The game is set entirely in Venice. Nancy Drew carries out her investigation in the faithfully recreated streets and piazzas of a city that is reconstructed rather vividly. Some of the locations that feature in the game are St. Mark’s Square, Campo dei Frari, Campo San Margherita, and Campo Santa Maria Formosa. When visiting the various locations, snippets of dialogue in Italian can be heard (in a strong Venetian accent) in which the locals comment on small everyday things. There are lots of references to Italian culture and Commedia dell’Arte in particular. Indeed, the criminal gang uses the names of the most famous characters from this form of theatre as aliases. The developers also include a small dictionary of Italian words that the player can learn over the course of the adventure (we should point out that the game is only available in English). During the adventure, the player can challenge a character to a game of Scopa, a well-known Italian card game, with a pack of Venetian cards. One particularly enjoyable feature is that the player can move around by gondola, listening to the gondoliers singing masterpieces of the likes of La Donna è Mobile from Rigoletto as well as, somewhat surprisingly, famous Neapolitan song Funiculì funiculà.
The game is set entirely in Venice. Nancy Drew carries out her investigation in the faithfully recreated streets and piazzas of a city that is reconstructed rather vividly. Some of the locations that feature in the game are St. Mark’s Square, Campo dei Frari, Campo San Margherita, and Campo Santa Maria Formosa. When visiting the various locations, snippets of dialogue in Italian can be heard (in a strong Venetian accent) in which the locals comment on small everyday things. There are lots of references to Italian culture and Commedia dell’Arte in particular. Indeed, the criminal gang uses the names of the most famous characters from this form of theatre as aliases. The developers also include a small dictionary of Italian words that the player can learn over the course of the adventure (we should point out that the game is only available in English). During the adventure, the player can challenge a character to a game of Scopa, a well-known Italian card game, with a pack of Venetian cards. One particularly enjoyable feature is that the player can move around by gondola, listening to the gondoliers singing masterpieces of the likes of La Donna è Mobile from Rigoletto as well as, somewhat surprisingly, famous Neapolitan song Funiculì funiculà.
Nancy Drew is the protagonist of the prolific series of thrillers of the same name first published back in the 1930s in America. The books were written for mostly young readers. The heroine is an aspiring detective who finds herself grappling with crimes and thefts against her will. She is somewhat the female counterpart to the Hardy Boys, another series of thrillers written by Edward Stratemeyer using a model according to which a group of writers published their writings under a pseudonym (in this case Carolyn Keene). The Phantom of Venice is loosely based on the book of the same name published in 1985: in it, the player takes control of Nancy, seeing things from her perspective as she investigates the theft of works of art in the city of Venice.
