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St. Louis, Missouri. Nancy has a meet-up with old high school gal-pal Maya Nguyen, now a budding reporter for her college newspaper. Since Maya has an interview at the old Royal Palladium theatre, she and Nancy have arranged to meet there.

But when Nancy arrives, she is just in time to hear Maya’s scream as she’s abducted. And once more, Nancy’s on the case. (She’s like any sleuth in a continuing series; you start to wonder just what it is about Nancy and all the mysterious things that happen to her friends.)This is how Nancy Drew: The Final Scene begins.

The facts: The Royal Palladium, built in the 1920s, is about to be torn down. In its heyday, it hosted performances by Harry Houdini and other great illusionists. In fact, that was its initial purpose, to be a premium venue for magicians of all sorts. As with the puzzle-mansion back in Message in a Haunted Mansion, the design of the building gives a reason for a game full of trap doors, hidden passages and other architectural tricks.

Its owner has booked one last movie premiere, and Brady Armstrong, star of “Vanishing Destiny,” (the new flick) has arrived to lend his smoldering wholesomeness to the proceedings. (Don’t believe us? Just ask his agent, Simone Mueller.) Joseph, the projectionist who has worked here for fifty years, is about to be cast out in search of a new gig, while Nick Falcone, spearhead of H.A.D.I.T. (Humans Against the Destruction of Illustrious Theaters) has set up camp in the foyer to protest the imminent demolition. Aside from several folks you contact by phone, these four are your only human resources and your list of suspects. (Aside from the initial scream, you don’t hear from Maya until you’ve secured her rescue. You are going to rescue her in time, aren’t you?)

As soon as you realize Maya is missing, you get a muffled phone call on the in-house line threatening that if the theater is torn down, Maya will perish with it. Since the demolition is scheduled in three days, that doesn’t leave you much time to untangle this mystery and rescue her.

All of the theaters “inhabitants” turn out to have motives to kidnap Maya (since discovering some of these motives is part of the game, we won’t spoil your fun by listing them). The police won’t start investigating until she’s been missing 48 hours or until they have physical evidence, so that leaves it up to you. Well, the others all offer to help, but since you never see them away from their “stations,” it makes you doubt how serious they are about discovering her in time.

So you’ve got to handle all the tasks that Nancy is used to by now — interviewing witnesses and suspects, sticking your nose into every corner you can find, picking up anything that isn’t nailed down, and solving onscreen puzzles of various sorts. Oh, and figuring out what is actually going on.

The interface is standard for this stage in the series — 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 two or three games 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.

We’re starting to be able to classify the various tasks in these games. You’ve got to:

• talk to people, which includes both figuring out whom to talk to, and when, and figuring out what the best responses and leading questions are
• find places
• find objects in those places
• figure out which objects combine with which hotspots
• solve onscreen puzzles
• unravel the mystery

Ideally, a mystery game excels at all of these. That’s not common, and it isn’t thoroughly the case in The Final Scene. Let’s go through the list. There are only four people to talk to, and (if you’re going to find them), you’ll find each in the same place — Brady in the men’s dressing room, Simone in the women’s dressing room (which she’s commandeered for her command post), Joseph in the projection room and Nick at the snack bar in the lobby. The trick is figuring out when each will be there — and when they won’t, so you can more thoroughly search their rooms. In The Final Scene, there are two or three times when the only thing for us to do was to make another circuit of these four locations, hoping that one or the other would have something further for us. That’s a little frustrating, since it feels sort of random.

On the other hand, as far as we could tell we did a pretty good job of picking the right responses. Of course, it could be that there aren’t any wrong responses … we’re not sure.

The various locations run the full range from easy to amazingly obscure. The Final Scene does a nice job of mixing them up. (This is one area where we can insistently ignore the obvious — we didn’t even realize there was a projectionist’s booth until we checked the walkthroughs.)

The items we had to collect were also nicely mixed between the obvious and the obscure. There aren’t many, which made figuring out which had to be used where a bit easier (so a few more would have been appreciated). We will pass on one word of wisdom. Bubblegum. Think about it.

There are fewer onscreen puzzles than in previous games in the series. None are so difficult that we had to resort to the walkthroughs and (wonder of wonders!) most didn’t reset so that when we had to go back we had to work them all over again.

The mystery itself has several nice twists and turns — none of the suspects were ruled out until the final few minutes of the game.

It didn’t take us as long to play The Final Scene as it did any of the previous games. That may be because we were less patient about figuring it out ourselves, but we think it’s more because there were several times when we just looked at each other blankly, without any idea what to do next. Which means more trips to the walkthroughs, and completion in about five hours. It might be pertinent to note that we had less than a page of notes, where other games have taken several pages.

The bottom line? It’s another fun investigation with Nancy. It’s more realistic than most, but the puzzle solving is easier. We enjoyed it, and are ready to move on to Nancy’s next case!