Previously on Nancy Drew: Danger on Deception Island: I hate this game so much. We had the thrilling task of identifying a piece of wood (“luan”), because it was suspicious wood. Then we ran around looking for stuff left on the island by crazy old lady Hilda Swanson Swenson. And then Jenna made us run around the beach looking for clams, which made me quit the game for literally three years.
Let’s get cracking, because if I have to spend any more time with this game, I might cry.
So we’re over at the Hot Kettle, which we’ve discovered contains SECRET PASSAGEWAYS! Are you surprised? Of course not. Each of the wall panels has to be changed to a poker hand, and once the correct combinations have all been entered, the suspicious salt shaker table will pull back into the wall. Oh, so that’s how the salt shaker got knocked over. I still maintain that it was a dumb clue, though.
Silly Nancy is like, “I bet that’s how the burglars got in!” like yes, Nancy, there is no betting to be done here. It’s really obvious. Anyway. When we try to go through the secret tunnel, we realize we don’t have a flashlight 🙁 Does Jenna have one, amongst all of her SaveKing purchases? Of course not.
So we have to bicycle slooowly all the way to Katie’s boat, where we find that she’s been making progress on the boat. She tells us that she “just remembered” that her friend had stashed some boat tools in the storage locker. You will recall that the burglar stole some of Jenna’s boat tools!
SUSPICIOUS.
Is Katie a thieving thief? We don’t get to ask, for some reason. Instead, she tells us we can borrow her headlamp in lieu of a flashlight, if we make her a sandwich first. Fair enough. I mean, as far as she knows, we’re just bumming around the island while she does all the work, so we could probably get her some food.
This is the part of the game where you can totally kill Katie if you want to. I’m bored and trying to get this game over with as fast as possible so I elected to leave her alive, but you can totally vent your frustration by giving her food poisoning. In the kitchen, there are a bunch of ingredients for a sandwich. Some of them are expired/raw/gross, and some are weird but otherwise perfectly healthy. You can get creative if you want to; I slapped together a peanut butter and jelly sandwich because I’m on a schedule here. Katie hands over the headlamp. Through the secret tunnel!
The secret passages lead to the camping store and the hardware store, and when we check them out, Nancy snarks that we don’t need to go shopping. Like, you know what, Nancy? I’m just trying to be thorough. Anyway, at the end of the passage, we hear the familiar clinking noise that we heard up at the lighthouse. Unfortunately, the puzzle that opens the door is missing some pieces. Don’t we already have Holt’s password into the lighthouse, though? This puzzle probably opens up another trapdoor or something. Whatever. I click on the pieces a little and Nancy’s like, “There’s OBVIOUSLY more to this. Like, say, the second half of the picture?” Jesus, Nancy. I’m doing my best here, okay? Not all of us have been super-sleuths since 1930.
Since we can’t go through any of the exits, lest Nancy scold us for wanting to check out carpentry supplies, our only option is to return to the Hot Kettle. Jenna is ALL SURPRISED that there are secret passages around here, and tells us not to go down there anymore. Don’t tell me what to do, Jenna! Nancy says she’ll stop snooping if Jenna calls the sheriff, and she refuses. Why doesn’t anyone in this town ever want to involve law enforcement? Anyway, Jenna caves and says that we can keep crawling around down there, as long as we don’t tell anyone else about the tunnel. And Nancy doesn’t, which is such a bad move. What if Jenna tries to murder her down there, huh? ALWAYS tell someone else. Always!
Let’s go check out the lighthouse, shall we? Once we get up there, though, someone tries to kill us 🙁 A bunch of rocks come tumbling down from the top of the building, which was intentional, right? I mean, this building is abandoned and crumbling, but Nancy Drew does attract a lot of murder attempts. She survives all of them, though, so joke’s on you, mystery villain!
When we get inside, Nancy notes that that someone’s been in the lighthouse recently. So like…did they try to knock a bunch of rocks onto our head and then skedaddle? I don’t know. Anyway, there’s a calendar lying on the table with the 17th circled and Nancy will say, “That’s today.” Hmm. (By the way, there’s no month visible, but it’s a 30-day month where the 17th fell on a Friday. I wonder if that corresponds with any real calendar, given how these games tend to avoid giving solid dates. ANYWAY.)
Anyway, we also see that the bulb in the lighthouse lamp is missing. Of course it is. Welp, there’s literally nothing else to do up here, so let’s go back down. Around the side of the lighthouse, we can get into the door that the pinging noise is coming from, through which is…a ladder? Or something? I don’t know, my screencaps aren’t very clear and might not even be in order. And I don’t care enough to go look up what actually happens. The gist of it all is that it leads to the lighthouse basement, where we can find a working lightbulb, as well as the other half of that sea serpent puzzle.
I’m…not entirely sure how the two halves of the puzzle work, but somehow we end up getting through the secret door, which leads us back to the sea caves. On one of the rocks is a picture of a snake. Cool. Also completely useless to us at this time, so we just turn around and head back into the lighthouse. See, this is a really annoying thing this game does — you have to run all over the map to find certain locations, but you can’t actually do anything with them while you’re there; you have to go back and solve another puzzle, and then click through the kayaking maze again or sloooowly cycle back to the original location. It’s just super tedious.
Anyway, our last task in the lighthouse is to use the now-working lamp to Morse-code our phone number to Hilda. I like how anyone who’s out at sea might look up at the lighthouse and be like, “What the hell?” Anyway, Hilda calls us on our cell phone and tells us she’s sent us an email. Cell phones and email! This game is super high tech.
(Also, Hilda tells Nancy that they’ll “do lunch” and Nancy’s like, “Cool, I’d love to actually talk to you in person” and Hilda laughs at her and is like, “Oh no, that’s a metaphor we use in Hollywood, darling.” Do we really have to work with this lady? She’s kinda obnoxious.)
Back at Katie’s boat, Nancy notes that there’s a lot of water on the floor. We track it to a closet, and see that Katie has a bunch of dead fish on her boat. Gross, Katie. We can’t confront her about this now, but it’s good to know.
Hilda’s email has another puzzle for us. Basically we have to run around and look up a bunch of stuff to figure out the numbers of the coordinates she’s sent us. It is stupid and time-wasting, so I’m not going to include it here. The coordinates lead us to a buoy out in the harbor, which as a wireless transmitter inside. When we find it, Hilda calls us to congratulate us on “[our] ability to take direction and follow through.” So basically, she’s really thrilled that she can tell Nancy to do stupid shit and Nancy will do it while Hilda watches from her island and doesn’t move to stop the culprit at all, even though she clearly knows more than we do. Hilda sucks. She also gives us a new puzzle, so I guess we have to do that now.
We have to go back into the tunnels, but first, let’s talk to Jenna. We find it very suspicious that she doesn’t want anyone to know about the tunnels, and she cracks and admits that not only did shanghaiing occur in the Hot Kettle, but her great-great-grandfather actually helped kidnap people. Oooh. Jenna said that she thought that the tunnels had been filled in, and she doesn’t want the truth about her no-good-dirty-rotten shanghaiing great-great-grandfather to get out. So that’s her innocent explanation for being so shady. Good to know.
Hilda wants us to find a trapdoor in the tunnels that leads to yet another secret passageway. This is where that port/starboard note from all the way back at the beginning of the game comes in — “P” is left and “S” is right, so we just follow those directions in order to find a rock that has another set of coordinates written on it. To the kayak!
Back at the boat, we notice that Katie has a bunch of stuff from SaveKing. The stuff that was stolen from Jenna was also from SaveKing! Katie looks more and more suspicious, which makes me sad. I like her, although admittedly mostly because everyone in this game — even Bess and George — is rude as hell to her.
Anyway, we slyly ask if she buys a lot of stuff from SaveKing, and Kate says that everyone buys their stuff from there. It’s basically Walmart, I guess. So that’s not actually very suspicious. What is suspicious is the dead fish — you have the option of pointing out that the fish are herring, the preferred food of orcas. I don’t believe Nancy would be so well-versed in orca feeding, though, so instead I just have her ask what the fish is for. It doesn’t matter either way, because Katie cracks in a second and admits that she’s been feeding the orca. Oh, Katie. But she adds that she’s not the only one — there aren’t enough fish in the channel (nice job, Holt), and Katie can’t afford to supply the orca’s whole diet, and yet it’s doing fine. HMMM.
We put in the coordinates on the rock in our GPS, which leads us to a new waypoint. Then we use the transmitter, and a buoy with a package pops to the surface. Inside the package is a pair of binoculars. Hilda calls and finally tells us what’s going on: she and Benjamin Hawkins spent their retirement exploring Snake Horse Harbor, and made a journal with maps showing where all the hideouts and secret passages are. Unfortunately, Hilda left it behind when she moved across the channel, and now our villain has found it and has been using it for dastardly deeds. I mean, Hilda could always come back to the island and tell the police where the passages and hideouts are so they could look for clues, but I guess that would require actual effort on her part.
Anyway, she tells us to use the binoculars to look at that ship in the bottle at Whale World. And this is the last time she’ll ever call us. Nancy protests, but I’m not really that broken up about it.
We can have a brief conversation with Andy about the burglary at the Hot Kettle — he merely remarks that it sounds just like the other ones. You’re awfully chill about this, Andy. And then I guess we whip out Hilda’s super-secret binoculars and look at the ship right in front of him? Even though he’s one of our suspects? I don’t know.
Blah blah hidden symbols blah. When we go back to the lighthouse, through the basement, and into the sea caves again, we can now look closer at the picture of the snake attached to the wall.
We have to turn the gears until the right symbols are in the serpents’ mouths (I think the for the left one it’s the trident-shaped thing, and the right one is the cross). The wall slides open to reveal a lever, and when we pull it, a rock opens up on the other side of the cove. Oh, look, it’s another secret tunnel. Fascinating.
So we have to go back into the lighthouse, back down the beach, cycle slooooowly back to Katie’s boat, and kayak back to the sea caves to get into the secret tunnel. BLAHHHH.
Here is me crashing into the rocks in despair.
Anyway, once we paddle in, Nancy muses that we must be in Benjamin Hawkins’s secret hideout (I think Holt or Katie or someone told us about it way back in the beginning of the game). Indeed! But we aren’t the only ones to have found it; we find a stash of food for the orca, toys, and a stack of crates from the Whitechapel Dawn. And then Nancy, like the smooth operator she is, trips and knocks one of the toys into the water. And then the orca shows up.
Now, I’m all like, “Dude, we’re trapped in a cave with a wild animal!” but Nancy’s just like, “Maybe it’s friendly!”, because Nancy Drew fears nothing. And naturally her girl detective instincts are right, because the orca bats the toy we knocked over back at us. “She’s not wild at all!” Nancy says. “Someone’s trained her!” Indeed. But trained her for what?
Now that we know the orca is friendly, we can poke around the cave some more. There’s a diagram for a harness that I guess the culprit is using to control the orca or whatever. We can also look more closely at the cases of fish, and we see a pair of gloves with “Firestone” written on them. Katie! What are your gloves doing in the villain’s lair? I was rooting for you! We were all rooting for you!
Just kidding, we shouldn’t jump to conclusions. After all, someone might’ve stolen her gloves when they ransacked her boat, right? Or maybe she IS evil. We should confront her with this evidence. “Bye bye!” Nancy chirps to the orca as we paddle out. Jesus Christ, Nancy.
Bess and George call Nancy while we paddle back to Katie’s boat, and Nancy just picks up her phone and chats with them while she’s floating in the middle of the channel. You know, as you do. I’d be deathly afraid of dropping my phone in the water, but as we established above, Nancy Drew knows no fear. Bess and George don’t actually have much to say, the whole point of this call is to recap the plot before the end of the game. Nancy tells B&G that the harness we found in the caves is the kind used by the military, and reminds us that the Whitechapel Dawn was rumored to be smuggling stuff. George question-exposits that the orca is being used to retrieve the smuggled cargo from the channel. Indeed. Unfortunately, we still don’t know who’s using the orca. It occurs to me that actually, our only lead is Katie’s gloves, and if she doesn’t know who stole them, we’re back at square one. It’s almost like Nancy should’ve been investigating the burgled stores and snooping around the suspects instead of solving Hilda’s bullshit puzzles.
ANYWAY. When we get back to the dock, though, Katie and her boat are gone. Where could she have gone? Is she off BEING THE VILLAIN?
So we need someone to take us out to find Katie, but both Holt and Jenna shoot us down. There are a couple of different dialogue options; you can either try to convince them to take us out without throwing Katie under the bus and just saying that we really need to talk to her, or you can tell them that you think Katie’s up to something illegal and we need to catch her (actually, the first conversation tree will still end with Nancy revealing that Katie’s been feeding the orca). Either way, they still refuse — although Jenna snarks that she’d love to do it, just to “get the goods on Miss High and Mighty,” but she has a cafe to run. Which only ever has one person sitting in it, Jenna, so I don’t see what the big deal is. But whatever. She suggests we try Andy Jason.
Before the end of the game starts, I should say — tedious as the first nine-tenths of it are, the mystery is pretty good. The smuggling plot is nicely set up and it’s just straight-up more interesting than looking for hidden treasure for like the billionth time. It would’ve been better, though, if we had discovered it by actually poking around the suspects instead of tripping over Benjamin Hawkins’s hideout because of Hilda and her stupid puzzles. But oh well.
Help us, Andy! You and your weird hairline are our only hope! We tell him that Katie’s gone out to the place where the Whitechapel Dawn sank, and we need a ride, but we want to “sneak up on her.” Andy is intrigued enough by our weird behavior to take us out.
Andy leaves us off a little ways away, and we kayak towards the site. I’m not sure how Nancy knows where it is? I guess she Googled the wreck offscreen or something. Anyway, we kayak through the fog and see a giant ship hanging out. I feel like maybe we should call for backup, right? Or the police? I mean, Nancy’s cell phone gets reception even in the middle of the channel. But nah, she decides to board the ship all by herself. We overhear voices mentioning that they’re almost done recovering the Whitechapel Dawn cargo, and they’ll be “out of here” in an hour. Dude! What if the ship leaves with us on it? CALL SOMEBODY, NANCY.
So once you’re on board the ship, you have to hide behind the crates while making your way below deck, lest the crew catch you. At one point, while we’re hiding, we hear some of the dudes talking about how “the boss” was mad after one of the smugglers stole beef jerky from the camping store. The guy says that he just couldn’t resist all the trap doors in the shops. So “the boss” is our main villain who’s behind the orca and the smuggling ring, and the burglaries were committed by the smugglers who…were just trolling, I guess. Good to know. Nancy opens one of the crates and sees a bunch of animal furs inside, which I guess is what they’re smuggling.
Below deck, there’s a ring with water in it, where the orca pops up. Further down the hallway, we go through the door into a room, where we see the back of Katie’s head.
Katie spins around in her evil boss chair and kills us. No, just kidding. Actually, she’s tied to the chair and has a gag over her mouth. Katie’s not evil! Suck it, Jenna. We take the gag off and she says she thought no one would ever find her. I bet Holt and Jenna feel like dicks. Katie tells us that she went out to go check on (and feed) the orca, but she saw the smugglers putting the harness on it, and they rammed her boat and grabbed her. Nancy starts expositing what’s going on, but then they hear someone coming, and Nancy has to hide.
I totally don’t hide in time, and the villain kills me. To the second chance button!
Why are there windows on a ship?
I run off and hide properly this time, and Andy walks into the frame. Amazingly, it takes him a minute to even notice Katie’s gag is off (nice job, Nancy). Anyway, he walks off looking for us, and Nancy muses that if she can get to the kayak, she can go for help. If only she had called someone BEFORE BOARDING THE SHIP.
Anyway, you can make a dash for the door, but Andy notices us from…somewhere? I don’t know. His disembodied voice is like, “Somebody stop her!”, and we get locked in the room with the orca.
Andy’s all like, threatening to put a pair of cement boots on Nancy. She tells him that she told Holt and Jenna what was going on, but he calls her bluff. Well, kind of — I mean, Jenna was the one that suggested Nancy ask Andy for a ride (nice going, Jenna), so surely he’d be a suspect if she disappeared. But whatever.
At this point, Nancy’s POV looks around, and you have a couple of seconds to click on a yellow canister off to the side, and then click on the orca to throw it into the ring. The orca bats it back at Andy’s head and knocks him out for us. Then Holt shows up with the Coast Guard, because I guess he decided to help us out after all? I mean, all the exciting stuff has already happened, but okay.
I like how they used the same render of Andy when he was trying to kill us, and just colored his shirt orange.
And that’s the end! Nancy writes to Ned that she “[has to] hand it to Andy Jason — the plan he cooked up was a darn good one.” Yeah! He tried to kill us and everything, but we “have to” hand it to him. I’m starting to think Nancy’s lack of fear is indicative of a deeper problem here. Anyway, it turns out the whale was trained by “the Russians”, which just makes me think of the Soviet Union fish steroid plot from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (I realize that looks crazy written out.) And the fisheries service has released it into the wild. And Katie decides to vote for Holt after all, although it’s never said if Holt and Jenna stopped being asses to her. I mean, if it weren’t for Nancy, they would’ve never bothered to look for her. And Holt was still late to the party! It occurs to me that Andy would’ve strangled Nancy by the time Holt decided to show up, so really it was the orca who saved her life. Whales do rule.
THE END.
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