Previously on Nancy Drew: The Haunting of Castle Malloy: It finally, finally occurred to the residents of Castle Malloy that Matt’s disappearance is not a joke. Kyler’s like, “You must solve this mystery, Nancy!” and then…unloaded some chores onto us. I bet Kyler is the culprit. She’s so invested in us not having any time to investigate this mystery. We found out about Kit’s massive unrequited crush on Kyler, which he didn’t really want to tell us about, but Nancy was like, “I’m Nancy Drew, and we’re on a limited timeframe to solve this mystery, so out with all your personal secrets, chop chop.” We also found a mysterious hut in a mysterious bog, which will obviously have lots of clues as to the mysterious history of the castle. I bet Matt, wherever he is, is pissed that Nancy’s fucking around with voodoo dolls and jetpacks instead of looking for him.
We found this doll chart in the hut, so we put the dolls in the dollhouse and get another token. Whatever, it’s boring. Moving on! We also got a doll chart from playing the dart game at the pub, but it’s showing that we need a sheep doll, which we don’t have. Maybe that’s the doll that’s being made back at the hut? Unfortunately, we can’t finish the doll without stuffing.
But first, we got that book about Ogham runes from Donal, so let’s get this bit with the “weird stones” out of the way. There are three stones on each pillar, showing an astrological sign, trees in various stages of life, and runes listing the seasonal festivals. So you turn each stone to match the season of the sign, the season of the tree, and the season of the festival. When that’s done, the ground opens up to give us a plate for the printing press. We’ve been collecting them over the course of the game, and I think this is the last one.
We go back to the pub to ask Donal if we can shear a sheep in our pursuit of justice. He’s like, “An excellent opportunity to rope you into doing more chores!” Since we’ll be shearing the sheep anyway, he wants us to go ahead and shear his quota for him as well. So we have to fill up three bags of wool for Donal.
The sheep-shearing machine is a bit of a puzzle; you have to read the value chart next to the keypad and figure out if the sheep is angry, happy, calm, etc. from its behavior. Then you have to add the values together (ugh, math) and enter it on the keypad to shear the sheep. Blah blah filling three bags blah, and then we steal a bit of wool from one of them for the sheep doll. To the bog!
Sheep doll completed! Away from the bog!
We have to go back to the castle to do the dollhouse puzzle. Since we’re here, let’s talk to Kit again. We tell him about Donal hiding Matt’s luggage, and that puts Kit back on the “practical joke” train: “Well, I guess that proves this really is all just one big inane practical joke. Matt ‘vanished’ thinking we’d find his luggage in the nursery.” I think I’m going to punch Kit. Anyway, he urges us to find Matt before we all go crazy wondering what happened to him. Well, you could put some effort in, Kit, instead of sitting around insisting this is just a prank. Then maybe this would go faster.
Okay, I lied, we actually find the last printing plate when we do the last doll chart (with the sheep doll). To the printing press!
We combine all the printing plates on the press — there’s writing in binary on the top of each plate, which spells out the color to use for each of them. Once that’s done, we get the instructions to turn on the jetpack that Nancy found in the hut.
Jetpack Nancy Drew. My hand to God.
So we follow all the instructions, and press “go”…
…aaaand I blow myself up. Okay, let’s try this again.
Let’s do this thing!
OH, COME ON.
I finally manage not to blow myself up, and now we can reach the tower with the aid of our jetpack. I SWEAR TO GOD.
I’m sorry. This is just so, so stupid. I can’t get over it. THE ENTIRE PLOT OF THIS GAME HINGES ON NANCY DREW FLYING AROUND WEARING A JETPACK.
Okay, if I think about this any more, my head’s going to pop off and fly around the room. Anyway, we finally discover what’s in the mysterious tower. It’s a bedroom, seemingly not abandoned. We find a ton of clues, but no Matt. Hmm, it looks like we aren’t quite to the end of the game yet. We see a family tree, and find a padlock that looks a bit like that “Le lapin bleu” book in the nursery. Entering “lapin” on the lock doesn’t open the desk it’s attached to, but it does shoot out another doll chart. Oh, you’re fucking kidding me.
I THOUGHT I WAS DONE WITH THESE. The good news is, this puzzle is optional, so if you think I’m doing it, you can think again!
We also find a list of books with a drawing of the padlock on top, so presumably these books will lead the actual combination to open it. The bottom of the list has a drawing of an island on it, and Nancy’s all, “We must find that island!” Oh, sure. Let’s take our prototype, rusting-since-WWII jetpack and fly over the Atlantic Ocean with it.
We find the island and land on it for a grand total of five seconds. The only thing there is to see is a rock with “N5” etched on it. I’m glad we came all this way for this.
Back at the castle, we find the books from the list in the library — four in total — and read all the instructions written inside them. With that done, we can strap our jetpack (sigh) back on and head back to the tower.
Way up above us, the banshee zips out of the window and goes shrieking off into the night. Now, we could just like…follow her to her hideout and see who the hell she is, but that would make sense. So instead, let’s just dig through all the stuff in the tower and see if we can find some more clues.
The instructions from the books will open the roll-top desk, but they’re very convoluted and bullshit, so I’ll just tell you that the combination is CQXLN. Once the desk opens, we find that the desk belongs to Caitlin Malloy, Brendan’s wife and Fiona’s mom. It’s all eerily untouched since her death, except for a freaky voodoo doll of Nancy. Dun dun dun! Although nicely, the banshee has attached the car key to the doll. Thanks, banshee! I was worried we wouldn’t be able to get our deposit back.
We also find Caitlin’s diary, where she waxes on about the happy days they were having before Brendan blew them all up. We find out that Fiona had her own jetpack, which is a super responsible thing to give to a little girl. We also find out that everyone thought Brendan was working on a fuel project for the war effort, but he wasn’t. Nice going, Brendan. Did you want the Nazis to win? Instead, he was doing something mysteriously mysterious in his secret laboratory.
We find the last key that we need, for the chest in the hut, in the desk as well. Off to the bog! The end of the game starts here, so if for some reason you want to torture yourself by playing Difference Detective one more time, you should do so now.
In the hut, we open the mysterious box full of secrets and find…a birthday card. For Fiona’s 6th birthday, to be exact. It’s kind of lame, since we pretty much already figured out Fiona is the banshee from the desk, so this reveal doesn’t have much punch. But okay, whatever, so let’s back up from the table and meet her.
So Fiona’s been living by herself for these past seventy years or whatever, zipping around the grounds of Castle Malloy and having absolutely zero human contact since the age of six. She’s our culprit, inasmuch as this game has a culprit. It’s one of those games where the real culprit is the friends we made along the way, and everything is just sort of a storm of coincidence and backstory. Eh. The character drama in this game makes up for most of its faults, but I like a nice standard villain myself. Would it bug me so much if I wasn’t already fatigued from the jetpack stupidity? Probably not. Those two things are pretty much the only strikes against this game, but they’re rather medium-to-large strikes.
Anyway, let’s try to reason with the feral old woman, shall we? Nancy monologues at her that this hut must be her home, and we’re sorry for intruding (like Nancy Drew has ever been sorry for intruding), but we’re looking for this dude named Matt, if she’s seen him.
Fiona is pretty much incapable of human speech, so she just hisses at us and then throws Nancy down a pit. Dang, Fiona, we’re just trying to help.
We follow a tunnel along until we come to this room. Nancy’s like, “A secret lab! Let’s touch everything in it!” We find a big old lever and Nancy reaches out to pull it. We hear a man’s voice say, “No, don’t touch that!” but it’s too late! Nancy Drew does what she wants, suckas!
Aaand we’ve found Matt, and ended up trapping him behind a big metal door. Nice. Matt tells us that he’s been stuck down here for days, only seeing the outside when Fiona comes to feed him. He’s been living off of carrots and potatoes (“Dibs on the potatoes”) this whole time. Nancy’s like, “Wow, so your disappearance wasn’t a prank. Kit and Kyler are gonna feel like dicks.” Matt sheepishly admits that it started as a prank — he was going to hide in the nursery secret passage and make noises to scare Kyler, but then he was jumped by that crow (Nancy’s like, “#relatable”) and lost his glasses and fell down a pit. He eventually made his way to this lab, but this being a secret laboratory working on rocket fuel, it was designed to go into lockdown at the slightest hint of danger, so he’s well and truly trapped down here. At least he and Nancy won’t die alone!
Matt tells us that he’s been yelling for Fiona, trying to summon her to let him out, and even gave her his ring as a kind of bargain (which is how it got onto that doll). So that explains that. We try to catch him up to speed: we tell him that Kit thought Matt might’ve left Kyler at the altar, and Matt’s like, “Yeah, he wishes.” Indeed, that’s the reason Matt didn’t ask him to be his best man — he hopes he and Kit will always be besties, but he knows Kit’s still all in love with Kyler, for some reason. After spending this entire game with Kyler, I’m at a loss as to how she got not one but two guys in love with her. Matt wails that he’s ruined the wedding with his eagerness to play a prank — Kyler will be so disappointed in him! “I love her so much, and I’m so lucky, a mongrel like me landing someone as smart and beautiful as her.” Let’s not exaggerate, Matt. Who even calls themselves a mongrel anymore? Did Matt have to go begging, cap in hand, on the streets of Victorian London or something?
We tell him Donal thinks the fairies have taken him, and Matt has a chuckle over how he and Kit tried to prank Donal. They were messing with the leprechauns in the garden, trying to make Donal think they were alive, “only a branch snapped off and whacked Kit in the eye and that was that.” So that’s how he got the black eye? It’s unclear if that’s what this is supposed to mean. Kit was awfully shifty about it, if that was the case.
All of our explanations are out of the way, so now we can wander around the lab and try to find a way out of here.
We find a big ol’ rocket, just hanging around. Well, presumably setting it off would create a big enough explosion to bust us out of here. In any other circumstance, I’d say lighting up a bunch of untested fuel for a 50-year-old untested rocket is the worst idea ever, but this time I think it’s justified by us being trapped underground by a feral old woman.
So we run around gathering pieces for the rocket and reading Brendan Malloy’s notes about how to activate it. We find a big red button that says, “In case of lockdown, press to open,” and Matt is like, “You’re shitting me.” I guess he really does need those glasses.
So we press the button, and the underground lab immediately opens up, freeing us and Matt and solving the mystery. Ha, of course not. No, apparently when Brendan Malloy said “press to open”, he really meant “press to activate a puzzle that will eventually lead to opening if you don’t blow yourself up first.” Has anyone considered that Brendan Malloy maybe would not have exploded himself and his entire family if he hadn’t kept around so many flammable devices, and his emergency exit wasn’t a puzzle with more flammable devices? Just a thought.
So this puzzle is not hugely difficult to figure out; we had to crack a code on the period table earlier to figure out which chemicals can be stored together. All the category 1 chemicals go in the appropriate box, and so on. We can open that claw thing to various sizes to grab them and move them to the box, but if they touch each other, or the claw isn’t just the right size to grab them, they’ll explode.
Like so.
Also like this.
And like this.
Third Fourth time is the charm, right?
No, it’s not.
Oh my God, let me just burn myself up in peace.
When all the chemicals are finally put away, we get a key. From here, we just have to run around collecting various objects and putting things back together to fix the rocket.
We have to fit a bunch of shapes together to fix the stairs, so we can climb up and get the nose of the rocket, which is lying on some shelf.
We then need to put the fin on the rocket, and fix the wiring. There are three types fins, but only one will work properly (the one in the middle bucket, with the white dot on red). The wiring is tangled, so we have to read Brendan’s work long to figure out which ends connect where. It’s all fairly easy.
The final step is prepping for launch at the control panel. We put the key from the chemical puzzle into the panel, adjust the angle to 90.1 (Brendan’s blueprints have the number), and then flip the switches to launch the rocket.
Full disclosure: I blew it up twice before successful liftoff. Dammit Jim, I’m a broke liberal arts graduate, not an engineer.
The lab opens up and frees Matt from behind the door.
The rocket cockblocks Kit, who was all trying to make a move on Kyler in the midst of her grief.
And Donal’s so wasted on juice he doesn’t even see the rocket launch behind him. Bless.
Kyler runs over to look into the underground lab, and declares her love for Matt. Denied, Kit!
Jesus, Kyler, trim those nails.
Kyler and Matt get married as planned, and everyone rejoices. Nancy thinks that Matt’s disappearance has suddenly made them both mature enough to get married, or something. Kit hooks up with some chick who’s catering the reception, who, given the amount of Photoshop, might just be a figment of his imagination:
What’s up with his jaw in that photo, anyway? Well, whatever. So Kyler and Matt are happy, Kit’s happy…
Nancy tells us that after the explosion, Fiona was taken in by the hermit who lived in the bog (because…there was no one else in the entire castle to call child services?), and raised in total isolation. But now she’s recovering in a nursing home, and all looks well for her. Trauma? What’s that?
The jetpacks have been confiscated by the military, although they’re having a hard time figuring out the fuel system. The…fuel system that was busted by an 18-year-old amateur detective in less than 24 hours? Whatever. As we all know, Nancy Drew is better than you, at everything. And I think that’s a good moral as any to end on.
Next up: Ransom of the Seven Ships, which is either the worst Nancy Drew game or the 2nd worst Nancy Drew game, depending on how you rank The Shattered Medallion. So we have that to look forward to!
THE END.
Leave a Reply