The game starts off simply enough. Your friend, Bess, has gone and gotten herself kidnapped. You have to race to the Bahamas – Indiana Jones style – and locate a missing artifact that will appease the bandits and free your friend.

And how do we do this, precisely? Good old-fashioned detective work.

That’s not to say it’s easy. Even on the ‘Junior Detective’ setting, some puzzles are vexing. I’ll give you an example with one of the first real puzzles of the game:

You need to power up a golf cart to traverse the island. The problem is that the golf cart battery is kind of dead, so you need to infuse it with a certain amount of distilled water distributed along six caps and get each cell of the battery to 100%. The apparatus you have to fill the batteries with dispenses water at 60 units per click. Each cell already has a varying amount of charge in it. And you need to remember that the dispenser pumps out water at 60 units per push which is distributed among the cells you’ve left on or open. You have five shots to get the division and addition right. Otherwise, start all over.

These are REAL puzzles. Puzzles that take time and thought. These are not the puzzles we see in action games that typically involve rotating the camera 30 degrees to the left and then shooting something so that it falls and tips over something else which magically unveils the passageway you needed.

Again, you will be doing mental gymnastics in this game. And it’s fantastically refreshing.

The locations you’ll be doing your puzzle-solving and mind bending are pretty, make no mistake. Ransom Of the Seven Ships hearkens back to the LucasArts classics like Monkey Island, Day Of The Tentacle, and Full Throttle. Her Interactive obviously spent a lot of time making sure that the scenes looked right. Though I must add that this is not a ‘make your eyeballs explode’ graphics party. Things look good. Not great.

There is plenty in the aural department to remind you that you’re on a tropical island. The ambiance is full of life when needed, but always subtle. The voice acting actually surprised me. It’s not superb, but it does the job, and the shock came from hearing a Nancy Drew that is a bit older than I expected. Though, if you’ve been solving mysteries since 1930, you’d probably sound older than folks expect as well.

But, again, the focus of the game is to get you involved in the story and the mystery, and Nancy Drew succeeded in making even me step away from my guns and bombs and sit down to think. Is it perfect? No. No game is perfect. (How a game can obtain ‘perfect 10’ status while complaints about controls or graphic issues crop up astounds me.)

Ransom Of the Seven Ships is a great game that delivers on its promises. It’s hard to ask for more than that. Each puzzle will test your mental resolve. And every time you manage to defeat one of the game’s clever conundrums, you might feel just a little bit smarter.

Final grade: B (Equivalent to an 8/10)