Nancy Drew: Legend of the Crystal Skull (Part Three)

Previously on Nancy Drew: Legend of the Crystal Skull: We started investigating said legend, mostly by running around finding all of Bruno’s glass eyes. We also aggravated a local shop owner, and…wait, no, that’s it. The entire middle part of this game is finding all those stupid eyes. Just leave me here to die.

So our last clue was a tiny pirate hat, that we’re going to use to dress up Bruno’s pet iguana. Why? Because Nancy Drew says so, that’s why.

So when we last tried to see Iggy, he wouldn’t come out of his vent. We have to lure him out with a loquat, which grow on this one tree in the garden that is surrounded by wasps. There’s a similar mini-game in The Phantom of Venice — basically you have to spray all the wasps, but the Bolets have the worst bug spray in history, because they don’t die. They’ll get back up eventually, so the idea is to spray them all quickly enough that you get them all down at once.

So now we can lure Iggy out of the vents with a loquat. It’s a little weird, because…I don’t think there’s any point where we actually learn that Iggy can be lured out with loquats and that we have to dress him up. You just have to figure it out yourself. Anyway, once he comes out, we can dress him up. The first outfit we need to put on him is a pirate outfit:

When we do that, he’ll run off and bring us back a box:

Spooky! However, the box is locked (of course it is). The clue on the top of the box tells us that we need to know the name that opens the Jolly Roger Society meetings. Well, we’re physically incapable of leaving this house, so it’s back to Bess we go!

Note that Zeke’s is closed and Dr. Buford has also left his post. I wonder what time it’s supposed to be. Nancy asks Bess to infiltrate the Jolly Roger meeting; Bess says, “No — which of course, actually means ‘yes’, because if I don’t do this, I’ll be stuck here by myself until you give up, and since we both know you will never give up?” Hee. Bess points out that Zeke’s is closed, so she can’t just walk in and grab the skeleton man costume. Nancy’s like, “Whatever, just break in. I do it all the time.”

The back entrance to Zeke’s is locked with a keypad, but Bess (being the girly one of the trio) is carrying around a compact, so she can use that to dust the keypad for fingerprints, and see which numbers are in the combo. We did the same thing in Treasure in the Royal Tower, by the way.

Armed with the skeleton costume, we hop on over to where the Jolly Rogers are having their meeting. Kind of neatly, after we leave Zeke’s, we take a couple of steps down the alley, which is the only time in the game we actually get to street-level walk around New Orleans. That was really a missed opportunity for this game. Anyway, the next door over is where the Jolly Roger meeting is. The password, Nancy has learned from Bruno’s planner, is “scuttled bones.” And in Bess goes!

We sneak into the meeting, which opens with all the Jolly Rogers chanting “Jean Lafitte.” So that’s the name we need to give Nancy. The head Juggalo begins to lay out their agenda, but they’re interrupted by Bess’s cell phone going off. She doesn’t have it on vibrate? Was she raised by wolves? The Jolly Rogers jump her and unmask her, but Bess also knows who she’s talking to: she recognizes the Skeleton Man’s voice, and reveals him to be Dr. Buford. Shouldn’t have spent so much time perving on a teenage girl, dude!

Bess accuses Dr. Buford of being the guy we saw in the foyer, way back in the beginning of the game. Dr. Buford agrees to tell her everything. Not that we get to see that.

Instead, we cut back to Nancy, where Bess gives her all the gory details. As he was dying, Bruno told Dr. Buford to put the portrait of Henry’s parents in their crypt. He seemed to think that would kick off Henry finding all the various clues and leading him to the crystal skull. Sadly, Henry is not a super sleuth, he is just emo. Anyway, that was the first time Dr. Buford was in the house (when Renée claimed to have seen “Mr. Death”). Then he decided he wanted the skull for himself, and came back today (when Nancy saw him). He told Bess that he’s embarrassed to let superstition get the best of him, and he doesn’t want it anymore. Then Bess is like, “Also, I kind of told him you were about to find it anyway.” Nancy’s like, “Jesus Christ, Bess.” Bess panics that she didn’t see Dr. Buford go back to the Jolly Roger meeting, so he might have lied to her, and he could be on his way to the house to beat up Nancy. She feels really bad, but Nancy’s like, “People try to kill me all the time, it’s whatevs.”

A huge clap of thunder sounds outside, because we’re getting to the end of the game, and it’s ~*~SPOOKY~*~!!!

So all that drama of Bess sneaking into the meeting was to get the code to unlock this box (“Jean Lafitte”), and when we do, we get…another eye (24/25). All this trouble for a scavenger hunt. I can see why someone might’ve wanted to kill Bruno at this point.

We have to put Iggy in two more outfits to finish the game, ergo we must lure him out with two more loquats. The next outfit he has to wear is an optometrist getup, which will cause him to run back and give us yet another glass eye. 25/25! We did it, guys! USA! USA!

Before we go solve the puzzle with the eyes, we have one more outfit for Iggy (and we have to give him one more loquat). This time, we dress him up like a mailman. He runs into the vents and retrieves a letter for us. Gasp! Could this be the letter Bruno was reading when he died?

The letter, from Chas Milo, says that the skull is a fake. Aw 🙁 Interestingly, though, he mentions that Bruno and Renée brought the skull in together — even though Renée told us she had never heard of it before. QUÉ MISTERIOSO.

All the eyeballs are automatically placed into their holders when we check on it. Bruno’s book of clues will tell us how to arrange them — there are directional words hidden in the story, and the numbers at the bottom of the page tell which eyes the words refer to. When that’s done, a hidden compartment pops out and we find…

YET ANOTHER EYEBALL. You’re shitting me. This one is much larger, and so clearly much more important. It also shows us a drawing, telling us to combine the eyeball with the skeleton shovel arm, and a lightning rod that I found earlier but didn’t mention. It’s out in the garden; you have to go past the fireflies and climb past a wall, blah blah blah. There’s no puzzle involved, you just pick it up when you find it.

Let’s confront Renée about her lies, shall we? She tells us that she lied because Bruno had sworn her to secrecy, and also she wanted to find it for herself. It was her idea to get the skull authenticated, but she certainly didn’t expect the shock to kill him. OR DID SHE? Nevertheless, she feels foolish for believing in the skull, and thanks us (and Iggy) for setting her straight. K.

Back in the house, we get a call from Ned. Ned! We are almost at the end of our mystery here! We don’t have time for you! We update him on our progress, and tell him that Bess has been helping us. “I thought you said Bess was a disaster when it came to detective stuff,” Ned says. Hee! Nancy Drew is cold. We tell him that Bess hasn’t entirely fucked the case up for us, so that’s good enough! Then we tell him about Bruno and Iggy the Iguana, and Ned remarks, “Poor Henry. If weirdness is genetic, he doesn’t stand a chance.” Ned and Nancy are rude as hell in this game. I love it. Anyway, we tell him about the skull and the letter, and Nancy muses that the shock of finding out the skull was fake probably killed Bruno. Nevertheless, we’re still suspicious of Renée, since she lied about the skull to us in the first place. Nancy says she plans to call the authenticator, just to be sure. And that’s what we do. Chas the Skull Tester tells us what he told Bruno: the skull is real. Wait, what? That’s not what our letter said.

“Then the letter he got must not’ve been the letter that I wrote.” DUN DUN DUN!

We call Ned back and tell him the news, but Nancy doesn’t want to tell anyone else, as that would show her hand. What? Nancy, you love running up to our suspects and telling them everything you know about a case. What’s gotten into you?

Thus, the end of the game begins. We go to Bruno’s grave, and stick the lightning rod in the hole in the ground. Then we add the skeleton arm on top, and put the glass eye in its hand.

I HAVE THE POWER!!!

Lightning strikes the hand and travels through the lightning rod, opening up the crypt. What happens if you try to do this when it’s not raining? It’s unclear.

The platform we’re standing on lowers into the ground, and we see the crystal skull in front of us. We reach out to grab it, and the lid starts to close. Uh oh, we’re gonna die in here.

Luckily, Renée comes by and sees us down there. Nancy asks her to help us out, and Renée tells us to give her “what [we’re] holding” so our hands will be free.

I DON’T THINK SO, RENÉE.

Nancy falls for this, and throws her the crystal skull. It’d be pretty funny if it broke, but it doesn’t. Instead, Renée grabs it, and starts cackling about how “after all that scheming…a nice little Yankee gal just hands it to me.”

Dammit, Nancy. You’ve really gotta stop doing this.

So Renée leaves us to die underground. Luckily for us, Bruno’s crypt, like all good crypts, has an escape mechanism. Basically you just have to click all the matching squares, with the trick being that you can only see the puzzle when lightning flashes. We get it done, and when we escape, we can follow Renée’s footprints to see her trying to escape.

Renée’s trying to escape via boat, and she crazies about how she deserves the skull, because she’s the only one that can fulfill its destiny. She wants to collect all the other skulls, and they’ll start talking to teach other and solve the mysteries of the universe. Uh, okay. Maybe Renée should stop hitting whatever herbs she keeps in that bag of hers.

As she blathers on, we see Bernie the alligator pop up. You’ll recall that Renée told us that whenever the log is shaken, he leaps out of the water to get food.

So we hop on the log, and Bernie jumps. He shakes the boat, causing Renée to lose her grip on the skull. Bernie eats it.

And that’s the end of the game! Renée is arrested. Dr. Buford apologizes to Nancy for throwing the smoke bomb at her, and takes her and Bess on a tour of New Orleans to make up for it. Nancy dorks out about how “truly special” it was to see the city through the eyes of one of the locals. I think Dr. Buford was just trying to get into one or both of their pants, but whatever.

Henry, meanwhile, is 500% more emo over the fact that Bruno loved him after all. He now spends his days hanging around cemeteries, taking pictures for his eventual album cover.

Lamont close down Zeke’s and goes hunting for Bernie and the skull. He probably gets eaten by another alligator, but that’s up to you.

Interestingly, it looks like you could actually solve the mystery without ever calling the authenticator guy. If you figured out the lightning rod puzzle, you could’ve just done it, and never figured out that the letter was fake. But then, of course, you’d be missing a huge chunk of it.

THE END.