Back when they were annual releases, Nancy Drew games used to have downloadable demos on HeR Interactive's website. That page doesn't exist anymore, but the magic of the Wayback Machine lets you visit it and download the demos. Shadow at the Water's Edge was the last game in the series to have one.
The demo itself is the first 30 minutes of the game, though there are a few differences.
- You never call anyone. You get a letter from Bess and George telling you all the things to do at the ryokan.
- Takei, the grandma, never shows up after the first scene and her room is empty. The calligraphy minigame is there to experiment with, but no origami or tea.
- The portrait puzzle skips itself and the inside says "UNDER THE BRIDGE" prompting the stone hunt, which is supposed to happen later in the game.
- You can't visit Yumi, but you can go to the pachinko parlor.
- You can sleep, but the balcony scene doesn't happen.
- The baths always have a blue banner even if you sleep to the next day, so Nancy can never go in and trigger the mirror scene.
Up until the release, HeR Interactive actually ran a blog featuring one of the characters, Yumi. She would give updates on her shop, teach readers how to make bento, and gossip about the other characters in the game. There are actually pictures in the blogs about bento making and I can only assume it's a HeR Interactive employee making these in her home kitchen. The blogs also had comments that Yumi herself would respond to. Imagine if SEGA did this with Rouge the Bat.
The blog was discontinued once the game released, but it's surprisingly still up today. You don't even need the Wayback Machine.
https://yumi-shimizu.blogspot.com/
Alongside this blog was another fictional site named after the game written by ANOTHER character, John Grey. He isn't in Shadow, but he's specialized in ghosts in previous entries. It has a minigame on it that I can't seem to access, so I don't know what it is. This was simply a site to promote the game, and the URL for it now just directs you to HeR Interactive's main website.
The HeR Interactive site itself had a terrible dress-up minigame to promote Shadow at the Water's Edge. It had music that wouldn't end its cues when you changed scenes so you would have multiple songs going at once. The dress-up minigame shows up in the full game and is a core part of the story.
