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Nancy Drew: Secrets Can Kill is surprisingly deep for a 4-hour long 90s point and click gameThis school needs to start doing background checks
This school needs to start doing background checks
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Her Interactive
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Her Interactive
The first is 1998’s Nancy Drew: Secrets Can Kill, in which Nancy solves the murder of a Floridian highschooler named Jake Roberts, and there’s a lot to love about it right away. There’s a restrained cast, three locations in total, and the school sports team is called the Fighting Manatees. Thus the icon for the game is a lil' cartoon manatee - and to be absolutely accurate, this is the remastered version of the game from 2010, not the original 90s version. I’m as disappointed as you.
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Before we go any further, let me introduce you to our very small cast.
There’s alsoMitch Dillon, who services the school boiler and basically doesn’t appear, andUncle Stevewho is actually your cop contact, and who e.g. refuses to give you the code to Jake’s locker. Oh what, suddenly that’s a step too far, Steve?
She has her own letterhead. Girlboss behaviour. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Her Interactive
One of the more obvious surprises to me was the voice acting! Secrets Can Kill’s haunted 3D puppets are fully voiced, with Nancy having a kind of husky depth to her voice, as if the stress of being a teen detective has driven her to a pack of fags a day. Connie in particular really sells her increasing suspicion of our Nance, who has just moved to the town but keeps rocking up with questions about the murder every five minutes. Some lines are delivered with a weird tone of surprise, but all the characters are pretty indifferent to the recent murder - one even says Jake was just unlucky - which is how you know Jake was massively unpopular. It doesn’t take long for you to intuit that Jake was blackmailing everyone, even without solving any puzzles.
The puzzles are pleasingly complex, too. The 90s were the halcyon days of not getting any help, and Nancy doesn’t narrate what she should do next out loud. It’s up to you to put together that if, for example, Hal mentions that Hulk had a recent sports injury, you should probably go and ask Hulk about it. The most in-depth puzzling is a load of secret messages that are hidden on the school notice boards, many written backwards or in code, which reveal hints about checking library books, things like that. It’s the sort of game that had me writing things down in a real life notebook, something that we praise Sam Barlow for today as a great innovation! How short memory is. Some puzzles make no sense (knowing to check an encyclopedia for the kanji for crane requires some intuitive leaps), but all in all the depth of the puzzles is what stretches the run time to four-ish hours. There’s even a bit where a boiler is about to explode, and it’s way easier to survive if you found some bolt cutters in the diner - but they’re also entirely optional! Nice!
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Her Interactive
Unfortunately, while I didn’t encounter any problems with the static pointing and clicking around the halls of the school aside from it being a bit clunky - even working on Steam Deck - I did have to resort to using a guide. It turned out that Secrets Can Kill bugged out on me, and didn’t trigger a dialogue option that in turn should have triggered a threatening note. Alas, I had to watch the end on a YouTube let’s play, and it was simplistic and obvious and didn’t make best use of the cast. A disappointment on two counts, there. Still, Secrets Can Kill has given us a solid starting point for the rest of this Case Rankings series. I’m interested to see how Nancy’s personality evolves as we go.
