Previously on Nancy Drew: White Wolf of Icicle Creek: Nancy Drew’s been called to Canada, where suspicious accidents have been occurring around Icicle Creek Lodge. These accidents always seem to coincide with the appearance of a wolf, which makes us suspicious: what could wolves be doing in Canada? Only crime, that’s what.
We have about five minutes every day to do detective work, as the rest of our time is taken up by menial labor. The titular wolf has decided to give us a hand by showing up while we were doing menial labor, to save us some time. Thanks, wolf friend!
So Nancy followed the wolf tracks out to Chicken Ridge, where an explosion went off and caused an avalanche. That you, Mulan? We were buried under a ton of snow, but luckily the wolf found us and poked a hole in the snow for us to breathe. Nancy briefly fears getting mauled, but the wolf gets distracted and runs off. With a hole dug in the snow, we can now pull ourselves out and get back to solving crime.
On our way back, we see a crater in the ground. “That must’ve been made by the explosion,” Nancy muses. We find a fossil as well as a bunch of rubble, and Nancy’s like, “These rocks do not look like other rocks. This must be a clue!” I mean…whatever, if you say so, Nancy.
We’re supposed to call Avalanche Patrol if we see any avalanches, so let’s do that. Remember how we spent half of part one on the phone? Yup, here we go again. The avalanche guy tells us that Ollie is also on the Patrol, and asks us to pass on the message that their explosives training course is being postponed till next month. Will do! By the way, have any of them been setting off explosives around the lodge? No, they sure haven’t. Please, Nancy, like the mystery is that easy to solve.
We then call the sheriff to ask him about the clock face we found. We think it’s part of the bomb that blew up the bunkhouse! The sheriff says that Ollie told him that all the room clocks in the lodge looked like that, so it might’ve just been the actual bunkhouse clock. Nancy’s like, “Oh.” Nevertheless, he does tell us that the explosive was C4, and notes that it’s not too difficult to get, if you’re already in the demolition business. “In Eastern Europe, it’s called semtex,” he adds. HMM. And then! “For someone who’s had training in explosives, it’s a piece of cake.”
OLLIE!!!!
Let’s see how everyone is doing post-explosion, yes?
Yanni is all upset over the explosion, as he thinks it was his competition trying to scare him off. He blathers on about how the bomb could only have been meant for him, to take him and his mad skiing skillz out of the tournament. You know what, Yanni, it’s not always about you.
Chantal’s called Ollie and given him permission to tell us about the accidents, so we can ask him now for more details. One guest fell down some icy stairs, and Ollie insists that the stairs were dry right before the guy slipped on them. If you ask him, someone iced them on purpose, because it definitely wasn’t Ollie’s fault. The handyman doth protest too much, I think.
Weirdly, we can only ask him about that one incident. After he tells us, we have to move on to Trapper Dan’s Needle: does he know what’s up with that? He doesn’t, and suggests we look at the pictures and placards in the lobby. We also pass on the Avalanche Patrol, and that reminds him that they need to check out Skookum Ridge as well. Ollie’s too busy working on his plan to kill the wolf to do his job, so of course he foists it off on Nancy. “But I’ve never driven a snowmobile,” Nancy protests, like that’s ever stopped her.
Off we go!
It doesn’t look like there’s been an avalanche, so let’s just…turn around and head back. We report back to Ollie, and he says he’ll call Avalanche Patrol for us.
Let’s go bug these two nerds. We ask Lou about his education; he tells us he’s going after a Master of Fine Arts. He tells us that he “create[s] works of art by manipulating naturally occurring geophysical substances like dirt.” “Nobody understands my art,” he sighs. Heh. He corroborates Chantal’s story about him: he stopped by in the summer when his car broke down, and thought it would be nice to visit in the winter. Fair enough. We ask about his broken window, and he says that nothing was taken, and they couldn’t find anything that had broken it: no rock, “no bullet.” Man, everyone in this game thinks they’re being targeted for assassination. Bill says that the wolf probably tried to jump into Lou’s room and didn’t make it. “That’s bogus, dude,” Lou opines.
We can ask Lou about his snowshoeing hobby, and if he can teach us how to do it sometime. “You don’t learn how to snowshoe,” he tells us. “You just…do it.” That’s deep, man. Still, this is kind of a clue, as Nancy saw some snowshoe prints outside earlier. She doesn’t mention them or anything, but you can connect the dots if you want to. After all, there are so few people who might be snowshoeing in winter in northern Canada. He tells us that he sometimes sees Yanni while he’s out snowshoeing, zipping by on his skis. “Like…zippy zoom.” Yeah, we’re not getting a lot out of him.
Over to Bill. He congratulates us on our mad snow shoveling skills, eh. He and Lou had hella fun ice skating, eh. But that’s not enough for Bill! Now he wants to go ice fishing, and he wants Nancy to be his competition. My God, Bill, we already feed and clothe you. But we have to do it, so our new mission is to go out to the ice shack and catch a fish to have a dick-measuring contest with Bill. But hey, before we go, is he related to Rolfe Kessler, from an earlier Nancy Drew game? That would be a fun Easter egg to make this game slightly less boring!
“No idea.” Oh. Okay.
It’s gotten a little colder outside, but we soldier on, in the name of customer service. By the time we trudge all the way to the ice shack, Nancy’s dropping hints that we’re about to get hypothermia. Bill Kessler better give the lodge 5 stars on Yelp.com, ’cause this is above and beyond the call of duty.
But when we go inside, the shack has been trashed! Quelle shock! Nancy notes that we can’t go fishing now, as the tackle’s been ruined. Maybe we should be thanking our mystery villain, because I really did not want to do that. Find your own friends, Bill. Among the rubble is a torn up page for “Birds of the Southwest,” which has a phone number written on it. Nancy will note that it’s a US number.
Well, we accomplished pretty much nothing. There’s nothing else to do here, so we have to go back to the lodge now. My favorite part of this game is absolutely all the walking for ages and then having to go back after five seconds.
When we get back to the lodge, we find a note from Freddie, who tells us that she likes playing snowball fights with us. She likes getting whacked in the face by a grown adult? Freddie’s life sounds sad. Anyway, if we beat her at another round, she’ll give us something we need to progress later in the game. So we’ll have to do that.
But first, let’s get everything out of the way re: the ruined shack. We tell Bill that his fishing gear’s been wrecked, so now we can’t participate in his phallic fish-measuring contest. What a bummer, huh? Bill’s like, “Too bad, but you still have to catch a fish for me, eh.” What? Fuck you, Bill Kessler. I hope the wolf eats him at the end of this game. That’s still rated E, right?
So now we gotta go talk to everyone again to figure out how to fulfill Bill Kessler’s bullshit request. Back to the basement! I can see why Ollie hides out there now. Anyway, Ollie says he’ll lend us his fishing gear. We ask if he knows who might have trashed the shack, and he snarks that it was probably some “save the fish” tree-hugger. I mean, I too would like to save the fish from Bill Kessler’s stupid ego tripping.
We can also pop over and talk to Yanni for a few minutes. He explains that in his country, the number wolf means DEATH. Also, they ate his grandmother’s face when he was little. “How?” derps Nancy. They ate her, Nancy! It’s not hard to figure out! Yanni gives us the gory details of Grandma Volkstaia’s death anyway: one time when she was Vespa-ing her way home from the village, she stopped to pick up some guy who was going to get eaten by wolves, but their combined weight made the scooter too slow, so the guy pushed Grandma Volkstaia off and let the wolves eat her instead. Moral: never pick up hitchhikers. Anyway, that’s why Yanni hates wolves so much. “About them, I have nothing to say.” Except for where he just spent the last five minutes talking about them. Also, this sounds more like that hitchhiker’s fault. Anyway, Nancy’s like, “So…anyway, have you ever seen Lou when you’re out skiing?” Yanni’s like, “Yeah, I nearly ran him over yesterday.” Good talk, Yanni.
So we call the number on the “Birds of the Southwest” poster, which turns out to be for “Run and Grow Free”, a nonprofit in California. This doesn’t tell us much; like half the people in this lodge are from California. But while we’re at it, let’s get around to calling Tino Balducci, shall we? I bet he’s lonely.
Tino is all excited that we want his help on the case, and he asks if we remember “that Last Train to Blue Moon Canyon we went on.” I sure do now that you’ve namedropped the game, Tino! Nancy asks how he got mixed up with Chantal, and he says a friend of a friend hooked them up. “Bingo, I got myself a new client.” Nancy wants to know how many clients Tino could possibly have, and he’s like, “Well…you know, you go spreading yourself too thin in this business, and the next thing you know? Crime out the wazoo.” Actually, given that she took like a six-month break between this game and the last, Nancy might be able to relate. Anyway, we’re just calling to say hi; Tino doesn’t have any hints for us yet.
You can try calling Chantal to shit talk Bill Kessler, but she’s all, “The customer is always right!” and insists we go ice-fishing. I kind of hate Chantal. She’s almost as shitty a boss as Paula Santos.
As usual, Ned is last. We update him on Yanni’s life-or-death skiing career, and tell him about finding Call of the Wild in Lou’s room. Nancy’s like, “Have you ever heard of this book?” and Ned’s like, “…it’s a classic, Nancy.” Heh. Then we get around to telling him how the wolf saved us from an icy death, and he’s all shocked: “Why would a wolf do that?” Maybe the wolf is a big Nancy Drew fan? Nevertheless, we must admit that it’s not very wild animal-like behavior. Nancy also tells him that she thinks there’s a door in Trapper Dan’s Needle, and Ned says, “Just keep poking around. If something has a front door, it usually has a back door, too.” We catch him up on our suspects, but he doesn’t say much that we already know. “I miss you, ya know,” he adds. Nancy’s like, “Yeah, sure, miss you too,” and we hang up on him. Rough life, Ned.
At this point it got too late to go back outside; so onto day two! Blah blah maid chores, cleaning shit, feeding everyone breakfast blah.
Once we get all of our maid duties out of the way, we can’t procrastinate any more on appeasing Bill Kessler, so off to the ice shack we go. On our way out, we pelt Freddie with some more snowballs, and she gives us a hot pack that we can use if Nancy gets too cold, so we don’t freeze to death and lose the game. Thoughtful!
Back at the fishing shack, there’s a minigame to catch the fish Bill wants. Basically you just move the hook up and down, and try not to get it caught on the wrong fish or various types of debris. It’s pretty easy. I swear to God, if we bring this fish back to Bill Kessler and he tries to one up us again, I’m going to slap him with it.
Literally the second we step out of the ice shack, someone whacks Nancy in the face with a snowball. The screen goes black, and we hear the sound of an explosion. Nancy passes out. Wait, hitting someone with a snowball will knock them out? And we’ve just been throwing them at a 9-year-old girl left and right. Yikes. Anyway, Nancy comes to some time later, missing her jacket and with the ice on the lake being broken up by the explosion. But wait, what’s this?
On the other side of the lake, there’s the wolf, and conveniently, a jacket. Is this wolf really dangerous? It keeps saving Nancy’s ass. Anyway, so now we have to jump the ice floes to get to the jacket, while keeping an eye on the temperature bar to make sure Nancy doesn’t get hypothermia and die.
This is some bullshit before 9 AM.
Success!
Nancy notes that she doesn’t know whose jacket this is, but even if she weren’t already kind of a klepto, impending hypothermia is a pretty compelling reason to steal a jacket. Nancy finds a note in one of the pockets, made up of some bizarre symbols. Could this be a clue? It totally could.
We can’t go back the way we came, so we decide to follow the wolf’s tracks and see where that takes us. They lead to “Avalanche Ridge.” “Not exactly reassuring,” Nancy notes. Shut up, Nancy. Let’s just keep walking and see what happens!
Whoops.
The wolf doesn’t come to save us this time, which means that I’ve killed Nancy and have to reload. Second chance button, away! Nevertheless, if you foolishly walk further into the ridge, Nancy will note that we’ll need snowshoes to go any further. And we just had that scintillating conversation with Lou about snowshoeing! I bet we’ll come back to that later. Anyway, once we get to the ridge, we see ski tracks, and we can follow those back to the lodge.
When we get back, Bill Kessler’s like, “I went up to the ice shack eh, and it was all blown up eh.” I wish there was an option to be like, “Yup, that was me, because I didn’t want to do your bullshit fishing contest.” Instead, Nancy just tells him that someone blew up the lake. “Probably [Bill]. Couldn’t stand the thought of losing to a girl,” snarks Lou. Hee. I kind of like their bizarro Odd Couple friendship, I won’t lie. Anyway, Bill’s just like, “Bummer. No more ice fishing.” We also nearly died, Bill, thanks for your concern.
We can also ask Lou to borrow his snowshoes, and he shoots us down. So we’re going to have to go through some other needlessly complex route to get a pair, as always. Yanni also says he has better things to do than teach us to ski to the ridge. Well, what about those snowshoes in the display case? I mean, they haven’t been used in about 50 years, but they should work perfectly! Ollie tells us that we can use them, but we have to get the lock combination from Chantal. And Chantal will give us the combo, but first we have to fill out a survey for Tino.
For some reason, it hasn’t occurred to Tino that Ollie is also a suspect. Well, whatever. We can fill out a couple of the questions without asking our suspects: in the course of our maid duties, we’ve seen which side of the bed everyone gets up on, and their hometowns are all in the guest register. Now we have to go interview them about which planet they identify with. This should be fun.
Lou Talbot identifies as “Planet X.” Uh, Lou, that’s not a planet. “Planet X.” Okay, whatever, if you say so. Bill identifies with Mars, on account of “that whole god of war thing.” Bill Kessler wishes. Down in the basement, Yanni says he identifies with Pluto. Nancy points out that Pluto isn’t a planet anymore. That was pretty recent news at the time this game came out, in 2007. (Wow, it’s been over 10 years since Pluto stopped being considered a planet. I remember my 8th-grade class freaking out about that. Excuse me, I have to feel old for a minute.) Anyway, Yanni notes that Pluto stirs up controversy — just like him! Ergo, they are spiritually connected. Whatever, Yanni.
Our last suspect, Guadalupe, still hasn’t shown up. It’s lunchtime, so let’s go do that while we wait.
Blah blah cooking blah. We now have a reason to dump paprika into everyone’s lunch; when we’re done, Ollie will tell us that Lou Talbot hates paprika.
Two-thirds of the way through the game, Guadalupe Comillo has finally shown up. She has this really weird, over-the-top Mid-Atlantic accent, even though she’s supposedly from California. This is cot-caught merger country! Anyway, she’s all irritated that nobody cleaned her room in the two days between Elsa leaving and Nancy coming, and trills at us about how we should clean her room first. Don’t tell me how to do my job, Guadalupe. She tells us that she’s watching birds from the window (and lists some species), and babbles on about how much wonderful wildlife there is in the area. But! But! Nancy Drew was a thorough and studious detective, and we know from reading the wildlife info on the computer that none of the birds Guadalupe lists are here in the winter! DUN DUN DUN.
We get her thoughts on her fellow suspects: she thinks Yanni is kind of intense (but are his eyes piercing?), Bill Kessler is okay, talking to Lou Talbot is like trying to talk to “a giant turnip”, and Ollie is okay, although Guadalupe is offended by his vendetta against the wolf. She really wants to see the wolf, and Nancy tells her that we’ve seen the wolf tracks out by the pond. “Have you told anyone else?” Guadalupe asks. YIKES! We say no, and Guadalupe tells us not to, because she doesn’t want anyone else scaring it off. Oooookay.
Finally: is she the owner of the Birds of the Southwest book? Guadalupe notes that she does have some bird books, but she left them all at home. OR DID SHE? Also, she identifies with “Earth. No, wait, make that Venus. No, Earth. No, Venus. No, Earth.” Alrighty then!
I think, depending on the order you do the tasks in, you can meet Guadalupe a little earlier, so meeting her won’t be a giant infodump. However, I did not do that, so I pretty much just have this one long conversation with her. Case in point, the second we back up from her, we notice she’s dropped something on the floor. Back to talking to her!
Say, that looks like a bullet, doesn’t it? Guadalupe denies it, but you can’t get anything past Nancy Drew: we know she had that magazine on rifles in her room, ergo, she must have messed with the rifle sights on Ollie’s rifle so he couldn’t shoot the wolf. This is because Guadalupe is a member of Run and Grow Free, and she’s trying to protect the wolf. ISN’T SHE? Guadalupe feebly protests, but soon realizes she’s no match for Nancy Drew, and confesses all. Nevertheless, we still don’t have proof she’s behind anything weird going on at the lodge, so we have to move on.
We’ve finished Tino’s survey, so let’s send it over to him. But first I called Ned, just to be nice. There’s not much to say; we just update him on nearly getting blown up on the lake, and tell him that the person who attacked us was wearing a “black snowmobiling suit.” Nancy notes that she also saw a piece of black fabric sticking out of Trapper Dan’s Needle. “So if you come across someone who owns a black snowmobiling suit that’s missing a piece of fabric, you’ve probably found your culprit,” Ned says. And you know, seeing as how we’re in everyone’s rooms all the time anyway, we might actually be able to look for that suit! But we’re not going to, because that would make sense. Sorry, Ned!
Once we hang up with him, we can get back to Tino. We send him the survey, and he says he’s got it: our perp is “none other than our bird-watching champion snowshoer, Bill Kessler.” Nancy’s like, “Uh…that describes exactly nobody in this lodge.” Tino’s like, “Oh.” He decides to go interrogate the text from a different perspective, and in the meantime, he gives us the combo for the snowshoe case.
The combo is 7-6-6-9, and with that, we now have snowshoes! Time to go catch a wolf!
Up next: Nancy Drew snowshoes her way to victory.
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