So I think — I think — I have enough Nancy Drew games in my backlog to queue them up now, if I post them once a month. (I have three ready.) We’ll see how that goes. I’m going to try to post them on the 1st of every month. Again, we’ll have to see how it works out, but I think I can do it. So, for the first time in about a year, let’s return to Nancy Drew and her mom jeans and invasive questions!
Warning: this game contains the Hardy Boys. Do not continue if you are allergic to lameness and/or bad hair.
Dear Hannah: We’re back in the 21st century for this game, and we’re going on a train ride with the Hardy Boys! Worst. Vacation. Ever. If you told me I had to be stuck in a confined space with the Hardy Boys with no way of escaping for several days, I’d run screaming in the opposite direction. Nancy is excited though, because they’re so “cute.” Yeah, dig Frank’s puffy zip-up vest. Sexy.
Another vest? Have mercy.
Anyway, Nancy (and Frank and Joe) has actually been invited on this train ride by a “Lori Gerard”, who is vaguely rich and famous for no reason the game deigns to tell us. She’s the only one who has any idea where the train is going, everyone else is just…coming along and hoping for the best, I guess. As usual, Nancy chirps about how excited she is to go on vacation with zero mysteries in her future whatsoever. I feel like Nancy just brings it on herself now.
Intro letter over, we begin in the dining room car of the train, where Lori helpfully introduces our suspects — I mean, fellow passengers. Also, I’m not sure how her hat is adhering to the laws of physics.
John Grey is the host of “the best cable show ever,” Ghostbusters Ghost Chasers. He’s also rocking the same ribbed turtleneck Rick Arlen wore in 1999.
And Charleena Purcell is on the train with us! Hi, Charleena! Lori says she “adores” Charleena’s romance novels. Understandable, when you recall that reading a Charleena Purcell novel is like flying through the old west on the wings of love. Neatly, the light reflecting off of her glasses moves every time she turns her head. The graphics in these games have come so far.
Tino Balducci, who is “the most famous police detective in the country.” You see that they had to quantify that because everyone knows the most famous detective in the country is Nancy Drew.
Then there’s Frank and Joe, who are just here because their dad is friends with Lori’s. Heh. They’re so continuously lame. And where is Frank’s neck?
And then there’s Nancy, who’s…sitting on the floor, I guess. Lori keeps calling her “Natalie,” just to prove how little she cares. Introductions over, Lori tells us what we’re doing here: this train belonged to a “Jake Hurley” back in the 1800s, until ONE DAY, the train was found abandoned! And the only person on board was the engineer! And he was DEAD! And Jake Hurley had DISAPPEARED FOREVER! *scare chord*
Tino is intrigued.
Anyway, so now we’re on our way to Copper Gorge, Colorado, where Jake Hurley was rumored to have found a massive gold mine. Lori wants to solve the mystery of his disappearance, and possibly find the gold. Oh, and his wife Camille also died on this train. ~*~*~Spooky~*~*~
Then the train goes though a tunnel, everything goes dark, and Lori screams. When the lights come back on, she’s gone. ~*~*~SPOOKY!!~*~*~
Our guests react: John Grey deadpans that people should never tamper with what they don’t understand. Charleena just rolls her eyes and says, “Oh, brother.” Tino wails that everyone needs to stop panicking. I don’t know, Tino, I feel like these people could panic a little more over Lori disappearing into thin air. Joe dorks that “[Nancy’s] up on all that social etiquette stuff; what do you do when your hostess disappears?” Let me just hit up the Kidnapped Party Guest section of Emily Post real quick! The fact that the Hardys think Nancy “Invasive Questions” Drew is an etiquette expert makes me think they were raised by wolves.
I don’t know what kind of etiquette advice Nancy gives them, though, because we cut to talking to Charleena Purcell. She doesn’t remember us from that time she helped us find a hundred-year-old buried treasure and also catch a bank robber masquerading as ranch cook who used a phosphorescent horse to carry out his crimes. Shadow Ranch was kind of an insane game. Anyway, she thinks Lori’s faked her disappearance for attention — “Lori Gerard is a young woman whose only goal in life is to be famous. She craves attention and habitually uses her father’s considerable wealth to get it.” OOOOH. Charleena only accepted the invitation because she wanted to research Jake Hurley and the gold mines for a potential story.
We’re about to interrogate Charleena some more when Joe beckons us from the doorway. Go away, Joe! I’m solving a mystery here!
The Hardys tell us that they went after our other two suspects, Tino Balducci and John Grey. John’s locked himself up in Camille’s car, probably trying to communicate with her ghost. John Grey/Abby OTP! Joe tried to join forces with Tino Balducci, but Tino’s not interested in hanging with amateur detectives. Joe pouts: doesn’t Tino know that the Hardys work for ATAC? ATAC, by the way, is American Teens Against Crime. That is the dorkiest thing I’ve ever heard in my life. Also, I like the implication that people are lining up to hire high schoolers to fight crime for them. They’re the detective version of the Baby-Sitter’s Club.
Anyway, Joe and Frank are split on the Lori issue: Joe is insists that Lori is all that is good and pure in the world, and she would have never faked her own kidnapping. Frank’s like, “Anyone can scream, Joe.” I have Nancy agree with Frank, because Nancy is a smart detective, although agreeing with Frank makes me feel dirty. I hates him, precious. Aaaanyway, Nancy asks if anyone’s spoken to the engineer, as he’s the only who would have been able to stop the train. Frank and Joe are like, “Oh, hey, that’s definitely something someone should do. Not us, though. We’re just going to sit here.”
See, theoretically, the fact that Hardys are in this game means that there are three people working on the mystery. Of course, this is a Nancy Drew game, so she’s the only one that finds anything significant. (Actually, you can’t even play as them in this game — there’s like, one minigame from Frank’s POV.) The Hardy Boys are, as ever, useless.
But first: let’s call Bess and George! Bess is all aflutter that Nancy is on a train with a bunch of famous people. She’s “dying” to know what Lori Gerard is wearing. I hate to break it to Bess, but it is all puffy vests up in here. This is 2005, right? Lori really should be dressed more like this. Anyway, Bess and George are painting Bess’s room. I like how Bess is the only one of those two who is ever doing anything, and George just comes along for the hell of it. Like, are we ever going to call them one day when Bess is helping George fix a computer or whatever? Anyway, Bess and George tell us that Lori’s faked a kidnapping before; as Charleena says, she did it for attention. Not even Bess is worried that Lori’s in danger for real.
The phone to call the engineer is in the kitchen. He’s completely unperturbed to hear that someone has disappeared off the train while it’s still moving, and he won’t even like, pull over for five minutes so we can make sure Lori’s still here. After hanging up, Nancy wanders around the kitchen and notices an etching of a duck and a square on the furnace. “A square and a duck. Now, where have I seen those before?” she muses. What? Dude, I don’t know.
…did I skip a step?
Onto exploring the train. I dig it a lot; it’s all dark wood and muted colors, and lots of patterned wallpaper. This is exactly the way I decorate my Sims’ houses. We find a plot-important note about a pickaxe and a lamp, which are with “Buell,” and “lead is the key” to “open what’s closed.” I like how no one in these games can ever just leave a simple note to themselves. I also have high hopes for any game that involves a pickaxe!
We’ve spoken to the engineer, so now we can do what we want. Let’s go back to interrogating Charleena, which the Hardy Boys so rudely interrupted. She tells us that she’s writing her next book and she’s on a deadline, so she has to bring her laptop everywhere until she’s finished. Fair enough. She backstories a bit about Jake Hurley and Camille, and how Jake Hurley came to seek his fortune out west, so he had this train built so he and Camille could travel in style. Uh…why did he need to seek his fortune if he was rich enough to build this fancy-ass train? Whatever. Anyway, nobody knows why or how Camille died, or where Jake got the money to build the train. It’s suspected that he found a rich mine somewhere in Copper Gorge. I thought he built the train before he even came out west? This entire conversation makes no sense. Anyway, the whole point is that Camille’s death was mysteriously mysterious, and Jake has hidden treasure somewhere.
That’s it for our conversation with Charleena. “Let me know if you run across anything juicy,” she says. Please stop looking at me like that, Charleena.
Let’s harass John Grey! He’s actually not really that much of a douche to Nancy, which is nice. He tells us that he’s getting “vibes” that Lori’s in serious danger. Vibes from CAMILLE’S GHOST! His laptops can sense her ghostly presence! Technology is amazing. Nancy says that Charleena thinks Lori is just playing a prank. John: “Charleena Purcell writes romance novels. End of comment.” His TV show about ghost hunting, on the other hand, is completely legit. John Grey’s thoughts on the rest of our suspects: he knows Lori by reputation, but never met her before now. He notes that nobody here seems to know her personally. “Maybe she doesn’t have any friends,” Nancy suggests. Way harsh! John also feels sorry for Tino Balducci; apparently Tino caught some bank robbers a while back, and now the pressure is on him to do it again. It must be hard having to prove you’re a great detective constantly, right? Nancy’s like, “Not rly, I single-handedly bust cases open all the time.”
The “poking around in the room” segment of the game: there’s a mechanical horse-jumping game on the table; when you manage to hop the horse over all the jumps, you get a music sheet for “Camptown Races.” When we try to play it on the piano, though, John tells us that music is like, throwing off his ghostly vibes. So we’ll have to do that when he’s out of the room. Is there a bathroom on this train? Anyway.
We find a certificate from “Krolmeister”, the brand that makes everything in the Nancy Drew games, giving Camille ownership of a doll named Teddy Eberhardt. Camille apparently collected dolls; there are a bunch of references to about ten of them, and we have to find them all eventually. We also find another music sheet in one of the boxes in the room, a sewing sampler, a metal slug with a number 7, and a weird-looking grill in the wall. That’s all the clues for this room.
Tino’s set up shop in Jake’s car, and looks v. official sitting behind his desk. We introduce ourselves, and he says, “Amateur detective, huh? You ever thought about becoming a real detective? You know, like me?” He tells us about his police bust — the FBI had no idea who the bank robbers were, but Tino stopped their car, disarmed them, and single-handedly arrested them.
“I heard they stopped because you accidentally rear-ended them,” Nancy says. Hee.
We ask if he’s going to figure out what happened to Lori, and Tino condescends to us that he won’t know until he’s gathered “all the facts.” Nancy’s like, “Oh, is that what you’re supposed to be doing now? Because it looks like you’re just sitting there.” Man, Nancy is harsh in this game. Tino snaps that it may not look like he’s doing anything, but that’s just because he’s a low-key kind of guy. Heh. His thoughts on our suspects: Charleena writes crappy books, and John Grey is a quack. No word on whether or not he respects the Hardy Boys. John told us that Tino picked something up off the floor of the dining car. When we mention this, Tino just forks it over: it’s another slug, this time with the number 3 on it. He tells us it to put it on a necklace so we can show it off and tell everyone that “the” Tino Balducci gave it to us. Swoon!
Clues in Jake’s car: a jewel in the eye of the dog statue on Tino’s desk, a book about precious gems, a box with a puzzle lock on it, and a chart of the periodic table. Oh, hell no! I cheated off of my friend throughout the entirety of sophomore chemistry, and I still only passed with a C-. I’m never going back there again.
Anyway, here’s a photo of Camille with her creepy-ass doll collection.
Back to Charleena! We never fully interrogated her, after all, since the Hardy Boys cut in on us. Charleena has an equally low opinion of John Grey and Tino Balducci. Man, nobody on this train likes each other. She snarks that “[Nancy] and those two Boy Scouts would make better detectives.” HA! I love Charleena.
We’ve managed to go through all of the rooms on the train except the machine room and the caboose. Unfortunately, the door is locked. Is it locked with a key like any other normal door in the world? Of course not. There’s a carving of an owl and a cherry on the door; this is a reference to sampler patterns in one of Camille’s books. The owl is pattern #7, and the cherry is pattern is #10. So…there’s a scale in one of the cars…and you have to balance the metal slugs on the pans to match them to the symbols which…match the patterns…
Whatever, explaining it is too hard. Here’s a picture. Nancy will note, again, that we’ve seen the square and the duck before. It occurs to me that I was probably supposed to look at this before going into the kitchen. Anyway, the metal pans will weigh the slugs, and light up the owl and the cherry accordingly when you add the slugs up to 7 and 10. And that unlocks the door. Yay!
The machine room is also pretty nifty, it’s v. brightly lit and has lots of gold and wood. We can poke around here for clues, although the puzzle to get into the caboose doesn’t involve picking anything up in here at all. But whatever, I’m an efficient sleuth, so we’ll just get what we need now.
Another metal slug, because locking doors with keys is for squares.
“Silver is orange, blue, green, red, purple, yellow.” Jake Hurley was color blind? Just kidding, I bet that’s answer to a puzzle.
We find some blueprints for the machine in the middle of the room, and Nancy notes that a bunch of gemstones are written along the side. Presumably we’ll need those to make it work.
Nancy looks at the machine and is like, “I need a spyglass.” I’m glad she figured that out just by looking at it. Anyway, I don’t think we can touch this till the end of the game. To the caboose!
The caboose puzzle is kind of funny because it’s the last car on the train and therefore the only place Lori could possibly be, and so you’d think the puzzle would be be more climactic, but you basically just have to press the keys until one of them stays down, then do it again and again until you figure out which order to press them in.
Oh, hey, look who’s here. Lori’s all appalled that she wasn’t found by someone cool, like Tino Balducci. Whatever, Lori. You could’ve been found by the Hardy Boys. It could be so much worse. She exposits that her dad bought out a shipping company, and Jake Hurley’s train had been abandoned in one of their warehouses. Lori shows us a letter that came with the train — Jake was afraid that “claimjumpers” would find his mine, but he didn’t want his treasure to be lost forever, so naturally he set up a puzzle for one of his relatives. Naturally, his relative (“Ruth Kensington”) couldn’t figure it out, so the mystery remains unsolved. And that’s what we’re all doing here! Nancy’s like, “Okay, but you forgot to exposit about the part where you disappeared. What was up with that.” And Lori’s like, oh, right. That was just for funsies. Also, whoever found her first gets the letter, since they’ve proven their detective-ness or whatever. But we can ask everyone else on the train to help us out, and have a mystery-solving party! “I like parties!” Fair enough.
We ask her the standard questions: she doesn’t know Nancy or “those Harvey guys” (Nancy: “Hardy.” Lori: “Whatever.” HA!) at all, but she loves John Grey’s show and Charleena’s novels — she wants to be a novelist herself, but Charleena rejected some drafts that she sent her. Also, she thinks Tino must be a swell detective on account of his “piercing eyes.” Heh.
So, the letter. Blah blah hints to puzzles blah, Jake thinks the ghost of his dead wife still haunts the train, whatever. The point is, we now have our first task: collecting Camille’s dolls and putting them in the right order. To do that, we have to find Camille’s dancing shoes and do her “favorite step” on the dance floor. The shoes are right there in the car with us, but of course the name is rubbed out. “Maybe Bess and George can help me,” Nancy muses. I guess George is a fashionista too now, on account of those three days she spent reading that fashion of the 1800s book. So we use Nancy’s camera phone(!) to take a photo of the shoes and text(!!) it to Bess and George. The technology in these games is advancing so rapidly.
I should add, while it’s all very convoluted, the mystery doesn’t actually feel unnecessarily so — Jake’s paranoia about his mine is fairly justified, and he lays it out for Ruth in a way that can be plausibly solved. And it’s nice that this game is actually about finding the mine from the get-go — it’s not like Nancy stumbles into it while investigating another mystery. So that’s cool!
Jake’s letter also mentioned that we need a map to his mine. We have to start by doing a word search for four cities he mentions: Calico, Silverado, Central City, Dodge City, Virginia City, and Tombstone.
We have to put the cities in on this weird thing (the walkthrough calls it a “Chinese pagoda”) in the car. When we’ve got them all, the only letters left are n v r z t b a a. A clue! We’re really making progress!
We also find a trunk, which has a socket wrench. The head of the wrench has the same weird symbol as the grill in John Grey’s car, so we’ll have to go use that there.
There’s a cabinet where we have to put the letters from the pagoda into, and we find Jake’s map! That was easy. It doesn’t resemble any place on this Earth, so we need to get the projector working so that it can…project stuff. I guess. We have to arrange the stones we’ve collected in the projector in the proper order, and to do that, we need the name of “someone who holds a warm place in [Jake’s] heart.” Ugh, that sounds like a lot of work. Let’s just harass the suspects again.
Tino’s all shifty over getting out-detectived by Nancy Drew. “From now on, if you come across anything that may have to do with Jake Hurley and his mine, let me know, okay? Just so I can, you know, give you advice.” He tells us that he’s onto something, and he’s going to bust this case wide open. It turns out that Lori told him about the letter (Lori! I thought you were giving us a head start!), but when we show it to him, he says it’s meaningless.
Whatever. There’s a cigar box in the room, and Tino won’t even notice us fooling around with it. As you will recall, silver is orange, blue, green, red, purple, and yellow, so you press those colors in that order, and we’ve found more clues! The first is a letter from a “Thomas Willson”, telling Jake that he’s sent him two newfangled lamps, but they need carbide to light up. That sounds like something we’ll need to know later. Secondly, we find the steps for “Hurley’s Whirly Burly,” which is the dance we have to do with Camille’s shoes. Finally, we have to reconnect the pipes in the car, for like…no reason that I can see, but whatever. Maybe Nancy just defaults to doing chores around all her crime scenes because she figures someone’s going to try to make her do them eventually.
Anyway, so we go back to Lori’s car and perform the dance, and a cabinet opens up:
JESUS CHRIST.
Camille’s creepy doll collection hits us right in the face, and we can also pick up a gemstone off the floor. There are 12 dolls, and the object is to line them up in the correct order, going by name, to spell out the name of Camille’s dance shoes. Of course, we still don’t know that. Let’s call Bess and George! They might not have cable internet yet, but they should at least have DSL, so their research shouldn’t have taken too long. Bess and George tell us that the name of shoes is “Chaussettes Chatoyantes,” and then we all gossip about Lori and Tino Balducci for a while. “So there’s some kind of mutual attraction between them?” Bess asks. “Something’s going on between them, but I’m not sure what,” Nancy says. Scandalous!
So we know all the dolls’ names from the photos and receipts lying around the train, so we can put them in order and we get…more slugs, this time with the numbers #1 and #2 on them.
We tell Charleena that we found Lori, but she isn’t impressed by our detecting skillz. Or by Lori’s writing, for that matter. “Do you think she could really be a romance novelist?” Nancy asks. Charleena’s just like, “No.” Heh.
Frank and Joe are all like, “You found Lori! We’re totally the best detectives here!” Behind every successful detective is Frank and Joe Hardy, smiling and taking partial credit. Anyway, we can now spill about the entire mystery to them: we show them the letter and tell them about everything we found. When we get to the part about the Buell note, Frank and Joe show us a photo they found of a “Buell’s Pawn Shop”, in Copper Gorge. Which is where we’re going! How convenient! Joe points out that the stuff was pawned like a hundred years ago and it’s probably gone, but Frank’s like, “Joe, we’re in a Nancy Drew game. Of course it’s still there.” Not in those words, of course.
They also told us they heard a mad crazy argument between Charleena and Lori, but “All we heard was the tail end of it, and we couldn’t really make out what they were saying.” The Hardy Boys are useless.
We go visit John Grey and tell him that Lori was perfectly fine, so his “vibes” were way off, and his sweater is stupid. Maybe not that last one. He’s like, “Well, maybe those vibes are about you! YOU are in serious danger!” I mean, that’s not exactly news to Nancy Drew. We ask him how these “vibes” work exactly, and he BSes about energy that’s being generated from the ether and floating around. This reminds me of this guy at my job who cornered me once for like 20 minutes to tell me his theory about how Jesus was an alien.
Back to our puzzles. There’s another pipe-connecting puzzle in Camille’s car, so we do that before leaving. And we now have a bunch of slugs, and we have to find someone who has a “warm place” in Jake’s heart. That’s a reference to the stove in the kitchen, which you recall has the duck and square engraving on it. So we go back to the light-up table and use our new slugs to weigh the pans to light up the duck and square. Inside the stove, we find a note from Jake about a “James Thurston,” who was the original engineer of the train. It sure is lucky nobody turned that stove on in the past 100 years.
On our way back from the kitchen car, we see some weird sparkles floating by the window. It’s Camille’s ghost! I bet John Grey will be crazy jealous that we saw her and he didn’t. Nancy Drew is better than you at all things, including ghostbusting. When we go talk to him, though, he rambles on about pseudoelectricity and quartz crystals and the point is that ghosts are totally real except when John Grey doesn’t want them to be. O…kay.
Suddenly, the train grinds to a halt. “Somebody must’ve thrown the emergency brake!” Nancy says. We then cut to the Hardy Boys. “Did somebody throw the brake, or someTHING?” Joe asks. He’d probably be waggling his eyebrows if this game were better animated. Joe tells us that he was the first one on the scene, and then John Grey, then Tino, the engineer, and Lori. Everyone showed up except Charleena, who continued to give zero shits about this train. Heh. Nancy says she’ll go investigate, and in the meantime, the Hardy Boys can Google James Thurston for her. Hee! They’re so useless.
I was going to make part two when we actually arrive in Copper Gorge, but there’s like eighty million conversations I have to have before triggering the arrival, so I’ll just stop here. Up next: Lots of talking. We go on a mission to find a pen.
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