Nancy Drew - Midnight in Salem 12+

Nothing like the old games (in a bad way)

New technology is bound to happen and I'm fine with it, but the game itself is just really bad and totally uninteresting. I enjoyed so many of the previous games but this one has a boring story and is actually not a game at all. You have no choices regarding your actions, there are no puzzles, no games, nothing. You have to select all of the options in each area to continue, and it's just listening to really, really boring conversation. There's nothing to figure out and the story is obviously someone's idea of a topic people care about, but we don't. It's just really, really boring. I never finished because I just couldn't put up with it, when hours after I started there was still just nothing stimulating going on. I'm also really angry that the company won't update any of their older games, so all of the money I spent on previous Nancy Drew games is lost to me because I can't play them on an Apple device anymore. They're not even available for downloading to my new device in the app store.

Many many flaws

I’ve been playing Nancy Drew Mysteries for years and have never had a problem with Her Interactive before. I have all of the available mac downloadable games and have never had issues until downloading this game. Midnight in Salem does not have the same type of gameplay as the other games. After playing this game for 15 minutes I believe this choice made by the developers was a huge mistake. The graphics are extremely choppy. It’s super difficult to move around and get Nancy to select objects. It says to right click to look around the frame. Whenever I right click the frame shoots to the left. There is a ton of lag and the game freezes constantly. I’ve had to give up on the game completely because one of the puzzles you have to complete to move on to the next scene just opens up to a black screen when you try to solve it. You can click on the puzzle and hear pieces moving but you can’t see what you’re doing so it’s impossible to complete. This game is a huge dissapointment to us Nancy Drew fans who waited forever for it to come out. What’s truly dissapointing is this game has a great concept and could have been amazing had they chosen to stick to the original format.

I’ve filed an issue with Her Interactive on their website. If they can fix these issues, I will update my review. Until then, do not waste your money like I did. I recommend you download any of the other games. Ghost of Thornton hall is especially great.

Developer Response ,

Hi Mblake3 -

Thanks for the feedback! First, does your Mac meet the minimum game requirements?

Mac Minimum System Requirements:

Processor: Intel Core i3 3.00 GHz
Memory: 4 GB RAM (absolute minimum – 6 GB RAM recommended)
Graphics: Intel HD 4000, 2 GB of video RAM
Hard Disk Drive: 8 GB storage space

If they do, then I would also suggest that you tweak your advanced settings to the following:

Advanced settings
-
Graphics: custom
Window: borderless window
Res: 1440x900 or one lower is fine too
Vsync: on
Texture quality: low
Anti-aliasing: low or med
Anisotropic: on
Anti-aliasing: low or med
Post-Processing: low
Shadows: soft
Shadow quality: low

If you are still having issues, please feel free to contact us at techsupport@herinteractive.com.

should have stuck to the old technology

I appreciate the fact that Her Interactive wanted to improve things and make the game more realistic (or whatever their aim was), but the 3D feeling was just unnecessary to me and I honestly hate it. It took me forever to even learn how to navigate and to realize the fact that you can interact directly with the objects you pick up (SPOILER BUT HELPFUL- the key you find in the first scene is in fact the key, you just have to like twist it right). I am not finished with the game yet, as I have little motivation to play and am regretting spending $22 on it. It’s disappointing because I LOVE Nancy Drew games so much AND I just taught a mini lesson (I’m a college student) on Salem so I was stoked for this game but the graphics and technological features really fell flat to me. If this game used the old features, I’m sure I’d love it. Overall just really disappointed and honestly sad :(

Developer Response ,

Hi emcdonaugh17 - We appreciate your feedback and I will pass it along to the design team.