Developers: Her Interactive
Publisher: Her Interactive
Platform: PC, Mac OS X (Steam)
Nancy Drew: Ghost of Thornton Hall – Review
The good old days of point and click games are long over. At least, that’s what a lot of people believe. Nothing could be further from the truth. Nancy Drew: Ghost of Thornton Hall is already the 28th game from the long living Nancy Drew serie and even number 29 (The silent Spy) will see its release in Fall 2013.
Story
The story is loosely based on one of the Nancy Drew books, Uncivil Acts. The story starts when a sudden phone call awakes you. Paranormal expert Savannah Woodham is calling you, Nancy Drew, to investigate a sudden disappearance of Jessalyn Thornton. She explains to you that Jessalyn disappeared during a pre-wedding celebration in Thornton Hall. Despite the several attempts of friends and family to find Jessalyn, no one has a clue what happened yet. Taking into account that Thornton Hall is known for its haunts, makes the disappearance only more suspicious. By talking to the family of Jessalyn, solving puzzles and finding items, you’ll have to find Jessalyn during this very interesting and detailed storyline.
Graphics
Since this is only a 19,99 dollar game, it would be unrealistic to expect the graphics of a high budget game. Despite this fact, the game still looks pretty fine, especially how nicely they’ve realized to create a spooky atmosphere. Also the few characters you meet are looking okay and they add a certain credibility to the story. The only disadvantage is that you won’t be able to play game fullscreen on a standard 1920 x 1080 resolution. When you do, you’ll receive 2 ugly black bars on the left and right of your screen.
Sound
Barely using music seemed like a deliberate choice to avoid disturbing the atmosphere and create some extra tension. The only music you’ll hear is during some of the short cutscenes. Now and then you’ll here some sound effects of some wind blowing, footsteps, etc… and this fits perfect in a game like this.
The biggest (but one of the very few) minors in this game are the dialogs. Nothing bad about the dialogs themselves since these are very interesting, but the voice acting is a bit disappointing. Not all the dialogs are bad, but some of them are pretty much over-acted and not very realistic anymore. This disturbs the tension and suddenly makes you realize how hard you’ve got sucked into the game’s story before the dialog was taking place.
Gameplay
Nancy Drew – Ghost of Thornton Hall is a point and click game, so most of the time you’ll be running around looking for clues, items and solving puzzles.
Since you’ll be running around a lot, movement is a very important part of the game. Sadly, this feels a bit clumsy now and then. Sometimes you’ll turn around accidently, while you wanted to turn left or right, just because you’ve clicked a little bit too low. Other times you can’t move into a certain hall (even while you can clearly see it), since it’s only possible to enter the hall from a certain spot in the hallway. This makes you need to turn around first, move one step further and then turn around again to be able to enter the hall. Luckily you’ll pass these places a lot which makes you used pretty fast to the paths you’ll have to take.
The puzzles in this game are fun, challenging and very diverse. Some of the puzzles are so geniusly done, that they even would be perfect for a full smartphone game. Some puzzles will consist of a small mini-game to open a door, while others make you search for clues to form secret passwords or find more information about the missing Jessalyn. When playing the game on amateur, you’ll be able to ask hints to solve the puzzles, but when you choose to play on master, puzzles themselves will be a lot harder and you won’t be able to ask for any hint to solve them. If you want to try out this game, but aren’t very experienced with point and click games, or not patient enough to check out every little corner, amateur is your best choice since master can become pretty hard without any hints.
The biggest surprise of Nancy Drew – Ghost of Thornton Hall is how detailed the game is. You’ll find a lot of interesting books, newspapers and notes with additional information about the story and background information of the characters. Above that, even the cellphone of Nancy has some short but funny mini-games. This makes it feel like the developers still had some time to add all their wanted “finishing touches” to the game.
Conclusion
Nancy Drew – Ghost of Thornton Hall became a great game. The spooky atmosphere, great story and genius puzzles, will suck you right into the game and you’ll never want to stop playing. Sadly this feeling gets interrupted sometimes by some over-acted dialogs. A point which could be fixed in the next Nancy Drew of course!
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[…] The review can be found here. […]
[…] Our review of the previous Nancy Drew (Ghost of Thornton Hall), received a nice score of 8.5. A great story, a nice atmosphere and wonderful puzzles. We only had a negative feeling about the voice acting and the clumsy movement controls. We hoped that The Silent Spy would fix these issues to make this a perfect game. The clumsy movement controls got completely fixed. The voice acting isn’t perfect yet, but it’s definitely more enjoyable! […]