Previously on Nancy Drew: Trail of the Twister: We arrived in Oklahoma to investigate the possible sabotage of a storm research team. Is there sabotage? There might be. It could also just be mice. It’s still up in the air.
The next day dawns, and we check in with Debbie as per our instructions. We have to realign the sensors in the corn field (oh my God, Oklahoma is so boring), then Frosty’s going to show us the basics of storm photography. Cool beans.
The realigning sensors puzzle is one that we’ve seen many times before (or, okay, twice), so it’s pretty easy. When we’re done, we hear SUSPICIOUS THINGS BETWEEN THE CORN STALKS! Dun dun dun! Just kidding, it’s just Debbie and Frosty. They’re having a low-toned, heated argument, about how she’s ~NOT LEAVING~ Canute and they’re ~SO CLOSE~ and Debbie just has to give ~HIM~ a little push. Frosty’s like, “No, we mustn’t!” and babbles on about how when he agreed to help her, he didn’t mean he would — OH FOR FUCK’S SAKE, KROLMEISTER, NOW IS NOT THE TIME TO BE CALLING US.
Yeah, so P.G. Krolmeister calls us and interrupts our eavesdropping. We can go over our suspects with him, even though two of them are still standing right over there. We note that nobody seems to trust Scott — is it because he’s suspicious, or is he just an asshole? And Debbie and Frosty are up to something, which we would know if you hadn’t called us in the middle of our eavesdropping, Krolmeister. He tells us that there’s a lot of money to be made in filming storms, and Frosty might feel that his contract with Scott’s team is holding him back. Debbie, on the other hand, has no motive because all we know about her is that she likes storms and the theater.
Once that conversation is over, we have to go out and take storm photos with Frosty. The driving interface is the same thing as Secret of the Old Clock, which apparently everyone hates? I like it 🙁 I think it’s cool to have a layout of the town we’re in, and the driving’s not impossible, even if not as simple as it could be. Anyway, Frosty will monologue a little as we drive — nothing super important, but he’ll tell us stuff like how he used to want to be a doctor, and how Debbie had to take him out for ice cream the first time that Scott yelled at him. Hee!
Frosty will give us a notebook that has drawings of all the different cloud types, and we have to troll around town looking for them. Sometimes none of the locations will have the clouds we’re looking for, so you just have to wait and come back later. It’s boring, but not too difficult, and some of the cloud images are very pretty.
Once we’re done with that, we go back to the farm and upload the pictures. Frosty has an MP3 player that he borrowed from Chase, and naturally, why give it back himself when he can make us do it for him? So off we go, and as we walk to the barn, we overhear Chase yelling that he got something all over his best boots. “How can something that makes such a mess be worth so much money?!” he wails. I guess this is supposed to be suspicious? Let’s go inside and see what’s up!
We give back the MP3 player and ask if Frosty borrows stuff from Chase a lot. Chase is like, “Hardly ever, because he’s too cool to borrow stuff from a backwards redneck like me. I can’t believe a COOL CITY BOY would even borrow the iPod of a COUNTRY BUMPKIN LIKE ME.” Either Frosty and Chase hate each other, or they’re going to make out.
We ask if Debbie and Frosty get along, and Chase muses that he never thought they hung out much — hey! She took him out for ice cream that one time! — but lately they’ve been spending quite a bit of time together. He doesn’t think it’s anything romantic, though. Could they be plotting something?
And with that, day two ends. Wait, what? We just got up!
We’re woken up in the middle of the night by a storm. The tornado alarm is going off, telling us to get to shelter. Spooky! Nancy stumbles downstairs to get into the cellar. It’s dark, and the house is only periodically lit up by flashes of lightning. With that and the sound of the storm and the siren blaring in the background, it’s pretty genuinely scary. We get downstairs, and the lightning briefly reveals ~*~SOMEONE~*~ standing in the living room, over the coffee table. Nancy calls out to him, but he ignores her. Then we run to the cellar and the cutscene ends.
“I should check that out in the morning,” Nancy notes. So morning comes, but do we check it out? Of course not. Instead, Debbie has more chores for us. She tells us Scott wants to see us, and then we have to figure out a way to get rid of the prairie dogs in the corn field. Nancy bleats that they’re not hurting anyone, and Debbie’s like, “…they’re fucking pests, Nancy.” She does, however, agree that we can’t kill them.
And then! We don’t get to tell Debbie about the weird guy we saw last night, but we do find out that Chase and Frosty are capable of, as Debbie puts it, “sleep[ing] through a circus explosion.” The person we saw in the living room was definitely a guy, so that would make him…Scott. Dun dun dun!
(Or maybe it’s Pa. I mean, we can’t rule him out.)
Scott’s like, “So Debbie says I have to like, encourage my underlings and shit…so good job chasing that tornado yesterday…is what Debbie said…I guess.” Nancy’s like, “Thanks,” and Scott’s like, “Yeah, well…GO TRAP ALL THE MICE RUNNING AROUND HERE.” Heh. So we have half a compliment from Scott, and also our next chore.
Debbie is anti-cruelty to mice as well as anti-cruelty to prairie dogs, so we have to buy a catch-and-release mouse trap from Ma ‘n Pa’s. When we stop by to see Chase, he tells us that he’s rigged up a contraption to vacuum up the prairie dogs without hurting them, but the tube is too small. Pa should have a bigger tube, and we’re going there anyway, so we’ll get that from him too.
What’s up, Pa! We ask where Ma is, because every time we come into the store we can ask about that, even though we’ve known that she’s dead since the beginning of the game. Pa lies and says that Ma’s off running errands, but she should be back in later. This entire Ma storyline is so fucked up. She’s dead! Pa knows she’s dead! Nancy knows she’s dead! And we’re just needling him about his dead wife and letting him lie to our faces because Nancy Drew is ice cold and enjoys watching this elderly widower try to appear happy for his customers when he’s crumbling inside under the weight of keeping up this masquerade.
Pa does happen to have both a cruelty-free mouse trap in his museum, and a vacuum tube, and we can borrow both if we do something for him first. “Always a catch,” Nancy sighs. Hee.
In order to get the vacuum tube, we have to rearrange the candy display. It’s similar to the book rearranging games in Danger on Deception Island and Legend of the Crystal Skull, so if you’ve been playing these games in order, you should be pretty good at this by now.
Next we have to update the tornado display to show the new Fujita system, because apparently Pa’s still using the old one. For someone whose wife died because of an inadequate tornado warning system, you’d think Pa would be more diligent about keeping up on this. Just saying.
So we have to take the old Fujita scale on the display and match the old values to the new system, along with pictures of how much damage each level indicates. As we work, we overhear Pa talking to a customer: “Howdy, Brooke.” Ah, it’s Scott’s arch nemesis. Brooke asks if Pa has anything new to report about Scott’s team, and he awkwardly evades the question. What the fuck, Pa! I thought we were friends! I FIXED THE FUJITA SCALE FOR YOU!
So, hey, Pa, why are you giving away all our secrets to fucking Brooke? He tells us that she comes in here and always asks about Scott’s team, particularly the accidents we’ve been having. But it’s fair, because Scott always asks Pa for the dirt on Brooke, too. ~*~Suspicious~*~
In order to lure the mice into our trap, we need cheese. Pa has cheese, but we do not have any money, and he is out of menial chores for us to barter with. Wait, what? A character has actually run out of bullshit busywork for Nancy to do? Say it ain’t so. So now we have to find a way to scrape together the Pa Pennies to buy the cheese. There are a couple of ways to do this; we could always go back to the farm and help Chase out, but I don’t want to have to go there and come back; instead I just played a bunch of the arcade games until I got the money.
We have the vacuum, we have the cheese, and now it’s time to go back and do yet more chores. The mice enter the trap one by one, and the puzzle involves opening and closing the gates at the correct times to trap one mouse in each cell. You have to do it like three times, which — look, like I said, I don’t mind chores, but I do think it’s BS to drag the same chore out multiple times, like the maid duties in White Wolf or the mosaics in Phantom of Venice. Please make it less obvious that you’re padding the game out with pointless repetition of puzzles.
Once that’s done, we have to go suck up the prairie dogs. They’ll appear in the holes, and we just have to quickly click on them to vacuum them up. Occasionally some will escape, like the sheep in Castle Malloy. Eventually we catch them all, and we go over to a patch of land to set them free.
We go over to the side of the house to release the prairie dogs — I feel like we should release them further away, so they don’t come back, right? — and Nancy spies something in the bushes. It’s another metal box! This time it has a note, requesting a “series of CB, with CC or CG, from an HP storm by June 2nd,” with a payment of $550. Intriguing!
Let’s catch the Hardy Boys up on our case, so they can live vicariously through us because they’re such losers. Frank’s boner is all worried for Nancy, while Joe’s like, “She’s with Frosty, the greatest photographer on the storm circuit, she’ll be fine!”, because I guess Joe’s a tornado chaser fanboy now. Frank frets that we shouldn’t trust anyone who’s trying to make a name for themselves, or who engages in such reckless behavior. Is Frank Nancy’s wannabe boyfriend or is he her grandma? The dialogue makes it difficult to tell.
We have to dump the mice off at some place called the “spring house”, so we drive out there. This is the spring house; we’ll have to come back here later for clues and shit.
So, Scott, what’s this about you and Brooke spying on each other? Scott denies that he would ever gossip about a fellow scientist — no peer jealousy here! — and snips that Nancy should be doing work, not nosing around everyone’s personal lives. Hey, I can do both, Scott! I’m efficient that way!
Debbie tells us that there’s a storm coming, so we’re going to ride out to catch it. We’ll be riding with Frosty. Somewhere in Europe, Joe Hardy is seething with peer jealousy.
We have to drive around, until we find this vaguely dusty area that I guess is meant to signify the storm. It cuts to a view from the ground, and then Frosty starts wailing that his camera just died. He shoves it to us to fix while he takes photographs. So…basically, we have to do another chore, just with a storm raging in the background this time.
Remember how we had to fix that fuse board for Chase, and no sequential numbers could be touching? This puzzle is the exact opposite, where we have to fill in the blank spots so that sequential numbers are touching each other. For example, the top number next to the 15 is 16, because it’s touching 15 and 17. The number below that is 14, because it’s touching 15, and so on. Each number can only be used once.
Once that’s done, we watch the rest of the storm. The twister knocks a whole barn down, and Frosty’s like, “Wow, that was awesome! It sure is lucky the camera was fixed in time for that!” Oh, wait, except it wasn’t. Nancy protests that we did fix it — yeah, I did the puzzle and everything! — but Frosty is pissed at us.
Back at the farm, Scott blames us for not getting any footage of the storm. Hey, what the fuck! I worked hard on that puzzle, Scott! He snaps that he doesn’t want to hear excuses and dismisses us.
The day is nearly over — Debbie will tell us to go to bed — but first, I want to go yell at Frosty. He’s not in the basement, though, probably because he’s hiding from us, like an asshole. I will have my revenge, Frosty!
Since he’s not here, we can poke around his desk, and we find an ad for a car. “If only…” Frosty’s scribbled underneath. HMMM.
We make it through the night without incident, and we meet up with Debbie in the morning. New day, new chores. Today we’re having a problem with our antennas, so we have to go check those out. Then we have to go talk to Chase. Oh, shit, I totally forgot to give him back his prairie dog vacuum yesterday. Whatever. Did he really need it back right away?
So we drive out to where the antennas are, and Nancy notes that the storm must have blown pieces off of them. The storm now, was it? So we have to pick the pieces off the ground and then match them to the proper place on the antenna. It’s kind of challenging, because there’s an optical illusion element with the corner pieces and curved pieces.
On the ground, we spy a key. Nancy thinks it belongs to someone on Scott’s team. OR DOES IT?
When we back up, a storm will come rolling in. But…I just fixed the antennas. Can Mother Nature CHILL?
We book it on out of there and try to head back to the farm, but someone’s programmed our GPS with faulty instructions. Our car gets buried under hail, and we die. Well, that was depressing. To the second chance button!
We finally make it back to the farm. Chase is like, “Hey, Nancy, thanks for not dying because I need you to do some more chores for me.” Theory: there is no saboteur, the storm research team is just completely useless and were shooting themselves in the foot until Nancy showed up and started doing all their work for them. That sounds about right to me.
So now we have to fix the car transmission; we have to match up the proper sized gears on the rods. The gears should touch but not overlap. It’s pretty easy. Once we’re done, Chase tells us that the repair shop gave him an estimate on fixing the car the old intern wrecked, and he wants us to run it over to Scott so Scott can sign off on it. Fair enough.
We give back the prairie dog vacuum, and Chase gives us like 100 Pa Pennies in return. We’re nearly two-thirds of the way through the game now, so this does jack all for us, but it’s the thought that counts!
Then we bring up the GPS that tried to kill us, and Chase apologizes profusely. Aw! I can’t believe someone’s actually sorry that Nancy nearly died. That’s such a rarity for these games. He says all he did was run a few updates on the system. HMMM.
We go back inside and tell Debbie about our near-death. She’s like, “Whatever, I’ll have Chase look at it.” Ah, that’s the level of concern I expect from a Nancy Drew character. Then she tells us that she wants us to catch the mice in the kitchen. Nancy points out that someone’s been leaving piles of corn around the house, and Debbie’s like, “Corn? What corn?” Jesus, Debbie, it’s only fucking everywhere. She doesn’t think anyone’s leaving it out on purpose, and says the mice are probably storing it up for the winter. I bet they aren’t.
So now it’s time for round two of mice-catching. Then we have to go to the spring house and release them. Then we go back to the farm, give the estimate to Scott, which triggers a scream from Frosty. He’s upset because he’s seen a mouse in the basement, so now we have to catch the mice down there, then release them all over again. Fuck’s sake!
While we’re down on the basement floor catching the mice, we find this sheet of storm symbols. We’ll need this later, as usual.
Once we’re done with the mice, we can head back to Frosty and finally confront him about not appreciating our camera-fixing skills. He admits that it’s partially his own fault for not checking to see if Nancy fixed it properly, and he told Scott as much. But we did fix it! If there’s one thing Nancy Drew is good at besides sleuthing, it’s doing bullshit menial chores. We fixed the hell out of that camera, and you are a lying liar, Frosty. However, the dialogue forces us to accept his apology, and with that, another day ends. I’ll end this part here, too, as the plot finally shows up again the last act of the game.
Up next: Nancy is the resident mouser of Oklahoma. The plot of the game finally gets moving, and we get to yell at all of our teammates about everything in rapid succession.
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