Nancy Drew: Tomb of the Lost Queen (Part Three)

Previously on Nancy Drew: Tomb of the Lost Queen: We opened the queen’s tomb (maybe), and spooky shit immediately started happening. We’re cursed, you guys! Or maybe this is just what Nancy gets for running all over an unstable thousand-year-old building without any regard for its structural integrity. 

So we just found this VERY SPOOKY letter, presumably from an earlier explorer of the tomb. The letter’s all, “I’m gonna die in here, and if you’re reading this, YOU ARE TOO.” Nancy’s like, “Haha, as if,” and we keep plowing forth in the tomb. Sorry you weren’t an international super sleuth, dead letter author!

We come across this mural on the wall, and Nancy will note that it looks important. Probably!

Then we turn around to go back down, and we overhear Abdullah yelling at Lily. “You have no idea the damage you have done!” he’s saying to her. Oops. I hope Lily’s not taking the heat for Nancy stealing artifacts or moving around columns or opening up ancient coffins. Anyway, Abdullah tells Lily she’s off the site. Uh, Abdullah? I know you’re mad and all, but Lily’s kind of the only other person at this site with any background in archaeology.

So we hop back down, which I guess doesn’t bother Abdullah at all. Messing with the dig site artifacts: the worst thing ever; you will get kicked off the dig site and condemned to a lifetime of academic obscurity. Playing leapfrog on ancient columns: totally cool. Got it.

We ask Abdullah if he had to be that mean to Lily, and he’s all like, “I didn’t come to this dig site to make friends!” He snarls that he is her proving ground, and if she can survive him, then she’ll be unstoppable in the archaeology world. I thought you said she would never succeed in this field once you kicked her off the site? Which is it, Abdullah?

We can go explore the area where we lost Dylan. OMG, look at the cats! I love cats! Sorry, I’m getting distracted. It’s another dark chamber, that we have to light up with our lamp oil. Then we have to do the mirror puzzle again.

Like so.

Inside the room, we find another translation puzzle, which are the instructions for…

…this puzzle. We have to find which statue weighs the least. We have three chances to put the statues on the pans and weigh them to find the lightest one. Okay, that doesn’t sound too hard.

Whoops.

2011, the year the word “hipster” entered our vocabularies.

Okay, once you actually solve the puzzle correctly, a drawer will open, with more secrets for us. We find more letters from the explorer who died in here — she belonged to some organization called the D.O.N., and she’s basically just writing about how they’re running out of food and water and they’ll never see the sun again. Bleak. And then there’s a page with a riddle on it, which we’ll need later. We also find a tile with a cat on it, which says that the cat’s name is Meskhenet.

There’s a big box in the middle of the room, and we open it up and find this cat sarcophagus. There’s a big amulet attached to it, and we just…reach in and straight up steal it. What the fuck, Nancy? Isn’t it like a thing that you’re not supposed to rob tombs, especially ancient Egyptian ones? Man, maybe we deserve to be cursed.

Looking up, we can also see this puzzle on the ceiling, but we’re still missing a tile that it needs.

I wandered around a bit, and found no options to talk to Jamila or Abdullah, so let’s go back to the camp and — OH FUCK, there is a cobra on the bed. Oh dear. Okay, so once you go back to camp, Nancy will hear a hissing noise, and now we can’t leave until we figure out a way to get rid of the cobra. The solution to this is to take the stick leaning against the wall, and gently nudge the cobra into the yellow trash can off to the side. Then we put the trash can outside.

When we go outside, we see that the water tank is now covered in locusts. Oh, dude, I went to Catholic school and this is just like that part of the Bible where plague descends on Egypt. Is this because I haven’t been to confession in like 10 years?

Let’s see what Lily makes of all this spooky shit. She’s panicking about pretty much everything under the sun — the pillars moving, Dylan’s accident, general bad vibes — and she’s certain it’s because of the curse. Lily, we’ve been over this. There is no curse, your life is just terrible.

We can go over the history of Nefertari’s tomb once again, if you’re still confused (which I am, I won’t lie). Lily explains that there was a tomb in the Valley of the Queens, which contained Nefertari’s grave goods, but not her actual body. People have been looking for the mummy ever since (e.g. the doomed expedition). Nancy points out that maybe, if Ramses didn’t want Nefertari to be found, we should just leave her grave alone. Lily’s like, “But then I won’t have a PhD project, so…no.” Her argument is that Abdullah and Lily will treat the tomb with respect, while any other research time will try to sell Nefertari off to the highest bidder.

Okay, but is Lily even still working with Abdullah? We bring up their argument, but Lily just says that she’ll be fine as long as she stops screwing up. I wouldn’t bet on that, Lily. We offer to help (dammit, Nancy!), and Lily tasks us with sorting the amulets while she does research. Aw, man, I thought I’d get out of this game without having to do any dumbass chores 🙁

We’ll have to look in the relics book in order to figure out how to sort the amulets. Once we’re done, Nancy will note that one is missing. Then, as we back up, Nancy will also notice that there’s a cut in the tent. Outside, the cut is covered by a bunch of boxes, and Nancy observes that if someone wanted to sneak stuff out of the artifacts tent, this would help cover it up.

We have a shovel that we were using inside the tomb, so we can use that here. The spot that the clue is in is random, so we just click around until we find it.

We find this piece of paper, detailing someone’s interest in buying a “pristine jackal amulet.” Gasp! Someone’s selling the artifacts!

I went back and talked to Lily, but I’m going to skip that conversation because it’s just her freaking out some more. Lily really needs to chill. Instead, let’s go back to the tomb and solve that puzzle on the mummy! Except my dumb ass didn’t take any screencaps of me solving the puzzle, because I just want to make life hard for myself, I guess.

But anyway, it’s this puzzle. Remember how the translation hint for this puzzle said to “seek them out under the protection of the heavens”? Right, so that means that the solution for this puzzle was in the mural on the upper level. You want to move the columns so that the correct pictures are in the boxed tiles, in the correct order. From left to right, it should be the jackal, ibis, and falcon in the top row, and then the beetle, crocodile, and lion in the bottom.

Once that’s done, the coffin opens to reveal…another coffin!

I HERD U LIKE COFFINS SO I PUT A COFFIN IN YOUR COFFIN SO YOU CAN SOLVE PUZZLES WHILE YOU SOLVE PUZZLES

I just showed my age, didn’t I.

We have another puzzle to solve to open this coffin, but it’s related to Nefertari’s children, and we don’t know enough about them yet. So let’s leave it for now.

Let’s check in with Bess. I bet she’s secretly an expert on Egyptology and can tell us all about Nefertari’s kids. No, wait, she can’t. Bess suggests that we call Professor Hotchkiss. Sigh. Anyway, we can also update her on what’s happening here. We tell her about finding a cobra in our bunk, and Bess is like, “That is some freaky curse shit!” Nancy disagrees, and says it was probably one of our suspects. “Or you.” “Honestly, Nancy, let it go. That was a harmless little garter snake, and we were kids. Anyway, it was George’s idea.” HEE.

But before I torture myself by calling Professor Hotchkiss, let’s see how Dylan’s concussion is going. We can confront him about the missing amulet, and he denies any involvement — “I wouldn’t even want to touch one of those creepy things,” he says. Huh? I don’t know what’s supposed to be creepy about amulets. Anyway, we also tell him that Lily says hi, and chat for a bit about how she had us sort the amulets for her. Dylan’s like, “Why would she make you do that? Amulets are like, her speciality.” Wait, what? But Lily said she’s bad at amulets! “Well, she lied to you,” Dylan says.

Whoa, so our dorky friend Lily is the liar, and flirty jerkface Dylan is on our side? This game has me all mixed up.

Speaking of being on our side, we can now get ~the truth~ out of Dylan — being that he’s in the hospital and a million miles from us now, he doesn’t have much to gain from lying. He tells us that he really is a guide, and all he was trying to do was get his name in the papers and promote his business. “People aren’t taking vacations like they used to.” Well, especially not to Egypt in 2011, Dylan.

And now for Professor Hotchkiss. Getting the names from her is pretty simple; she’ll list them off for you, but the game hints several times that you have to write them down yourself. Or you could just cheat, like me. Hotchkiss will ask who’s above the door to the antechamber before she’ll tell you the names of Nefertari’s daughters; the answer is “Ma’at” and then she’ll tell you the rest. That was easy.

And we finish up with Professor Boyle. We tell him about the cat tomb, and he gets all hype that it might be Nefertari’s cat, ergo this might be Nefertari’s tomb. We also tell him about finding the diary pages from the lost expedition. Somewhat weirdly, Nancy tries to suggest that, since the expedition made it here, then this isn’t Nefertari’s tomb, because nobody has ever found Nefertari’s tomb. Professor Boyle’s like, “Well, there’s the part where they all DIED before they could tell anyone about it, so yes, this could still be Nefertari’s tomb.” I don’t know, this bit of the dialogue doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Then we can bring up the possibility that there’s some black market shadiness going on here. Professor Boyle gets upset and says that black market dealers are dangerous, and it would be not good at all if they’re involved. Nancy muses that if they’re interested in the dig site, then all the accidents would make more sense. Yes, they would, wouldn’t they?

It looks like this black market thing may be a lead, so let’s ask Abdullah about it. He’s all, “Aha, no one would DARE steal from one of my dig sites! I would shame them and stop them from ever publishing a paper, and they would perish in the fires of academia!” That said, he admits that the black market is booming, and he’s been approached by buyers before. Nancy’s like, “Well, do you sell to them?” Abdullah denies it most emphatically, and adds, “I am surprised you lack the tact to even ask.” Ha! Oh, Abdullah, you must be new here. He adds: “You remind me of my ex-wife. I divorced her for being tactless.” Ned would never!

But hey, Abdullah, wouldn’t it be kind of dumb to go around selling one-of-a-kind artifacts? Abdullah gets very philosophical about how thieves are dumb — “Steal small, you are a crook. Steal big, you are an explorer, or a pharaoh.” That’s deep.

And now we can go back and solve the puzzle about Nefertari’s kids. This combines all the glyph information we’ve gotten up till now — Jon’s notes, our book, and the table of gods Dylan gave us way back when. We put together the characters to create the names of each child, from top to bottom and left to right, with the sons first. Sexism!

And then the coffin comes off to reveal Nefertari! No, wait, that’s just a keychain. Wait, what?

There are also a bunch of torn papers, that we put together and then have to translate. The final line is “The true tomb is revealed”, so it looks like this is a riddle that will lead us to Nefertari’s REAL tomb. I don’t know, guys. I’ve been betrayed one too many times. My trust is broken.

So we want to put the shiny cat amulet on a panel in the wall, which will open up to reveal a puzzle.

So this is a kind of slider puzzle; the cobras have to be arranged in the order of colors given by the torn piece of paper we found. They have to be clicked in the right order to slide around and be placed properly. The right order is, clockwise from the blue bird in the corner: gold, purple, empty, green, blue, red.

The panel pulls back and we find ourself in another hallway. I…am very impressed with the backgrounds in this game, the screens are all really beautiful and detailed, but OH MY GOD if I see another hallway I’m going to die.

So we find another set of glyphs to translate. “The path lies in destiny.” When we approach the stones leading down the hallway, Nancy will say, “Let’s see if destiny really is the path,” except I don’t know which stone to step on and we die. Okay, so we have to figure out which stones lead the way, and then we can explore further.

We tell Abdullah we found a new chamber, to which he says, “Well done, Nancy! You are very good at this.” Watch out, Lily! We’re coming for you and your PhD!

So then we go outside and call Professor Hotchkiss, and she’ll tell us that Nefertari’s cat was named Destiny. There was also that tile we found — you know, in the room where we shamelessly stole an amulet off a mummy — that said the cat’s name is Meskhenet, which is Ancient Egyptian for Destiny. So the solution to the stone puzzle is to find the glyphs that spell out Meskhenet.

And so back into the tomb we go, except — dude, what’s this? That mummy was not there earlier. “How could a mummy just appear like this?” Nancy asks. SPOOKY!

We’ll have to look into that later. In the meantime, we follow the glyphs that spell out the cat’s name, and when we get to the end of the path, a bridge will shoot out.

OH

SNAP

Or, “Wow,” as Nancy deadpans. Guys, I think this might be Nefertari! Just like, going off of how shiny the sarcophagus is and everything. Naturally, of course, we can’t just pry the coffin open. I don’t mean because we would want to document it or be careful with a thousand year old artifact or anything like that; I just mean that there’s a puzzle to solve first. Nancy will note that the symbols on the sarcophagus match that board game Lily made us play.

And we also find the missing tile from the cat room.

There’s a new passage in Nefertari’s room, but when we try to follow it, we end up at this locked door. Most mysterious! Also rather modern for an Egyptian tomb, don’t you think?

We go out through this door instead, which will take us back out to the cat room.

We can now solve this puzzle; the tile have to be pressed in a certain order, which we can find in the D.O.N. explorer’s journal.

Yet another hallway. Okay, here we go.

More sand! And, more suspiciously: FOOTPRINTS in the sand! Someone else has been here! We notice something shiny in the corner, which Nancy will pick up and then recognize: “This is a match to Lily’s sunglasses!” So it looks like a decorative jewel or something has fallen off of Lily’s sunglasses…while she was sneaking around in here. What are you up to, Lily? Only Nancy is allowed to sneak around with impunity!

We also find a piece of plastic with some numbers written on it. We’ll need this later.

A little further on, we find another journal entry. The author writes that by now they should’ve found the mummy, but they’ve only found CONFUSION and DEATH! But they can’t turn back now, not when they’ve come so close! Also, I think they literally cannot turn back, because they’re trapped in the tomb and being picked off one by one, but whatever.

Anyway, now that we’ve explored a bit, let’s tell Abdullah what’s going on. First we tell him about the mummy appearing in Nefertari’s fake coffin — and we know there wasn’t a mummy there before. Is it possible someone put it there? Abdullah gets very upset, and says that that would mean someone is staging the site — meaning, someone is placing artifacts in an empty site, to raise their value. This is apparently a big archaeology faux pas, and Abdullah does not like it at all.

But for news that he does like, we can tell him about finding that big ol’ gold coffin. Abdullah rushes off to investigate, and we can poke around his area. We find this key, which we steal.

Back to camp, where we can talk to Lily, and then get rid of her so we can go through Abdullah’s stuff. First, let’s tell her about finding Nefertari. “OMG, we found the Lost Queen! Do you know what this means?” Lily gushes. “She’ll need a new nickname?” Nancy snarks. “Nancy, I know this is a joke to you, but this is my fucking doctorate degree,” Lily doesn’t say. She babbles on about how this will make us the BIGGEST deals in archaeology. “I look forward to being mentioned in many sixth grade essays,” Nancy deadpans. Hee.

Let’s ask her about that board game, and she’ll explain the symbols to us. We’ll file that away for later.

Now let’s accuse her of sneaking around the tunnels! We know you’re up to something, Lily! We found your ugly-ass rhinestone sunglasses in the tunnels! Lily gets hella defensive, and she’s all, “You can’t prove it was me! Ancient Egyptians put rhinestones on lots of things!”

So now we want to get her out of the bunk area, so let’s tell her that Abdullah is looking for her. This will cause her to clear out, and now we can snoop.

Once she’s gone, we use Abdullah’s key on his trunk. And would you look at that, the very first thing we find is a letter from some guy at the university, telling Abdullah that Lily is SHADY AS FUCK. I knew she was lying about Ancient Egyptians being into rhinestones! Ancient Egyptians weren’t teenage girls from the 2000s! The Egyptology chair tells Abdullah that Lily was caught falsifying research — they ultimately concluded that she was mostly caught up in someone else’s plagiarism scandal, so she was allowed to stay in the program, but he cautions against allowing her on the team. HMMM.

We also find this letter from Sonny Joon, stating that Jamila is not into aliens at all. What the hell, Jamila?

Now let’s use this number thing we found in the tunnels on Lily’s trunk. Hmm, okay, so it’s not complete yet. Let’s come back to this.

Jamila, j’accuse! Of not thinking aliens built the pyramids! She gets all snippy that she doesn’t have to tell us anything, but if she does, we have to promise that we won’t tell anyone. Nancy’s like, “It won’t leave this room! Except for when I tell all my friends and my boyfriend and also my dad. But other than that, like, no one.” Jamila says the time isn’t right to tell us what she’s really doing here. She swears, though, that she really does think Sonny Joon is special. So special that he might get his own game one day! And that game will be an epic disappointment, Jamila, so hush.

We still have to do some investigating before we can unlock all of Jamila’s backstory, so let’s tell her that we saw some weird hieroglyphs. Jamila runs off to go look at them, and now we can look through her bag again. Heh. What a chump.

We find a secret compartment in Jamila’s bag, and inside we find this article about Abdullah. The article talks about Abdullah’s search to find Nefertari, and is very saltily annotated by Jamila. She apparently has a real hate-on for him, noting that he is “a cheater, and a thief,” and she’s searching for evidence of “outside help” at the dig site. She hasn’t found any, and she doesn’t know if she can scare Abdullah out — but she can make the tomb inhospitable. HMMM.

Let’s see what the rest of our suspects think of all these shenanigans. We tell Dylan about finding the mysteriously appearing mummy, and how someone might’ve dropped a fake mummy in the coffin to stage the sight. Dylan: “Gross.” Uh, okay, that’s a take on it. “That means someone just had a fake mummy lying around,” he says. “SO GROSS.” Hee. Other than that, he doesn’t have much to contribute.

We can now have a really weird conversation with Professor Boyle, which I think wasn’t supposed to trigger until we got the truth from Jamila. We ask him if he knows what the “Daughters of Nefertari” are, and he muses that it’s very obscure lore, and he’s surprised we’ve heard of them. Me too, because at no point have they been brought up yet. He knows that they’re looking for Nefertari too, but that’s about it. Anyway, we have to have a conversation with Jamila about this, so we’ll leave it there.

Let’s also tell him about the mysteriously appearing mummy. Professor Boyle freaks out that this is bad news — someone stealing from the site is one thing, but if someone is staging the site, then the black market is definitely involved. Shady! We also bring up Lily’s history, and Professor Boyle once again vagues that he doesn’t like her very much, but he doesn’t want to slant our opinion of her. Dammit, Professor Boyle! Give me the gossip!

Okay, so let’s go back to Jamila and have the conversation that we were probably supposed to have before calling Professor Boyle. We accuse her of being here to fuck with Abdullah, and she confesses all: Abdullah is shady as hell, and he’s been “plundering” Egyptian history for his own gain. It’s not clear if we’re meant to take that literally, i.e. that Abdullah’s in on the black market, or if Jamila’s just accusing Abdullah for exploiting Egyptian history for academic fame and fortune.

Jamila’s part of a secret group called the Daughters of Nefertari, who have existed since ancient times, trying to protect Nefertari from dudes like Abdullah. Like, literally ever since Ramses II died, approximately a bajillion years ago, the daughters of Jamila’s family line have been tasked with searching for Nefertari and returning her to her “rightful place” before dicks like Abdullah can get their hands on her. Man. Can you imagine being part of an Ancient Egyptian secret society on a mission for thousands of years, only to have your case solved by some rando American? I’d be pissed, myself.

Anyway! Remember how the explorer who wrote those journal entries said she was a member of “D.O.N.”? Yup, she was a Daughter of Nefertari, here to look for the tomb. She was also…Jamila’s mother! Oh snap! Jamila tells us that she always believed her mom died in a car accident, but when she came of age, she received a letter her mother wrote before she was born, telling her about her ~destiny. Jamila is determined to find Nefertari, so her daughter will never have to deal with losing her mom like that. Bizarrely, Nancy does not take this as an opportunity to be all, “Oh hey, my mom’s dead too, WHAT UP.”

This is also foreshadowing for The Silent Spy, by the way.

Now that we’ve bonded with Jamila over her tragic backstory, she gives us the top half of the code we need to open Lily’s trunk. Thanks, Jamila!

Why…didn’t I screencap the puzzle? What was I doing when I played this game? Okay, anyway — the two transparent pieces of code have numbers on them, and they overlay the lock. The numbers each overlay a color square, and we have to extend the square so that it covers the numbered amount. So, for example: a 3 overlays the color orange, so we want to have three orange squares; 8 overlays a yellow square, so we want 8 yellow squares.

Lily’s trunk turns out to be full of suspicious shit: she has a business card for a snake shop in Cairo, plus a book on snakes that just happens to fall open on the chapter about cobras. So…I’m guessing Lily was the one to put the cobra in our bunk. I feel like we could’ve guessed that just because she’s the only one who’s always hanging around here, but whatever.

Most suspiciously, she has the missing page of Professor Boyle’s notes. We also find a postcard, from Lily to some girl named Bianca, telling her that she’s so happy she’s finally on a dig — yeah, she had to do some VERY SHADY THINGS to get here, but it was so worth it and NO ONE WILL EVER FIND OUT!

Lily, are you new here? Nancy Drew finds out everything. Even shit you did years before you met her. NANCY DREW KNOWS WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER.

Finding out about Lily will trigger the end — ish — of the game. A sandstorm kicks up outside, and Nancy will say that we need to get to the tomb for shelter.

So into the tomb we go, and now that Lily’s explained the board game symbols to us, we know which ones to press to open up the sarcophagus. We have to press the ankh, the falcon, the eye of Horus, the three truths, and the water symbol.

The lid comes off, and we find a mummy. “Nefertari. It’s got to be,” Nancy says. We have no proof of that, but we’ve also been running around this stupid tomb for freaking ever, so I don’t blame her for wanting to be done with the search. Somewhere, Jamila is seething.

Opening the sarcophagus triggers Lily’s arrival. I knew you were evil, Lily! You were far too quirky not to be up to something!

Lily denies hurting anyone on purpose — she just wanted Dylan to leave; she didn’t mean to give him a concussion and put him in traction. She won’t tell us why she did all these dastardly things, and Nancy cottons on that someone else is involved. OMG, we have two culprits! Lily wails that even if she wanted to tell us, we can’t do anything to help.

And then the ceiling caves in and Lily dies, and the mystery dies with her.

Just kidding! “I’m still in here!” Lily bleats. Hee. Unfortunately, we can’t call for help, as the cave-in has blocked the exit of the tomb. We’re trapped inside with her, Abdullah, and Jamila. Worst sleepover ever.

Oh, wait, Abdullah’s not here. Well, that’s pretty suspicious. We run to Jamila and she tells us to find a way out for help. She gives us a signal box, and a key for a secret exit that only the Daughters of Nefertari know about. Well, if they knew about a secret exit, how come your mom died in here, Jamila? Anyway, she’ll stay here and watch Lily, and if Abdullah comes back, “[She’s] ready for him.” Us, on the other hand: “If you see Abdullah,” Jamila advises, “Run.” Creepy!

So I guess we’re officially on the “Abdullah is selling artifacts from the site on the black market” train? Okay, let’s go with that. There is, by the way, an illuminating conversation you can have with Dylan, that I did not have — if you call him, he’ll admit that being a tour guide doesn’t pay that well, so yes, he was selling shit on the black market. He was trying to get on Abdullah’s good side so they could work together. Nancy tries to shame him into being a good person, and Dylan’s like, “Uh, maybe. Warm fuzzies won’t really pay my medical bills.” So that happened.

So the key unlocks that gate we saw in Nefertari’s room, which leads us out to a ledge.

Unfortunately, not all the ledges are at the level that we need to walk across to a door at the end of the wall. Thus, another puzzle!

Jamila also gave us a riddle, which will help us solve this puzzle. There are four circles like this, and the puzzle involves changing the heads of the painting dude — each head has to be put on the correct body, and that will raise the ledges to let us walk across them. The solution is going from left to right on the wall: alligator, falcon, cat, and then woman.

To freedom!

We go through the exit, and we meet Abdullah! Gasp! Wait, we do? Oh, hold up, there he is — the tiny dude in the top right. Nancy’s all, “You were behind the curse!” and Abdullah says, “Good, for once I don’t have to explain myself to you.” But…Abdullah, I really need you to explain yourself to me. This game is not clear at all about what everyone’s motives are.

Anyway, Abdullah creeps at us that we’ll have a beautiful tomb to live in for all of eternity, unless, of course, we manage to stop him. With a puzzle!

SIGH. Maybe I should just let myself die, and then I’ll never have to do a puzzle again. Okay, so we have a bunch of squares with different colors on each side. When two sides of the same color are facing each other, a bridge appears between the squares. So we want to turn the squares and create a path to the exit — the center tunnel with the blue stripe — before Abdullah makes it across the room. Every time we turn a square, he takes a step. The dots he’s standing on show how many moves we have left before he kills us.

So we make to the exit and run out…and run into Abdullah anyway. What the hell? He was like all the way over there!

Luckily for us, Professor Boyle runs up at the last minute and jumps Abdullah. He knocks him out, then says, “That’s that. Come on, Nancy, I’m dying to see Nefertari.” What, you two are going back into the tomb? What if Abdullah gets up and traps us both in there? Quit thinking with your archaeology boner, Professor Boyle!

So Abdullah is arrested, and Nancy very vaguely alludes to his “crimes against archaeology.” This game is weird. They really never explicitly say that Abdullah is selling artifacts on the black market, except in that optional conversation with Dylan. I mean, it’s pretty easy to infer, but I spent a lot of time watching walkthroughs and combing through my screencaps, trying to find a point where he actually admits it, and I haven’t found one. For that matter, we tell Dylan that Jamila told us that he’s trying to form a business partnership with Abdullah — again, this is heavily hinted at, but not actually said. It’s a little weird.

Lily switches to studying paleontology. I guess she just straight up gets away with all the other shady crap she did, like falsifying her research.

Dylan goes back to giving tours of Egypt, and Nancy says, “I hope he’s had enough of the black market.” If you didn’t have that phone call with him, then this line makes no sense.

Professor Boyle takes Jamila on as his assistant, and promises to return Nefertari to Ramses II’s side, wherever that is. That’s nice, I guess. Together they’ll change the field of Egyptology! And presumably manage to avoid the whole coup thing going on a few miles from here.

So there you have it. A mildly interesting game with interesting subtext that never makes it to actual text — some good foreshadowing of future games and nice buildup of the crimes everyone’s committing, except they forgot the bits where people actually confess to said crimes. Also, way too many hallways. But points for removing making out with Frank Hardy from this adaptation entirely!

THE END.