Previously on Nancy Drew: Last Train to Blue Moon Canyon: Lori Gerard has way too much money and free time, and has assembled a crack team of detectives to figure out the mystery of Jake Hurley’s train. This crack team includes the Hardy Boys, so it’s safe to say Nancy’s going to be doing all the work around here. Anyway, Lori disappeared, but then we found her in like five minutes, so whatever.
So someone pulled the emergency brake! But before we get around to investigating that, let’s dig up everyone’s drama.
We can talk to the engineer about the brake thing. He tells us that anyone could’ve done it, but snarks that anyone stupid enough to pull the brake has no business being on a train, “or anywhere else for that matter.” Heh. I sympathize. I work in customer service, and the shit people do, sometimes I’m just like, “You can’t be trusted with [product we sell], holy Jesus.” Anyway, we find Charleena, and she tells us that she doesn’t give enough of a crap about any of this to pull the brake. I can believe that. She says it probably wasn’t Lori, ergo, it was probably the Hardy Boys, John Grey, or Tino. “Boys will be boys,” she opines. We also ask if she wants to check out the letter from Jake Hurley, but she snips that she’ll leave it to us to solve the mystery of his disappearance. “You can afford to look foolish. I can’t.” Rude!
But wait! We also know she and Lori were having an epic fight about…something. What was up with that? Did it have anything to do with Lori’s romance novel aspirations? “Really, Nancy, eavesdropping is so tacky,” Charleena tells us. Nancy says it’s the Hardy Boys who are tacky, not us — but anyway, if she won’t tell us what the fight was all about, we’ll just have to go ask them. For some reason, Charleena flips out at the idea, and she admits that Lori sent her a storyline that “somehow” ended up in Charleena’s new book. Charleena sniffs that Lori shouldn’t have sent her unsolicited material…but yes, technically, she stole Lori’s work. Oh, Charleena. She snips that she’ll pull a few strings to get Lori cast in her producer friend’s next movie, and maybe Lori will become a movie star and forget all about writing novels. “I mean, she is blonde.” Oh, Charleena.
John Grey tells us that he has bone-hard scientific proof that Camille’s ghost is for real, and shows us some “time-lapse” photos he took. I wasn’t aware Polaroid cameras had that ability, but whatever. John tells us that the white blob in the photo is Camille’s ghostly presence reacting with the photographic chemicals. Nancy’s like, “Or maybe you didn’t shake it enough?” and John’s like, “I mean, that too. But PROBABLY NOT.”
We can go ask Tino Balducci if he found any clues, and he gripes that the train engineer had the nerve to fix the train before Tino could take any fingerprints. “If we didn’t need him to drive the train, I’d charge him with obstruction of justice!” Anyway, he did find a sort of thermometer, and he points out that it looks like the kind John Grey uses to detect ghosts. Tino theorizes that John Grey threw the brake to make it look like Camille’s ghost did it, as John’s show is on the verge of being canceled, and he needs something big to save it. Nancy asks if he’s brought this up to John, and Tino’s like, “All in due time! I gotta get my ducks in my row before I arrest him.” Nancy’s like, “Aren’t you like, going to ask him about it before you arrest him?” and Tino’s like, “No? There’s absolutely no step between finding evidence and arresting someone?” Oh, Tino.
Over in Lori’s car, we ask if she has any idea who threw the brake. “Camille’s ghost, duh!” Okay, we’re not going to get a lot out of her. Instead, let’s nose into her private life. She tells us that she and Tino did go out, but he was the one who broke up with her. Let’s go back to Tino and ask what was up with that!
“How come you told me you and Lori never went out, and she told me you did?” Tino snaps that he’s not proud of dumping her, but it happened, and it’s over, SO THERE. “Guess I’ll just have to talk to Lori again!” Nancy chirps. No! Do not make me walk all the way back there just for two more lines of dialogue! Thankfully, Tino caves and tells us that he broke up with her because people were making fun of him. “They said no one took her seriously, and if I started hanging out with her, no one would take me seriously.” I mean…anyway, all this emotion pisses Tino off, and he kicks us out of the car.
Back to John Grey! He tells us that he set up a recorder, to record ~ghostly sounds~ in the car, and he totally found something! See, if you play the tape at a normal volume, it’s just white noise, but when you turn it aaaaall the way up, and run it through like eight different filters, it sounds different! I don’t think John Grey knows how audio works. He plays the new version for us, and I actually do not hear anything different, but Nancy’s all like, “I hear a woman singing!” and she and John Grey go “IT’S CAMILLE.” Spoooooky~*~*~ John Grey tells us that we better be careful about dissing his ghostbusting in here, because she’s listening. Anyway, Nancy brings up his missing ghost thermometer, and he says that he noticed he was short one when he went through his equipment earlier. But he wasn’t the one who pulled the emergency brake — in fact, while his show was canceled, it’s just been picked up by a major network, so he has no reason to pull a stunt like that. HMMM.
When we go back to Tino with this information, he’s still refusing to talk to us. Hm. We can’t talk to the Hardy Boys, because a conversation with them will end this subplot and trigger the arrival in Copper Gorge. Charleena is still all, “Not my circus, not my monkey” about this whole thing, so she’s useless. Back to Lori! She chirps that Nancy’s therapy session with Tino totally got him to admit his real feelings, and now the two of them are back together. “He thinks we make the perfect couple!” “Can’t argue with him there,” Nancy deadpans. Heh. Let’s go back to Tino and rub that in, shall we?
In Tino’s car, we notice that the packing peanuts under his desk look suspiciously like the packing peanuts John Grey uses for his gear. As usual, Tino caves in a second: the rumors that he’s a crap detective were getting to him, so he thought it’d be good for his reputation to solve another case, so he pulled the brake and planted one of John’s thermometers at the scene. He asks us not to tell anyone, and Nancy kind of shrugs and is like, “Eh, I guess it’s not that big of a deal.” And that’s the end of that subplot!
Back to the main game. We go talk to the Hardy Boys, and they tell us that they managed to do some research on James Thurston. It turns out that he ended up settling in Copper Gorge and starting a family, so there might be descendants who still have all his crap. And that’s all the research they managed to do, because then their Internet crapped out. Heh.
And with that, we arrive in Copper Gorge!
This is basically a rip-off of the scene changes from the 5th edition of the Oregon Trail.
There are a couple of locations we can visit in Copper Gorge. The only one available when we get there is the “Copper Gorge Museum and Taffy Shop.” What is it with small towns and taffy? Every time I end up in one, there’s always a taffy store. Anyway, when we go in, the person at the counter welcomes us to “Buell’s Old Time Taffy Museum.” So the pawnshop is gone, but we managed to run into one of Buell’s descendants after like five minutes in Copper Gorge. That was easy.
The person behind the counter — “Fatima” — says that there’s a rumor going around that Charleena Purcell is aboard our train. We confirm, and she says, “HOT DANG!” Bless. Anyway, Fatima tells us that we can sample some taffy. Nancy gets all excited: “Sample? As in…free sample?” Well, actually, we have to win tokens from playing the arcade games to exchange for taffy. “Do the games cost anything to play?” “Well, ain’t you the little pennypincher!” Fatima says. Hey, sometimes Nancy Drew just goes places without any money, okay? Leave our life decisions alone 🙁 Anyway, the games are also free to play, but if we touch any of the museum artifacts, Fatima will kick us out. “Are you Buell?” Nancy asks. What? He’s been dead for like a hundred years, Nancy! Fatima says he was her great-great-uncle, and after the mining boom went bust, he was stuck with all the crap people had pawned. But luckily for us, Buell was hella sentimental and kept all of it. We ask Fatima about Jake Hurley’s lamp and pickaxe, but she says she’s never heard of him.
Luckily, all we have to do is back up and click around a bit, and we run right into Jake’s trunk. It’s locked, naturally. When we ask Fatima, she immediately jumps on us for fooling around with it. Excuse you! For once, Nancy Drew didn’t actually start going through someone’s stuff with impunity. Anyway, Fatima says no one’s ever been able to open it — not even her cousin Alvin, “and he went to junior college.” Heh. Nancy suggests that she could try to open it, if Fatima is willing to bend her no-touching rule. Fatima is, if we can get her a meeting with Charleena Purcell. Unfortunately, even though Charleena owes us big time, we know she won’t do it. Nancy is wily and suggests that an autographed photo would make a better keepsake. “Hot dang!” Fatima agrees.
Charleena tells us that she probably has a photo of herself lying around somewhere, but she doesn’t have a pen. Of course not! We can trip over Jake Hurley’s 100-year-old personal effects within five minutes of arriving in Copper Gorge, but we have go on a quest to get a pen. Question: does Nancy actually pack anything besides mom jeans and horse shirts? Don’t answer that; I already know. Anyway, the only person on this entire train who has a pen is Tino Balducci. He won’t just hand it over, naturally. We have to beat his high score in Leaping Lizards, which is basically peg solitaire. It’s pretty fun in a zen kind of way. That said, I’m not good at it at all. I lose about eighty times, which I will not show you screencaps of. “Talk about luck,” Tino grumps when I finally beat his score. He forks over the pen, and we hand it to Charleena.
I’ll just leave this here.
Mission accomplished! Back at the taffy museum, Frank and Joe come in to tell us that they found out that James Thurston’s grandson eats every day at the local diner. Dude, is the entire population of this town just Buells and Thurstons? Joe wants credit for it, because they wouldn’t have gone in there if he hadn’t had a craving for a cheeseburger. Fair enough. Unfortunately, the diner owner won’t point out which guy is the grandson unless someone subs in for his cook. Since Tino had a brainwave that the mine is probably right here in Copper Gorge, he, Lori, and John Grey are hiking up the mountain to look for it. That leaves Frank, Joe, and Nancy as the ones available for unpaid labor. Did we expect anything else? Frank says that Joe barely knows how to boil water, and Nancy’s busy interrogating Fatima, ergo, he draws the short straw. Ha! I love when bad things happen to Frank Hardy.
Nancy: “And you found all this out when Joe stopped there to get a hamburger.”
Joe: “CHEESEBURGER.”
This is unnecessary.
Anyway, the Hardy Boys finally leave us alone so we can give the photo to Fatima. “Hot dang!” she chirps. That out of the way, we can go mess around with Jake’s trunk. Remember that rainbow-colored thing we picked up Jake’s car back at the beginning of the game? Yeah, me either. This thing:
It fits into the lock, and — wait, I just checked the walkthrough and apparently there’s a puzzle we have to do on the train first. Why do I not have any screencaps of this? Well, whatever. You’ll recall that everyone’s gone from the train, which means we can poke around in their cars. Remember when we tried to play the piano in Camille’s car, and John Grey got all snippy about messing up his ghost vibes? Well, now we can go play the sheet music we won from that horse-jumping game. When we do, we get the spyglass we need for the projector. We also have to go Jake’s car, and check out the stuff behind the desk. We can finally take the gem off the dog statue, and check Jake’s mining tools for the carbide. Excellent. Back to town!
We still don’t have everything we need to open up the trunk, though. Now we gotta go to the cemetery to find Camille’s crypt. The cryptkeeper creeps at us that it’s a beautiful grave with excellent drainage. O…kay. Anyway, he dropped the key to the crypt down a grate, so there’s no way to get in. Unless you’re Nancy Drew, of course. It’s basically the same concept as in The Final Scene — you have to go back to the taffy museum and get the taffy on a stick prize, and you can use that to grab the key. In order to get the taffy on a stick, you have to win the worst game known to man:
I DIE.
Once again, my next hundred screencaps are just me losing over and over. You also have to beat the horse-racing game, which I think is just luck? You pick a horse and watch them go. It’s basically gambling. For shame, Nancy Drew!
So now we can get the key, and unlock the crypt. Nancy Drew loves hanging around in graves!
We have to do four things here: one is look at a carving on a pillar. Nancy will note that Jake told his niece to come to the crypt and let Camille’s goodness “rub” off on her. “Rub as in rubbing, maybe?” Nancy may not carry around a pen, but she does have a pencil. All we need is some paper. Moving on, we find another slug (#6) in the crypt. There’s also a plaque with a bunch of colors on it, lined up next to chemical symbols. As Jake’s note told us, “Lead is the key”, so we need to find “Pb” and note the order of the colors in its row. We also have to use the color wheel to click on the colors next to copper (“Cu”). When we do, a drawer opens and we find another gem. I don’t know if I’m disappointed or not that we don’t get to look for clues on Camille’s musty corpse.
Anyway, we now know the order to press the buttons on the trunk key. Let’s trudge back down to the museum. When we open the trunk, we find Jake’s lamp and a #10 slug, but no axe. BOOOOO. Maybe Fatima’s seen it? Of course she has. She uses it to crack open the coconuts her aunt sends her from Hawaii! Fatima is the best. She won’t lend it to us, though: how else is she going to open the coconuts? We tell her that her great-great-uncle’s probably rolling in his grave over her appropriation of museum artifacts, and this somehow convinces her to give it to us. But of course, we have to do an errand first.
Fatima makes us sort the taffy for her, which isn’t super hard, so whatever. She also lets us take a piece of wax paper, which we can use to make the rubbing in the crypt. When we’re done, she hands the axe over: “Cracked it pretty hard on the last batch of coconuts. Are you sure you still want it?” I LOVE HER.
Anyway, our phone rings, which triggers our brief switch into Frank Hardy’s POV. Up next: we get to be a Hardy Boy for five minutes! It sucks just as much as you’d expect it to.
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