HeR Interactive’s 33rd installment to their PC/Mac Mystery Adventure games based on the classic female detective, Nancy Drew! Midnight in Salem released on December 3rd, 2019. The PC and Mac versions were made available on herinteractive.com, Amazon.com (affiliate link), and Steam as digital downloads. Herinteractive.com also offered exclusive physical copies for PC only, which were limited in quantity.
To quote the game description from HeR Interactive, here’s what the mystery game is about;
Nancy Drew unexpectedly finds herself in Salem, Massachusetts investigating an arson on the Hathorne estate. The Hathorne House was originally constructed by Judge John Hathorne, inquisitor of the infamous Salem witch trials and the final home to 102-year-old Frances Tuttle, his last direct descendant. When Tuttle passed away, the estate became city property and while the mayor was seeking a manager to oversee the estate the home burst into flames. The ongoing investigation has turned up little evidence but concerned citizens have accused Mei Parry of arson and are pressuring the police to arrest the secretive teenager. As Nancy races to uncover the truth behind the arson, she discovers connections to the house’s past with the Salem trials and finds herself drawn into a struggle with supernatural events that she simply can’t explain. Nancy’s convictions are put to the test. Are the ghosts real? Has Salem’s dark history come to life, or is there someone else to blame? Time is short, and Nancy must find the answers before the clock strikes midnight.
Quick Navigation:
- Walkthrough (Coming soon!)
- Puzzles
- Environments
- Characters
- Inventory (Coming soon!)
- Bonus Content (Coming soon!)
This game was built on a new platform, Unity, by new teams. MiPuMi, ToyBox, and others along with HeR Interactive are listed in the credits. Since the game was built on Unity, this opened the door of possibilities. The environments are even more 3D, with navigation and controls to match this visual. Players can click and drag their view around to look up, down, a bit left, and a bit right with each step they take. The inventory and objects in the game now have an inspection mode, where players can look closer at the items and manipulate them. Text on letters and books have a new feature to click to read the text in a more legible font. More characters than any Nancy Drew game before are in this title, including NPCs (non-playable characters that are seen in the world, but are not suspects or important to engage with.)
Set in Salem, MA, Nancy is called in by her ‘frenemy’ Deirdre Shannon to help her in her investigation to clear her cousin, Mei Parry’s name in an arson case. Mei will not give her alibi, so Nancy and Deirdre must track down clues and other suspects’ alibis, all while stumbling across ghostly hallucinations, thefts, and witch-like magic tricks to figure out what is really going on in the small town.
This mystery game has far less puzzles than previous Nancy Drew mysteries, as this one leads with story and character.
Other features:
An autosave feature was added to the game, which helps in case of game crashes, freezes or second chance situations. Advanced features in the game settings allow for far more abilities, like changing the resolution, dialogue skipping, dialogue overlays, turning volumes down for music, audio, sound effects, and music, and more.
Achievements in Midnight in Salem replace the trophy awards and badge stars from past games, but as an added bonus, these achievements are also applied to Steam achievements. You can still view collected awards within the game menu. Unfortunately, in order to get four of the awards, you must play the ending of the game three different ways to get three of the awards, and the fourth is for playing all puzzles on Master level.
At the end of the game, Nancy has a one-sided phone conversation with Ned about possibly revisiting Austria with him for vacation, but other than that, there are no teasers to the next game’s mystery or location.
There is, however, a trivia question to answer at the end of the credits.
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