Nancy Drew is back with another great mystery

ByABC News
October 27, 2007, 8:21 PM

— -- Want a fun spooky mystery to put your family in the mood for Halloween? The newest Nancy Drew PC mystery may be just the treat. To solve this mystery, you must explore an old mansion and cemetery at night, during a thunderstorm. Eerie.

Nancy Drew: Legend of the Crystal Skull, the 17th computer mystery in this series, adds a new game play feature to its award-winning formula. Not only can you play as Nancy Drew, but also, at times, you can play as her best friend Bess as you solve a mystery set in New Orleans by questioning characters and snooping around for clues.

Bruno Bolet has recently died in the old mansion, and when you stop by to check on the deceased's grandson Henry, a person wearing a skeleton costume accosts you. Instead of being scared away, you decide to check into whether Bruno Bolet's death was really from a heart attack.

So begins this carefully constructed mystery where paying attention to details leads to clues. For example, early on, you will find a miniature scale model of a cemetery in the great room of the mansion and discover that the cemetery is adjacent to the mansion's garden. By exploring the model carefully, you uncover a glass eye inside one of the minimausoleums. This starts you on an odyssey to find all of the glass eyes hidden around the property. Likewise, you will stumble upon secret rooms, passageways with peepholes and a cemetery full of clues, including some that are found on headstones.

Unlike some of the past Nancy Drew mysteries where you could wander through a lot of scenes without finding anything, this one limits your scope. You can only explore a few rooms and areas at a time, with new ones opening up when you find the right clue. In this manner, the game never overwhelms you. And if you aren't making progress with your sleuthing, you need only look more closely in the few scenes open to you.

As with all the Nancy Drew mysteries, this game is loaded with puzzles. For one, you will need to make grave rubbings to decipher a code to open a minicrypt.