Danger by Design

Plot
Minette, the world renowned fashion designer, has been acting a little eccentric lately. She’s hidden her face behind a mask, been throwing temper tantrums left and right, and her assistants are lucky to last a week without being fired. You as Nancy Drew, have been flown to Paris to go undercover as a fashion intern and investigate what’s causing the strange behavior.

So as you can imagine, this isn’t a very threatening case nor is it spooky. Also, don’t expect to see a lot of fashion or Paris. On top of this, you don’t spend much time working on the case you were hired to solve but rather on something that is seemingly unrelated.

Characters
The characters in this game are a mixed bag of interesting and boring. Minette, of course, is a very eccentric character and really well-developed. I still wish that I could talk to her more but the lack of conversation makes her more intriguing. I felt the other people were not as involved in the overall story as in other games.

Setting/Graphics
I’ve always loved Paris, but unfortunately you don’t get too see much of it. You hop around to various offices and homes but the only historically cool thing you get to (sort of) see are the catacombs.

The graphics are not amazing, but pretty good. The characters are a little cartoony-looking but their movements are nice and fluid. In fact, HeR demonstrates their potential with character animation quite nicely at one particular point in the game. The lighting is much more realistic than earlier games.

Difficulty/Length
Since you're technically on a "job," naturally you'll have lots of tasks to do among your sleuthing. Some of them are basic while others will be fairly more difficult to do. You may find yourself messing up several times but if you remain persistent and exercise a little patience you'll do fine.

"Scare Factor"
Not really scary, but one part was a little nerve-wracking.

Final Verdict
Not my favorite game, as I believe they could have done so much more with the game (I mean, it was set in Paris and we only caught a quick glimpse of the Eiffel Tower in 2D at the beginning), but I still had fun playing it. But it was an engaging, rather fast paced mystery with multiple challenging puzzles, so I can't really complain!