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Midnight in Salem

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Joined 2007-01-04

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Nancy Drew’s latest game is out. I have not heard anything good about it.

I do believe they will patch this game and down the road, the change to the unity engine will do them a lot of good.

Have you played it? What’s your opinion?

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I enjoy playing adventure games on my Alienware M17 r4 and my Nintendo Switch OLED.

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I tried it, but it was laggy on my PC, and decided it was not worth playing like that. It is playable, but it does not look good and I decided it was not worth playing like that. They went to 3d but it does look pretty bad in my opinion,both the characters and cinematics, they probably had small budget. Now I do not care that much for the graphics, and I played most of the old Drew games for the puzzles, but this one does not look good to play with lag. Steam score is 6/10 atm, so it looks like I made a right decision. It is a shame, because I know they struggled to finance a new game.

     
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I’ve played all of the previous ND games none of which ever made my top 20 games for any particular year but I’ve always been a sucker for them! They’ve always felt comfortable & been decent enough adventures albeit a little formulaic, but because of that you always know what you’re going to get although some have proved to be better than others.

The last game Sea of Darkness for me was an improvement over the previous 3 games: The Shattered Medallion, Labyrinth of Lies & Ghost of Thornton Hall but I personally think that the series had started to decline in terms of quality of plot which seemed to integrate contrived personalities & dialogue.  Yes, but for the most part the puzzles were fun.

It was time for a change which has taken over 4 years so naturally now expectations are higher which has lead to disappointment.

I’ve been playing the game for over 5 hours now & loving it so far.
The plot is compelling & integrates history (I don’t know how authentic but seems to be) with a current investigative mystery. There is a lot of dialogue & also reading if you want to get involved in the story (if you’re not interested it may be possible to get through this game in 4 hours? But what’s the point?) So be prepared to be in Salem for many hours.

The game as far as I’ve got hasn’t been puzzle heavy but there have been a couple of typical ND tasks to do & to progress is not quite as easy as it’s been made out to be. It’s a little more than an interactive story.

The voice-acting is excellent & for the most part comes across as very natural.

You can look completely around you as it’s a full 3D world but what I really liked it was mainly point & click (so minimal of motion sickness for me) but you could in certain areas manipulate close-ups to swing around to look at different angles as you could also do for inventory items.

Graphically, I liked it & it was pleasing to me but felt there was a long way to go!

The game has been described as very easy but not really as it doesn’t hold your hand but it is fairly linear.

I haven’t experienced any glitches so far (touch wood!)
Smile

I forgot to mention that if you’re a Nancy Drew fan it does feel like a Nancy Drew game just a little more of a grown-up one.

     
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Glad to hear something positive about the game. Strange, but there isn’t yet a review from us. Hopefully they will distribute keys to major reviewers.

There are NO major reviews of this game and the fan reviews are horrible.

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I enjoy playing adventure games on my Alienware M17 r4 and my Nintendo Switch OLED.

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Joined 2017-04-14

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I have to give the game a chance (my backlog is growing by the day…) even though my expectations are quite low. I’ve read some fan reviews and most of them are negative indeed, many motivated by frustration after such a long wait and circumspect feelings towards the new team, but nonetheless pointing out specific issues such as bugs, a lack of puzzles, or uninspired dialogues. Several reviewers mentioned that the game was too demanding for their equipment, which is understandable since older ND games would run on surprisingly low specs and few ND fans are gamers with a state-of-the-art machine. Some reviews are more balanced and describe a mediocre but enjoyable game, with no substantial improvement over previous titles and some disappointing choices, but nothing cataclysmic either.

I feel like I could have written the first part of chrissie’s message almost word for word, so her altogether positive reaction raises my hopes a little Grin

     
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I finally finished the game after around 11 hours & there are still things I missed. I don’t want to give false expectations - I liked the game a lot but considering the numerous number of teams involved in the development of the game it should have been far better than it was - it was very enjoyable but by no means perfect.
Small team Indie developers have proved to be capable of equivalent or far better games quality wise.
Because of the amount of people involved in the production I’m wondering how it could possibly be financially viable?

     

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Joined 2014-09-30

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Having been a fan of Nancy Drew games for years, it’s hard to say that this game is so bad that I think it should be recalled by Her Interactive. Another player (on a different site) summarized my thoughts on it so well that I copied and pasted a portion of their comments below: 

“...It feels like there is no art direction, no detail on anything, textures on assets look like garbage, environments are bland, movement is choppy, animations are overall poor, lip movement does not match up at all with the words, assets do not look rendered at all. Also in many cutscenes (Deirdre driving for example), it looks like there is just one plane for the grass and a skybox. It just makes me think we are all floating. All of these things contribute to feeling like this game has no atmosphere. It just feels empty. Every part simply feels empty. Many trees are just floating in the air, and the backgrounds are empty in each scene. These technical things are too distracting for me. I know it’s not the case, but it feels like the game was made in a month. I went in knowing that there would be some technical and graphical errors, but I can’t look past them. They are so apparent it takes away all of my enjoyment for the game. I love the Nancy Drew games and wish HER the best moving forward. This game can be salvaged, but I would say just move on. The amount of time it would take to fix the game isn’t worth it…”

     
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The game has obviously disappointed many fans by not meeting their expectations in many ways but, albeit flawed, it really is not that bad & certainly by no means deserving of a recall.

If you & the person you quoted are trying to play this on systems that are not up to the required specs then you really can’t expect the game to perform properly.
If however your system does meet the requirements many of the technical/graphical problems you reported can apparently be alleviated by changing settings.

There are some superb experts on hand over on GameBoomers in GLITCHES, BUGS & PATCHES where there is currently a thread for MiS which might be of interest if you experience problems.

     
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I think the issue is that old Nancy Drew games would run on very spartan computers just fine. The typical Nancy Drew buyer didn’t own a state of the art gaming rig.

It’s good to hear that with the proper settings the game is pretty playable however.

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I enjoy playing adventure games on my Alienware M17 r4 and my Nintendo Switch OLED.

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I’m playing on a Helios 300/i7 processor - The earlier comments summarize my experience with the game’s design flaws. 

     
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The earlier comments express technical/graphical problems that can for the most part, according to reports, be fixed by adjusting the settings.
N.B. I didn’t experience anything that was described in those comments. But to be fair the p & c interface for movement I did find clumsy in places.

Did you try adjusting the settings?

Aside from that perhaps you’d like to elaborate on what you perceive to be design flaws in YOUR words.

It may be helpful to anyone on the fence about buying the game.  Smile

 

     
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Well, the official review is in, a 3. Not going to get me in a buying mood, I have several unplaced ND games in my collection I will play first.

I do know the Herinteractive has been losing money lately and layed off most of their employees. This game actually had most of its development farmed out.

If it makes money, we may see another Nancy Drew. Time will tell.

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I enjoy playing adventure games on my Alienware M17 r4 and my Nintendo Switch OLED.

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Joined 2005-07-07

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Long time since I played a Nancy Drew game. I quit in the middle of Shadow Ranch, which I only found tedious and boring. The ones before that had an easy going, “cozy” feel to them. Maybe I’ll continue the series from where I left off some years ago.Smile

All ND games seem to be on Steam, but what strange bundles they have put together. Had been great if they had bundled them in chronological order instead of in those strange “adventure” and “travel” bundles. Had been much easier for me to push the button and buy the games I don’t already own.

     
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The last Nancy Drew game I played was the Silent Spy, which I actually liked. I have quite a few old Nancy Drew games waiting to be played. Sadly, one of them is Shadow Ranch.

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I enjoy playing adventure games on my Alienware M17 r4 and my Nintendo Switch OLED.

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Joined 2005-07-07

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Mikekelly - 26 December 2019 09:37 AM

The last Nancy Drew game I played was the Silent Spy, which I actually liked. I have quite a few old Nancy Drew games waiting to be played. Sadly, one of them is Shadow Ranch.

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Smile Well, maybe it was just me and Shadow Ranch is just as good as the others.

There was a sale at Steam and I ended up buying all the bundles… Just gonna finish playing through Frogware’s Sherlock games (replaying up until Testament) then maybe it’s time to spend some time as a teen sleuth!

     

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Joined 2004-01-06

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Shadow Ranch was full of chores.
Which is why I wasn’t particularly fond of it.

     

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