Nancy Drew® Dossier: Lights, Camera, Curses! Reviews

Terrible game. Very repetitive and comes off very low budget. They should not have switched the style from the old games. Waste of time.

Lights, Camera, Curses! is the first of the Nancy Drew Dossier games. While the Dossier games are also made by Her Interactive and have some of the same voice cast, the gameplay is pretty different from the main Nancy Drew series. You're still solving a mystery, but the gameplay is more like a hidden object game than a point and click adventure. There are three main gameplay elements. The investigation scenes remind me of hidden object scenes combined with adventure game puzzles. You have to find clues in the hand-drawn background and combine the different elements to deal with obstacles. When a conversation with an NPC comes up, you have to use your knowledge of the story to respond correctly. You also play a few minigames. Solving puzzles correctly and doing well at the minigames allow you to earn points. If you get enough points, you can unlock an alternate ending. This game is a lot easier than a regular Nancy Drew game. The story is totally linear and the game moves you to the next scene automatically. The puzzles are fully contained within each scene and were very straightforward. You have so few options that even if you have to guess, you get to the right combination pretty quickly. You do need to be paying attention to the story to do well with the conversations, although you can guess as many times as you want. The minigames were pretty easy but you also don't need to do well on them to move on. The only thing I struggled with were a couple of timed puzzles later in the game, and those just took a second try to solve. I felt like the story was pretty much on par with the average story in a main series Nancy Drew game. It wasn't anything mind-blowing, but the reveals weren't too obvious and I was interested enough to keep playing. I liked the hand-drawn art style and the Hollywood meets Ancient Egypt aesthetic. Overall, Lights, Camera, Curses! isn't a regular Nancy Drew game at all, and if you go into it expecting that, you'll be disappointed. However, for a very casual hidden object adventure, it's pretty good. 7/10