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Low-Spoiler Hints for Nancy Drew: White Wolf of Icicle Creek


Welcome to my Nancy Drew: The White Wolf of Icicle Creek hints page. (-: If you're new to my series of low-spoiler computer game walkthroughs, the idea is to point gamers towards things they might not have thought of in each game rather than divulging puzzle solutions or giving step-by-step instructions. There's not much point in playing an adventure game if you know the puzzle solutions in advance, and there's no point at all in investigating an ominous mystery like The White Wolf of Icicle Creek's if you've already had the story spoiled for you.

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So these pages are as close to spoiler-free as possible while still providing some valuable The White Wolf of Icicle Creek hints and game recommendations. If you are looking for the solution to a particular puzzle, I recommend UHS--due to their unique website setup you can only see one hint at a time, so you can get the answer to one pesky puzzle without ruining all the others for yourself. Here's the UHS link if you're interested. My site here focuses on exactly the things traditional walkthroughs don't: the non-critical bits of The White Wolf of Icicle Creek, detours you can take, little things you can do to smooth the gameplay out for yourself, extra details you might miss if you did only what was strictly necessary to complete the game. If you want even fewer spoilers--you're considering whether to buy the game, for example, and want to know whether there's anything you're going to detest in it--please try my Nancy Drew Review page to find all the pertinant information in one convenient spoiler-free package.

Now, on with the game!

Nancy Drew: The White Wolf of Icicle Creek Hints and Tips
Nancy Drew: The White Wolf of Icicle Creek Walkthrough
Nancy Drew: The White Wolf of Icicle Creek Game Spoilers and Easter Eggs
Nancy Drew: The White Wolf of Icicle Creek Plot and Character Information
Nancy Drew: The White Wolf of Icicle Creek Cheats and Links
Backseat Game Designer: Nancy Drew: The White Wolf of Icicle Creek Critique

The White Wolf of Icicle Creek Hints and Tips



Nancy Drew: The White Wolf of Icicle Creek is a modern PC adventure game in the popular Nancy Drew series. Like the other Nancy Drew games, The White Wolf of Icicle Creek 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 ski resort in Canada. These are relatively easy games, designed with young teens in mind, and The White Wolf of Icicle Creek 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: There is very little difference to the gameplay depending which difficulty setting you use. There are no additional puzzles if you play on Senior Detective, but a few of them are made easier for Junior players. If you play as a Junior, Nancy also makes a few more leading comments as she goes along, keeps track of more things in her notebook, and can ask Tino for hints over the telephone. None of these are very important differences and 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 White Wolf of Icicle Creek is well-constructed and does not suffer from serious bugs; in fact, the Nancy Drew games have a "second chance" feature that automatically replays any scene in which Nancy dies or fails at her mission, so you theoretically shouldn't need to worry about savegames at all. In practice, however, the 'second chance' replay occasionally does back you up to well before you made the fatal error, so it's always a good idea to save the game after completing any difficult or time-consuming puzzle just to ensure you won't have to go through it again.

Time Management: There are a few timed sequences in The White Wolf of Icicle Creek (including one moderately complex puzzle that will result in Nancy's death if she doesn't solve it quickly enough.) If you run out of time on any of these, though, the "second chance" feature will restart the timer and let you try again. Except for these timed challenges, The White Wolf of Icicle Creek proceeds in Ultima-style flextime--the NPCs will move around the cabin at set times every day, but if you miss them, you can just sleep for the requisite number of hours and catch them there the next day (use the alarm clock next to Nancy's bed to accomplish this.) It doesn't matter if you conclude this quest in three days or thirteen; except for the routine movements of NPC's, nothing in the cabin changes except in response to actions you've taken yourself.

Nancy's Chore Schedule: Nancy is supposed to make the beds and do the laundry every day by noon, cook breakfast between 7 and 8, lunch between 12 and 1, and dinner between 6 and 7. This is irritating both because it means you always have to be keeping an eye on the clock and because it leaves Nancy with only a few hours a day in which she can venture outside (she needs to return to the cabin by 5:30 every night.) However, in reality, nothing happens to you if you miss one of these chores-- you will not get fired, just get a scolding, a time-warp to the next meal, and possibly a snide message in your end-of-game award. So you don't have to take these dull chores too seriously. Skipping dinner is the least problematic because it will just take you to breakfast the next morning and there's nothing much to do in the lodge at night anyway. Skipping breakfast is the worst idea, because then you will be time-warped to lunch and lose half your explorable time that day. Skipping lunch isn't serious if you're careful not to come back inside till close to dinnertime anyway.

Interrogation: You have a selection of different dialogue choices during most conversations with suspects in The White Wolf of Icicle Creek, but these choices do not affect anything in the game, so 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, both because it gives you more details so that you can figure some of 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 game.

Movement: The movement controls in the Nancy Drew games can be inconsistent--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). 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: Unfortunately, Nancy doesn't have a cell phone in this game (I have no idea why, since it was implemented in previous games with no problems.) So if you want to make phone calls, you need to walk Nancy back to the reception desk and dial the number in manually.

Problem Spots: There's not much that could possibly go wrong as you play The White Wolf of Icicle Creek. 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 some of the NPC-implicating 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.

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