In her usual a-friend-of-a-friend-needs-help style, Nancy has arrived at Captain’s Cove to investigate the mysteriously cavorting carousel, and other assorted amusement park problems. As in the Scarlet Hand, the facility is shut down, leaving her just a few folks to deal with. This time around, a large part of the mystery is sorting out what the various suspects might achieve by closing down the park — it’s not obvious what the advantages of closing the park are.

The remaining park staff include Harlan Bishop, security guard and ex-con; Ingrid Corey, engineering chief with far too much disposable income; Elliott Chen, art director and procrastinator extraordinaire; and Joy Trent, accountant and daughter of the park’s former owner. In addition, Nancy is in close contact with Paula Santos, the park’s current owner and the one who called her in; Lance Huffington, who may (or may not) have suffered whiplash when the Tidal Terror roller coaster lurched to a halt; Tink, the carousel’s loving caretaker who is off on a fishing trip to recover emotionally from the heartbreak of the stolen carousel horse (did we mention that one of the horses has been stolen?); and several others. As in previous games, Bess and George and Frank and Joe are also available by phone.

As the series progresses, the games’ solutions are becoming more and more intricate. Haunted Carousel isn’t a simple whodunnit. There are several mysteries woven together that you have to untangle before calling it a day. That’s more interesting than walking a direct path to a straightforward solution, but it can also leave you with a bit of confusion and a few dangling plot twists that don’t seem to have been resolved.

Once more, the interface has been upgraded. Her Interactive must have heard our cries for a simpler time-keeping system (four years after the fact …) and time has been banished. There is no more clock at all. Day and night are of no consequence — it’s always time for more sleuthing. That’s less realistic, but also much less awkward.

Nancy’s laptop has replaced her PDA and holds plenty of useful hints and tips. As with Ghost Dogs, we rarely had to resort to a walkthrough — her to-do list helped keep us focused on what we needed to do next, and her journal helped remind us of what we had already accomplished. You can call these a crutch for incompetent detectives, but they also help keep things straight between the designers and the players — there are times when the designer is trying to tell us one thing, and we interpret it as something entirely different. When HI repeats the clue on Nancy’s laptop, we are much more likely to understand what they’re trying to tell us and much less likely to go wandering down some unintended rabbit hole.

We should also mention Nancy’s cell phone. It’s a thoroughly handy gadget. We think it’s shown up in previous games, but we haven’t described it before. It automatically records any phone numbers you find (so you don’t have to scramble to note them yourself), and its directory finds any number you want pretty quickly.

There actually isn’t much of a storyline to describe. You’ve got to keep talking to people, and keep nosing around, until you can figure out who all has done what, and why. Along the way, you get to repair and master a few arcade games — Breakout is resurrected as Barnacle Blast, and who can beat Squid Toss? You’ve also got to fix the carousel’s broken pipe organ. The puzzle parts of the game deal with getting the park back into operational shape (can’t the regular staff do anything?) while staying in one piece.

Meanwhile, there’s a missing carousel horse to account for, and research into why it might be missing leads to the educational part of the game. (The ND games always seem to have something of this sort, and that’s one reason why we like to play them.) It turns out that designing carousels was a highly developed art, especially at the turn of the previous century. While the haunted carousel’s designer, Rolfe Kessler, doesn’t appear to have actually existed, we did enjoy learning about carousels and their horses.

And last, but not least …

Quick side note. The interface is identical to previous Nancy Drew games. In fact, to repeat from our last review: your cursor (a magnifying glass) glows red when it rolls over a hotspot, and turns into an arrow pointing in the appropriate direction when you can turn, back up, move closer, and so forth. The music is nice without being intrusive, the sound effects are good (giving you clues at times), and the animations are as good as they’ve been for the last several in the series (3-D animations; better than cartoons). If you’ve played earlier games in the series, you probably won’t need to look at the manual.

Second side note. We didn’t go back and check the previous games, but as best we can remember, Lani Minella has voiced Nancy Drew for the entire series so far, and she’s done an excellent job. All the voice acting is good, but Minella has maintained a constantly believable voice throughout the entire series — props to her.

As we said, the plot isn’t the main draw this time around, but the carousel hijinks, the missing horse, the unsolved jewel theft, and Joy’s missing mother all combine to make this one more enjoyable addition to the series. The individual puzzles were good; not too easy and not too hard. It’s not Evie’s favorite — she ranks it about the middle of the pack, but that still means it’s a pretty good game. Dad doesn’t enjoy amusement parks as much as Mayan archaeology, so it doesn’t earn top marks from him, either. But it’s always a fast spin on the merry-go-round when Nancy’s in charge — this one was fun and we’re looking forward to the next one.