Four Fat Chicks -- Nancy Drew: Message in a Haunted Mansion for GBA Review

Nancy Drew: Message in a Haunted Mansion
Game Boy Advance Version

Review by Orb

Message in a Haunted Mansion is one of a handful of adventure titles that have either just been released or are about to be released for the GBA. In fact, one of the greatest things about the title is the fact that the increased graphics horsepower in the GBA really enables developers to start taking advantage of the platform as they never have before.

Previously, there were enough Game Boy Color adventure games to count on one hand. With the advent of GBA, there are more adventures than that for the current and the upcoming quarter alone. Quite a difference indeed. As for Nancy Drew, this is obviously one of the bigger titles to be released so far in the genre, and it will be interesting to see how sales go (which I'm sure will determine future development and releases), and this on a platform and to a gaming public not traditionally associated with adventure games. The other handicap, of course, is the fact that the core base of gamers that traditionally purchase games in the Nancy Drew series will have most likely already purchased and played this title on the PC.

So hopefully, we'll see this put into the hands of the handheld public in some way, thus getting them interested in adventures and giving the genre an increased possibility of life on the platform. It's at least a way for the Nancy Drew series developers, Her Interactive, to gain some potential ground in the preteen gamer market that they have lost by not porting their games to Macintosh, the platform traditionally purchased by school systems and parents based on its fundamental ease of use. It's certainly inexplicable that this market has been snubbed up until now.

The story of Nancy Drew: Message in a Haunted Mansion is the usual Nancy Drew girl detective fare. And if you played the game on PC, you get to skip this paragraph, as the story is the same. Nancy has gone to visit a friend in San Francisco and assist in fixing up a Victorian mansion. But a series of accidents has delayed the project's completion. It's Nancy's job to find out what or who is behind these accidents. The game is played in the first person, from the viewpoint of Nancy. Our more modern Nancy (she's at least more modern and high-tech than when I read the series in third grade) has a cell phone, to call her friends for clues, and a PDA that keeps a running record of the clues that have been discovered.

As for the graphics, it is an excellent and smooth transition to the Game Boy Advance. The screens are amazingly defined. The rooms in the mansion have quite a bit to look at in them, and all of it is done in such a way that it stays clear, and easy to see, while still enjoying a high amount of detail.

The biggest drawback in the game, however, lies in the fact that the game takes place in a dark, creepy (as the name implies) mansion. And, as anyone who has ever played on a Game Boy knows, there is no backlighting. So I rolled into the game, after littering the desk with a wormlight and various other sundry plug-in lights and fixtures, searching for the right lighting combo to get the graphics lightened enough so that the darkness was not a complete distraction. This, of course, is not an unusual situation, as anyone who has used these can attest, but it seemed as though there was no attempt to lighten the coloring of screens at all to take this into account when porting the game. The one other noticeable weakness was that there is quite a bit of reading to do, and this was presented in a very small, hard-to-read font, which took a bit of getting used to.

The lighting notwithstanding, once embroiled in the game, I found it to be an absolute delight. The story is well-written, and the layout of the mansion is very clever and entertaining. There are plenty of rooms to explore and really a very satisfying amount of well-constructed and pure-fun puzzles. I was gratified to find how well the puzzles in the game were assembled, and it has both inventory and straight puzzles, which were a real kick in the pants to get through and certainly worth the money.

The game does trim down some of the plot points and puzzles from the original version, I assume to fit it into the confines of the platform. This did not, however, detract from the gameplay at all. For example, a puzzle to access the contents of a PC is omitted, and the player is just given access once having gotten to the PC. The inventory system is particularly well-organized, and it is very easy to speak to characters and move around the mansion the way the interface is designed. In fact, I found the controls smooth to the point of being addictive.

To anyone who has played Inherent Evil, the save system of Haunted Mansion will be very familiar. It is structured in seven chapters, and specific actions must be completed, including moving the story along to certain points, before a chapter is complete. Once the chapter is complete, a save game is automatically enabled, which is a very smart, very cool thing, so that there is virtually no saving in the game at all, and it runs like a platformer—just pencil in getting to the end of the chapter before you put the sucker down.

There are places in the game where the player can do something boneheaded and get kicked out of the mansion before the story is complete. The game does not save just before this, as in the PC version, but the player can return to the beginning of the last chapter she was on.

The music is a short, repetitive MIDI-style loop, similar to other Game Boy game music. Considering the fact that all this gaming came in a cartridge that is tiny—literally half the size of a GBC cartridge—this is certainly understandable and acceptable.

If you haven't gotten a GBA, Message in a Haunted Mansion is plenty of reason to splurge on one. This is a title that packs an incredible amount of fun into a tiny package.