Nancy Drew has proven to be a popular adventure game franchise over the years, but that’s been mainly on PC. The Mystery of the Clue Bender Society was the second Nancy Drew game made for the Nintendo DS, published by Majesco in September 2008 and created not by Her Interactive but by Gorilla Games. Unfortunately, just like its predecessor, The Deadly Secret of Olde World Park, the sequel is not a very good game, proving instead to be overly short, repetitive and dull, even for its younger target demographic.

At first the story sounds promising enough: Nancy gets an invitation from the mysterious Clue Bender Society, a secret club of intelligent people who dedicate their lives to finding and solving mysteries and protecting secrets. Apparently they are looking for new recruits, and Nancy is one of three promising candidates they have invited to their headquarters, located on a remote island filled with puzzles. Whoever is first to solve a series of challenges will be declared the winner and the new Society member. However, as soon as Nancy manages to find the secret storage of the Society's prized Tome, the ancient book turns out to be missing. As it supposedly contains secrets that could threaten our world, it is imperative that Nancy and her fellow candidates retrieve it before the next ferry leaves for the mainland. Why the current Clue Benders themselves are not joining in the search is not explained, but to find it herself, Nancy needs to explore the mansion and the rest of the island, with secret passageways to discover, doors to unlock and suspects and witnesses to talk to. There is also some snowmobile racing and sneaking around in shadows to be done.

Unlike its PC counterparts, which never show the teen sleuth in action, Clue Bender Society is a third-person game, though apart from a few references at the beginning, there is nothing in particular that makes this feel like a ‘Nancy Drew adventure’. Nancy is depicted as a teenager, and the cartoony character depiction of her in close-up view is quite nice, though she looks a bit blocky and fuzzy when walking around the realistic-looking main environments, especially if she is far away from the camera. With no animation to speak of and only a few slideshow cinematics to drive the story forward, this game offers few visual highlights. This is true of the music as well, which is so annoying I couldn’t listen to it for long at any one time, as there are very few tracks with very short loops, making it exceedingly repetitive. There are only a couple of sound effects that do nothing to immerse you in the game, and no voice acting at all to bother keeping the volume turned up to hear, though there is one puzzle that requires you to have the sound on.

The top screen shows Nancy in her current location, along with hotspots for exits to other screens, people to talk to and objects to investigate. You maneuvre Nancy around by pressing the +Control pad, which is far more cumbersome than it needs to be. You can only leave the screen by positioning Nancy onto the exit marks, which is often quite hard to do since they are small and the visual alignment is not quite right. It is especially frustrating getting Nancy to leave snowy locations, since the exit marks are a very light gray, which is hard to see on light backgrounds. Occasionally when you try to walk past an exit, you accidentally trigger the unwanted action anyway. Some exits are placed so close together that you end up going around in circles, while others are disorienting because Nancy appears to be walking in a different direction in the new screen. The bottom screen can be toggled between a map, the inventory and the current objective, which seems largely a waste of the DS touch screen functionality.

The gameplay consists of walking around the mansion (and a handful of other locations such as a small village and a lighthouse), finding people to talk to or objects to use. Nancy writes down what she is supposed to be doing in a notebook, which is meant to serve as a memory aid for the player. But these entries are not very helpful when all they say is "I should find Henry" or "I should look at the puzzle box in Nero's Room" if you have no idea what room that is or where Henry might be. The map only shows a very general outline of the rooms with no labels, and it doesn’t display Nancy’s actual position, though it does assist in figuring out the layout of the mansion and the most likely location of a secret passage. Often there is no other option than to revisit every location until you have found something that has changed since the last time, as speaking to someone in the kitchen can trigger a new object in the library, or maybe in the garage. A few rooms are locked, and these can only be opened by using four consoles on the second floor. As opening one room locks the others, you'll have to use these consoles a lot before you’re sure Henry or a new clue is not hidden in any of them. A lot of backtracking ensues, as you rarely have any idea where exactly you should be looking.