The phone conversations Nancy has with them (and also Bess and George) are funny, sometimes touching but, most of all, realistic. There is one arc in the story where Nancy has to employ the help of a former ghost hunter, Savannah, and her assistant, Logan. However, the one redeeming element of the game in this regard is that the phone characters are fantastic. They are diverse and quite interesting but, like most of the games in the series, there’s simply just not enough opportunity to engage with them. In terms of the suspects, I wasn’t overly impressed with them. However, the phone contacts are fantastic. If you’re not into logic puzzles, they’re likely to be very challenging although, since most of the puzzles repeat themselves throughout the game, the game does at least give players some time to get accustomed to these types of puzzles before their difficulty escalates.Īs in other Nancy Drew games, there is simply not enough time spent interacting with the characters to make them feel developed or interesting. If you’re someone who enjoys logic-based puzzles like myself, the puzzles are likely to be entertaining, although a bit repetitive at times as many earlier puzzles return later in the game in either larger or more difficult form. For example, there are a lot of Sudoku and Anagram puzzles. Unlike other Nancy Drew games, these puzzles are almost entirely logic-based, mostly focusing on the player distinguishing patterns in number or picture sequences. This will probably be a similar case for the puzzles. However, this is a technique that Her Interactive employs a lot in their later games (most obviously in Ghost of Thorton Hall which deals with similar subject matter), so I suspect it’s one people will either like or dislike. I do acknowledge though that my dislike of the ending is principally down to personal taste: if so much time is invested in developing a story, I like it to have some kind of resolution. (I won’t spoil anything but there is an aspect of the ending which suggests Kasumi knew of her impending death). Most notably, while the cause of Kasumi’s death is revealed, it’s still not really explained how she died exactly and whether this death was deliberate or not. Since the game spends so much time establishing the plot and slowly revealing details about the inn’s and its family’s history, it was a shame that so many questions were left unanswered by the end of the game. (To describe it, I may be revealing some minor spoilers so beware!). The only fault I have in the plot is the ending. The game does give you some time though to adapt to them before escalating their difficulty. There are a lot of logic-based puzzles in this game. The slow unfolding of the mother’s tragic death definitely brings depth to what could have been a standard ‘ghost/other mythical beast haunting’ as in earlier Nancy Drew games.
Yet, as the game progresses, it becomes clear that the ghost is, firstly, (seemingly) real, and that the ghost has taken the form of Kasumi whose death – as Nancy learns – is both tragic and suspicious. When Nancy first arrives, most of the family is in denial about what’s going on and the ghost just seems to be a typical, abstract entity in the house. For one, the ghost – or what the ghost represents – develops over the course of the story.
Nevertheless, I do think it’s one of the more interesting and better developed ones. This is another one of the series’ ‘haunting’ games, where something supernatural is supposedly about. Nancy becomes determined to find out if the inn is really haunted, or if someone else is trying to scare away the guests. However, she soon discovers that the inn she’s staying out has a reputation for being haunted, supposedly by the recently deceased mother of the family, Kasumi, which has scared away all of the inn’s business. (A reward/vacation which still requires Nancy to spend all her days teaching English to Japanese students, go figures). In this mystery, Nancy travels to Japan with Bess and George as a reward for solving the mystery in Trail of the Twister. While it’s still not now one of my favourite Nancy Drew games, I have come to appreciate a lot of its merits which do largely outweigh its weaknesses. Like Curse of Blackmoor Manor, I didn’t initially warm to this game and considered it to be highly overrated.