Nancy Drew: The Shattered Medallion starts off with the teenage detective being invited to a reality show, "Pacific Run: New Zealand." Here she and her friends will compete against other teams by solving puzzles and trying to become the top contenders in the show.
Oddly enough, it is that reality show setting that really throws the whole groove off in The Shattered Medallion. For one, what story the game presents feels very disjointed as you are tasked to solve very random puzzle for no other reason than they are puzzles that need to be solved for the show. For another, I felt like I kept waiting for the reality show aspect to be interrupted or ended so that the real mystery could begin, only to find that it never really got off the ground. Oh sure, there is a little something that needs to be uncovered, but the mysteries and criminals that surround Nancy Drew seem to be on vacation while she is in New Zealand.
As for the puzzles themselves, there is a lot of variety to them as you will do everything from scour the land for local plants, to arrange and categorize sheep, and even decode a few cyphers, but there was no real cohesion to them. From my talks with developers of most adventure games, they start with the story, and from there, they figure out where puzzles should go and how to weave them in so that they make sense. In this case, the opposite seems true. Given a bunch of random puzzles, the only story that can really fit them is a setting where random puzzles are a matter of course, a game show.
From story to mystery to puzzles, The Shattered Medallion feels like the weakest Nancy Drew game I’ve played yet.