Review of Nancy Drew: Midnight in Salem

Your attention is presented a detailed text review of the game "Nancy Drew: Midnight in Salem".

The detective series about the young detective Nancy Drew can be attributed to the most successful franchises of the quest genre. The first game, Nancy Drew: Secrets Can Kill, appeared back in 1998. During this time, we managed to see its re-release, as well as 31 more titles. Each with their own unique puzzles, exciting storyline and features. Prior to the release of Midnight in Salem, the Nancy Drew series was almost an annual series, but the appearance of Midnight in Salem had to wait almost four years. As the developers assured, they need this time to switch to a new engine and improve the graphic component as a whole. Let's figure out what they did, and what, against the backdrop of such a significant delay, managed to disappoint us.

Gameplay

As usual, most of the time we will be doing the usual things:

1. Chat with characters.
2. Gather clues and evidence.
3. Solve puzzles.
4. Search for items to advance in investigations.

All this with a first-person view, old and new mechanics. The innovations in Nancy Drew: Midnight in Salem don't look so smooth, but they're the foundation that Her Interactive has laid for future, hopefully more complex games in the series. Unfortunately, against the backdrop of a variety of game mechanics that have appeared, on the level of "Junior Detective" on the first playthrough, you will need about 6-7 hours of playing time. And if you repeat it, you can master it in 1.5-2 hours (with skipping dialogues).

One of the innovations is perspective. Instead of the old navigation system, where you could turn in a certain direction and look at a static screen, you can now rotate the camera by holding the RMB. And this is a definite plus for the series, since the previously used navigation was very fettering and did not provide, at times, the desired freedom of action. However, the developers failed to fully polish the new system, so it turned out to be too far from ideal.

At the bottom of the screen, the inventory we are used to is shown. It cannot be hidden, which does not contribute to immersion, howeverit's such a familiar element that removing it could hurt the bottom line. The used item instantly disappears from the inventory, so you do not have to try to use the same thing over and over again.

As before, you can use the phone of Nancy, who likes to play up all her acquaintances and chat on arbitrary topics. In it, if the game is played on the difficulty of "Junior Detective", the current goals of the investigation will be recorded.

In any investigation, Nancy Drew has multiple suspects. And the current game is no exception. But if in the previous parts the developers managed to find a middle ground between the number of dialogues and the number / complexity of puzzles, then Midnight in Salem is more focused on communication in this regard. And there will be a lot to talk about! You have 7 suspects at once. And that's not counting Deirdre and the Hardy brothers, as well as a few contacts from the phone book.

Graphics also can not be called a strong point of the game. It can hardly be called a smooth transition to a new engine. We may reap the benefits in the future, but Midnight in Salem is graphically even worse than the previous game, Sea of Darkness.

For four years, the developers, apparently, have managed to rewrite the plot of "Midnight in Sale" more than onceme." However, the final result can be called satisfactory. The game does not get hung up on the search for the missing book, because in parallel we become participants in other storylines. But the most beautiful thing is a lot of references to previous games in the series:

1. Nancy continues to sort things out with her boyfriend, Ned.
2. The characters of the game discuss Mei's parents, who moved to another country after the girl was accused of arson. And this is a clear reference to Alibi in Ashes.
3. The Hardy brothers continue their "secret project" based in the Labyrinth of Lies.

The disadvantage of the plot can be called its linearity. Only in 1-2 cases I did not understand what to do next. And the reason for this could not be the game itself, but the fact that it was simply not translated into Russian. And there are a lot of fans of the series in Russia and the CIS countries. Let's hope that Her Interactive will try to resolve the issue with the lack of Russian localization in future games.

In technical terms, the game turned out to be a solid "troika" (according to a five-point system). We did not find any fatal errors or crashes. There were only minor flaws that did not affect in any way?and the course of the game.

There are few puzzles in the game, but some of them are well thought out and inventive. A quite obvious question arises: why, in four years, the authors of the game, having switched to a new engine with great potential, could not create something more? Her Interactive's workforce is too small, so there could be many reasons. Take even the banal lack of time. Of the most interesting moments, I would like to highlight the viewing of recordings from CCTV cameras and compiling a frame-by-frame sequence that will allow us to determine the identity of the person hiding under the mask. Against the backdrop of complex puzzles, there are frankly weak puzzles. For example, the mechanics of picking a lock and searching for ghosts are quite simple.

Summing up, I would like to emphasize that despite the large number of shortcomings and disadvantages, Her Interactive has made a huge step forward. Switching to a new engine was not ideal, but in future Nancy Drew games, we will definitely see that this was really necessary. Nancy Drew: Midnight in Salem turned out to be ambiguous, so, perhaps, I will use my right to leave it without a rating, but I definitely recommend it for review. Especially if you have a liking for this series or love good detective stories.