Previously on Nancy Drew: Secrets Can Kill (Remastered!): We cleared one of our suspects, and are on our way to figuring out what’s going on with the rest of them. There’s a surprising amount of crime involving teenagers in this town, but does that include murder? Let’s find out!
We received a note that is very obviously a trap, but there’s nothing else for us to do but walk into it. Mitch Dillon, of Dillon HVAC, wants us to meet him in the school boiler room. We have the security code (“NOTE”) from looking through Aunt Eloise’s computer. The keypad for the room is written all in Braille for some reason — equal opportunity crime for blind people? — but there’s a Braille book in the library that will tell us how to spell NOTE, if you’re one of those people who prefers not to cheat their way through these games.
We go down into the boiler room accordingly, only to find that the furnace is on, and we’re trapped! Somehow! I don’t know, we just are. So we have to find a way to turn the furnace off and not die.
The furnace controls are padlocked. As I mentioned earlier, the diner blowup with the bolt cutters is optional, so you may or may not have them in your inventory. If you do, you can cut the padlock chains and get to the controls that way. If not, the combo for the padlock is located in the boiler room, on a plaque saying that the school was built in 1967. So you put 1967 in as the combo, and that pops the padlock open.
The chart on the wall shows the correct gauge settings for the furnace. Dillon HVAC has just left their toolbox lying around, because it’s like Mitch Dillon wants to get caught, so we steal a pair of gloves (gotta take the proper precautions when we’re saving our own life!) and adjust the gauges until the flames go back to normal.
Off to the side, we find some Maxine’s Diner paraphernalia, including Jake’s missing matchbook. You’ll recall that his notebook told us that the matchbook contained the first step to solving his mysterious death.
We open up the matchbook, and see this symbol. Looks familiar, yes?
As it turns out, the panel to control the service elevator popped off during our misadventure. Mitch Dillon: able to rig the complex machinery of an elevator control box, forgets to change his number when calling and making death threats. Anyway, we just have to crawl around the room, and we find a grate that we can exit through. And outside of the grate just so happens to be Jake’s missing VHS! Wow, this whole near-death situation is really working out for us. I wish people would try to kill Nancy more often!
So let’s go home and watch the tape on Aunt Eloise’s sweet, sweet VCR. We see, in order: Hulk taking a box helpfully labeled “DRUG STATION HECTINOL” out of his locker; Connie putting the judo trophy in her locker; and Hal copying his essay. Jake was blackmailing them all! I guess I can see why none of them were too broken up when he died, although…still. Cold blooded, man. Anyway, this tape doesn’t exactly narrow down our list of suspects, so let’s go see if we can talk to them further.
Let’s start with Hulk. He told us earlier that he only knows about football, but clearly he also knows about steroids! Like everyone who’s ever been subjected to the Nancy Drew Interrogation Method, Hulk cracks in a second: He broke into the Drug Station and stole the steroids, because he had to impress the football scouts despite his injury. Jake found out (somehow) and began blackmailing him to do all of Jake’s chores. Hulk complains that it wasn’t even worth it: his recovery isn’t any faster, and he spent all his free time running around for Jake. Well, that sounds like it sucked. Did it suck enough for Hulk to want to kill Jake? “I’m not a killer, Nancy,” Hulk says. “I didn’t do it!”
And that…somehow…clears Hulk as a suspect. What? I mean, at least Hal had that whole spiel about respecting human life. Hulk’s just like, “I didn’t do it!” and Nancy’s like, “Cool, sounds legit.”
Anyway, Hulk tells us that the last thing he had to do for Jake was deliver a note to Daryl Gray. We’ll follow up on that after we leave the school.
Is there anything else we can talk to Hal about? No, there is not. “I’m really embarrassed to see you again,” he mutters when we walk up to him. Hee! I imagine a lot of people feel that way about Nancy.
Then we confront Connie about cross-dressing her way into the men’s judo competition. For someone whose academic and athletic careers rely on keeping that a secret, she’s remarkably blase about spilling it to us. She’s like, “Yeah, whatever, it was me.” What if Nancy was also a murderous blackmailer, Connie? Do you ever think of those things? Nancy spells out Connie’s potential motive: Jake blackmailed Connie into dating him (hence why she had to break her date with Daryl) — if she didn’t, she might even lose her black belt. And whoever killed Jake also beat him up, which definitely makes a judo student look suspicious. Connie’s like, “It wasn’t me!” and Nancy’s like, “Oh, okay then.” Oh, Nancy. Should I be so hard on her? This was her first mystery, after all.
Finally, let’s confront Daryl…except not really, because when we bring up the note from Jake, Daryl flips out and yells at us for asking too many questions. See, this is why you’ll never be Nancy’s boyfriend, Daryl. Ned accepts all of Nancy’s inappropriate personality traits, even when he probably shouldn’t.
Daryl storms off in a fit of pique, so that only leaves Detective Beech to talk to. We haven’t spoken with him since the beginning of the game, so it’s okay if you forgot he existed. I almost did, too. We tell him that Daryl told us about his freakout, and Beech gets SUPER SHIFTY and goes, “Yeeeees…I forgot my wallet.” He says it in the the skeeviest voice ever. I’m thinking maybe he did not, in fact, forget his wallet. Beech tells us that he found the wallet in his hotel.
We update him on our case, and how we think one of the students killed Jake because he was blackmailing everyone and their mom. Beech blusters that we need solid evidence, LIKE JAKE’S JOURNAL! O! Kay! He’s riding awfully hard for this journal idea, considering that we have no proof that Jake had a journal.
However! We do know that Jake liked to set up shop in the library. Way back when we first came in here, we found the clue that we should search under his locker combo in the library’s catalogue. When we do, we see a “book” called Evidence, which is apparently located under Jake’s seat. When we look under the seat, we find this box.
Now it’s time to use all the chemical symbols we found on every scrap of paper and note in this school. Jake’s notes told us to start with the symbol from Maxine’s matchbook, which is the mercury symbol. If you didn’t play Curse of Blackmoor Manor, one of the library books will explain which one is mercury. Then we go to the periodic chart on the wall, and put together all the chemical combos we’ve found so far. The atomic number tells us what order to put the chemicals in, from lowest to highest, and they reveal the steps to press the buttons on the box. The letter and number next to the elements are how many steps to move after pressing the button. So after mercury, the next element is He:U2, so we move down two steps and press that button. The next one is R1, so we move right one place and press that one.
And we get another VHS. This game is so 1998 it hurts sometimes.
This game has nothing in the way of side quests and puzzles, and we’ve spoken to all of our suspects, so let’s go watch this VHS and begin the end of the game. Remember how Daryl wasn’t on that first tape we found, with the rest of the students? That’s because Daryl is so fucking shady he gets a whole tape dedicated to him. As it turns out, Daryl is stealing secrets from his dad’s secret military industrial aerospace whatever the hell company, and selling them to Mitch Dillon. So he can…make military grade HVAC machines?
Oh, wait, it turns out Mitch was just a middleman (is Dillon HVAC a money laundering front? I need answers), and he was selling Gray Enterprises’s secrets…to Detective Beech! Shock, gasp! And Detective Beech kept track of all his shady dealings in…his journal!
Yup, so Detective Beech lost his journal at Maxine’s Diner, and has spent the whole game trying to get it back, under the guise of looking for “Jake’s” journal. And as usual, Nancy was about to solve the whole case for our culprit. Man, Nancy, you gotta stop doing that.
Jake tells us that he hid the journal under one of the book carts at school, just in case something were to happen to him. Like, say, murder. But he highly doubts that — he bets Beech will just give him a ton of cash and Jake can go retire to a private island and “tan [his] bod.” Remember when “bod” was an almost-common way to say “body”? The late ’90s were dark times.
With that, the tape shuts off, and we hear the front door open. “Aunt Eloise?” Nancy calls. Of course, we know it can’t be Aunt Eloise, because that would require them to render an entirely new character. Damn, Nancy, haven’t you ever heard of locking the door?
MAN, Detective Beech looks creepy. That’s because he’s our villain, of course. He asks if we found the journal, and like a total chump, Nancy derps, “Yes, I found your journal. I mean, Jake’s journal!” Beech cottons on immediately: “No, you said you found my journal.”
And then he pulls a gun on us! Honestly, the scariest thing about this game is that it has no sense of tone or atmosphere whatsoever, so it all feels like some bizarre, trippy dream. We’re being held up at gunpoint in Aunt Eloise’s fucking floral living room, I’ve had nightmares about this.
Beech brags that he tricked us into finding the journal for him via the undercover detective ruse. “And you just ate it up! I mean, you had the lingo, the self-important attitude — you’re a real Snoopy Susie, aren’t you?” Can Beech not call us out while he has a gun pointed at us? I’ve never felt more personally attacked in my life. He denies killing Jake, though, and claims that that was Mitch Dillon’s doing.
With that out of the way, he wants to know where the journal is. The correct answer is to direct him to the safe behind the tapestry, but we can misdirect him a few times and get some more information out of him. He tells us his whole dastardly plan: Beech is a “businessman, albeit an unconventional one”; he buys and sells information that the government and other shady people are interested in. I find this hard to believe. No self-respecting black market information dealer would wear that striped polo. Anyway, Jake tried to blackmail Beech, so he sent Mitch to beat Jake up. Mitch went overboard and ended up killing Jake. Still needing the journal, Beech overheard Aunt Eloise talking about Nancy in Maxine’s one day, and decided that an amateur teenage detective could find the journal for him. So…when you think about it, this is all Aunt Eloise’s fault. She just believed this dude when he rocked up and said he wanted to hang out with her teenage niece? Aunt Eloise shouldn’t be allowed to work with children.
Beech still wants the journal, and still has that gun, so we have to trap him. We tell him the journal is in the safe, and give him the wrong combination three times in a row. That triggers the alarm, and Aunt Eloise’s burglar cage comes down around him. I have so many questions. Why does Aunt Eloise need such intense security? Who IS she?
Detective Beech is arrested, and everyone else’s fates are revealed. Unsurprisingly, Gray Enterprises went into a rapid decline after it was revealed that the CEO’s dumbass son was selling information to some rando he met in a diner. However, Daryl’s father has forgiven him, so that makes it totally fine that Daryl was selling military secrets. I feel like that might be a crime? I feel like Daryl should be getting a visit from the FBI or something?
Connie’s busted the glass ceiling for women in judo, and a women’s competition has finally been created. I genuinely can’t tell if this game is meant to be set in 1998 or 2010, but either way, Paseo del Mar is way behind the curve when it comes to women’s rights. Sue the school, Connie!
For some reason, Hulk and Hal only get about a sentence devoted to them each: Hulk will pay for the damages to the pharmacy, and Hal will get his scholarships. No mention of Hulk’s chances of getting into college with steroid abuse on his record, or Hal being punished for plagiarism. I’m guessing the reason for glossing over their stories is because Hulk finally realized Hal was in love with him, reciprocated his feelings, and they ran off together.
I get an award for continuously rejecting Daryl, although tbf, it’s not like that was hard. I feel like if the game really wants to introduce tension in Ned and Nancy’s relationship, they should actually give his competition eyebrows.
I didn’t get the award for following up on every lead! I’m a failure as a super sleuth 🙁
This entire game just feels…weird. An Ice World calls it a “coked-out after school special”, and that is the best and most succinct description of this game I’ve seen. Absolutely nobody treats Jake’s death with any kind of gravitas; in fact, they all seem to genuinely believe that murder is an appropriate punishment for daring to do drugs-slash-blackmail his peers. The general horror of a teenager being murdered in his own school is skated over, too, and the result is a shiny “for kids!” veneer over what is actually a pretty dark story. HER’s certainly been willing to get dark with this series, so it’s weird that they created an intense storyline with drugs and murder and Nancy held up at gunpoint…then pretended like these events aren’t scary at all. Like, “Jetpack old woman who doesn’t want to hurt anyone, but is just sort of feral and confused” got a darker treatment than this game. The bizarre tone just pushes the game even further into the uncanny valley, and it was already pretty deep into it with its shitty graphics, voice acting, and background music.
If all that wasn’t enough, the environments lack any sense of population or activity, particularly Aunt Eloise’s house — we can’t even call her on the phone, so it feels like we’re staying in a weird ghost house. I don’t know why she’s such a non-entity, either. You’d think a school employee would be a better source for information than Jake’s salty classmates. The clues aren’t integrated well at all and, as I mentioned, remind me of old-school education games like Carmen Sandiego and ClueFinders — not a genre Nancy Drew ever really fit into.
It’s hard to rank the OG Secrets Can Kill because it was barely even a Nancy Drew game — it looked, felt, and worked nothing like any of the games that came afterwards, not even its immediate successor, Stay Tuned for Danger. The remaster improved the game mechanics but didn’t change much else. The clunky dialogue is actually really jarring when you play this game right after Trail of the Twister — which, for all its faults, has fairly natural-sounding conversations.
It’s funny because I can’t point to anything actively bad about this game, but it’s still much less than the sum of its parts. Like, I can easily point to RAN‘s mind-numbing monkey BS or CUR‘s corny-ass puzzles as the source of all my anger and hatred, yet I’d still replay either of those over SCK. I dig the fact that the plot rests on a bunch of VHS tapes, though. What a throwback.
THE END.
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