Miss Marple and Nancy Drew paved the way for female detectives. And while the characters are products of their time, both have contributed to the image of strong females role models. Nancy’s latest adventure for the Nintendo Wii is Nancy Drew: The White Wolf of Icicle Creek. Although I think the Wii version does the series no favors, you may like it.
You see, sweet 16-year-old Nancy is still solving mysteries, and this time, she travels to Canada. No, it isn’t for skiing or hockey. Instead, she visits Icicle Creek Lodge to solve a variety of mysteries. The lodge’s owner, Chantal, hired Nancy to get to the bottom of a series of horrid accidents that have been happening for almost a year straight. Guests became sick after eating some potato salad (even though the ingredients were used in other dishes), icy stairs on which a guest tripped, slashed tires, explosions, avalanches, and a mysterious wolf that seems to be at the heart of it all. Add to the mix an intriguing cast of characters: an art student, a bird watcher, a groundskeeper, a paranoid ski champion, and a Canadian man on vacation. This is perhaps one of the best interactive mysteries to date. Is it one of the guests, or is the wolf really the cause of it? Red herrings abide as this game will kept one wondering who’s really at fault.
Gameplay is in the form of a traditional first-person adventure. Nancy will traverse the different rooms and areas of the lodge while during chores (housekeeping and cooking). Movement is rather intuitive as you just point the Wii-mote to one of the spaces of the screen and see if it changes to an arrow. The same is true for other items of interest: Sometimes it’ll be a magnifying lens, while other times it’ll be a hand. Plus, if you’re like me and have a hard time finding items, you can turn on a sparkle function that highlights points of interest. Another important aspect to note is the inclusion of two difficulty levels. Junior detective gives you a task list to help give you clues on what needs to be done. Senior detective is just a harder game overall.
There also are a few minigames. There is fishing. You can clean the skating pond, which works a lot like Mine Sweeper (and is far more forgiving than that game). You can throw snowballs at the groundskeeper’s daughter Freddie. For this game, you aim and “throw” the Wii-mote. It messes me up as it places the cursor around one of the coroners and takes a few moments to properly re-aim. The first time I attempted to play the minigame, I could not get it to work. There are some snow-driving segments. Ultimately, you just drive slowly and don’t hit anything. (It isn’t very interesting as you follow the moving area.) The last minigame is cooking. It is pretty easy as long as you follow directions. However, the motion sensitive controls are spotty. The motions either easily perform the task or make it difficult. Cutting things is almost a joke as I didn‘t even have to try to move the Wii-mote very much. Flipping food or flaking sugar on top of pancakes is frustrating; it requires you to raise the Wii-mote all the way to “stop” at the “top” of the screen.
The game is wonderful to look at. The lodge is full of various knick-knacks and incredible photographs. Moose heads hang on the walls. A fireplace roars in the commons room. An incredible snow fort is outside the lodge, and the rest of the area feels like a peaceful wintry area. The problem? Load times are everywhere. Take a step, load time. Call someone on the phone to get information, no matter how trivial, load time. Talk to someone, load time. It is horrible. There really is no excuse for this in this day and age. Games across all systems have found ways to decrease, mask or almost eliminate load times. I do not understand how this could happen.
Other things I do not understand are the options. Yes, this refers to the sparkle function. But every time you load a saved game, the options revert to their defaults. This means no sparkle function, no matter how much one loves it. This means if you like the teal matte color over the black, it will revert to black. Period. Why have options if they’re not going to be saved? Another oddity is the fact that all saved games must be named. OK, this is nothing too odd as PC games do this almost all the time. But every time the game is saved, it has to be renamed. Yep, those awesome titles that can be created are not saved and make your life a tad more difficult. I quickly found myself giving my saves one-letter names.
The game sounds nice. Nancy’s footsteps are heard as she wanders the grounds. Cabinets and doors squeak as you open them. There also are the stereotypical dial tone and ringing of the phone. Music is pleasantly ambient and sets the mood for a pleasant mystery. However, the true joy of the game is the voice acting. Every little part of human interaction is fully voiced. Nancy sounds perky and upbeat. Ollie, the groundskeeper, has a southern drawl to his timbre, and Yanni, the skier, sounds Russian. It truly brings the game’s universe to life! It nails the universe perfectly.
If we look at Nancy Drew: The White Wolf of Icicle Creek overall, it is a decent game. It has all the proper elements of what could be considered a “classic” adventure game. It is accessible, has great voice acting, and is an intriguing mystery. The problems with the game are the horrid and constant load times, the resetting of the options, an odd save system and spotty Wii-mote motions. In this case, the Wii’s version of The White Wolf of Icicle Creek does not do Nancy’s latest adventure justice. And that is a shame, because if everything flowed a little better, little flaws would not matter as much. It would have held my attention longer.
I highly suggest that you rent Nancy Drew: The White Wolf of Icicle Creek for the Wii if it interests you. See if the game jives with you more than it did with me. There is a PC version available, but I have no clue how good it is. According Velea Gloriana, it is a pleasant experience. (Please read her review for her perspective.) In this case, the PC route may be the way to go. Nancy really needs to find a new travel agent.
