I adore the Nancy Drew mystery series. They're excellent point-and-click adventure games with a kooky sense of humor, fun minigames, and great puzzles. However, this one was hands-down my least favorite of the series.

Plot: There was very little? The game focuses too strongly on the mechanism of being both Nancy and the Hardy Boys (which is fun, sure, but not enough to carry the game), and not enough time is spent unraveling the plot. Instead of letting the player put all the pieces together, the answer is just dumped on you in several minutes of exposition at the end of the game.

Minigames: There were three. An arcade game version of rock paper scissors (seriously,) making shell necklaces according to a pattern (you have to acquire the shells by either wandering the beach/scuba diving for the rest of your life, or buy them from the little store. Some necklaces cannot be completed without purchasing items, which was boring), and fishing. Yes. Fishing. You click the horizon. Wait for the bobber to drop. Click the bobber. Bam, fish. That was the whole thing.

Puzzles: There were a number of puzzles, which ranged from busy work (separate insect parts from seeds and count them, do math, write up a chart), to "push buttons in order that you saw them in the hallway," to "make one hundred snow cones for some guy until he tells you you did it right." None of these were especially entertaining or needed much use of your mind to complete them. At the end there is a completely nonsensical puzzle where you guide one of the Hardy Boys to jump onto a stone pathway... and he dissapears and reappears randomly around the pathway? That's not... how pathways work? I don't understand.

Snooping/Exploring: There was very little! Most of the locations are just long pathways to click through. I want to rummage through people's desks and sneak into their bedrooms, but we don't really get to do that much at all in this game.

Characters: Nancy Drew usually has a variety of colorful, weird, kooky characters. This time? We have an angry guy, a rambling woman who is more annoying than charming, and a guy and his daughter who play the parts of Stereotypical Hawaiian Native and Stereotypical Surfer Girl.

Also... this game did not age well at all. Even the updated version for steam was... yikes.