So the last game revolved around a character named Maya, and this game is about the Maya. Yeah, I’m going to get tired of that name really fast.
I’m always surprised by how much I like this game every time I play it — I always seem to remember it as being boring, and I have no idea why. I think the Maya research, which mostly involves running around reading exhibit plaques and memorizing glyphs, is kind of tedious, but the rest of the game — the characters, the clues, and the museum setting — are all pretty fun. We also get to visit quite a few places instead of being stuck in the same building like the last three games, so that’s cool. I feel like the game just feels more, I don’t know, energetic or something, because of the fact that quite a bit of it takes place during the daytime, so there are lots of bright colors and white light. It’s a nice switch-up, anyway.
So alright, Nancy’s got a new job — she’s the deputy curator at Beech Hill Museum in Washington, DC. This is apparently an internship position, although “deputy curator” sounds pretty heavy to me. And naturally she got this internship without any kind of background in art history or curating or archaeology or anything like that, because her dad’s friend Franklin Rose works for the museum or something. Well, whatever. In fairness, I bet an art history major couldn’t solve the case that’s inevitably going to pop up while Nancy’s there.
Carson Drew is also in Africa, for some reason. Apparently he’s chilling in Burkina Faso, and then he’s going to “move on” to Kenya, even though Ouagadougou and Nairobi are about as close as San Francisco and New York City. Carson is weird.
Nancy’s going to be working under the supervision of one Joanna Riggs, an archaeologist who is apparently the head curator for Beech Hill. Joanna’s recently become very popular because of her acquisition of a Mayan monolith (“mysterious monolith!” the next photo says, which strikes me as really funny for no reason I can put my finger on), which is going to be exhibited for the first time at Beech Hill after being buried for “hundreds” of years. See, I feel like Nancy shouldn’t have this job if she doesn’t know that Maya civilization reached its peak more like a thousand years ago.
Anyway, Beech Hill is so short-staffed, and they’re anticipating such a huge turnout for the monolith, that they’ve closed their doors to prepare for the exhibit. It’ll be just us and our suspects in the museum! Uh, I mean, just us and the other staff. Ahem.
Joanna introduces herself to us by looking totally evil. Actually, she’s checking on one of the museum’s “most treasured pieces,” a carving of King Pacal. “Who?” asks Nancy, the deputy frickin’ curator. Joanna tells us that King Pacal was one of the Maya’s youngest rulers — he assumed the throne in 615 AD, at the age of 12, and ruled for 68 years. I’m only mentioning this because it’s probably going to come up again later. Joanna continues that the carving is made out of jade, which the Maya really liked to use in their work, and it’s priceless — “I practically had to sell my own grandmother to get it.” Heh. Well, Joanna sounds…dedicated. Nancy asks how Joanna managed to acquire such a rare piece, and Joanna looks creepily towards the camera and says that Taylor Sinclair is a “wizard” when it comes to these things. Hmm.
That’s the end of the opening movie, and we cut to Joanna in her office (which is where we’ll find her for the rest of the game), welcoming us to Beech Hill — and by welcoming us, I mean threatening us not to fuck up, because she doesn’t care who Nancy’s father is. Fair enough. She says that it’s a critical time for the museum, because an exhibit this important isn’t “kid stuff.” And yet, they decided to hire an intern with no background in archaeology or art at all for this super important exhibit. Beech Hill isn’t a very good museum.
(Somewhat hilariously, the first part of the conversation is shown in third person, but Nancy is completely covered in shadow. Heh.)
Anyway, Nancy says to just tell her what to do, because she’s a real trooper, as Dexter Egan will testify. This is the part where we can ask a bunch of questions on the setting and the suspects, so I’ll just bullet point the infodump:
- There’s a task list in the lab, which is also where our desk is. We’ll have to check on it periodically to make sure we’re getting everything done.
- The only other people we’ll be seeing are: Henrik, Joanna, Taylor Sinclair, and Alejandro del Rio. Taylor is an art dealer, from whom Joanna gets a lot of her artifacts, and Alejandro is an attaché at the Mexican Consulate. Joanna really doesn’t like him.
- The monolith was dug up by a team of American and Mexican archaeologists in a cave near Palenque (in the present day state of Chiapas, Mexico), and there’s a bit of contention over whether it should be kept in the United States or not. (Joanna doesn’t actually say this, but whatever, it’s implied.)
- A monolith is essentially a giant pillar of stone (“Oh my God, a giant rock!“), and this one is nearly 1500 years old, with Mayan glyphs carved into it.
- “What’s a glyph?” derps Nancy. What, was she asleep during the Ancient Egypt section of sixth-grade history? But for the benefit of the 9-year-olds playing this game, Joanna explains what a glyph is, and says that Henrik is the encyclopedia on the subject.
- “Henrik” is Henrik van der Hune, an expert in Mayan glyphs. He’s the museum’s most recent hire, and he’s working on translating the monolith in time for the opening.
- Any last advice? “Semper ubi sub ubi!” Ha. Ha ha ha.
We can look around Joanna’s office a bit; she has a couple of stone statues and stuff, very cool, etc etc etc. On the table near the window is a magazine containing an interview with a lady named Prudence Rutherford — she lives in Topeka, Kansas, and owns a necklace with a Mayan jade carving on it. How keen. Also, Prudence sits on the board of the Topeka Commission of the Arts. “How cultured!” Nancy says. Hee!
Out in the lobby, we can take a museum guide that says “Ekahau, God of Travelers” on it, and then go around the desk to also take a set of headphones — unfortunately, the knob to the headphone case is missing. Sigh. We can look for it in the drawer under the case, but all we find is a “Temple Key Card” (which of course we take) and…hey, what’s this?
Crumpled on the floor is an “Addenda to the Palenque Monolith Loan Contract between The Republic of Mexico and Beech Hill Museum, Washington DC, USA.” Uh oh, what could this be? Joanna seems to be trying to adjust some details of the contract — she wants to pay the government of Mexico after receiving the monolith, instead of upon delivery as originally agreed; she’s trying to extend the amount of time Beech Hill has the monolith (from 120 days to 200); and instead of assuming liability for $5 million, she’s trying to haggle it down to $1 million. Her signature is at the bottom, but the line above Alejandro del Rio’s name is blank. Huh.
We can hold on to this and probably get up in Joanna’s face about it later, but for now let’s go to our desk and see what we have to do.
This is the main exhibit area; we can go down the aisles to the left and right and read all the information about the Maya, as well as open some of the cases (what) and take out some of the artifacts (WHAT). There’s a tile in the “Range of the Maya” case that we’ll need, so let’s nab that, because…heh, why not. I think Nancy Drew has some problems.
Let’s go to the lab, shall we? It’s at the end of the exhibit room, off to the right.
And this is where Henrik van der Hune hangs out! He wears a very weird flesh-colored shirt. And his hair reminds me of a seashell stuck on top of his head. We can ask what he’s working on, and he says that it’s just some “light housekeeping”, i.e. cleaning the artifacts. We ask him for any handy advice he might have (that’s not “Semper ubi sub ubi,” Joanna), and he encourages us to explore and get to know our surroundings. Oh, Henrik, you don’t know what you’re doing. To Nancy Drew, “explore” is just code for “trespass and look through personal property.” Henrik also exposits how to use the lab — our desk is our “home base”; any messages for us will be left either in the museum’s mail or on our office phone, so we should check back here often. Duly noted. Finally, we can ask him about his work, and he tells us a little bit about glyphs, particularly that there are lots of subtleties and nuances in a single pictorial character. Good to know. Thanks, Henrik!
Over at our desk, we have a couple of things to look at. There’s a list of vendors for things like microscopes, packing tape, curating supplies, etc., as well as our task list. The priority item is to bring that addenda we found to Alejandro del Rio and have him sign it; I’m kind of wondering why it was on the floor if it’s so important. We also have to reassemble a broken pot, reorder a Maya numbering exhibit, order more packing supplies, and match the audio narration to the display cases outside. Alrighty. Despite it being priority, we can leave the addenda for last, since we’ll have to leave the museum to do it, and we’re lazy.
In the desk drawer is the missing knob to the headphone case, and a notebook. Say hello to Sonny Joon! This is his first appearance in a Nancy Drew game, and as we all know, he will be a beloved invisible character for many years to come. At this point, however, his notebook is useful for giving us tips on a game called “Bul” (which we’ll have to play later), as well as instructions for the audio narration. He also has drawn some unflattering pictures of Henrik and Joanna — he seems to think Henrik is anal and Joanna is obsessed with money; he likes Alejandro, though. And he warns us to “never look directly at Taylor Sinclair’s tie.” Uh, we won’t?
You can also take a Koko Kringle chocolate bar from the drawer. Mmm, chocolate.
Over on the other desk — presumably Henrik’s — is a book telling us how to use a ham radio. Let’s file that information away for later and move on. The broken pot is right here in the lab, so we can do that first.
“It looks like some pieces are missing.” Ugh, fine. We can talk to Henrik about them, and he tells us that there might be some unnecessary pieces; some pieces might also be missing — “if I know Sonny Joon.” If we ask about Sonny Joon, he tells us that Sonny was constantly losing paperwork and harassing the museum guests about aliens. On the one hand, hee. On the other hand, why doesn’t Beech Hill just hire someone who’s actually qualified to do this work? And do background checks on them?
We can also ask how to rearrange the narrations. Henrik tells us to check out an auto narrator in the shipping and receiving area (which is in the same hallway as the lab), and then get the headphones and just go around listening to the narrations and changing the numbers until the display information matches up with the audio tour. Alright, good to know!
Since we can’t complete the pot on account of “Hurricane Sonny,” let’s order the packing supplies, which we can do right from our desk.
We call Silvio Jr. at Silvio’s Curatorial Bonanza (I am definitely want to have a business called “Curatorial Bonanza” one day, just so you know), and he…he sounds like he’s from Jersey. Maybe he relocated. Maybe people in DC are more into curatorial bonanzas. Anyway, he’s nice to us at first, but then he finds out that we’re from Beech Hill and tells us never to call him again. Um, okay? Apparently the museum has six outstanding payments that he’s had to send to collections. Oooooh. Joanna, you’ve got some explaining to do. (As does Franklin Rose. This museum lacks oversight.)
So, alright, we can’t order the packing supplies or put together the pottery. The numbering exhibit and the audio narration are both really tedious, so instead I’m going to go deliver the addenda to Alejandro del Rio. I just reread this post and realized I said I was going to do it last, but, you know what, I lied. Sorry!
So in a change of pace from the last couple of games, we actually have some different locations we can go around to. Once you leave Beech Hill, you get taken to the Washington Metro, and from there you can go back to Nancy’s hotel or to the Mexican consulate. (Two other locations will get added later, but we won’t worry about them now.) So, off to see Alejandro!
We introduce ourselves to Alejandro del Rio, and he is cranky. He immediately starts in on us for being a “modern day conquistador” — hey, that’s conquistadora to you, mister! No, but really — Alejandro is not a fan of the habit of Western museums holding artifacts from other countries, particularly less industrialized nations and former colonies, which is the reason he and Joanna are mortal enemies. Is it wrong that I ship them a little? They probably have a lot of belligerent sexual tension. But in all seriousness now, he does have a point — Nancy can argue a bit, but eventually there’s an option to say that she hadn’t considered it that way and Alejandro’s given her a lot to think about, which I think is a nice approach for the game to take towards the issue, given its limitations as a children’s mystery adventure.
Anyway, we hand over the addenda, and Alejandro says he has to swing by Beech Hill later anyway, so he’ll give it to Joanna then, once he’s looked it over. Nancy tries to say that she’s supposed to bring it back to Joanna herself — I think she was expecting him to just sign it and hand it back, but Alejandro clearly doesn’t have a lot of love or trust for J. Riggs. He shuts Nancy down, and we leave without it.
This is the part where I’m forced to admit that I totally cheated. We go back to the museum and grab the headphones out of the display case, which we can now open with the nifty doorknob we found in the desk drawer. In the shipping and receiving room, there’s a couple of things to look at — there’s a list of deliveries and a box called “Sonny’s Stuff,” wherein we find a floppy disk (hee!) and one of the pottery pieces that we need. And up on the shelf, there’s the auto narrator device Henrik told us about, which we use to change the display narration. Each panel thing on the device has a letter (representing the exhibit) and a corresponding number (representing the audio clip). The correct way to go about this is to use Sonny Joon’s chart — he’s labeled all the exhibits from A to O — and go around looking at what each exhibit is about, then going back to the narrator and finding the correct number.
However, I have no screencaps of this because I just looked up which number went with which letter, and I never actually went around to the exhibits. Oops. Like I said: it’s really tedious. When you’ve got them all correct, Nancy will say, “There, that looks like it’s in order.” Mission accomplished!
Since Henrik is our lab buddy, let’s ask him what to do about the packing supply situation. We ask if Beech Hill has bills it can’t pay, and he avoids the question. Hmmm. Joanna already mentioned budget cuts — it’s the reason why we, a lowly unpaid intern, have to do all the work around here — but could something ~more~ be going on? Henrik won’t tell us, and “absolves” us of the task. Um, okay. We can also ask about the HAM radio on his desk — we’d sure love to try it out! “Absolutely not!” The HAM radio is not for amateurs such as ourselves, and if another vacuum tube blows, Henrik is going to go “mental.” Um…okay. Whatever, you know we’re going to use that HAM radio eventually. Henrik can’t stop us!
The only thing left on the task list is to reorder the Maya numbering exhibit. A couple of pieces from it are missing, so we have to go find those. We have one (we stole it from an exhibit earlier), and the other is out in the garden. The monolith is also in the garden, so why don’t we look at it while we’re out here?
We notice that one side of the monolith seems damaged, and then someone comes up behind us. Meet Taylor Sinclair! (Quick, look away from his tie.) He’s probably the worst character in the game, mostly because he’s not very original — he’s basically the same character as Louis from Message in a Haunted Mansion, except while Louis was a sleazy, creepy-looking antique collector/dealer, Taylor is a sleazy, creepy-looking art collector/dealer. And that mustache is not doing him any favors.
Anyway, he immediately lets us know that he knows that Nancy’s a detective — he found it out when he sat in on a Board of Directors meeting. Nobody is very good at keeping Nancy’s alter ego secret, are they? It’s a good thing she’s not attempting to go undercover here. Taylor asks if we’ve ever seen a million dollars’ worth of rock before, regarding the monolith, but Nancy Drew’s been here before: “Do diamonds count?” Hee! Taylor is duly impressed, but he’s not here to compare expensive rock experiences: he really needs our help. Beech Hill may be in terrible danger! Well, “terrible danger” are Nancy’s favorite words, so she immediately asks if there’s something she can do. He refuses to talk about it here, and tells us to meet him at his office. Nancy agrees, because going to a stranger’s place in a city where you don’t know anyone is definitely a safe move. Nancy Drew lacks a functioning stranger danger radar.
Anyway, Taylor swans off with a “Enjoy your first day at Beech Hill!” and we’re alone with the monolith again. You can look closer at some of the designs, but they don’t mean anything much to us yet. Back inside the museum!
No, wait, I lied again. I decided to go back to Nancy’s hotel, since it looked like night out in the garden (it’ll pretty much always be night out there, even when it’s morning in the front of Beech Hill and at Taylor’s office), and check on her notes and call her friends. This is the first appearance of the task list and journal, both of which are staples of Junior Detective mode in the later games, to make sure you’ve done everything to trigger the game’s progress. But in this game, instead of just being accessible from the inventory or the control panel, we have to go back to the hotel and open up Nancy’s computer to look through everything. Well, alright. Let’s see:
Nancy has a file called “Notes” that essentially recaps everything we’ve done; at the end, there’s a reminder to call Bess and George. But we can also use her computer to check out Sonny’s floppy disk (heh), so let’s also do that. It’s password-protected, and the password is “Koko Kringles.” Sonny has notes for figuring out the audio narration system as well as the numbering system, which you can use if you have, like, integrity and aren’t going to cheat your way through the puzzles. But I am going to cheat my way through the puzzles, so I just skimmed past these. Sonny also has some notes on “Temple Quizzes” — these are in the temple room at the end of the exhibit hall; we haven’t been in there yet. He can’t figure out one of the questions, and Henrik won’t tell him the answer, because Sonny messed with Henrik’s HAM radio (probably trying to contact aliens). And his museum login is “sjoon” and the password is “spacebaby.” Alright.
Let’s call our friends, shall we? Bess and George are playing a weirdly intense game of Go Fish, because life in River Heights is incredibly boring. We tell them about life at Beech Hill — Nancy says the monolith is as big as “Bigfoot’s refrigerator,” which I guess is a joke. Nancy is a dork, but we knew that. We explain glyphs and King Pacal to them, and they’re duly impressed. We don’t have the option of telling them about Taylor’s concerns yet, for some reason, so we leave them to their card game. We can also call Franklin Rose, but we don’t say much to him, except to tell him that everything’s going swimmingly so far.
I have no idea what time it’s supposed to be in the game. Well, I can go to Taylor Sinclair’s office, so I’ll do that and then start a new day. This game has reverted back to the alarm clock system of passing time (ugh), but for the most part, if you try to get things done during “working hours” (9 to 5), most of the characters will be available. And now that we’ve heard his ominous message, Taylor’s office is a new location on our map of DC.
See, it was dark in the garden when we met him, but suddenly it’s daytime over Taylor’s office.
Taylor immediately starts freaking out on us all, “My fears are like maggots infesting my poor old carcass!” Then he immediately adds, “Want a cookie? They’re from Oaxaca.” Heh. We reject his offer, because we don’t have time for cookies when there’s crime afoot. Taylor tells us that the art world is in terrible, terrible trouble — Prudence Rutherford, who we read about in Joanna’s magazine, has had her necklace stolen! The necklace that, you will recall, had a Mayan jade carving on it. A display case full of Mayan artifacts was stolen from a museum in New Mexico (I believe this is the Chaco Canyon Cultural Center, which was mentioned earlier in passing, but I don’t remember where). Beech Hill could be next! Nancy asks if Joanna is similarly concerned, and Taylor tells us that she doesn’t think the time is right to ask the board of directors for money, in order to make the security upgrades. He needs our eagle eyes! Our bat ears! Our dog nose! Nancy’s like, “Uhhh…” and says that she’s not bionic, but at Taylor’s insistence, we agree to look into it.
(Somewhat weirdly, Taylor will say that “[his] people” are being stolen from, and for like a second I thought he was saying he was of Maya descent. Then I realized he just meant art collectors and museum folk.)
Then we can ask about his weird-ass piece of art, which is on the floor near his desk. He says that it’s by Poppy Dada, a teenage artist from South Dakota, who is quickly becoming super popular in the art world. “How about that rubber shark?”
We can also ask how much he makes on commission — 10%, which he admits isn’t much, unless he sells something worth, like, a million dollars. “Too bad I’m not allowed to put the monolith on the market, huh?”
I’M WATCHING YOU, TAYLOR.
Finally, we can bring up Alejandro del Rio’s opinion of Taylor and the whole museum business; Alejandro thinks that Taylor and “his people” are robbing Mexico of its cultural history, Taylor thinks that Alejandro is being a bully who’s trying to keep artifacts all to himself and denying them to the rest of the world. That’s…I’m not going to touch that.
That’s all for Taylor; I went back to the museum after this, and after a short conversation with Joanna, the mystery portion of the game starts rolling, so I’ll end part one here. (Also, I just broke 4k words. Yikes.) Up next: Trust no bitch. Henrik takes a tumble. I accidentally wrote that as “tumblr” on the first try, which may say something about the times we live in, but I’m not sure what.
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