Previously on Nancy Drew: Treasure in the Royal Tower: We were friends with Jacques Brunais for like five minutes, but then someone knocked us out and stole his medallion, and he is being very unreasonable about it. Well, whatever. Who needs him? He was holding Nancy back. Dexter has decided he likes us now, and gave us the key to the Queen’s tower as well as a bunch of hints. Thanks, Mr. Egan! Lisa is trying to be the Robin to Nancy’s Batman, and she’s not very good at it. Professor Hotchkiss is…a thing that’s happening. And hey, we’re finally going to the Queen’s Tower! I hope we don’t run into Jacques again. We’re on his bad side now, and he still has that saw.
So when we last left off, we found all three medallions, and now we’re on the hunt for Marie Antoinette’s journal and her diamond, both of which are presumably in the Queen’s Tower. Why are we doing any of this? I don’t know. There are some Nancy Drew games where she gets explicitly hired to check out strange incidents, and then there are Nancy Drew games where one weird thing happens and then all of a sudden she’s on a hunt for a 300-year-old diamond. This is one of the latter.
So alright, let’s head into the Queen’s Tower! We don’t need a saw, since Dexter gave us the key. See, Jacques, all you have to do is be nice to the grouchy old caretaker man, and you don’t even need to saw your way through solid iron.
There are, predictably, a bunch of puzzles to solve in order to get there — the first is a puzzle with a bunch of chains, where moving one moves the others, and the goal is to get them in a sort of hill shape (which you can see on the wall opposite). Once that’s done, the stepping stones in the middle will rotate, and we can walk across to the next puzzle guarding the Sorcerer’s stone the Queen’s Tower.
In the next room, there’s a table with this game, and a prison cell off to the left, but we don’t need to worry about that right now. So the goal of this game is to get the pieces to their matching squares, but moving one moves all of them. It’s not hugely difficult, so whatever. Once you finish it, the upper half of the staircase to the Queen’s Tower appears, and we can walk up, where we encounter one last puzzle. There’s also a stone panel in the wall near the door, which makes the lower half of the staircase disappear, for…reasons. Anyway, the last puzzle! We have to reassemble a gold leaf inlay, which isn’t hugely difficult, although it did make me go a little cross-eyed. And once you complete that…
Marie Antoinette’s journal is revealed! It’s too bad Nancy doesn’t speak French. How will we translate it? How, indeed?
Well, there’s only one person we know who speaks French (although Lisa probably does and just hasn’t told us, the lying liar), but Professor Hotchkiss’s office hours are over, so let’s skip ahead to the next day.
Hey, Lisa! You tried to give us hypothermia! *shakes fist* She’s all concerned for us, and then asks what Dexter was hiding out there. This time, both options are lies. We’re done telling you stuff, Lisa. You have been fired as a sidekick. Lisa tells us that she still thinks Dexter’s shady and advises us to keep an eye on him. Ha, do you think Nancy Drew is new at this, Lisa?
Speaking of Dexter, the newspaper article in the shed allows us to confront him about being Ezra Wickford’s son, since he still doesn’t know that we were poking around in the library. (Which is weird, since how does he think we got into the tower?) Dexter gives in and tells us that yes, Ezra Wickford adopted him, but Dexter split when he was 16, and never saw him again. We ask why he left/why he never came back, and he just says that some things can’t be explained. ‘Kay.
And hey, we’ve got the blue medallion back. Should we go return it to Jacques?
Jacques just huffs that we can keep the “stupid medallion.” Wow, he gives up easily. Maybe your lack of perseverance is why you didn’t bring honor to France, Jacques, do you ever think of that? Anyway, he won’t talk to us anymore, so the only thing left to do is meet Hotchkiss at 3 AM.
Professor Hotchkiss is actually thrilled that we enjoy snooping in her room, what a weirdo. But the good news is we can go in as often as we want, at least. We have a little chat with her, and ask about the French words we saw in the stained glass. We also ask about the medallion her friend Helga gave her — if it had a blue stone in it, since that was the one we found in her room. But no, Hotchkiss’s medallion was green. But didn’t Lisa see Dexter with that medallion? Hmmm. Finally, we show her the journal. Hotchkiss is all aflutter — she’s been looking for Marie Antoinette’s journal for fifteen years! See, this is why I didn’t become a history major. Anyway, she tells us that she’ll wrestle us for it, “and it won’t be pretty!” Hee. We make a deal with her: we give her the journal, and she translates it for us. Hotchkiss is amenable to this.
It takes her 24 hours to translate the journal, but there’s nothing else to do, so I just set the alarm and then came back.
So, alright, Hotchkiss has translated the journal! Even better, she’s figured out Marie’s “official decoder”, which will help us with those weird symbols on the stained glass. It’s in her room, by the typewriter. Marie Antoinette writes about how she dismantled the tiara, and her jeweler friend Claude M. is going to make them into medallions that she will then scatter across the continent. And yet somehow, they all ended up in Wisconsin. But she’s going to hide the diamond, since it’s worth “untold millions”, and it will only be found once the medallions are reunited and her message is decoded. She also writes about how she sent the emerald one to her friend Helga von Hanseldorf, who is presumably the ancestor of Prof. H’s friend Helga von Hanseldorf. Unless Helga is 300 years old.
So we’ve got the decoder, and Nancy will spell out the message in the stained glass for us: “Purple rose holds diamond key of queen.” But where’s the purple rose? It’s time to go back to the Queen’s Tower!
This is the beginning of the end of the game. Go harass Dexter one last time, call Ned, etc, because there’s no turning back!
(Note: I didn’t do this conversation, but I saw it in arglefumph’s walkthrough and figured it might be helpful re: tying up loose ends. We know how Hotchkiss and Jacques came into possession of their medallions, but Ezra Wickford is still a mystery. If you call Ned, he’ll mention that the Wickford Castle library was purchased from the Le Boeuf family, and as you will recall, Monsieur Le Boeuf stole some of Marie Antoinette’s possessions when she tried to bribe him with them. So the red medallion was hanging around in the library when it was brought to Wisconsin, and that’s how Ezra Wickford ended up with the red medallion. Cool? Cool.)
I’m pretty sure you have to do all the puzzles again to get back up here, but whatever, they’re not that hard. So here we are in the Queen’s Tower and check out that purple rose in Marie Antoinette’s hand! If you click on it, it will go closer until we’re right in front of it, and we can see that the portrait is made out of tiles. Remember that time we pried those tiles off Rose Green’s ceiling? We use the sword tip for a similar purpose here, and the tiles come off to reveal a secret compartment with a square-shaped key inside.
The key gets placed in the center of the crest, with the medallions surrounding it, and it spins around to reveal Marie Antoinette’s diamond. Yay!
And at this point, the culprit reveals themselves. “Will ya look at that sparkly rock? And me without my sunglasses!” There’s really only one person in the game who talks like that, and it’s…
…Lisa! Of course. Nancy, hilariously, is just like, “Oh hi, Lisa” when she sees her. How are you doing, Lisa? What’s new? Lisa suggests that we give her the diamond so she can get out of “lame-o” Wisconsin, and Nancy is all appalled by the suggestion. “This diamond belongs in a museum in France!” like, you’re really trying to reason with a diamond thief, Nancy? Lisa is unimpressed by Nancy’s upstanding citizenship, and sprays her in the eyes with pepper spray.
Lisa’s evil face is actually really creepy. I’m going to have nightmares.
Of course, Lisa also sticks around a while longer to answer our questions. She’s a helpful villain, after all. We ask if she trapped us in the elevator, and she chirps that she also locked us out of the castle and nearly froze us to death. And she conked Nancy on the head in the locker room, as well, since she “had to get her hands on the medallion somehow.” Except then she immediately put it in Hotchkiss’s room, so…not a good plan, really. Oh, but wait, Lisa was at a dead end, so she moved the medallions around so Nancy would find them and lead her to the diamond. Oh, Nancy, you really have to stop solving mysteries for the villains. Finally, there are two more questions — if you ask the first one, you can ask the second one, but if you pick the second one first, the conversation ends there. The first one is why, why would she ever do such a thing, and Lisa snarks that it’s a material world, and she’s a material girl (okay, Madonna), and photojournalism isn’t paying for the life of tropical beach vacations and cabana boys that she deserves. Fair enough.
Dorky Nancy is my favorite, though, so I had her ask the second question first, which is asking why Lisa chose to vandalize “that beautiful library.” All that shiny wood! The decor! You’re a fiend, Lisa. Lisa says it was a translation mix-up (I guess she’s not as fluent in French as she is in Spanish); she thought that the diamond was in the library. I’m not sure how she got “library” (bibliothèque) from “journal”, but okay. Anyway, no more questions, Lisa has to go make her grand escape. Of course, the pepper spray has been wearing off during her gloating, so by the time she’s running down the stairs, Nancy’s vision has cleared up, and we can go to the panel outside the tower door and pull the lower half of the stairs out from under Lisa. She falls right into the prison cell underneath.
“Darn you, Nancy Drew! You’re the worst friend a diamond thief could ever have!” I can’t improve on that, so I’m just going to leave it there.
And so the game ends, and everyone (except Lisa) is happy. Marie Antoinette’s reputation has been restored in France, and Professor Hotchkiss gets the fame and respect she’s always wanted. Jacques has restored his family’s honor through his efforts to find the journal — I guess Nancy gave him the credit for that one, which is a lot nicer than I would be. You weren’t very friendly to us, Jacques! And he and Isabelle have eloped, although it’s not clear if they’re still living on hot dogs and mac ‘n’ cheese. And Nancy shows Ezra Wickford’s secret study and poem to Dexter, who’s happy that his dad forgave him before he died. Aw. And Christi Lane has made Dexter co-owner of the castle, and together they’ll rule with an iron fist. Or something. Happy endings for everyone! Nancy signs off with, “It’s never too late to change history!” Again: missing the point of history.
(By the way, a newspaper article on Lisa says that she “illedgedly” stole a diamond from a local resort. Man, who spell checks these games?)
By the way, for what it’s worth, Marie Antoinette is generally considered more sympathetically than she was in the past — Wikipedia says that the phrase “Let them eat cake” has generally come to be accepted as libel, and there’s no evidence she ever said that. I don’t know that she’s considered a great ruler who was misunderstood by the French people, but I think the general opinion has come around to her being a good — if somewhat sheltered — person who was way in over her head. (Correct me if I’m wrong, I don’t study history.) But this is fiction, after all.
Also, you know, this was a surprisingly short game. Admittedly, I played a rather condensed version of it (I barely used the phone and didn’t harass the suspects that often), but…yeah. For what it’s worth, I don’t think that’s a bad thing. The padding in the later games drives me a little crazy, and this game still takes a while if you play without a walkthrough. Good times!
THE END.
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