Nancy Drew: Shadow at the Water's Edge

2025-12-21
I have a friend who one time when we were in college was like "Yeah I'm playing the new Nancy Drew game." I was baffled. There's a new Nancy Drew game in 2010 and you--an adult--are playing it? She was like, "Yeah, they're dope. I've played 'em all." Fast forward ten years, it's Covid lockdown, and she buys me one for my birthday. And of course she picks the weeb one. And of course I dove in.

For the Nancy Drew neophytes they're basically point and click mystery games with puzzles and minigames. This one's set in Japan so we're solving nonogram puzzles and making bento lunch boxes between moving through an overarching plot of getting to the bottom of the hauntings of a ryokan inn. I have no familiarity with how these Nancy Drew mysteries normally fare but this one was pretty trite. It kind of played out like a Scooby Doo mystery with the whole thing basically being a creep in a white sheet going "OooooOooo". It's fine.

The real standout though is the voice acting. It ranges from OK to comically awful. My favorite is the bento girl who 99% of the time speaks in an American accent and then pronounces every 5th "L" sound as "R". Rewatching it I was like "Oh that's good she didn't even try to do the accent. That's much less offensive." And then I caught one of her attempts to sneak in some Real Japanese Flavor. Needress to say I riked it.

The gameplay is again mostly clicking around and exploring prerendered 3D areas from mostly fixed points of view. It suffers from the frustrations that plague this genre where it's often unclear what's clickable or what things have been missed in a given area. The order in which you can do things is open-ended at points which starts great but then is quickly ruined by the fact that many points of the game are scripted based on very specific triggers. Some of these triggers are very easy to miss. I spent a solid half hour talking to every NPC and going to every area trying to figure out what I missed. Turns out I hadn't flipped through all the pages of a comic I received much, much earlier because it wasn't obvious you had to click on the right side of the screen to flip through the pages (or that there were pages to flip through at all). All of these points of friction hilariously meant even though I played on "Junior" difficulty I had to use a guide several times to get myself unstuck.

Maybe the most important thing this game did for me was introduce me to nonograms. I have no fucking idea how I avoided them for 30 years of life but even with this game's clunky version of them it was like the way Hunter Biden describes trying crack the first time: an exultant experience and the beginning of a lifelong addiction. So while I probably won't ever play another Nancy Drew game in my life I have spent easily hundreds of hours playing nonograms in all its various forms because of this game. That plus listening to some terrifically bad Japanese accents was easily worth the price of admission.