Previously on Nancy Drew: Shadow at the Water’s Edge: On her very first day in Japan, Nancy’s managed to piss off the entire ryokan she’s staying at. Though we’re presumably just here for a vacation, mysterious accidents are happening around the ryokan, and everyone is acting real sketch about it. Throw in a dead mother, and Nancy Drew is itching to get up in everyone’s business about what’s going on here.
Last night, we saw the mysterious ryokan ghost. Despite her extensive experience with suspicious household accidents attributed to ghosts, Nancy was still like, “Hmm, maybe I just hallucinated that.” So the next day dawns, we go to our job at the English school, then come back to the ryokan. We promptly get a call from Bess and George, who tell us that they have just happened to meet some girl at the technology expo, who she says she grew up at the Ryokan Hiei. Nancy asks if that’s Yumi, the older Shimizu sister who ditched the ryokan. Bess and George confirm that it is, and Nancy muses that she ought to go down to the expo so she can ask Yumi some questions. “I may have found a mystery,” she tells them. Bess: “Shocking!” Hee.
We can tell them everything weird we’ve seen so far, starting with the weird shadow outside our room. George thinks that there must be a logical explanation; Bess is less rational: “If we were being chased by a dinosaur, you would be too busy debating about the fossil record to run away. Where is your sense of panic?!” Also hee. Nevertheless, George and Nancy agree that it was probably some sort of trick of the light.
Nancy asks if they’ve seen any robotic cats at the expo, and apparently robo-cats are all the rage in Nancy Drew’s Japan, because Bess and George are like, “Yeah, they’re everywhere! Everyone has one!” Nancy tells them that Suki won’t let us get close to the desk, and George says that Suki must be in guard mode. Bess and George agree to ask around the expo for a way to turn guard mode off, and then we can snoop with impunity. Thanks, guys!
Let’s talk to Miwako. We tell her that we tore the screen in our room, and when we did, we saw the ryokan ghost! Dun dun dun! Miwako blows us off and says that tearing the screen sometimes creates optical illusions. “I’m sure it was just your imagination.”
Did you just say what I think you said, Miwako? YOU’RE ON MY LIST NOW, GIRL.
Let’s change the subject. Can Miwako translate this old article about her dead mom for us?
Yeah, Miwako does not like that, at all. She yells at us and kicks us out of the ryokan, and the game ends. Whoops! Okay, so now we know, tactlessly bringing up Miwako’s dead mother is a no. I feel like maybe it shouldn’t have taken a game over for Nancy to figure that out. So now I just have to be super careful to not accidentally click that conversation option for the rest of the game D:
Let’s go talk to Rentaro. We tell him that we tried to break into Miwako’s desk, and by “break into Miwako’s desk” I mean “play with Suki”, but she’s pretty aggressive. Once again, we find out that she’s in guard mode, and there are commands we can give her to make her switch modes. Not that Rentaro remembers the commands, because that would be helpful.
But! Lucky for us, Bess and George ran into the inventor of the Suki cats. Wait, I thought Rentaro built Suki for Miwako? I mean, I guess he could’ve just put Suki together from a kit, but still. Well, whatever. Apparently the inventor was all hitting on George, and said he would share his secrets with “the like-minded” (sounds like he’s inviting her to his cult dungeon or something), so if she solves a puzzle for him, he’ll give her the codes. And by “she”, of course we mean Nancy.
While we wait for Bess and George to send over the puzzle, let’s go see how Takae’s doing. Is marinating in all of her ~tradition~ treating her well? Takae tells us that today we are going to learn the art of origami. It is a very important tradition to keep, because if we forget our traditions, we forget who we are. And once something is forgotten, it is gone forever. Takae knows they sell origami books, right?
Anyway, time for “Nancy fucks up three steps into the puzzle and Takae yells at us”, round two! What we have to do is match the folding directions with the finished origami piece. There’s a book that has the answers off to the side. Once we’re done with that, Takae will gush that Nancy has many talents. Hell yeah we do, Takae!
The sauna is open to women now, so let’s go check it out.
Seems pretty normal. Let’s keep walking, shall we?
THEN THE LIGHTS GO OUT. Aw, hell no. Is there an option to back out of here?
WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT THING BACK THERE
WHAT THE FUCK
NO THANKS I’M GOOD
So fucking SADAKO came out of nowhere and tried to jump us in the sauna, shattering the mirror. But then the lights come back on, and that creepy motherfucker is nowhere to be found. What the fuck, man! I for one am a little scared! I think maybe these ghosts aren’t in my imagination, Miwako.
We can look around the room for clues, but all we find is a pachinko card, which we will need later, and Nancy will notice that some tiles are missing from the wall in the hot springs room.
Clearly, our suspects have some explaining to do. Once again, Miwako tries to convince us that we’re crazy, and tells us that maybe we should get more sleep. Stop trying to tell me how to live, Miwako.
We want to go down to the expo and talk to Yumi. The expo is at Matsue, and the nearest station to the ryokan is Misawa. We have to look at the rail map to find all the connection points, then click on the correct transfer when we get off at a stop. The order we want is Misawa -> Nagoya -> Otsu -> Aomori -> Kochi -> Tochigi -> Seto -> Niigata -> Fuji -> Iga -> Matsue.
When we get off at Matsue station, Nancy sees a piece of paper with instructions on opening a Japanese puzzle box. “This looks important!” she chirps. Does it? Does it really, Nancy?
Some very excellent, appropriate music plays over the expo scenes, and a few other locations as well — it’s a mix of traditional Japanese music with a bouncy, J-poppy backing beat, but with bizarre electronic distortion running through it. It’s great for the setting of a technology expo, and is just unsettling enough to give the game an extra creepy factor.
Tickets for the expo are all sold out, but that’s okay. We don’t need to go inside, because Yumi works at the bento stand right outside the train station. Hi, Yumi! Man, her hair is tragic.
So Miwako is the dutiful, sad, slightly dour younger sister, and now we meet Yumi, who’s frivolous, hyperactive, and obsessed with fashion. Ah, juxtaposition. Like everyone in this game, Yumi’s accent is pretty bad. She has pretty much zero accent, except for the occasional L/R swap when the voice actress remembers to do it. On the other hand, I prefer to to Takae’s…neverending…pauses…between…her…words…that really…just emphasize…how shitty the accent actually is.
Yumi talks at about a mile a minute, with tact that rivals Nancy’s: “Are you going to order? What’s your agenda here, stranger?” We introduce ourselves, and she recognizes us as being Bess and George’s friend. Then she promptly pulls us around the counter to learn how to make bento. Dammit, Yumi, I didn’t even volunteer to do this chore! I didn’t even get to ask you about your dead mother!!!
Yumi’s got some errands to run, so she’s going to leave us, a foreigner who doesn’t speak a word of Japanese, to run the bento stand while she’s gone. As you do! I actually really love this bento puzzle — I love a lot of the puzzles in this game, actually, bar all of Rentaro’s stupid math ones. Basically you get a 3×3 square for each order, and the order list will show you what goes in each box. The trick is that some of the clues are incomplete, or the boxes are empty, or you get slips of 1×3 or 2×3 orders that overlap with the 3×3 grid, and you have to figure out where they overlap, and use process of elimination to figure out what goes in the blank boxes.
Yumi comes back once we’re done, and we ask her about the ryokan. “I’m hoping for an insider’s opinion,” Nancy says. “Oh, I get it. You want the dirt on the situation.” Heh. Yumi is super hella passive-aggressive about telling us anything, and twists our arm into doing another errand for her first. UGH, YUMI. We have to pick up some more bento boxes from her apartment, so Yumi hands her keys over to us, a girl she just met five minutes ago.
So we can’t ask about the hauntings until we come back, but we can talk about some other stuff. Let’s ask about Takae. Yumi says that Takae thinks that this whole sweet lolita-bento shop thing is a phase, and one day Yumi will take up her rightful place at the ryokan and bring honor to them all. But this isn’t a phase, man, this is who she is!
Moving on: what’s up with Rentaro? Yumi opines that he’s not too bad, even though he’s a massive geek. “What do you think of Rentaro?” She says that in this kind of weird voice, like she thinks we’re gonna confess to wanting his body or something. “There’s something a little weird about him,” Nancy says. “Yeah, that weird thing is his personality,” Yumi says. HEE! One thing I love about this game is that you can really feel that the characters have history with each other and know each other well. Yumi says that despite Rentaro’s weirdness, he’s her “fake little brother” and she likes him. Apparently when he first met Yumi and Miwako, when they were kids, Miwako punched him in the face. Ah, love at first punch.
We try to suggest to Yumi that she and Miwako are close, but Yumi knows what we’re doing: “That doesn’t sound like the impression you’d get from Miwako. What are you trying to ask?” Dang, Yumi’s pretty sharp. She could totally be a girl detective. Ooh, she could be our sidekick! Anyway, we tell her that Miwako seems pretty beaten down by life, and Yumi’s like, “Probably because working at the ryokan is sucking out her soul.” Heh. Well, if Miwako gets sick of the ryokan and decides to ditch it, and Yumi never comes back, what happens to the ryokan? Yumi doesn’t give a single shit about the ryokan, and thinks it’s pretty weird that we do. Nancy says she’s just naturally curious, and Yumi ominously warns us that she’d “backburner” that curiosity if she were us — because Nancy seems nice, and it sure would be a shame if something ~happened. Well, she doesn’t say that last part, but it’s implied.
We can’t talk to her about anything else, so let’s go to her apartment. Like in the five minutes after we leave her, Yumi texts us a bunch of pictures of her, Bess, and George. They’re pretty cute, although I can’t believe Bess and George are out taking purikura instead of helping us solve a mystery. After we saved Bess from a psychotic talent agent, too, and got them off a deserted island. Some people ain’t loyal.
We arrive at Yumi’s apartment, where we can pick up the bento boxes and also go through all of Yumi’s personal stuff. She really should’ve known better than to give us those keys. Her apartment is very pink. I dig it more than I probably should.
We find the bento boxes right over by her sink. And now, to snoop with impunity!
We find a couple of weird books lying around: one on shadow puppets, and this book by Savannah Woodham. Hey, Savannah’s that ghost hunter lady who cleansed the ryokan. What’s Yumi doing with her book? Inside the book is Savannah’s business card, so now we have her phone number. We can also see that there’s a chapter on the Ryokan Hiei, but when we flip to that page, it’s been torn out. Suspicious!
There’s this shelf with two frogs on it. The right front has a code on its bottom that we’ll need later. The left frog is hiding this iiiiinteresting letter from Kasumi to someone named Maryanne. Apparently Yumi and Miwako used to fight quite a bit as kids. Suspicious! Siblings never fight!
Let’s look in Yumi’s closet. I hate myself for liking that middle pink dress as much as I do. I like clothes that look like my grandma’s wallpaper, what can I say? Anyway, we can check the little box off to the left, and with the help of our dictionary, find out that Yumi has dye among her sewing supplies. That doesn’t seem too suspicious to me, but I guess we’ll have to see. Under the dresses is a DVD. Cool, let’s watch it.
Um, okay…
O…kay…
OH FUCK ME IT’S THAT CHICK FROM THE BATHROOM AW HELL NO
Okay, so Yumi is just hanging out with a DVD of The Ring, that’s totally normal. We can also try to click on some of the icons on her TV-slash-computer, but we’ll need a password to open them.
We bring Yumi’s bento boxes back to her, and in thanks, she gives us a phone charm shaped like onigiri. Aw, super kawai-i. “What’s it do?” Nancy asks, like she’s never seen a keychain in her life. “Come to think of it, it doesn’t really do anything. Get a job, phone charm!” Yumi says. Hee! I think it might not be for everyone, but the awkward, non-sequitur humor in this game is right up my alley.
We tell Yumi that we dig her pink apartment, and I am not lying about that at all, personally. Yumi gushes that it’s tiny and overpriced, but she loves being away from the ryokan. Fair enough. When we ask about Savannah Woodham’s book, she says she doesn’t believe in all that ghost hunting stuff. That doesn’t explain why she has the book, then, but okay.
Then we compliment her on her outfit, and she tells us that she makes them herself — “You can’t get something this cool in a store!” You can’t? I think there’s like, three lolita stores in my city alone. Anyway, this starts Yumi gushing on a super-cool app (“program”, whatever) she has that lets you try on clothes virtually. Oh my God, like Cher’s closet in Clueless? I have longed for that closet ever since I was little. Nancy thinks that sounds neat: “I don’t usually have time to keep up with the latest fashion trends.” “I could sorta tell, but I couldn’t tell if you were going for an irony thing with your outfit.” HEE! Although to be fair, mom jeans and ugly ’90s clothes will be back in a big way, 7 years after this game. Nancy was ahead of the curve! Yumi offers to let us use the program on her TV-slash-computer, and she’ll give us the password if we do another round of bento making for her.
Before we go back, we should ask her about more of the weird stuff we’ve found in the apartment. I love this, by the way — we meet Yumi and she seems completely upbeat and uninvolved in the weird things going on at the ryokan, and then we poke through her apartment and find out that she’s just as mixed up in all this spooky shit as everyone else. I think this game actually captures the atmosphere Secrets Can Kill was going for very well — eerie, creepy goings-on hidden under a veneer of cheerful bento shop workers and hotel receptionists.
Anyway, Yumi seems caught off-guard by our mention of the shadow puppet book, and blusters that it’s Miwako’s, not hers — she doesn’t even want it; Takae gave it to her. Oookay. Nancy wonders if the tricks in the book could be used to project a shadow from farther away. “Say…a balcony?” OOOOH. We also bring up that weird DVD, and she shrieks, “Why would you watch that?” She assures that it’ll be fine, we just have to be “very cautious.” Seven daysssss~*~*~
We try to broach the topic of the ryokan again, and once again Yumi blows off the whole concept of tradition. She’s like, “The past is stupid and we can’t learn anything from it!” Wow, that is an incredibly awkward line to put in the mouth of a Japanese character. Then! Then, then, then, Nancy “Queen of Tact” Drew asks, “Can you tell me about what happened with your mother?” Oh my God, Nancy. Yumi snaps that she is never going to talk about it, so we should just drop it.
Having successfully pissed Yumi off, the conversation ends and we can go back to her apartment. We get this bizarro text message, which is just a photo of a face, and an…egg? It’s unclear.
We can’t really do much in Yumi’s apartment. I could have sworn I had a screencap of the passcode screen but I guess I don’t. Basically it’s a bunch of colored balls, and you have to use the shape in Yumi’s drawing and slot it over the group of balls pictured, and that’s it. That just takes us to the avatar game, where we can dress up webdolls to look like Bess and George, and then put their pictures in our phone. That’s about it.
When we go back to Yumi, the only option left is to ask her about the newspaper article. Well, it’s pissed off every member of the Shimizu family plus Rentaro so far, surely fourth time’s the charm?
Yeah, Yumi’s not too thrilled that we have it, either. Okay, welp, let’s go back to the ryokan.
Upon our return to the ryokan, Miwako tells us that we got a delivery. It’s a note with our name on it, but we’ll look at it after we talk to her. First off, now that we’ve heard Yumi’s thoughts on tradition (lame) and history (full of dead people), let’s ask Miwako how she really feels about the ryokan. We ask if she even really wants to manage it, and Miwako dodges the question, saying merely that she has to. She doesn’t think anyone would sabotage it — even Yumi and Rentaro rely on its income. “What about someone else, on the outside?” Nancy asks. “No. There is no one else,” Miwako says. Another excellently creepy thing about this game: the slightly incestuous vibe of a close-knit family keeping a huge secret from an outsider, and their own isolation leaving them with no one to turn to while this secret tears them apart. If these games were darker, the Shimizus would probably be cannibals or something.
We do get to open Miwako up to a little rant, though: she feels unappreciated by Takae, who spends all her time being salty that Yumi doesn’t want to take over the ryokan, and never acknowledges that Miwako is the one actually running it. Aw, poor Miwako. She stops herself before she really gets going, though: “This is nothing you want to hear about.” Au contraire, Miwako, I want to know all the drama! She snaps that Yumi better come back and run the ryokan when she’s done with her whole Shibuya fashion phase; when we ask why Yumi doesn’t want to, Miwako grumbles that their mom always said Yumi was a free spirit, which is “a nice way of saying that Yumi’s selfish and doesn’t want to help.” YIKES! Miwako’s got a lot of bottled-up rage there, doesn’t she?
We ask if she and Yumi ever got along, and Miwako tells us that they did, briefly, right after their mom died. Nevertheless, for the most part, Yumi is a dick. Oh dear.
Let’s go hang with Rentaro. We can ask about the breaking mirror, and he tells us that he made a hairline crack in it a few years ago, so it was bound to break soon. He’s glad, we’re not hurt, though — mirrors breaking is scary, for MORE REASONS THAN ONE! And by that he means like, the mirror breaking is scary, and the shards of glass are also scary! It’s not scary because you just saw a corpse in the reflection or anything! Sure, Rentaro. Sure.
We ask what his thoughts on Yumi are, and Rentaro seems to like her. “She’s like the older sister you wish you had,” he says. I mean, she’s the older sister Miwako actually has, and Miwako seems less than thrilled with that, but okay.
It’s been a while, so let’s call Bess and George. Also, I totally just realized that that envelope at the desk must have been the puzzle, and I totally haven’t done it. Awkward! That’s okay, we can still talk about bunches of things, such as the creepy mirror girl. George is all pumped over our mystery; Bess is scared. Nancy says, “Actually, I have to agree with Bess here.” Man, you know it’s serious business when Nancy’s scared. If you think this shit is so cool, George, how come you aren’t down here solving it, huh? George tells us that it’s possible to throw a false image on glass, but it’s tricky, and could break the mirror. Hmm, is that what happened in the baths?
We also tell them about finding Savannah Woodham’s book about haunted places, but there’s a chapter missing. “What’s the missing chapter?” George asks. Then: “Nope, strike that. That is a dumb question.” Hee. Again, your mileage may vary, but I really like how meta the dialogue is in these later games. They advise us to call Savannah, so that’s our next step.
Okay, so we don’t know Savannah, but I didn’t want to leave her out of our super-cute paper doll adventures! So we call her, but we’re cockblocked by her snippy assistant, Logan. We tell him we want to talk to her about her book, and he chirps, “Oh, I’m so glad you called! It’s been like three days since I’ve gotten to hang up on anyone. I wonder if I’m still good at it.” Heh. He does, however, let it slip that Savannah’s at the technology expo. Who isn’t at that tech expo, honestly.
We call Bess and George back and tell them that Savannah’s assistant takes his job way too seriously, and we need a distraction. George is like, “I volunteer Bess’s feminine wiles!” So they’re going to call us back once Logan and his dick are distracted.
Let’s check in with Takae, as it’s been a while. We tell her that we’ve gone to Yumi’s bento stand and ask if Takae’s ever been. “I taught her to cook. I should not have to sit on the train to try her bento,” Takae huffs. Oh my God, why is Takae my grandmother? She tells us that Kasumi didn’t want to run the ryokan either at Yumi’s age, and that Yumi will come around eventually. Interesting! Still, we point out that since Miwako’s already here running the ryokan anyway, is it really such a big deal that Yumi take it over? “You don’t understand. That is not what Kasumi wants,” Takae snaps. Kasumi, as in…the dead mom? Uh, what is Takae trying to say here? Takae ominouses that ghosts are real, and Kasumi’s is still here — “She’s trapped, and she’s scared, and she’s angry.” Eesh. Okay, let’s leave the slightly senile old woman alone.
George calls us and tells that Logan has been successfully lured away by Bess, so we can call Savannah now. She picks up, sounding very Southern: “Let me guess, you’re that Nancy girl who’s been drivin’ my assistant to distraction and back this last week.” Didn’t we just call Logan five minutes ago? I think I was supposed to call him earlier in the game. Whoops! Anyway, Savannah freaks the fuck out when we tell her we’re staying at the Ryokan Hiei, and tells us to get out of there. Nancy’s like, “I can’t leave now, I’m only halfway through the game!” Savannah reluctantly agrees to help.
We tell her about the mirror first, and she tells us that she knows it’s a trick mirror because it broke: “An illusion can only last so long before giving up its secrets.” Well…yeah, being fake is what makes it an illusion. Also, didn’t George say that throwing the image is what broke the mirror? I don’t know. Anyway, Savannah suggests that our culprit broke it on purpose because they knew we’d figure out the trick if we examined the mirror close enough. She figures the shadow we saw could’ve also been faked, which we already knew, but okay.
We find out that Savannah’s at the expo because she’s a tech reporter now. She’s super cagey on why she left the ghost-hunting business, and merely tells us that it’s dangerous. Whatever. I bet way more people have tried to kill Nancy than Savannah. We’re still number one!
Savannah will also agree to translate the article about Kasumi Shimizu for us, so we’ll have to send that over to Logan. Cool beans.
Hmm, can we insensitively bug Miwako about her dead mom some more? No, not really. We try to bring up that Takae believes in ghosts and that we spoke to Savannah, and Miwako just snaps at us to remember that we’re talking about her dead mother. Sorry, Miwako, I guess I’m just used to people falling all over themselves to tell Nancy all about their tragic pasts and then dragging us into their personal problems. Joy Trent could learn a thing or two from Miwako and her severe repression of her feelings!
Our phone rings again, and it’s Logan. He tries to yell at us that ghostbusting is messing with Savannah’s fragile mental health, and Nancy’s like, “But busting makes us feel good!” Logan ominouses that the Ryokan Hiei fucked Savannah up so badly that she gave up ghostbusting and never published her second book. Nancy’s like, “Second book?” and Logan’s like, “Uh, what’s that Savannah? GOTTA GO, NANCY.” Okay, so that’s something to file away for later.
Let’s finally do that puzzle George sent us. I’m just gonna casually throw it in here like it didn’t take me an hour to do, although it’s not very hard — just long. It’s five interlocking Sudoku puzzles, but really they’re all separate except for the middle one, so you just have to solve it five times. I guess the idea of Rentaro giving you all those puzzle books was to prepare you for this one, but if you’ve ever played Sudoku in the newspaper or a magazine in your life, it’s not that hard.
Once that’s done, we wander around the ryokan some more, and we get a ~mysterious~ phone call, with nothing but “creepy static” on the other end. Whatever. It’s probably Logan, the mouth-breather.
Then we go upstairs, and the lights flicker on and off, while the doors open and slam shut.
Then we get to Nancy’s room, and someone’s replaced the “2” on our door with a “4.” And as we know, FOUR IS DEATH. Spoooooky!
Well, shit, I’m not staying up here any longer than I have to. We have to get the article to send to Logan and put the puzzle in an envelope to send back to George. Then we haul ass downstairs to mail them.
When we go back downstairs, we hear another guest — the Williams family, I think this is — yelling at Miwako. Aw, Miwako. I feel her; customer service is the fucking worst. Mr. Williams yells at Miwako for leaving “that thing” in his room; whatever it was, it freaked him and his wife out. He’s leaving, and he wants the ryokan to be shut down! Yikes. He storms out, and Nancy notes that the Williams were the ryokan’s last customers. It’s just us and our suspects from here on out! Spooky.
We offer to help Miwako, but she tells us that the ryokan is beyond help. It was creepy even before “everything happened”, and afterwards…”Why do you think Yumi got out of this place as soon as she could?” Hmm, an acknowledgement that Yumi wasn’t entirely wrong to leave? Intriguing. Miwako wails that we should just find another place to stay. Damn, Miwako, I feel like being asked constantly about your dead mom should have tipped you off that Nancy Drew does not let things go.
And…whoa, hold up, I just had the disturbing realization that Miwako looks like Tina Belcher.
Free yourself from the ryokan, Miwako! Be the strong, sensual woman you are inside!
Up next: We find out what happened to Kasumi Shimizu. Nancy Drew busts ghosts and plays matchmaker.
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