Product of the Month: "Nancy Drew: Warnings at Waverly Academy"

Nancy Drew: Warnings at Waverly Academy

List Price:	$19.99
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Average customer review:

Product Description

You, as Nancy Drew, are undercover at a prestigious girls' boarding school to discover the culprit behind threatening notes and dangerous accidents aimed at its valedictorian candidates! Is there a secret someone wants to protect or are the malicious pranks intended to scare away the competition - permanently? Solve the mystery before the threats turn deadly and you're expelled from the case!

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #91 in Video Games
• Brand: Her Interactive
• Model: WAC game
• Released on: 2009-10-13
• ESRB Rating: Everyone
• Platforms: Windows Vista, Windows XP
• Format: CD-ROM

Features

• Play as Nancy Drew and go undercover at a exclusive girls' academy
• Immerse yourself in the high school drama by receiving text messages, cramming for projects,and navigating social cliques
• Manage the school snack bar and play air hockey in the student lounge
• Stay up past curfew for some extra-curricular snooping, but don't get caught by the RA or you'll receive demerits
• Choose from two difficulty settings (Jr. or Sr. Detective) to allow players of all skill levels to solve the mystery

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Customer Reviews

A Solid Installment After being sorely disappointed by the previous installment in HER's usually fun Nancy Drew series, I admit I was a bit apprehensive about this one. Happily, however, I thoroughly enjoyed this solid game. Set at a girls' boarding school, Warnings at Waverly Academy offers a well-thought out plot centered around a mysterious series of threatening notes. As the story develops, it weaves both the fictitious history of the school as well as the real history of an American literary figure into a much more complex storyline than you might expect from the initial premise. There's a particularly clever twist that comes just when you think you've got it all figured out, and while you've probably pegged the bad guy--or girl, since Ned's the only male voice in this one--by the end, it's not a "well, duh," kind of solution. Practically all of Nancy's tasks are seamlessly integrated into the storyline, making even the usually somewhat tedious chores such as cooking feel important to the advancement of the game. I found the game immensely less difficult than some other recent ones--I'm looking at you, Ransom of the Seven Ships--and although some of the puzzles were head-scratchers, none were so baffling to drive me to online hints. There's also a nice diversity of tasks: some visual, some logical, some skill-based. The archetypal characters at the school are distinctive and interesting, with what come across as actual personalities and motivations--which is good, because there are quite a few of them, another welcome change from the last game. The addition of texting made the story feel very contemporary and real. Although the setting was fairly limited with little exploration available, the graphics were nicely rendered and the music quite pleasant. So what are the downsides? The world of the game isn't as deep as it could have been, with few locale additions as the story progresses; equally, the game isn't perhaps as long as some others, although it's certainly not the shortest, either. Suspense or even a sense of foreboding is distinctly lacking. Nancy's perils involve demerits rather than actual danger most of the time. And the nature of the storyline seems to dictate the audience for this game to a degree: girls and young women will probably appreciate the characters and school life aspects much more than would some older players. For some, too, the puzzles are probably too easy. Those caveats aside, I recommend this games wholeheartedly for the ND player more interested in plot than in puzzles and in secrets than in secret passages.