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Nancy Drew: Shadow at the Water's Edge

Score: 88%
ESRB: Everyone 10+
Publisher: Her Interactive
Developer: Her Interactive
Media: CD/2
Players: 1
Genre: Adventure

Graphics & Sound:

Nancy Drew: Shadow at the Water's Edge is another adventure following the teenage detective - and this time, she is traveling around the world to Japan. While she is going for a bit of vacation, she quickly finds another mystery to solve, this time, it involves a haunted hotel.

Shadow at the Water's Edge continues the series' pretty good standing in the graphics department. The game's different scenes are detailed and visually stimulating. Personally, I found the hotel's Japanese water garden the most stunning location in the game, and since it is the hotel's centerpiece, that is very fitting.

Audio isn't bad either. As with most of the other games in the series, Nancy's voice actress does a good job delivering the game's dialogue, while a few of the NPCs seem to be a bit overacted.


Gameplay:

Nancy Drew: Shadow at the Water's Edge will introduce Nancy to a slew of puzzles, both old and new. Chief among the game's puzzles is a book of games provided by one of the characters. Not only does this book provide a steady stream of sudoku problems, but also two other logic games I hadn't previously seen, nanograms and renograms.

Nanogams have you using clues in the grid's columns and rows to determine which blocks should be shaded in. Once you've completed it, a nice picture is blocked out on the grid. The other puzzle type, renograms, has the player filling in an 8x8 grid with numbers. Like sudoku, some numbers are already on the board, but here, your goal is to draw a path to all of the numbers in sequential order by placing the missing numbers on the grid. In other words, you start with the 1 block and if the next number on the board is 4, you need to fill in connecting tiles with the numbers 2 and 3. From 4, you connect the tiles to the next number, and so on.

While I found a majority of my time was spent playing through these three puzzle types, they are definitely not the only ones Shadow at the Water's Edge has to offer. The game will challenge you to do everything from write Nancy's name in Japanese to arrange the strings on the back of an old picture so that none of the lines cross in order to get the backing off.

One of the really good details about this particular game in the Nancy Drew line is the amount of information younger gamers will glean about Japanese tradition and culture. Once again, the game borders on the edutainment genre without making it so blatantly obvious about the teaching.


Difficulty:

I will say, while I can typically work my way through a Nancy Drew game in a couple of nights, I found Shadow at the Water's Edge to require a bit more work. Unfortunately, it wasn't always because the game's intriguing puzzles were hard to get by. There were several times in the game when I was very unsure about where to go. Usually, the Task List does a good job of keeping you on target, but there were at least a couple of times when I would run out of items in my Task List and simply not know where to go next.

I also felt like the game's multiple sudoku/ nanogram/ renogram puzzles given to you by the hotel's handyman seemed to do little more than earn the game some extra play time. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed these puzzles; well, not the sudoku as much, since I've never been a fan. It just seemed to have more than was necessary simply to add extra time to the game's clock.


Game Mechanics:

Nancy Drew: Shadow at the Water's Edge sticks to the point-and-click style that works so well with this license. There isn't much you need to be able to do besides using your mouse to navigate the rooms, pick up and use inventory items and talk to the game's NPCs. Because of this, the game is pretty accessible for gamers of any age.

I've started enjoying the Nancy Drew games more and more over the past few releases. While I'm not necessarily the target audience, I do still find the games to be enough of a challenge to be stimulating. All that being said, a lot of adventure gamers might continue to be turned off by the license attached to it, but those younger female gamers out there should find this title right up their alley.


-J.R. Nip, GameVortex Communications
AKA Chris Meyer

Minimum System Requirements:



Windows XP/Vista/7, 1 GHz Pentium 3 Processor, 256 MB RAM, 1 GB Hard Disk space, 32 MB DirectX 9.0 compatible video card, 16 bit DirectX compatible sound card, 24x CD-ROM drive
 

Test System:



Windows 7 Ultimate, Intel i7 X980 3.33GHz, 12 GB RAM, Radeon HD 5870 Graphics Card, DirectX 9.0c

Related Links:



Microsoft Xbox 360 Castlevania: Lords of Shadow Microsoft Xbox 360 Lucha Libre AAA: Heroes del Ring

 
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