Her Interactive, the company founded by Megan Gaiser in 1995 to design computer games for girls (their motto is "For girls who aren't afraid of a mouse"), has recently announced the impending release of their sixth Nancy Drew mystery game, "Secret of the Scarlet Hand." Visit Her Interactive's message boards, and you'll see that girls are not just a little impatient -- they're chomping at the bit. They want to know the date, the exact date the game will be released. When in summer? When in June? The moderators try to explain the timetables and economics of software production: Her Interactive can't give an exact date because programming modifications tend to mock fixed release dates.

Meanwhile, the girls use the waiting period to continue playing the other five titles in the series, including the third game, "Message in a Haunted Mansion" (MIAHM), released for the PC in November 2000. In a breakthrough move, Her Interactive partnered with DreamCatcher and Nintendo to produce the game for another platform, Game Boy Advance (GBA), and released the game in November, 2001. MIAHM is thus the only Her Interactive game available for a handheld gameplayer.

This is particularly good news for Mac users (of which I number), since the Nancy Drew games, alas, are only available for PC's. When I was given the Game Boy Advance version of MIAHM, I jumped up and down and then settled down to play. The story involves Nancy's trip to San Francisco to help Rose Green, a friend of Hannah Gruen (remember the trusty housekeeper in the Drew household?), who has purchased an old Victorian mansion and is renovating it into a bed and breakfast. However, Rose is having problems with unexplained accidents and occasional ghostly sightings. Just as in the other Nancy Drew games, the player takes on the role of Nancy through a first-person perspective, and the only way to find out who's sabotaging the mansion's renovation is to solve puzzles and talk to all the suspects (ahem, characters) repeatedly throughout the game for clues.

MIAHM presents a well-woven mystery, which hinges on late-19th and early-20th century San Francisco history and relies on written Chinese characters or "hanzi" for the central puzzle. Each of the four characters (Rose, the owner of the mansion; Abby, Rose's friend and co-financer of the renovation; Charlie, handyman; and Louis, the antiques dealer) remain plausible suspects until the end of the game. Players who know the Nancy Drew series will find themselves in a familiar world, since the GBA platform replicates the fine graphic detail of background scenery and the music remains similar and appropriately eerie. Movement around the play area also remains the same: the arrowed cursor indicates directions to move and the magnifying-spy glass cursor indicates hot spots to investigate more closely. The almost cartoonish graphic rendering of characters, which has always been a jarring contrast to the rich backgrounds in the Nancy Drew games, also remains.

The Game Boy Advance platform does contain some modifications, such as level of game play. The PC version allows players a choice in difficulty (junior or senior detective), which then affect the number and detail of clues. The GBA version doesn't allow the user to select any game play level. Another modification involves the way a player uses the phone, which helps Nancy gain clues. In the PC version, Nancy must locate a phone, which she can then use at any time in the game to call Emily, Bess and George, or Hannah. In MIAHM Game Boy Advance, the game screen already contains an icon of a cell phone, so that the player can call for clues at any time rather than returning to the phone's location in some room of the game. The PC version of MIAHM includes a journal in the Chinese Room, the guest room in which Nancy stays, and the journal records actions the player has completed. The Game Boy Advance version offers a PDA (personal digital assistant), which is located on the main play screen along with the cell phone; the PDA offers quick and easy access to clues Nancy has already found. Modifications like the cell phone and the PDA indicate that Her Interactive keeps an ear out for what girls want, and what girl wouldn't feel cool with her cell phone and PDA right at hand?

So what's not to like? My two main criticisms of the Game Boy Advance version include the lack of a user-determined game save option and the darkness of the screen. The PC version allows the player to save the game at any point and to have several saved game files going at the same time. The only thing approximating a saved game option in the GBA version is the password option in the main menu. When the player completes certain actions, she receives a password consisting of three zodiac animal images. When a player comes back to the game, she can access the password option from the main menu. The player then sees a screen with a 3 X 4 grid containing the 12 animals of the zodiac (another part of the central puzzle); by clicking either left or right on a row of animals, the player is returned to a pre-determined place in the game. In some of my game-playing sessions, I did not always complete the proper sequence of events to gain the password, so when I quit the game and then returned, clicking on one of the passwords invariably catapulted me further in the game than I had been; my game screen usually contained items I had not gotten and had no clue how to use.

The darkness of the GBA version results from transferring the rich denseness of the PC background graphics to a much smaller screen. Handhelds traditionally present viewing difficulties; that's why companies like Nintendo offer a battery of accessories like specially designed lights. For girls and for those of us who will never view a handheld without bifocals, ensuring that we play the game in sufficient light may be the only solution.

For girls with no savings or little allowance, or for folks with limited budgets wanting to buy a computer game designed for girls, the cost of the GBA version of "Message in a Haunted Mansion" may be prohibitive. MIAHM costs the same as other GBA games - close to $40, but that's a solid $15 more than the PC version, which sells for $24.95.

One last point: Her Interactive's Forum, a well-moderated group of bulletin boards for discussing all the games, is a fantastic resource! When you get stuck trying to figure out where to find the hanzi for "fire," just try going to gamefaqs.com or even nintendo.com. You will find no help. There are no walkthroughs, no hints. But travel to herinteractive.com and click on the bulletin boards, and you're likely to find your answer already posted by some ten-year old girl, whose username is "kittybobo3" and who really wishes "Secret of the Scarlet Hand" could be released during spring vacation, since she really cannot stand the tension of waiting until summer.

Nancy Drew: Message in a Haunted Mansion by Her Interactive
Platform: Game Boy Advance by Nintendo
Publisher: DreamCatcher Interactive, Inc.
Category: Adventure ESRB
Rating: E (for Everyone); best suited for girls, ages 8-13
Awards: Parents' Choice Award, Fall 2000 (for PC version)

Reviewer: Sandra Shattuck works occasionally as a college professor in literature and women's studies; some of her work focuses on gender and information technology. Her video game-playing history begins almost a decade ago when trips to the laundromat were enlivened by bouts with Ms. PacMan. As a single mom of an almost-10-year-old son, she finally learned to enjoy the Mario games on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and soon became a devotee of the two Nintendo 64 Zelda games. In a course she designed called Cybergrrls and Wired Women, her students taught her about a population of intrepid women gamers, who play Quake and other games online. These students also taught her that one can play on the Barbie website in subversive ways. Shattuck advises anyone wanting to learn more about girls and games to read Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins' From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games. She thanks Brenda Laurel of Purple Moon, Megan Gaiser of Her Interactive, Janese Swanson of Girl Tech, and Mary Flanagan of The Adventures of Josie True, for pioneering girls' interests in the tech world. May their numbers increase.

Copyright © 2002 by Sandra Shattuck

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