![ds nancy drew game ds nancy drew game](http://www.searchamateur.com/pictures/nancy-drew-the-white-wolf-1.jpg)
We have a repeat-the-pattern puzzle, and several puzzles where the solution is “slide the stylus in a particular direction”. There is a side-scrolling challenge, where you move Nancy up and down to avoid obstacles, although nothing happens if you hit them. The best challenge was probably the wedding word scramble. What about the rest of the gameplay? There’s not much of it, to be honest. Okay, so the hidden objects scenes were awful. So really, the time limit is more like two and a half minutes, not three. I should note that it takes about three seconds for any object you find to register on the top screen. Once or twice, I tried to move the screen around and the game registered that as me making a mistake. If you can’t find everything within three minutes, the puzzle resets with a new group of items for you to find.
![ds nancy drew game ds nancy drew game](https://wowroms-photos.com/emulators-roms-logo/36/18736/420-420/Nancy+Drew+-+The+Hidden+Staircase+(USA)-image.jpg)
The hidden objects challenges also come with a time limit. It’s almost impossible to find everything when you can only see a fraction of the screen at a time. The touchscreen on the DS is too small it’s about a sixth of the size of the hidden objects scenes. This definitely would have worked better if it wasn’t a DS game. You learn absolutely zero clues from questioning the suspects, probably because the questioning scenes weren’t in the books.īesides for the visual novel parts, we have hidden objects challenges. It doesn’t matter that you can’t question everyone thoroughly. Twice. Why would you purposely cut off two-thirds of the dialogue options in a visual novel? That seems contrary to the genre. Also, you have an arbitrary limit of three questions. If you want to hear all nine conversations, you’ll have to replay the game. Half the time, the suspects ignore your question and talk about some other random thing. It was a good idea in theory, but a bad idea in practice. She can talk to each suspect about three topics, giving you a grand total of nine conversations. Every now and then, Nancy is given a group of three suspects to talk to. You know, stuff like “Hey, we skipped over two chapters of the book! Let me spend three sentences explaining what you missed!” The rest of the original dialogue comes in the form of questioning suspects. Some of the original dialogue comes in the form of recap. Not a good way to start your visual novel! It didn’t take long for me to realize that 90% of the dialogue is taken directly from books. Is this because of laziness, or dedication to the source material? Either way, it’s not an effective strategy here, because the books are not particularly well-written. Expect to see at least four characters appear without an introduction, only to disappear completely after two sentences. That’s because there’s a glaring typo on the second screen. I disliked the game’s dialogue from the very start. And Nancy is wearing glasses, even though she doesn’t have glasses in the books or even on the game’s cover. Josh’s artwork was put in even though he has no lines. George looks like she’s twelve, not eighteen. I’d say most of the artwork is fine, but there are some minor weird points. It’s a very minimal visual novel, with only one piece of artwork per character. The trilogy is a mess, too. I guess it’s just bad luck that the game developers picked the worst trilogy to date as the one to base their game on. Nancy Drew: The Model Mysteries came out four months after the book trilogy, and it is a real mess.