Those fucking monkeys.
For a really long time, I considered Creature of Kapu Cave to be the worst Nancy Drew game. Then I realized that I had just been repressing my memory of playing this game. It’s so bad. It’s so bad that when I realized I didn’t actually do a proper screencap-taking playthrough of this game, I screamed in horror, considered just screencapping some video walkthroughs, and then took six months to play through it again. I was kind of enjoying myself by the end, but it’s possible I had developed a form of video-game Stockholm Syndrome and was just trying to muster up enjoyment to prove I wasn’t entirely dead inside.
Okay, deep breath. Let’s do this thing: Bess has won a five-day trip to the Bahamas, at a remote island resort. Nancy is arriving a day late, as usual, because she and Carson have to go to a “father-daughter banquet.” What the fuck is that?
We’re staying on some place called “Dread Isle,” and Nancy’s like, “What a fun and not at all ominous sounding name!” The island is only accessible by floatplane, so if any sort of crime should happen (perish the thought!), we’re pretty much on our own. I mean, as usual.
The pilot blah blahs about how the island is super isolated and he hasn’t had any passengers in weeks. Wait, so when the hell did Bess and George get there? We touch down on Dread Isle, and George runs out, yelling at the plane not to leave. The pilot’s like, “Peace out, suckers!” and flies off. George wails that we need help. Uh, I’m kind of offended? George should know that whatever’s going on, Nancy Drew can solve it single-handedly.
Anyway, we have our mystery: Bess has been kidnapped! OH SNAP! George tells us that Bess went to the beach last night to watch the sunset, and she never came back. George shows us a note from the owners of the island and resort, the Gibsons, saying that they’ve gone deep-sea fishing and won’t be back until tomorrow. In the meantime, though, they insist that George, Bess, and Nancy won’t want to miss watching the sunset on the beach. Suspicious! George notes that the Gibsons weren’t there to meet them and they haven’t come back either. Even more suspicious!
George also has a note from the kidnappers, addressed directly to Nancy. The kidnapper(s) want her to find the treasure of “El Toro” for them, in exchange for Bess. You know, if I were Bess, I would really rethink my friendship with Nancy Drew. It never ends well for her.
The ransom note has a puzzle to solve on it, but first, let’s ask George if she knows anything that can help. George hasn’t seen anyone else on the island, and she hasn’t gone out since she found the ransom note. Fair enough. She’s trying to get the phone to work so they can call for help, but we know that’s not going to happen until we solve the mystery, so whatever. Nancy says she’ll go down to the beach to look for clues. George tells us that Bess took the only working golf cart, so we’ll need to fix the other one to get anywhere. And that’s our first task!
Every time we pass by George, she’s making faces like this. That’s not how you fix a phone, George.
We find a closet, which Nancy notes has a rather complex lock on it. “Probably to keep out nosy guests,” George says. “Oh. No offense.” HEE!
When we get the door open, we find scuba gear, some walkie-talkies, and a map. Nancy helpfully tells us that she’s up-to-date on her diving certification, just in case we need to go scuba diving in this game. I bet we do. Hm, and what’s up with the map? The closet is kind of a weird place to put one. “That’s weird,” Nancy says. “I’ve solved a case in every spot that’s marked on this map.” Uh-oh! Is something sinister going on here? Nancy and George wonder if the Gibsons have been “keeping tabs on” (read: stalking) Nancy, but then George is like, “Whatever, it’s probably just coincidence.” For fuck’s sake, George. Do you even go here?
Right now, we only need the walkie-talkies; so now we have a way to communicate with George. She’s our only phone contact in this game, obviously. If we call her, the game will switch POVs. George can’t do shit, though, so we’ll only play as her when we have to.
The lobby of the hotel has a bunch of stuff we can look at, that will help us in our ~mystery. There’s an exhibit about bats, and we find a sonar device to help us find bats. We can put it together now, but it’s still missing a battery. Blah blah information about monkeys, and notes from Sonny Joon (who else?) on some games we can play with them. Another thing we’ll be doing later.
Over here in the corner, we meet the second character we can talk to: a bird named Coucou. Oh, man. This was not cute when they did it in Curse of Blackmoor Manor, and it’s not cute now. Nancy’s like, “Golly, this is exactly like what happened in an earlier game,” and Coucou mentions that Loulou is her grandmother. I do not care at all. Coucou squawks that she wants fruit, so if we want any hints in this game, we have to collect fruit and then let a parrot talk to us. It’s so incredibly stupid, let’s move on before I think about it too much.
Let’s pull up our to-do list and see what our next steps should be. Nancy’s like, “The kidnappers want me to solve the mystery of El Toro, but I’d rather find Bess. I can multitask!” Heh. Oh, Nancy. Bess was supposedly at Sangre Beach (“Blood Beach”, not at all ominous!) to watch the sunset, so our next move is to go there and see if there are any clues.
We have to fix up a golf cart so we can drive down to the beach, and the toolshed is locked (naturally), so let’s go see if George has the key.
Our first conversation option with George is to bring up that this whole thing — the contest, Bess winning, the Gibsons — seems like it was a trap to lure Nancy to the island. It looks like the kidnappers want Nancy to find El Toro’s treasure for them, so it must be either someone who knows Nancy is the best girl detective, or someone who doesn’t like her very much. Or both! It doesn’t seem like a coincidence at all, George. Nancy and George wonder who the culprit could be: “Well, let’s see, if we take the number of crooks you’ve busted in the course of solving a mystery, factor in their friends, relatives, and co-conspirators, and add that to all the people out there who don’t much like anyone, we’re down to what? Like a thousand people?” Hee.
George has the key to the shed, and she hands it over. She doesn’t have a battery for our bat sonar, though, so we’ll have to find that elsewhere.
We get the toolshed open, and in here is pretty much everything we need to explore the island. The golf cart runs on water (“It’s car that runs on water, man!”), and there’s a puzzle about how much water to dispense into each of its batteries.
It’s a math puzzle, and I hate math. Basically, pushing the button dispenses 60 mL of water, and we want each battery to have 100 mL. They all start at different levels (although conveniently all divisible by 5), so the goal is to open and close the tubes so that each 60 mL is distributed properly, to bring them all to 100.
We also find the sails for the boat, in case we need to go sailing, which we totally do. The flags on top correspond to numbers in the international signaling code, so we just put in the numbers that they represent and get our sails.
There’s also a shovel in the shed that I should have grabbed at this point, but I didn’t. We’ll pretend I did, though.
And off we go! The driving controls are basically the same as in Secret of the Old Clock and White Wolf of Icicle Creek. It’s super easy to go off-road and whack the cart into things, but you don’t sustain any damage for it, so whatever.
So this is Sangre Beach, so named because of the pink sand. The graphics in these games have come far enough that the water is animated. It’s a little uncanny valley, mostly because it’s not quite good enough to not make the water look like jello, but pretty good for these games!
Note the other ship on the beach. Could someone else be on this island? Dun dun dun!
We go a little further down the trailer, and see a lone flip-flop in the sand. Could it be Bess’s? We lumber forward to get a closer look, then Nancy trips into something and gets pulled off the ground.
WHAT THE HELL, MAN.
So we fell into a hunting trap set by this guy, Johnny Rolle. Going by his accent, he’s from whatever part of Jamaica Kendra is. He insists that he hasn’t seen anyone, Bess or otherwise. Nancy’s like, “But that was her shoe, and her golf cart is parked outside, so…clearly she was here, and you’re here…” Johnny’s like, “IDK what to tell you, man.” He’s just here to fish, and says that he travels around from island to island, camping and fishing. He’s stuck here, though, as the island’s populations of monkeys got into his boat and broke the motor. Jesus, is he gonna make us fix his motor? Nope, he doesn’t need our help — and besides, there are other people on the island. Say what? Johnny says he’s only seen them from a distance, “moving through the trees.” So…Bess was kidnapped by the Others?
Johnny wants us to leave now, but we have one last request: does he have a battery for us? He says he does, but of course we have to do something for him first. He does want us to help fix his boat after all — the boat’s beacon should still be chilling in the ocean, so he wants us to sail out and find it for him. Oh, sure. It’s just somewhere in the ocean, how hard could it be to find?
Before we help Johnny out, though, let’s see what the kidnappers want us to do about this El Toro treasure thing. The instructions they gave us tell us to start at one of the palm trees. The path to the end point is calculated by looking at the number of leaves/coconuts/rocks in front of us, then multiplying that by the numbers in the instructions, and taking that amount of steps away from the landmark. God, there’s a lot of fucking math in this game. Maybe that’s why I hate it so much.
Anyway, when we complete the puzzle, we dig at the indicated spot and find El Toro’s journal. Okay, if the kidnappers knew it was there, why didn’t they just dig it up themselves?
So the next bit of the puzzle is to actually decode the journal. Conveniently, it’s written in English (although they attempt to explain that, with El Toro writing that he doesn’t want the rest of his crew to know where he’s buried the treasure), and each symbol corresponds with a letter. By the way, you don’t know how hard it is for me to not call him “Del Toro” every time I write his name.
There are several pages of the diary to go through. They tried to make it not so easy and changed which symbols correspond to which letters, which…makes it kind of pointless as a code, right?
Nancy can’t figure out the next few pages, so we’ll have to put that aside for later. One of the notes we can decipher says that El Toro buried an iron chest in the ocean, a bit off the island. We can go diving for it, but we don’t have a metal detector.
Hey, Johnny, wanna lend us your metal detector without making us go on any missions for you? No, of course not. He refuses, so Nancy just plants herself there and says she’ll bug him until he gives in. Heh. It’s a pity that this game is so crappy overall, because I love when the series references its internal continuity (meta jokes about Nancy’s lack of boundaries, Bess and George acting like real friends and not just hint-givers, mentions of past suspects) and the entire plot of this game is meant to be built around that, but it’s just…not done very well. Finally, Johnny breaks down and says he’ll lend us the metal detector if we get his compass back from one of the monkeys who ruined his boat. I like the implication that we’ll somehow be able to pick out that specific monkey.
In total fairness, Johnny does tell us that we’re looking for a monkey with a notch in its ear. Back at the hotel, Sonny Joon’s notes tells us that there’s a notched-eared monkey at the island’s Monkey Center, which plays the coconut throw game. Somehow, on a nearly-uninhabited island, half the monkey population is in captivity. I don’t know.
A lot of people mention that the coconut throw game is hard, but I found it to be the easiest one of all the mini-games. (Fuck the rock climbing bit, man. That’s where I quit and never looked back.)
So you have a limited number of coconuts to throw at the boards, with certain boards being worth more points than the others, and a set amount of time to throw them. The AI is a cheating bastard, and the monkey always throws way faster than Nancy (and frankly, seems to have more coconuts). You can see which boards are which before they pop up, though, so my method was just to watch the high-points boards (the crab and guava) and throw only at those, instead of wasting coconuts on lizards. If you throw the coconut right as the board starts going up, it’ll always land.
So we get Johnny’s compass back, and there’s another game that we don’t have to play now, but we might as well get it out of the way. This game involves coloring in a larger area of a puzzle before the monkey does, and if you win, you get the rainbow dial. We’ll need that way later.
We go back to the hotel to give George an update. You know, the animation has improved a lot, and she’s very expressive — when we tell her that we dug up El Toro’s journal, she leans forward and widens her eyes, asking if there’s any sign of Bess; she raises an eyebrow skeptically when we tell her about winning prizes from the monkeys. But the model design, my God. Her mouth! It’s so freaking flat! Girl has no upper lip, what is up with that.
We tell her about meeting Johnny; she and Nancy both agree that he’s pretty suspicious. George wonders if Johnny made up the mysterious other people on the island to divert attention from himself. Good point. Anyway, we update her on everything else we’ve been up to, and she muses that someone must have taught the monkeys to steal stuff. I mean…not really, but I guess that’s meant to be a hint.
We have to go sailing both to get Johnny’s beacon and El Toro’s chest, and sailing is a major pain in the ass, so I don’t want to do it twice. Ergo, let’s go back to Johnny and give him his compass and get the metal detector first, instead of going back when we have the beacon too. He tells us to give the metal detector back to him “tomorrow”, not that there’s any indication that time passes at all in this game. Cool beans. See ya, Johnny! “Do not hurry back.” Heh.
On our way down to the sailboat, we stop to talk to George. “You know who absolutely adores sailing?” she asks. “Bess. I mean, getting kidnapped is bad enough, but missing out on sailing in the Bahamas? Boy, is she gonna be ticked.” Sure, that’s the worst part of being kidnapped.
So we put the sails on the boat, and off we go!
Sailing.
Still sailing.
The sailing is super tedious, and all the water looks the same. Anyway, eventually we make it to the wreck of El Toro’s ship, and where he’s buried this chest.
The scuba diving is pretty cool. We swim past the giant shipwreck, and the metal detector starts going off. We find lots of crap, but eventually come across El Toro’s chest. We’ll probably have to do a puzzle to open it, but that shouldn’t be too hard, right? I mean, we’re underwater with a limited amount of air, right?
Wait, what the fuck is this. In order to get the chest open, we have to play sudoku, underwater, except there are no numbers, just colors. It’s really hard, for junior detective mode. The tiles with dots in the middle are the ones that already there, but you’ll notice that they aren’t set up in a way that makes it easy to guess where the starting colors are.
Please note how far down my air level is. And I was playing with cheats! Anyway, inside the chest, we get another rainbow dial, and an astrolabe.
Johnny’s beacon is chilling between these two rocks, so we swing by and grab that, too.
We go back to the hotel, and find an OMINOUS WARNING stuck to the post. Nancy’s like, “Whatever, I get this all the time.”
Back in the lobby, George says she heard people moving outside and she’s super freaked out now. She’s like, “We’re not the only people on this island and we all know it!” DUN DUN DUN!
Up next: We totally are the only people on this island. We have to bargain with a parrot.
Leave a Reply