Nancy Drew®: Ghost of Thornton Hall Reviews

spooky and fun

I'm gonna be honest, 90% of the intended scares didn't work for me. However the mystery was engaging enough to keep playing. However, there's 2 things that make me love this game. 1, entering a certain area (no spoilers) gave a sense of dread and weird regret like I just stepped on someone's grave that I thought was really effective. 2: *SPOILERS* I can't tell if this was intentional or not but the "rational" explanation for the ghost is really weak. So weak that it implies the ghost is real. I like that.

i love this game, love ghosts and ive enjoyed the nancy drew games for years with my mom. they've helped me alot with many different things like math, spelling, even learning words in different languages. ive also become faster with puzzles, so now my mom asks me to help her solve her other games xD

Nancy Drew: Ghost of Thornton Hall is a point and click adventure game where you've been called to investigate the mysterious disappearance of Jessalyn Thornton from her family's abandoned manor. Along the way you solve puzzles, uncover family secrets, and encounter a mysterious ghost. The abandoned family estate vibe works pretty well here. The music and sound design help give everything a creepy, tense vibe, and the ghost activity gives a couple of small jump scares. My only complaint there is that, for a house that's supposed to be pretty large, we only get to explore a couple of rooms. There were two different difficulty levels to the game. I played on "senior detective" which gives fewer hints and harder variations to some puzzles, although the game was still relatively easy. There was a mix between inventory object puzzles and logic puzzles. The inventory object puzzles were pretty straightforward, although there were a couple of smallish items that were easy to glance over. The logic puzzles were mostly good but a couple were frustrating, and there were a couple of puzzle types that repeated a few times. You can take notes on paper or use your in-game phone to take pictures of clues, but there was still a lot of backtracking for a couple of the later puzzles. I generally liked the story, although the writing had some weak points. Your investigation starts with Jessalyn's disappearance, although you also end up investigating a lot of Thornton family lore, particularly that related to Charlotte, a relative who died and is now believed to haunt the property. I was really drawn in by the mystery at first, but I felt like the resolution was a bit predictable and a couple of key questions weren't fully answered. The vast majority of the story is told through dialogue, but the dialogue trees are a little weird, mostly in the early game. A few of the conversations felt unnatural because questions in the same dialogue path seemed to come up out of order. I also felt like the early conversations with the NPCs happened in a weird order based on what they were saying. Overall, I thought Ghost of Thornton Hall had a strong atmosphere, good puzzles, and a decent story, although there was definitely some room for improvement. 7/10