Physicality is less important than intellectuality.īut an equally important aspect is interpersonal relations.
Typically, only one or two moments in a game are timed, and they usually take the form of puzzles. The pacing is slow, relying more on exploration and looking for clues and connections than fast-fingered shooting or racing. The Nancy Drew games have remained similar in their gameplay over the last 21 years, even as point-and-click mysteries gave way to other, more popular styles of games. Which isn’t to say the games aren’t feminine – they just explore a different kind of femininity. Famously, when HeR launched in the mid-90s, the company was advised by publishers and retailers that girls were “ computer-phobic ” and not interested in video games, and that if they insisted on making games for girls, to “make it pink.” Instead, they did the opposite: leaning away from stereotypically feminine elements like fashion, beauty, and dating, and focusing instead on making rich mystery games with compelling narratives. One of the things that’s always distinguished HeR’s Nancy Drew games is the indie studio’s longtime devotion to creating and defending an unexpected kind of femininity. Nancy has come to town to discover who’s responsible for the arson of a historical landmark before local authorities pin it on Mei Parry, a local teenage girl who so far can only be proven guilty of being a misfit. Midnight in Salem is set in contemporary Massachusetts, against the backdrop of the Salem witch trials. Through years of near-silence, diehard fans – many of whom, like myself, had started playing the games as children and found that each new installment held up as we entered adulthood – wondered if the teased Midnight in Salem would ever come out.Īnd finally, last month, it did. It turns out a new CEO had recently stepped in, and virtually everything was changing - staff were laid off, the voice actress Lani Minella, who had played Nancy in every game since the beginning, was fired, and the studio was attempting to adopt a new game engine that felt more modern. Then in 2015, the games stopped coming on their reliable schedule. HeR had been churning out two games a year for almost two decades, starting with Secrets Can Kill in 1998. After 80+ years in the cultural canon, Drew is arguably a folk character - but this is the first gamers have seen of her in awhile.
Midnight in Salem is the 33rd game in HeR’s long-running series based on teenage private detective Nancy Drew. Despite being a detective story, Midnight in Salem respects and makes room for feminized modes of knowledge, like empathy and even witchcraft, alongside the dominant masculine ones. The latest Nancy Drew game by HeR Interactive, the long-awaited Midnight in Salem, doesn’t shy away from the gendered as well as religious and racial injustices of this history. In the case of law versus witches, there’s another implicit dichotomy at play, that of men versus women - or at least, the masculine versus the feminine. witches, a better-publicized rivalry that also falls under the general category of the reasonable, the empirical, the judicial, going up against the unruly, unlikely, supernatural. Of all the famous feuds in the world, one we don’t talk about enough is detectives vs.