Death of old regime

I recently got reintroduced to my love for Nancy Drew mysteries when I saw a couple of the newer titles and decided to see what they were all about.  Having played some of the newer one first, my view of the older ones is a tad tainted. Primarily, in that I go to look for a feature, only to find out it wasn't available in the older games kind of thing.

As a child, I grew up with Bess Marvin, George Fayne, Ned Nickerson, and of course Nancy Drew and the infamous Hardy Boys.  It was always cool to read the books and uncover hidden passages and pretend even for a brief moment that you were the girl detective.

Secrets Can Kill is the first adventure of the 13 part series. It is also one of the few adventures done under the original label of Dream Catcher. The later ones are done under Her Interactive and there is a huge difference between the two labels.

Upon starting the game, you have 2 main options. You can either start as a junior detective which gives you more hints or the senior detective which is a bit more difficult. As a 33 year old, I have to say the junior version puzzles tend to give me a problem in certain cases.

Secrets Can Kill starts off with you,as Nancy, visiting your aunt's home where you find out that there was a murder at the local high school and it's up to you to determine who the guilty party is.  There are four main characters that you interact with and each of them has their own skeletons. The 4 main characters include both a male and female jock , a Vietnamese exchange student and a diner employee. I found the locations in this particular one were a bit limited with only 4 places to go.


Nancy Drew's job is to interact with the subjects, ask questions, find clues to solve various puzzles throughout the game. As the player, we take over as Nancy and everything is very interactive. Unfortunately with this type of game, it is a bit linear in form meaning you may wander around with nothing to do since you skipped a key step in something. I also found it a bit daunting to try and navigate through the various locations with the mouse. I miss the old King's Quest games from Sierra where you want to go up, you type go up etc. I prefer that interface to the one these games are on. There is also a red hourglass type thing that shows up when you move the cursor across the screen to let you know there is something to do there whether its pick up a key or open a door. There is also a payphone where you can call Bess and George,Ned, the police and anyone else who may be a witness or have information vital to the case

Graphics were good- certainly not as realistic as the later editions and the voice overs were also pretty good. I liked the music choices and the varying music played depending on the scene and what was going on with suspenseful music at the end when you're trying to catch the bad guy.  Some of the dialogue was a bit stereotypical particularly with the exchange student studying to be a doctor etc.

I really like these games. Unfortunately in the earlier versions, many of the features in the later editions are not available.  However, twenty dollars for a computer game isn't much when it offers hours of entertainment value.  I also like the Second Chance Feature which basically allows you to come back from the dead to where you made your fatal mistake and keep redoing it until you get it correct.

The minimum requirements for this game are almost not worth mentioning since pretty much any computer nowadays could run this game. However, for those of you with older computers here are the requirements.

MINIMUM Requirements: 
Windows 95/98/ME
166 MHz Pentium Processor
16 MB RAM
42 MB Available Hard Disk Space
16-bit Color Graphics Video Card
8X CD-ROM Drive
16-bit Windows Compatible Stereo Sound Card
DirectX Compatible 
 
My biggest complaint with this game was having to constantly switch between more than one disk when the storyline itself was less involved than the later ones and they only use one disk.

Other features include being able to save your game and load the saved game so you don't lose any progress that you may have made. You can also adjust the music, speech, sound, captions, etc.

You also have an inventory icon which is where you can view your current items in your inventory. There is also a map that you click on to visit various locations throughout the game.

Personally, I prefer the later games to these early ones. However, it's a good way to spend some time on a rainy day or late evening. I tend to play these games late at night and on occasion they have some scary situations in them.  I would recommend this game.