Previously on Nancy Drew: The Secret of the Old Clock: Josiah Crowley is dead! Who’s Josiah Crowley? We don’t really know, but we’re super convinced that he was an upstanding citizen and would have never gone back on his word to leave Emily Crandall money in his will. Something foul is clearly afoot. Speaking of Emily, everyone thinks she’s insane — she says she isn’t, but she does spend all her time locked in her room, weeping in her nightie and wailing about hearing voices, so…maybe not helping her case there. Anyway, she originally asked us here to protect her mother’s super valuable and completely uninsured jewelry, but somebody has made off with the jewels. Nancy’s like, “Omg, this is just like a Dashiell Hammett book!” This game is indeed very similar to The Maltese Falcon, except without the sex or the murder or the black market smuggling. But the same in all other aspects!
Anyway, we have to go see a lady named Mrs. Sheldon, who tells us we can have the trivet, as long as (sing it with me) we do some errands for her. Well, we do have a car and five whole dollars for gas! The Great Depression is nothing to Nancy Drew!
So Mrs. Sheldon wants us to get her bridge cards from Miss Jakowski, one of the phone operators. Miss Jakowski is like, “Oh, you’re Nancy Drew! I’ve been eavesdropping on your phone conversations for this entire game!” Then she tells us she’ll give us the bridge cards if we get her raffle tickets from Brigid at the orphanage. Brigid at the orphanage Irish brogues at us that the orphans really need toys, and she’ll give us the tickets if we get some for them. We’re like, “That’s not really our deal?” and she Catholic guilts us all, “Well, you wouldn’t want to disappoint the ORPHANS, would you? Right now all they have are STICKS. Do you want the ORPHANS to keep BEATING EACH OTHER with STICKS?” Jesus Christ, we’ve only been here for like five minutes. Anyway, we go to the general store and buy some toys, and then Brigid’s like, “Lol guess what, the tickets aren’t even here, they’re at the print shop.” Brigid! Oil is a finite resource, you know!
Then the print shop guy is all like, “Oops, I was supposed to print the tickets, but I really want to go fishing today, so…bye.” He wrings his hands over how if he doesn’t catch a 19-inch bass by today, he has to turn his stamp collection over to his brother, and “Stamp collecting’s about the only hobby I can afford these days.” Well, in that case, maybe you shouldn’t be blowing off customers in the middle of the Great Depression. Nancy offers to catch the fish for him while he prints the tickets, and he’s all like, “I don’t know, it takes SKILL and MUSCLE and BRAINS, and you’re a GIRL.” We catch the fish in like, two minutes. Suck it, sexist print shop guy! If this were the future, I would leave him a bad review on Yelp dot com.
Anyway, we finally get the tickets, hand them over to Miss Jakowski, get the cards, give them to Mrs. Sheldon, and get the trivet. I pretty much blew all my money on gas at this point, so I went out to deliver a few more telegrams. Nancy delivers one to the observatory, and marvels, “Wow, you have a big telescope.” The scientist guy is like, “Come back after dark and I’ll let you take a look at it.” DUDE. But his awkward sexual advances are futile, as this is one of the few Nancy Drew games that takes place entirely during the daytime.
I call Bess and George, because I can. Miss Jakowski’s all like, “Hey girl hey!” when we come on the line. Heh. Bess and George argue some more over who gets to hold the phone earpiece. What wacky, newfangled technology these telephones are! We get on the topic of Richard Topham, and George weirdly says she wouldn’t want to read minds, as then she would hear what everyone thinks about her drippy fashion sense (she once mixed plaid and paisley!). I find it hard to believe George “My Only Defining Character Feature is Being a Tomboy” Fayne would even care about that, but whatever. Bess’s neighbor is eavesdropping on the line, and Bess says she’s going to get her own private line one day. George reminds her that a private phone line costs hella money, and Bess says, “Oh, ish kabibble.” Nancy tells them she’s sticking around to solve the mystery, and they ask her if she’s been “reading Dash Hammett stories” again. Heeeeee. Interestingly, nobody name-drops the Hardy Boys, even though their first book was published in 1927. Nancy and her friends are too hardboiled for them, I guess.
Anyway, Bess and George have to leave, because they’re going to see The Big Trail. “This guy called John Wayne is in it. Helen says he’s a real dreamboat.” HA!
And then I call Carson, just because I like talking on the phone. I hope he’s useful, because I had to spend another five cents on this call. He tells us that we can give him the papers we picked up “tonight when [we] get home from Emily’s.” Wow, so this game really does only take place over the course of one day. He lectures Nancy some more about not putting too much wear and tear on her car. I’m confused by this game’s version of Carson, where he has like, actual concern over auto safety.
Time to go into the barn! You put in all four of our puzzle answers on the door, and it swings open for us. Inside, there’s a clock with the same moon pattern as the poem on the golf course. You have to enter the highlighted poem numbers (once = 1, ate = 8, “’tis heaven” = 7, etc) in the order they appear in the poem, and the clock pops open to reveal the fourth mirror. Then you have to solve a domino puzzle to open up one of the barn windows. “Something tells me I need to adjust the mirrors so the light bounces off of them and onto that radiometer over there,” Nancy muses. Nancy’s detective intuition is really oddly specific.
I don’t know why there are suddenly five mirrors in this puzzle. Don’t ask questions.
Anyway, you get the mirrors to bounce all the light off of each other and onto the radiometer bulb, and a ladder comes down. There’s a nifty animation, although it gets less nifty when it plays every single time you go upstairs. The upstairs part of the barn has yet another clock, with a bunch of hobo symbols on it. “I’ve seen these somewhere before,” Nancy muses. As have I! I’m very excited to bust out all the knowledge I learned from Kit Saves the Day. A note pinned to the clock says we can look in “Marcel’s band” for “LWAT.” There’s also a ham radio, but it’s missing “something.”
It turns out the only person who can help us with this is Richard Topham — he tells us that “Marcel” is actually Josiah’s old hat, which he gave to the Crandalls. He’s all like, “They SAID it was because he was a dear friend that had just died and they wanted a momento, but I really think they were looking for money, because they are POOR.” I like how Topham thinks this is an appropriate thing to say to someone he doesn’t even know (and who’s staying with the Crandalls to boot). And he has the hunk of raw quartz that Josiah was going to put in the ham radio to make it work. He’ll give it to us if we help him prove that he’s psychic. I mean, okay. It’s not like we’re on a schedule or anything. (Seriously, it’s been the middle of the day ever since we got here.)
Topham lays out a bunch of cards and makes us guess which one he’s thinking about. If we get five correct in a row, it means that he has telepathic powers. If we don’t get five correct in a row, he just starts over until we do. I feel like maybe his methodology isn’t super-sound here. Anyway, you can tell which cards he’s thinking about, because he uses certain phrases for each of them. “You go, girl!” he says when we get one right. Dude, Topham is weird, and not just ’cause he thinks he can read minds.
So now we have the quartz, and we know that the Crandalls have Josiah’s hat. Emily points it out in the drawer in her window seat. We also see a letter to Emily in there! Let’s read it! She’s like, “Do you need to look at everything in there?” I mean…we kind of do, Emily, to finish the game! Anyway, we’ll have to look at that when she’s not around. In the brim of Josiah’s hat is a key. “To his safe deposit box?” Nancy wonders. Indeed.
There’s not a specific point in the game that you have to do this, but let’s go into the secret passage now. Yay! It’s been so long since we’ve had one of those. The passage is in the parlor, under the window seat (what is it with this game and window seats?). We trip over a piggy bank and Nancy’s like, “Swell! A dollar!” I bet everyone else in the Great Depression was like, “Damn, I wish I could just trip over some money like that.” Anyway, the passage is lit by lanterns, and Nancy notes that someone else has been down here recently. When we walk to the very end of the passageway, we hear Richard Topham meditating, and Nancy realizes the passageway connects the two houses. Duh, Nancy.
There’s also a tile puzzle in the passageway, which turns into a picture of “Creepy’s Corner” when you unscramble it. We get a record! Let’s go play it on Emily’s phonograph player, and swing dance in our bobby socks or whatever the hell people did in the ’30s. What you’re supposed to do is listen to the sound effects in the background and not the dialogue. Tricky!
Let’s go see Mr. Archer about this safe deposit box business, shall we? He shuts us down quick: we may have Josiah’s key, but we also need the bank owner’s key, and Mr. Archer doesn’t really feel like opening the box for us unless we do a favor for him. Of course not. His seamstress quit, and he needs someone to stitch together a dress for his wife. Nancy’s like, “Just hire a new one, bro,” and Mr. Archer breaks down: he totally lied to us earlier! His bank is NOT doing fine, and this is the last nice dress his wife is going to get until the Cold War. His life is in shambles! Nancy’s like, “Oh. That sucks.” We agree to make the dress, because having this grown-ass man crying all over us is hella awkward. And Jane is an ex-seamstress, so she can just do it for us, right?
Haha no, just kidding. Jane punks out on us, no matter how easy we tell her it is. She BSes that she hasn’t sewed a stitch in years and she’s just completely forgotten how to do it, so sorry, no can do. What’s funny is that this is supposed to be suspicious behavior on Jane’s part, but I’m so used to everyone making up excuses to foist their work off onto Nancy that I didn’t think anything of it. Emily is also useless — she’ll let us use her mother’s sewing machine, but we’re on our own. Unfortunately, we still don’t have a sewing needle. Jane says she’ll find one for us if we arrange the pies for her. Fair enough. I think the pie puzzle is pretty fun, actually! It’s sort of a logic puzzle, where you get clues about which kinds of pies go in which delivery rack (e.g. Sandgate has 2 large cherry pies, 1 blueberry, and 1 chocolate, while Riverville has 1 small and 1 large blueberry, 1 small and 1 large chocolate, and 2 large pies overall). When we’re done, Jane has disappeared to go find the sewing kit. Let’s go through her stuff!
We find a photo in Jane’s podium of two guys, and Nancy immediately says, “I bet those are the two brothers who built the inn!” I’m so sure. They could be literally anyone, but Nancy Drew is never wrong. When we flip the picture over, someone has conveniently written “Door in parlor window seat.” It’s kind of weird, because you can go into the passageway at any point before this, so it’s not like they need to tell you where it is. But anyway, Nancy mentions that the brothers look like they’re in the passageway, but there’s a door behind them that wasn’t there when we looked. Back into the tunnels! This time, we find a door that goes behind one of the walls, and Nancy realizes we’re looking into Emily’s room. “Jeepers! I bet that’s how someone is making that picture move!” Indeed. There is no good explanation for why those brothers built a passage that lets them look into someone’s bedroom, though. Ick.
Jane is back and hands over the sewing kit, and she tells us that Emily has “gone to town.” I hope Emily put some shoes and a bra on before she left. Anyway, now we can look through all her stuff with impunity, so let’s go do that. We find a letter from Josiah! It’s to Gloria, and he tells her not to show it to anyone, and not to ask him why he’s being such a weirdo. You know, I will admit that as much as I like this game, the mystery is just straight-up nonsensical. There’s literally no reason for Josiah to have made the location of his real will a secret, or to have involved everyone with his puzzles. Dude is just a troll. He tells Gloria to memorize a nonsensical line: “You are a kind lady who sparkles like good water, and makes me think that the sky’s the limit.” We’ll need to know that line later.
We also find a letter from Jane, written a year ago, promising to take care of Emily if anything happens to Gloria. You know, it’s not mentioned if Gloria was sick or anything. Did she know she was going to die? Anyway, Jane writes that her roommate is a thieving thief, but she’ll be able to move out of the boarding house soon: she’s investing in the stock market, as it’s a surefire way to get rich. Oh, I see what you did there, game.
I also enjoy the sewing-the-dress minigame more than I probably should. You have to use the mouse to guide the needle along the dotted line on the dress, and of course messing up significantly means you have to start over. It’s not hugely difficult, although also very much not designed for computers with trackpads. The dress is done! Let’s go needle Mr. Archer about how he’s totally indebted to us now!
Mr. Archer repays us by opening Josiah’s safe deposit box for us, and what do we find inside? “That’s not Josiah’s will,” Mr. Archer says. Of course it isn’t. That would be the logical end to this game, and we can’t be having that. “It’s locked. Naturally,” Nancy deadpans. Heh. If Nancy really were in a Dash Hammett book, she’d just use Mr. Archer’s face to bust the journal open, but alas, we’re in a Nancy Drew game. Maybe if we solve the puzzle and open the journal, we’ll finish the game? Just kidding, we still have like, eighty more puzzles to go.
Up next: More puzzles. Josiah’s online friends help us solve the mystery, and someone crashes their car. As to be expected from Nancy Drew!
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