Nancy Drew®: Mystery of the Seven Keys™ Reviews

A Thoroughly Great Game! I'd like to start by saying I really enjoyed this game. I have read so may bad reviews and I honestly don't understand why. I think perhaps many are stuck in the nostalgia of the old games. Don't get me wrong, I love those too, but I think Her Interactive did a really good job of bringing Nancy into the future with this game. Please don't be turned away by a bad review, give this game a chance. I think you will be pleasantly surprised. Now on to my pros and cons, pros first. I have been playing ND games since around 2008 and have played them all. This is my first time playing a ND game on Steam, using my husbands account no less lol, but it was a great experience. In the game, I loved the option of having the traditional point and click movement. A panning feature was also added to point and click, which I thought was fantastic. I say this because in so many past games, I wished there was a fuller view of the area to explore. The storyline was very intriguing, and there really seems to be a lot of effort that was put into the history surrounding the location of the game, which I loved. In my opinion, the graphics of the game were really good also. I also enjoyed most of the puzzles, however (and this is really my only con) there were several that were not intuitive at all, and I struggled a bit. I did use hints, but have done so in past games, so that wasn't a deal breaker for me. I will also add that I missed Nancy's desk at the beginning of the game, that was always one of my favorite parts, but again, in no way was that a deal breaker. Overall I think this was a great game and a great addition to the ND series. I say well done Her Interactive. I look forward to seeing where Nancy's adventures lead us in the next game.

My least favorite ND game so far. The story line was dry and boring. The characters were not as interesting as other ND games. There were also a lot of glitches in this game. Overall, this was not like the classic ND games and did not hold the same energy.

I didn't want to believe the reviews being someone who has played all the other games and love them, but they are all true, unfortunately. I could barely finish the game.

I enjoyed this storyline and mystery. The look and feel of Nancy could definitely use some improvement. The voice actress had NO emotion. The one they used in their previous games was much better. Other than that, I think it's a great game. Hope Nancy will come back in future games.

I'm a dyed in the wool Nancy Drew Fan for 7 decades so yes...I love Playing these Nancy Drew games...I've played everyone since the beginning and this is my next one because it's new and I've been waiting 6 years for it to come out. I've read every book in the original series as a kid. So yes it's a great game ...mystery to solve.

Very fun game with great graphics and it feels like an old nancy drew game. I grew up playing these and I am obsessed with the nancy drew series. Great game. I can't wait for the next one! :)

---{ Graphics }--- ☐ You forget what reality is ☐ Beautiful ☑ Good ☐ Decent ☐ Bad ☐ Don‘t look too long at it ☐ MS-DOS The graphics in the game are actually quite good! Some of the locations and items are extremely detailed, and the brushstrokes visible in the loading screens were really nice. The brightness was a bit troublesome, though- I struggled with the interface for Nancy’s laptop because although I followed their brightness guide, I couldn’t see the X button and had to resort to aimlessly clicking every centimeter of the screen to progress. ---{ Gameplay }--- ☐ Very good ☐ Good ☐ It's just gameplay ☑Meh ☐ Watch paint dry instead ☐ Just don't I didn't try point and click mode in the game because I was having too much fun running around in open world, but the controls are not very intuitive. I had to look up how to interact with inventory items, and I spent a solid ten minutes trying to figure out the mechanics of the left click. It was frustrating that I couldn't customize the controls to something more intuitive, and the left click thing in particular really kept tripping me up through the endgame. The new open world system afforded a few cool new opportunities- namely, the postcard photographing collectible and Nancy's newfound ability to run at a speed faster than the Flash, my God. (The photograph collectible may well be available in point and click too, I wouldn’t know because I didn’t try.) ---{ Audio }--- ☐ Eargasm ☑ Very good ☐ Good ☐ Not too bad ☐ Bad ☐ I'm now deaf Honestly the audio was one of the best things about the game! They did a great job creating ambiance, though the transitions between the different spaces and their soundscapes can be rather abrupt. The Haunted Tour in particular is an example of the highlights of the sound design, while the fountain in the square is a lowlight. I know this is something of a controversial opinion, but I thought that the new voice actress did a great job. Not as good as the voice actor for Radek, but she’s not as robotic and emotionless as people claim. ---{ PC Requirements }--- ☐ Check if you can run paint ☑Potato ☐ Decent ☐ Fast ☐ Rich boi ☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer The reviews are full of people saying their laptops threatened to achieve sustained flight with how hard the fans worked during this game, but I ran it on a computer from 2009 that struggles to run Discord and a single Firefox window at the same time and I didn’t have any issues. I did play the game with pretty low graphics settings, though, so maybe that’s part of it. A lot of the graphics are quite detailed, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of computers did struggle to run with it at top quality. ---{ Difficulty }--- ☐ Just press 'W' ☐ Easy ☐ Easy to learn / Hard to master ☐ Significant brain usage ☑ Difficult ☐ Dark Souls Listen, none of us are here for an easy game, but the puzzles in this game were a whole different kind of difficult. Many of the puzzles require more knowledge than the game really offers you, or expect you to make Sherlockian leaps in logic to get from point A to B. In addition to that, the new hint system is both less fun and less useful- you don’t get to phone a friend for help in this game, though you do text Ned, and there are points where your game can reach a complete halt because you missed something outside of the task-centric hint system’s purview. I got stuck for quite some time waiting for Ned to call me when I needed to collect a book. Also, you can no longer rely on a visual marker for a point of interest- there are several points in the game where you need to click on text to register it in your journal/phone, and one particularly egregious moment where you are tasked with placing something at the base of a statue. It took me ten entire minutes to find the stupid spot because I had to just click my way around the whole thing. It’s one thing to be frustrated by not being able to solve a puzzle because it’s meant to be difficult, but it’s another thing entirely to be unable to progress without a walkthrough because the game simply gives you no indication whatsoever of what to do next. ---{ Grind }--- ☐ Nothing to grind ☑ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks ☐ Isn't necessary to progress ☐ Average grind level ☐ Too much grind ☐ You'll need a second life for grinding As with all ND games, some effort will need to be put in in order to do things enough times to get all the achievements. Other than that, there’s no grinding to be had. ---{ Story }--- ☐ No Story ☐ Some lore ☐ Average ☐ Good ☑ Lovely ☐ It'll replace your life The story for this one was actually pretty good! I was able to guess about half of the twists, but it remained an interesting landscape full of dynamic characters. The dialogue can feel stilted because of awkwardly-long pauses between voice lines, but the actual content of the words made for one of the more coherent entries in the series. There are a bunch of completely irrelevant things in the game, though. The entire Kafka display, for example. But the characters were really great! I loved Radek, Patricie, and Leo, and the rest of the cast were nothing to sneeze at! Each character clearly had their own ideas and opinions, and the game had what felt to me like a larger cast than usual, though there are far fewer opportunities to call your friends and family in this one. ---{ Game Time }--- ☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee ☐ Short ☑ Average ☐ Long ☐ To infinity and beyond Took me about 40 hours. ---{ Price }--- ☐ It's free! ☐ Worth the price ☑ If it's on sale ☐ If u have some spare money left ☐ Not recommended ☐ You could also just burn your money I didn’t pay full price for this game and I’m glad I didn’t, but I do still think it was a fun play and it’s nice to have in the library. If Midnight in Salem worked for you, this game would be worth it on sale. If you didn’t like the changes in that game or you’re really attached to the format of the older games (reasonably so), give it a few years until you can pick it up for ten dollars or under, or you’re going to feel cheated. ---{ Bugs }--- ☐ Never heard of ☑ Minor bugs ☐ Can get annoying ☐ ARK: Survival Evolved ☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs The only bug I personally experienced was getting stuck looking at the café wifi sign, which happened twice. Both times I just closed the game and loaded my last autosave and was able to continue. ---{ ? / 10 }--- ☐ 1 ☐ 2 ☐ 3 ☐ 4 ☐ 5 ☑ 6 ☐ 7 ☐ 8 ☐ 9 ☐ 10