Most of your time is spent visiting nearly a dozen suspects and speaking with them via dialog trees. Midnight in Salem significantly switches that focus to its characters, story, and various mysteries that crop up as Nancy pokes into events. Previous Nancy Drew games tended to place a strong emphasis on solving mechanical puzzles, codes, ciphers, and the like rather than on detective work. Sensing a connection between the book and the fire, Nancy heads for Massachusetts where the story proper begins. While chatting, the momentary distraction of Nancy allows a hooded thief to break into the room and escape with the book. Deirdre reports that she’s in Salem herself, where her young cousin Mei Parry has been accused of burning down the historical Hathorne House. In short order, Nancy discovers the lost book she’s searching for before she’s momentarily distracted by a cell phone call from frenemy Deirdre Shannon. I found myself wishing this element would have been used more as it felt quite investigative to me. In a couple of cases this sometimes yields additional hotspots, such as finding a business card in a jacket pocket. A nice touch is that any such object can be inspected up close and rotated in three dimensions. Compared to other node-based adventures in which each scene is essentially a sphere that allows players to freely spin in place, Midnight in Salem's system is more restrictive and proves to be a little cumbersome.īeyond basic movement, Nancy also has an inventory at the bottom of the screen where she can collect a few items throughout the course of her adventure. So, for example, if you’re facing north, you’ll be able to freely turn to look northwest or northeast, but not all the way to the west or east.
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By holding down the right mouse button and dragging, you will be able to look up and down and also pan partially left and right, though never the full 90 degrees in either direction you get by clicking the screen edges. However, turning can be a bit more complicated than it sounds.Īlong with rotating in predetermined increments, it’s also possible to look around within any given view. Clicking on the left or right side of the screen rotates the camera 90 degrees and clicking on the bottom of the screen turns you completely around to face the other way. Moving the mouse about the scene causes the pointer to change when over something interesting, whether the path to the next location, an item or area that can be examined more closely, or a device that can be manipulated. Within a given station, the game operates more or less like a typical first-person point-and-click game.
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Midnight in Salem has indeed made the jump to real-time 3D, but it still retains the node-based movement of its predecessors instead of allowing for free roaming about the environment. This short section reveals much of what is both old and new with this latest installment in the Nancy Drew series. The book is to be taken to Salem, Massachusetts and delivered to one Judge Danforth to help compensate the descendants of the unjustly accused. Nancy’s father has sent his titian-haired detective daughter to help track down the Book of Apologies, a ledger detailing all the people who were wrongfully accused of witchcraft in the Salem Witch Trials of the 17th century. The game begins with a brief tutorial section taking place in Moosham Castle in Austria. It’s great to see Nancy back in action again, although the results are something of a mixed bag even after such a long wait. But now the long-delayed Midnight in Salem is finally here, and with it comes a new format more focused on character and plot than puzzles, featuring almost casual levels of gameplay. After regularly releasing two games per year for well over a decade, it would turn out to be four full years before the new adventure was done. Between then and 2015, the company would go on to release 32 entries in total, but then came the announcement that HeR was looking to move from their old pre-rendered slideshow presentation to real-time 3D for the next installment, Midnight in Salem. By 1998, the golden age of adventure games was largely over, but that didn’t stop fledgling developer HeR Interactive from releasing their first Nancy Drew mystery game, Secrets Can Kill.
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