Nobody likes this game, but I kinda do. Overall it’s still pretty mediocre, but it’s a nice, small-scope game with an interesting focus. It feels like it’s getting back a bit to the series’ edu-venture roots, with a cool and unusual topic in meteorology, as well as Nancy Drew’s roots as a girl who solves minor crimes around her small town. Like, we’ve busted international forgery rings with the Italian FBI and gotten stalked on a Caribbean island, and now it’s time to chill a little.
So we’re going to Oklahoma at the behest of P.G. Krolmeister, whose name is slapped on every object we come across in the Nancy Drew universe. He’s sponsoring a storm research team, who’s in the running for a $100 million(!) grant in a storm competition. I don’t know what a storm competition is, but it sounds like serious business. They’re suffering a suspicious amount of equipment malfunctions, so Nancy’s joining them as an intern to investigate. To Oklahoma!
So we show up right in the middle of a storm. We see a twister right in front of us, and it’s pouring rain as we poke around the farmhouse where the team is set up.
We roll up to the house that the team is based out of, and we trip right over this box full of cash on the doorstep. Well, that’s pretty weird! I’d go so far as to say suspicious. There’s a note with the money, thanking someone for doing a good job “once again.” HMMM.
Someone on the team is totally cooking meth, y/y?
“I’d better go see who this belongs to,” Nancy derps. Like she’s just gonna ask around and everyone will totally be honest about whether or not this giant wad of cash is theirs. Not that it matters, since when we go inside, we find a note from one of our bosses, Debbie. The research is team is out chasing a storm, so we’re left on our own to wander around until they get back. Debbie has some chores for us to do while we wait — we have to file some papers and take a Tornado Quiz. “Don’t worry, we don’t care how you score!” Debbie writes. Uh, you sure, Debbie? I feel like you want Nancy to be at least a little familiar with tornadoes before you throw her in the middle of one.
So we can poke around a bit. The TV barely works, but we can catch like half a second of video. Look familiar?
Our first task is to fix Debbie’s filing system. There are instructions as to where to put each label, and you just have to puzzle out the hints to figure out what order to put them in.
There’s a random pile of corn on the floor, and when we inspect it, a mouse darts out. Nancy panics: “I did not sign up for mice!” In the recycling bin next to the file cabinet, we find a receipt for “Ma ‘n Pa’s General Store,” for three bags of corn. Suspicious!
I like this farmhouse a lot, it’s very homey but also cool-toned enough to be creepy and not quite welcoming.
Doing the tornado quiz will trigger the return of the team, so let’s poke around a little while we’re alone.
There’s a garage in the barn, where we see a run-down car and a workbench. We will, of course, be needing to steal tools from there later. In one of the drawers we find a newspaper article about how Canute College — Canute being the county we’re in — is running out of money and is thinking about restructuring their Meteorological Field Research Team to cut costs. Hey, that’s us!
So let’s go down to the cellar and take the tornado quiz. I couldn’t find any way to look up the answers before taking the quiz, so you pretty much just have to guess and try not to fail. Like Debbie said, they don’t really give a shit if their new intern doesn’t know a thing about tornadoes before running headfirst into a storm with them.
Once we’re done, the team will come back and we’ll cut to a conversation with our boss, Scott Varnell. Insert obligatory joke about Robert Downey Jr. here. He refers to the team as a “meteorological train wreck,” so…someone clearly loves their job. He’s the head of the team, but we’ll be reporting to his number two, Debbie. He gets super salty when he finds out that they were running all over creation chasing a storm, while Nancy saw a tornado within two minutes of driving up to the farmhouse. Scott will soon learn what everyone who meets Nancy knows, which is that she is better than you at everything. He goes on a brief rant about how all of Krolmeister’s equipment is crap and they’ll never win the meteorological competition! Then he’s like, “Anyway, here are some chores.”
So first we have to put together a sample disaster kit for a class Scott is teaching, and then we have to fix a siren chart. Cool cool cool. On our way out, Scott stops us and asks what we thought of the tornado we saw. Nancy “No Sense of Self-Preservation” Drew gushes that it was totally awesome, and Scott’s happy to have someone around here with some enthusiasm.
We can poke around Scott’s office a bit, and we find this newspaper article. Looks like the Ma half of Ma ‘n Pa’s died in a tornado a while back, and the forecasting system failed when the sirens didn’t go off. That’s pretty sad. It’s a good thing Scott is leaving such a big project to his brand-new intern!
So let’s meet Debbie. She’s Scott’s second in command, and he mentioned to us earlier that she was one of his best students. She tells us to report to her every morning, so she can tell us what to do. In addition to the disaster kit and the siren chart, we also have to go meet Pa, and then she wants us to fix the sprinkler system. Debbie exposits that the farmhouse was donated to Canute College as a research facility; the storm team shares it with the agriculture department and has to maintain their projects as well. (The agriculture team, by the way, is doing something with “this big mucky-muck research center in Hawaii.”) Ah, but that news article we read said that the college was thinking of ~restructuring~ the storm team, which might mean kicking them off the farmland. HMM.
We bring up the accidents as well, and Debbie says that the equipment problems might just be Scott fucking up, not sabotage — “But hey, I could be wrong. Which, by the way, is something you’ll never hear him say.” Oooh, research team drama.
We show Debbie the box full of money, and she claims not to know who it belongs to. It might not even belong to anyone here, as the tornado could have carried it from miles away. Fair enough. Nancy clutches her pearls and says she’d be more comfortable if an authority figure had it. What if Debbie’s our culprit, huh, Nancy? WHAT THEN? Debbie says she’ll call the sheriff and report it. OR WILL SHE?
We can also ask Debbie about her files — we saw a folder in there called “Grange Theater”, and Debbie tells us that she loves the stage, and she has a side job as the Grange Theater’s sound and lighting director. That’s such a hilariously random twist on her character and I love it.
All of our other suspects are back as well, so let’s meet everyone. Down in the basement is Tobias “Frosty” Harlow, who has the dubious honor of looking the least like a human being than any character so far, even including Mattie “Dead Eyes” Jensen. I think it’s his skin — they gave him some really weird undertones that make him look kind of purple? If he were a lipstick color, he’d probably be called greige. Maybe he’d look more normal if he had hair or something to balance it out. As it is, the ’90s eyebrows and baldness just make him look even weirder. Anyway, he tells us that he got the nickname Frosty from an intense hailstorm he managed to photograph, and now he’s known as a “fearless documenter of extreme weather phenomena.” Good for him.
We notice he has some gnarly scars on his arm, but he brushes it off as falling into some thorns while trying to get a photo. Also, he likes working for Scott — he’s a dick, but he’s better than Brooke, the leader of the rival storm team. So Frosty’s worked for Brooke, then.
The disaster kit is also down here in the basement, but it’s missing several items, so we’ll have to go buy them from Ma ‘n Pa’s. Nancy spies another mouse in the basement, and starts to get suspicious.
I make the mistake of going into the garage to say hi to our last suspect team member, and Chase immediately ropes us into doing a chore for him. This game is very, very chore-heavy; I think that combined with the boring location is what makes a lot of people hate it. I’ve mentioned that I don’t mind chores very much, and to elaborate, I hate puzzles in all their forms (I much prefer interrogating suspects and exploring locations) so I like that they’re made into chores and busywork, instead of part of the main mystery. Probably my least favorite Nancy Drew trope is finding a random object on the floor, having to solve a puzzle to open it, and having it conveniently contain letters or something. The issue with this game, I feel, is that the puzzles are strung together without being broken up often enough by interesting conversations or events, but I don’t inherently mind them all being framed as chores. YMMV, of course. Anyway, we have to rearrange the fuse board in the car so no consecutive numbers are touching.
Like so.
So this is Chase, who informs us that his job on the team is “fixin’ stuff.” He must be pretty busy, then. Chase shrugs that stuff breaks, and Scott’s probably attracting all the accidents to himself because of his negative attitude. I feel like Chase and Ingrid would get along.
So, do they call you Chase because you chase tornadoes? “Do they call you Nancy because you Nancy too many questions?” That would’ve been a hella sick burn if it made any kind of sense. Do Chase and I even speak the same language? Anyway, despite Scott’s bad juju, Chase acknowledges that he’s good at his job. Chase gets along with pretty much everyone on his team — he’s not too fond of Frosty and his ego, but they’re not enemies or anything.
Chase tells us that the guy we’re replacing had car troubles, because mice chewed through his car hose and all the coolant leaked out. But! Let’s take a look at the hose over the workbench:
Yeah…if Chase thinks mice did that, he’s not as good as his job as he thinks he is.
We can also poke around the workbench — dig that computer! — and we note that Chase has a major sweet tooth, and also has a jar of pennies. He tells us those are “Pa Pennies”, which can be used at Ma ‘n Pa’s store to buy snacks. We’ve already picked a ton up (see the top left corner), but now we know what to do with them. Cool beans. Nancy makes the mistake of saying that she also likes snacks, and Chase is like, “I like you, Nancy Drew! That means I trust you enough to pawn more chores off on you!” So now he wants us rewire some circuit boards, and he’ll pay us in Pa Pennies. I mean…I guess he’s paying us? That’s a rarity, in Nancy’s world.
But we got things to be doing, so let’s ditch Chase and his menial labor for now, and go to the general store. It’s pretty depressing, in a “shitty small town that not even tourists go to so they don’t even bother to make their buildings attractive” way. I like it, though — the overall vibe of this game is “small town that’s not really quaint, just depressing and kind of creepy”, and I dig it.
We say hi to Pa, who tells us that “everybody in a hundred miles” knows him as such, but there’s something he bets we don’t know. “That it’s not your real name?” Nancy cuts him off. Heh. Pa flips his shit: “Well, ain’t you Miss Smarty-Boots, Little Miss Gal-From-Up-North-Who’s-Helpin’-Out-Tornado-Chasers-From-Canute.” Oooooookay. So this is Pa, who apparently thinks the fact that his real name isn’t “Pa” is some kind of big secret. All of his dialogue is written in his accent, a la Hagrid from Harry Potter. It’s terrible. Pa starts to explain how things work around here, to which Nancy says, “Don’t things work the way they normally do in stores?” I love what an asshole we can be to this poor old widower.
Anyway, Pa tells us that we have store credit for Canute purchases, but if we want anything that’s not on Debbie’s list, we have to pay for it in Pa Pennies. We can win Pa Pennies by playing arcade games in the back of the store.
Debbie told us that Pa also has a passion for the ~theatre, and he waxes on that he loves being backstage when the lights go down. It’s almost like the moment right before a storm! Does Pa also like storms, then? (…we ask, knowing that his wife died in one.) Pa gets real sad and says that he hates storms: “You watch this dark, rampaging monster go tearing across the land, wrecking everything it touches, ’til all of a sudden it ain’t there no more. Ya can’t go after it, ya can’t make it put everything back, ya can’t get even with it, ’cause it’s just…gone. All you can do is stand there thinkin’, now that ain’t fair. That just ain’t fair.” Aw. Every now and then, the writing for these games can be really good. “Sounds like you’re talking from personal experience,” Nancy notes. Yes, Nancy, we read his wife’s obituary. The myriad ways we can dick Pa around over the course of this game are really something.
Shopping at Pa’s is a puzzle, and I sort of hate it because it involves math, but it’s also a well-integrated and appropriately challenging puzzle, and I appreciate it for those qualities. Several of the items we need are on sale, and there are three types of sale options. Blue tagged items are “buy two, get a cheaper item for free”, green tags are “buy one and get another green tag item half off”, and yellow tags are “buy 2 and get 60% off both.” So we want to buy the right combination of items to get them all as cheaply as possible.
When we’re done shopping, we can check out the arcade in the back. We can play these games to get more Pa Pennies later, which I will only be doing if I absolutely have to because arcade games suck the life out of me. There are also a bunch of little educational displays about tornadoes and storms that will provide information that we need later. One of them has a tag saying “divining rod”, but the rod is missing. We report this to Pa, who doesn’t remember when he last saw it. He doesn’t think anyone would steal it: divining rods are believed to find oil (and underground water, metals, etc), but that’s just superstition. Of course, if there are any superstitious people out there who are trying to find something, they might’ve stolen it anyway. HMMM. Pa says that he’ll just have to whittle a fake one and stick it on the display. “Just be our little secret, okay?” Aw, that’s cute. Dammit, now I’m feeling about about always choosing the most hilariously douchey option when I talk to Pa.
Back at the house, we finish putting together the disaster kit. Once we’re done, it’ll automatically trigger a comment from Frosty that we should talk to Debbie again. She actually doesn’t have anything to say to us, but we can ask her about the receipt for dried corn. (Why didn’t we just ask Pa about it?) Debbie refuses to believe that anyone would be luring mice into the house on purpose. And yet they are, Debbie! Denial helps no one!
Our last two duties for Scott and Debbie — we haven’t done Chase’s thing yet — are the sprinkler system and the siren chart. Both are pretty easy; the sprinkler system just involves clicking on valves that don’t occupy any of the same horizontal, vertical, or diagonal rows. (I still stole the solution from a walkthrough because I’m a lazy shit, though.) The siren chart is a little tricker. We want to make sure the entire county is covered by the sirens, and it there were a few times that I thought I had got it all covered, only to realize there were a few sneaky gaps between the sirens.
Once that’s done, Debbie will say that it’s late and tells us to go to bed. Back off, Debbie! I do what I want!
Let’s bug Scott before we go up. (By the way, dig the calendar: we are apparently in May; it was November-December during our last game.) Apparently he told us earlier that if the team doesn’t win the competition and the prize money, the school is selling the farm. Scott elaborates that the cost of maintaining the farm is helped by funds from “private companies like the Hilihili.” (They do not ever explicitly state that the Hilhili is the aforementioned mucky-muck research center in Hawaii, so if you didn’t play Creature of Kapu Cave, you might be confused.) But that money is about to dry up — aw, man, what’s going to happen to Dr. Craven? — so if they don’t get that $100 million prize, the farm has to go. Uh, what about the agriculture department? Do they not have to worry about this place? How come they don’t win a grant and keep the farm open?
We bring up the newspaper article about Ma: Scott was interviewed in it about the forecasting system, and Nancy notes that he sounded much more optimistic back then than he does now. Was that article supposed to be from a long time ago? And we’re just getting around to fixing the siren chart now? Anyway, Scott bitters that times change and dreams die and your friends stop calling, so we should enjoy our youth before it all goes downhill. Jesus, what a monologue to put in a game meant for preteens.
Debbie yells at me to go to bed again, but guess what, Debbie! You…actually are the boss of me, but it’s clearly still daylight outside, so I’m gonna ignore you. Let’s call the Hardy Boys, shall we? They actually appear to be solving a mystery for once, and the conversation is peppered with bizarre asides about them finding a secret door and a secret lever and I guess they were in Paris but now they’re on track to find the secret Romanov fortune and they were on a train at one point but hey, that’s not important, how’s the tornado internship going? (“You’re NOT going to believe what’s in here!” Joe shouts in the background. I don’t know when they switched Joe from being “slightly more impulsive than Frank” to “hyperactive teenager with the attention span of a gnat,” but this is who he is now.)
We can run down our case with the Hardys, and I can’t say that they’re helpful, because lol Hardys. We tell them about the box of cash, and Joe advises us to “follow the money.” “It’s hard to follow the money when it’s just sitting in a box,” Nancy snarks. Hee! We tell them about the cut coolant hose, and Joe observes that it’s not very “smart sabotage” — too easy to detect and doesn’t cause significant damage. He and Frank suggest that perhaps our culprit is out for revenge instead. Oooh, revenge! Joe says that if it’s revenge, the culprit might be sloppier than a saboteur would be. “But remember,” he adds, “every act of sabotage reveals the nature of the saboteur.” I…don’t even know what that means.
So after that scintillating talk with the Hardy Boys, let’s call P.G. Krolmeister to update him. He’s pushy but jovial and wants to call us “ND”, so we can be two-initial buddies. We ask why he’s so obsessed with tornadoes when he could be obsessed with any of the literally hundreds of other things he’s invented (where was he when all his arcade games were breaking down?), and he backstories that a tornado wrecked his house once. While Prudence Rutherford was visiting! He mentions that she got hit on the head, but seems to be fine. I mean, pre-head injury she was still walking around wearing bunny masks and fur bikini tops, so could anyone really tell the difference?
Once we’re done with that, the game will finally kick us into the next day. Up next: We do some more chores, then encounter our first storm. The storm causes a ton of damage for the team, which leads us to…doing more chores for them. Exciting stuff!
Leave a Reply