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Nancy Drew: Stay Tuned For Danger   Released: 1999 Manufacturer: HerInteractive Developer: HerInteractive In Brief: Low Budget adventure game for adolescent girls doesn't do much for this middle-aged guy
As I review more and more games it gets harder and harder to play them to the end. I have all sorts of games that I mean to finish at some point, but as new games come in the liklihood of the old games being completed gets less and less. I need to finish Deus Ex, Timelapse, Thief 2, MDK. And I haven't even played enough of Nocturne to decide whether it's worth playing. And with a new batch of games on their way I may never work my way down to "Nancy Drew: Stay Tuned For Danger", although I'm inclined to play some more of it. So I'm just going to tell you my experience so far.
"Nancy Drew: Stay Tuned For Danger" is a game designed specifically for young girls. I am not a young girl, so it's reasonable to ignore my ideas about this game. You play as Nancy Drew, girl detective, as she investigates strange goings on the sound stage of a soap opera.
There is a certain voyeuristic fun in poking around soap stars' dressing rooms and listening to conversations through the doors, and this is the level on which the game works best. In terms of puzzles, though, it's a real mixed bag. This game has the most contrived set of puzzles I have ever seen. You can't get into the prop room until you guess the answer to three riddles posed by the prop lady (why do you want to get into the prop room? Just because you can't). Clues are spread about in an odd way, as though the whole thing was set up specifically for Nancy to solve, which of course it was. These are not well-integrated puzzles; at one point in order to find a key you have to play through the old games Towers of Hanoi.
It's also apparent HerInteractive is on a tight budget. For example, if you look at a photograph of a group of people you will see characters from the game drawn in on top of normal photographs of real people, which looks really weird. The game is like those shows for kids you can watch on PBS, sincere and under-produced.
With my usual overconfidence I started in Medium rather than Easy mode, thinking they're not going to make this game so hard an adult can't get through it, but I did get stuck after awhile. Rather than cheating I restarted in Easy mode but, perhaps because I was dashing through the game, I got stuck even earlier. Then other games started flooding in and Nancy got shoved down a ways on my priority list.
"Nancy Drew: Stay Tuned For Danger" was not designed for me, it was designed for adolescent girls, and I don't know or even want to know any adolescent girls, so I can't say whether this game is on target in terms of audience. And if I had less games I would play a little further, it's not a bad game, after all. But not one for the ages -- at least not for my age. -- Charles Herold -2000
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