Previously on Nancy Drew: The Secret of Shadow Ranch: The phantom horse strikes again, apparently with a personal vendetta against running water and electricity. Maybe it’s like the ghosts in the Sims, where they get mad if you add anything new to their houses.
We open the third and final day on the phone with Bess and George. Nancy is telling them about the phantom horse cutting the power lines to the house — wow, that’s one talented horse. It doesn’t even have opposable thumbs! Anyway, they have a generator, so everything’s okay at the house. Bess and George have finally booked a flight to Arizona, but their plane is delayed. Of course it is. It’s almost like they’re conveniently not going to get here until our mystery is solved. Nancy notes that Dave was SUSPICIOUSLY ABSENT from all the excitement. This bums Bess out, as we told her earlier that Dave was the cutest cowboy.
Sidebar: one weird thing about this game is that there’s this like, super triumphant sounding music — it mostly plays when you’re out galloping over the fields and whatnot, but sometimes it doesn’t shut off when you come back, so you have this sweeping, adventure-style music playing while you’re like, picking vegetables and shit. It’s funny. Anyway.
Over in the kitchen, Shorty is all aflutter — the horse is just too scary! He’s not sure he can last much longer here! Aren’t we scared too? Nancy’s just like, “Oh, dramatize.” Anyway, we have to pick vegetables and gather eggs again, and then we can go riding. We also grab a magnet from the refrigerator.
Outside, Nancy notices that there’s a horseshoe on the ground that wasn’t there before. Could our phantom horse have thrown it? We take it to Tex, and he notes that there’s a rock lodged in the shoe that looks like it came from the ghost town. I mean…do the rocks in the ghost town really look that different from the rocks in the rest of the desert? Whatever. Nancy is on that like white on rice: “So you’re saying you’ve been out to the ghost town?” Ooooh, we’re good. Tex tells us the last time he was out at the ghost town — he doesn’t specify when — his horse started acting weird. “Almost like there was something there he didn’t like. Something telling him to STAY AWAY.” Creepy!
Before we can go riding, we have to put together a bridle for Tex. And now we can go head out to find “zebra rock”!
So first off, me being the super-sleuth that I am, I totally figured out what zebra rock was and decided to check it out before I got the magnet. This was a BAD MOVE.
It’s the striped rock at the trail stop, by the way. But if you try to look at the rock without being fully prepared for whatever’s under it, you get attacked by a rattlesnake. Just like Uncle Ed! So that’s how I died on day two. But now we have the magnet, and I guess the rattlesnake psychically knows that we’re ready to find whatever Dirk buried, because it’s not there anymore.
There’s another puzzle to solve — you have to use the magnet to drag some metal pieces around the top of a box or whatever to get to what’s underneath. And what’s underneath is a flower puzzle! Charleena Purcell has emailed us that the crackers were called “Sunflower Crackers”, so that’s 5/6. Bess and George have emailed us the bead pattern for the purse, so we have to stitch that together before we can find the sixth flower and open the box.
(Also, Sunflower Crackers were apparently manufactured in San Francisco. My people!)
We have to go Mary Yazzie to get beads for the purse, and she makes us put together a bead display for her before she gives them to us, then we have to figure out the pattern and put the beads on accordingly, blah blah menial work blah. When it’s done, Nancy will say “That flower looks kind of like a poppy.” She has to tell us this because the flower looks like actually nothing, and no one would ever be able to figure it out just by looking.
So we’re 6 for 6, re: flowers! They are: the Harrison Yellow (a yellow rose), a daisy, a lily, a tulip, a poppy, and a sunflower. So we put them in on the box, and it opens up to reveal a music box. But we need a key to wind it up. Uggggh. Okay, let’s go find that.
I head over to Dry Creek again for…reasons. I don’t know, you have to go here at some point, so I figured I’d just get it out of the way now. The sleeping bag and books are gone from Cappy’s! Did we tell anyone that we knew they were there? But there’s a key on the box in the corner, and Nancy’s all, “Ooooh, maybe this is the key to the jail cell,” and lumbers right towards it. It’s a trap, Nancy! Someone sneaks up on us and bonks us over the head. Smooth.
We wake up in Dirk’s jail cell — you know, the one we needed to get into. So that’s convenient. The culprit also hasn’t bothered to take away our phone, our lariat, or run Bob off. So we just rope the chair upright, use a brick lying in the cell to knock the key off the wall and onto the chair, and then rope the chair over to us. Breaking out of jail sure is easy! But before we leave, we can see a message Dirk has scratched into the wall, which translates to “under bank lamp.” And on our way out, we can find a note dropped by one of the thieving thieves. It’s Dirk’s super-secret code, and bank robbers are using it to communicate. (Apparently, our culprit found it “in the cellar.” Who do we know who was poking around the cellar, hmmm?) Now that we have the code, we can read the note that we found by the fire pit way back during day one. It says, “Will need more supplies. If ranch is not soon check message mesa again. Dirk might have hidden it right under sheriff nose.” HMMM.
I know Mary Yazzie spends all her time riding around the ranch and macking it with Tex, but I’m pretty sure someone would’ve spotted her nosing around the cellar, so I think this pretty much rules her out as a suspect.
Anyway, under the bank lamp is another note, telling us we need Ellie’s ring, and we should use it on that arcade game in Cappy’s. Cool cool cool.
Dave’s just carrying the ring around, naturally. He’s like, “It was my dead great-aunt’s most prized possession! Here, take it.” Oh, Dave. We also tell him about getting hit on the head in the ghost town, and he tells us we should stay away from now on. “And call the sheriff, of course.” Which we do. The sheriff says he’ll look around the ghost town, which we know will do absolutely nothing, so whatever.
So over at Cappy’s, there’s this thing that looks remarkably like a slot machine, because I guess they had those in the 1880s? (Apparently, according to Wikipedia, the first true slot machine was invented in the late 1880s-1890s. Also in San Francisco! Gambling and crackers, represent.) Anyway, you use the token we won at Mary’s shop to play, and you should save your game because if you don’t win this game the first time around, you have to go back and win that stupid game at the shop to get another token. You pull the lever to try and get four mean characters, then once you do that, you use Ellie’s ring on the red button, and the game will switch to making you get four nice characters.
It’s completely random, and it takes for frickin EVER. “If I keep playing, I’m bound to win eventually,” Nancy says after I lose for like, the fifth time in the row. And that’s how Nancy Drew developed a gambling addiction. Maybe this is the reason she never has any money.
When we finally win, a key falls out of the machine. We use it on the music box, which reveals another note. It has a bunch of glyphs written on it, so we have to connect the glyphs on the map in the order Dirk gave us. When we draw the line, it comes out as a loopy, cursive-y V. Wait, so Dirk does know how to write in cursive?
We go back to the rock and find the V. Underneath it is…another rock. Thrilling stuff, this game. Dirk tells us to take the rock to “Charlie’s grave”, and we’ll find the trail to the treasure. (“Treasure trail.” Heh.) He’s referring to the Charlie that’s buried at the trail stop:
I really want to know how they buried an entire mule, but alright.
When Nancy holds the stone up, though, she’ll say it’s too scuffed to see anything. Off to Mary Yazzie!
I feel like even the game knows it’s been going on for a long time, because when we hand the rock over, she immediately kicks us out, there’s like two seconds of whirring noises, and then she hands it back over and says “It’s a picture agate,” and that’s the whole visit. Off to finish the game!
The agate leads us off in this MYSTERIOUSLY MYSTERIOUS direction. So we’re going off trail, by ourselves, into an area without cell phone reception, with no one knowing where we are. Good job, Nancy. At the end of the trail is more rocks. Dirk Valentine really knows how to show a girl a good time, I guess. So we wander around the rocks for a bit until we look up and see a tree branch hanging over the side. “How am I going to get up there?” derps Nancy. I don’t know, the same way you got up onto the second level of the glyph rocks? “But I need a rope!” COME ON, NANCY.
Anyway, we use the lariat to climb up to the second level of the rocks, where we find ancient cliff dwellings. Super cool! Mary Yazzie told us about them way back during day one — apparently they were built by the ancient Puebloans, whom Mary Yazzie calls the “Anasazi,” though Wikipedia says that’s not the preferred term. The steel guitar strums ominously as we explore. On the wall there’s a message from Dirk, telling us when to go left or right, and which doors to go through — all the doorways have colored rocks on top, so if the directions say “brown”, you go through the doorway with a brown rock on top. It’s kind of confusing, actually. I’d bet he’d feel like a dick if Frances got lost and died in here.
I saved, just to be sure.
There are also pots near all of the doorways, which have metal keys inside. The keys appear randomly, so you have to look in all of them. They unlock the door at the end of the maze.
Yeah, these kids were DEFINITELY teenagers.
And we find Dirk Valentine’s treasure! Kind of funnily, Dirk painted a bunch of loopy Vs all over the room, like…isn’t that his own name? That’s kind of conceited, right? And there’s a chest in the corner, inside which is a bunch of solid gold hearts. It’s kind of a small chest, actually. This isn’t nearly as impressive as the Queen’s Diamond or the gold in the mansion or the gold in the speakeasy.
There isn’t much else to look at in the room — Dirk didn’t leave Frances a letter or anything, so we might as well head out and see who the villain is.
It’s Shorty! This part really terrified me when I first played the game, at the age of 11, and I still maintain that he’s one of the scarier Nancy Drew villains. He creeps to us about his plan — he and “his buddies” went through all the trouble of wrangling the horse, and cutting the power lines, and bursting the water pipes, when all they really had to do was stalk Nancy. Ick. And he ran Bob off, so we have no way of getting out of here (except…didn’t Shorty also come here by horse? Can’t we just steal his?), “so ready or not, here I come.”
CREEPY.
Wait, but if Shorty is one of the Denver bank robbers, doesn’t he…already have money? From the bank he robbed? Or did they have to dump it while they ran? I don’t remember. Anyway, he sets off, calling out how many doors he has left while we scramble for a way to thwart him. This part was really hard for me when I was 11 — I remember being too panicked to click in the right direction through the maze, and then he rounds the corner going “HEEERE’S SHORTY” and kills us. I think I might’ve made my mom sit down and play with me because I was too scared. Oh, self. Anyway, what you have to do is go a few rooms back, and switch a red stone and a green stone, so that Shorty will go through a doorway that has a hole in the floor. This is the part where the pop-up inventory is kind of a pain — if you’re too nervous to click straight, it takes too much time to bring the inventory up, take the stone, and click it closed.
But I am no longer 11 years old, so I manage to trap Shorty in one go. And it only took me 10 years! It turns out Shorty rode the ~phantom horse~ to the dwellings, so Nancy just hops on and rides it back to the ranch. Everyone oohs and aahs over Nancy riding the horse. Three days and she’s already a better wrangler than Tex, because Nancy Drew is better than you.
One thing that impresses me about this game — and I thought it was cool even when I first played it — is that the build-up to it being Shorty is actually pretty well-done. Once you see that he’s the villain, everything we know about him — his propensity for get rich quick schemes, his insistence that the horse is bad luck, his continual hinting that it’s too scary to stay here — makes sense. And he doesn’t even change his tone of voice or anything — his over-the-top friendliness just naturally becomes creepy once he starts following us. Well played, game.
So the sheriff busts Shorty and everyone is happy. The Rawleys keep the ghost horse, and Tex gets to take care of it. Mary Yazzie and the Rawleys make up, although it’s never said if she gets the land or not. But either way, she starts coming around to call on Tex. “It’s actually kind of cute,” Nancy says. “Speaking of cute…”, which is a segue into talking about Dave. Dude, what happened to Ned in this game?
Anyway, Dave tells the Rawleys that he was looking for the treasure, and they offer to split it with him, if it turns out they can keep it. But…I thought Frances left the treasure to Ellie? (Her letter says that she’s “too heartsick” to look for it, but if Ellie finds it, she can keep it.) And Ellie, upon dying, left all of her stuff to Dave? So isn’t the treasure Dave’s anyway? Also, it’s implied that the cliff dwellings are pretty far out. Was the treasure even on the Rawleys’ property? Why am I even asking?
Blah blah Bess and George show up blah. Nancy starts reading a Charleena Purcell book, and she gets pretty into it. And I win the “Hawkeye” award, for “reading everything [I] can get [my] hands on.” Wait, did I? I don’t remember doing that much reading. But okay, I’ll take it.
THE END.
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