Nancy Drew®: The Secret of Shadow Ranch

was a difficult one but always good to think outside the box

I quite like this one. It gets you in the gut a few times, then at the end takes you out with the iconic line should you game over. You know the one. also we <3 Dave Gregory

I love all the Nancy Drew games! I am an old school gal and have been playing her games for decades but with the newer computers it was getting harder to play some of them until I found steam!!

Part of my chronological playthrough of the Nancy Drew series. If I were not hellbent on doing them all in order, I would have rage quit this one. It was so monotonous until the last day, nothing but chores and tasks that weren't even really puzzles, just conversions and busy work. I know this one is a nostalgic favorite for some people, but the game play just simply wasn't enjoyable to me at all. I would skip this one.

This was a tricky one; some of the puzzles took a little work to figure out, but the dialogue was excellent, the backstory of the treasure and the people involved was surprisingly romantic and melancholy, the whodunit aspect was good fun, and the puzzles were great, though a few were less fun than I'd like; the slot machine and the bridle puzzle in particular, but the rest of the puzzles were interesting and fun.

Game is ok, but the real killer is the tedium of getting Bob ready to ride. Open gate, turn, open door, turn, grab saddle, turn, open door, go to Bob, apply saddle, lift stirrup, tighten cinch three times, click Bob, click saddle, click gate, click path. EVERY TIME. Ditto the tedium of having to take of the saddle, put it in the stable, and get back outside.

I love ND games and I'm aiming to play all of them, but out of all 14 games I've played so far, this one was my least favorite. The story line is very easy to stall in; you can accidentally miss a trigger very easily and end up getting stuck somewhere without realizing what you missed in order to get to the next part of the story. Some of the puzzles are very unclear and clunky, and the horse riding mechanic is not intuitive at all. I also found a lot of the characters to be kind of flat and uninteresting, and although I love the Western environment, the world feels limited.

I would recommend this to fans of the Nancy Drew games, but not a first time player. I found this to be so tedious I just started shamelessly using walkthroughs because I was so annoyed.

classic favorite. I left my game on overnight hense hourly play.