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Nancy Drew: Message In A Haunted Mansion traps you in a ridiculous hotel with an alarm clock for a best mateThe third in the Nancy Drew series doesn’t deliver on the promised haunting and is my least favourite so far
The third in the Nancy Drew series doesn’t deliver on the promised haunting and is my least favourite so far
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Her Interactive
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Her Interactive
Nancy Drew: Message In A Haunted Mansionis the third game in the Nancy Drew mystery series ofpuzzle games, and boy does the weird first-person fixed camera work against you here. It’s also a more disappointing plot than the previous games, but it adds in a new time system that, much like Stay Tuned For Danger, is an ambitious move - and in this case I think it sort of works. It’s a mixed bag, is what I’m saying.
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You can also ring your friends Bess and George to get a hint on what to do next, or a local journalist you know who exposition dumps (and for some reason sends you a letter at one point), but they don’t really count as people. In terms of boots on the ground characters, this is a much more restrained list than Stay Tuned For Danger, and it’s all the better for it.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Her Interactive
You spend most of your time running between rooms to cross-reference how to play notes on a piano, or write down Chinese words, in service of puzzles that range between extremely finnicky jigsaws to intelligent exploration. I liked a bunch of them and hated a bunch of others, especially one involving a safe lock. That’s par for the course. I was shocked that, despite the size of the building being smaller than previous games, I got lost and accidentally spun in circles - because of the weird fixed camera angle thing - more often. It’s particularly disorientating in the hotel, because the aggressively neutral hallways of hotels are tough to navigate in actual real life, let alone a video game with click-to-reorient-camera controls.
Ah yes, everything is now clear from reading this very legible document |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Her Interactive
The B&B itself is also a hilarious collision of influences and decor styles, the likes of which you would probably only see on a 90s episode of Changing Rooms. People keep saying that it might have been a hotel at one point, but there aren’t any records of that time, despite the fact that during your investigation you find many records of that time mentioning that it used to be a hotel, one of them in a book in the selfsame building’s library. Also, there is a bar in the basement. Which doesn’t seem usual for a regular home that was not a hotel.
