I like this game a lot! It actually doesn’t really have much going for it plot- and puzzle-wise, and some of the characters are more fun than others, but the location makes up for all of it. The atmosphere in the spooky mansion is effectively creepy, and outdoors New Orleans is as fun and colorful and jazzy as you would want your fictional portrayal of New Orleans to be.
Also, Henry Bolet was the man of my mall goth preteen’s dreams. I’m just throwing that out there.
So Nancy and Bess are ditching George and going to New Orleans for the weekend. What the fuck did George do to them? I mean, you can’t tell me she had anything better to do. Anyway, Ned wants Nancy to check in on his friend, Henry Bolet. Henry’s great-uncle has just died, so Henry’s had go down and chill in his mansion, and he might be lonely. I don’t believe Ned “Literal ’50s Boyfriend” Nickerson would be friends with someone who wears that much eyeliner, but sure, let’s roll with it.
The game advises us to play the game in the dark, for maximum effect. Don’t tell me what to do, game.
So we ditch Bess at the hotel and head over to the Bolet mansion. There’s a storm outside, and it’s all very ~*~spooky~*~.
The door’s unlocked, so Nancy just waltzes right in, as she’s wont to do. Judging by the footprints, someone else is also here.
Nancy rounds the corner and sees someone in a black trenchcoat and a hat and of course she just chirps, “Hi, the door was open!” I mean, I guess I can’t blame her for thinking that emo kid Henry Bolet likes to wander around his house dressed like that.
YIKES! I MEAN OKAY
IT’S HIS OWN HOUSE, NO JUDGMENT
ON SECOND THOUGHT I DON’T THINK THIS IS HENRY
MAYBE HE BROUGHT SOMEONE HOME FROM A JUGGALO GATHERING?
Our mysterious intruder blows some stuff in Nancy’s face, making her pass out. And we come to with YET ANOTHER CREEPY PERSON STARING US DOWN.
I DON’T THINK I LIKE IT HERE.
She offers us some weird drink, which I have Nancy refuse because I am frankly a little freaked out. But then Henry shows up and tells the lady not to force her “weirdo concoction” on us. The lighting goes back to normal, and the woman introduces herself as Renée Amande, Henry’s great-uncle’s housekeeper. She tells us that she and Henry carried us up from the foyer, where we were passed out. The electricity’s gone out in the storm (spooky!!!), so everything is lit by candles and it’s all very shadowy. And spooky, naturally.
Nancy tells her about the skeleton guy we saw in the hall, and Renée muses that we should call the police. Henry shuts that idea down: “Things are complicated enough as it is.” Or, alternatively: “Then we wouldn’t have a game.”
So here we are in the library. We can poke around a bit, we note that all the book on the shelves have teeth printed on the spine. That’s pretty weird. Bruno Bolet (the dead great-uncle) also has several first-place trophies from the “Miniature Modelers of America”. When we click on the 1991 trophy, we find…a glass eyeball. Huh. Okay.
We can also check out a card catalogue of the books in the library. We’ll need that later, for now you can just chuckle at Prudent Living: A Memoir by P. Rutherford, and Finding Fish by Bill Kessler. Fuck you, Bill Kessler. Finding that fish for you was the bane of my existence.
The library is also where we’ll find Henry. He tells us that he and Ned aren’t particularly close, but Ned is a nice dude. When he found out that Henry’s great-uncle died, “he was all like, ‘How ya feeling, man? You doing okay? Wanna talk?’” HEE. Henry totally does want to talk, though, because we basically ask if he and his great-uncle were close, and he goes off on a whole rant about how Great-Uncle Bruno never loved him — Henry’s parents died when he was young, so Bruno was his guardian most of his life. He tells us that Bruno was always sending him away: “Boarding school, summer camp, military school, college…” Uh, I hate to break it to you Henry, but by the time you’re in college, you’re legally on your own. Anyway, so Henry’s emo because his uncle didn’t hug him enough as a kid. He’s only down here because he was named as the executor of the estate. Wow, I definitely want an 18-year-old handling my affairs after I’m dead.
Henry snarks that now that we’ve seen that he’s fine, we can go report back to Ned and enjoy our time in New Orleans, and let him sit here in the dark listening to My Chemical Romance or whatever. Nancy’s like, “No way, I saw something vaguely weird, and now I must get to the bottom of this!” Henry gives us the go-ahead, but warns us that Bruno had a lot of weird pets, and they’re still wandering around.
We go to the foyer, where we encountered the mystery skeleton clown man. We go over to the table to see what he was looking at, which is…a miniature map of a cemetery. Sure, that’s normal. The map corresponds to the actual cemetery outside, and the puzzles on the miniatures will help us solve stuff in the actual mausoleums.
MOST MYSTERIOUS.
So there’s a puzzle on the roof of one of the mini-mausoleums, and we also find yet another eye in another miniature.
On the wall of the foyer, we find a bunch of portraits, presumably of Bolets past. But one of the portraits is missing! SO MYSTERIOUS.
On the floor in front of the portraits, we find this rubbing. VERY MYSTERIOUS.
Over in the corner is this book, with literally eight pages full of burial plots. We’ll need to know where some of these people are later, obviously.
Blah blah puzzles blah. This one is pretty easy; you use the dark brown piece to push the light brown block and the two marbles into the lasers so they won’t block your path. This all serves to get another eye! We’re up to 3 now, out of like…20. Sigh.
And a fourth eyeball, on the bookshelf. Like I said, this game is really all about the setting, not the puzzles.
Let’s look in the fireplace. One can always find suspicious things in a fireplace. We find a half-burnt receipt from a place called “Zeke’s.” MUCH MYSTERIOUS.
We can also grab a piece of coal, because why not? That shit is expensive nowadays.
Let’s go talk to our suspects. Renée is out in the backyard, tending to some plants. Well, I say backyard, it’s really more like the garden leading out to the rest of the Bolets’ massive frickin’ property. She asks if we’ve talked to Henry yet, and Nancy immediately jumps on them for not being best friends: “Did I detect a little…animosity between you two back there?” She totally did: Renee grouses that Henry is an annoying emo kid, and she thinks he’s been selling off Bruno’s stuff. Nancy suggests that, being executor of the estate and all, it’s kind of Henry’s stuff now, and Renée corrects us: nothing is to be sold until all of Bruno’s affairs are settled. Hmm. She tells us that Henry is set to get 30% of the estate, with another 30% going to a physician named Gilbert Buford (we’ll meet him later), and 30% going to a school. Renée gets the remaining 10%. HMMM.
We ask her what was in that thing she tried to make us drink, and she brushes the question off. QUELLE MYSTERIOUS. We then ask her about the rubbing of a crow we found, and she remarks that it’s probably Henry’s junk: “I guess he figures I won’t notice amid all the other clutter, but I do. I notice everything,” she creeps. Yeesh. Anyway, we have a couple more questions: she doesn’t know about the missing picture in the foyer, but she thinks it disappeared after Bruno’s funeral. And even though she doesn’t like Henry, Bruno paid her in advance, so she’s sticking around. Finally, we can ask about the super mysterious pouch around her neck, and she says it’s filled with herbs that connect her to the universe. I know a guy like that. He smokes his, though.
With all that done, we start to leave, but Renée has one last comment: she’s also seen the Skeleton Man, and she thinks it’s “Mister Death.” “And he’s come back.” SPOOKY~*~*~
Back to Henry. I think this game was around the point that I figured out that the best way for me to explore all the conversation trees was just to run back and talk to everyone as soon as I found something and/or talked shit about them with another person. Thus, we can now ask Henry about the crow rubbing. He doesn’t know what it is, nor does he know about the burned-up receipt from Zeke’s. Well, what about that weird miniature cemetery? Henry tells us Bruno oversaw it, and he made a scale model so he could keep track of everything. “And people think I’m weird.” Aw, Henry. Has he never been to an Evanescence concert? Nobody would think he’s weird there.
We bring up the missing portrait, and Henry emos to us that it was of his parents. He thinks Renée took it down, just to be a dick.
With all that done, time to go into the cemetery!
It’s raining! It’s nighttime! We’re in a graveyard! ~*~*~SPOOKY~*~*~
By the way, the whole game is set at night. Another game Nancy Drew solves in like 6 hours! Also note her covered in shadow; the walk through the cemetery is done in third person.
So we can explore the ~*~spooky~*~ graveyard. Towards the end we’ll find the Bolet crypt, where Bolets past are buried. And what’s this?
The Bolet crypt has four blank squares on the columns and walls. Could they be related to that crow rubbing we found? They totally could. Nancy’s like, “But I don’t have any paper! Where could I possibly find some!” Yeah, because I’m sure Henry, a college student, doesn’t have any filler paper lying around. But it wouldn’t be a Nancy Drew game without an overly complex quest, so off we go to hunt for paper.
Let’s ask Renée. She tells us that she does have paper, but she can’t grab it for us until she’s done with her work. Nancy’s like, “No worries, I’m totally used to doing everyone’s chores for them.” Renée, God bless her, says we don’t need to do that: she just gives us the key to her room and tells us to grab the paper and bring her a snack. I LOVE YOU, RENÉE.
So up to Renée’s room we go. There’s another room on the second floor that serves no purpose except to have yet another glass eye in it. We’re up to 5 now, if you’re counting (which I’m trying to, but not that hard, so I’m probably gonna fuck it up somewhere down the line).
We go to Renée’s room, and grab the paper and a candy bar out of her dresser drawer. Then we turn around and see these freaky-ass symbols painted on the walls. Dude! What is wrong with the people in this house? Poking around, we also find that she has a mysteriously locked trunk, and a jar of hiccup powder on her desk. HMM.
We go back to Renée and ask what that symbol on the wall is, and she tells us that she put it there. She has a spirit living in the wall, and for a while it was always saying this word, so Renée wrote the word on the wall in hoodoo signs, and that shut the spirit up. Or something. Nancy wants to know what the word is, but Renée is all superstitious and says she’ll never say it out loud, ever.
Whatever, Renée. Nancy can read Mayan glyphs, stenography, and hobo code. Your feeble alphabet won’t stop her!
So now that we have the paper, we go back the crypt and use the coal we jacked from the fireplace to make rubbings. We get, going clockwise: a worm, a coffin, a crow, and bones. Then we go back to the house, and put them in order on the miniature of the crypt:
With the pictures in the right place, the roof pops open, and we get a key. Woo!
With that done, the next portion of the game will automatically trigger. Remember how Bess is in New Orleans, too? (I know, me either.) Well, for once, she doesn’t just have to sit around doing nothing while Nancy has adventures. We get to play as her for actually a good chunk of the game, although unlike Creature of Kapu Cave, you can’t choose to switch to her, it’ll just do it automatically. Her bits are pretty fun, and she’s not as incompetent as the Hardy Boys (although few people can be, to be fair). Nancy catches her up to speed, and tells her about finding the receipt from Zeke’s. Bess is like, “I’m standing across from a store called Zeke’s right now! What a coincidence!” Not if you’re in a Nancy Drew game, Bess.
Nancy tasks us-as-Bess to go into the shop and find out what the receipt is for. Bess starts freaking out that she can’t do it, and Nancy’s like, “Just go in and ask! It’s not hard!” Hee. I kind of love Nancy coaching Bess on how to snoop. It’s a little reminder than in the real world, it’s kind of weird to just waltz in and start nosing around. (And also kind of a cool reminder that Nancy is actually pretty gutsy and driven.)
So we go in and meet the proprietor. His name is not Zeke. There are no Zekes in this game. His name is Lamont, and he asks if we’re doing a little “day shopping.” It’s the middle of the night, dude. Anyway, Bess is like, “So I have this receipt, but I understand if it’s weird or if I’m not allowed to just ask about random receipt numbers –” “No problem. What’s the number?” Heh. It turns out that the receipt is for a box of assorted items from Henry Bolet. But Henry said he didn’t know what the receipt was! Never lie to Nancy Drew, Henry. Ned should’ve warned him.
Lamont refuses to say what was in the box, but does let it slip that it’s in the back room. So we’ll have to get in there soon. He doesn’t know Henry very well — they just met at the funeral, which Lamont went to…in hopes of hitting Henry up for some of Bruno’s stuff. Man, Lamont is cold. He tells us that Bruno has tons of crap in his house. Interesting.
And now, it’s time for a puzzle. We can’t switch back to Nancy until Bess figures out what’s in the box. In order to do that, you have to put all the objects on the shelves to create a wacky, Home Alone-esque chain reaction that will eventually knock over a bottle of sneezing powder and send Lamont into fits. I was going to explain it, but then I realized that it’s the most nonsensical chain reaction ever and there is no explanation for it. I will merely note that somehow, you manage to inflate the same balloon twice. What’s up with that?
So the powder makes Lamont sneeze, and he asks Bess to get him his allergy medication from the back room. The back room? Not a problem, Lamont!
Dig the cutscene graphics! These games have come so far.
So we leave Lamont to sneeze himself to death while we take our sweet time going through everything in the room. We see an old photo of Bruno and a dog, a photo of an iguana dressed like a pirate (which will be important later, amazingly enough), and a trunk that’s locked with a puzzle, because of course it is.
Oh, and that exact same freaky skeleton costume our villain was wearing! That’s pretty weird, right? But let’s just ignore it. We’ll come back to it later, I guess.
There are two pieces of paper on top of the box. One is a letter written in French, the other is a bunch of numbers. What you do is count off the numbers in the letter (1 is the very first letter, L, 3 is the third, E, and so on), which will give you the code for the trunk: “LEBEN UND TOD.” Which is German for “life and death”, by the way. I thought this game was supposed to be French? Also, don’t ask me what Hamlet has to do with any of this.
When we open the box, we find a letter from a “T.W. Caldwell,” telling Bruno that they’ve completed their transaction, but that he should ~*~beware~*~ the power of the skull, named the Whisperer. Gasp! Could this be the same skull that’s in the title of this game? It totally could.
Bess exposits that she needs to call Nancy, and off we go, switching back to Nancy’s POV. Bess tells her that the box was empty — there was just a depression in the lining, like there used to be a skull in there. Dun dun dun! She notes that Lamont was very reluctant to talk about Henry selling him Bruno’s stuff, and Nancy muses that Henry is Up To Something. We must investigate further!
But first, let’s call Ned. Henry is his friend, after all. We catch Ned up on the mystery, and Nancy’s like, “So how exactly are you friends with Henry? Do you secretly put on eyeliner and go to Warped Tour?” Ned says they aren’t really friends; he just felt bad for him when he found out there was a death in the family. So…he doesn’t know this guy at all, and he sent Nancy waltzing into his house? Frickin’ Ned.
That’s all we can talk to Ned about right now, so let’s finish our puzzle from earlier. When we put the pictures from the mausoleum onto the miniature, we got a key. What does that key open? The actual mausoleum, probably (hopefully). Back out in the cemetery we go!
As we get close to the mausoleum, we hear someone crying. It’s Henry! Aw, he must be feeling sad about his parents. Cheer up, emo kid! Nancy Drew is going to break into your parents’ crypt and make everything better!
Once Henry leaves, we use the key to get inside the mausoleum. We can see Henry’s parents’ graves: their names were Claude and Marianne (and they both died in 1990). In the corner, we see a rolled-up piece of paper, which turns out to be the missing portrait of his parents. And it was just hanging out here the entire time? Huh.
So, we go back to the house and replace the portrait of Henry’s parents. Let’s go tell him the good news, shall we?
For some reason, we can’t actually talk to Henry about the portrait. Uh, okay. Instead, Nancy tells him that we can’t get a cab on account of the big storm coming in. Henry’s really sarcastic about it, but then he’s like, “Don’t worry, you’re welcome to stay.” Do you want our company or not, Henry? You’re sending me so many mixed messages! I just want to date you and go to Atreyu concerts together!
We back up from Henry, and see an iguana on the bookshelf! The same iguana that was in Bruno’s photo? Let’s follow it! Sadly for us, iguanas are quite speedy, and it darts behind the bookshelf, knocking a bunch of books over in the process. Henry’s like, “You’ve been in this house for more than five minutes without doing manual labor? Clean the books up, plebe!” It’s one of those arranging-things-to-fit-in-the-box puzzles (I think last seen in Danger on Deception Island). Once we’re done, one of the book titles will catch Nancy’s eye: Crystal Skulls: Fact or Fable? By none other than Professor Hotchkiss, our friend from Treasure in the Royal Tower. Wait, so we went through all that effort to help her find Marie Antoinette’s lost diary, and she doesn’t even study her anymore? I feel betrayed. Anyway, inside the book we find Hotchkiss’s number, as well as a paper with a bunch of letters that we’ll need in a moment. The book itself blah blahs about the history of the skulls, and the gist of it is that the skull Bruno has, the Whisperer, supposedly makes its owner immune to illness, which everyone interprets as immortality. Except not really, because all its owners have been brutally murdered. Rough luck!
With this new knowledge, let’s go very sensitively ask Henry how his uncle died. Henry tells us that he had a heart attack, and shows us the medical report. It’s signed off by a Dr. Gilbert Buford, who Henry tells us was Bruno’s doctor and best friend. You’ll recall that Dr. Buford is set to get 30% of Bruno’s money. HMMM. We also note the glass eye on Henry’s keychain; he tells us that it was the one Bruno was wearing when he died. ICK. I guess that fact would pick up a few girls at Marilyn Manson concerts.
Let’s call Professor Hotchkiss. After all, we need information, and we’re practically best friends after what happened at Wickford Castle, right?
“Oh, yes, you were the delightful young lady doling out the samples in the tasting room of the cheese factory!”
Sigh. Nancy Drew gets no respect, man. Anyway, she tells us that Bruno Bolet did indeed contact her about the Whisperer, wanting to know if she knew anything more about it. Professor Hotchkiss says she doesn’t know where the Whisperer would be now, but notes that it would be worth quite a bit of money, if it were real. The skull is (as the title of the game implies) entirely made of crystal. A fake would have microscopic markings from being carved by modern tools, but they would have to be checked out in a lab, as a human eye can’t see them. Interesting stuff. Nancy tells her that all of the skull’s previous owners have been murdered, but Bruno died of a heart attack. Professor Hotchkiss ominouses that if Bruno did have the Whisperer, then there was no way that was just a heart attack. Dun dun dun!
Next up, we call Dr. Buford. His assistant tells us Dr. Buford isn’t in, but he’s hanging out at a gumbo place at “Rampart and Dumaine.” Conveniently, that’s exactly where Nancy’s hotel is! We’ll have to get Bess to talk to him later.
Finally, let’s finish up part one with — what else? — a secret passage. We take the piece of paper with the random letters on it from the crystal skull book, and note that each letter corresponds to an object in the Bolet family portraits. We have to rearrange the portraits in order of the letters — so, the first letter on the paper is T, therefore the first portrait is the one of a guy holding a toothbrush. The last letter is U, and the portrait of Henry’s parents has them holding an umbrella. With all the portraits in order, a secret passage opens up. Woo! What would this game be without a secret passage?
Up next: We go through the secret passage. We have to endure the inappropriate attentions of a pervy old dude in order to get information, which is probably the most realistic thing that’s ever come up in these games.
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