Previously on Nancy Drew: Danger by Design: We arrived in Paris, wherein we were immediately made to do menial work. In fairness, we are an unpaid intern. We ran around and met our suspects, and learned that Minette is insanely behind on her work. For suspicious reasons, or is she just a hardcore procrastinator? Because I can sympathize with that.
So actually, the game forced me into day two before I was done baking, but that was stupid, so I’m just gonna pretend it starts now. We wake up and head to the moulin, where we’re greeted by a ringing phone. If you don’t pick it up, Minette fires you. And that’s how I died within the first five minutes of day two.
So this time I pick up the phone, and it’s some asshole with a German accent who wants us to get Minette on the phone. Well, she’s kind of busy with JJ. “I don’t care.” I mean, maybe if you tell me who you are, she might be expecting your call? “No. Just get her on the phone.” Well, I can’t do that. Can we take a message? “I’ll just send her one.” Ominous! Can I just say, I’ve been a receptionist, and one of my pettiest joys is putting people like this on hold forever. Anyway, we can tell Minette about the caller later. If we check around our desk, we find a note from Heather. She wants us to go to the market to buy a stuffed parrot, as she’s too busy with a bunch of errands on the other side of town. “You rule!” she tells us. Aw! That’s nice! Let’s help Heather out, shall we?
So we head to the square accordingly, and who should we run into but Dieter? Nancy immediately starts trying to flag him down, and is suspicious when he runs away. Heh. Maybe he just doesn’t want to talk to a designer’s assistant that he met one time, Nancy. Dieter leaves behind a newspaper clipping, which is an obituary for a “Noisette Tornade.” Hey, that’s the lady that historian called about yesterday. What does she have to do with Dieter?
We buy the parrot and go back to the moulin. When we get there, though, Minette runs out of her studio screaming, and tells us there are a bunch of cockroaches in there. Sucks to be Minette! No, wait, she’s going to make us hunt them down and put them back. =/ This unpaid intern thing sucks, man.
We go into the studio and see an open box of “Eiffel Tower” chocolates. I guess Sorpresa Chocolates doesn’t do business in France. Instead of sending chocolates, though, our culprit has sent cockroaches! Quelle horreur! Minette wants us to capture them all alive, put them back in the box, and set them free in the Pont Neuf. See, if we kill them, their cockroach brethren will seek Minette out for revenge. Or something. But on the upside, Minette has left us alone in the room, so let’s look through all her stuff!
We can check out the dress Minette is designing, and some of the stuff in the studio. Nancy will take notice of three gears up against the wall. There’s also a magazine article on Minette, with a picture of her in front of the gears before the paint on them. This will be important later. There’s a memo from Heather on what fonts Minette wants to use for her show, as well as letter from that historian lady re: Noisette Tornade. And those are all of our clues! Let’s catch some bugs!
There are nine cockroaches. Once we’re done, we have to go outside to set them free. But hey, Heather’s still not back. Let’s look through her stuff, too! We can look at Heather’s designs, about which Nancy remarks, “Not exactly my style, but cool.” Yeah, Heather hasn’t designed any horse shirts, and mom jeans won’t come back into fashion until the 2010s. We can also look at the dodo box, which Heather has forbidden us to open, but she’s not here, so fuck her.
A couple of notes in the box are written with cut-and-pasted magazine letters, including one that says next time, the culprit will do more than “throw red paint.” HMM. But one of them is written with the same letters from the font memo Heather sent! That means Heather sent the note! Or anyone else who has Times New Roman installed on their computer, Nancy. Nevertheless, let’s go get rid of these bugs and then confront Heather.
Actually, while we’re out, let’s check in with Dieter. What’s up with him and Noisette Tornade? He’s like, NOTHING! ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! He doesn’t even know who that is! We can keep the newspaper clipping, because it means ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to him! Well, okay. We also mention that he dropped some kind of miniature clock trinket, and he tells us that it opens up the panel over there. We’re welcome to look at it if we want! And we definitely do want, because Nancy Drew’s never met a secret passageway she didn’t like. Dieter doesn’t mind us checking it out, because there’s nothing there. OR IS THERE?
The clock puzzle is one of those moving-one-moves-the-others things, and you want to get all the clock hands pointing to 3. That’s it. Down the secret tunnel! Through the mountain! Yeah!
I believe that symbol’s supposed to be a hazelnut (“noisette“). We’ll be seeing a lot. Behind it is a combo lock that says “The year our despair ended, the year when my despair began.” We know from her obituary that her life went to crap after the war, so that would make the year 1945. The safe opens, and we find a journal that’s all like, “Welcome to the French Resistance! Here’s your decoder machine and the code we’ll be using to pass secret messages! Have fun!” Hmm, so we’ll definitely be using this, but why is it in Dieter’s studio?
Back to work. We hand the parrot over to Heather, and she gripes that it’s for one of Minette’s bizarro projects. Heather doesn’t really like working for Minette, does she? Is that why she sent Minette those threatening letters? Heather caves in about a second, and admits that she did write the letter that matches the font memo — but just that one. She wanted to get back at Minette for being such a shitty boss. “And for going out with Dieter?” Nancy adds. “You really don’t miss a trick,” Heather says. Now you’re catching on, Heather. Nancy Drew knows all! Anyway, she maintains she didn’t send the others, and when we ask about the red paint, she says that Minette probably threw it herself, during one of her tantrums. As we leave, she asks us not to tell Minette, and Nancy icily says she’ll have to think about it. Oooh. Who’s not tough enough for this business now, Jean Michel?
It looks like our mystery is leading us to Noisette Tornade, so let’s call that historian lady about her. The historian (“Lynn”) tells us that Noisette worked as a translator for the Germans by day, but by night she was part of la résistance, which led to pretty much everyone being suspicious of her. The fact that she was banging a German officer, Hans von Schwesterkrank, didn’t help matters. Dude! Could Hans von Schwesterkrank be related to Dieter von Schwesterkrank? I bet he could. Anyway, after the war, Noisette became the Director of Public Works in Paris, which is how she was able to leave clues all over the city. And it’s been rumored that she stole and hid some art from the Germans during the war, although it’s never been recovered. And Noisette said that the truth of what she did resided in “the place she loved most”, which Lynn thinks is the moulin. AND, her last words were “red left green.” Whew. That was a lot of clues.
Let’s catch up with Minette. We tell her about her mysterious German caller, but she’s like, “It was probably no big deal. Don’t worry about it.” I dunno, Minette, he sounded pretty angry — “It’s probably just some idiot who has NO IDEA how much work I do and thinks the WHOLE WORLD revolves around him!” O! Kay! Awkwardly changing the subject, we ask why she wears that mask, and she goes on a pretentious ramble about how the mask draws attention to look at her creations: look at people’s clothes, not their faces. Clothes are what matter, not what’s on the inside!
We also have the option of throwing Heather under the bus and telling Minette that she sent one of the threatening letters. If we do, Minette will fire Heather and Heather will be pissed at us for the rest of the game. If we don’t, we stay friends and she lets us walk in Minette’s show at the end. It doesn’t make a huge change to the gameplay either way, but I choose to let Heather keep her job, because I’m nice like that. And really, if this were real life, would Nancy want to do Heather’s job?
So, okay, the photo of Minette with the gears, pre-paint accident. Nancy decides we need that picture to continue our mystery, and since it was published in Jean Michel’s magazine, he probably knows where to get the full picture. Off to the Cafe Kiki!
Does Jean Michel have the photo? Yes, he does. Does he just hand the photo over? Of course not. We have to do a favor for him, first. Or, actually, for the guy who runs the cafe and lets Jean Michel dick around at one of his tables all day. See, the dessert-maker has stepped out for his “two and a half hour break”, which is almost as French as Jean Michel’s ringtone being La Marseillaise. Thus, the responsibility of making sundaes for tourists and French teenagers falls on Nancy. Like all food making games, it’s pretty mindless and fun. When we make enough sundaes without fucking up, Jean Michel forks over the photo. We can see that the gears have a bunch of Roman numerals running around their edges.
(How do I have two cursors in that screen? I have no idea.)
A clue! A poorly Photoshopped clue!
Since we’re out, let’s stop by to harass Dieter. It sounds like Minette gave us a hint as to why they broke up, but it turns out we can’t talk to him about it. Instead, he tries to blow us off with how busy he is, and frickin’ Nancy volunteers to relieve him of his workload. Nancy, we’re not Dieter’s intern here! He wants us to take some stock photos for him, because he can’t afford a Getty account? And naturally the list of photos we need to take is in French. Blah blah buying a dictionary, painting knockoffs of the Mona Lisa for money blah. And what’s this one of the sellers has?
“That looks just like the picture in Noisette’s codebook!” Nancy gasps. Yup, we just tripped over a decoder machine from the 1940s, ten minutes after finding out about its existence. Lucky us! The vendor’s not willing to part with it, though, unless Nancy brings him a bottle of Mouton Fouetté 1968. The vendor’s like, “It’s basically impossible to find, so fuck off and stop trying get your hands on my machine.” Whatever, vendor guy! Nancy Drew’s going to find that bottle of wine, and THEN you’ll be sorry! Anyway, we can also buy a book of codes and ciphers, which we’ll be using to figure out the decoder machine.
The game kicked me into day three at this point, which is dumb, but who am I to deny the will of Nancy Drew?
The newspaper has an article on how there’s a ton of flooding in the Parisian catacombs, and coincidentally there’s also an article about the catacombs in JJ’s magazine. Nancy’s all like, “OH MY SHIT, SECRET PASSAGES???” Let’s call this Zu guy! We tell him about how we totally also like to climb around secret passages, and the last time we were in one, we saw a carving of a hazelnut. Even though it’s a totally different passageway, Zu should know what’s up with that, right? Zu agrees to help us out, one one condition. See, he noticed that we’re calling from JJ Ling’s number, and he knows it’s JJ’s number because he’s been stalking her for like a year, but she won’t return any of the messages he leaves on her machine all day. I…really do not want to go underground with this guy, but whatever. I am merely a puppet strung along by Nancy Drew. Anyway, he wants us to get a note from JJ that says, “Zu my love Jing,” and he’ll check out the hazelnut symbol for us. Well, okay. With enough underhanded trickery, it can’t be that hard.
Hey, JJ, wanna play hangman?
So the solution here is to play hangman with JJ and guess the letters to spell out “Zu my love Jing.” It’s a good thing Zu didn’t want a full grammatical sentence, because that would’ve been harder to trick JJ into. So let’s go enable JJ’s stalker! He wants us to leave the autograph at the entrance to the catacombs, so we do that. Conveniently, the skull at the entrance is the last photo we need for Dieter (the rest are objects you can find around the moulin and the park), so we’re done with that quest, too. Let’s go find him, shall we?
Once we fork over the photos, Dieter becomes willing to answer our questions. We’re after information about Noisette Tornade, but let’s ask him about JJ, too, since the option is there. He tells us that he’s suspicious of her: she claims to have won the lotto “back in the States” (isn’t she Australian?), so why would she be modeling for Minette? I think we’re meant to be suspicious, but it’s also possible that JJ was just screwing with Dieter.
Alright, now it’s time to hit Dieter with the TRUTH! We know some very interesting facts about Hans von Schwesterkrank, and Dieter’s whole “von Schwesterkrank is a very common last name!” act didn’t fool us one bit, because you can never lie to Nancy Drew. Dieter’s like, “Well, there’s some things you DON’T know, Fräulein!” and proceeds to…give us his clues? Does Dieter want to help us or not? His actions say yes, but he’s being awfully aggressive about it. Anyway, he gives us this thing:
The fuck.
He says Hans von Schwesterkrank gave it to him while he was on his deathbed, the way all people get tangentially involved in these games, and admits he originally started dating Minette just to have access to moulin. But then he fell in love with her for real, and now all he cares about is getting her back. Fuck his grandpa’s dying wish!
You’ll recall that Noisette’s last words were “Red left, green.” Conveniently, that refers to the paper Dieter just forked over to us. When we click on all the red eyes looking left, and all the green eyes, we get a message at the bottom: “Sous Lorraine 4154.” To the Cross of Lorraine!
Since we’re in the park, we might as well go shopping. We have to pick up a book on “Ichi-Do,” a kind of karate that involves yelling things every time you strike. I guess Nancy’s worried she might have to fight Heather to be the Supreme Intern or something. Anyway, now let’s look at at the cross.
“I bet those numbers are movable,” Nancy says. You know what, Nancy? I bet they are too. When you press “4154”, the bottom part of the cross slides away to reveal…more puzzles! Woo! They’re of three statues here in the park, showing us how they have to be set up to reveal whatever Noisette wants us to find. The mouth and fish statue are fairly self-explanatory, but the windmill statue keeps getting fucked up by a squirrel. Does this squirrel not know that we’re solving a mystery here? So then we have to go around the all the vendors and buy a string, a stick, and a tin pan, and Nancy will put those near the statue to scare the squirrel off. While we’re shopping around for squirrel deterrents, we can also buy a flashlight and a wetsuit, because it’s time to go into the SECRET TUNNELS! Through the mountain sewage system of Paris! Yeah!
I guess nobody notices Nancy going into a hole in the earth in broad daylight.
We walk through the tunnels a bit, then find this chest with a picture of a hazelnut on it. Inside is this key, which we will be using later. Having gotten that, we leave the sewers and head over to the catacombs. Zu has told us that the skull is fake, and has a button inside that will open up the catacomb entrance. We sneak through the catacombs until we come to the water, and Nancy will put her wetsuit on. A bar appears at the bottom of the screen, showing you how much time you have before Nancy has to come up for air.
Through one of the tunnels, we find the bottle of Mouton Fouetté, and it just happens to be from the year 1968! The power of Nancy Drew compels you, vendor guy! After grabbing that, we continue on to find a door that’s marked again with a picture of a hazelnut. Naturally it’s locked with a number combination. The marked words in the message (Europe, Pont Neuf, Blanche, Chateau Rouge) correspond to various metro lines in Paris, so we put in the numbers of those lines (3, 7, 2, 4), and that unlocks the door. We find…something. Even Nancy doesn’t know what it is.
“I have no idea what this is, but after everything I went through to get here, I’m taking it.” Heh. I love when Nancy’s self-aware about her klepto tendencies.
That accomplishes our mission, and we can head back out of the catacombs. When you exit the water, there’ll be a rat by Nancy’s stuff. It may or may not make off with one of Nancy’s items. Presumably if it’s something you need and haven’t looked at, you’re fucked, but it didn’t steal anything from me so I don’t know. Anyway, we go back and give the vendor guy the bottle of wine. “Oh la la!” he gasps. Indeed. We now have the decoder, and I’ll end this here. To part three, and the end of the game!
Up next: Nancy solves the mystery, completely forgets how to speak French, then suddenly remembers again.
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