every nancy drew game from best to fuckin bad

here it is, finally, my ranked list of nancy drew games. it’s fucking huge, so it has been placed under a cut. if you manage to read the whole thing, I applaud you. if you like LIE and manage to read past my scathing review of that, I REALLY applaud you.

my reviews of the games are subjective, which is to say only some of these games I find objectively bad (some really do have poor structure & handle themes badly), but then we all play nancy drew games for different reasons. what I want out of games is good mystery story with solid story structure, high verisimilitude (realism), and creepy shit. you might like them for a good emotional content, you might hate the scary games, etc etc. I bother saying this so that everyone will know I’m not trying to hurt anyone’s feelings with this; if we disagree on a game, we disagree because we have different needs/wants from these games. okay!

also, I missed a handful of games cause DAN was a mess and I abandoned them for a few years after that one. while I’ve seen walkthroughs of the games I’ve missed and am familiar w the stories & characters, I haven’t actually played them, so they’re missing from the review. those games would be: ICE, RAN, TRN, TOT, CRE, WAV. (maybe one or two more honestly idk rn)

with all that said, here’s a ranked review list of every nancy drew game I have ever played, starting with the worst:

#26 - Labyrinth of Lies



Ugh do I really want to go here? LIE, as we call it, is a complete sham of a game and a good time. A half-recycled plot of art heists in a museum with the most watered-down side serving of Greek culture is brought to life with one insufferable actor or artist type after another. It’s not a sin to be depressed, but it is a sin to write a character with depression as badly and annoyingly as Nik wrote Xenia. I can’t suffer it. Listening to how Xenia feels about her depression is worse than my own depression, which is really saying something. If she wasn’t bad enough, Niobe reminds me of the countless cis white feminists I have blocked on twitter for saying shit like you should water your houseplants with menstrual blood because of inherent womanly witch power or something. Of course, Niobe’s not white, but I can still see her logging on to Twitter and talking about #uteruspower or something equally enragingly gender essentialist in a way that’s just overly, cloyingly emotional and ~deep~. [Yes I have made bitter photoshops of her imaginary twitter account, but I don’t think anyone understood it was an angry joke; I think it helps to be trans and on twitter and besieged for years by overly sentimental, gender essentialist poetry twitter.] And if I’m dragging all the characters individually, Thanos does not have a personality, but not to the offensive point as to match Frank Hardy’s “I’m actually a piece of water-logged cardboard from a ditch and the hets love me and my soggy texture” level of personalitylessness. Grigor? Easily the most bearable because of his voice actor, but then equally infuriating as all the rest for the American accent and this half-assed “I don’t know what else to do with this character so I guess I’m going to do this” backstory. Eugh. I spit on this entire game. I do shits that are more interesting—and less annoying—than this game. Not to mention!! None of the game makes any damn sense. I can’t even squint my eyes and go… yeah… okay I can see how that works. You just don’t build theatre sets like that, nor would a government sanction the complete Fuck Uppery of a historical site in such a manner. At one point Niobe tries to convince me she was trying to trace a necklace in a glass case by putting paper on the glass and just drawing? Like???? How fucking stupid does she think I am? I fuckin KNOW u can’t do that. I put my foot down at a point with what Her Interactive will have me believe, and that point is LIE. It has the same feeling as that final season of Black Adder in which it clearly had became a parody of its own self, dragging its feet through to its own anticlimactic and overdue demise; I can almost hear it groaning as it pauses here and there to insert the necessary sort of puzzles and games because “This Is How Nancy Drew Games Work”, the reality of the game and what it needs be damned. All of it makes me want to throw my computer out the damn window. And I want my twenty bucks back.

#25 - The Silent Spy

Here we are in Scotland on preposterous grounds, being badgered by different flavours of annoying in both human and sentimental-flashback form. What else is there to say? It attempted to pull at my heartstrings, without knowing I have no heart and couldn’t care less about Nancy’s dead mother, apart from how it laughably spurs her to pester others about their deceased moms. I am not this game’s demographic, and for that I must suffer through endless adoration and chatter about Zoe goddamned Wolfe or whatever. My only enjoyment in this game was escaping the rest of the game to make cookies. I made so many cookies. I will never play this game ever again.

#24 - The Shattered Medallion

Spend all day playing different Nancy Drew games, clue-crew-blogging for the exposure to memes, and then eat a lot of cheese before you go to bed. Any Nancy Drew dreams you will have that night will make about as much sense as this actual Nancy Drew game. “It was Sonny Joon, but I don’t think it was really Sonny Joon,” you might say, trying to keep everyone’s interest, which is clearly already flagging. “And I was on some reality TV show with like… a puzzle… shack? That was just kinda.. in the middle of a place? And there was like an earthquake room and… at one point I was in a kayak… and there was like a bubble gum tortoise or something and someone fell of a bridge… and then this HUGE RUBIX CUBE FELL ON ME FROM THE SKY.” Nothing any of the characters say makes a lot of sense and it’s hard to tell them apart. I don’t recall enjoying a single puzzle. I don’t remember ever understanding what I was supposed to be doing next, or why. MED has a random, Myst-like feel to it, in that the directionless unreality of it all is slightly menacing. Where is it going? Who is taking us there? Is Sonny Joon dangerous? Perhaps for that it ranks higher than those below it. But not by much.

#23 - Danger by Design

What is this game actually about? It’s certainly not about the fashion world, as it portends to be. I gave up playing it when I got it in high school. It was this sin of a game that lead me to abandon all the Nancy Drew games coming out for a few years because they had just become… this. Whatever this game is. Buying junk in a park, doing underwater cave mazes, mixing tea blends for some sort of fucked up mime. Who the fuck knows.

#22 - Secret of the Old Clock

Here we jump back to 1930, an early point in the past of vampiric teen sleuth Nancy Drew, and we enter a world of pies and miniature golf with the horrible, single totem of the world’s ugliest cat lurking at our ankles. There are stolen jewels and a broken kitchen—as kitchens are wont to be around Nancy’s power. A hideously abrasive woman mans the foyer, a milk sop sits at a window seat above, and you fill your time running errands while avoiding pot holes, playing mini-golf and trying to prove your psychic prowess to the giant from Twin Peaks*. All of this, somehow, leads to a will from an old man who seemed borderline obsessed with the milk-sop’s mother, despite being obviously very very gay. The game is valuable only for the evidence it adds to the pool supporting Nancy’s canon immortality, and provides an important glimpse into her psyche: she has all the time in the world to waste on boring mysteries such as these. Death will never come for her.

*this likeness held up more before I played it again recently, which proves that playing this game is perhaps always a bad idea

#21 – Secrets Can Kill (Remastered)

Everyone’s said it and everyone’s right—it’s an afterschool special in mystery format. Wander about an empty high school littered with garbage and poorly hidden codes, get hit on relentlessly by a teenaged white walker single-handedly running a 50s style diner, enter the stuffy restraint of Aunt Eloise’s ugly living room with the guilty suspicion you’re not allowed to wear your shoes inside the house. And why? Because steroids, I think. A murder. Steroids? A large boy named the Hulk? I’m not really sure. A string of simple puzzles suddenly dead ends at some kind of nightmare massive puzzle at the end, as far as I can recall. A cage saves you from your creepy “Uncle Steve”, thank god. If the lesson of this game is do not take steroids or murder people, it didn’t stick with me. Get it???? Cause I’m trans. I – I inject testosterone into my body once a week. I’m on steroids. It’s funny. I also murder quite frequently.

#20 - The Haunted Carousel

Forgetful, frustrating, draining. While Nancy may be the respectable, normal sort of vampire, Joy Trent may be a psychic one, draining every ounce of energy I have just by talking and existing at me as though her title of World’s Wettest Blanket is in danger. A not so Magnificent Memory Machine whirrs and clicks behind her, cruelly set up by a now-deceased man to force someone in grief-stricken depression to complete complicated and yet completely inane puzzles, the prize of which is being reminded of a previous, and possibly worse, grief stricken period in her life. An ex-convict, an ass and a woman whose name might be Niacin orbit the perimeter. There is no haunting—there’s barely even a haunted atmosphere, as the garish park is only ever visited during daylight (a huge oversight in the conception of the game, since a theme park at night could’ve been truly frightening.) The park is visually cloyingly sick, like cough syrup. There are small joys, however, such as being able to burn down your hotel. Nancy laughably gets her ugly jeans caught in a rollercoaster track and almost dies. But Barnacle Blast is infuriatingly difficult. Ghosts never show up. And all of this we endure for a fake horse and a pocket full of chewed up pencils.

#19 - The Phantom of Venice

An incohesive, sun-drenched, cut-and-paste collage of preposterous Italian spying. The spirit of the game can be summed up in the infamous tesserae slideshow Colin urges you to view; in this, we are Nancy and Colin is Her Interactive. Just how much trivial, annoying little shit being thrown at you under the pretence of a good time can you handle? Alright, admittedly a bit harsh, but this game is nothing compared to its slick, classic counterparts. I feel the frustrating weight of its billion, random puzzles and errands on my shoulders just thinking about this game. Once everything is tallied up, it comes up to nil—dressing up Nancy poorly is oodles of fun, but Scopa is unquestionably rigged so that you must play it for two hours, listening to some masked jackass smugly tally up all of his points, before you finally win. The cat suit dancing is so absurd it’s hilarious, but as for the mystery, I can barely remember what it is, much less recall caring about it. It’s an outfit that’s all accessories, and if I recall correctly, the end climax of the game is just a lesson in Italian vocab.

#18 - Tomb of the Lost Queen

This game is a beautiful, sand-swept, utter mess. I love the atmosphere, the music, the evil sandstorm, the overall hopelessness of being stuck out here in the middle of nowhere with no water, a hot tour guide, and cobras appearing on your bed. I don’t love the actual plot or the inside-out gameplay that feels like a constant one step forward and five steps back. The tour guide, yes, is delicious, and Jamila is fabulous—not to mention (and I didn’t know this until very recently) the Annunaki are, like, The Watchers from the book of Enoch. This isn’t some spaceship green men alien shit—Sonny and co are into some deep shit. As in fucking apocryphal angels. Like, shit. Who knew? Nancy should’ve been able to scroll through the Books of Enoch via the web on her cell phone on her down time. But anyway. How about those puzzles? Being able to read hieroglyphs like that… it’s a crock of shit but I love word puzzles like that. And I love Professor Hotchkiss… but not in this game. Hit and a miss, but a miss in the way that, like, I’ll play half of it until I get too fed up and find something more productive to do.

#17 - The Captive Curse

When I think of The Captive Curse, I think of ennui. Castle Finster is easily one of the most brain-numbing places Nancy’s ever had the misfortune to be stuck in. Not even the misty forest paths or underground tunnels—both admittedly creepy, but then there are better versions of both in other games—are enough to make up for the rest of it. The conversation is endlessly dull and I think would put any sane person to drinking heavily just to endure it. Which makes it a shame that it’s not a dinner party with hard alcohol just a waiter’s harkening away. But ah, you can buy sausages and pretzels to keep yourself busy. You can scrounge around dirty couch cushions and infinite undusted corners for spare change, all while wearing some truly fateful fashion. There is a monster—somewhere, surely—but all there really seems to be is an endless tuba waltz playing from somewhere. The card game RAID never ends, and neither do the stultifying tales from this old bitch that sets all my emotional abuse triggers off. The mystery itself is scooped straight from the palm of Scooby Doo, fuelled entirely by a staggeringly infantile brand of revenge. It barely matters. The reward of this game is the single interesting lifeline to the outside world—Markus Boehm. I imagine him swooping in at the end and becoming Nancy’s irresistibly, filthy rich sugar daddy, road-raging his way across Europe. Nancy’s relationship with Ned crumbles with each deliciously staticy, angsty telephone call. For Markus, I endure these tubas, these infinite forest paths, this cartoon bat attempting to teach me German in a mysteriously all-English newspaper. But not too often, because there are better games to be played.

#16 – The Deadly Device

A cutting edge mystery with an wonderful cast of characters, some of the most satisfying and cool music out of all the Nancy Drew games, and yet… a lot of really hard, kind of boring puzzles. Writing this originally I was quite enthusiastic about it; the game’s got a real electricity to it, a sense of science as magic, but when it comes right down to it, I don’t actually enjoy playing this game as much as I like thinking about it. There’s a lot to love in hindsight, though: Mason and Ellie are the perfect pair of spiteful co-workers, Mason charmingly misanthropic, Ellie sweetly biting her tongue about all of it. And Ryan, tinkering away next to her motorcycle, manages to still be somewhat of a kid at heart, despite the knowledge that all her tinkering might not be put to the best ethical use by others. The ability to switch between night and day plays with my favourite cheery daytime / ominously creepy night-time dichotomy. And Deirdre is back to deliver Nancy some coy, frenemy-style investigation help. There’s a mechanical pigeon, a robotic cat. I always recommend this game highly whenever suggesting ND games for someone to start out with because objectively, it really is one of their finest. But in the end, it’s not really for me, as it fails to really keep my attention through the entire game. And I should also note, there’s a computer beeping sound effect near Mason and Ellie’s workstations that sounds like a frog to me, and it chips away at my sanity every time I hear it. Where is that goddamned frog?? And why.

#15 – Stay Tuned For Danger

An adorable toddler of a game, still somewhat bumbling around the world of Cyber Mysteries, but doing it with such enthusiasm, such care, such an attachment to the 1990s and the idea that Soap Stars are relevant. Mattie Jensen is a sort of bland, inoffensive actress type, but still has the guile to fuck with you by attempting to blame the disturbing stalking of a co-star on an imaginary man. NANCY, IT’S YURI!!! LMAO SRY YURI’S NOT A REAL PERSON, THAT WAS A JOKE. HAHA. ANYWAY BACK TO THESE DEATH THREATS. Rick Arlen loves himself and white t-necks with shoulder pads and hitting on 18 year olds, and I wish Nancy could refuse to call him Rick but go with Ricky instead cause I think it’d infuriate the shit out of him. The prop room is full of cool, weird shit and guarded by this wizened old bridge troll and I enjoy so much being able to just snoop around the prop room. The music changes room by room, we have our first incident of a stage light almost falling on someone, the first bad ass bitch in the form of Lillian Weiss, and then Pappas. Ah, Bill Pappas. What a performance. I’m blanking on the actual ending of the game, since it’s been over a decade since I played it, but that doesn’t really matter—it’s still a great game. An iconic game, for no other has the guts to present us with quite so many CGI heads photoshopped onto real bodies. For that, I will toast to its name forever.

#14 - The Haunting of Castle Malloy

There is something soothing about this game to me as a goth—the sort of person who is soothed by Ogham Runes, the sight of constellations through crumbling castle walls, by wandering around dark landscapes littered with Druid leftovers. Nancy’s vampiric prowess is at full force in this night game in Ireland, which manages to walk that fine line between creepy and beautiful for much of the duration with the help of nostalgic, wind-swept music, the small and strange haunted nursery, and that car wreck down by the gatehouse, headlights blinking endlessly. It strikes, not as well as some of the other games, a sense of the location as character. As a possibly sinister character. I believe the premise of the game fully, which is where it might suffer for some, as being too true to life can come off as boring, especially when you’re dealing with a cast of heterosexuals starring in Wedding Gone Awry. But this gives the characters realistic interpersonal tension with its inevitable love-triangle. Kit’s sinister real estate development plan is laughably boring, but then, realistic. Kyler, while almost unanimously hated by the fan base, is dull, but only in the way that shortbread is dull. Sometimes dull is what you want, especially when one of your co-stars is a feral woman on a jetpack. Visiting Kyler and her wholesome horse-face in that library with the crackling fire, her endlessly pouring over what looks like Marie Antoinette’s journal that we found in Wisconsin, no matter what she says it is, is soothing. She sends us out to collect flowers. The colour of her sweater is an enchanting green. I’d never be friends with her in real life, but damn if she isn’t a calming presence. What a great cookie. Meanwhile, Donal and his non-alcoholic pub is a good laugh—as good as Cat Suit Dancing in Venice—and really what is to be expected from a Nancy Drew game. Not to mention, I really enjoy making all those bevs with their squirty squishy sound effects and odd lumps of ice cream. There’s also a bog with its own bog hut, a creepy garden with an ominous line of garden gnomes, and yet another unexplained castle automaton. But most notably, this game does what horror (and arguably surrealism, to some degree) stories do, in that it presents the audience with a familiar, believable world that slowly slips away more and more until you end up with… yes. The jetpack. Which ultimately is delightful in its camp, and I love telling everyone about this game and how Her Interactive had the guts to actually write something so absurd. The end puzzle knocks this game down quite a bit in ranking for me, it being completely impossible without a walkthrough, and really not enjoyable even with the help. But the scenery, the music, the ability to wander at will and slurp delicious xXx_Straight_Edge_xXx bevs all while your boyfriend in the states is cowering in a closet at a pool party? Fabulous.

#13 - Alibi in Ashes

Alibi in Ashes feels to me like that first sunny spring day after a long winter of Seasonal Affect Disorder when you go outside and you can feel the sun on your skin actually raising your mood. Endless sun is unbearable, as is the heat, but I love the sun then, and I love this wholesome, Midwest, hometown vibe of Alibi in Ashes. The set up in a bit rushed, admittedly; you’re barely oriented into the game before Nancy gets framed for burning down Town Hall and is thrown in jail. (Honestly, I’m surprised Timmy never gets stuck down a well at some point.) The writing is quite good in this game—the mystery, the web of playable characters and the way they can all illicit different answers and asides from suspects. Not to mention the characters themselves, each one interesting, entertaining and believable as real people. This is a game that took how people interact with each other in reality well into consideration, and it doesn’t shine any brighter than when playing as Bess and hearing Toni get off topic, rambling about cute but stupid hunks. Delightful! Amazing! I wish every game had such a sense of character-to-character interaction. But alas, Nancy is professional and emotionally restrained as always, unless someone’s kidnapped Maya (but not Bess, from what I hear.) The puzzles are a good mix of actual forensic sleuthing, believable enough real-world puzzles and Nancy Drew Game style puzzles, which makes it exciting and at times quite easy to glide right through the gameplay. I never get confused or stuck or frustrated with what the game demands I do or somehow figure out on my own. And it’s filled with amusing bits like Nancy forcing Ned to flirt with Deirdre, only to later stand her up. And, if you’re me, forcing Ned to eat the entire menu of Scoop every time you visit (he never complains, whereas Bess will groan about all the ice cream she’s inhaling, and this makes me feel bad.) Not to mention, the music is perfect. The only weak spot in the game for me is the parallel between Nancy and Alexei, but then, it’s not out of line with the theme or style of the game. Other games have mysteries, themes and locations more tuned to what I like, or heaps of nostalgia to contend with, but this is a solid, beautiful game all the same.

#12 – Sea of Darkness

The animation is unparalleled, the locations and their atmospheres divine. Black Icelandic oceans, a lone lighthouse, the shimmering aurora borealis which you can clamber up to a crow’s nest in the ever-falling snow to gaze at unobscured, ice caves and tiny cabins, the requisite tourist centre/museum and the crackling glow of the Missti Skip’s fire. It all sings and soothes and bewitches. The cast of characters are (three for four, at least) interesting, well-rounded and completely enjoyable to continue pestering without tact; I love Gunnar and his lucky three fingers bellowing and spinning lengthy yarns about shark attacks, Soren enthusiastically gushing about a hundred kinds of ceremonial Viking daggers, and Dagny, of course, snarking and pissing about, being one of the greatest misanthropic women since Simone Mueller in FIN. (The less said about Elisabet and that accent of hers, the better.) And of course Ned, our dear sweet puppy of a boyfriend, continues to love us as he always has. Despite the beauty of the graphics and it being home to the first canon queer character, however, there’s nothing that feels really new in this mystery. Updated, perhaps—a quasi-Danger on Deception Island 2.0—but not something that stands entirely on its own two feet. A missing person leads us to hidden treasure, which we find through a string of endless, and I mean endless, puzzles. It has a sort of emptiness to it, this familiarity, which I can’t shake. Of course, many games recycle mystery themes (there are only so many suitable for an E for Everyone audience) but something about SEA frustrates me that it wasn’t just a bit more. It seems, at a point, to rely more on puzzle after puzzle to string us along. To be fair, there’s always a point in these games where Nancy is left to her own devices, characters silent and hints from friends all dried up, where she busies herself with the mystery at hand, but in SEA it seems to turn into Puzzle Hour. There aren’t chores per se, which I think are often necessary for a backbone of verisimilitude, and there are no collecting tasks either—only puzzles. Ship puzzles and matching puzzles and even a 2048 hidden in there. And puzzles aren’t quite a story, not quite mystery relevant enough for me. So SEA rests here, outside the top ten, despite my love of Iceland, Icelandic vocab games, and fellow gays named Soren who are, like, really into knives.

#11 – Legend of the Crystal Skull

A simple, satisfying game about goths and eyeballs. One of the least demanding Nancy Drew games (apart from the first handful I played and thusly could solve in my sleep), we get to inhabit sleepy, creepy New Orleans on a budget and collect things. And I love collecting things. It’s a little kooky, which I think fits the treasure we end up seeking—a crystal skull that grants the owner immortality. Henry Bolet never has much to say to us, but he is wearing eyeliner, and the fact that Ned himself begged us to come visit him, well, it’s all very endearing. (Not to mention his impersonation of Concerned Ned is priceless.) Meanwhile, Renée out back is connected to the powers of the universe, and her room is fucking terrifying and deserves a huge round of applause. It alone makes up for how half of the mansion seems to be missing. The candle-lit mood is so cozy and so are the recycled elements—that Big Drink Of Water from CUR appearing at Zeke’s, a sawed-off Shorty re-used as the gumbo cook, and FIN’s Manny the Magician masquerading now as a pirate. The crypts we hunt down pun names in behind the mansion are labyrinthine and drizzly in the rain, and while Nancy’s clacking footsteps echo over the cobblestones, lazy fireflies stir in the garden. We pluck harmonic strings to fuck with a spider. An enchanted skeleton shovel helps us dig around in a graveyard. You get to play as Bess and give a poor man a sneezing attack and, as an apology for the sneezing attack, horrible indigestion. Or is it diarrhoea? There’s no telling. CRY has the taste of a Halloween party decorated equally with the classiest of Martha Stewart Halloween decorations and the faded, drug store Halloween kitsch from last year’s bash. And every corner of the game it sticks to this theme, without fail. The climax is as in-tune with anything else in the game, the end puzzle cleverly using the thunderstorm to give an interesting twist to what would’ve been a fairly simple match up puzzle under other circumstances. And the ending is just as kooky as the rest of it. I love it. I love all of it. Hopefully the next time Ned has us check up on one of his sad boyfriends, it’s as enjoyable as CRY.

#10 – Ghost Dogs of Moon Lake

Canine terrors at night melt away into shafts of sunshine through forest leaves, a melodic cast of birds on the wind. What in this place is there to fear? The moon hangs heavy over the lake, the forest is grey meandering during the day, leading to the cold isolation of a cemetery—half a farce. “Marbles” it says “we’re so sad to have lost you.” But there is a sense of fear, a sense of being circled as dogs howl in the night. Ghost dogs? You bet. The quaint cabin with its creaky floors is being threatened by the apparitions of dogs and you, as Nancy Drew, are stuck there. It’s a fabulous game. It presents us with the terrors of ghost dogs, of unlit, subterranean cemetery tunnels, of middle aged men prowling around on your property and asking you to take some pictures for him. He laughs in a way that squiggs me out and makes me want to leave very quickly. But Red Knott’s passion is for birds, thankfully, as Emily’s is for old bottles and Jeff’s is for being as bland as humanly possible. Emily will yodel at you between trading you for sandpaper, batteries. She demands you catch critters for her, critters that usually don’t chirp in the real world, but do when you’re Nancy Drew. The task forces you learn for the forest at night, though you really don’t want to. Owls hoot and dogs howl. It’s such an experience, every inch of it. And slowly you untangle a tale about hidden gold and speakeasies, each layer of the game being more beautiful, more intriguing than the last. The writing sings, so deft its existence seems effortless. Nancy gets in real trouble at Moon Lake, falling through floorboards if you’re not careful and always, without fail, getting tied up in a burning shed and left for dead because she saw a bird land somewhere she shouldn’t have. And, of course, the culprit comes by later to give you tea and comfort. It’s all so beautifully malicious. And all for gold. Gold you find by paying close attention to dog-themed décor. A total masterpiece

#9 – Message in a Haunted Mansion

This accident-prone Victorian mansion is a virtual fear cage. It sweats out and steeps you in fear, anxiety, a constant mounting tension that is never released. You see things, hear things, feel things that are never really fully explained away. Still awkward around the edges—or around the entire face region, if we’re looking at Louis—it has the initial marks of what makes Nancy Drew games truly great. It’s all here in infant form. Peepholes through paintings, creepy attics, tragic romantic backstories and hidden treasure all cradled in layers of local culture and lore. Rose and Abby are perhaps their own mystery (how are they a couple, exactly?) and ol Basement Dwelling Charlie With Ned’s voice is always good for a laugh, as is Louis’ entire face and shirt and voice and embarrassingly easy choices in laptop passwords. The gameplay as I remember it from years and years ago glides smoothly enough from one task to another, never leaving you too lost all by yourself in such an utterly haunted place. There’s great success in letting us figure out the hauntings early—of halfway—on, but still—still—all the music, all the shadows moving across windows, all that unbearable tension never lets up. The place is haunted. It feels like the Golden Gardenia always will be haunted, no matter what is solved within its walls.

#8 – Danger on Deception Island

The crisp wind of the coast with the riff of a jig on its back, crabs and clams and semaphore, café babble, right as rain, and a crumbling lighthouse. Each note of this game is so pleasant, so perfect. Well, as long as we ignore Andy Jason and his sin of a Whale World. Deception Island is a fabulous place to connect the dots between a ransacked boat, an orphaned orca and a handful of robberies, all with the full ability to give yourself food poisoning whenever you damn well please. But then there’s a cozy bowl of clam chowder for free, whenever you want, over at the Hot Kettle, or a muffin if you play on your feet and demand that first. Small town tension plays the characters off of each other beautifully, politically dividing them into groups of people who loves whales too much and people who don’t. And Nancy has the luck of staying with the one woman pissing everyone in Snake Horse Harbour off with her Fancy Shmancy Science Degree. Ah, such quaint troubles. Holt Scotto is running for mayor while prompting young women to guess what else he’s got in his duffel, Jenna Deblin is eavesdropping and buying everything at Save King, no one cares about Andy Jason because he’s horrid, and Hilda Swenson—oh what a gem she is. Doing lunch or not doing lunch, luring Nancy to anvil shaped rocks and the tops of lighthouses. The puzzles are all perfect in my opinion and not a single one feels arduous or out of place. It sings, swims, glides, does other nice things like that. There are cairns and over-the-phone driftwood diagnoses and… it’s all perfect. And amidst all the Shanghai-ing tunnel and Snake Horse gossip, ransacking and almost getting killed by a piece of lighthouse, you never do think to yourself, hey, what if that orca out there is an ex-Russian spy? No one could’ve seen that shit coming.

#7 – The Secret of Shadow Ranch

The Secret of Shadow Ranch romances you like no other game does. It’s hardly love at first sight, I’ll admit; Nancy arrives at a cattle ranch in the sprawling deserts of the American Southwest and is instantly given chores and tests and a bad attitude. Impossible vegetable picking, broken baskets resulting in broken eggs, and having to earn the respect of a steely (and frankly, quite sexist) old cowboy. But once chores are done and old men put in check, the ranch begins to charm you and the mystery of a phantom horse, and what it might have to do with rumours of hidden treasure, drops neatly in your lap. The backstory of Frances Humber, the sheriff’s daughter, falling in love with the outlaw Dirk Valentine is heart breaking and brought beautifully to life by each hidden letter and diary you find being read out loud by their original authors, a feature that only appears in this game. Perhaps you fall a little bit in love with Frances and her wit, or Dirk and his devotion—or both of them, I wouldn’t blame you—and the quest to find the treasure Dirk hid for Frances over a hundred years ago takes on a bit more of a noble feeling. Their love might, after all, remind you of Nancy and Ned; the adoration one man can have for a brilliant young woman who loves puzzles, who loves using that brilliance. The puzzles Dirk came up with for Frances take Nancy through the surrounding areas gathering petroglyphs, lassoing her way up steep, rocky inclines, and even lets us visit the beautifully eerie ghost town of Dry Creek where there there are looming shadows out of the corner of your eye—just enough creepiness to keep you on edge while you get threatened by a scorpion, look for the brand of the BD eyes ranch, and, of course, get knocked out and locked inside the jail. The beauty of this game is its humbleness, how deceptively simple it seems, how neatly written and tied together. The gameplay is never too stalled, the puzzles never too illogical or absurd, but they follow neatly from one to another (not to mention, the chores give this game a palpable dose of realism that helps cement the story in reality.) It is hardly grandiose, hardly flashy. The characters are not quite the strongest part of this game, though none of them are particularly bad—Shorty is an enjoyably gossipy cook, Tex is honestly quite rude at first but then kind of lovably gruff, and while Mary may well be a robot, she’s at an artisan and store owner, and has the ability to fall in love (which she does.) And getting to tell that sad, sorry cowboy Dave, with a tone of absolute condensation, that you’ll let him get back to work when you damn well know all he does all day is stare at the chicken coop, is one of the heights of interacting with him for me. That’s right, Dave. You stare at those chickens and remember that Nancy has a steady back home, and while I maintain it is an open relationship, there is no fuckin room for you in here. I wipe my hands of any of Dave’s hurt feelings; there’s a mystery to solve, after all. Which comes to a head beautifully, in an immense maze that treads the line of Nancy Drew Trope and Realistic Enough to be really quite enjoyable. Not to mention creepy, and then really honestly scary once the Who Dunnit shows up and starts coming after you. Dropping someone through a false floor may never be so satisfying. And finding heaps of gold in the desert could never be as romantic as it is in The Secret of Shadow Ranch.

#6 – Curse of Blackmoor Manor

The Curse of Blackmoor Manor is a dream. Nancy gets to go to ‘jolly old England’ to investigate why the daughter of one of her neighbours hasn’t been feeling well, and it turns out that it’s because she thinks she’s turning into a fucking werewolf. Now this is a mystery game. Nightmares crowd in at night, there are things travelling down the hall, peering at you through the windows, and beasts growl your name forebodingly outside. Blackmoor Manor is practically abandoned (completely dashing all verisimilitude with the notion that there are no servants and never have been), the only other souls being an alienesque Wednesday Addams obsessed with board games, Leticia Drake, old school goth high on allergy meds, the ghostly Linda Penvellyn hidden always behind bed curtains, torpedo-boob Ethel, scaring the living daylights out of everyone faithfully for 12+ years, and Nigel Mookerjie, whose most compelling personality point is that he was “very very tiny” when he was born. It’s a real beast of a game, managing to be both enthusiastic and completely irreverent with the histories it presents to us. The portraits of Penvellyns past are a mish-mash of wrong eras, the manor’s requisite automaton, Betty, is sporting a cameo on a button-up shirt and a soccer mom bob despite supposing to have been created in the 18th century. (Did they, I wonder, even google these things before whipping this up?) But all its faults are made up for—are surpassed—with the smattering of occultism, the myriad secret tunnels, that Glow in the Dark Eyeball Curse, and one steak served as bloody as can be. Not to mention the late night rituals with Byzantine-esque headwear, picking up the Elder Futhark of Norse Runes (which are slightly fucked up, I should note—Othala and Dagaz being swapped), messing around with alchemical symbols, a mutus liber, a hidden forge, and a parrot that knows Latin. I ought to be annoyed beyond words by Loulou, as she seems like the sort of character that would annoy me, but somehow I’m not. I don’t mind making her cakes out of meal worms and listening to her tell me I’m going to need a bigger boat. At fifteen years old, this game put me steadily on the path towards so much of what I’ve got my fingers in these days—occultism, hermetic symbolism, the paranormal, and these weirder, darker sides of history. It’s the scholastic Goth game, the heart of Illuminancy, and I adore every second of it. Not to mention, Nancy crams a pad of butter into an antique lock at one point because, well, why the fuck not? The ending is somewhat anticlimactic, and I really would’ve picked a different culprit, but even this I can overlook, since every corner of Blackmoor Manor and its mystery delights my weird occult heart.

#5 – The Final Scene

Every note FIN aims for it hits with complete perfection. The crumbling, soon to be demolished theatre is lustrously forgotten, its old glory smeared with a patina of grime. It aches with the legacy of cracked moulding, a plugged dressing room sink, hot pink bubble gum stuck to red velvet. Once a stop for the most famous magicians of its era, the shadow of this show magic that haunts the Royal Palladium is subtly eerie around the edges—down in the basement, Manny the Magician delightfully deceives you time and time again in a card game before breaking down, collapsing and contorting in an Exorcist-like fashion before your eyes. And yet, perhaps even more frightening, more menacing, is the reality of the mystery itself; Nancy’s girlfriend Maya gets kidnapped and held as hostage in an attempt to stall the theatre’s demolition. What started out as tagging along on a journalist’s assignment and snagging a free viewing of what I can only assume is a historical romcom ends with Nancy tied to the theatre for three days, sassing her way through the secrets of Royal Palladium and all its inhabitants in order to find Maya. Each character she meets is a perfect match for her sassiness, her desperation, her totally done with all of it. Brady, while basically well-meaning, is a spineless Gemini who just wants his ponytail and his freedom back, while Simone, CEO of Brady’s life—err, his agent—spends all her time snarling at people on the phone and trying to get her hooks into kickstarting Nancy’s film career as Samantha Quick, as Fancy Jackson, as anyone at all, so long as she doesn’t have the utterly forgettable name of Nancy Drew. Meanwhile, Joseph lurks in the projector room like an ashen vulture, sad and rural and overly helpful, and Nicholas Fight The Power Falcone mans the foyer with his laughable HAD-IT brochures and cargo pants, frustrating Nancy with his desire to be groovy overriding his observance of grammar, and mystifying her with simple slang. Suitably, she doesn’t seem to like any of them, since any one could be Maya’s kidnapper, and it comes out time and time again in the dialogue. Not many games have this dynamic in them; Nancy falls quickly and easily into being a not-so-personally invested detective soon after this. But it shines strongly here, adding to the sense of urgency as time slips away, making it a race to snoop, to fuck around with old magic trick props, learn that rubber is shock-proof and the police are a bunch of fools. Which is perhaps one of the strongest morals of this mystery, amongst Not Letting The Turkeys Get You Down and Fighting The Power. Girl detectives > the fuckin police. Every time. Maya would be dead if it weren’t for Nancy. The Final Scene is fucking perfect.

#4 – Shadow at the Water’s Edge

The only thing more fucked up than this poor ryokan is Nancy’s pronunciation of Japanese. They exist side by side as two beautiful things marred by their own sadnesses—gorgeous, grief-stricken J-horror for one and the unfortunate decision that Japanese is just “too hard to pronounce” for a girl from River Heights. (Lani, honey, I know it’s not your fault.) But really, few places in Nancy Drew games are as perfect as the haunted Ryokan Hiei; the music, the sounds of the garden at night spilling in through the open doors, the fire crackling in the corner, the residual energy of what happened in the baths following each move you make. For all of this, it ranks incredibly high for me, despite the fact that I’ve only managed to finish the game twice. I love being in this game. I love soaking it all in. I have dyscalculia, a numbers-related learning disability, which makes many of the puzzles actually impossible for me to complete on my own. And I’m always offended that Rentaro tells me that numbers are better than letters. But I love this game all the same and Rentaro has actually grown on me quite a bit. Yumi is just so kawaii and sends you a photograph where she has bananas for eyebrows. I’d never be friends with her in real life, but her presence in the game is fabulous. Miwako is too sad, too pained by the whole thing and I only wish the best for her in her future. She does, at least for the time being, have a robotic cat to keep her spirits up. There’s a lot of heart—a lot of quietly broken heart—in this game. But there’s a bento stand and pachinko parlour to visit for a breather. The game play is a bit puzzle and calling-everyone-100-times-to-move-ahead heavy, but it’s also deliciously haunting-heavy, and gives us Savannah Woodham, after all. Its sins are quickly buried. It’s both one of the most terrifying and most beautiful Nancy Drew games, and if I never actually finish it ever again, I wouldn’t care. I just like being there.

#3 – Ghost of Thornton Hall

Crumbling, dark, spooky and an intensely gothic triumph of a mystery game. GTH feels like a throwback in a lot of ways—in the best of ways—avoiding Zap Ups entirely and scattering a handful of classic Nancy Drew style puzzles our way, all wrapped in the most mature and fucked up Missing Person + Haunting storyline yet. The entire game is met in eternal night, the baseline of the game subterranean, rarely peaking its head above ground for air. Nancy gets called by Savannah Woodham from SAW to investigate the disappearance of Jessalyn Thornton, who went missing on the night of her bachelorette party, which took the form of a ghost hunt at the abandoned Thornton Hall, purported to be haunted by the ghost of Charlotte Thornton, dead these past twenty something years. There are issues, here and there, with the verisimilitude of the abandoned mansion aspect, but it manages to satisfy and tick off a huge list of gothic tropes to make up for it—there are maidens, ghosts, family dynasties, weddings, crypts, graveyards, spooky notes, family “monsters”, the-setting-as-a-character, and if we give a nod, which it deserves, to the fan incest theory, the ultimate horror of subversive sexuality, or sexual taboos. It’s a writhing tangle of a fucked up wealthy southern family who all low key hate each other stuck on the same property, scared shitless of a ghost from when the previous generation fucked up. And amidst this, Nancy gets to solve tangrams to break into coffins, putter about with an EMF detector (a somewhat anticlimactic non-start to what I thought was going to be a dose of real-life ghost hunting in the game), drink tea with no more than 10 sugars allowed, and deface generations worth of family portraits. Clara is beautifully cold and perfectly voice acted, Colton spends all his time on the porch poorly hiding his homosexuality, Wade is a perfect version of those weird relatives you never really can put your finger on exactly, and Harper ah, Harper is quite entertainingly written, though completely not a sociopath*–what exactly her mental illness issues are, I couldn’t say. But there’s a good amount of wrath there, which is understandable given she was locked up for not being “normal” enough for her family. And the game is full of uncovered mysteries still, as we know from correspondence with Her Interactive. It doesn’t give up all its secrets, and the thing it does explain, the reasoning for the ghost, like MHM, doesn’t quite cover all of it. Not to mention, there’s more of the incomparable Savannah Woodham and Bonus Ned (one of my favourite kinds of Neds). It’s a perfect game. Carbon monoxide poisoning has never been quite so goth.

*sociopaths never, ever, advertise to anyone that they are a sociopath; their entire “thing” is being charming and “normal” to cover this up & get people to trust them so they can manipulate them—trust me, I grew up with one

#2 - Treasure in the Royal Tower

This is the game that I love. My first game, a game that took me months to solve with a friend, a game that is so snowed-in beautiful, so wistful, regretful, gently creepy and home to one of my childhood idols: Professor Hotchkiss. It’s honestly hard to write about, which is why this ranked listing has taken so long to get around to finishing. I love every corner of this absurd dead ended castle with an imported library and whole fuck damn tower from FRANCE. I love Jacques Brunais’ mediocrity and his weird biceps, his Hope Boxes ~for keeping secrets safe~, his rage at having to take out a big bag of chicken legs from the freezer, forcing him to become Dexter’s sous-chef when all he wants to be is an Olympic failure turned ski instructor. I love Dexter’s gruff edges, the way he dead end refuses to answer any of Nancy’s prying questions about his childhood, the way he thinks it’s perfectly fit to turn Nancy into a staff member since she can’t fucking ski anyway. I do not love Lisa, who is lonely in that really annoying way where everything she says feels like grabby-hands and PLEASE LET’S BE FRIENDS. I do love all her awful passport disguises and how she had the balls to give one of them a Halloween birthdate, however. And I love Professor Hotchkiss. Batty, enthusiastic, possibly making soufflés in her room (Nancy is not really good with metaphors), she exchanges an order for couscous for the endless drumsticks—chicken, that is. Cluck cluck. She’s a historian, she’s a night owl, she’s working to defend Marie Antoinette and undo the damage of the smear campaigns against her name hundreds of years ago. She’s a perfect woman who appreciates everything good in life, and she makes no excuses for herself. I genuinely think she taught ten year old me that it really was okay to delve into as many weird topics of interest as I wanted, that my passion for history was totally cool and I could indulge it as much as I wanted. And then there’s the mystery of the game, strung together with realistic as fuck chores and tasks and puzzles. It’s genius—I still think it’s genius—that Nancy opens Lisa’s locker on accident, because this was just a vacation, and it wasn’t a mystery yet, and she wasn’t in Nancy Drew Breaks Into Everything mode. She just fell on a bit of a mystery, and the mystery bits keep on piling up until she just has to break into a tower without falling down an elevator shaft or getting crushed to death. This game deserves many kudos for the deaths that really realise the full horror of elevators. They’re not paltry “second chances”; they’re Nancy becoming human pâté for Dexter to find… eventually. It’s hardcore, it’s realistic ,it’s even spooky in places—there’s a blizzard whirling around outside, giving the castle an odd drone, there are tons of dead ends which low-key fuck with reality as we know it, and there are creepy banging noises in the night. You get to crawl around a ventilation shaft for the first time and get dumped into a ransacked library which is creepy and weird and has that ominous “three openings” phrase above the fireplace. It’s magical. Not to mention that fuckin sad as hell garden. All of it is just perfect. There are no flaws. And the game gives us something I so so sorely wish existed in real life—Marie Antoinette’s actual personal diary. Fuck that would be good to read. I adore this game really beyond words and suspect I would be a slightly different person today if it didn’t exist.

#1 - Secret of the Scarlet Hand

My favourite ND game sounds boring as fuck on the surface–really, a museum internship in DC gone wrong—but it unfolds slowly and beautifully, so effortlessly and elegantly, becoming as intricate and full of depth as the museum’s own replica temple. The setting, the theme and the atmosphere in this game are unlike any other. The game is its own labyrinth of facts and factoids and weird little backstory things squirrelled away that you get to discover and rediscover as you play and replay it. The museum is so thoroughly filled and feels like an actual museum; there may be more displays that aren’t involved in some kind of puzzle than there are displays that are. THIS is how you do museums, this is how you make a realistic damn environment!! IM SO JAZZED ABT IT. The amount of research that must’ve gone into this game is staggering to me, and it all pays off. Nothing really seems too out of place or absurd or like too much for me to swallow. Henrik’s amnesia is a bit much for the real real world, but for Nancy Drew, for a mystery game, it fits in perfectly and gives the game a beautiful second act. The game uses the initial tasks/chores to beautifully integrate you into the game and get you to learn about the ancient Maya. It all slowly lures you into this kind of weird and enchanting culture that’s so different than the usual history you—or at least I—learned at school. There’s something magic about it. And something ominous as you progress down the levels of the temple, as you end up dealing with the black fucking market. The characters are amazing, Johanna is dry and stressed out and snappy and feels as real as anybody; I’ve had a crush on Henrik, the 61 and a half year old epigrapher with a voice of velvet and possibly no shirt, since I was 12; Alejandro is beautiful and so passionate about lecturing Nancy and he and Henrik go see baseball games together I guess (so adorable??) and SINCLAIR is too much. The tie, the John Waters moustache, his excessive descriptions of his fears, his Oaxacan cookies, his fucking abysmal taste in modern art (seriously that Poppy Dada painting looks like something you’d find the trash of a high school art class.) There’s so much character in this game from everybody, from Silvio Jr. who denies you bubble wrap to the lesbian Sheila Shultz over at the Chaco Canyon Cultural Center. Plus, there’s Sonny Joon’s first appearance and our indoctrination into the Koko Kringle cult, which grows and grows with each subsequent game. The structure and the flow of this game is amazing, the amount of locations are just right, the music is excellent, the puzzles are such a broad range of Interactive Museum Puzzles and realistic enough locks and codes and such interfaces. It does everything a Nancy Drew game should and it does it all without a Flashy Location or abysmal accents. It’s just purely perfect.