Previously on Nancy Drew: Last Train to Blue Moon Canyon: We arrived in Copper Gorge, where Jake made his fortune. Lucky for us, all his crap from a hundred years ago was still hanging around in the town.
After Nancy collects everything she needs to put the projector together, the game switches to Frank’s POV. He’s working as a short-order cook in a diner so that the diner owner will point out James Thurston’s grandson to him. I don’t know if the guy already told him or what, but Frank will mention that he’s seen the grandson come in, so now we’re just eavesdropping on him. Grandson Thurston is hella senile and every time the order bell rings, he gets mine flashbacks and starts telling detailed stories about his grandfather to his lady friend. Convenient! He babbles on about Jake and Camille, but it’s not really anything we don’t know, so whatever.
Anyway, the cooking game is pretty fun! I always like putting together food in these games. When we’re done, we have the whole puzzle we need to solve: “The eye of the tiger is fixed on a star. Zircon lies in finger that scar. Amethyst floats in a hand from the deep. Citrine is what the fowl mouth shall keep. Tourmaline by a soft arm is ensnared. Peridot rests at the foot of the mare.”
We cut to the train and now we’re back to being Nancy. I’m not saying I enjoy being a Hardy Boy, but you’d think they would’ve played that up for more than one mini-game. (Although in Creature of Kapu Cave, which also has the Hardy Boys, you do get to play as them for more significant chunks of the game.) Frank tells us that he also found an old letter addressed to Jake, from Samuel Clemens. Everyone is duly impressed, except Joe: “It’s not like it’s from Mark Twain or anything. What?” Oh, Joe. This is what happens when you hire teenagers to fight crime instead of making them go to English class.
Let’s talk to everyone, shall we? It’s been a while since we called Bess and George, so I do that. Bess fangirls over the Hardy Boys. Between that and her thing for puffy vests, I feel bad for Bess and her tragic taste in this game. She muses that Joe is cuter, but Frank’s personality is more her type. The important thing, of course, is which one Nancy likes. I make Nancy answer with, “Neither. I like Ned, remember?”, because someone around here has to pick him. Bess snips that Ned is boring. Hey! I mean, he is, but he’s still my favorite 🙁 Anyway, Nancy catches them up on everything that’s happened. She tells them about Tino and the emergency brake, which George calls “pathetic.” “Cute and pathetic,” Bess says. “Just my type.” Bess! Love yourself, girl! We also tell them about Charleena ripping Lori off, and they muse that if Charleena thought Lori’s story was worth stealing, Lori might be smarter than she acts.
Speaking of Charleena, let’s go make fun of Tino Balducci with her. She opted out of going on his mine hunt, because, as she says, “The man barely knows where his head is. If he’s the one who finds that mine, I’ll eat my laptop.” Ha! John Grey and Lori express similar sentiments: “Good thing for him my fingers were frozen stiff, or I would’ve strangled him,” John says. Lori tells us that Tino ended up finding an outhouse. Bless.
So with all that done, we go back to the crypt and do the rubbing. It turns out to say “Wisdom, Purity, Chastity, Eternity”, which sounds like the kind of thing they made us write in our confirmation journals when I was in Catholic school. If you look in the sampler book, you’ll see that each word corresponds to an animal, which in turn corresponds to a number. The numbers are 7, 9, 6, and 3, which is the combination for the lock on the grate in the sleeping car. “More pipes. Why am I not surprised,” Nancy deadpans. After that’s done, we have to go look at the eagle on the sampler (#2), and do the slug puzzle to make the eagle light up. That unlocks the eagle picture in the dining car, behind which is more pipes. Thrilling stuff. Once that’s all done, we turn the wheel in the kitchen, which makes air go through the pipes.
We can now put the projector together! Unfortunately, when we put the pickaxe in the holder, the handle immediately breaks. Fatima must really have a lot of unresolved issues re: coconuts. Who on this train might have duct tape? Tino Balducci doesn’t. He’s like, “But one time I totally did, and it was AWESOME,” but Nancy shuts his story down. We’re on a schedule here! John Grey has duct tape (can’t bust ghosts without it!), but he locked it in a box that has to be opened by a picture puzzle. Of course he did. The puzzle is a bunch of pictures that have to be put in order to tell a story. It’s easy. Let’s move on.
Armed with duct tape, we fix the axe, put the lamp, carbide, and spyglass in the projector, and start placing the gems in the machine according to the riddle Frank gave us. It’s not super hard (“fowl mouth” = bird beak, “foot of the mare” = horse leg), and when it’s all done, we just pull on the pickaxe and the projector turns on.
It’s pretty trippy! After the fun disco show, Nancy will note that the light beamed at a place on the map called “Brimstone Canyon.” Oh, sure, now the map’s labeled.
For a second I was like, “Why are Lori’s hands a shade darker than her face?”, then I realized she was wearing gloves. Anyway, Lori tells us that she’ll give us a ten minute head start to find the mine, and then she’ll bring everyone along to…marvel at our detecting skills? I don’t know. Lori warns us, though, that everything in the mine will belong to her (how?), so if we try to take anything, “it could get ugly.” I mean, it’s kind of true that Nancy gets strangled or knocked out every time the villain gets within a foot of her, but still. We could take Lori, I’m pretty sure.
We get off in Brimstone Canyon, and Nancy notes that it sounds like the train’s leaving without her. She panics for about two seconds and then is like, “Whatever, the Hardy Boys will come get me.” I wouldn’t rely on the Hardy Boys to pick me up after school, let alone rescue me from being stranded in an abandoned canyon, but Nancy is more optimistic than I am. I mean, let’s not let that get in the way of our finding hidden treasure! The entrance to the mine is blocked, but luckily there’s a cannon just sitting out front, waiting to be fired. The cannon is locked by a similar puzzle to the door to Lori’s car; i.e. there’s no method to it, you just click until you get them all in order. The cannon blasts the mine open, and Nancy’s all, “Woo! Time to charge into a mine that’s been abandoned for a hundred years!”
The mine has a bunch of lizards of various colors hanging on the walls. “Glowing lizards,” Nancy notes. “Cool, but weird.” Nancy is really chill about all the weird shit she runs into, isn’t she? Anyway, conveniently, once we’re in the mine, Jake’s color-wheel-key-thing will turn into a compass, pointing to which color of lizard’s tunnel we need to turn down. What doesn’t this thing do?
As we go through the mine, Nancy will trip over rocks with a bunch of symbols on them, and planks with a bunch of symbols on them, blah blah puzzles blah. Eventually we come to a bunch of planks blocking off part of the time. Nancy will note that there must be something ~important~ behind them, but we have to remove them in the right order or the mine will come tumbling down. It’s a dumb puzzle, so I’ll just show you what it should look like when you’re done:
Cool? Cool.
Anyway, we go into the chamber, and there’s Jake Hurley’s skeleton! Not creepy at all. Nancy notes that he’s carrying a photo of Camille. I guess it’s supposed to be sweet. I don’t know. Does it ever saw how Jake Hurley died, specifically? Because I’m just imagining him building this like, death chamber and curling up with his wife’s photo and starving or something. Spooky. ANYWAY, under her photo is a letter from Abraham Lincoln! From the night he was assassinated! He’s all like, “Yeah, the theater gives me a weird vibe but I guess I’ll go! Should be fun times!” Nancy muses that this letter must be worth a fortune.
“That’s just what I thought, too!” Lori chirps from behind us. Yup, Lori is our culprit. She goes on about how she found Jake’s diary — which she sneakily kept a secret — and he wrote that he had a letter from Abraham Lincoln that was so valuable that he always kept it on his person. Lori set up this whole thing to find Jake’s body so that she could find the letter. She asks if she can have it, and Nancy, like a chump, just forks it over.
Then Lori starts getting evil all, “Wouldn’t I be more famous if I found this all by myself? OOOH, wouldn’t I be even famouser if I was the only survivor of a TRAGIC MINE COLLAPSE?” Don’t those two plans directly contradict one another? Either Lori found the letter by herself, or Nancy was helping her and died in the cave-in. Whatever. Nancy’s like, “I mean, I don’t mind being uncredited if it means I don’t die here,” and Lori’s like, “Nope, I’m committed to the murder plan now! Bye!” She kicks in one of the planks holding the ceiling up, and a bunch of rocks come down and seal off the entrance. Why you gotta do us like this, Lori? Anyway, now we have to escape. Nancy will notice that we can hop onto a mine car from the chamber, and we basically rollercoaster our way out of here.
The track has a couple of splits, with skull signs on the sides that will cause us to fall off the track. So every time you see a skull, you click in the opposite direction, and avoid certain death. It’s not really that hard — the pointer will switch to an arrow pretty early before the actual split, which gives you plenty of time to click in the right direction.
Sweet freedom! We get to hit Lori with our mine cart, which is also pretty fun.
The Hardy Boys show up just in time to do absolutely nothing, as usual. “What the heck’s going on?” Frank derps.
I’m just including the screencap because I think the graphics here look pretty nice.
And that’s the end of the game! I have no idea how they get back onto the train, but whatever. Lori’s father cancels all her credit cards, which everyone has a hearty chuckle over. What a wacky punishment for someone who tried to kill us! Tino Balducci tries to steal all the credit. John Grey and Charleena get into a fight over which of them has a more embarrassing career. The Hardy Boys presumably go back to high school after all this.
“Jake spent his whole life searching for gold when all along he possessed something far more valuable — his uncanny knack for making friends,” Nancy dorks.
THE END.
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