Nancy Drew®: Message in a Haunted Mansion

nancy once again slunts and sleuths her way through the lies and delivers baddie BUSSY truth

Message in a Haunted Mansion is the third Nancy Drew adventure game. In this game, Nancy goes to help a family friend uncover the reason for the strange accidents and ghostly occurences that have been plaguing her bed-and-breakfast. The mystery in this game was pretty simple, but I enjoyed it. The suspects were all pretty strong and I wasn't absolutely sure who the culprit was until pretty close to the end of the game. The puzzles were pretty enjoyable. There were a couple that were tricky or not very clear, but they were mostly straightforward and just difficult enough to be enjoyable. One of the first puzzles you do was very annoying. The controls are not very precise but you need to put the pieces in precise places to solve it, and the differences between the pieces are very subtle. There were also one or two places where you had to redo a long puzzle if you had to go back and check something, which was a little tedious. I enjoyed the aesthetic of the house and the spooky vibes. The ghost activity was more subtle than in some of the other games with "supernatural" mysteries, but it still made me jump a couple of times. The "scary" cutscenes weren't particularly impressive, but the ghost noises, moving shadows, and other smaller ghost phenomena made a subtly spooky atmosphere I really enjoyed. Of the early games, this was the one that showed its age the most for me. The animation and 3D characters are not very good looking, especially in the cutscenes. A number of the papers you find are written in spidery cursive that was very thin and hard to read blown up on a large monitor. The controls almost aren't precise enough for one of the early puzzles. Navigating around the mansion was a little weird. There are directional arrows to go back but to go forward, the cursor looks the same as it does when there's a hotspot. Overall, Message in a Haunted Mansion was pretty middle of the road for me. I liked the old San Francisco but subtly spooky vibes in the mansion. The story and puzzles were both good but didn't stand out from the other games. The technical issues were annoying but didn't make the game unplayable. 6/10

This was the very first game that introduced me to the world of Nancy Drew adventures. I played this story back in childhood, when I used to collect games on CD discs. That was exactly when my love for detective stories, the Nancy Drew universe, mysteries, and investigations began. The game gently immerses the player in fascinating details about the architecture and atmosphere of San Francisco, touches on elements of Chinese culture, and explores the everyday life of Victorian mansions in the XIX century. The story itself is inspired by urban legends of that era, and it becomes incredibly engaging to dive deeper into the mystery through newspaper articles, book notes, and letters written by the game’s characters. What I especially love is that everything “ghostly” and supernatural always ends up having a logical explanation rooted in reality. It makes the story feel believable and allows you to truly feel like the main character of a real detective investigation. I wholeheartedly recommend this game to anyone who loves mysteries and atmospheric adventures!

I have almost all of the Nancy games through steam, but I won't be purchasing anymore through here. At one point or another all the games functioned as they should, then steam did an update a while ago and now most of the games I have I can not play, some games just won't simply load or give me an error when they do. I have spent hours and days looking online to try and solve the issues I'm having, to no avail. I'm not sure if others are also having this issue as most of the time others are able to resolve it. So it's not that I'm not recommending the Nancy games. I am simply not recommending purchasing them here on steam from my experience. All the Nancy games are fun, exciting and fulfilling.

Хорошая игра, но головоломок, увы, мало. Проходится данная часть за несколько часов. Рекомендую фанатам Нэнси Дрю!

It's very intriguing!

so many beautiful rooms :')

An excellent game of mystery and intrigue that I'd recommend to players of ages 10 and up! The puzzles can stump you, but they don't feel impossible. Voice acting is great, and so is the story! Every character seems to have their own motive; it's hard to discern what or who is behind the mystery! I wish that these games would get a remaster!

I really wanted to like this game - but genuinely compared to all the other nancy drew games it's just so lack luster that it's genuinely hard to even finish, the story is extremely slow to start and just seems generally pretty dull especially compared to the other nancy drew games. Because it's an older nancy drew game - it has the classic smaller screen for game play that many of the older games have but unlike the other games, this back fires immensely because you can barely read anything due in part to both extremely small text but then also because the game uses a variety of different forms of cursive (some legible and others not); unlike other nancy drew games, nancy never reads anything out loud from the various things she picks up either. The voice acting is not only awkward and robotic sounding, but there is also this issue where when tasks are completed - instead of only getting dialogue options for confirming the completion of the task, you get both dialogue options for confirming that you did or didn't complete the task, often with the confirmation of not completing the task as the first option. There is also this consistent issue, where a pop up warning occurs saying there is some issue with the sound, and ultimately this leads to the entire game crashing - there's no telling when this warning will occur, and when it does any progress not already saved is lost.

Im going to be biased because of nostalgia, however this game was another one that I played in my childhood. And I LOVE IT. It's spooky and the music is so good someone even put it on spotify and i listen to it obsessively. This one made me constantly switch back and forth between two people on who was the suspect, and the way you catch them is HILARIOUS because in reality that person would definitely be a goner, but nancy gets hit on the head and wakes up fine in over half of these games so physical inaccuracies are part of the charm of it all I suppose lol. This game had actual history and facts wrapped into it as well which I enjoy and appreciate! I love reading in this game(its my favorite part) and a lot of the stuff was pretty accurate. I won't spoil anything but the way you find whats causing all the ghosts in the house is cool too. All in all a nice and cozy game that lets you take your time figuring stuff out. the only thing I didnt like was the very ending with the safe combination because it expects you to remember EVERY character you come across AND what sequence to put them in, which unless you were taking note of every little thing(which I do thankfully) you wouldn't correlate it or at least not the sequence. Thankfully there ARE walkthroughs out there and I dont think they diminish the gameplay at all so just look up anything if you get stuck, I had to do it a couple times myself. if you want to figure it out on your own though, it gets frustrating but is WORTH IT when you figure it out.