Appletell Review: Nancy Drew: Trail of the Twister for Mac OS X

Sister site (or is it a Brother site?) Appletell offers up a mixed review of the puzzle-adventure game by Her Interactive, Inc.

Naturally, anything with the Nancy Drew name on it involves some sort of mystery. This one involves a lot of weather (I love-hate that expression), a $100 million research grant competition and a possible saboteur. Nancy is brought into the meteorological fold after one competing group begins to experience seemingly deliberate and nearly fatal equipment failures.

From the review:

Throughout her investigations, Nancy will meet some quirky and suspicious characters, piece together many clues, and play quite a few mini-games.

She’ll also have a lot to learn, as this game works really hard to teach you about meteorology. You’ll also learn tornado safety, but hopefully you’ve got that down… The wealth of tasks and mini-games helps to keep things fresh through throughout the game, and that’s good, because the story itself is a bit slow and never really gets all that involving. It’s hard to immerse yourself into a mystery when you don’t really care about what’s going on.

This problem is exacerbated by the fact that a lot of the puzzles and mini-games don’t really have anything to do with the mystery itself. They work within the story, but don’t drive the story. As such, mystery solving often gets pushed aside so you can take quizzes, shop, do some filing, etc…

Nancy Drew: Trail of the Twister works more as a puzzle game than as a mystery adventure, but fans of the character will be happy with the familiarity.

Read [Appletell] Site []