko’s legacy all to himself — to effectively erase it, in other words, which is another marker of him being our out-and-out villain.

Niko was divisive in life, and is even more so in death — no one can quite say exactly who he was. A jerk, a total scientist, someone who needed caring for, naïve, a useful tool — all of these were how people thought of him, and all of these were a part of who he was. In the end, it’s the efforts of the living that kill Niko — Ryan’s engineering, Ellie and Mason’s lack of concern, Grey’s reticence to get involved, and Victor’s machinations – along with his own secrecy and feeling of being apart from the world — or dead to it, more appropriately.

Stepping back from our characters and the weight of the living for a bit, let’s talk about the other thing that really makes DED stand out not only as a game but specifically as a Nancy Drew game — that is, its design in being a game that subverts the Nancy Drew formula at every turn.

There are a few obvious ones, like a phone character turning to a real-life suspect (rather than the other way around, like in TMB and ICE, or in any other game, where phone characters are Above Suspicion), the person hiring Nancy actually being the baddie, and Nancy having her safe places removed throughout the game, rather than crossing off locations where Bad Things can happen, but the more interesting ones are a little more subtle.

Our suspects provide a few more subversions — for example, our ‘meanest’ characters (Mason and Gray) are neither our explicit Good Guys or our definite Bad Guys, as often tends to be the case in Nancy Drew games. We also have suspects who hate each other openly revealed to be working together towards a common goal, which is a nice twist on the Warring Suspects trope that we see in quite a few games (ICE, FIN, SSH, etc.).

Finally, the structure of the mystery gives us our last two subversions. Instead of our normal Nancy Drew status quo where the characters are simple but their motivations end up being surprising/hidden/secret, we here have a straightforward motive — remove Niko to get his stuff — and our characters are the part that’s not straightforward, with each of them having warring traits within themselves that contribute to the fog surrounding the mystery.

Our villain also fails in this game through the cover-up, not through the crime. Normally, there’s a mistake that the culprit makes during the committing of a crime that Nancy finds evidence of later — a dropped business card, etc. — but in this case, it’s really only the cover up that implicates Victor at all, and he would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for, well, himself.

These subversions wouldn’t have been possible 10 or 15 games ago, and it’s a mark of how far the games have come that a game can be dedicated to subverting the usual formula and do it with such panache — and make a great game out of it, besides.

The Title:

 As a title, The Deadly Device is pretty solid, if lacking a bit of flash. It gives us our method of murder and the academic ‘scope’ (i.e., science/engineering) that we’re playing in for this game, and tells us our crime — can’t be a deadly device without someone ending up, you know, dead — but doesn’t do a lot outside of that and hinting that the dead as a thematic element will have some role to play.

The reason the title is solid, however, rather than lacking, is that there’s not much else to call it that’s quite as well-fit to the game. It pulls (in a matter of speaking) from two Nancy Drew stories, The Crime Lab Case — which, as a title, yawn — and In and Out of Love, a story from the Nancy-at-college era that tried to be Hotter and Sexier than the previous books, but just ended up being a bit ridiculous. Neither one of those titles would have been any better — they would have been significantly worse, honestly, so The Deadly Device will stand as a good, solid effort for a great game.

The Mystery:

Disaster has struck at Technology of Tomorrow Today, a research lab in snowy Colorado: the lead scientist, a man named Niko Jovic, has been discovered dead in the Tesla Coil lab of electrocution. Months later, the case has gone cold, so owner Victor Losset decides to take matters into his own hands and hires Nancy to find his employee’s killer — not that there’s any doubt in his mind that Ryan Kilpatrick, the engineer who built the coil that killed Niko, is responsible.

When Nancy arrives on-scene and undercover, however, things aren’t quite as cut and dry as Victor would have her believe. It seems that everyone at the lab has means, motive, and opportunity — and whoever killed Niko doesn’t have any qualms about killing a nosy detective to cover up their crime…

Like with TMB, DED isn’t that interested in obscuring its bad guy to a “gotcha!” moment at the very end of the game. Instead, it’s largely concerned with putting disparate personalities under a huge amount of pressure and seeing what results. No one at the lab is super fond of anyone else who works there, nor of their superiors or employer(s), and all have the equipment and the intelligence to make use of the equipment to deadly ends.

Also like TMB, the crime has already been committed or begun, and it’s not Nancy’s job to prevent it — nothing is going to bring Niko back, after all — but to put together the post-mortem pieces and discover what really happened in the past, and the effect that the living have on the dead. It’s a thematic sort of conflict, and it really helps to elevate the game past “fun science mystery”. And speaking of thematic resonance in this game…

The Theme:

As we discussed last time, TMB was a game about fear — fear of death, of responsibility, of ignominy, of failure, etc. Being its sister game, DED is focused on the opposite of fear: acceptance. Instead of failure, responsibility, and other ever-present fears, DED is about the acceptance of the good, the bad, of yourself, and what others will do with your work and legacy once you’re gone.

In other words, DED is a game most concerned, thematically speaking, with certainty and resolve, rather than fear.

One of the biggest thematic elements in the game that proves this point is the presence of Niko’s recorded diaries. Not only does this feature some excellent voice acting by Josh Crandall, but it also gives a dead character the chance to discuss his motivations, his considerations, and — importantly — his sense of his impending death.

At no point does Niko dissolve into hysterics or even palpable fear; he simply accepts that there are consequences for both his and others’ actions, and that there are people in the world who believe the opposite of what he believes in — and are willing to kill for it.

Niko was a man who personified resolve and acceptance to a fault — had he informed others that his life was in danger, Victor would have had a much harder time killing him — but was also jealous of those who didn’t have to or have the capacity to have that kind of acceptance:

“I see why Tesla liked his pigeons. They fly only where they’re directed, and never question the effect the beating of their wings will have on the skies and the world below.”

The lack of acceptance in our villain is actually what leads to his downfall. The case has gone cold, and Victor is, legally speaking, off the hook — but he can’t accept that he’s gotten away with it, and instead decides to push it one step too far by hiring a detective. Had he not hired anyone, he would have been free and clear for the rest of his life — if the police weren’t able to find anything, the chances of them reopening the cold case are extremely slim — but instead Victor couldn’t accept it, and so hired the instrument of his own demise.

Every suspect has their own resolve in this game, and it’s that facet of their personalities that gives Nancy such a hard time at first, because none of that resolve includes answering the questions of a pesky investigator.

The Suspects:

First off is Obadiah Stane Victor Lossett, Nancy’s boss, owner of Technology of Tomorrow Today, and super evil killer of scientists who piss him off and prevent him from making oodles of money.

Like I mentioned above in “The Mystery”, the game isn’t so much concerned with obscuring Victor’s role as the bad guy. It’s a lovely moment when he shows up, changing from phone to real-life character (and suspect) — it’s in fact one of my favorite moments in the series, and I’ve spoken about it before in my list of the top 5 twists/surprising moments in the series — but it’s not a surprise that he’s involved in Niko’s death.

Victor fulfills the subversion of the formula that DED plays with a while also telling the correct story and theme for the game: he’s a man who took advantage of others for his own personal gain, and so everything he has is taken from him — including his notoriety — because of his lack of acceptance of the world.

“The world fondly remembers those who always give, and soon forgets those who only take.”

Next on the list is Ryan Kilpatrick, Victor’s favored patsy suspect and technical engineer at TTT. Energetic and quirky to (in my opinion) a fault, Ryan warned Niko several times that the Tesla coil would kill him, and then did exactly what he wanted her to do anyway.

To be fair to the girl, she was definitely in love with him, albeit a love more based on pity than on straight-out affection. “He had no one else in the world looking after him”, anyone?

Ryan only makes sense in a world where Niko was killed in the way that it appears first: by a simple malfunction in the Tesla Coil. Because Ryan built it, she would be legally responsible for his death, even though he was her boss when he told her to build it that way. It would be a simple, easy answer, and one that would have been totally thematically opposite of the story the game was telling, which makes her the perfect “preferred” suspect for Victor’s ruse.

Our two research assistants are next for consideration, so let’s start with Ellie York, our night-shift assistant who switched in order to avoid her coworker. A Good Southern Girl, Ellie is not above talking smack with a pretense of politeness and has a rather sinister motive up her sleeve.

Despite the fact that all research done at a lab is property of the lab, she (and Mason) decides that Isn’t Fair and tries to shop around their research to the highest bidder in an attempt to make enough money to pay off her debts.

The fact that she’s selling research that isn’t wholly done by her or Mason when she’s mad that her research is being (contractually and legally) used by someone else does rather put a damper on her ‘righteous anger’, doesn’t it.

As a villain, Ellie would have had to be a pair with Mason, which would have been interesting and a parallel to TMB, but just wouldn’t have told the story that DED wanted to tell. It would have been a story about backbiting and jealousy within a workplace, and thus would have lost its resonance with the historical backstory and with who Niko was as a person. As the victim makes the murder, Ellie (or Mason, or and Mason) would have been a poor choice.

Mason Quinto works the day shift and is far more neurotic than his night-shift companion, though just as guilty of attempting to sell research. He prefers his space neat and orderly, and gets quite steamed when Ellie messes it up to piss him off.

Yeah, there’s no way those two don’t end up in bed when they’re drunk. Honestly.

While the more ‘scientist’-like and nerdy of the two assistants, Mason is, in a refreshing change from normal tropes, also the more maverick of the two, running away with Niko’s work after the murder is solved and is only found at an expo by Gray a bit later, where a fight erupts until Mason comes back to work with Gray and Ellie.

He can also turn into a supervillain in a second chance, which is awesome.

Like I said above with Ellie, the only way Mason makes sense as the villain is to be a pair with Ellie, but it just isn’t the right story, thematically speaking. Mason (and Ellie) are a great example of how everyone in DED is guilty of something, whether they think they’re justified or not, and how putting these kind of people in a pressure cooker and turning it on only leads to disaster, sooner or later.

The last still-living member of our cast is Gray Cortright, security guard and ex-theoretical physicist, along with being probably Niko’s only friend — for a certain value of ‘friend’, it should be noted. Gray used to be the “smart one” until he went through what is basically a nervous breakdown due to his knowledge of theoretical physics and never quite recovered.

I’ll note that Gray would have been a more obvious choice for the early Nancy Drew games; a friendship gone wrong, a slightly “crazy” villain — the pieces are there. But because DED subverts the Classic Formula, Gray is instead probably the only person fully on Niko’s side — no tricks, no ulterior motives, no nothing. He’s exactly what he presents himself to be: gruff, grumpy, unkind, and not even close to a murderer (except, perhaps, where Mason is involved).

Let’s finish off our roll call with Niko Jovic, our murder victim and one of two foils for Nancy in this game. Niko was “100% a scientist”, interested most in the free use and free sharing of technological and scientific advancement, and less interested in developing technology to harm others.

This didn’t make him very popular with those who wanted to harm others, funnily enough.

It’s important that our victim in this case foils Nancy, because this is a game about (as we’ve discussed) acceptance and consequences. The consequence of Niko not paying attention to the fact that other people in the world are not like him was that there was an opening for a bad man to kill him. It’s not Niko’s fault that he was killed, but neither was he unaware that it was coming. He’s described as a ‘dead brilliant jerk madman’, and there’s a lot of truth in that; those who ultimately do good things and work hard are not always good or kind or nice themselves.

And yes, this is how he relates to Nancy. Nancy, like Niko, is a person who rather thinks what most of us would call “people skills” or “kindness” get in the way of the most important thing: solving puzzles and figuring things out. Both of them make the world better through their work, but honestly speaking, that’s not their ultimate aim. They’re not working directly to improve the world, they’re working for knowledge and to solve the puzzle.

In other words, they’re investigators, not philanthropists. And often (ultimately, for Niko), that’s what puts them in danger.

Over on Team Nancy, we have some familiar faces, beginning with our most unfamiliar familiar face, Nancy herself.

Hired as a professional detective undercover, Nancy Drew arrives at the lab to ferret out the murderer — and the truth behind Niko’s death — before anyone figures out that she’s not actually there on behalf of a new owner.

We learn a lot about Nancy in this game, not the least of which because she’s in what we can cheerfully call the opposite of her element (contrasting with TMB). Closely observed, surrounded by a subject that’s not quite in her normal wheelhouse, and where everyone around her is hell-bent on hiding everything they can from her — it’s a recipe for a frustrated detective, and that’s part of the reason that we see the return of not one but two (three? technically) detective (or detective-adjacent) phone friends, rather than Bess/George/Ned.

(Side Note: George, for all her specialty with science and technology, wouldn’t have been a good phone friend for this game, as she would have focused on the science, which isn’t really the point of Nancy’s investigation, and not enough on the case. Just putting that out there.)

This game features Nancy as a sort of patsy, rather than an unexpected observer or the target of revenge, and it should be no surprise that she outgrows that role fairly quickly. Her reluctance to search for evidence against someone, rather than evidence for the crime, clears the hurdle of Ryan’s Suspected Involvement pretty quickly while being the opposite of what Victor wanted out of her assistance.

On display here is Nancy’s fairness and her ability to ignore what others say about a case if it doesn’t suit her. Sure, she’s been told to watch Ryan and find her guilty, but Nancy’s pretty uninterested in that, instead centering her search around Niko rather than Ryan. Ellie makes a comment about Mason being about 60% scientist (and Niko being 100%), and it’s fair to say that Nancy’s about 60% a detective; she has other interests and motivations, but when she’s ‘at work’, she’s focused on doing her job to the greatest extent that she can — which is what makes her such a problem for Victor in the long run. And speaking of problems for Victor…

Returning from her role as the gloriously catty mean girl in ASH is Deirdre Shannon, criminology student and absolute sass master. Busted for hiring someone to write an essay for her in college, Deirdre’s clever enough to suggest making up the credit by assisting in a real-life murder investigation — albeit with a heavy dose of sarcasm for her frenemy.

Besides having the best lines in the game (her ��did you forget that I don’t like you?” and voicemail message are incredible, along with her assertion that Nancy should get her head checked out due to her repeated hits on the head), Deirdre is there to help Nancy see things from a different perspective and to clue her in on information that she has no way to get — backing up alibis, old publications, and the like. She’s less concerned with the background of the case — the Hardy Boys (!!) have that covered — and is more here to figure out exactly who can be taken off of Nancy’s suspect list and why.

She also, in a rather glorious twist of fate, is the reason that Nancy is hired, having told Victor that Nancy suffers from “chronic wrongness”, among other things. I can just imagine how pissed Victor must have been in jail with her — more than with Nancy, certainly — and can easily see a future where, upon his release/escape, Victor goes after Deirdre — it was after all Deirdre, not Nancy, who cleared Ryan.

But enough about games that would have been better than MID. That’s a nigh-unquenchable topic.

Deirdre’s there as the more prominent foil to Nancy within the game — and the game isn’t shy about foiling the two women. Both are bright, both come from River Heights, both are interested in/involved with the same boy, both are involved in crimes/criminology to some extent…the list goes on.

The thing that Deirdre-as-foil shows us about Nancy is that Nancy isn’t unique in what she does. Sure, the way she got into the mystery business and her credentials are unusual, but she’s far from the only girl in her late teens that’s interested in crime and mysteries, and far from the only one who can solve these types of mysteries.

Deirdre is often referred to as “the girl who could have been Nancy Drew” had things worked out differently for her — different parents, different friends, different connections, etc. — and we see that play out here. She’s not lacking for smarts, intuitive thinking, or creative problem solving — just in opportunity.

The Hardy Boys are here for their only appearance in the Nancy Games, and boy do they do The Most.

When last we saw him, Frank Hardy was helping Nancy out with a ‘relationship talk’, but here he’s interested in two things: talking to Nancy and researching to help Nancy. He’s quite proud of Nancy and her reputation, and is more than willing to help her on the case — though his first priority is her safety, as demonstrated by the voicemail.

That really should be capitalized, huh. “The Voicemail”.

I first wanna say kudos to DED for actually making progress in Frank’s character arc and relationship with Nancy, and giving context to his sulking in the next game. So often in games like the Nancy Drew games — and indeed, in the earlier games in this series — there’s an addiction to the status quo that doesn’t really allow for anyone to learn anything permanent, much less something that changes their behavior, so I’m pretty thrilled with this development even outside of shipping.

Second, I love that this is a topic that both boys are interested in, albeit for different reasons. Too often we have either Frank or Joe being enthusiastic about the context of Nancy’s investigation, and it’s nice here to see that the boys can agree on something — even if their answers are different as to why.

Speaking of different reasons for interest, Joe Hardy is back (we haven’t seen him for quite a few games!) and is better than ever. I’ve said it before (and I’ll say it again), but really Rob Jones does a phenomenal job with Joe, especially as the games progress, and DED is a perfect example. Joe’s dialogue is pitch-perfect and his excitement about Tesla is adorable.

I’m also going to point out that Joe’s identity as a very proficient tactician is in play in this game, as he is the one to point out how very strange it is that a man of means and importance would hire Nancy — not that, as Frank points out, Nancy doesn’t have a great reputation, but just that Victor should be able to hire a world-class detective rather than a girl in her late teens to investigate this murder.

The thing that the Hardy Boys are here to represent is Nancy’s fledgling footing into the professional world. Sure, she’s been a detective for hire for a while now, and TOT sort of ushered her into that world for good, but the Boys have been doing this for much, much longer, and have the sort of resources that make a huge difference when investigating crimes like murder versus circumstances like “my daughter is unhappy go help her”.

For all of Nancy’s natural inclinations, talents, and drive that make her a good detective, the Hardy Boys (along with Deirdre) show the downside of being an autodidact: the breadth of your resources isn’t anywhere near what others’ might be. The things she needs to solve this mystery are privy to those with better resources — colleges and agencies — and she has to rely on them to get the job done.

The Favorite:

DED is a game that I didn’t expect to like, but ended up really loving, so there’s quite a few things in this section that stand out.

The first thing I want to mention is I love Ellie and Mason’s interactions. In a lot of Nancy Drew games, we get the characters interacting with Nancy, but not so much interacting with each other, so it’s always a pleasure for me when it happens.

Deirdre holds her title as one of my favorite characters in this series, so of course she’s going to get a mention here. The “TDPD” segment has me rolling on the floor, her comment about Nancy volunteering for a neurological study sounds exactly like what a lot of fans joke about, and her voice acting (major props to Meaghan Halverson) is equal parts snide and earnest, all without ever losing her edge or likability.

As anyone who’s been in the vicinity of these metas knows, I’m a huge fan of the Hardy Boys, and I love their inclusion here. The geeking out over Tesla, the brotherly camaraderie, the hints at Frank’s feelings, Joe teasing Frank about said feelings — it’s all here, and it’s all wonderful.

My favorite puzzle would probably have to be the whole fingerprint-melting-gummy-bear puzzle, just because — I mean, at the end of the day, that’s just cool. I did a forensic-science-style unit in my elementary years where we printed fingerprints and distinguished between whorls and such and this made me exactly as excited as I had been all those years ago. It’s fun, fitting with the story, and involves gummy candies — what’s not to like?

My favorite moment — and I’ve mentioned this once already in this meta, and in a different meta — is the moment that Victor shows up. Savvy players of this series would know that there’s no way HER would include a model of Victor just for a video call, so it’s not exactly a surprise, but it’s such a wonderfully scary moment without being a jump scare or a startle.

Victor’s appearance closes down Nancy’s snooping spots, removes a safe place for her, turns the last bit of the game into a sort of mix of detective and stealth game, and is a huge subversion of the usual “phone-client” formula, and I absolutely love it.

My last favorite thing about this game is when you realize that Victor hired Nancy due to her supposed incompetence, rather than her being, in Frank’s words, one of the best that there is. It chills you down to the bone and makes the whole game feel more antagonistic as a result, and is just a really nice writing moment.

The Un-Favorite:

There are, however, a few things that maybe aren’t so grand in this game, even with all its good points.

My least favorite puzzle is probably the chemical puzzle — with the beakers and the exploding water and such — just because it’s quite finicky, and it takes up time that I’d rather be doing other things with. I thought about the printing puzzle, but honestly even though it takes time within the game to do it, there’s plenty of other things to do with Nancy’s time that makes the time spent there not so big a deal.

My least favorite moment in the game is, quite frankly, the time spent talking to Ryan. I find all the characters interesting as characters, but Ryan is exactly the kind of Quirk that I don’t handle well, in real life and in video games.

Honestly, her remark of “I less-than-three them!” was enough to get me to stand up and walk away from the game for a minute the first time I played through it.

Had this game come out a few decades earlier, she would have referred to Niko as “totally tubular” and stuff like that, and it’s…it’s just a lot to handle for me personally.        

The Fix:

So how would I fix The Deadly Device?

Honestly speaking, this is a game where there’s not a lot to do. I’d probably tweak Ryan to be a little less annoying and smooth out the chemicals puzzle, but those are more personal grievances than they are actual issues with the plot and writing.

Probably the only substantial thing I’d do is tie in the robotic cat plotline a little more. As it is, it’s easy to ignore and doesn’t have a lot of plot or thematic resonance, so I’d make it a little more important and noteworthy. And less scary looking.

DED is a game that sets out to tell a good story while subverting the usual Nancy Drew formula in big and small ways, and honestly it succeeds at both of those things with flying colors. It really feels like a setting where life went on before and will go on after Nancy leaves it, which is Valuable to me all by itself, and features some of the more colorful moments in the series — all while solving an actual murder for the first time since a Florida high school in the 90s.

[lizacstuff]

Thoughts on the last episode of SCK? I thought it was a vast improvement over the last episodes but still seems like an Edser reunion is super far away.

Hello! I liked this episode, I really loved a lot of the Edser scenes and pretty much enjoyed everything that did not include Selin. (I hate her guts, ya’ll, lmao) 

Let’s see, I have a bunch of asks and I have some time today, so I’ll try and answer those in a big post later, but overall I thought it was a solid episode. As far as a reunion being super far away, I don’t know.  They are definitely doing what I’ve been saying all along, and that is proving that he would fall in love with her all over again. So that has to be complete before he gets back his memories. And I think they are going to give us a little more of that even after Selin and Deniz are gone. Hopefully we jettison them soon, and then we’ll get to enjoy a few episode of Edser shenanigans as they dance around one another. 

(more under the cut)

As for this episode, wow, the spoilers that said there was no Ayfer/Alex in this episode were WRONG, weren’t they? Starting with Ayfer, for the first time she didn’t annoy me with her trying to control Eda’s life. I actually applauded when she gave Eda the time limit for breaking the fake engagement. Good! Girlfriend is allowing Deniz to spin the situation out of control and I’m glad someone is helping her reign it in. Ayfer actually acting in Eda’s best interest for once, let’s hope Ayfer/Aydan plan that dinner with their wayward children soon and without any faux fiancés. 

As for the Aydan/Ayfer/Alex of it all, it wasn’t the worst B-plot we’ve ever seen on this show. At least there were some entertaining moments.  I liked Aydan/Ayfer getting together to discuss Eda and Serkan, and Alex as a two/three-timer is the least shocking development ever. Aydan is already ruined as a character so she might as well be okay with trying to move in on Alex while Ayfer is still in the picture. As for Alex... is he dead? Surely not...  Who knows, but it looks like we may get some more comedy out of the situation in the coming episodes. I did laugh at them moving the body and Ayfer trying to go incognito wearing the sunglasses at night. Neslihan is very good at certain comedic moments.

Even with Alex, Ayfer, Aydan, Selin, Deniz and Ceren running around my nominee for worst character of the week is... Piril. Seriously, fuck her.  She’s 100% enabling Selin’s delusions and has totally normalized her buttcrack crazy behavior and apparently cares not at all about Serkan or Eda. Is she high trying to convince Selin that Serkan went off to organize a surprise, can she not read the room at all? She should be staging an intervention with Serkan, not trying to further Selin’s deceitful agenda. 

I will say this for the writers, though they have done their best to destroy Aydan and Ceren recently, Piril is staying pretty true to character. She’s the actual emotionless robot of the show and has always been a pretty shrewish, not-great, not-likeable person. It makes me sad that a teddy bear like Engin is shackled to her and honestly I don’t think she has any business having children, she’s not gonna make a great mother. 

Melo and Ferit are honestly the only side characters (and Seyfi) that have rights at this point. Thank goodness Eda has Melo! Though I do think that the show purposely has weakened both Eda and Serkan’s support system in order to enable them both in this crazy storyline. If Serkan had real friends, he would have wizened up about Selin by now, and if Ceren hadn’t gone off the deepened, wanting to hurt Eda, she would have provided proof of Selin’s duplicity. 

As for Eda and Serkan, so glad their screen time is back on track! I will always, always take more of them, but this felt like a big improvement from the last two weeks.  I really loved their scenes together and their dynamic even (especially?) when they’re at odds and arguing, that was always a huge part of their relationship.  

Loved their office scenes, the sparing over the client and Eda coming out on top. It was priceless watching her bet with Melo and then counting down until Serkan came to find her in the coffee room. The red hot sexual tension with the “Nobody touches you but me” moments and the “accidental” kiss. I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve worked in offices for many years and shockingly have never had my mouth accidentally come into contact with Gerard from Accounting’s mouth. “Accident” SURE.  I guess that’s what happens when you’re drawn to each other like magnets. 

I know there’s a lot of vitriol being spit at Serkan for how “cruel” he’s being, and he does need a slap upside the head at times, but mostly I saw this episode how soft he was. Did ya’ll see him sleeping in the office clutching Eda’s wedding invitation? That is SOFT. Or inviting her to sit with him at the coffee shop and saying he felt at peace there? SOFT. Or apologizing after he said harsh words in the office? He said “sorry” he never says that. Or leaving the hotel and heading back to the office because she was having trouble? Picking up coffee at “their” place on the way? Offering to help and calling her boss? Smiling proudly when she closed the deal? Letting her hug him? Soft, soft, soft, soft, soft. 

Insisting she go to the hotel? Letting her sleep on him? Smiling about it? Snowball fights? and then finally at the end, taking off to look for her, finding her necklace, finding her, carrying her to shelter, caring for her, being concerned about her injuries, putting her necklace back on her, asking about their past, covering her with a blanket, and falling asleep with her?

IT’S ALL SO SOFT.

This man is already back in love with her, he just doesn’t know how to identify those feelings, process them or what to do with them. They still scare the crap out of him on top of the fact that he thinks she has been able to easily move on from him and their great love, and is sincerely happy and in love with another man. That shit-stain Deniz basically told him he was glad his plane crashed so that Eda could finally be happy!  What an awful, heartbreaking thing to hear.

Yes, he said/did some things to hurt Eda, mostly by laying it on thick with Selin at times, but EVERY SINGLE time, it was done in reaction to him having Eda/Deniz thrown in his face and he was absolutely reacting to that.  Our Miss Eda is really having to thread the needle when using her fake engagement to push him, and sometimes she went a little too hard and missed the mark. There were times when Serkan needed some hope and she didn’t give it to him.  And then we have Deniz the shit-stain interfering.  I’ve pretty much given up hope on him playing Selin, he did too much damage this episode, I will never be over his conversation with Serkan. And that conversation is what Serkan was reacting to when he laid it on thick with Selin at the party. It’s not because he actually gave a damn about her, there was nothing sincere about it, it was an act because he had been crushed. Plus the guilt of forgetting her birthday and of knowing the feelings that he was having for Eda.  

Selin needs to go. I think the entire audience is feeling the fatigue of her presence in this storyline and she crossed quite a whole new professional line with putting Serkan’s entire company at risk in order to prevent Eda from going to the hotel.  This storyline would be so much easier to take without her. I could actually enjoy the slow burn, falling back into love, stops and starts, hurt and angst if she wasn’t always looming, but she casts a pall over everything. I really think the writers miscalculated with this. The amnesia story could have worked fine without her and actually been really enjoyable to watch. At this point I will take her exit however I can get it, even if it means she doesn’t get her comeuppance.

However, how much do we love it on this show when the villains’ machinations backfire!? Sorry Selin, you weren’t banking on Serkan leaving you without a word and running to help Eda, were you? The scene in the office when Serkan arrives to help has catapulted on to my list of favorite scenes of the entire series.  I loved every moment of it (and plan to gif pretty much every moment of it).  I loved how they finally got to just work together, collaborate, join their talent and get a win for the company. Serkan needed to experience that, needed to see what kind of partners they could be and I’m so glad we got a chance to see it again too. Then the hug. What a relief! The first time since he’s been back where she’s actually gotten to hold him and have a few minutes to just feel his heartbeat and his warmth and take a beat to celebrate the fact that he’s alive. And how cute was he afterwards? All awkward smiles and fidgeting. It felt just as good for him as it did for her. 

Another scene that deserves to be called out is the coffee shop. What a delightful surprise, I had no idea that was coming. And to find out Serkan permanently reserved that table for them? Because it was their table on their first real date? MY HEART. 

Of course the final scenes in the cabin were beautiful and fraught and made my heart twist.  I think this was a moment where Eda should have given up the game and come clean about the fake engagement with Deniz, but then the show couldn’t continue to milk this story. And they’re clearly not done with it yet. 

However, I'm hopeful that we’re on the tail end of the engagements and Selin and Deniz will exit soon. So we’ll end with a <prayer circle> for that to happen!

[lizacstuff]

Anon asks: SCK Fragman 38 speculation

(Asks under the cut)

Anonymous said: Do you think they're getting married this next episode? idk if the tattoos were confirmation

I think it’s possible? But I also think it’s entirely possible that they get the tattoos as a symbol of their love and a promise of sorts that they are through messing around, but they’re not actually married yet.  Frankly, they already gave us all the wedding hoopla with these two, I’m absolutely fine with an elopement or quick courthouse style wedding, or just a couple of witnesses in a garden. Whatever they want! Let’s just get her done.

Also... I know I said it before, but I’m just in love with the idea of these tattoos. Such a great solution to their ring issue. 

Anonymous said: Thoughts on all these twitter theories from the “sick” line in the fragman?

- it’s about piril and engins kid bc basak and anil filmed in the hospital, and piril was hit by a car in 36 and in 37 she had that moment where she clutched her abdomen and had to sit down

- it’s a flashback serkan has to when his brother alp was sick

- serkan is sick and it’s a way to reveal Kemal as his bio dad (blood or organ donation)

- serkan is sick and it’s a way to reveal eda is pregnant when they draw blood from her to donate

That fragman could be hinting at so many things, and it very well could have been misleading. So lets take each theory in turn. 

“it’s about piril and engins kid bc basak and anil filmed in the hospital, and piril was hit by a car in 36 and in 37 she had that moment where she clutched her abdomen and had to sit down”

Very possible. Engin thinking something had happened to Piril two eps ago did feel like foreshadowing, almost preparing the audience for something. It would be so heartbreaking if she loses the baby, and seems too dark for this show, but it is something that happens to millions of women, so we’ll see.

Also can you imagine after the way Piril stuck by Selin, if Piril lost her baby, and she then witnesses Selin using her baby as a pawn to get revenge on Serkan and Eda?  I’d like to see Piril and Engin’s reaction to that. Though again I think that’s pretty dark, especially for the side couple. 

- it’s a flashback serkan has to when his brother alp was sick

I think this is a very good guess. Serkan probably will see a doctor after he passed out, and if it is another panic attack brought on by the stress of losing Eda, I could see a doctor telling him if he wants to move past the panic attacks, he needs to get at the root of his abandonment issues, which all lead back to his brother’s death. That could be why he’s getting out a box of his things and reading that letter.  So I could very well see a flashback happening to Alp’s diagnosis.

- serkan is sick and it’s a way to reveal Kemal as his bio dad (blood or organ donation)

I’m honestly fully onboard with Kemal as Serkan’s bio dad.  I hear a lot of people poopooing the idea because of opportunity, but I think they told us when it could have happened. In their first meeting, (unless my subs were bad) Aydan mentioned that Kemal had returned once to apologize for standing her up when they were young and going to run away together. I assume that was the window. Kemal showed up years later (after Alp was born) to apologize.. they had a fling and there’s the opportunity for Serkan to be his son. 

Though, to me, if they’re doing something with Serkan’s health it’s got to be related to the plane crash. The chest clutching since he’s been back is concerning, plus wasn’t his hand shaking at one point? So I don’t see him having some serious underlying issue that’s unrelated. This guy does not shy away from going to the doctor and was just in the hospital for probably over a month recovering, so you’d think if there was anything wrong before, we’d know it.  Unless the plane crash acerbated something that’s genetic? And/or requires a match like bone marrow or kidney. I suppose they could give Serkan some rare blood type and that would be something applicable to most any ailment. We shall see. 

- serkan is sick and it’s a way to reveal eda is pregnant when they draw blood from her to donate

This one I think is the least likely. It’s been very fuzzy how much time has passed, but at the minimum 3 months since they were supposed to get married and were having sex, so if Eda were pregnant I think she would have noticed the signs by now.  

Anonymous said: Liza, I know they won’t kill Serkan, but could you reassure me that they won’t? I’ve followed you since Once and you were always good at reassuring.

Ha! I remember making lists of all the reasons they would never kill Hook. 

THEY WON’T KILL SERKAN.

And I’m even more certain of this than I ever was of them not killing Hook, and I was damn certain then. 

There is literally not ONE reason for this show to exist without Eda and Serkan. Not one. This is their love story, and really, storyline wise, the show should have ended awhile ago, and the only reason they keep it going is to keep Hande and Kerem on screen together, making their magic. Seriously, that’s the only reason.

You see how Serkan dying would be counter to that, right?  And if the show were about to end, trust me, there is nothing in it for anyone to have a tragic ending. This started as a romantic comedy, and will end as one, with a happily ever after. And if you’re still nervous, trust this, the production company is still hopeful to sell it into even more foreign markets, especially English language ones, a surprise tragic, twist ending that gets vilified on social media (and trust me this fandom is huge, vocal and capable) would really hurt those chances. 

So even if we’re headed into a bad diagnosis for Serkan, he will be fine in the end, it will just be something for him and Eda to fight through. I promise. 

Anonymous said: thoughts on that wonderfully beautiful fragman? i was watching with hearts in my eyes and then read the translations.. poor serkan!! if it really isn't misleading i definitely think it's some consequence of the plane crash. but, we are secure in what kind of show this is and the full knowledge that it's not a drama and no one is gonna actually die, i'm excited for the potential this storyline is gonna give us!! (esp with the return of the old writers)

I can’t wait to see that rain scene, and the after-the-rain scene and their motorcycle ride. The fragman was very beautiful, but it also felt very poignant and a little melancholy.

It’s interesting with the announcement that the second writing team was back, there were tidbits from several legit entertainment-type reporters yesterday that the show was going back to it’s roots being funny and entertaining.  So a terrible diagnosis for one of the current characters, especially the romantic leading man, doesn’t really fit with that. 

It the writers hadn’t changed I’d be more concerned, not about a character dying, just about the show leaning into some big sort of health-related melodrama.  But I think whatever might be happening will be in service to the plot.  As far as Serkan having a health-scare related to the crash, as I said above it’s very plausible. I mean what are the chances that a man survives a plane crash, is fished out of the sea, spends weeks in a hospital, gets amnesia and is perfectly fine 3-4 months later with no other repercussion? Doesn’t seem possible! 

Anonymous said: Liza, the second set of writers is really coming back! We might actually get comeuppance for Selin!

YESS!!!!! Please. I had completely lost hope with the last set of writers who seemed hellbent on normalizing her behavior.  Look I’d be fine with a 3 minute conversation where Serkan tells her that he knows she’s a manipulative liar and the baby is not his, that he wants her out of their lives for good, and that if she ever comes near Eda ever again he will personally destroy her. 

Is that so much to ask?

Though I’d like her to be humiliated in front of the rest of the team. Just so everyone knows what kind of psycho she is and no one in Edser’s orbit is tempted to give her another chance ever again. 

It will be interesting to see how this plays out.  With the news that Sarp Can (Deniz) is COVID positive, he obviously won’t be back on set anytime soon. They could probably get some VO from him if necessary, for a phone convo, but I’m gonna guess he’s done on screen. 

It’s time to write both characters out! 

As for the 22-23, 25-30 writers coming back, that is the best news I’ve had in ages.  They weren’t perfect, but the things they did well, they did really, really well. Their comedy, romantic scenes, heartfelt dialogue, accurate characterizations and penchant for sizzling scenes that “break the Turkish family structure” will all be most welcome. I’m really excited for the first time in ages. 

Anonymous said: Very interesting that the fragman did not address the Selin baby drama at all. It focused solely on Edser which was a welcome change while at the same time has me a bit nervous for the angst & drama no doubt headed our way. But if Eda & Serkan are together for good now to face the challenges coming then I cannot wait to watch. The last episode was so well done but Eda & Serkan were both near their breaking points for different reasons & you just felt awful for both of them. Really glad that the engagement did not happen and the show focused on the fallout from Serkan’s amnesia. And even had the side characters addressing how difficult things have been for Eda and that she might need some time before picking things back up with Serkan! Looking forward to the resolution of the baby story/exit of Selin and seeing Eda & Serkan heal together.

I hope that the fact that nothing Selin-related was addressed in the fragman means that we finally have people in charge who understand that we are so damned fatigued of Selin that featuring her an active deterrent for viewers.  Also I haven’t seen any evidence that Bige has been on set for 38. That doesn’t mean she hasn’t, it’s still possible, but it is encouraging that the ep will be  light on Selin. 

As far as the drama and angst, I think there’s more headed our way, however I’m hopeful it will be the good kind and not the kind that made us really uncomfortable and want to tear our hair out during the Selin/Deniz era. We know that Eda and Serkan must decide to stay together (spending time together, ring finger tattoos) so the point of the pregnancy storyline is done. When Eda found out Selin was pregnant, it gave Selin the chance for one last Hail Mary pass, and she took it, trying to break them up, but it failed. So it’s usefulness is over. She can’t keep the charade going because of Deniz, and because once Serkan has time to calm down and think, he’ll realize that any time in Slovania where he was so injured that it’s possible he doesn’t remember, he also would have been too physically incapacitated to do anything of the sort. 

As for Eda needing some time, yes, things in 36 were just too easy for Serkan in terms of the fallout from his amnesic behavior. Episode 37 made him work for it and I think come to terms with the fact that, Selin manipulations or no, there’s work to do and things he needs to atone for.  Putting her first throughout the episode, and showering her with love, was a good start. 

Anonymous said: The conversations Selin had with Eda, Serkan and Aydan in this episode had my blood boiling. Someone stop this psycho! The unnecessary hole digging was real, my god. I don't care if she's pregnant, don't hold Eda back this time and let her fight this snake. Let everyone fight her! If she's lying to Deniz now, he can fight her too.

I know, she reached new levels of abusive manipulation.  They better be planning a comeuppance, if she’s just allowed to leave with people waving goodbye, I will scream.  The Aydan conversation with her posing the question about abortion was something else. It came across to me more as a threat. Like... I’m thinking about doing this, if you don’t want my decision to be your fault, you better stay on the right side of me. 

The Eda and Serkan stuff goes without saying. It still floors me that she’s willing to pretend like she raped him (if he can’t remember because he was that injured and foggy, then it’s impossible for him to have given consent.) rather than just giving up and living the truth.  

Anonymous said: Like I get it (kind of) but I am so sick of watching Serkan be nice to Selin. Very much looking forward to Serkan chewing her out for how much she hurt Eda with this fake Serkan baby daddy story when she is exposed. I get that Serkan feels he is to blame for calling her to Slovenia in the first place & essentially in his mind giving her hope of them being together but he needs to stop excusing her horrible behavior from there. No decent person would take advantage of that situation the way she did. It seems like the only way that Selin will have an epic fall is if Deniz decides to fight for the kid he knows must be his and tell Eda everything. Going to be tough for her to believe initially but it will have to start making sense once she thinks back on things and then if the photos surface then she will know it must be true.

Agreed. I get Serkan’s guilt, and it actually shows what a good person he is, but he needs to get over it.  Because seriously, all Selin was obligated to do when she got his call was to hang up, and then dial one of the following: his mother, his father, his fiancé or best friend/business partner Engin. That’s it. Call them and say, hey, Serkan’s alive, this is where you’ll find him. But NOPE! Instead she decided to fly there, manipulate him, keep him hidden and try to use it to get back with him. She made him beholden to her, just another in the long line of brainwashing and manipulation. Her flying to his bedside was the wrong thing to do, and it would be great if someone beside Eda recognized that. 

Anonymous said: Even though Selin is the worst and I just cannot wait for her to finally be unmasked as the manipulator she is, I am really looking forward to Edser in the next episode. Eda taking care of Serkan after he passes out, the two of them reaffirming their commitment to each other with the tattoos & possible elopement, Eda reassuring Serkan that she will be at his side even if the kid turns out to be his and also the two of them working together to get to the truth. So darn excited! And if the spoilers are right that Deniz tells Eda the truth and Serkan sees the photos from Ferit then I will be so happy. It is time for Selin to go for good!

SELIN MUST GO. Yes, I think as soon as the news that Selin is pregnant and trying to pass it off as Serkan’s brain-fog baby, Ferit will unleash the photos. (if it’s him that has them).  

I just want Selin and Deniz gone so we can focus on other things. Their presence on this show is a energy drain, and I want to focus on rain frolicking, motorcycles and bed sharing!!!!!  

Anonymous said: I'm so glad that we had a scene of Serkan telling Eda that even without his memories he fell in love with her again, he just couldn't admit it. Serkan has an interesting perspective on the memory loss part of their lives where I think he almost feels too guilty about it all and just wants to move past it. I've noticed that in his dialogues in 36 & 37 where he wants to leave it in the past and basically do his all to make it all up to her in the present and future.

I think this is very well observed. He definitely was trying to leave the past in the past, but honestly I think that’s just laziness on the part of the old writers, not wanting to have to have a reckoning for all the things they had him say or do. Since the writers decided to go that way, I could buy it’s because Serkan feels too guilty about it all. We know how much he loathes making mistakes or being wrong or owing apologies. If that’s what they wanted to do, it would have gone a long way if they’d shown a bit more of him blaming himself, especially in 36. 

I was also very happy that Serkan came out and said that he’s fallen in love with her again. My only thing is I wish if they were going to do that, they would have thrown a little more detail in the dialogue. Like Serkan admitting to her that he started thinking about her all the time as soon as he returned and met her, maybe admit that he slept on his office couch clutching her wedding invitation.  A couple of things like that would have been very nice for Eda to hear. 

Anonymous said: SCK sure loves creating difficult situations for Eda & Serkan. I really felt for Serkan in the last episode especially since he was back to being the romantic robot we all love. He so baldly wants to make up for lost time with Eda that he rushes ahead with the proposal and then gets crushed when she rejects him. And then spends most of the episode frantically trying to figure out what is going on with her and trying to show her how much he loves her. I was really happy though that the show addressed a few different times how awful the last few months have been for Eda and it also made Serkan address it. His plan to just forget about everything and move forward did not happen. Loved that the side characters stepped up to remind him of everything he & Selin put Eda through. Not so crazy that the show decided to use Selin’s pregnancy as the plot device to get Serkan to finally realize “oh yeah, what happened since my accident is a very big deal & now I have to face it & come to terms with it” but still glad it happened. Selin is obviously so much more in the wrong than Serkan but let’s hope her downfall takes place in the next episode.

All of this.  I think you’re exactly right, Serkan tried to brush past everything and I’m glad that finally the other characters stepped up a little to help make him see that he had more work to do. Special shout out to Seyfi for his sassy comment about Serkan almost marrying another woman. And finally Piril was useful and acted like a friend, the first time she had since he returned.  

[blackjack-15]

Silly Rabbit, Ecological Terrorism is For Kids! — Thoughts on: The White Wolf of Icicle Creek (ICE)

Previous Metas: SCK/SCK2, STFD, MHM, TRT, FIN, SSH, DOG, CAR, DDI, SHA, CUR, CLK, TRN, DAN, CRE

Hello and welcome to a Nancy Drew meta series! 30 metas, 30 Nancy Drew Games that I’m comfortable with doing meta about. Hot takes, cold takes, and just Takes will abound, but one thing’s for sure: they’ll all be longer than I mean them to be.

Each meta will have different distinct sections: an Introduction, an exploration of the Title, an explanation of the Mystery, a run-through of the Suspects. Then, I’ll tackle some of my favorite and least favorite things about the game, and finish it off with ideas on how to improve it. As ICE sends off the Jetsetting Games category and moves into the Odd Games category, there will be a section between The Intro and The Title called The Weird Stuff, where I’ll go into what storyline marks this game a bit Odd in the Nancy Drew series as a whole.

If any game requires an extra section or two, they’ll be listed in the paragraph above, along with links to previous metas.

These metas are not spoiler free, though I’ll list any games/media that they might spoil here: ICE; TRT; mention of FIN; mention of CUR; mention of TRN; mention of SEA.

This meta is under a read more because of its sheer length.

The Intro:

Ughhhhh. UGHHH.

The White Wolf of Icicle Creek has a lot of things that make it distinct in the Nancy Drew video game series — it sports the first new interface since SHA, it has the world’s most boring list of ‘enticing moments’ from the game on the back, its assets look like they were forcefully molded out of gummy bears, it randomly was released on Wii, it’s the best-known game among non-fans thanks to the Game Grumps — but it also stands out because not one of those things make it enjoyable to play or to watch without a heavy amount of MST3K-style commentary.

Also because it features the fandom’s least favorite puzzle of all time…but more on that later.

A point to get out of the way before we get into the game proper is that this game feels a lot like a cheap knock-off of Treasure in a Royal Tower. Like, a lot like a cheap knock-off. One of those animated films called “Bemo’s Lost in the Ocean” or “A Toy Tale” that come out around Disney/Pixar films to try to trick hapless grandmas into buying them.

Just lining it up, we have Nancy stuck in/around a lodge in winter, an edict from the owner of the lodge to figure out what’s up with repeated Incidents and possible sabotage while most guests have left, an academic around Nancy’s age, an Old Coot, an Olympian whose grandparent was important, chores (including food related chores) to do in order to progress in the story, a suspect you can only talk to face-to-face for part of the game…the list honestly goes on in both big and small ways.

While ICE isn’t the only one that tries to do this (since I’m not doing a SEA meta, I won’t get into the fact that SEA literally just remastered DDI’s characters and said ‘good enough’), it does feel particularly egregious because, for all its copying, there’s not enough in the game to distract from it even a bit.

ICE is a game searching for an identity and unable to find one, no matter how many plot points, chores, or games (horrible, unskippable games) they throw at the player. We have full on international espionage and ecological terrorism here (more on that in the next section), and it just…doesn’t matter, at the end of the day. It also takes place in Canada, but your only clue to that is that one of the characters says “eh” a lot, so that’s not great either.

If ICE is a new game to you (it can be a bear to install and even worse to complete, so I’m going to go off the assumption that not everyone will be familiar with it), you’ve probably only heard of the cooking chores, fox and geese, and that this is the game with the Return of Tony Balducci, previously of TRN fame. (Honestly, ICE had a big enough cast without its phone characters, but HER decided to shove three phone characters along with one partial phone character at us anyway.) And, to be honest, that’s pretty much all there is to the game.

Now I know this sounds harsh, but there is a possible explanation to the lack of content in this game. In my previous meta (link at the top of this post) I made a note that CRE’s production in all likelihood suffered because the company was focused on ICE’s new interface. I don’t think it’s a leap at all to say that ICE’s story and characters could also have suffered because of the same thing.

The biggest problem with ICE — besides the weird stuff we’ll get into below — is that it’s a shallow game. None of the characters have any real depth, the plot is a paper-thin copy of TRT, the puzzles are alternatingly impossible and extremely easy, and in an effort to add “depth”, we get…well, we get this next section.

The Weird Stuff:

With each of the Odd Games (ICE through RAN, Heaven help us all), there’s something that makes the game truly…well, odd. Odd for the Nancy Drew series, odd for the age range specified on the front of the box, and odd in general when you look at the rest of the plot.

In this game, it comes in the form of terrorism — or rather, two types of terrorism. Guadalupe is our first (and only, in this series) ecological terrorist, belonging to a fringe group called “Run and Go Free” and being perfectly fine with illegal acts (destruction of the fishing lodge, sabotage of personal property), even telling Nancy that she’s done worse in the name of Run and Go Free.

Nancy Drew Games are no stranger to hippie/naturalist types (see DOG, DDI, CAR, etc.) but Lupe is our first to be legitimately dangerous. Sure, she doesn’t end up being the ultimate Bad Guy, but she is A Bad Guy, and it really does seem very odd to me that after everything Lupe does (and insinuates that she’s done), that she gets away with barely a slap on the wrist in having to leave the lodge.

Lupe in no way fits in with the rest of the plot; there’s nothing to justify her being present in the game, she can appear about halfway through the game and then leaves to become a phone contact soon after, she’s not present enough to be an actual suspect — she has no place in the plot nor the game, and it really does just boggle the mind that a character is in it at all, especially with ICE having a greater than average number of suspects to begin with.

On the other hand, however, we have Yanni, an Eastern European Olympian spy/terrorist, sent by the Fredonian (a commonly used fake country) government to bomb around the lodge to find uranium under the cover of training for the next Olympics.

That is a whole lot of things for one character.

You’d think with the presence of Lupe that Yanni would fit right in, but he doesn’t make her — or himself — any less odd or out of place than he would have been alone. It’s a ‘suspicious Olympian’ character that we already got with Jacques, but he’s a million times worse, setting off friggin bombs to find a metal that his government wants for…well, the normal reason that governments want uranium.

So we can add in “reference to ongoing nuclear warfare” as another thing that makes this game Odd.

Yanni doesn’t fit the game or the plot, which is pretty bad considering he’s responsible for about half the plot in the first place. He also has that weird aside about his grandmother being eaten by wolves, as if HER wants the player to suspect him because of some twisted revenge against wolves plot (which would have been Very Weird) so that they can pull the rug out at the end and be like “see?? He’s a political terrorist looking for uranium for nuclear bombs for his country!!! Gotcha!!”.

Like, it’s not a Gotcha if it’s absolute lunacy. My land.

With that explanation out of the way, let’s get to something a little less Odd.

The Title:

 I actually don’t have much to say here. The White Wolf of Icicle Creek is honestly a great name; it tells us the focal point of the game (the wolf), the location, (Icicle Creek), and even pretty much tells you the season that this game is happening in (white, icicle). It accomplishes a lot in a very short amount of words, and pertains accurately to the game we’re dealing with.

We’ll chalk that up in the “Win” category…especially since we’re going straight back into the “Lose” category with the next section.

The Mystery:

The mystery is a mess, full stop. There’s way too much going on for the amount of payoff (i.e. little to none), and the plot, thin at best, completely drops off at the 2/3rds mark when all the player has left to do is wait for random events to occur and keep putting off fox and geese.

Anyway.

We begin with strange, destructive incidents of sabotage happening at a renowned winter resort. Most of the guests have left, and there’s been some damage to parts of the resort. Asked for help by the owner of the resort who’s away on business, Nancy must pick up the slack left by staff who have quit, run food-related errands, and discover who might be behind these attacks before it’s too late.

Oh wait, that’s Treasure in a Royal Tower. Lemme start again.

We begin with strange, destructive incidents of sabotage happening at a renowned winter resort. Most of the guests have left, and there’s been some damage —

You get the picture.

The biggest difference pre-game is that after every incident, a white wolf is spotted, only to disappear before the police get there. People start connecting the wolf to the crimes, and go as far as blaming it for cases of food poisoning and slashed tires, as if the wolf is cooking food and using a knife with its paws.

Just as Nancy’s arriving on scene, the bunkhouse is blown up and she hears the wolf howling — so obviously there must be a connection there, and a wolf definitely isn’t just responding to a loud noise.

This part honestly feels a bit like the beginning of CUR, where the game tries to establish Scary Feelings and Ominous Threats and just comes off ham-fisted.

The back of the box features three ‘exciting’ things that Nancy gets to do in this game, which are as follows: cook lunch and dinner, ride a snowmobile and wear snow shoes, and do snowball fights and ice fishing. While it’s sad that those moderately exciting things are the best that the box can boast, it’s even sadder that they really are the best the game has to offer.

It’s easy to lose thread of the mystery nearly as soon as Nancy gets to the lodge, because she’s immediately bombarded with laundry that has to be done before a certain time, meals that have to be done within a certain hour or two, and a suspect (Lupe) that can just refuse to show up.

Oh, and the return of Tino Balducci.

Returning in a game where he doesn’t fit in and where no one wanted him in the first place, Tino’s there to “help” Nancy solve the mystery by giving her a questionnaire for her suspects to fill out that asks what planet they see themselves as, among other inanities.

Honestly, this whole section could be summed up as “Tino returns, among other inanities”.

Nancy, throughout all of this, somehow has time to do a bit of detective work, interviewing a cast of rather one-note suspects, figuring out that more than one person is responsible for the many accidents. Guadalupe’s sabotage is discovered and she’s sent home, Yanni is increasingly unavailable (which is hugely suspicious), snowball fights are more prevalent than necessary, and finally the villain is exposed, all culminating in a glitchy, nigh-impossible snowmobile chase.

Oh, and there’s a half-tamed wolf storyline that kinda pops up every now and again.

All in all, the mystery is a weak thread throughout the game — which is a problem, because it’s the only thread throughout the game — that’s easily overshadowed by the chores, games, and frankly awful visuals throughout the game.

Now, to those who contribute (in a way) to the non-entity that is ICE’s story:

The Suspects:

Ollie Randall is our resident grumpy caretaker and is Chantal’s right-hand man, along with being on the Avalanche Patrol and a firm believer in the bad luck that wolves bring. His wife can’t handle cold temperatures due to a nerve condition, so he’s also his daughter Freddie’s sole parent during the winter.

As a culprit in the game as it now is, Ollie would have been the only sensical option; fed up with the awful guests that come and cause havoc, he starts causing little easily-solved accidents to spook away the less hardy-type guests, but it keeps spiraling as it doesn’t keep out everyone but people like Bill Kessler. Frustrated by the treatment the lodge gets, he decides that if people don’t treat it nicely, they can’t have it at all…

Unfortunately, Ollie is limited to being Grumpy, and not a lot else.

Freddie Randall is Ollie’s daughter and the self-proclaimed Snow Princess due to her ability to stay out in the cold for hours in her snow fort, and to take repeated snowballs to the face courtesy of a teen detective.

Freddie is…I know I talked about how Yanni and Lupe don’t really fit into the game, but Freddie really doesn’t fit any version of this game. She’s there for a mini game, she doesn’t have a personality, you can’t skip her mini game, she’s voiced by Lani Minella…the list goes on and on. Her shining moment of glory is acting as a red herring by throwing a snowball through Lou’s window.

She’s pointless to talk about as a potential culprit, even though she would have been an interesting “culprit” in a case where all the incidents are actually Freddie accidentally causing trouble, but that probably would have been even less satisfying than how the game actually went, so we’ll just move along here.

Our cross-country skiing Olympian from the fictional Eastern European country of Fredonia, Yanni Volkstaia is both our only suspect wearing a onesie and our only suspect with a family member eaten by wolves.

I know, that’s already a high bar to top. Don’t worry, he’ll fall very, very far below it.

Yanni, as mentioned above, is our odd spy/terrorist villain who is disguising his being there for uranium by saying that it’s his Olympic competitors trying to throw off his training. Why an Olympian is training alone without any coaches or security…well, let’s just say that Yanni didn’t really think his cover story through.

Just because Yanni’s the obvious culprit doesn’t mean he fills the role well; Yanni is obvious, annoying, and his paper-thin cover is just annoying enough to be…well, annoying. He throws out that his grandmother was “killed and devoured” by wolves as if he wants Nancy to believe that that’s the reason he’s targeting the lodge but…it still points directly to him. It’s just not great all the way around.

Joining Yanni in terrorism is Guadalupe Comillo, activist from California and hard-to-find suspect. Lupe can, as mentioned above, literally just not appear for a bit, stalling out the game and making her even more annoying than she already is.

Lupe’s cover is that she’s a bird watcher, but she knows absolutely nothing about birds — like honestly nothing, even though she had time to make her cover story (not unlike Yanni).

She gets sent away by destruction of private property (Ollie’s gun – super dangerous to make a gun misaim out in the wild and she’s lucky he didn’t hit anything problematic [like another person] because of it) and good riddance, but appears as a phone friend to rather pointlessly exonerate herself and do pretty much nothing else but stop the game in its tracks until she lets it proceed.

As a culprit, Lupe would have been the other obvious choice, but she’s just not in the game enough, so she’s easy to ignore. Her cover is thin, but so is her motivation (!!! Save the wolf!!!), so she’s one of the most annoying non-entity suspects in this series.

Our second Californian in the cast is Lou Talbot, who is a college student, master of ‘earthitecture’ (inspired by Poppy Dada) and stealer of dinosaur bones for money. He also plays fox and geese with Bill in his spare time. He does a really good impression of the Guy in my MFA twitter as well, but that’s literally it.

No, really, that’s his entire character. I can’t even posit what he would be like as the culprit because that is LITERALLY all we’re given on him. End of bio. My gosh, what a waste of pixels.

Lou’s partner in fox and geese is Bill Kessler, who loves to fish and whose grandmother used to own the lodge before Chantal. While he feels that his grandmother Tilly was cheated out of the lodge, he has little desire to get it back, and really just wants to hide the fact that he’s been to the lodge before (an odd thing to hide, but whatever makes him feel better.)

Like Lou, apart from that, he really doesn’t have any character. He basically is a mix of TRT’s Jacques in his family connection to the lodge and SHA’s Dave in actual amount of motivation (i.e., 0 motivation) to do anything about it. He is, however, the person who makes Nancy play fox and geese, and for that alone, I hate him.

As a culprit, Bill’s played as a red herring for a solid 5 minutes of gameplay (though not very well — why would an avid fisherman blow up a fishing shack?), and then totally discounted the moment Nancy finds out his backstory. He’s really just there — like most of the cast, worryingly enough — to pad out the number of suspects and to give Nancy a taste of Hell through fox and geese.

The Favorite:

There are a few bright spots in this confused mess of a game, so let’s go through them.

My favorite moment in the game is when Nancy, after Yanni says the horrific line about his grandmother being killed and devoured by wolves, can ask “how”. As if that’s a sentence that needs a ‘how’. It’s a great moment of Nancy being absolutely tone deaf, and I giggle like a madman every time I think about it.

My favorite puzzle in the game is probably the cooking minigame, which I dislike in frequency and time requirement, but do love in actual practice. It’s fun to cook in every Nancy Drew game, and this one is no exception. I just wish it wasn’t regimented so heavily.

I love the atmosphere of the lodge; it’s beautifully animated (in fact one of my favorite locations in the ND games), big without being too big, and is never boring, even by the end of the game. The lodge is largely a character unto itself, and is quite successful as a wonderful location.

The Un-Favorite:

There’s a lot to unpack here, but we’ll keep it short because the fix section of this meta is gonna have me by the throat.

My least favorite moment in the game is the moment Tino comes into the game. As the game now stands, there’s no reason for him to be involved, and short a comment about him by the Hardy Boys, which would at least justify it a little, he’s purposeless. He’s worse than that, actually — he’s there to slow the game down, and that’s a cardinal sin.

My least favorite puzzle in the game is a tie between fox and geese (UGH) and the final snowmobile chase. My problems with fox and geese are obvious — they’re everyone’s problems with fox and geese: it’s a required puzzle, it’s hard to do, there’s no way to cheat through it, and it takes forever.

The final snowmobile chase is somehow even worse. It’s buggy, laggy, has nothing to do with the actual plot, has arbitrary win conditions — it’s the worst (or at least among the worst) that HER has to offer with final puzzles. If everything else about ICE was perfect, engaging, fun, and thought-provoking, this final puzzle would still put me off of playing it. It’s just that bad.

The storyline with Isis and that whole backstory isn’t treated well in game; it’s almost as if they came up with the title and then remembered at the last minute that there’s supposed to be an actual wolf. I would have loved more of a focus on that storyline; as it is, it barely counts as a blip on the game’s radar — which is a shame.

The Fix:

Gosh, how on earth will I fix The White Wolf of Icicle Creek? The answer is that I don’t feel like I can just apply a few quick fixes and be on my way; the only answer I could find is to approach this as if I was at the proposal meeting for this game — how would I outline the barebones scenario?

This section will be long, as I’m going to start just from the skeleton and build things in. What follows is my own imaginings of what my own personal ideas would be to create ICE, rather than to fix it from what the finished product was. As an important note, the side-plot with the wolf, as it was really neglected and bare-bones to begin with in the game, is mostly removed.

The first section I’ll work on is structure. Though it wasn’t done perfectly in FIN, I feel like the pacing of ICE could be vastly improved by putting a clock on the game by assigning designated days and tasks. Three days is still probably a good idea, as it lets us easily break the story into a 3-act structure and delineate certain tasks for certain days without overloading one day in particular. We’ll get more into what should happen in Days 1, 2, and 3 later in a general overview of how the plot would go.

The mechanism used to get Nancy there — Chantal being a friend of Carson’s — isn’t bad, but I’d change it up just slightly. Nancy’s not yet a “professional” detective, but we’re only 2 games from her being hired by a foreign country’s authorities, so she should be making her way up there. It stands to reason that Nancy would attract some attention from the business in CRE since the Hardy Boys would definitely mention Nancy in their de-briefing and Aikens is a big name, so let’s build on that from here. Chantal is still Carson’s friend, and she still wants to get these incidents solved while she’s away from the Lodge for legal matters — someone got injured at the lodge and is now suing.

Carson decides to officially hire Nancy — paperwork, legal documentation, etc. — as a “concerned third party” in Chantal’s problems, telling her that her job is to find out two things: find out what’s causing the incidents of sabotage, and give Carson enough evidence in favor of the lodge’s safety that he can prove reasonable doubt against the people accusing Chantal. Nancy will be there undercover as a family friend of Chantal’s, with only Ollie knowing that she’s there in an official capacity.

ICE has a cast that is both unwieldy and characterless, and I feel like the way to fix that is through combining characters. Starting out we have Ned, Chantal, Tino, the ex-maid, her boyfriend, Ollie, Freddie, Lupe, Yanni, Lou, and Bill — 10 characters that we deal with in the present, plus one other player (in the boyfriend/stalker guy). 11 in total. That is a huge, huge cast that we definitely need to pare down.

The first thing to do is to take out Tino Balducci. He slows down the plot, is completely unnecessary, and isn’t even entertaining. Since there’s no Hardy Boys to play off of him (and I would keep the Hardy Boys out of this game, even with my love for them), Tino needs to go the way of the dodo. And good riddance to him, honestly.

Freddie, an obvious subject to axe, should instead be aged up to around 20 and combined with the maid whose ex-boyfriend’s letter Nancy finds at the beginning of the game. Freddie would handle all the chores the first day except the cooking.

Instead of a nebulous, incident-causing ex-boyfriend, Freddie would have just started a relationship with Lou, keeping our cast tight and visible, rather than one-off characters with nothing else to give to the story.

By now we’re down to Carson, Ned, Chantal, Freddie, Ollie, Lupe, Yanni, Lou, and Bill. I think we can do a little better than that.

The next step I’d take is to remove Yanni entirely. Yes, I know it’s a big change to remove the canonical culprit, but bear with me. With Yanni and Lupe having so many similarities and together being guilty of 99% of the Crimes in this game, I’m pretty comfortable in combining them. I’d also make the minor change of having Lupe be an Indigenous Canadian rather than Hispanic and from California, since our game is set in Canada and there’s absolutely no reason for a large portion of our cast to be American.

With Yanni gone, Lupe (or whatever her new name would be, since the name ‘Lupe’, all nationality changes aside, in a game ostensibly about a wolf makes me want to kill myself) assumes a few of his personality quirks – most importantly, a family member with a past with wolves. It doesn’t really matter if it’s positive or negative, you just want the association there as a herring (red or otherwise).

That puts us down to 5 suspects to talk to and three phone friends for a total of 8 players in the present. Since Chantal is supposed to be busy, I’d remove the ability to talk to her entirely — anything that Chantal could offer can come through Carson as Nancy’s official “employer”, which brings us to a nice 7 players — an entirely manageable number.

So let’s begin.

The beginning of the game with Nancy at her desk always includes a case file, so this time the case file would say that Nancy, at the behest of her ‘client’, Carson Drew, is flying out to Alberta to investigate strange happenings at Chantal Moique’s lodge. Chantal is trying to settle with people who got hurt there and are trying to sue her, and Carson’s helping to advise her. Nancy’s mission is two-fold: figure out what’s causing the incidents at the lodge, and find evidence that Chantal can’t be held liable for the injuries incurred by the guests suing her.

Wolves are commonly seen around the area of the lodge — Northern Alberta has some of the highest population of wolves in North America — and there’s a rumor at the lodge that the spirits of the wolves that are hunted in the area every winter are causing some of the sabotage.

Chantal thinks the rumor is being spread by whoever is doing the actual sabotage to make her guests leave and force her out of business, so Carson tells Nancy to pay attention to the stories about the wolves — and one snow-white wolf in particular, who is often sighted very close to the lodge. Carson suspects that, if it exists, the white wolf is actually a trained dog (a white/white and silver Siberian Husky, for example) being used to whip up panic, but tells Nancy to keep an open mind.

As Nancy’s arriving at the Lodge, an explosion occurs in the distance, causing the rumbling of snow to start. Ollie, who’s picked up Nancy from her plane, says darkly that he’s been waiting for something like this to happen, and that this will probably cause a minor avalanche (his opinion as the head of Avalanche Patrol in the area), making it impossible to leave the lodge for a few days. He tells Nancy to head straight to bed once they get to the lodge, as she’s in for an exhausting time dealing with the “weirdos” still left at the lodge.

Nancy wakes up and Day One begins with Freddie freaking out outside Nancy’s door. After explaining that the regular chef (who was off for the last month visiting family) can’t get back to the lodge until tomorrow and that Freddie’s only manned the kitchen once or twice, Nancy says that she has experience cooking and offers to take the chef’s duties for the day.

Day One has Nancy meet all the suspects – Bill’s playing a game (I don’t care what it is as long as it’s something that involves writing things down) with anyone who passes by and talks about how out of all the lodges in Canada, this one’s his favorite; Lou hangs out near the bones (make him an archeology major or something related to but not exactly paleontology) and Definitely Doesn’t Know the Cute Girl Who Works at the Lodge, How Dare Nancy Assume; Not-Lupe is gone until 4pm when it starts getting dark because she loves spending time in nature, especially with the Super Special Wolf running around the place; and Ollie’s in the workshop fixing the things that have been sabotaged, worries about his daughter being away from her mother and about her ‘cavorting’ with a guest.

Nancy still preps lunch and the day goes on without a hitch other than Lou having an overheard argument with someone at around 6. Nancy cooks dinner, accidentally (due to smudged instructions from Freddie) sprinkling paprika in everyone’s food and setting off an allergic (mild to moderate anaphylaxis, helped by an epi pen) reaction + hives in Freddie, who they fly out via helicopter that night.

Ollie, feeling hostile towards Nancy, takes a look at the instructions/recipe that Nancy worked off of and says to her that the first page is Freddie’s handwriting, but the second page isn’t — someone did this on purpose. Nancy calls Carson, who says that the soonest he can get there is the day after next, and to keep herself safe above everything — he’ll check in with the hospital Freddie’s at since it’s also in Edmonton, where Carson and Chantal are. Carson warns Nancy that the guests were about to settle the lawsuit when the news about the explosion hit the news, and are now more determined than ever to sue for all Chantal’s worth.

Day 2 opens with the cook (who’s unseen and just exists in order to relieve Nancy of kitchen duty) arriving and a phone call from Carson asking for Chantal/Freddie if Nancy can grab the laundry bags from the guests’ rooms and that the spare key is in the register at the front (of course guarded by a puzzle — I’d even accept a mini fox and geese, as one of the big problems with that puzzle in the vanilla game is that it goes on way too long.

While snooping in the desk, Nancy finds evidence that Chantal might have been guilty of criminal neglect — a few things around the lodge are listed as “fixed” and totally safe when really they still need some maintenance — and wonders how she should tell Carson and if she should wait until she has more evidence. Before she goes out for the day, Not-Lupe mentions to Nancy “in confidence” that she overheard Lou fighting with Freddie before dinner, calling it a “lover’s quarrel”.

After lunch and talking with all the suspects again, Nancy goes to grab the laundry with the master key and snoops in everyone’s rooms, finding various clues and suspicious things: Bill’s journal detailing how Chantal is running the place into the ground and needs to be replaced, along with a few lodge magazines; Not-Lupe’s gloves with suspicious specks of things on them (Nancy takes a sample of it in a Kleenex or something); Lou’s heavy suitcase that has a case with imprints of bones in it; Ollie’s has maintenance books that also detail how to take things apart and maintenance notes that say he saw the wolf around but didn’t have his gun; Freddie’s only thing of interest is a little dinosaur pin on her dresser.

Nancy takes the opportunity to snoop in Chantal’s normal room and finds that the things that were listed in the documents in the front desk really were fixed; Ollie reported to Chantal that things that he fixed were un-fixed by the time he went back to them the next day — most of the time suffering damage as well, such as the sauna that injured the guests that are suing Chantal. Nancy calls her father with the news, and Carson says to save those documents so that he can come get them tomorrow, and to see if she can find any clues to who might have done it.

After dinner Nancy talks to Lou, who confesses that he and Freddie started dating a few days ago after meeting online last semester in a dinosaur enthusiast forum — hence his decision to come to the lodge, as Freddie said there were cool bones here. He was originally going to steal a few small ones and thought no one would notice if he replaced them with resin-cast replicas, but Freddie caught him and they had a fight which ended with Lou deciding not to steal, and Freddie saying that she could help him make replicas for him to take home and keep in his house.

Nancy asks why he’s telling her, and Lou says that Ollie seems to get along with Nancy well, and he’d like Nancy to calm Ollie down if Ollie discovers that he’s dating Freddie. Nancy asks Lou about the wolf, and Lou says that some of the stuff could be a wolf — he’s seen one around the lodge once or twice — but he hasn’t really been paying attention to anything except the bones and Freddie (who he’s looking forward to visiting once he can).

When talking with Bill, he offhandedly mentions that he used to be a handyman — the sink in his room started acting up, but he fixed it easily because he thinks that Ollie has enough to do without doing this easy fix. Bill says that this would never have happened when Chantal’s father was running the Lodge and accuses Chantal of preferring to spend long “business trips” in the city to actually paying attention to the Lodge — he says she should just live in the city and hire a manager with experience who actually cares. Nancy asks Bill about the wolf, and he says if anyone could be haunted by wolves, he’d believe it was Chantal.

Nancy, it should be noted, during her explorations around the lodge, sees a few pawprints and some chewed-on debris, but otherwise hasn’t seen the wolf in person. Just traces and tracks.

Not-Lupe and Ollie both dodge Nancy’s questions – Ollie’s busy as everything seems to be breaking at once, and snaps at Nancy that without Chantal around, he’s the only person keeping the lodge afloat, and he’d be better off without the stress of this job. When Nancy asks him about the wolf, Ollie says that the last thing they need is some idiot tourist being attacked by a wolf, and so he refuses to believe that there’s a wolf around the area.

Not-Lupe is at her normal place at the window (though there’s a chair there because no one stands all day), and when Nancy asks about the wolf, says that that’s why she’s there — she heard the rumor about the wolf and wanted to see it, but that her visit’s been very disappointing — just a junky lodge with incompetent staff and no wolves anywhere. Her hobby is visiting winter lodges, and this one just Isn’t up to snuff.

Nancy tries to pry deeper, but Not-Lupe shuts her down and goes to bed; Nancy investigates the living room as everyone leaves for bed and finds crinkled up under the couch a magazine cutout about the Premier Lodge Group, a company that owns winter lodges all over Canada and the United States, and their plans to build a group of lodges in Alberta as soon as a few “minor inconveniences” with location are solved.

The day ends with Carson calling; Nancy tells him about all the suspects (Carson confirms Lou’s story by having talked to Freddie), the magazine, Ollie wanting to quit, etc. Carson promises to do some research on Premier Lodge Group and tells Nancy to send him a picture of the stuff she found on Lupe’s gloves. Nancy does so, and that’s the end of Day 2.

Day 3 opens again with Carson’s phone call, informing Nancy that he’ll be there in the early evening — he’s having a contact of his look at the photo Nancy sent, but he’s pretty sure it won’t be good news.

Premier Lodge Group was investigated a few years ago for sabotage to their competitors but ultimately nothing came out of it, and Carson suspects that people were paid off to keep quiet about it. Carson says that he’s looked into Ollie (since Carson suspected him the most) and apparently Ollie always grouches about quitting when he’s stressed but has been there for 20 years and is as loyal as they come, so Nancy says she’ll focus on Not-Lupe and Bill — the two lodge-hoppers who seem dissatisfied with the lodge.

Both Not-Lupe and Bill are gone when Nancy gets downstairs, and Lou (who’s planning on leaving that night to go to Edmonton) says that they both got a sack lunch from the kitchen and left early in the morning to go explore outside. He tells Nancy she can borrow his snowshoes and says that they both headed out (independently) in the direction of Skookum Ridge.

When Nancy gets up to the Ridge, she spots the “wolf” — really a Siberian Husky, like Carson thought, who seems very well trained. When the dog comes up to Nancy, a gunshot ripples through the air and nearly hits the dog, who would have gone running off had Nancy not grabbed her collar and yelled not to shoot. Nancy sees Bill across the ridge and waves him over, explaining that it’s a dog, not a wolf. The dog (whose name is something way better than Isis — literally anything else would do) is suspicious of Bill at first, which convinces Nancy that it’s not Bill’s — the only suspect left is Not-Lupe.

When she tells Bill what she knows about Not-Lupe, Bill admits to having seen her before at a lodge that went out of business due to mysterious accidents, but thought it was a coincidence before digging deeper in the magazines he brought and finding Not-Lupe in the back of a small photo of Premier Lodge Administrative Staff — he was worried about keeping it safe and knowing that there would be no cleaning staff until at least the next day, crumpled it up and put it under the couch he normally sits by.

A happy, friendly dog in tow, Nancy and Bill head back to the lodge only to find Ollie and Lou standing outside looking worried. They tell Nancy that they both went outside because they heard a loud noise, only to find the door locked behind them — and every other door locked as well. After realizing that Not-Lupe wouldn’t open the doors for them, Ollie went to get an axe for the door, only to have a note appear on the door’s window that if they forced their way in, the whole Lodge would be burned to the ground in an instant.

Carson calls then, saying that he’s a few minutes away, but that his friend got back to him — Not-Lupe’s gloves were covered in residue from explosives. Bill takes Nancy’s phone and begins to fill Carson in on who they think Not-Lupe is working for and who she is. Nancy asks Lou and Ollie to hoist her up to her own window, which she keeps unlocked, and crawls in, creeping downstairs to the main room to try to find how Not-Lupe will burn the lodge and stop her.

Nancy confronts Not-Lupe, who confirms her identity as a saboteur for the Premier Lodge Group, saying that with the bad press around the lodge Chantal would have already had to sell — but she’s going to go one step further and cause an ‘incident’, blowing up the lodge with fuses hidden around its ground floor — Chantal’s father won’t spend the money to rebuild the lodge, and the only proof that is against her is the word of two American kids, an old man, and a lodge-hopper with a very incriminating diary that would be found soon enough. She tells Nancy that she can either try to catch her or try to save the lodge and runs out the back, intent on escaping as she pushes the button to arm the explosives.

Nancy yells out the window for them to catch Not-Lupe, who’s got to be headed out to the main road, tossing the cushion of the seat Lupe usually sat in so that her dog can catch her scent, then has the final timed puzzle be switching off each detonator (which would be in each of the places where the suspects usually were, with the exception of Ollie’s whose is in the front desk).

As soon as Nancy disarms them, Bill calls out to her that Carson just called — Lou and the dog tracked Lupe to the main road, and Bill called Carson to let him know. Carson’s car stops Not-Lupe (Carson brought a policeman on a hunch), and the day is saved. Premier Lodge is snagged in a major lawsuit by Chantal’s father and other lodge owners who have had the same thing happen to them, and Chantal hires Bill as co-manager to ensure there’s always someone there to manage the lodge and for his wealth of knowledge of what makes a good lodge and good experience for guests.

The game ends with Nancy writing her letter to Hannah (so that Hannah doesn’t worry about them), and with her dad’s praise for a job well done.

I realize that this is a monumental fix; it’s a brand-new game made out of the skeleton of the old one. I also realize that there are a million and one ways to re-write this game; this one takes the idea of sabotage, one of the most frequent inciting incidents in the Nancy Drew world, and just makes it a little bigger.

No terrorism required.

[blackjack-15]

A Cursed Half-Game: Thoughts on: The Curse of Blackmoor Manor (CUR)

Previous Metas: SCK/SCK2, STFD, MHM, TRT, FIN, SSH, DOG, CAR, DDI, SHA

Hello and welcome to a Nancy Drew meta series! 30 metas, 30 Nancy Drew Games that I’m comfortable with doing meta about. Hot takes, cold takes, and just Takes will abound, but one thing’s for sure: they’ll all be longer than I mean them to be.

Each meta will have different distinct sections: an Introduction, an exploration of the Title, an explanation of the Mystery, a run-through of the Suspects. Then, I’ll tackle some of my favorite and least favorite things about the game, and finish it off with ideas on how to improve it.

If any game requires an extra section or two, they’ll be listed in the paragraph above, along with links to previous metas.

These metas are not spoiler free, though I’ll list any games/media that they might spoil here: mention of MHM, CUR, “The Bluebeard Room”(Nancy Drew Mystery), mention of Harry Potter, mention of Twilight.

The Intro:

Alright, time to pay the piper.

I haven’t exactly made it a secret that CUR is one of my least favorite games in this meta series, which is why I’ve kind of been dreading writing this meta. It’s not that I have nothing to say — quite the opposite — but more that I was worried about my own internal bias would make this meta boring, heavily one-sided, and (most of all) unpleasant to read. And while I’ve talked about games I dislike before (SCK and FIN primarily), CUR sits at many people’s #1 or #2 slots of Nancy Drew Games of all time, and there’s not much critique of it out there.

To make a long, rambling story short, I was most of all worried about being a lone, pedantic, soap-box bore rather than actually just working through the game. With that in mind, the first run-through of this meta was too much of a “compliment sandwich” type review, and didn’t say anything productive. And I hated writing it.

So instead, I’m just gonna play this straight. Let’s dive in, shall we?

The Curse of Blackmoor Manor is the first in a sequence of games that goes from CUR through CRE that I refer to as the “Jetsetting Games”, where HER decided to experiment with the locale of their games and be more (though not completely) conservative with their actual plots.

Nancy’s summoned to these cases for small, every day reasons — helping a neighbor, helping a friend, having fun with friends on a trip, an internship, etc. etc. — and a large part of the game is devoted towards the “oooh look we’re in this Weird Place!! This is so Weird and Cool! Look at this place!”. This isn’t a bad thing — two of my personal favorite games fall within this section — but it does represent a marked shift from the Classic (SCK—FIN) and Expanded (SSH—SHA) Games.

CUR as a game is perfectly emblematic of the Jetsetting Games; the setting (England and Blackmoor Manor) takes up most of the narrative room in the game, dictating what Nancy finds suspicious and what she ignores, and presents challenges that are simply due to the setting. Decoding cockney, the (horrific) old architecture and decorations, the “family legacy” spanning centuries — all of this relies on the setting rather than being justified within the mystery itself.

It continues with the full-screen approach that SHA presented, allowing for larger visual puzzles and more work being put into the actual setting, a quality that CUR largely benefits from, excepting the fact that it shows just how ugly some of the rooms really are.

CUR is also memorable for being the first absence of Bess and George, Nancy’s erstwhile phone compatriots, since their introduction, and the reoccurrence of Ned as a phone contact. I do find the absence of Bess and George a little odd in a game featuring one of Nancy’s (and thus one of Bess and George’s) neighbors, but Ned has been absent for the entire Expanded Games saga, so his presence is a fair trade-off.

I could go into the fact that I find it very curious and telling that the appearance of the Hardy Boys usually shunts Ned off to the side, if not out of the whole game, but that has nothing to do with CUR itself…so I shall forbear until a later date.

Though I don’t usually go into the actual book that the game is based on most of the time, it’s impossible to resist in this case.

CUR is actually based (loosely) on a book called “The Bluebeard Room”, notable for including the Cliché Trifecta — drugs, sex, and rock ‘n’ roll — not to mention giving Nancy multiple romantic entanglements and being the book where Ned and Nancy decide to date other people. The title of the book is a reference to a room in Penvellyn Castle that Linda (or, in the book, Lisa) is forbidden to go into by Hugh.

“The Bluebeard Room” has two main plots that actually converge into one about 2/3 of the way through the book: drugs and witchcraft. A Penvellyn ancestor (who, oddly enough, is also Linda’s ancestor) from the 1700s was burned at the stake on supposition of witchcraft, leading those who still practiced it to form a secret coven, sending Nancy “elf darts” (which apparently look like arrowheads) as warnings/threats. The coven turns to drug smuggling and selling, but keeps the room in Penvellyn Castle previously used for witchcraft for their drug trade, threatening Hugh in order to keep it secret.

Nancy comes in because Linda is still her old neighbor and her mother still asks Nancy to go investigate why her daughter looks so sickly after her marriage. Linda’s mother suspects Hugh of poisoning his new wife, which is a great dark turn that I wish the game had kept. Nancy, hearing about this in the first chapter, faffs around a bit with the lead singer of a British band and sleuths about drugs for half the book (9 out of 18 chapters) before going to investigate this majorly time-sensitive issue.

In the biggest change from the game, there’s something actually physically wrong with Linda — she’s being poisoned. She’s worried that the townspeople don’t like her, but other than that and Ethel (a local retired games mistress and drug dealer in this book) doing fake seances to scare her and Nancy, she’s totally fine, psychologically speaking.

Nancy figures out that Ethel���s the one poisoning her via an “herbal remedy” and takes it to a doctor, but the doctor says that it’s harmless — due to the fact that the doctor is part of the Witch/Drug Coven as well. This discovery doesn’t really impact the plot, and Linda’s only real symptom is repeated sleepwalking towards various cliff-like structures so that Nancy can save her at the last moment.

This poisoning subplot is instead changed to psychological manipulation and gaslighting in CUR, and the entirety of the drug/witchcraft coven is taken out, leaving just the inciting incident and the new “poisoning”. Without the coven, Her Interactive had to find a new plot and a new culprit, and instead decided to take the incredibly minor genealogical plot in the book and blow it up to be the main plotline of the game.

In CUR, the Penvellyns take main stage, and a few Holmesian twists (the move from Polpenny to Dartmoor, the mysterious “beast” of Blackmoor) are thrown in to round out the game. CUR also takes one look at witchcraft and shakes its head, instead relying on more realistic things like Bad Science, Bad History, and Werewolves to carry the “haunting” aspect instead. The “Bluebeard Room” changes from a locked room to a secret passage, and Linda is shoved behind a curtain, never to be animated seen. Hugh Penvellyn is a ghost, only able to be called a few times, and Ethel is remarkably innocent, considering she’s the main bad guy in the book.

In the end, CUR has very little resemblance to its source material, and while it’s certainly not the only game that does this, I feel like it’s a great shame. Just including the whole spousal poisoning angle and letting us see Linda (if only at the beginning) would vastly improve the game — and before you say that spousal poisoning is too dark for HER, this is the same game that includes witch-burning as an integral point of history and has an outwardly abusive villain, so I think it’s a fair shot to include it.

The Title:

The Curse of Blackmoor Manor at first glance looks like your typical ‘haunting’ title…until you realize that it has little to do with the game itself.

For starters, the manor that Nancy explores is rarely referred to as “Blackmoor Manor”, so it’s easy to forget that the manor itself, according to the title, is supposed to be at the center of the mystery, when it’s really just a location to bottle Nancy into so that they had an excuse for not sending her to a pub.

The curse is also then at the center of the mystery via the title, and while it’s a part of it, I wouldn’t say it was the focus either. Even worse that the title places the curse on the manor, rather than on the inhabitants — The Curse of the Penvellyns (a bad title in itself for multiple reasons) would have at least been a more on-the-nose title while still keeping itself vague.

The problem that the title exposes is that this game leans way too heavily on the “ooh isn’t this spooky look at it” side and not enough on actual plot. “The Curse of Blackmoor Manor” shows immediately that Linda’s not the focus of the mystery, that the villain’s got to be a Penvellyn — if the manor is cursed, then it’s got something do to with the family, after all — which before the game really begins in earnest, already boils us down to the two actual Penvellyns in the cast.

Nancy, Linda, and Nigel are outsiders, and neither Hugh nor Ethel appear enough to be the villain by HER’s preestablished conventions, so the title has already closed opportunities, rather than opened them up, which is what a good title should do.

What really gets me is that this title is a great title…but not a great title for this game. I feel like it’s a waste of a really good, provocative title on a game that doesn’t live up to it nor is defined by it, and I think that’s a real shame.

And speaking of living up to things and closed opportunities, let’s take a look at the mystery.

The Mystery:

Mrs. Petrov, Nancy’s neighbor, asks her help to go see what’s wrong with her recently-married daughter who now resides in her husband’s native England.

Because when you’re worried about your child, send the recent high school graduate in your neighborhood rather than going yourself. Alas, the Plot Must, so away Nancy goes on a jet plane to Merry Olde England.

Nancy discovers that it might not be so Merry after all when she arrives and immediately hears howling and snuffling, running into the Manor for safety from the possible werewolf outside. (Yes, this game drops the Werewolf Bomb that early.) Linda refuses to talk much to Nancy, claiming that the girl detective wouldn’t be able to help her, and Nancy finds that most of the rest of the inhabitants of the house aren’t too keen on her presence either.

With the help of Ned (in his first appearance since FIN!), a lycanthropy researcher (yes, I know) named Paliki Vadas, and a talking, possibly immortal parrot, Nancy must solve the case, figure out what’s going on with Linda, and along the way uncover a creepy family cult centuries in the making.

The bare bones of this mystery are quite similar to a lot of the Nancy Drew games, and are solid on their own. Besides the fact that we’re missing the usual suspect in cases like these — aka the spouse — it’s a fairly cut-and-dried plot, which is a plus to the game as it has to sell quite a few very odd things.

Even adding in the werewolf stuff (which, once again, occurs too early in the game), the mystery still isn’t too out there…until you remember that the werewolf stuff also includes ridiculously anachronistic technology, dubious history, an immortal parrot (parrots of Lulu’s size and coloring would live at most 50 years, not the 80+ she’s got under her wing), and a secret family society. While one or two of those can (and have) go together and still make for a solid, believable mystery, having all of them occur at once does stretch this mystery further than it should be.

The mystery as laid out in the beginning is a solid 7/10, but as it is added to over the course of the game degrades until you’re looking at something silly, unbelievable, and just plain odd, placing it at around a 3/10. The “twist” of who the culprit really is only works if you’re the type to pass over a child as a suspect, so if you’re not that type, it doesn’t add to the mystery at all.

What really hurts the mystery (and the game) the most is that CUR is, at best, plot-optional (if not plot-avoidant). While the puzzles are front-and-center (infuriatingly so in some portions, where Nancy can do five or six puzzles in a row without any real story push behind them), what little story there is often hides behind events that are hard (or sometimes impossible) to trigger and require a guide to achieve even most of them (like the guinea pig note, which requires Nancy to enter a room before doing the puzzle that guards the room).

Even then, there’s no guarantee that you’ll hear Brigitte’s ballad, that you’ll see Linda roaming, or anything else that gives you a better chance at unpacking the mystery. (In my latest playthrough with my friend, who played for the first time, we only got one “haunting” scene, despite setting alarms throughout the night to attempt to trigger them for at least a week in-game).

You need every haunting to actually make this a fair-play mystery, and the fact that you can miss all of them shows that they didn’t care about the plot/story.

All of the puzzles and garish rooms and promises of nightly hauntings can have the effect of duping the player into thinking more is going on plot-wise than it seems, but when you take it apart, all you have is some spooky music and flashes, and an endless stream of Halloween-at-the-school-gym puzzles without much of anything to tie them together.

The Suspects:

Linda Penvellyn is the person that Nancy’s hired to help, and is the source of one of the most far-fetched plots in any Nancy Drew game. Due to circumstances out of her control, Linda believes that she’s been cursed for exploring a secret passageway and is turning into a werewolf. Because of this, she’s taken to eating incredibly rare meat, shutting herself in her curtained bed, and only roaming around at night for fear of discovery. She refuses to talk to Nancy because she wants the girl detective to leave before she’s cursed too.

Had the game been done better, Linda would have been a heart-wrenching character — a young woman alone in a new house and new country where no one seems to like her and her spouse, who is the whole reason she’s in that situation, is rarely present, leaving her with unknown and unfriendly in-laws. On top of that, she’s being gaslit in order to think that she’s turning into a werewolf, her hands are growing terrifying amounts of hair, and her own brain is sabotaging her. Even when someone she knows turns up to help, she’s terrified that she’ll go through the same thing as well, and thus keeps to herself as much as possible.

However, because most of this is glossed over in the game, Linda gets little sympathy and is instead treated as strange and possibly dangerous, but ultimately as a character of little weight. She doesn’t speak much and she’s never animated, and the most humanity we get of her is her worry for Nancy and whatever her mother says about her.

Linda is thus a non-entity as a character and as a possible culprit, and is mainly just there to give Nancy a reason to be there so that she can unravel the actual “focus” (such as it is) of the game: The Penvellyn Secret. And speaking of…

Ethel Bossiny is Jane’s tutor and the most terrifying part of the game by a long shot, courtesy of her multiple jump scares. Though not a Penvellyn herself, Ethel is a keeper of their Secret, and is part of a long line of tutors to the Penvellyns, helping each “chosen” Penvellyn learn their history, navigate the ludicrous series of puzzle guards, and leave their own to protect the Sacred Penvellyn Rock.

Sarcasm aside, Ethel would be a good choice for the culprit — not the least of which because she’s one of the villains in the source material — except for the fact that she shows up too little to be the actual culprit. By this point in the series, HER has hammered out its formula pretty well, establishing the 4-suspects-to-a-plot standard and requiring that the baddie must be able to be interrogated. As Ethel only shows herself to Nancy twice, the game’s interface itself spoils the fact that she’s not the culprit.

Her section in this meta is short because, frankly, the game doesn’t care about her — not even enough to really give her any backstory at all besides her job — so why should I?

Her charge, on the other hand, has a little more to do.

Jane Penvellyn is Hugh’s bratty daughter and Linda’s abusive step-daughter. She enjoys being raised by her (from all appearances, highly irresponsible) mother and resents being taken back to England because her father remarried (though she Doesn’t Mind being the next Initiate). That alone would make for an understandable character (though at 12 [and as a character who is supposed to have at least reached puberty], Jane is just slightly too old to not have that feel a little childish), but Jane takes it to the next level.

Faced with the common feeling of kids whose parents are divorced, Jane is upset that her parents didn’t remarry, and decides to make it everyone else’s problem. She first experiments on her guinea pig, killing it, then (instead of stopping there like most people because hey something has died) turning her experiment onto her step-mother, gaslighting her (and putting hair growth serum in her lotion) into believing that she’s turning into a werewolf. Jane continues this after Linda becomes a recluse suffering from paranoia, depression, and a lack of nutrition, trying to get her to crack so completely that she leaves.

Jane is one of the most horrific Nancy Drew villains due to her sheer lack of remorse. The ending tries to play it down like “oh Jane stop pranking your stepmother, you silly thing, here’s a slap on the wrist” but like…her being a tween doesn’t make what she’s doing any less horrific.

She’s also not particularly clever, getting away with this simply because no one bothers to check on her or to be more than just slightly helpful to Linda in a hands-off sort of way.

The whole game hinges on the fact that HER thought that no one would consider the 12-year-old as a suspect…except, like in Ethel’s case, the mechanics of the game work against them, as Jane is firmly in the “suspect” territory due to her availability and the fact that Nancy can question her. Once again, if the concept of “a child can’t be a suspect” doesn’t work on you, then there’s no reason at all that the player won’t figure it out in the first 1/3 of the game.

Letitia Drake is Linda’s mother in law and the current matron of Blackmoor Manor while Hugh is out doing Diplomatic Things. The most British stereotype ever, Mrs. Drake is Posh and Tightly Laced while secretly a bit more human than she seems, attempting to care for Linda in the most hands-off ways she can think of.

She’s also the source of a dangling plot thread about the inheritance and ownership of Blackmoor Manor, making a fuss about it without it actually mattering.

The inheritance plotline isn’t enough to make Letitia a compelling culprit, however. She’s given book!Ethel’s role of giving Linda herbal remedies, but unlike book!Ethel, these are actually meant to help her, rather than introduce cocaine into the poor woman’s system. Her greenhouse is by far the most visually enjoyable part of the game, and a welcome change from the haphazardly-decorated rooms of the rest of the manor.

Finally, rounding out this estrogen-heavy cast is Nigel Mookerjee, a historian studying the Penvellyns and camping in their library to write the most boring memoirs of all time. He hangs out in the library doing research while the actual history of the library lurks in every corner outside of the library, so bad luck there, Nigel.

Nigel is…I hesitate to call him fully a non-entity, but he’s more of a comic relief character than anything else. He gives Nancy a few pieces of information, but is mainly there to round out the cast and to make the player laugh during what could be a tense game/moments for younger players (scaring him with the statue is probably one of the most overt, in-your-face laugh-out-loud moments in the series).

Nigel is never really in contention for “villain” status, as he has nothing to gain by hurting Linda, and thus pretty much disappears from the player’s (and Nancy’s) mind for the last third of the game — and not just because he runs out screaming. The thing that hurts him most as a character is the fact that either Paliki Vadas or Hugh Penvellyn (voiced by good ol’ Jonah Von Spreecken, in case you were worried that CUR wouldn’t give you your recommended dose of Vitamin J) would have been far more welcome as the fifth suspect (more on that in The Fix), making Nigel seem even more piddling and tiny than he was when he was born.

(Side note: after working as an admissions officer for a private university, I can say that I have had more than a few students begin an essay with some variant of “when I was born, I was very tiny”, so someone at HER either knew what they were doing or got lucky in making a joke.)

The Favorite:

Even though this review tends towards the negative, there are positives to be found.

My favorite moment in the game, sadly, would have to be when Nancy hits on that one statue during the first game in three full years where she can call her boyfriend. Either that or a few of the more subtle hauntings (like seeing Linda in the robe in the hallway — and yes, I do know that it’s slightly sad that that’s one of the more subtle ones).

The other moment that’s up for honors is where Nancy discovers Corbin’s crest (the crest that was lost due to the Penvellyns fleeing to France). Jane is dismissive of him, but Corbin is by far the most interesting Penvellyn — his crest even declares his loyalty to his bloodline, no matter where he was living — and designed the gargoyle puzzle (and ostensibly the curse beyond it).

Corbin is actually the Penvellyn with the most effect on the story (as the curse is what freaks Linda out in the first place) and I think it’s great that Jane doesn’t even realize that she’s a mirror image of him — displaced to Blackmoor, rather than away from it, having ties to a different country, etc. The big difference between the two is that, from what we know of him, Corbin is actually intelligent, subtle, and doesn’t spend his time abusing his relations.

My favorite puzzle in a game that’s pretty much nothing but puzzles is the Cockney Rhyming Slang. Sure, it’s not a traditional puzzle, but it’s super interesting, introduces the players to something they might never have heard of (especially at age 10, the lowest age HER recommends), and is a nice break from…well, all the other puzzles in the game.

I also don’t mind Lulu, as impossibly, ridiculously old as she is. HER does try to sprinkle Trustable Allies throughout the series — Miles the Magnificent Memory Machine being the standout — that Nancy can rely on for the cold, hard truth, and Lulu isn’t a bad attempt at the trope.

Lastly, I do really like that this is the first Nancy Drew game to take us out of the United States. Yes, the location is limited in scope and has nothing but accents to pin it down to anywhere specific, but it’s something new and different, and opened up the world of Nancy Drew to a considerable degree.

The Un-Favorite:

First off, this game does not do enough with Ned to justify his inclusion after so long an absence, and it doesn’t make sense that Bess and George wouldn’t be able to weigh in with Nancy about their neighbor. There should always be a rhyme or reason to why Nancy calls her specific contacts during a case, and this one is particularly egregious.

My least favorite moment in the game is definitely the beginning sequence (tied with the end sequence). The howling of the “beast”, the immediate slap in the face with the visual terror that is the great hall, the feeling of claustrophobia of being stuck in the Manor…none of these are things that excite me to play the game. Add in the last sequence, where past Penvellyns pretty much guaranteed that someone is going to die down there and Jane being a huge brat (and getting off way too easy), and it becomes quite easy to see why both the beginning and the end leave a bad taste in my mouth.

My least favorite puzzle is a little bit of a harder question. I don’t tend to list puzzles that can be solved easily with a walkthrough on here because, well, they can be easily solved by a walkthrough.

The whole maze and glowstick sleuthing, however…wow I hate it so much. It’s horrible that the glowsticks burn out so quickly, having to solve the maze over and over again (or use the shortcut, which the game doesn’t give you even after having completed it once like normal Nancy Drew puzzles)…it’s enough to make me close my computer and go take a nice relaxing bath before I overrun the Her Interactive office with mail-order rats.

If we’re going with puzzles that can’t be cheated with a walkthrough, then Betty takes the cake — for a few different reasons.

The automaton, commissioned in 1775, is based off The Turk, a master chess player automaton which debuted in 1770 — and which was a fraud, being operated in secret by a handful of chess masters to give the appearance of a working automaton. Betty is supposed to be a genuine automaton capable of playing a complex game (cards rather than chess, which would have fit better in 30 years during the Regency, when card parties were commonplace), built 5 years after The Turk made its debut.

I realize that what HER was attempting to do was to show how smart the Penvellyns were, and to scratch the Robot Itch that they seem to get every couple of games…but to put something so incorrect in a game is galling, especially as the Nancy Drew games are still in full-on edutainment mode. Part of learning the history of the Penvellyns is to allow the player to watch the advancements in technology and innovation throughout the 600+ years of Penvellyn lore, and to have Betty as the 1775 puzzle (and also used by the next initiate, Brigitte) is a slap in the face to the real inventors and geniuses of the time.

Betty is also as out-of-place as Alan’s puzzles are; CUR relies of the feeling of Ancient Magics and Rituals to keep Blackmoor Manor feeling appropriately spooky, and both Betty and the “ghosts” puzzle yank the player out of the world. Not only is it bad history and bad science, it’s bad aesthetic, and it cuts through any suspension of disbelief that CUR has managed so far with a knife.

Don’t even get me started on his crest having the GIGO principle bungled into quasi-Latin.

The Fix:

So how would I fix Curse of Blackmoor Manor?

The largest fix I would attempt (remembering that I’m trying to keep the fixes as small as possible) is to move the Werewolf Bomb from the first minute of the game to much later. In the Nancy Drew World, ghosts really and truly exist — even if they aren’t the culprit in any mystery — but it’s quite a jump from ghosts to werewolves, and an even bigger jump from werewolves to a character possibly being a werewolf.

I realize that the shift from witchcraft to werewolves was an attempt to jump on the small but growing bandwagon of paranormal fiction/romance (Twilight, for example, would come out the next year) and to disassociate the game from allegations of witchcraft in children’s/juvenile fiction (HER already received flack for it in MHM, and Harry Potter was receiving similar allegations). However, it does fit much less nicely than witchcraft would have (as you could have simply said that the “beast” of Blackmoor was the noises from the scientific experiments, a la HAU) and should definitely be moved.

A good point to move it to is the 1/3 mark in the game, after Nancy’s “nightmare” — placing it there would give Nancy a good reason to have the nightmare matter to her, and would make it seem like the Beast of Blackmoor is actually a Scary Thing that they don’t want to reveal to an outsider/foreigner/what have you, rather than feeling like the legend of a mischievous family pet.

Fixing the ending and having Jane actually punished for what she does (and having is acknowledged more than Nancy half-jokingly calling her a “beast) would go a long way towards improving the game. It’d also be good to mention Linda getting professional help and her and Hugh working out a compromise so that she’s not always at home while he’s always away.

In the other big change I’d make, throwing out Nigel (who is functionally useless) or relegating him to a small, Ethel-sized role (even better, a phone contact) and replacing the fifth “suspect” with either Paliki Vadas or Hugh Penvellyn himself would create more mystery, disguise the real culprit, and give some much needed plot into the game.

For Paliki, the werewolf researcher, including her as a physical suspect would entail something like her visiting Blackmoor to research the Beast (given permission by Hugh, who wants the family name cleared) and asking/telling Linda all about it to get an “outsider’s perspective”. Nancy would be drawn in by the possibility that Paliki was using her Psychologist Know-How and the power of suggestion (with a dash of poison/hair growth serum) to make Linda really think that she was becoming a werewolf in order to study her or catch a big break in the publishing community by “revealing” her.

Having Nancy get the system of poisoning figured out while attributing it to the wrong suspect would make Nancy look much smarter than she comes across in this game, and would give Nancy something concrete to investigate rather than bouncing from puzzle to puzzle.

Paliki could easily switch between the library during the day and that one chair in Linda’s room during the evening, giving you a chance to snoop through each area without her being there and giving another place to find clues (as well as making Linda’s bedroom an actually usable and useful location).

If HER instead went with making Hugh the fifth physical suspect, it would be a great reveal to have him be a phone contact in the first half of the game (certainly no later than the halfway point) and then revealing that he’s actually been hiding in the manor the whole time (some of the nighttime spooks that Nancy sees are revealed to be him), having come home early — or even never left — to try to catch who was hurting his wife right in the act of it.

Nancy suspects him because he lied about where he was and because she thinks that Hugh might want the notoriety of a crazy wife — especially if he’s thinking about leaving his job and doesn’t know how to quit. He could be discovered in the greenhouse room, sitting amongst the plants, or even occupying the Great Hall after he’s discovered. His inclusion would be particularly good if Nancy starts out the case with Mrs. Petrov priming her to think that Hugh is poisoning his wife (like in The Bluebeard Room).

Those are just two options, but I think they show how easy it would have been to interject more than just a shadow of a plot into this game, and how much HER missed out on by simply not putting any effort into the writing.

CUR isn’t the worst game that HER has ever made, but it does stick out as a game filled with bells and whistles and no actual substance, and I think it’s a shame that it gets praised for its flashiness and ridiculous plot when better games are overlooked because of it.