Rant 2: Alibi in Ashes (No spoilers, promise)

So the new Nancy Drew game finally came in today (3 days AFTER its schedualed release). I wasn't planning on playing it right away, since I have a houseload and a half of work to get done for next week, but I couldn't resist blowing the evening checking it out.

Official pre-review? It's great. Not ADKBSLKSK! amazing great, but great. Definitely better than the disaster that was Kapu Cave.

First of all, setting. It follows a similar feeling to that of Twister or Deception Island. (Meaning that it has a similar kind of layout of a few, isolated areas to explore seperate from one another). Which is kind of sad in that there's no big, epic castles to explore with secret paths or dark corridors right away, but the setting of each place echoes back a feeling of some of the older -not classics- but older games, which is nice.

Suspects next. I won't go into detail with this one, because I know some people really want to discover it all for themselves, but I can now say that I have a new third-favourite suspect, immediately underneath Dwayne Powers and Henry Bolet. The person in question has right away racked up big points for this game.
In terms of the three other suspects... I feel they all possess unique traits distinct to each character. They all seem pretty well-rounded.

Which brings us to our third category: gameplay. One piece of advice:
TAKE NOTES.
Despite the fact that you get a whole suspect board to work with (and a journal as usual, though modified into a wiki), there's still a lot of smaller points of interest that the game neglects to keep track of. I already regret not starting my own notebook, an early practice I later abandoned once the journal became a common feature to the games. However, the layout of this game of course means that the focus is on the suspects rather than exploring the surroundings. Which means that there's a lot of info coming at you really quickly. Also, the fact that you hear it through three different pairs of ears doesn't help either.
That's right. Three.
You play as Bess, George, Ned, and Nancy in this one. (And we thought juggling two characters was hard!). However, I say three because if you know anything about the basic premise of the game, you'll know why Nancy doesn't question the suspects quite as much. ;)
Truthfully, I know that HI was probably trying something different like this to give the game a bit of spunk, but I think they went a bit overboard. Maybe if we just had two external characters from Nancy rather than three?

EDIT: After finishing the game, I realized the player actually gets the handle of swapping between characters while playing. It may seem a little strange at first, but I found the gameplay got smoother as the plot went on.

Another downside to this is also that it can lead to some inconsistencies if you don't play the game in what it considers to be the 'proper order'. I've already come across a minor glitch that led to a brief moment of confusion. Granted, it was easy enough to pick up on, but at times if you focus on one character (meaning suspect) for too long, the timelines might get a bit skewed. Overall though, it makes the game interesting.
A final, seperate note on gameplay - automatic driving. It is a beautiful, beautiful thing. No more crashing into trees and getting lost down side streets. You just click the building you want to arrive at and zoomzoom you're there. I have to say, personally, I love it. Big time saver, and considering you move from place to place a lot in the game, it's amazingly useful.

Okay, last section: puzzles. I haven't played a whole lot so far (basically three) but so far as I can tell they've been pretty good. Completely solvable, and one in particular extremely addictive. Of course, as it is my first run-through of the game, I'm on junior detective, so that may just be the decreased difficulty talking. ;)

(EDIT: After finishing the game, I found all the puzzles pretty straight forward. There was just one at the end of the game that gave me grief.)

All-in-all, it's going well. It's fast-paced, so stay on your toes and keep track of your suspects. It has a few new interesting features such as the combined wiki journal and a method of sharing inventory between characters, which adds a new way of going about play, yet not too extreme to throw the player off their normal way of doing things. That's the initial impression at any rate - I still have a ways to go. Finished! :)

(EDIT: I hate to say this, but there are no bloopers for this game!)