Nancy Drew®: The Captive Curse

The Captive Curse is the 24th Nancy Drew adventure game. In this entry, Nancy travels to Castle Finster, a tourist destination in Germany. The owner has asked her to investigate rumors of a monster that is terrorizing the residents. The story was pretty enjoyable. The characters had a bit more depth to them compared to some of the other games. We even get a bit of development for Nancy and Ned's relationship, although it doesn't go anywhere. The mystery was interesting, and it was fun trying to piece together what was going on and which parts of the story were true, which were legends, and which were lies. You get enough clues along the way that the culprit isn't very surprising by the end, but there are enough red herrings along the way to keep you guessing for most of the game. There are a couple of minigames. They were actually kinda fun and not annoying because unlike in some of the other Nancy Drew games they're optional. The characters who have them will ask you to play them once, but you can decline if you want. While you can choose to play them later, you never have to. The puzzles in this one were pretty difficult in almost every sense. Some were clever and really required you to think them through. There were a few puzzles that didn't make much sense to me or needed big leaps in logic. There were also a number of places where solving the puzzles ended up being easy but actually finding the items or information you need to move forward was hard. I ended up needing to rely on a walkthrough more than with most of the other Nancy Drews I've played so far. The castle is really tough to navigate. Although I ultimately got used to it, the layout was really confusing and made the beginning of the game more difficult. There were a couple of places that were hard to navigate to within the screen, making some important items or directions to turn easily missable. There were also a couple of maze-like areas that were annoying to navigate even with a map and involved a lot of backtracking to look for other items later on. I liked the traditional German aesthetic of the castle and the general emphasis on folktales. Some of the scenes with the monster were genuinely pretty creepy. I also enjoyed the music. Overall, I liked The Captive Curse, although there were some parts that were annoying. The game was tough to navigate and some of the puzzles were difficult in bad ways, I genuinely enjoyed some of the more clever puzzles, the story, the characters, and the aesthetic. 7/10