And now, for something completely different! I wasn’t in the mood to pick apart writing today, so instead I played a Nancy Drew game and thought, “Maybe it would be fun to recap this.” I was originally going to do Stay Tuned for Danger (a personal favorite), but apparently Fraps can’t hook into any pre-Windows Vista games. Booooo. Well, no matter — Nancy Drew is nothing if not prolific! So, The Phantom of Venice. I’m not some die-hard Nancy Drew fan so I don’t know much about the different periods of games (other than the fact that at some point, Her Interactive dropped the sort of old-timey frame and books at the beginning), but this game seems like one in a long line of “The X Thing of Y Place”, where Nancy is called to some ~exotic~ area to Fight Crime. I mean, Nancy going to Y place to find X thing is the basic formula of the games, but I think there was a point starting around The Creature of Kapu Cave where the games were all about the ~location~ and less about the mystery (The Creature of Kapu Cave was so awful, you guys. I can’t even). I mean, I like The Phantom of Venice but my God, the loose ends! Anyway. (I like how I was all, “I’m not some die-hard Nancy Drew fan” and then proceeded to write a paragraph about the games losing their ~integrity. Oh, self, you so wacky.) But whatever. I should add that I basically skipped from Secret of the Old Clock to this game, so the shiny graphics were…surprising, to say the least.
Nancy has a new logo, too. I have to say, I’m a sucker for nostalgia, so I kind of miss the old one.
“Hi, I’m Nancy Drew!” Don’t sound so chipper now. Blah blah learning how to play a Nancy Drew game blah. I’m kind of offended that they think I need to be taught how to play, to be honest. How dare you, I am a Nancy Drew veteran.
Anyway, there’s a Case File that we can check out before we leave, although it’s pointless since the whole thing gets recapped for us once we get there anyway. But the basic gist is that there’s a thief in Venice known as “The Phantom” (obviously), so named because not only does he like to cosplay as a bat (or something — but seriously, look at his costume later), but because he leaves behind so few clues. Which, once you find out who the Phantom is, seems kind of implausible. But whatever. Prudence Rutherford (who was introduced in an earlier game; suffice to say she’s sort of like that old lady from The Aristocats) talks the owner of a palazzo into letting Nancy stay there while Nancy works undercover for the Italian FBI.
The Phantom, by the way, mostly steals historically valuable/classic art and books while wearing a silly costume. Sort of The Phantom of the Opera meets The Thief Lord meets Chasing Vermeer. (I’m not sure what it says about me that my reference pool is limited to children’s books.)
I’m playing on Junior Detective mode on account of me being dumb as a pile of bricks. These games are hard, dude. I usually have to resort to a walkthrough for them, which is…kind of pathetic, but whatever.
The opening movie! Nancy’s ~exploring~ a tunnel of some sort, comes to this room, when the door is shut behind her! Shock! Horror! The room starts filling up with propane! OMINOUS.
And then you wake up in Venice. (And can I say, that room is nice.)
So blah blah exploring the room blah. Nancy can take a shower (admittedly I made her go in like three times while I was trying to figure out what that room did). Which she sings in, by the way. And then you can go to the wardrobe and dress her up in a paper doll fashion (although of course it’s merely a dotted outline of a girl, because God forbid we see what Nancy looks like*), look through her toiletry bag, flip through an Interactive Guide to Venice (which you’ll need later), and snoop through her roommate’s stuff.
*Sing it with me everyone: slender, blue eyes, titian hair…
Speaking of the roommate, let’s meet her!
Well…that’s not an awkward photo at all. Her name is Helena and she’s German (which you can find out from snooping through her mail). You have to buy a German-English dictionary later on for the game to register that you’ve looked through her stuff, but it’s pretty easy to translate on your own if you know basic German. (Shit, I could read it and my German is limited to “Guten Tag” and “danke schoen.”) Anyway, she’s written postcards to “Mamma und Papa,” a friend of hers named Nina (who lives at ’99 Luftbaloons’ — oh, I see what you did there), and the Killian family in Chicago.
Actually, you don’t need to look at her mail at all, since all the information you learn from the postcards is helpfully provided for you elsewhere in the game. Hmph. I’m not sure why the game feels the need to safeguard against the chance you might not look through Helena’s stuff, when there’s a million other things you’re more likely to skip over that it doesn’t bother to tell you about at all.
Anyway, the game makes you call Prudence Rutherford. Apparently she was in Secret of the Scarlet Hand, but I barely remember anything about that game so I can’t tell you anything about her. In this game, at least, she’s an over-the-top neurotic posh woman who is writing her ~memwaahs~ (and you have no idea how badly I wish I could reproduce the way she pronounces it). She also doesn’t know how caller ID works. You learn basically nothing from her, and her voice gets kind of grating after the first five minutes. I shan’t be calling her again.
So hey, let’s explore! To our left: the weirdly neurotic British guy, Colin Baxter! Hi, Colin!
Colin restores mosaics (or something?) for a living and is working on renovating Ca’ Nascosta. He’s studied at Oxford University, and is from Oxford, England. Yes, Oxford is the place he is from. Has he mentioned that he’s from Oxford? He’s also obsessed with mosaic tiles. Seriously, within the first five minutes of meeting him, he makes you look at his tile slides and while I usually make Nancy step back after about five tiles, the implication is that it goes on…and on…and on.
(“I adore this shade of criiimson.”)
Anyway no matter how many tiles you sit through, the second you step back he’s all, “I THOUGHT I HAD AT LAST FOUND SOMEONE WHO SHARED MY PASSION FOR ART AND HISTORY AND CULTURE BUT I SEE YOU’RE JUST LIKE ALL THE OTHERS” like, dude, what is your deal? But whatever. You can also talk to him about a statuette on the table, which will be important later.
Helena’s not here at the moment, so by all means, let’s read her notebook! It’s all in German, of course. And not really relevant to the game as a whole, so…you don’t need to look at it, is all I’m saying. (But she does have a page dedicated to snarking on everyone she meets, which you’ll want to read anyway.)
There’s also a box of chocolates on the table in the main room, which you’ll want to remember.
Oy. Helena does not photograph well.
And in the grand tradition of looking through Helena’s stuff all day every day, let’s note who she’s sending mail to! Hildegard, really? Helena picks up her stuff and goes into the ca’, and we’re free to look for our own mail. The Italian FBI (the GdiF, apparently) have sent us a bank card that we must activate immediately. Well, okay, but first let’s talk some more to Helena.
“You don’t want to know where the cheapest cafes are? Are you sure you’re American?”
OUCH. And hee! Anyway, so, the rundown on Helena: she’s from Hamburg, Germany, and is a reporter for Eurowelt magazine. Her thoughts on the phantom? “I think it’s great. A caped figure darting down walkways, beside moonlit canals, melting mist-like into the shadows, escaping not with stolen money, but with stolen art — it’s all just so wonderfully…Venetian.” Helena is such a hipster. She also thinks it’s possible that the Phantom is a woman. ~Ominous~
(Also, she compliments Nancy on a locket she’s wearing, and Nancy says “Thank you! My boyfriend gave it to me!” and Helena says, “BOYFRIEND. You do have it all, don’t you, Nancy Drew.” Like…what? You just met her.)
Welp, let’s meet the lady that’s letting us stay here!
Margherita Fauberg, everyone! There’s a note on the table next to her, but if you try to look at it, she gets mad. She also likes to gossip and passive-aggressively criticize Nancy. Fun times! So tra la la, yes it’s a lovely day, no I don’t mind having a roommate, and so on. Margherita then proceeds to badmouth Helena all, “She only stays here because I am so popular. She is, how you say, a social climber. But the upper class of Venezia is closed to outsiders! Helena will never be one of them…Us! I said us!” So you know, OMINOUS.
This is, of course, a 100% accurate map of Venice. Bring it with you on your next trip! Anyway, there are three options: Walking (black), taking the bus (red), and the gondolas (blue). The gondolas cost money, and are for the most part kinda boring. Although depending on how much you pay, you can be serenaded in a way that’s so bad it’s hilarious. So, you know. I’m an impatient bitch so I walk everywhere. To the Piazza San Marco!
To your left: Banca dell’Oro! To your right: a kiosk from which you are going to buy most of your worldly goods for this game. So you go to the bank and insert your card, and the screen ~transforms~ into a super-spy communication network thing, and we get our ~dossier~ and our assignment: we’re going to be spying on a dude named Antonio Fango, whose offices are conveniently located right across from the ca’, so we can conveniently peep into his window. There’s also a list of crimes attributed to the Phantom, which aren’t really important, except for the most recent one, the Chalice of St. Gervase. We also get a snazzy pair of binoculars and a PDA.
So, let’s do some more thrilling exploring! You can enter this club here…
And make Nancy dance for money. (This is, I think, the closest we ever get to actually seeing Nancy, by the way.) This game is kind of tricky (especially if you’re like me and have an attention span of about zero) but as long as you don’t fuck up too badly they’ll hire you. And then whenever you’re running low on Euros, you can just come back here (in your cat suit) and dance! Great fun.
Of course, Nancy is a boring name, so the guy running the club dubs you “Punchy LaRue”. Brilliant.
This can happen at any point in the game on the first day — when you go back to the ca’, as you walk to the door, an urn falls from above and if you don’t click yourself out of the way in like two seconds, it hits you and you die. So…watch out for that.
Anyway, if you survive that, the second you set foot in the entryway, your pager starts beeping. Mmm, spying. Margherita is a nosy wench and is all, “What are you doing?” and Nancy says that she’s studying architecture. Margherita is like, “YOU AMERICANS. Always doing something.” What does that even mean?
Anyway, Nancy catches Fango sending something by carrier pigeon. OMINOUS. She goes back and calls her police ~contact~, Sophia. I personally think Sophia is a bit sketchy and I was 80% sure she was involved with the culprit. I was wrong, but STILL. Anyway, the GdiF have left a tracker in a costume shop which we have to pick up. Then we have to break into Fango’s office and find a way to feed the tracker to his carrier pigeon. Good fun.
Hey, let’s talk to Helena again!
An interesting conversation occurs. Margherita claims that Helena is a social climber who desperately wanted to stay at the ca’ and take advantage of Margherita’s connections. But Helena here says that Margherita is the one who ~begged~ Helena to stay. She mentions that Margherita wants to think that she’s a member of the high society, but that Margherita’s not actually one of them. HMMMM.
We also have a chat with Colin, who apparently is staying in a room “on the other side” of the Grand Canal. HMMMM. He also asks the name of “the bloke” who gave Nancy the locket. Heh. Colin totally has a crush on Nancy.
Anyway, the costume shop is located at Campo Santa Maria Formosa. You have to click on the tiny tracking device in a certain amount of time or it will self-destruct. Also you can buy some new clothes for Nancy, if you enjoy dressing her up. Although I can’t imagine wearing a clown outfit would be helping her position as an undercover detective.
After getting the tracking device, we head on over to the Argon building (in Campo del Frari), but the door is locked. Boo, you whore. Well that’s okay! I have amazing powers of foresight and bought a copy of Sassy Detective magazine (what a name) at the kiosk earlier* so we’ll just read that and find out how to pick a lock! We need a hairpin, which means we have to go back to Ca’ Nascosta. Honestly, the most annoying thing about Nancy Drew games is all the back-and-forth.
*A tip for the kiosk — basically, buy everything that you can when you go. Because you’ll need it all later. Bah. You’d think Nancy Drew would know how to pick a lock.
Back at the Ca’ Nascosta — hey, what’s this?
Sausages? Para nos? They’re from Colin, who I guess is trying to one-up Ned’s locket. With…sausages.
…oy. Must we?
Well, Nancy eats them and she doesn’t pass out. What’s supposed to happen is that you leave the room after this and get struck with food poisoning (and I was totally expecting Nancy to collapse the second I backed up and the game to be all ~you have made a fatal error~). But see, instead I decided it was time to call Ned and Nancy spends a good ten minutes chatting to him, so I assumed that there was nothing to the sausages after all. Also apparently Ned hangs out with the Hardy Boys, who knew? (By the way, do the Hardy boys’ girlfriends ever show up in games?) Nancy tells him that even a weird guy on her plane approves of the locket and Ned says, “It passed the semi-neurotic but otherwise thoroughly impartial geek test? YES!” Hee. Usually Ned is super boring in games but I like him here.
We grab a hairpin from Nancy’s bag (which is filled with, among other things, Bobbi Brown and MAC makeup — being a teen detective pays well…I guess…) and leave the room, and…
…yeah.
Nancy comes to an unspecified amount of time later. Even though you’re supposed to have been passed out for a while, it’s still the middle of the day and you can still totally hop on over to Fango’s office because he’s still not back from his lunch break.
But first! Let’s ask Colin about those sausages, shall we? He denies ever sending them (and repeats the word “sausage” like twenty times) and says, “Besides. You don’t think someone would give you tainted sausages on purpose, do you?” Come on, Colin, have you ever played a Nancy Drew game? Attempts on her life are par for the course here.
Nancy tells Helena that it seems like Colin sent her the sausages, and Helena says, “Colin? You’d think someone who can see a flaw in a tiny little tile from three meters away would be able to pick out decent sausages.” Ha! Also, we can grill her about an article she wrote for Eurowelt, about the trial of a crime lord named Leo Machiano. This will be important later, so pay attention.
OKAY ANYWAY. We ate the bad sausages, we had a nice chat with everyone in the ca’, so now it’s time to break into Fango’s office. Mmm, crime. <3 You have to do this lock-breaking puzzle every time you want to break in, and it’s one of those clicking-on-one-moves-the-others puzzles, which I am CRAP at. You sort of get the hang of it by the fourth or fifth time though, which is good because you will be in there a lot.
So you go into the office and the messenger pigeon is sort of just chilling on the windowsill like, “O hay, I didn’t have anything better to do while you were getting food poisoning and interrogating your roommate.” There’s some travel brochures on his side table and a music box on his shelf. A music box? Really? Okay, well, whatever.
Say! That bottom mask sure does look like the one the Phantom wears! (Nancy will point this out for you, which is helpful because I never pay attention to things like that. I am the worst super-sleuth.) Gee, that Il Dottore mask is way bigger than the other ones. Maybe that’s a clue…? :O
Anyway, the password for Fango’s computer is “il capitano” (he has a little symbol of the mask next to the password screen) and you can just log right in and look through all his stuff. You’d think villains would know to have more obscure passwords. 1l c4p1t4n0, maybe. So Fango’s computer is sort of boring, basically he canceled a bunch of trips to a few countries* and plays a lot of chess** with someone named Scaramuccia on Gina’s Chessboard Service. By golly, I think Scaramuccia is another one of those mask fellows!
* Maybe I’m missing something, but the travel brochures + the cancellation emails seem to be significant, but they don’t pan out to anything at all.
** This, on the other hand, is important.
Oh, and Fango keeps a list of chocolates somewhere in his office (I forget where). It’s also important. There’s a lot of chocolate in this game, actually. I dig it.
Fango also keeps a deck of cards (along with a bunch of other items from previous Nancy Drew games) in his file cabinets. Ominous!
So we feed the pigeon the tracking device…
Oh. Whoops.
Okay, so, your pager beeps and Nancy’s like, “Oh snap! Fango’s coming back!” and you have to run and hide in his big cabinet while he rummages around and sends the pigeon off. Again, I suck at these games, and I can never click her in the right direction fast enough. It took me like three tries to get her in the cabinet in time. ARGH. Anyway Fango sends the pigeon off and you can gtfo before anything else happens.
Anyway, when you get back to the ca’, someone has left a package:
O.
SNAP.
(by the way, you may remember Sorpresa Chocolates from Stay Tuned for Danger. Apparently they run a transatlantic business.)
Inside the box is a message that translates to CUP SAFE. Cup? What cup could they mean? Hey, maybe it’s that chalice that was stolen at the beginning of the game? YOU DON’T SAY. So basically, “Il Dottore” is (obviously) the culprit you’re after, and it’s someone in the ca’ (also obviously — I mean, they’re the only people you’re allowed to talk to).
Oh, and Nancy hears Margherita badmouthing her to the others. Again. That woman needs a hobby.
Speaking of hobbies, let’s do what Nancy does best and get up in everyone’s business! Colin says he doesn’t know who Il Dottore is, and mumblegrumbles because he thought the chocolates were from Ned. Oh, Colin. Give up. Nancy and Ned have been together since the 1930s. Their relationship has survived countless car crashes, numerous attempts on Nancy’s life, the two of them never actually being in the same town at the same time, the Great Depression, World War II, and Nancy making out with Frank Hardy. You have no chance.
But by all means keep trying, it provides some comedic relief.
Helena says that she thought the chocolates were for Nancy as well. Margherita says she doesn’t know who Il Dottore is and she doesn’t care. “Something gets delivered, something does not get delivered, it does not matter to me!” That…doesn’t seem like a very good policy, but whatever.
Up next: Emily sucks at tracking pigeons, we find some secret messages, and a crime lord makes us play cards with him. ~OMINOUS~
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