Playing old Nancy Drew games as a gothic heroine

Stop me if you’ve played this one before. You’re a heroine who arrives at a desolate location. Whether it’s a manor in the English moors, an exclusive boarding school upstate that happens to look like a castle, or a haunted traditional ryokan in Tokyo, these locales are as grand as they are unsettling. As you acquaint yourself with your new sublime surroundings and introduce yourself to a colorful cast of characters, you notice strange goings-on: weird noises in the night, people in shadowy cloaks moving about the halls, tales of monsters and ghosts and spook 'ems galore. Something is wrong. And you, Nancy Drew, must uncover the mystery behind it. 

So you begin examining elaborate family crests, poking around in hidden passages, and fiddling with chests that have the most unintuitive locks you’ve ever encountered. Often, this also involves quite a bit of reading. At the eleventh hour, you find a long-lost treasure, or a diamond, or a forgotten manuscript, and it is only then that the lone culprit responsible for all the terror you’ve endured reveals themselves. When the culprit confines you to some locked room with a swiftly descending death-trap, you use your ingenuity and wits to emerge victorious. You prove that any and all supernatural happenings are the machinations of man. You uncover the mysteries of the past. You leave the desolate location behind, though it always lingers in memory.

I’ve certainly played this game before, and if you were a young person (especially if you were a young girl) in the 2000s, I’d wager you’ve played it, too: the Nancy Drew point-and-click PC adventure games developed by HeR Interactive, which thrust players into the role of the famous female sleuth. I owned a fair amount of the now 34-game series back then, and they were some of my favorite games growing up. I spent many a weekend afternoon at the family computer, notebook in hand, attempting to solve maddeningly difficult puzzles — and venturing to forums for answers instead. I cheated frequently. 

But even before I discovered the miracle of walkthroughs, I still logged countless hours as Nancy Drew. I simply loved being immersed in games’ worlds, talking to the eccentric characters, fully inhabiting each location, so often extravagantly ornate in scope if not graphical quality. In retrospect, I realize I loved playing the games because I loved being a gothic heroine.

The gothic genre has two inextricable pillars: setting and history. To make a story gothic, there must always be some sort of atmospheric location that functions as a physical manifestation of the past, of the previous transgressions and looming secrets of forebears that will, in the course of the story, be unearthed by the protagonist. If this sounds suspiciously like a mystery plot, that’s because it is. The gothic is porous: its influence creeps into other genres like horror, domestic thriller, and Sherlockian stories of intrigue, to name but a few. So long as there are dark mysteries from times before to be uncovered in a spooky setting, you are experiencing a gothic or gothic-inspired story, regardless of the specific aesthetic of that spookiness. In addition to the traditional gothic, known for its creepy European castles and mansions, there’s the afro-gothic of Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved; the Southern and eco-gothic of Resident Evil 7; the Japanese gothic and horror folklore found in the Fatal Frame series, and a vast array of more specific gothic subgenres.