Review: Miss Clue: Formula for Danger

Before I start this review, I’ll admit that I’m not that good at adventure games. I’ve only ever beaten one Nancy Drew game out of the ten or so that I’ve played, and I needed the help of a walkthrough to do it. I needed the help of a walkthrough for this game as well. I’m hoping to get better at these types of games, and I’ve made it my goal to not use a walkthrough for the next game I play.

“Formula for Danger” is a fun clone of the Nancy Drew games. The game has you play as Jane Darcy, who is staying at her aunt’s lodge. One day, she hears a scream coming from the other side of a lake and decides to investigate it. It turns out that Jane’s friend Anne needs her help finding a formula hidden by her late father. Someone else is after the formula, and it’s up to Jane to find out who.

If you’ve played an Nancy Drew game, you’ll notice that “Formula for Danger” is extremely similar to the earlier games in the series. This isn’t a bad thing. With the next Nancy Drew game not scheduled to come out until 2019, it’s nice to have something to play while waiting. 

The puzzles are similar to the ones in the Nancy Drew games. I can’t really comment that much on the game’s difficulty due to me being genuinely bad at the game. * I will say that this probably is not the best game for beginners, as well there is a hint system at the start of the game, you lose access to it halfway through, when the puzzles start getting harder.

One problem I had with the puzzles was the amount of backtracking you had to do to solve them. To get from the lodge to Anne’s mansion, you have to walk for a bit, take a boat, then walk a bit more. In the early chapters, I had to do this multiple times. This got old fast. Fortunately, this stops being a problem in the later chapters.  

It doesn’t help that the game expects you to check everywhere to solve the puzzles. Even with the hint system early on, the location of some things wasn’t clear.  The fact that some things could only be clicked on in a specific spot didn’t help at all.

For example, I had to check Arglefumph’s playthrough to find the boathouse keys because they happened to be on the couch I checked several times without finding the hotspot. The area with the sofa was hard to navigate as well, and I had to go in circles a few times to get to the right spot.  I had the same problem with Jane’s room in the lodge.

Like in the Nancy Drew games, you can die or fail, and if you do, you can continue from where you left off. I only failed once near the end, and there appears to be only four points in the game where you can lose.

The first one didn’t happen until almost halfway through the game, when the lab I was in started filling up with gas. This caught me off guard, but I managed to stop the gas in time. This was a really suspenseful moment, and it kept me on my toes for the rest of the game.

There were also some creepy moments in the game. The scene where Jane gets woken up in the middle of the night by strange noises genuinely scared me.  There was also a moment involving a secret passage that made me jump. 

The game’s mystery was rather fun. Although the culprit’s identity was painfully obvious, there were still a few twists and turns along the way. You don’t spend as much time talking to suspects as you do in most Nancy Drew game, and one suspect you only talk to twice. The game is more focused on the puzzles then the story, but the puzzles are fun enough that it doesn’t matter. I will say that the voice acting could have used some work, but it was good enough. 

Unfortunately, I had some technical issues while playing the game. Flash crashed twice, forcing me to refresh the page. To the game’s credit, I didn’t lose any progress from this, as the game frequently autosaves. Occasionally, I saw stuff appear then randomly vanish. For example, for a split second, I saw the Macaw I had already dropped off at the lodge magically appear on my boat then disappear.  It’s not game breaking, but it’s still odd.

There were some more serious problems. Some areas that looked like hotspots (the magnifying glass would turn red) weren’t, causing me to waste time trying to click them. There were some missing sound files, as I would often see subtitles for an unsaid line. These problems weren’t that common, but they were still annoying.

There was also one time in Chapter 13 where the correct code refused to work on a code machine, forcing me to check a walkthrough again. I consider that almost game breaking. If someone insisted on not using a walkthrough, they would be stuck on that spot forever.

All in all, “Formula for Danger” is a good game. You can play it for free on the VFK website if you make an account, and I’d recommend it. It’s got its problems, but hey, it’s free. There’s a few other games in the series to check out as well, and all but one of them are free to play.

Rating

6.5 out of 10

* At one point in the game, I got stuck because I forgot how to spell the word “Mongoose”. Another time, I counted the wrong number of chess pieces, and initially thought it was glitch when my answer turned out to be wrong.