Backseat Game Designer: Nancy Drew: The Secret of Shadow Ranch Critique
Nancy Drew: The Secret of Shadow Ranch is a modern PC adventure game in the popular Nancy Drew series.
Like the other Nancy Drew games, Secret of Shadow Ranch offers a simple 1st-person point-and-click interface
with which to navigate a small gameworld, solving puzzles and interrogating suspects. This one is
set in a condemned theater once owned by Houdini and appropriately stocked with secret passages and
slider puzzles. These are relatively easy games, designed with young teens in mind, and The Secret of Shadow Ranch
is very much plug and play. However, there are a number of things you may want
to be aware of before beginning to play in order to get maximum enjoyment out of the game.
Without spoiling anything:
Difficulty Setting: I've never seen a game with such an irrelevant difficulty setting as the Nancy Drew series has.
There are no additional puzzles if you play on Senior Detective--the in-game hint system (i.e. Bess, George, and the Hardy Boys) is scaled back, and
you have less time to complete timed challenges, and that's it. If you've played the game on one setting, there is no need
to go back and play it again on the other.
Savegames: Like other games in this series, The Secret of Shadow Ranch is well-constructed and does not suffer
from serious bugs; in fact, the Nancy Drew games have a "second chance" feature that allows you to automatically replay
any scene in which Nancy dies or fails at her mission, so you theoretically shouldn't need to worry about savegames at all;
even in practice, one savegame should suffice. Which is good, because
the savegame mechanism in the Nancy Drew games is extremely annoying and Secret of Shadow Ranch is even worse than most!
Time Management: Unlike many Nancy Drew games,
there is no game clock in The Secret of Shadow Ranch. If another character tells Nancy to wait for something to happen,
the only way this will ever occur is if you take some in-game action to trigger it. If a game event isn't happening, it's your responsibility
to walk around talking to all the NPC's and picking objects up until the plot progresses. The sun will not set in this game without
some unrelated help from you.
Interrogation: You have a selection of different dialogue choices during most conversations with suspects in
The Secret of Shadow Ranch, but in no case do your choices affect anything in the game. This is somewhat unfortunate (it would have been
nice for the amount of information you decide to reveal to the suspects to affect their behavior), but it also means you really needn't
waste your time reloading or replaying any conversations. You should, however, make an effort to exhaust every line of conversation
with every character (except Bess, George and the Hardy Boys, who are completely optional), both because it gives you more details so that you
can figure the mystery out for yourself, and also because the act of conversing with an NPC sometimes triggers an unrelated plot event
to happen somewhere else in the ranch.
Movement: The movement controls in the Nancy Drew games are very inconsistent and often unintuitive--sometimes
it is hard to see an exit to your left, right, or even straight ahead (!), because the cursor does not shift to show that you can go that way
unless it is resting in the precisely correct location (which is not always to the far margin of the screen where you'd expect it). Clicking to
the left or right will sometimes rotate your view 90 degrees, and other times cause you to rotate and move. Clicking a down arrow
will sometimes cause you to look down, sometimes cause you to move down, and other times cause you to back up. There's no way to predict
any of these things in advance, and it can be very disorienting. Luckily the area available to explore in each of these games is very small,
so you can get used to the arrows in each location quickly.
The Phone: Thank heaven, Nancy has finally gone and invested in a cellphone. This means you don't need to trek back
to the living room every time you want to make a call. Sometimes, however, you will find yourself unable to use the cellphone. Usually this is because
there is another person in the immediate vicinity (well, what detective would want to give everything away to the suspects by yakking away on
her cell phone?) Sometimes the phone is unavailable for plot reasons. But other times, the phone won't work and there simply is no good reason
as far as gameplay is concerned. I guess the designers just wanted to give the feeling of being out in the wilderness so remote that there is no
cellphone coverage there. In those cases you'll just need to go back to the ranch.
The Internet: This is a neat feature. I don't believe you ever HAVE to use the Internet in Secret of Shadow Ranch, but if you
happen not to know something pertinant to the game-- the color a tomato turns when it's ripe and so on-- you can learn it online using Nancy's
cellphone instead of going off to look it up in real life. Like the cellphone, Nancy's Internet connection is not accessible in outdoors areas or while
standing next to an NPC.
Problem Spots: There's not much that could possibly go wrong as
you play The Secret of Shadow Ranch. There's no way to lose this game that Second Chance wouldn't undo.
In fact, it doesn't even matter if you never read or pick up any of the important evidence. There is only one ending cutscene, and it is not
affected by any choices you make. Of course, the game is more fun and makes more sense if you bother collecting the evidence and
conversing with suspects.
Go on to the Secret of Shadow Ranch game walkthrough...
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