Nancy Drew: Warnings at Waverly Academy Demo

When a prestigious girls-only boarding school starts to be terrorized by an unknown assailant who calls himself Black Cat, Nancy Drew is the detective that answers the challenge. Using her honed perception skills and experience, she must get to the bottom of the mystery and save the girls from peril, as well as uncover the culprit in the meantime.

Nancy Drew: Warnings at Waverly Academy is an adventure game that allows you to tackle the mystery at the boarding school by yourself, by analyzing clues, talking with suspects and witnesses, as well as finding evidence against the ones who might be responsible. Naturally, the plot revolves around the one from the book, although it does go off-script from time to time.

The point-and-click mechanics are about as simple as they can get, which means that you simple have to look around the environments and use the mouse to click on the object you want to study more closely. Although you cannot move in real-time, it is also possible to click on the arrows and explore the locations for as long as you want.

As with any other adventure game, the puzzles you are required to solve get more and more difficult as you advance through the story, although the overall difficulty level is nowhere near to being impossible. Hence, with a bit of practice and enough attention to details, the game can be passed in a few short hours, depending on how quickly you figure out the riddles.

Since most of the time will be spend examining objects, the visual quality has been an important part of development, although it certainly doesn't shine that much. The graphics are not bad, but a lot more work could have gone into the textures and the lighting, since many of the locations have been neglected and they do not look that great.

Nancy Drew: Warnings at Waverly Academy may not be the pinnacle of adventure games, but it does feature enough suspense and puzzles to keep you entertained for a short while. However, do not expect clever plot twists or ingenious mechanics, since the game basically bets on the success of the book to attract the fans and gain recognition, rather than on its own qualities.