Hello! Slight change to the schedule for this: As I have not entirely finished the entire recap (on account of being dead inside and other personal issues), this is going to be posted over the next few days, from the 1st to the 3rd. Let’s go forth!
Oh my GOD I am so excited don’t even touch me I am in the REALMS OF DELIGHT. This is my second-favorite Nancy Drew game, and it was the game that knocked Stay Tuned for Danger from my #1 spot after STFD held it for like 10 years. I love everything about it. I love getting to explore Nancy’s house and hometown, I love the quirky shops, I love all the characters, I love the amount of snooping and sleuthing we do here. There are plenty of legitimate criticisms to be made about this game, however I am choosing to ignore them. LOVE IS BLIND, DUDES.
Even though it’s November, the game also feels very seasonally appropriate for me, as we’re in the middle of an Indian summer and it’s like 80 degrees out every day, so the whole “midsummer in an quaint town” vibe is really working for me here.
Nancy’s hometown of River Heights is holding a “Clues Challenge”, which seems to be a town-wide scavenger hunt — teams have to follow clues (as the name implies) to find a hidden medallion, with the winners getting to put something in the town time capsule. Uh…this seems insanely biased towards Nancy. If I were the other teams, I’d be pissed. Anyway, Nancy’s teamed up with Ned, Bess, and George to form “Team Danger.” Hey, what the hell? We told Ned we wanted to be called the Clue Crew! I swear, that boy doesn’t even listen.
We don’t have a ticket to anywhere this time; instead we’re following this clue Nancy found. She says we should check out the thermostat in the town hall. And off we go!
The action begins pretty much the second we cut to town hall. We’re standing in a room with a mysterious ticking noise (I will not link to Potter Puppet Pals here, because that joke was used so much when I was in high school that I’m still recovering). When we go to investigate, we see a snowflake-shaped ice cube melting on the thermostat…and then the thermostat explodes, and the room goes up in flames. Dude! Not cool at all!
So we’re thrown right into the puzzle, and if we don’t solve it in time, we DIE. This game is hardcore. Remember when the first puzzle of the game was Lukas making us match monsters?
The only way out of the room is through a window above the door, so we have to pile together all the boxes in the room so we can escape.
Then we have to crawl through the hallways, looking for the exit. There aren’t any hints as to where you’re going, you just have to guess and hope you open the right door.
This is not the right door, clearly.
We finally make it outside, where we see these three staring at us judgmentally. It’s also apparently nighttime, which strikes me as odd for some reason. You gotta admit it looks a little suspicious for Nancy to have been crawling around town hall in the middle of the night.
And then there’s this lady, who’s all, “Why did you burn down town hall, Nancy?” “I didn’t!” Nancy bleats, and she’s all, “You heard it here! Nancy Drew DEFINITELY BURNED DOWN TOWN HALL.”
We get pulled aside by perennial Nancy Drew character, Chief McGinnis, to give our statement. We have a couple of options as to how to describe the situation — he’ll ask what color the smoke was (black), if anything about the fire was strange (it was in the middle of fucking Town Hall, Chief McGinnis — just kidding, we’re supposed to note how quickly it spread), and we can either say that we think someone else was in the building with us, or we can note the snowflake-shaped ice cube. We mention the four people we ran into outside — Alexei Markovic, Deidre Shannon (young girl, green sweater), Toni Scallari (glasses), and Brenda Carlton (reporter lady). Hey, that’s a nice reversal from previous games — usually in games with lots of suspects, the male suspects far outnumber the female ones.
With that, we cut to the news report, where Brenda is telling everyone and their mom that Nancy is an arsonist. Wait, what? That’s not true at all! This is fake news! What kind of journalistic standards do they have in River Heights? SAD!
Nancy’s on the phone with Bess, and we’re just getting to talking about the fire, when the doorbell rings. Chief McGinnis is here to arrest us — “My hands are tied, Nancy,” he says. In the background, Bess is still on the phone: “Nancy? What’s happening? Nancy?” It’s a nice detail.
And thus, Nancy Drew is arrested and brought to River Heights police department. Man, is this how it feels to be a suspect at the end of a game?
We get our one phone call, and the only number we have is Carson Drew’s, so I guess we have to call him. He’s not there, which is stupid, because it’s not like he has anything else to do. Maybe he popped over to Africa again for a quick visit. Nancy’s like, “Sup, Dad, I’m in jail. Don’t bother coming back from your vague important lawyer business, I’ll just get myself out, as usual.”
After that, Bess, George, and Ned’s numbers suddenly appear on our Post-It. Let’s call them. They agree to help us, and exposit that we were already using a group wiki (the future is now!) for the Clues Challenge, and now we can use it to share information related to the mystery.
We task Ned with finding the note that lured us to City Hall, so we can use it as evidence. Then we tell him we’re turning the case over to him, which allows us to switch into Ned’s POV. Yeah, so, remember how in the past few games, we were able to occasionally play as other characters? This game has decided to go all in on the idea, with us being able to switch between Nancy, Bess, George, and Ned. The switching is the same as the previous games — we call the other character and announce that we’re passing the case to them, and we’ll switch to their POV. Everyone puts what they’ve learned on the wiki, so we’re all on the same page, but we can’t transfer items in the inventory. Suspects will react differently to different characters, which I think is pretty cool. In a gameplay sense, the POV-switching mechanism is incredibly clunky and frustrating, but it allows for some really fun character interactions, and I’d let these games drag me through hell for a good story and good dialogue, so I don’t mind it.
And with that, now we’re Ned. “Ned, reporting for duty!” he dorks. Like Nancy, we can only see from his POV, and we don’t get to see what he looks like. Bess and George are both playable and rendered as talkable characters.
So this is the map of River Heights. It’s pretty cute! The driving is much easier in this game; we just click on a location and we’ll speed over to it, no navigation required.
Over at town hall, we can’t enter the building from the front — the cops will bust us and we’ll get in trouble — so we have to go around the side. We find the burned note in the parking lot, and Ned will notice that there’s an open window, but it’s too high up to reach.
So we drop off the note for Nancy, then call her to let her know it’s here, which will switch us back into Nancy’s POV.
Chief McGinnis is all like, “So sorry we had to arrest you, Nancy! Here, have the run of the police station and solve your own arson case to make up for it.” I swear. He blah blahs about how Nancy is a model citizen and therefore he doesn’t see the point in keeping us locked up in a cell (like a real criminal, heaven forbid). He meaningfully tells us not to let him catch us messing around the station, but he never leaves his office for the rest of the game, so whatever.
So here’s the police evidence board. Our sidekicks will drop evidence off to us throughout the game, and we can pin it under a corresponding suspect. We can then call Chief McGinnis when we think we’ve solved the case — or at least exonerated Nancy — and he’ll let us go. Obviously, that won’t happen for a while yet.
We also have a care package from Hannah, which we can dip into for candy whenever we feel like it. Wow, jail in River Heights seems like a pretty sweet deal.
Poking around a little further, we find a book about how to investigate arson — handy for us! — as well as the police computer and an evidence analyzer. We’ll be using all of these.
We also pass by Chief McGinnis’s door, and hear him reaming some rookie out for losing the key to the evidence locker. “Where did you see it last? Pancake City? I don’t recall Pancake City being part of your beat!” he yells. Hee! Hey, man, I’ve heard Pancake City is in a growing state of disrepair and the crime rate is increasing rapidly.
(“Flip Pancake City over if you have to! YOU DID NOT JUST ASK ME IF THAT WAS A PUN.” Ha! Arresting us aside, I’m starting to like Chief McGinnis.)
Now that we’re free of our cell, we can use the station phones to call our friends. Love how the River Heights police just lets suspects use their equipment and wander around the station! No wonder they need Nancy to solve all their crimes for them. Anyway, so we call George and put her in charge of finding the key at Pancake City.
And now we’re George! She’s meant to be watching Nancy’s house and dog-sitting Togo, so whenever we switch over to her, we’ll start here.
Dig Nancy’s fancy-ass house, damn. Oh, well, maybe I could have a house like that if I lived in a white bread suburb in the middle of nowhere.
We drive to Pancake City, but the key’s not there. We ask where the cop went, and we retrace his steps to this antique store.
Oh hey, it’s one of our suspects! What up, Alexei! Alexei Markovic is the cranky proprietor of this antique shop, and he’s…he’s a little weird. We ask if he’s seen our cop, and Alexei muses that yes, yes he has…and the cop left something behind. Did he leave it behind to torment Alexei? Perhaps not, and yet the object does! It taunts him, for he cannot figure it out! It is on the new arrivals shelf, MOCKING him! Ooookay.
I am confused as to whether or not the cop was pawning something that happened to have the key in it, or if Alexei is being over-the-top confused over why he would leave a key behind. Anyway, so this is a puzzle. The key is trapped under the center of the wheel, and we have to get all the bars to retract so the middle’s exposed. It’s one of those moving-one-moves-the-others, so we click on the bars in the right order to pull them all back, and grab the key. “I won!” George says, weirdly. George, this isn’t a competition.
This vial is free, so let’s grab it, shall we?
Let’s see if we can talk to Alexei about anything. “Are you the Alexei from the old stories around here?” George asks. Intriguing! We gush that he was the original kid detective — the pre-Nancy, the OG Hardy Boy — but he gets all salty and snaps that that was a long time ago and he doesn’t want to talk about it. Oooh.
So how about that fire, huh? Alexei snips that he’s as in the dark as anyone else about it, and with that, the conversation ends. HMMM.
So we go deliver the key to Nancy, and you know what? I am in the mood for some ice cream. Let’s go to Scoop! It’s quite the happening place; it’s run by Toni, one of our suspects, and another suspect, Deirdre, is hanging out in the front. Bess has also parked herself here to spy on them.
Let’s say hi to Deirdre. I am trying to play it cool here, because I don’t want to embarrass myself, but goddamn do I love Deirdre. She is far and away my favorite suspect to have ever graced these games. She might be my favorite character in general. She spends this entire game shitting on Nancy and her friends and trying to steal Ned, and it’s fabulous.
“I thought you’d be jailin’ it up with that firebug friend of yours,” Deirdre chirps as we approach. “Shouldn’t you be baking her a cake with a saw in it or something?” “Hi, Deedee,” George deadpans. “Deir-dre,” Deirdre corrects. “I know it’s got that tricky second syllable, but I figured it out by age two. Don’t give up, you’ll get there.”
God, I love her.
Deirdre snarks her way through our conversation and refuses to give any information about her whereabouts on the day of the fire, apart from insisting she didn’t set it. Sounds legit to me!
We can also ask her about Alexei, and she’s like, “Ugh, old people.” She thinks Alexei should’ve been arrested years ago, but won’t tell us for what. HMM.
Let’s say hi to Bess. She’s keeping an eye on Deirdre, and plans to go through her stuff the second Deirdre steps away from the table. The trouble is, Deirdre isn’t showing any signs of going anywhere. Bess asks us to try and get Deirdre to go away. Okay, let’s try it:
“Hey, Deirdre, would you like to go for a walk somewhere?”
“No.”
“Okay. Good talk.” Hee. George, you didn’t even try.
“That didn’t look like it worked,” Bess says. “Brilliant observation. I see why you’re the one doing the stakeout,” George snaps back. Everyone is such an asshole in this game, and I love it.
The correct solution here is to use Ned; however, somewhat irritatingly, I didn’t realize that you can’t switch from one of Nancy’s friends to the other — you have to switch to Nancy, and then call the person you want to change to. That’s not annoying or inconvenient at all. So I call Ned, but all we can do is have a quick chat about the case with him. He suggests that the culprit didn’t want to just burn down town hall, they were also trying to kill Nancy. Creepy! I feel like Ned is a little too casual about suggesting someone was trying to murder his girlfriend, but then again, I guess he’s probably used to it by this point.
So now we can swing by the police station and drop off the evidence key. Let’s call Nancy, and talk to her a bit before handing the case over. We ask about the fire, and Nancy muses that the fire spread really quickly — “Whoever set that fire knew what they were doing.”
We tell her about our talk with Deirdre; Nancy is of the opinion that while Deirdre hates her, she doesn’t really have a reason to burn down town hall. On the other hand, she’s been trying to bring Nancy down “for years.” One of the things that’s fascinating about this game is that we’re dropped into a cast of characters who have known Nancy for ages, instead of just meeting her when we arrive on the scene. They don’t do as much with this opportunity for backstory as they could, but it leads to some interesting dynamics and motives later on.
Deirdre, by the way, was introduced in the Girl Detective series, which ran from 2004 to 2012. Those were the Nancy Drew books I (mostly) grew up with — I had a bunch of my mom’s old yellow covers, but the Girl Detective books were the ones I would buy at the bookstore whenever I saw them. Deirdre’s slightly more obnoxious in the books than she is here — the game makes her very enjoyably snarky, with some good zingers, and she’s even helpful at some points. The books, on the other hand, tend to shy away from making any of Nancy’s enemies sympathetic, so Deirdre’s generically rude and jealous of Nancy, and she throws incredibly lame insults at her that Nancy just shakes off.
Anyway, so in order to give Bess a chance to snoop through Deirdre’s stuff, we need our “secret weapon.” “I’ll talk to him,” Nancy promises. It’s totally Ned. Ned! Come let us use your body for our mystery!
Wait, just kidding, we can still talk to some more of our suspects as George. We go back over to the antique store and ask Alexei about Deirdre. He opines that her parents are awful, money-obsessed people. “What are the chances that they’re going to have a non-tedious, non-awful daughter?” Clearly Alexei has never met Deirdre, because then he would know that she is absolutely non-tedious and non-awful. Well, okay, she’s a little awful, but in an amazing way.
Upon exiting the antique shop, we can now see this news van parked outside. News, huh?
Say hi to Brenda! Her design is kind of interesting; something about her really reminds me of a Sim, compared to the other characters in this game. Brenda, like Deirdre, is also a character taken from the books (Alexei and Toni are not, as far as I can tell) — she appeared in the Nancy Drew Files series. She and Deirdre filled the same role in their respective series — Nancy’s enemy, who’s only mean to Nancy because she’s jealous — so it’s kind of weird that they’re both in this game. Anyway, George asks Brenda to put it on the news that Nancy’s innocent, and Brenda snipes that she can’t do that. Well…I mean, she’s overly gleeful about shooting George down, but Brenda’s not wrong. You can’t just hijack the news to start a “Free Nancy” campaign!
That said, Brenda’s not exactly in the business of telling the truth, either, as we saw when Nancy was arrested. She chirps that this makes such a good story — the girl detective falling from grace! The town turning its back on her! Ooh, she doesn’t even have to try and make it dramatic. George asks if she’s interested in seeing justice done, to which Brenda deadpans, “No. I’m a reporter.” Heh.
Well, would Brenda want something bad to happen to Nancy? “On the record or off the record?” she snarks. Off the record: Brenda thinks Nancy is in big trouble, and in way over her head. On the record: “Well, gosh, she’s just another example of what makes this town so special!”
I gotta say: as someone who is simultaneously drawn to and repulsed by twee, charming, Anne of Green Gables-type stories, I love that this game never loses sight of Nancy as the sympathetic protagonist, while also acknowledging how fucking irritating and corny she can be.
Brenda refuses to tell us what she was doing at town hall, sniping that she’s already given her statement to the police. Well, Nancy’s locked up inside the station, so we might be able to get our hands on that anyway. Then she starts needling George, trying to get us to talk shit about Nancy. Brenda says she knows plenty about the case, as she’s been all over it — writing, broadcasting, microblogging. Microblogging! The future is now! I wonder if she and Dr. Craven follow each other on Twitter. “This is the biggest thing to happen here since old man Crowley’s will was found,” she says. That confirms Titusville is now River Heights, or at least very close by. Nice continuity. (Although I guess it’s worth mentioning that the real Titusville is in Pennsylvania, while River Heights is in Illinois. But whatever.)
Brenda’s willing to tell us what tips she’s received on the case, if we give her details about Nancy. Naturally, she doesn’t give us any useful information, while also twisting everything we say: “Has Nancy been known to skirt the law when she’s on a case?” Brenda asks. “No!” George says, even though that is totally a lie. “So she just flagrantly breaks the law. Got it.” Hee! I mean…she’s not wrong. So now we’ve just dug Nancy’s hole even deeper, and we didn’t even get any clues out of it. Nice going, George.
Back at Nancy’s house, we can poke through her stuff. We find a book called On the Case. Oooh, maybe it’ll help us be better girl detectives! There’s a chapter about arson, which gives tips on what to look for and how to proceed with our clues. It’s useful if you like…actually try to solve these mysteries instead of using a walkthrough. I don’t have confidence in my abilities, okay 🙁
Oh, and it’s a picture of Ned. What a dreamboat.
Hey, what’s this behind the picture?
God, Ned, could you be any more fucking corny? Sometimes I have to question my love for him.
Okay, so let’s call Nancy and go back to her. We have the evidence locker key now, and we find Nancy’s phone and keys; her lock-picking kit (way to look innocent there, Nancy); hints for the computer password; and a Krolmeister user manual.
The user manual gives us the rules for this puzzle, which we need to solve to unlock one of the drawers in the locker. We want to light up the green connectors between the triangles, as well as the colored bars beneath them. Pushing in one of the tabs will light up some of the connectors and turn off some of them, so you have to click them in the right order to get them all lit up. It’s a pretty classic puzzle, not too hard if you’ve played these games before. Inside this drawer, we find Nancy’s booking report.
“Hair: Titian.” Ha! Also, dang, Nancy is pretty tall. It turns out the police went through Nancy’s house, and found traces of gasoline on Nancy’s clothes. Oh dear.
We can also read the transcript of the 911 call, and find out that Toni reported the fire. Our arson book told us that sometimes the perpetrator is the one that reports the crime, to throw suspicion off of themselves. HMM. Also, Toni said that she saw more that one person in the building. HMMMMM!
We can now also get into the computer, but there’s nothing we can do with this just yet.
We have the SD card with everyone’s statements on it, and we can play it on one of the recorders. Nancy’s statement will play whatever answers you gave to Chief McGinnis after the fire. The rest of the statements range from helpful, to, uh…not. Let’s start with Deirdre.
McGinnis: “Did you notice anything strange about the fire?”
Deirdre: “Yeah, the strangest part was that the building was ON FIRE. Also, it took a really long time for the fire department to arrive.”
McGinnis: “Do you really want to start down that path with me, Shannon?”
Hee. I love her.
Toni Scallari isn’t very helpful, either, although she very creepily says that whoever was responsible for the fire will pay for it, and she’ll see to that personally. Jesus Christ, Toni, it’s not like they burned down your house. Toni is also running for town council, and claims she was canvassing the area.
Brenda’s statement is about as charmingly sociopathic as we could expect from her; she goes on about how awesome the smoke looked with her lighting setup. She was in the area doing her usual beat for the evening news. Oh, and she thinks Nancy is guilty. Just in case you didn’t get that before!
The final person at the scene was Alexei Markovic, who grouches that he was just out for a walk, and does he need a reason to be out for a walk, huh? It’s a free country! Anyway, as a former kid detective, he’s noticed a lot more than our other suspects. He says that the fire shouldn’t have spread in the first place, as town hall has a sprinkler system — but he doesn’t think anyone set the fire on purpose. Who would want to wreck town hall?! What if they weren’t after town hall, Alexei? Respect the sheer amount of attempts on her life that Nancy’s escaped!
Listening to the statements will give us some idea of where to look for clues next. We call Bess and tell her that we need to look into town hall’s sprinkler system, as it may have been tampered with. We also have to see if we can find any trace of an accelerant. I really love how (mostly) realistic the mystery solving in this game is — I guess for most people all this phone-calling and note-taking isn’t super thrilling, but All the President’s Men is one of my favorite movies, and I’m pretty sure that long phone call scene with Robert Redford like, shaped me as a person.
Aaaand I fucked up, because we can’t pass the case to Bess (she’s stuck at Scoop, spying on Deirdre). Okay, to George! We’ll need that glass vial she took from Alexei’s shop to collect the accelerant sample and test it.
We go back to town hall to look for clues. As before, we can’t go through the front, so we have to find a way into that window on the side. There’s a fallen shutter that we can click on, which will put it under the window, and we can climb in. The interior is all burnt-out, very spooky.
We have to find the “point of origin” of the fire, which we know was the thermostat. We use the vial on the thermostat, which collects a sample of…something…and we can hand that off to Nancy to test it.
Hey, let’s go talk to Alexei some more. I feel like we were really getting to be friends, back there!
“Salutations,” he deadpans at us. We can ask about Brenda, and he snipes that she was in here pestering him with questions, and now we’re just pestering him about the questions that he was previously pestered with, so why don’t we just fuck off. Maybe not that last part exactly. George is like, “Jesus, you’re cranky,” and that sets him off on a rant about how he was happy once, he had family and friends and a cat and a girlfriend, and then he lost it all because of The Man. Ominously, he warns us about the dangers of speaking truth to power. That’s quite a heavy phrase for a Nancy Drew game.
Actually, for someone who’s all cranky and hates questions, Alexei is real willing to talk about why he’s such a crotchety old guy. He tells us that he used to be the best kid detective on the block, until one day he made it his mission to put a corrupt politician, J.P. Bennington, behind bars. Am I meant to associate that name with, say, J.P. Morgan? Anyway, the Benningtons are the most powerful family in River Heights — they run this shitty small town, and J.P. Bennington smeared Alexei’s name and reputation to hell and back, then ran off to go be a judge in the big city. And now Alexei’s just a sad old man who runs an antique shop in lieu of being able to see the world. Man. Now I’m sad.
So anyway, good talking to you Alexei, thanks for sharing your tragic backstory, now let’s play a game. We’re supposed to click all the numbers in order, as fast as we can, and beat Alexei’s time. It’s tricky — the numbers don’t stay in the same place every time you play, so you can’t memorize their positions — but I got it on my third try. The puzzle box pops open and we get a key. Later, Alexei!
Back at the station, Nancy can use the police analyzer to test the sample from town hall. “I need to figure out which accelerant matches these figures,” she says. I’ve noticed this is something these later games do quite a bit, which is that there’s more automatic dialogue to guide you through the game — Nancy will have conversations with suspects where the player can’t pick everything she says, or she’ll flat-out say what has to be done in order to progress during a puzzle. I think this was done to balance out the play time, as the later games are much longer in general, so there’s less time to allot towards wandering around wondering what to do next. That said, I do think it’s a bit of a cop-out, as the whole point of these games is to, you know, be the detective.
Anyway, we’ll get back to finding this accelerant. In the meantime, let’s go back to trying to get information out of Deirdre. You’ll recall that neither Bess nor George can get information out of her, but we do have one person left on our team.
Sup, Ned! Would you be cool doing the things a prostitute does, minus the money?
Ned pretends not to know that Deirdre has a big ol’ crush on him, then is like, “Yeah, she’s pretty into me.” Heh. I lowkey ship it, I won’t lie. Nancy insists that she’s fine with Ned flirting information out of Deirdre — “I’m not the jealous type, and also, I am in jail and would like to get out.” A very fair point. Ned agrees, and thus, let us assume Ned’s identity and go escort Deirdre about town.
Up next: the adventures of Ned du Jour. Everyone provides their alibis…IN ASHES. Oh, and Bess is a human disaster.
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