Previously on Nancy Drew: White Wolf of Icicle Creek: We witnessed the wolf (twice!) and nearly died (also twice!). We found a path with some wolf prints, but in order to get there, we need snowshoes. When we asked Lou Talbot (the only person in this lodge with snowshoes apparently), he told us to fuck off. Joke’s on him, though, because we just jacked a pair from the lodge museum display. Thus, the mystery continues.
Armed with a pair of snowshoes, we can now proceed further into Avalanche Ridge. I should note that most modern snowshoes look like this, while we’re tromping around like Kirsten the 19th-century American Girl.
As we walk, we hear the wolf howl (gasp!) and then a gunshot (shock!). We then stop walking and cut to a portion of the trail, where we see a journal just lying around in the snow, as you do.
The journal is filled with notes about dinosaur bones, which apparently are scattered around the Lodge and being used as furniture. Our mysterious writer wants to steal them and excavate around the Lodge to see if they can find more, and sell them on the dinosaur bone black market. Shenanigans!
Well, let’s keep walking. Eventually we come to some random-ass shack that nevertheless doesn’t seem to have been abandoned, since it’s got a relatively modern padlock on it.
The padlock code can be figured out from the note we found in that jacket: it had what looked like a bunch of weird symbols on it, but are actually just numbers mirrored back-to-back. So the code for junior level is 6-5-1-2, and just like that, we waltz in.
The inside of the cabin is pretty trashed, but we do find yet another diary, this time by a dude named Julius McQuade. He’s conveniently written down everything he’s been doing over the past couple of months, and we find out that he adopted the white wolf after hunters shot her mother (Ollie!!! *shakes fist*). He named the wolf Isis, and taught her to follow commands, including sorting objects by their scent. Hey! I bet that will help us figure out who owns that notebook!
Anyway, the last pages of Julius’s diary are about a massive snowstorm he got caught in. He got sick and has gone to Pinevale Hospital. Well, cool, maybe we should call them, and get some clues for sniffing —
Or we can just hang out with the wolf right now. That works too.
So now that we know she’s been trained, we can practice a couple of the commands on her. It’s lucky that the wild animals Nancy runs into are always already trained.
We can find a couple more heating packs around the cabin, which is good as we’ll be doing more and more walking (sigh) from here on out. We also find a mysterious device with a phone number on it. What could this be!
Blah blah back to the lodge blah. We find a mysterious note that tells us to go to the basement sauna, if we want to know some very interesting information about our case. Does that sound like a trap? Nahhh, couldn’t be.
To the surprise of absolutely no one, there’s nobody in the sauna. What we do find are pictures of some kid in the lodge — a kid with a familiar birthmark on his face. Bill Kessler has some explaining to do! Like, for example, why he’s wearing such a stupid hat.
Then the door shuts behind us and steam starts filling the sauna. Someone lured Nancy here to try and kill her? I for one am shocked. In order to save our butts, we have to reconnect the pipes to turn the cold water on. There’s like one of these puzzles every two games, so it’s pretty easy.
So we reconnect the pipes and manage to save ourselves from being…steamed to death, or whatever. We’re still locked in, though. Luckily for us, the door swings open, and none other than Bill Kessler lets us out. The game makes sure he gets right up in our faces, just in case you didn’t realize he has the same birthmark as the picture kid. DUN DUN DUNNN!
So the fuck is going on with you, Bill? He immediately spills all: his grandma, Tilly Wentworth, used to own the Lodge, and Bill spent a lot of time here as a kid. So when he said he’s never been here before, he was lying to us! FOR SHAME. Bill bitters that before his grandma died, she sold the Lodge to the Moiques, and Bill is pretty sure they coerced her into it. Nancy suggests that Bill’s here to exact revenge, but he claims to have nothing to do with the accidents. So…what, he just showed up here to…give them his money and passive-aggressively play Fox and Geese all day? His plan is unclear.
The only useful thing Bill tells us is that he does know how to get into Trapper Dan’s Needle: there’s a puzzle we need to do here in the Lodge, which will give us Trapper Dan’s key. Cool beans.
So we wander on over to this weird pyramind thingy on the table, and do a puzzle to switch all the animal faces to the side to be pigs. When that’s done, the side of the pyramid will open up. But there’s no key! I know! You’re shocked that we have to jump through yet another hoop to solve this mystery! Bill’s like, “Oh, yeah, if you do this other thing, then you’ll find Trapper Dan’s journal.” Wow, there’s a lot of stuff in this tiny-ass pyramid. So we have to do another puzzle, this time making each face of the pyramid covered with the same type of animal face. When that’s done, we find the journal. Trapper Dan’s like, “Here’s how to get into the Needle, just in case the key is ever contrivedly lost.” In order to get into the Needle, we have to find some three more keys around the lodge.
“Trapper Dan had waaay too much time on his hands.” I like when the writers know that their plot is BS and try to be cute about it.
Before we do that, let’s go see the rest of our suspects. We haven’t hung out with them in a while. I pretty much blew through all the conversation options with Guadalupe in one go, so we can’t talk to her again. To the basement!
We decide to bring up Guadalupe’s bullet up to Ollie, because Nancy Drew is a total shit-stirrer. (“Can you think of any reason why somebody would be carrying a bullet?” she asks. “Sure. They wanna shoot something,” he deadpans. HEE.) He muses that he doesn’t trust her, and Nancy waltzes off. Sure enough, a little while later as we wander around the lodge, we overhear Ollie confront Guadalupe, and she yells that she’s leaving the lodge. And that’s it for Guadalupe! We can still call her and stuff, but she’s effectively off our suspect list.
We also call Pinevale Hospital about Julius McQuade, and the nurse is like, “Oh yeah, he dead.” The hospital doesn’t have any of his stuff, either. On the upside, that means we don’t have to feel bad about stealing his jacket and all the Toasty Packs in his cabin.
Next up, we call Chantal about the whole Bill Kessler and Tilly Wentworth deal. She gets all defensive and says Tilly was deep into debt (due to an addiction to the shop-at-home channel. That’s probably going to be me in 60 years, lbr), so Tilly secretly sold the Lodge to the Moiques. She didn’t want her family to know the truth because she was ashamed she’d squandered their inheritance. Fair enough.
I also call Ned, because I’m a better girlfriend than Nancy Drew. We run through all our new developments with him; he doesn’t offer much by way of advice, although he does remind us that Bill works in construction, ergo he might know something about explosives. His sob story about his grandma doesn’t clear him yet!
Finally, we call the phone number on the mystery object we found in the cabinet. It turns out to be a geologist (“Dr. Sabatini”), who has nothing better to do than answer all of Nancy Drew’s questions. She IDs the mysterious device we found in the cabin as a geophone, and notes that someone stole a bunch of hers while she was out on Skookum Ridge (which is one of the ridges by the Lodge, if I forgot to mention that, which I probably did). Nancy’s like, “Golly, what’s a geophone?” Dr. Sabatini explains that they make it possible to detect mineral deposits without having to dig — the geophone detects seismic waves bouncing off stuff, and said waves can only be created by…blowing something up. Well, there’s the motive for our bomber. Dr. Sabatini tells us that there are tons of minerals to be found around the Lodge.
While we have her on the line, we can also ask about dinosaur bones. There was an empty plaque that used to hold a bone in Julius’s cabin, plus we found that journal about selling bones on the black market. Dr. Sabatini’s like, “You know science isn’t just like one branch, right?” She tells us pretty much what we already know: because of their rarity, the black market for them is a pretty big deal. Before we hang up, she also lets us know that her geophones transmit at 990 kilohertz, so if we find a receiver tuned to that frequency, that might be our culprit. Cool beans.
With all our talking out of the way, we can get back to our puzzles. Trapper Dan’s journal tells us that there are four keys hidden around the Lodge: a moose key, a raccoon, a wolf, and a pig. The moose is the easiest: there’s a moose head in Yanni’s room, and when we pop its eye out, a secret compartment will open. So we get the key…
…and hey, what’s this?
When we flick the radio on, we get a bunch of babble in an incomprehensible language (Fredonian?). Nancy muses that it’s odd that Yanni would be hiding a radio. I mean, Yanni is pretty weird. He’s not even from a real country.
Next up is the raccoon key, which is a little more complex. There are color discs above the doorknobs to each rooms that we can move; a necklace down in the lobby shows us which colors each doorknob needs to have. (The necklace has three discs on the left and three on the right, corresponding to each room.)
So we go around like so — the Chinook room has to be white, Eena red, Pish Pish blue, Ollalie green, Kalakala blue, and Kwel Kwel red. When all that’s done, the raccoon painting in the hall will light up and the key will fall out from under it. Two for four!
The wolf and pig keys require a little more work, so let’s take a break before we do those.
You have some explaining to do, Yanni! He’s like, “My trainers and I must use a secret radio channel so my competitors cannot hear our TOP-SECRET TRAINING CONVERSATIONS! They are a matter of life and death!” Where the fuck are these trainers of Yanni’s, anyway? Weirdly, Nancy never asks about them — she does ask if he really thinks his competitors are out there (of course he does), but this seems like a glaring oversight. Taking nearly a year-long break from detective-ing will do that to you, I guess.
In the interest of not boring everyone to death, I haven’t been screencapping or mentioning all the chores or the snowball fights with Freddie, but rest assured, we are still doing them every single day, making me want to stab myself.
The next morning, we wake up before everyone else to begin our maid duties, which is somewhat handy as we can poke around with everyone gone. Over by Yanni’s post, we find a crumpled note on the ground: “Leave this place now, or be prepared to leave it FOREVER!” ~*~Spooky~*~
What we really need to do is grab one of Ollie’s rags from his worktable, to give to Isis. Remember how Julius McQuade was all, “Oh yeah, I totally taught a wild animal tricks, like recognizing scents”? We can get an item from each of our suspects and give it to her, to see whose scent is on the journal we found.
As for the rest of the suspects, we can just steal a washcloth from each of their rooms when we’re doing the cleaning. We also find a note from Guadalupe in the main hall, telling us that she’s left, but she wants us to call her. Cool cool cool.
Isis groups the journal with Lou’s washcloth, which means the journal is Lou’s. Furthermore, when we get back to the Lodge, Tino has made himself useful and mailed us a news article about Lou getting arrested for digging up dinosaur bones.
Note the reference to Poppy Dada! Man, Secret of the Scarlet Hand was a much better game than this one.
…seriously, fax machines and mailing the news? Doesn’t anyone here have email?
So Lou has some explaining to do. We confront him about stealing the dinosaur bones, and he admits to it. The T-Rex bone we need for our puzzle is in his closet. And! He totally stole the geophones and has been blowing shit up to more easily find bones, right? “Negative. Huh-uh,” he tells us. Huh. Lou’s remarkably blase about the whole thing — he hands over the key, and goes right back to playing Fox and Geese.
That’s it for the bone puzzle and Lou’s subplot. We get the bone from his room and head back to Julius McQuade’s cabin to put it back in its plaque.
The wall pulls back to reveal a puzzle, naturally. The goal is to line them up in matching horizontal rows. Once that’s done, we can go into a secret passage, because this game has so far had an appalling lack of those.
It’s never really made clear what exactly this passage is, but whatever, it’s here.
In the tunnels, we find a map. The red diagonal bars indicate levers that have to be pulled, and the gold marks and red straight bars are pits and gates, respectively. Getting to the levers will open up parts of the tunnels that we need to get to. The thing is, it’s physically impossible for Nancy to get through parts of this maze. Trapper Dan’s journal is like, “My pig Mary can help you!”, which would be nice if both Trapper Dan and Mary weren’t, you know, dead.
It sure is a good thing we’ve made friends with this wolf! So what you do is give Isis commands to steer her through the maze (jumping over the pits, etc), and then we’ll be able to go through more of the tunnels and find the keys. Or whatever. Anyway, she can’t open the gates, which means that the only place we can send her is to the blue arrow on the top right.
The level above the tunnels is the maze that the map indicates, so once Isis makes it to the arrow, we climb up and follow the same path we sent her down. If you do it right, you’ll see her waiting for you, like so:
Then we can tell Isis to pull on the rope, which will open up a key area back at the Lodge. Sneakily, it’s a timed puzzle, because Isis can’t hold the rope forever.
If you’re like me and getting to this point in the game took you for fucking ever, it’ll be too late to go back to the Lodge, and Nancy will sleep in the mines. She must smell pretty gross the next day, but whatever. Isis will have let go of the rope and you have to do the whole puzzle all over again, but also whatever.
The upper level will lead you to the Needle (remember what Ned said about back doors? No, not like that), but it’s pointless because the door is still locked. We do see this panel with all the animals on the keys, though. It looks like the reason there’s no wolf in the maze is because its panel is already open.
The next day: like a dumbass, I trudged all the way back to the Lodge, talked to everyone, went back to the cabin to do the maze puzzle again, went back to the Lodge to get the key, then went back to the cabin for another clue. That was stupid. I will pretend I did not do that. So, the next day! I woke up, did the maze puzzle, and on my way out of the cabin, grabbed the Geiger counter under the bed:
Isis has been using it as a chewing toy, but we need it to find the final key. After grabbing this, I immediately went back to the Lodge to get the pig key. The rope Isis pulls opens up the boar mouth in the second floor hallway, and from there we get the key. Three for four!
And while we’re up here in the hallway: what’s the housekeeping sign doing on Guadalupe’s door? Isn’t she gone?
Well, the room’s clean. Maybe we should check the closet.
DUN DUN DUN!!! Nancy finds her jacket, with a note pinned to it telling us to “LEAVE NOW!” ~*~*~Spooky~*~*~
Isis will drop the rope eventually, so we can just wander around and see how everyone’s doing.
Ollie informs us that Lou has also left. AND THEN THERE WERE THREE. The good news is, with so few guests, we’re absolved of kitchen duty.
Let’s call Guadalupe, for some reason. I really don’t know why we have to call her, because we don’t learn anything from her. We talk about the wolf; she fulfills the educational portion of this game by explaining wilderness sanctuaries and environmental preservation to us. We get closure on why she had a magazine featuring Yanni in her room: she wanted to ask him to be a spokesperson for Run and Grow Free, until she found out wolves murdered his whole family and stole his girlfriend. She wrecked the ice shack, too, because she was afraid Bill would run into the wolf and do something to it. Nancy asks if she knows about the explosions, but Guadalupe says she doesn’t. “That’s serious. No offense, but it sounds to me that instead of hiring a new maid, [Chantal] should’ve hired herself a detective,” she says. A ha ha ha.
Alrighty, let’s get our final key. Trapper Dan’s journal says that “only the likes of Marie Curie or Mr. Geiger can hear his call.” It’s a good thing we just tripped over that Geiger counter, isn’t it? So we just walk around the Lodge with the counter, noting that the numbers spike when we get close to the dinosaur bones. Finally, in the basement, the reading gets higher and higher the closer we get the cellar stairs.
Four for four! Now that we have all the keys, we have to be able to use them in the tunnels. Which means that it’s time…to play Fox and Geese.
So, Fox and Geese. We play as the geese; our goal is to move the pieces around and box the fox in so he can’t jump over and “eat” our pieces. Before we play, we swap out the fox piece for the pig key, because Trapper Dan’s Needle is somehow technologically advanced enough to know the difference, and will only open up if you use the pig key. I don’t know.
So basically you just slowly advance all the geese across the board until the pig can’t make any more moves. It’s a pain in the ass, because the pieces can move forward, back, and diagonally and I KEPT FORGETTING TO COVER MYSELF D:
The best part? You don’t get to play just once; you have to win THREE TIMES.
I didn’t bother screencapping the whole game because I lost a lot. I will just direct you to notice that by the time I won, more than 4 hours had passed in game, which was something like 2-3 hours IRL. (You don’t have to win the wolf section of the board, since its panel is already open. NATURALLY, the very first time I played it, the wolf section was the only one I managed to beat.)
So the gates in the tunnels have all been opened. Given that I wasted pretty much the whole day playing Fox and Geese, it’s too late to go back out. To bed, and to the last day of the game!
So we wake up, blah blah maid duties blah, and head out to the cabin. We send Isis through the maze again, and direct her to flip the levers. Now, when we go to the Needle door, all the animal panels will be open:
There’s no puzzle here, you just put in all the keys and the door to the Needle will unlock. And we’ll find out whole the culprit is! And this game will finally be over!
Inside the Needle, we find a BLACK SNOWMOBILING OUTFIT! Missing a piece of material! Just like the thing that was sticking out of the Needle!
Dig the expired-in-1989 mayonnaise.
We also find a bag that says “UC Brea”, and inside is a ton of explosives. “Lou lied to me!” Nancy gasps, clutching her pearls. “He has been looking for dinosaur bones!” Well, shit, now it looks like we gotta teach Lou a lesson about lying to Nancy Drew.
I’m sorry, that pose is just hilarious to me.
Yanni comes busting in, and tells us that he saw that the door to the Needle was open. We tell him that Lou is the bomber, and he says he’ll ski back to the Lodge and tell Ollie. As he rushes off, his Fitbit or whatever that thing on his arm is falls off.
We look at the screen, and note that it’s collecting geophone data at 990 kilohertz, and is set to blast a site. Uh, Nancy? This seems pretty suspicious? Nancy?
Isis comes in and drops a piece of the snowmobiling suit next to Yanni’s geophone Gameboy. “Wait a minute…this means the scent on that glove and the scent on what Yanni dropped are the same,” Nancy derps. Wait for it…”Which means that the person who’s been wearing that snowmobiling suit and blowing things up…IS YANNI.”
Oh, Nancy.
At this point, we can press the big red button, which doesn’t seem like the greatest idea, but sure, why not?
“Oh my gosh, he’s set the timer! It looks like he’s about the blow up the Needle!” Nancy says. Uh…I hate to say this, but given that we pressed the button, I think we were the ones to set the timer. Oops.
We barely make it out of the Needle, and run into Ollie. We tell him that we need to borrow his snowmobile, and now we have to chase Yanni down.
Way, way back in the beginning of the game (man, that feels like forever ago), when Ollie sends you out to check Skookum Ridge, there’s a driving mini-game where you have to steer the snowmobile around various rocks and trees without crashing. And now we have to do it again for the end of the game. It’s pretty much the same idea as the end of Secret of the Old Clock. You can’t actually catch Yanni; you just have to keep him in your sights long enough and he’ll eventually crash.
It’s no car crash, but I guess a snowmobile crash is good enough. Yanni is captured and confesses all: he tainted the potato salad with the expired-in-1989 mayonnaise, giving everyone food poisoning; he iced the stairs and broke that guy’s leg; he opened the gas valve in the sauna; and he was the one to blow up the bunkhouse. The only thing he didn’t do was break Lou Talbot’s window; if you went by Ollie’s worktable at one point, there’s a note from Freddie saying, “I will not throw ice balls at windows.” So that was that. He planted the photos of Bill in the sauna to try and throw us off his (Yanni’s) trail, although he swears he didn’t mean to lock us in. Whatever, Yanni. It wasn’t even the scariest attempt on Nancy’s life she’s experienced so far.
It turns out Yanni totally wasn’t here for the skiing; he was helping the government of Fredonia search for uranium. I just wanna say: the fact that he’s from a fictional country totally gave away that he was the villain. I don’t think any other Nancy Drew game has ever made up a country wholesale like this. Would it have been controversial or something to have just made him Russian? Because “Fredonia” wasn’t fooling anyone.
Anyway, the scandal of it all has brought the Lodge plenty of new business, and Ollie doesn’t want to shoot Isis anymore now that he knows that she saved our butts. Guadalupe finds a sanctuary for Isis to stay at, and everyone’s happy. Except for Bill and Lou, who don’t get mentioned in this epilogue at all. Maybe they find comfort in each other, speed skating and playing Fox and Geese to the end of their days.
THE END.
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