Just like Nancy Drew, you have to solve a mystery - who murdered Jake Rogers at Paseo Del Mar High School. You search for clues, some hidden behind pictures, others disguised as page borders and highlighted sequences on bulletin boards. A lot of what you need to decode this way is described in the library, so it's a good idea to get the library key from Aunt Eloise's safe as early as you can.

Other messages are hidden as mirror writing, or fragmented words, or scrambled sequences. Some of these have no relation to reality - why would a menu have highlighted letters spelling out a warning to you, or a book have a Morse code border with an important suggestion?

You meet four people, all high school students, who give you help. The scenes are all pretty realistically (if simplistically) drawn; the characters are simpler animations. You choose what you say to them, and they give realistic answers; in fact, some get pretty angry at you if you keep pestering them with questions. All of the dialogue (both Nancy's and others') is actually spoken, by decent voice actors.

Oh, and you switch discs a lot. Most of the game is on Disc 1, but all of the high school (except for the Boiler Room) is on Disc 2. Later in the game, when you're going back and forth between other locations and the high school, you're switching discs a lot.

The interface is pretty basic. A magnifying glass cursor (of course!) glows red when it rolls over a hotspot and blue when it reaches a scrollable edge. In most places, you can turn in a complete circle and look all around you, but there are some aggravating locations you can't get to (like up the school stairs). Of course, we assume that there aren't any clues hidden there, so it doesn't matter that we can't get there, but still …. You have to locate about eight key items (yes, two are keys) to advance the plot; with the right item in hand, you can turn on the video player, break into the teachers' lounge, and so forth.

We played through the whole game in about five hours. That includes some embarrassing running in circles when we overlooked key clues, and a couple of times that we pulled up Linda Shaw's walkthrough (http://members.aol.com/LShaw3457/NDSCK.html) to figure out what we were missing. And we got lost in the high school a few times. No, it's not a complex layout; we're just a little directionally challenged at times. (We didn't find the gym until the last hour or so ….)

It was cool. Actually, the best part was playing a computer game together. Since Dad spends so much time glued to the screen playing and writing about other games, it was nice to have a game that we could play together. It was all fun (except for the part where we got blown up - thank goodness for save games). We're looking forward to later games in the same series!

Minimum Requirements
Windows 95/98/ME (and played just fine on XP)
166 MHz Pentium Processor
16 MB RAM
8X CD-ROM Drive
DirectX Compatible