Previously on Nancy Drew: Ransom of the Seven Ships: Bess won some Internet contest to go on a trip to the Bahamas, and invited Nancy and George to come along with her. If I were George I’d be like, “Oh sure, now you guys want to hang out with me,” especially as Bess disappears their first night there. The culprit wants Nancy to find the treasure of some dude named El Toro in exchange for Bess, and seems to have been stalking Nancy for a while, too. It’s all quite creepy and rather meta, yet sadly uses none of this to any kind of effectiveness. Anyway, our lone suspect keeps dropping hints that there are ~Others~ on the island, and now George is hearing them too. Spooky!
So George is all freaked out about these potential Others, but Nancy’s like, “Whatever, just ignore it and keep working on the phone,” and George is like, “You’re right! I’m acting LIKE AN IDIOT!” She says it really aggressively. Don’t be so hard on yourself, George. We can’t all be completely immune to fear like Nancy Drew.
We also tell George about tripping over all these different dials. Nancy’s like, “Man, I don’t even know what they’re for.” “But despite their cumbersomeness, you feel strangely compelled to collect them,” George deadpans. “You know, if this detective stuff doesn’t pan out, there may just be a career for you in trash collection.” HA!
Johnny Rolle wanted us to find the beacon for his boat, which we did even though it was all the way out in the middle of the ocean. The things we do for our random-ass suspects. In exchange for the beacon, he gives us a battery we need for our bat sonar.
The astrolabe that we found in the chest will help us decode the rest of El Toro’s journal. We find out that at some point, we’ll need to put the astrolabe on top of a pole of a certain height, and that will point us to where El Toro wants us to go next. Nancy realizes that the pole is the same height as Coucou’s perch.
So first, Coucou won’t even talk to us about her perch until we give her a piece a fruit. Then of course she won’t just fork it over, even though there’s another perch like right behind her. Then she won’t tell us that she wants a driftwood perch until we give her another piece of fruit. Why don’t we just kill her? Just throwing that out there.
The driftwood can be found pretty much anywhere on the beaches. So we drive aaaaall the way to the beach at Shark Cove, grab a driftwood, and drive aaaall the way back.
Coucou doesn’t like the wood we found, so we have to go back and get another. Seriously, we don’t need Coucou to solve the mystery. And we’re gonna run out of food soon.
It’s mostly a game of guesswork; Coucou will tell you what’s wrong with each driftwood she rejects, until you realize she wants one with three branches, covered in bark, and two leaves. So with that done, we get the metal rod.
As we back away from Coucou’s perch, we find these VERY INTERESTING newspapers. “These headlines are about cases that I helped solve,” Nancy notes. (Left to right: Phantom of Venice, White Wolf of Icicle Creek, Danger by Design.) Oh snap! Something weird is going on!
So the other part of El Toro’s journal that we decoded mentioned a particular type of bat, with large ears and a diet of insects. The bat display in the hotel tells us that those are called Waterhouse’s Leaf Nosed bats, and they have a frequency of 16 KmHz. So what we do now is go to Bat Steep, which is a bunch of rocks that we have to climb.
This part? This is the part of the game that made me give up. Basically, you control Nancy’s climbing with the arrow keys, but she doesn’t move as soon as you press the key. Instead, she scrambles in place for a second before moving, giving the monkeys ample time to whack her on the head with rocks. If you pop into one of the caves, it’ll refill your health, but frankly the monkeys drop rocks way faster than it takes for us to get to a cave.
Fuck these monkeys, man.
We use the bat seeker thingy to read the frequencies of the bats in each cave, looking for the one that’s 16 KmHz. When we find that one, it’s time to go exploring!
Let’s just press this button, shall we?
“Well, that was kinda dumb,” Nancy says. Hee.
Clicking on the beam of light coming through the rock will start a puzzle, where we have to reflect the light off of some mirrors to direct to the end of the cave. The same puzzle appears in The Secret of the Old Clock. Also, I like how there are a bunch of random mirrors in this cave? Whatever, man.
We get yet another rainbow dial, plus a plate of symbols and their meanings.
Okay, we have all our clues. Now we should maybe alert George to the fact that we’re running out of air. Hey, what if we had called her first, then gotten the clues while we waited? I feel like that would’ve been more efficient.
So we switch into George’s POV, and we have to set off to save Nancy. As far as I can tell, there’s no time limit until you actually get to the cave, because I got lost all over this island and Nancy still hadn’t died by the time I made it to the cave.
The cave is somehow locked by a puzzle. It’s a jigsaw that turns into a slider once we finish putting the pieces together, and it’s a pain in the ass, but doable.
Once the puzzle’s done, the rock rolls away and we switch back to Nancy’s POV. “Wow, there’s like no air in here,” George says. Duh, George. We ask if she saw anyone around — Nancy thinks she heard someone — but George didn’t. Man, George is useless.
George disappears after our talk with her. What the hell, George? You just saved us from a suffocating death, and you’re not even gonna stick around to drive us back? Anyway, we can poke around the cave a little, and we find this VERY INTRIGUING piece of evidence outside its mouth. Just kidding, nothing about this game is intriguing. We’ve found a driver’s license, with a guy who looks suspiciously like Johnny Rolle, except white. Apparently, he’s actually an Australian named John Poole. Could Johnny Rolle, our only suspect on this island, be lying to us? I am shocked!
Since we’re out at the cliffs anyway, we might as well work on another of El Toro’s clues. We came up here to investigate the bat clue, and the next one mentions the highest point on the island. That’s the top of the cliffs, so we clamber on up there and find…a bunch of monkeys. UUUUGGGGHHHH. Okay, so they’re making a weird sound at us, and now we have to go find out what the means.
It turns out that the monkeys want a ball, and the monkey research center helpfully tells us that when they say “ball”, that they actually mean is “sea urchin.” Well, there’s no way we can just dig up a sea urchin from the beach or something. We’ll have to sail out to the middle of nowhere and go scuba diving to the bottom of the ocean to find one!
Alright, so we drive aaaaall the way back to the resort, get in our boat, and sail aaaaall the way out to the middle of the ocean. This game really lacks urgency. If I were Bess, I’d be pissed that Nancy’s screwing around running all over creation instead of ever actually looking for me.
And then we go scuba diving for a single sea urchin. Nancy knows that you can trip over like five sea urchins if you just go looking in tide pools, right?
While we’re sailing, we come across a bunch of these messages in bottles. If you collect all the bottles, they’ll be pieced together to form a poem (I think it’s “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe), and that’s pretty much it. I don’t know if they were trying to trick us into spending more time with this game or what.
How the F do I get back to the hotel??
So now we have to climb aaaaall the way back up to give the sea urchin to the monkeys. I’m like two feet off the ground and the monkeys already pelted me down to 2/3rds health. I hate those monkeys. They don’t deserve this sea urchin.
Then I got hit with two more rocks in a row.
Then I ducked into a cave to refill my health, exited, and…promptly got hit by two more rocks. FUCK.
Okay, confession: I took like a monthlong break from the game at this point, and when I came back to it, I forgot which part of the rock is actually the clifftop. So this is partially my own fault, because it’s actually a relatively straight shot from the ground to the monkey ledge at the top. I thought that “highest point on the island” meant this really tall towerlike thing, so I climbed all the way across and up the rock face to get to it. I was deeply confused when it wouldn’t let met off at this point. In my defense, how is this not the highest point on the island? I was being logical!
Well, anyway, I had to climb all the way to the other side of the rocks to get to the monkeys again. Whew, finally. Anyway, so we give the sea urchin to the monkeys, and they scamper off to play with it. That leaves the way clear for us to plant Coucou’s perch, and position the astrolabe on top of it.
None of my googling tells me if astrolabes also double as telescopes, but apparently this one does. Nancy will look through it and gasp that there’s someone moving through the bushes on the other side of the island. It’s the Others! Benry is coming for us!
Anyway, so El Toro’s journal has instructions for how to enter coordinates on the astrolabe, so we can find some new and exciting locations to sail to. Fuck you, El Toro. I don’t want to sail anywhere.
Not one of the locations, but if you turn the telescope around, there are some fun shots of the ocean and stuff. They’re actually quite nicely done, and the ocean, killer whales, reefs, etc. are all very pretty to look at.
So one of the locations we’re looking for is a place called Halfmoon Reef, at NE 40 on the astrolabe. El Toro refers to the reef as a “watery grave,” so of course Nancy’s like, “Sounds like a fun place to go scuba diving!” We also have to find Dove Isle, at SW 70.
Before we go off sailing, though, let’s confront Johnny. He tried to lie to Nancy Drew, which is really the most unforgivable crime of them all.
Scroll up and take one last look at Johnny Rolle and his fake-ass dreads and nose ring, because once we confront him, he pulls off his wig. He’s not a Jamaican guy with a bad accent after all — he’s actually an Australian guy with a bad accent, and his real name is John Poole. He’s an accountant who discovered just a little too much about one of his clients, and now he’s on the run for his LIFE. Now John has to travel around, trusting no one, and changing his name every time he goes somewhere new. He doesn’t think the mysterious Others on the island are his enemies: “If they were, me, you — they’d’ve done us all in first thing. My enemies are ruthless.” So ruthless they’ve apparently been defeated by a wig, fake accent, and a motorboat.
John still doesn’t want to help us find Bess, so let’s go back and talk to George. We tell her that we saw ~*~something~*~ moving through the bushes, like, way to keep everyone calm, Nancy. George flips out, and Nancy says that it was either several people, “or something really big.” Maybe it was a polar bear!
Man, I think this is the most I’ve talked about Lost since like, 2007.
We then update George on the artist formerly known as Johnny Rolle, and she’s like, “So we’re right back where we started from.” What? Were we…somehow making more progress when we thought John Poole was Jamaican? I don’t know. Anyway, we leave George to wrestle with the phone some more. Let’s go sailing!
I’ll spare you the million caps I have of me just sailing around aimlessly, wondering where the F Dove Isle is. Have I mentioned that the compass in this game is useless? It spins around in a full circle even when you’re sailing in a straight line. You’re really just better off always assuming the top of the screen is north.
So we land on Dove Isle and find a random sundial, just hanging out in the middle of a beach. Several random sundials, actually, each labeled with a letter. Together they spell out “ATOCHA”, and Nancy’s like, “Whoa, there’s a whole plaque about that ship back in the storage shed.” Thankfully, even she realizes that going all the way back to the hotel just to find the plaque would be stupid, so we call George.
So we get to be George again! Woo! Nancy tells us that from her vantage point of being across the ocean, she saw ~*~someone~*~ creeping around outside the hotel. We go to check it out, but it turns out that it was just monkeys. Monkeys who trashed the shed and stole the silver coin that has the date of the Atocha’s sinking on it. Because, you know, nothing can ever be easy in these games.
Alrighty, so we take the golf cart and head out to the primate center, and…hey, there’s nothing actually stopping us from talking to John, is there? Let’s try it!
I’ve never actually tried to talk to John while playing as George before, but apparently you can do it! George rocks up to him all, “You kidnapped my cousin, prepare to die!” John tells us to get lost so he can work on his boat, and George is all, “Finding Bess is more important than your stupid boat and hiding from murderous tax evaders!” John snaps that if she doesn’t go away, maybe he won’t get help for us when he lands at San Salvador Island after all. Oh. Well, I guess that would be nice, but thanks for ever telling us about it before now.
The conversation ends, and we can keep clicking on him while George yells that she’s not going anywhere until he helps us, but he won’t talk to us again. Well, that was fun.
So we have to play another game to get the coin back from the monkeys. This game is basically just chance; we spin the thing in the middle to land on a number, and move that amount of spaces. If we land on 13, 25, or a space that’s already occupied, we have to go back to the beginning. I lost twice and it was pretty embarrassing.
The date the Atocha sank was 6/9/1622. Armed with that information, let’s go back to being Nancy.
The sundial puzzle is of the moving-one-moves-the-others variety, so we have to click the dials in the proper order until they’re pointing at 6-9-1-6-2-2. When they do, the podium they’re on opens up, and we get an old plate that’s carved with El Toro’s “Code of Conduct,” as well as a token imprinted with what is supposedly an owl. I dunno.
Does this look like an owl to you?
Conveniently, El Toro’s Code of Conduct is in English, like everything else he’s written. I bet El Toro was an Anglophile. He probably had a Tumblr devoted to Sherlock and Doctor Who.
The other place we saw through the astrolabe was Halfmoon Reef. We sail over there and drop anchor, and we can go scuba diving for more clues. We have to dodge a bunch of jellyfish, and near the bottom of the sea, we find a conch shell. We need this because we’ll find a cave with one of El Toro’s symbols carved near it. When we get close to it though, we find that the cave is already occupied by an octopus. Hey, maybe it’s friendly, like all the other wild animals Nancy’s encountered in these games. Just kidding, this time even Nancy’s like, “Yikes, what do.”
The solution is to put the conch shell on the rock farthest from the cave opening. The octopus will be lured out and then, having a taste of the open ocean, will swim away, leaving us free to investigate.
We find a box that’s locked with a puzzle. El Toro’s journal gives us the solution: 2 form a perfect square times 3, 3 create 4, four makes 5.
More math. Fuck everything.
The solution here is to form a closed set of squares using the lines that are sticking out — so you use 2 lines to make 3 closed squares, 3 to make 4 squares, and so on.
When that’s all done, we get another rainbow dial. And I’m almost out of air, so let’s get out of here.
Back at the hotel, our culprit’s left another threatening note, telling us to hurry up and find the treasure already. “I’m working on it, okay?” Nancy gripes. Yeah! If they wanted some half-assed detective work, they should’ve kidnapped someone else’s friend. You can’t rush art, you know?
These ominous notes actually mark the acts of the game quite neatly, so I’ll end part two here. Up next: We do some more math. I run around like a fool not realizing I’ve already solved a puzzle for like twenty minutes.
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