Nancy Drew: Shadow at the Water's Edge will introduce Nancy to a slew of puzzles, both old and new. Chief among the game's puzzles is a book of games provided by one of the characters. Not only does this book provide a steady stream of sudoku problems, but also two other logic games I hadn't previously seen, nanograms and renograms.
Nanogams have you using clues in the grid's columns and rows to determine which blocks should be shaded in. Once you've completed it, a nice picture is blocked out on the grid. The other puzzle type, renograms, has the player filling in an 8x8 grid with numbers. Like sudoku, some numbers are already on the board, but here, your goal is to draw a path to all of the numbers in sequential order by placing the missing numbers on the grid. In other words, you start with the 1 block and if the next number on the board is 4, you need to fill in connecting tiles with the numbers 2 and 3. From 4, you connect the tiles to the next number, and so on.
While I found a majority of my time was spent playing through these three puzzle types, they are definitely not the only ones Shadow at the Water's Edge has to offer. The game will challenge you to do everything from write Nancy's name in Japanese to arrange the strings on the back of an old picture so that none of the lines cross in order to get the backing off.
One of the really good details about this particular game in the Nancy Drew line is the amount of information younger gamers will glean about Japanese tradition and culture. Once again, the game borders on the edutainment genre without making it so blatantly obvious about the teaching.
