Ah, the new start game screen. I almost forgot about this. So we’re on Tomb of the Lost Queen! It’s a pleasant enough game — it doesn’t really do anything interesting with the ND formula the way the previous few games did, so it gets a little lost in the shuffle when I think about the newer games. The location is cool, though, and it feels classic in the sense that Ancient Egypt is the setting for every edutainment game ever. I almost expected Carmen Sandiego to come bursting out of the shadows.
Somewhat hilariously, for such a lackluster game, it is actually based on THE Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys crossover book, Secrets of the Nile, where Nancy and Frank famously pretended to be married, and they had to make out to protect their cover. That book also had bomb threats and camel rides, so actually, it seems like they just borrowed the setting for this game and nothing else. Fair enough. Someone on the HER development team didn’t ship Frank/Nancy, I’m guessing.
A long time ago, in a desert far, far away…
Background: Sixty years ago, a British expedition found a tomb outside Cairo, rumored to be of ~the Lost Queen~, dun dun dun. A sandstorm buried the tomb, and presumably the expedition, too. For sixty years, the only proof of its existence were the grisly rumors of the team’s demise…
Until an 18-year-old amateur detective comes along to solve the mystery in a day, of course.
Alright! Here we are, tagging along on Kingston University’s archaeological dig. I’m assuming Nancy got this job the way she gets all other jobs that she’s unqualified for, via either nepotism or someone thinking that they need to hire an amateur detective for their archaeology project.
And in the first five minutes of our arrival, a sandstorm blows through the camp. Everyone starts shrieking that IT’S THE CURSE!! and runs away. Our team leader, Professor Jon Boyle, somehow ends up unconscious on the floor.
We cut to speaking with him on the phone, and we exposit about where we are now. The rest of the crew left after the sandstorm, because they’re weak as fuck. It’s just us and a couple of others left. Professor Boyle tells us that he “has reason to believe” he was attacked, not that he’s going to tell us what the reason is. He asks us to stay on the ground and try to find out what’s going on. Nancy protests that she was only here to shadow him (meanwhile, some archaeology grad student is crying into their notes that they lost a research opportunity to a random 18-year-old who’s not even in school), but Professor Boyle’s like, “You’ll do fine! If you can find out who attacked me and also find the lost tomb, that would great! Later!”
Alrighty, so let’s explore our base. Miraculously, Nancy hasn’t lost her luggage on this trip, so we’re armed with clothes, candy, and a dictionary of Egyptian hieroglyphs. Sure, there’s like a 1:1 translation ratio between Ancient Egyptian and Modern English. Just google the glyphs! Also, does Nancy know they speak Arabic in Egypt nowadays?
We also have a book about Egypt’s lost queens, by none other than our bestie, Professor Hotchkiss. I like how Hotchkiss doesn’t really have a field; she just specializes in whatever area of history the game needs her to.
Most of the team has left, but a few of the tent’s stalls are still occupied. Can we go invade their privacy yet? No?
We try peeking into one of the rooms, but this chick yells at us. So let’s go over and meet Lily!
Lily is all shocked that we didn’t run away after the storm. Lily, please. Did the storm try to kill us? Did it try to poison us or knock us out or send us threatening messages? No? Then we’ll be fine. Lily tells us that she’s putting herself in charge of the American team — i.e., us — while the professor is out, and Nancy’s like, “O…kay…did not agree to that, but okay.” Lily correctly points out that someone has to take care of this thousand-year-old archaeological dig site, and maybe that person should be someone who, you know, actually has a degree in this field. Yeah, well, Nancy Drew has a B.A. in being nosy, so there, Lily!
Let’s ask her what happened to Professor Boyle. She didn’t see him get knocked out, but she doesn’t believe it was an attack. Of course she doesn’t.
Then I make the mistake of asking her what that board game in the middle of the room is, which immediately cuts us to playing it. Aw, dammit, I wasn’t ready for this. Okay, let’s see if I know how to do this.
So this game is called Senet, and we click on the sticks to “cast” them. The number of light-colored sticks determines how many spaces your pawn (the light brown Hershey Kiss looking things) can move. There are special squares that let you do certain things, blah blah blah. The goal is to get to the bottom right corner, which clears your piece from the board, and you want to get all your pieces off the board first.
Did I win? Did Lily win? Whatever, I don’t care, and it doesn’t matter, anyway. All you have to do to proceed is play with Lily this one time, and then we can move on. We try to go into Professor Boyle’s bunk area, but Lily stops us. She’s on some kind of power high and snips that she’s Professor Boyle’s sidekick, not us. Wrong, Lily! Professor Boyle told us that he wants us to be nosy and look through all his stuff. You can ask him yourself! “Fine, I will,” she snaps. Oh, dear. We’re not getting off to a good start with her.
We can go into Professor Boyle’s bunk now and look through his stuff. We find this letter from Franklin Rose — of Beech Hill Museum fame — recommending Nancy as an assistant. Understandable, considering how we ran that museum by ourselves because Franklin couldn’t be bothered to appoint a new director or pay any attention to it at all. Actually, with that in mind, I feel like a recommendation from him can’t be worth that much.
We also find this…lighter? Let’s steal it, because why not.
The important thing we want to look through here is Professor Boyle’s notes. He was working on translating the hieroglyphs around the dig site tomb — he thinks the glyphs “strongly suggest” a royal female presence. What, you don’t know, Professor Boyle? You don’t have a dictionary that fluently translates Ancient Egyptian to Modern English?
But when we get to the last page of his notes, we see that they’ve been ripped out! Uh-oh. Could someone have jumped Professor Boyle and stolen his notes?
Our next move is to explore the antiquities tent, where lots of clues and helpful tools are stored. We want to pick up a map of the dig site, a flashlight, a pick, a brush, and a bird tile.
We can also find an…ancient Egyptian phone charm. “I was hoping those existed!” Nancy chirps. Nancy, please, we’re here to solve a centuries-old archaeological mystery.
And of course, Sonny Joon has been here.
We come across this amulet, which has been broken, and we have to put back together. It’s a fairly simple puzzle, and when we’re done, we can see a list of amulets that have been found in the tomb.
Speaking of the tomb, let’s go there!
We can explore a bit — Nancy will find these hieroglyphs on the wall and note that the passage is marked with a jackal symbol at the beginning and end.
But when we use our dictionary on it, it won’t translate! What, are you saying you can’t just Google Translate a 1000+ year old language that uses a completely different alphabet?
We come across a pile of dust in the corner, and Nancy will note that per the site map, this is a spot where some of the amulets have been found. We brush away the dust and find another amulet piece, which attaches onto the cat amulet we fixed earlier.
Hey, who’s that guy?
He introduces himself as, “The Distinguished Dr. Bakhoum,” aka Abdullah, aka some research…archaeologist…dude, who’s along on the dig. He’s not the team leader or anything, he’s just kind of a self-important dick. An important stock character for any Nancy Drew game! He immediately wants to know if Nancy is “very brave or very stupid.” A little bit of both? Nancy says she’s not afraid of the rumored tomb curse, if that’s what he’s asking. After all, we have lots of experience with curses! There was the Curse of Blackmoor Manor, and also the Captive Curse, plus lots of other curses that didn’t get to be in the title of their games. We are curse veterans.
We ask Abdullah if it’s like, normal that we can’t just use a tourist dictionary to translate hieroglyphs. Instead of explaining the complexities of historical linguistics to Nancy, Abdullah opts to tell us some deep story about how the ancient Egyptians’ perspective on the world must have been so different from ours, we wouldn’t be able to understand them even if they spoke English. Or…they just spoke…a completely different language from English, with wildly different syntax and a different writing system, combined with the fact that it’s been dead for hundreds of years. Whatever.
Okay, I’m gonna skip all of his deep philosophical rambling and cut to the interrogation. Abdullah assumes that, now that Professor Boyle’s been knocked out, their funding is going to get yanked, so they should work fast. We tell Abdullah that Professor Boyle’s injury has been chalked up to a lightning strike (what? That’s random), but we think he was attacked. Abdullah tells us to be careful, though he doesn’t believe us. Nancy points out that if she’s wrong, and it really was an accident, then all that’s happened is that she’s wasted some time. But if she’s right, and they just let it go, then the attacker could strike again. “You are very shrewd,” Abdullah says.
So what does Abdullah think of Professor Boyle, anyway? Abdullah says he respects his work, but when you are the best — like Abdullah is, natch — other people only get in your way. He didn’t want Professor Boyle along on the dig, so as to not taint his genius.
As for Lily — Abdullah notes that she’s smart and ambitious, and says she’s either going to succeed, or crash and burn epically. His tone of voice hints that he’s hoping for the latter. He doesn’t like how volatile she seems, and says he doesn’t trust her. This seems over the top. I mean, she’s a little Type A, but I don’t get the “potential crazy” vibe from her. Maybe I’m being misled by her cute braid and pink sweater combo. Nevertheless, Abdullah sees some of himself in Lily’s ambition, and thus he put her on his team.
We can ask about what he’s working on, and he tells us that this mural has something very important hidden in it — he doesn’t know what yet. He can’t confirm this is the lost queen’s tomb, and if they don’t find out before their funding gets pulled, they may never know. Nancy’s like, “Ooh, can I help? I have this handy book!” Abdullah sends us to work on another mural instead.
Not this one. But we do use our dictionary on it and find a creepy message, saying that anyone who doesn’t know ~the spell~ shall never enter.
I mean, that’s fine by me. I’m okay not entering any weird creepy ancient tombs. Nancy, on the other hand, is all, “Never enter WHERE? Why NOT? LET ME IN, DAMMIT!”
We also find another tile, this time with a bird on it. Alright.
The mural translation isn’t that hard; it’s the same puzzle as the journal translation in Ransom of the Seven Ships. The passage is about the four sons of Horus, and Nancy says that we’ll have to figure out who they are.
We see this puzzle, and Nancy is all, “This must be the queen’s titles Jon mentioned in his notes!” I guess I would’ve figured that out too, if I’d bothered to read his notes all the way. So this is a slider puzzle, and the goal is to slide the bars until each column contains only one type of hieroglyph.
Like so. A set of glyphs will appear on the bottom bar, and when we use our dictionary on them, we’ll read that it says, Great King’s Wife, Lady of the Two Lands, Beloved of Mut. Great King’s Wife? Could that be…a queen?
The doors are locked with a seal, but all we have to do is touch the seal, and it’ll break. Whoops. Hope no one wanted that for our artifact collection.
Lily, Abdullah, and these two weirdoes follow us into the tomb. “I think we’ve found the tomb!” Nancy tells them. We have? That was easy. I only started this game like ten minutes ago. Abdullah wanders over and starts inspecting the walls, and then he’s like, “Oh snap, we gotta get out of here!” Nancy’s flashlight starts flickering and gives out, and then we all run out of the tomb.
Aaand smash cut to the camp, where we’re now talking with Lily. So Lily! What are your thoughts on this curse business? Weirdly, Lily actually hella believes in curses — “They’re deadly 76.42% of the time!” she tells us. “You know what else has that fatality rate? White water rafting with a hungry bear. Who also has the bird flu. And he’s holding dynamite.” Wait, white water rafting with a hungry, sick, dynamite-holding bear only has a 76% fatality rate? I’d take those odds. Anyway, Lily felt some weird vibes when we opened the tomb, and it’s freaking her out. Nancy’s kind of like, “Okay…curses aren’t real, but okay…” and Lily’s just like, “Stop saying words.”
Let’s ask her about Abdullah. Lily acknowledges that he’s a total jerkface, but says he’s earned it, because of all his contributions to the field of archaeology. I mean…whatever, if she says so. He’s her boss, not mine.
When we go outside, we can now find this dude sitting there. He was one of the people who entered the tomb after we opened it, so let’s go see who he is and what he’s doing here.
This is Dylan “Eye Candy” Carter, who I’m sure would have been a Dave-caliber dreamboat if he had been in a game that anyone actually bothered to play. As it is, everyone kind of knows he’s one of the series’ stereotypical hot guys but no one really cares. Nancy’s social instincts kick in and she demands, “Who are you? Why are you here?” “I’m Dylan Carter, to answer the question you didn’t ask but probably meant to,” he says, randomly flexing for us. He’s British, and snarks that he’s sitting outside in the sun because England is so cold and gloomy. “You know why England tried to take over the world?” he asks. “To exploit your colonies for material gain and make a bunch of pasty Victorians wealthy at the expense of entire nations?” Nancy doesn’t say. Just kidding, it’s because they wanted sunshine! The Koh-i-Noor diamond was just an added bonus.
So Dylan is all cocky and snarky and douchey, and he spends all his time flexing and waggling his eyebrows at us. Dylan, please. You’re no Frank Hardy, in terms of men who can get Nancy Drew to cheat on her boyfriend. Nancy cuts through his bullshit and notes that the real reason Dylan is hanging around outside is because he doesn’t actually have clearance to go into the tomb. Dylan tells us that he’s a tour guide, and he gives tours all through Egypt. Competition is getting tough, and he needs to do everything he can to stay ahead of the game, which is why he’s here. Is he…going to lead a tour through an active dig site in a thousand year old tomb? I feel like that could end badly. I hope he has good liability insurance.
We ask if, in his work as an Egyptian tour guide, he has any advice for us. Dylan’s response is to hand over this table of Egyptian gods. Thanks, I guess?
Dylan tells us that the tomb site is a surefire draw for tourists, what with the whole lost queen and the curse angle. Nancy asks if he believes in the curse, and he says, “Of course I do.” He’s not too worried about being cursed himself, saying that his luck is so bad that a curse won’t make a difference. Fair enough.
We can ask what Dylan thinks of Abdullah, and like Lily, Dylan tells us that Abdullah is a total dick, but a very good archaeologist. “He’s close to being known the world over,” Dylan says. “I wonder what he’d do to make it over that last hurdle.” Hmm!
Let’s go back down into the tomb and A) see what Abdullah thinks about all this and B) meet our last suspect.
We talk a bit more about the tomb with Abdullah; Nancy suggests that given the amount of detail and the size of the tomb, someone very important must be buried here. Someone like…the lost queen? Abdullah shrugs and says he doesn’t leave the house for anything less than amazing (hee), but he won’t say if he thinks this is the lost queen’s tomb or not. He tells us that the last time people thought they found her tomb — over a hundred years ago — there was no mummy inside. Abdullah thinks she was never there to begin with. So who knows where she is now? Hmm.
We bring up Dylan, and Abdullah gets all salty about tour guides and tourism. He snipes that tourists think they can just take a little bit of the pyramids back with them, and “bit by bit, they smuggle [their] history back in their luggage.” He tells us that international teams have stolen artifacts from Egyptian digs, too, so all in all, he’s not too thrilled about foreigners running around here. If the dig site was under Abdullah’s leadership — “like it should be,” he says — Dylan would be trying to hitch a ride back to Cairo at this very minute. “Except he would never find one. Because there is no street.” Heh.
Alrighty, and let’s go down some halls and meet our final suspect. Say hi to Jamila El-Dine! She immediately asks us why the hell we’re still here — friendly! — and when we say the sandstorm didn’t scare us, she snaps, “Shh! Do not tempt the Annunaki.” Say what now? Jamila starts rambling about how they’re the “makers,” the original creators of civilization. They were the ones who taught us how to be human — we didn’t just learn it on our own, you know! We didn’t? What the hell is evolution, then? Oh my God, Jamila thinks humans rode dinosaurs, doesn’t she?
Jamila tells us that Abdullah doesn’t believe in the Annunaki, haha, what a LOSER. She doesn’t think he deserves to be in charge, but whatever, it’s not like he’s her boss, either. She doesn’t have an opinion on Dylan — “Do I have to have one?” I mean…I guess not, but it sure would help our mystery if you did!
So Jamila, what’s all this shit about aliens? She gushes to us that she took Sonny Joon’s “Are You Alien or Alie-out?” course, and it like, changed her life, man. She’s all in awe of Sonny, because he’s met them. Nancy’s like, “The…aliens?” and Jamila’s like, “Yes! Do you want me to call them?” and Nancy’s like, “No, that’s okay.” Jamila tells us that the tomb is proof that the Annunaki exist — do we think all of this could have been built without their help?
Yeah, so…that’s Jamila. Actually, given the year this game came out (2011), I’m pretty sure she’s a direct reference to this meme.
Thankfully, Abdullah also thinks Jamila is full of shit. “She believes aliens built the pyramids. She is a waste of my time,” he says. I know he’s a buttface and all, but for real. After our conversation, he leaves, and we can hear him arguing with Jamila — he wants her to leave the dig site, but she yells at him that he doesn’t own the temple. Okay, but like…is Jamila on the dig team? Is she allowed to just waltz in and out of a research site?
With Abdullah off yelling at Jamila, we can take a closer look at his hieroglyphs. He’s almost finished translating this passage. I imagine it must be something very cryptic and difficult if Abdullah, an expert in Egyptology, is having trouble translating it.
JK Nancy Drew busts the code in like five seconds. “This is the tomb of Nefertari,” the glyph reads. Well, I’m glad they just came out and told us that.
Let’s talk to Dylan some more. Now that we’ve met Jamila, we can talk about her as well. Dylan calls her a nutter. Then he says, “Subject change. Do you happen to know how a bloke like me can impress that cantankerous old curmudgeon?” Just in case you forgot he’s British. Nancy’s like, “Abdullah? Well, uh, he likes…archaeology…” and Dylan’s like, “Excellent, sounds like a plan.” Okay, well, I hope that works out for him.
We also find this bottle of lamp oil, which is a good thing, as our flashlight won’t recharge. “I guess I’ll have to find another light source,” Nancy says.
And the reason we’re going through all this, is because we want to go back into the tomb! You know, the tomb that everyone says is cursed and that the team leader told us not to go into. That one.
We find a candle holder in the wall, and we can use the lamp oil to light it. But how to light the entire room?
Aw yes, it’s time for one of these puzzles. We’ve had them in I think three other games at this point, so you should know how this works: we turn the various mirrors (conveniently placed in the tomb!) so that the light bounces off of them, to create a path to the other light.
And now we can see the whole tomb. Nancy barges on over and tries to lift the top of the coffin up, but being that it’s made of solid stone, we can’t move it. Except Nancy lifts gigantic slabs of rock all the time, but whatever. I guess she hasn’t been working out recently.
There are four jars in the room, each containing a little wooden button thingy. There’s a falcon, human, jackal, and baboon button, so we take all of them, because why not. Is this grave robbing? Whatever. It’s not like they have to make a note of all the artifacts they find or anything.
And hey, what do these hieroglyphs say?
Uh-oh, that’s not good. Whoever broke the seal? Is that us? Hey, Lily totally barged into the tomb ahead of us! She should totally be cursed, not Nancy.
As soon as we step back, we hear a crashing noise from outside. OMG, it’s the death that awaits us!!!
Just kidding, it’s just Abdullah. The scaffolding collapsed around him, but he’s unharmed and unfazed. We’re like, “Abdullah, we just read about some scary curse shit and now scary curse shit is happening, are you okay?” and he’s like, “Whatever, I once saw two guys die on a dig before, so this is nothing.” Damn, Abdullah! He says he believes in the curse, but adds: “I am Abdullah Bakhoum. Curses have no power over me.” Heh.
We ask Abdullah why Nefertari — the lost queen — would be hidden away in a false tomb where no one could find her, and Abdullah says Ramses II (her husband, obvs) didn’t want her to be found until the time was right. I’m assuming that means “until a nosy American teenager comes lumbering into the tomb despite knowing nothing about archaeology or Ancient Egypt.”
So Abdullah! Let’s say we do find Nefertari, what happens then? Abdullah’s like, “I take her to tour the world, I give speeches, I release a book, people worship me, Obama is there…”
Nancy suggests that maybe, perhaps, Abdullah should deflate that ego, and he’s like, “Never!” and refuses to talk to us again. Oookay.
But hey, now that the scaffolding’s collapsed, we can take a stray piece of wood and use it to lever the tomb open. In a way, that heinous accident was a good thing!
We open it to find the sarcophagus. Bro, this queen was not lost at all. I’ve been playing for like *checks watch* half an hour, and I already found her.
Up next: Oops, maybe we didn’t find the queen after all. We meet the rest of our suspects, and HER tries to use memes to be hip to the 2010s. Also, Nancy gets really good cell reception out in the middle of the desert.
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