I will admit that women, especially little girls, are a mystery to me. For example, while playing Her Interactive’s Nancy Drew: The White Wolf of Icicle Creek, I found it perfectly reasonable that girls would enjoy being a girl detective solving intricate clues in unusual settings. But do they really also fantasize about making beds and collecting damp towels?
Nancy does both puzzle solving and bed making in Creek, the first game in the long-running PC adventure game series to be ported to the Wii.
A Mix of Chores, Puzzles and Conversation
In Creek, girl detective Nancy is hired to investigate mysterious accidents at the Icicle Creek Lodge, an inn serving the snowy Rocky Mountains. Since much of the staff has left, Nancy is convinced to go undercover as the Lodge’s cook and maid.
Fortunately, housekeeping is not especially onerous. Each morning Nancy must make the bed (simply by clicking on it) and put the towels in a laundry bag, which isn’t remotely interesting but which takes little time, and cook meals in a pleasant but unchallenging cooking mini-game.
A lot of time is spent talking to lodge staff and guests, including a somewhat paranoid athlete and a woman who spends her time at the lobby window with binoculars. Everyone is suspicious, but no one is particularly interesting, although you will you’ll still have to talk to them many times to push the story forward, although you will often not have the opportunity to ask the questions you would ask in real life, like “how come my master key doesn’t work on one door.”
The game offers up standard Nancy Drew mysteries. A building has been blown up, a white wolf has been spooking the locals, a letter indicates one guest is holding a grudge against the lodge’s owner. A few times Nancy must use her quick wits to save herself from a deadly predicament.
An Excess of Technical Issues and Design Flaws
Nancy spends a lot of time out in the snow, where she searches for clues. Wandering about is annoying due to the game’s constant load times. Since the game is a Myst-style point and click adventure in which the player simply moves from one still image to the next, you would not expect the game to take much processing power, yet almost every time Nancy takes a step a “loading” notice appears on screen for two to seven seconds. To make things worse, longer jaunts are indicated by animated walking scenes that I could at least describe as “brief” if not for their even longer load times.
Throughout, the game suffers from poor design choices. Every time you save your progress you must type in a name for your save file (I just would type “1” to save time). Entries in Nancy’s journal of in-game events are put in random order, and there is no way to look at the most recent entries except to simply move down line by line until you find something new. The clunky inventory system won’t allow you to quickly swap one item for another, even though that has been a common option in adventure games for decades.
Game Play - A Mixed Bag
For the most part, Creek is a collection of simple mini-games. Nancy is told to put orange danger cones on the thin parts of a pond, and this turns out to be a variation of the casual game Mine Sweeper. She has to play several rounds of a somewhat interesting, checkers-like board game called Fox and Goose. When Nancy drives a snowmobile, the player must guide her around trees and rocks. And Nancy must, over and over, engage in snowball fights with a young girl. The latter has the most Wii-like gameplay, in which you flick the remote to throw a snowball, but it gets old quickly.
Towards the end, there are less mini-games and more adventure-game-style puzzles, the best of which involves giving commands to the wolf. Some of the puzzles suffer from being poorly clued. There is a journal in the game with an encoded message that according to <A HREF=http://www.uhs-hints.com/uhsweb/hints/ndrew16/1.php>UHS Hints</A> gives several useful clues, but I didn’t come across any hints in the game on how to decipher it.
A Lesser Nancy Drew Effort
One of the hallmarks of the Nancy Drew games has been an educational-historical theme, but there is just a smidge of that in Creek, which doesn’t really teach the player much of anything about much of anything. It is yet another aspect of the game that suggests that not a lot of effort was put into this one, an impression underlined by the dull characters and the abrupt, absurd dénouement.
Even though the primary target demographic for the Nancy Drew games has always been young girls, I rank several games in the series among the better adventure games of the last decade. But while Creek has only a little of the tedious busywork and endless chores of the series’ worst games, it also lacks the intricate puzzles and engaging stories in terrific entries like Curse of Blackmoor Manor and The Final Scene.
But I am not a young girl, so perhaps I am completely off the mark on Creek, and the mix of cooking, a friendly wolf and collecting laundry will completely fulfill every female adolescent’s fantasies. And if it is true that girls dream of cleaning and cooking, they are welcome to come over to my apartment and turn those dreams into reality.
