Previously on Nancy Drew: Tomb of the Lost Queen: Nefertari, the wife of Ramses II, has been buried in hidden tomb, lost for centuries beneath the sands of Ancient Egypt. We’ve come here in search of the tomb’s treasures and secrets, which archaeologists have tried to find for ages, and failed…
What’s that? We found her sarcophagus within the first day of working on the site and we just opened it? Oh, Nancy.
Anyway, so we got the tomb open and have seen the sarcophagus, although we have yet to confirm if A) there’s a mummy inside and B) if said mummy is actually Nefertari. I mean, we did find a bunch of hieroglyphs all over the wall there were like, “THIS IS THE TOMB OF NEFERTARI,” “NO REALLY,” “IT DEFINITELY IS”, so I’m thinking the chances are high that it is.
Nancy will tell us that we have to translate the panel on her uterus. It’s another translation puzzle, not too difficult, and we get “The procession of gods begins the reveal. Seek them out under the protect of the heavens.” Intriguing.
The translation refers to this puzzle, but we don’t know how to solve it yet. We’ll come back.
Let’s tell Jamila we opened the tomb! It’s not like she’s just some rando hanging around the dig site who’s not supposed to be here. Call your boss, Nancy. However, telling Jamila that the tomb’s been opened causes her to rush off to see it herself, so we can snoop around her area.
Jamila’s bag is locked with an Eye of Horus puzzle. The idea is to look in our book about relics (which we stole from the antiquities tent), which assigns numbers to the different parts of the eye. Then we look at that flyer for Sonny Joon’s alien conference, and note the numbers (4-32). We reduce the fractions down to 1-4, and click on the eye parts in order. I realize that makes no sense when I write it out. It’s a stupid puzzle.
In Jamila’s bag, we find a book by Sonny Joon about aliens (no surprises there), and an intro to Ancient Egypt book. “Why would an alien expert need an archaeology textbook?” Nancy wonders. Maybe she’s taking an elective, Nancy. Anyway, Jamila’s made some ominous notes inside the archaeology book about the queen’s “daughters”, and investigating sites. We’ll keep that in mind.
We also find this…puzzle? Coded message? It’s unclear, so we’ll have to solve it to figure out what it is. In the meantime, let’s steal it. I bet Jamila won’t notice it’s missing or anything.
We leave the tomb and run back into Dylan. “I’ve got something for you,” he says. Yeah, I bet he does. Just kidding, he found a piece of paper that “proves” that Jamila is weird. Dylan, we don’t need more proof that she’s weird. Have you ever like…talked to her? Anyway, he forks over the paper, which looks to be a code, or possible the key to a code. I bet it’ll help us with that weird paper we found in her bag!
Then Dylan starts hitting on us, saying that we should leave this small-time tomb and see the world together. Dylan, Nancy already sees the world as a famous amateur detective. She doesn’t need you dragging her down. (She has Ned for that. Just kidding!)
So Dylan, how did you even find this tomb, anyway? It’s a new dig site, and it’s not on any map. Dylan blusters that he caught a ride with some traders, and they just…knew, somehow, where the site was. Hmmm.
And then! We go over to the water tank to get some more water, but the tank’s been punctured. Whoever did it used a piece of Sonny Joon’s spaceship model. Dammit, Jamila! Just because you hang around in a tomb with shade all day, doesn’t mean the rest of us don’t need water! Nancy’s pasty redhead complexion is in dire enough straits as it is.
Back to Dylan. Did he see what happened to the water supply? No, no he did not, because apparently he just sits around here all day looking at nothing. You’re on your butt all day over here, Dylan, and you can’t even spy properly? I’m starting to side with Abdullah on the whole “letting Dylan waste away in the desert” thing.
Well, maybe Dylan can still prove he’s useful. We’re still trying to poke around everyone’s bunks, and we need help distracting Lily. Dylan refuses to do it for free, and we have to put in good word with Abdullah for him in exchange.
Let’s check in with Lily. She still believes in curses, thinks Jamila is crazy, and thinks Dylan is annoying but hot. Good to know!
Alrighty, so let’s look at that puzzle of Jamila’s. We have the cipher key that Dylan gave us, plus the puzzle. The key says, “Each must be five or more,” meaning that we have to fill in the blanks to create words that are five or more letters.
Once we do that, Nancy will say that we need to look at the first letter of each of the words. The words are grouped into color sets, e.g. the red set is T, C, A.
We see that the color sets unscramble to form words, and we arrange them to make a sentence: BLUE CAT OPENS TOMB. Alrighty.
Let’s go talk Dylan up to Abdullah, so he’ll do the distracting bit for us. Abdullah catches on to us instantly: “He told you to do this, didn’t you?” Hee. Abdullah has a response for him, too: “Tell him he is stupid, but use small words so he can understand you.” Abdullah, I’m not a messenger pigeon.
Except I guess I kind of am, because I go back to Dylan right after that. I should make Nancy Drew respect herself more. Anyway, Dylan’s unfazed by the failure of his plan, but he refuses to tell us why he needs Abdullah’s trust. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say it’s because Dylan’s up to something shady. That sounds about right.
Nevertheless, we held up our end of the bargain, so he agrees to distract Lily for us. He’s like, “Ooh, we should have a signal if she starts heading back to her bunk! Like, ‘She’s back, stop looking at her things!’” Dylan, if you fuck this up for me, I’m going to leave you here in this desert to die.
Joke’s on Dylan, though, because once he leaves, we go through his shit. We find a bunch of tour IDs, and Nancy becomes suspicious that Dylan has so many certifications. What, dude can’t give tours all over the world?
Slightly less explainable: this bag labeled “LIVE SNAKE”, although it doesn’t have anything in it.
Alright, so let’s go look through everyone’s bunk! Both Abdullah and Lily have the audacity to have locks on their trunks; we can’t open either of them yet. However, we can pick up a book from Lily’s bed, and see that it’s called Curses of the World. Dude, Lily, quit freaking yourself out.
Let’s go talk to Dylan again. Apparently he tried to talk to Abdullah, and that went over…not great. I don’t know why he thought it wouldn’t. We can also ask him about Lily, and he stops to perv over her a bit. “She’s cute, interesting — and not interested,” he says. What gave you that impression, Dylan? I guess Lily doesn’t think too highly of his personality, but I bet she’d be willing to have a messy, brief affair with him, so she could go back to school all, “One time when I was on an archaeological dig in Egypt, I hooked up with this British fake tour guide who was just parked out in the desert stealing our water.”
Speaking of being a fake tour guide — let’s accuse Dylan of forging his guide licenses! He snips that everyone does it, and he totally is a real guide in every sense except the technical. “Okay, prove it,” Nancy says. “Give me a tour.” Of what, Nancy? You’re in the middle of the desert. You want Dylan to talk up the sand dunes?
Dylan blah blahs about showmanship and how to play an audience, while making some facts up about the dig site. “Now someone will ask a shockingly stupid question,” he says. “Play along, ask me the stupidest question you can possibly think of.” And then we get a bunch of hilariously dumbass options. I choose to go with, “Why didn’t they write in English?” and Dylan chirps, “No one knows! Now, let me change the subject and talk about something dramatic, LIKE CURSES! And that’s how it’s done.” Nancy is suitably impressed, so I guess we believe Dylan’s a guide after all.
It’s been a while since we’ve spoken to our friend Jamila. We can ask her about Lily, and Jamila says that Lily is not a “friend to the cause”, but other than that, she’s cool. Wait, what cause? Jamila’s like, “The cause of welcoming our alien overlords, duh.” Oh, right, that cause. Lily doesn’t understand that the Annunaki built the tombs to hold their secrets, and only those who believe in them will be taken to the mothership when the pestilence comes, or whatever. “That is bleak,” Nancy says. Jamila: “I know, right?” HEE.
We ask if she’s into archaeology, and she says no. “Then why did you have an archaeology textbook in your bag?” Nancy asks. Oh snap! Jamila refuses to explain, and snarks, “Why should I bother [explaining] when you’re so good at sneaking around?” BURN. We can also tell her that the water tank was destroyed with one of her UFO discs, but Jamila says it must have been someone else. Perhaps it was the Annunaki!
That’s it for Jamila. We keep poking around the tombs and find this beetle tile, which we will need later, naturally.
Then we find this mural. Nancy will note that it has a blue cat, just like Jamila’s notes. We clear away the dust and see the cat-shaped hole in the middle. Conveniently, we happen to be carrying a cat amulet around! So we put in the amulet that we fixed earlier, and another tomb door will open up.
Then, bizarrely, Dylan will come out of frickin’ nowhere and be like, “Step aside, woman!” and waltz into the tomb. Dylan, what the hell?
And then he gets completely bodied by a pile of rocks. Whatever, I feel like he kind of had this coming. So now we have to remove six rocks in order to keep Dylan from being pressed to death. The rocks that you have to remove are random, so you just click on them, die a bunch of times, and then learn from process of elimination. And then Dylan is taken to the hospital and pretty much drops out of the rest of the game.
So…that happened. I think where this game falls down is that it’s similar to a lot of middle-era Nancy games, where you spend the first two acts just poking around and waiting for random shit to happen, and then in the last third enough random shit has happened to add up to a bigger picture, and that’s it. It’s a bit disappointing after the tight plotting and pacing of the past few games.
Once we manage to save Dylan from a grisly death, we cut to speaking with Professor Boyle. Dylan’s the second person at the dig site to end up at the hospital now! Could this be suspicious? I mean, Professor Boyle was very clearly knocked out and had his shit stolen. Dylan was just being a dumbass. Professor Boyle’s like, “Holy shit, this sounds dangerous, do you want to leave?” and Nancy’s like, “Nah it’s cool, I’m not scared at all because I have a potentially pathological addiction to adrenaline.”
Since we’re here, let’s catch him up on everything that’s been happening while he’s gone. We tell him that Abdullah is having some trouble translating all the hieroglyphs, and Professor Boyle’s like, “Haha, suck it, Abdullah!” He does admit that Abdullah is one of the brightest minds in the field, so if he’s having trouble with the translations, then they must be very tricky. Uh, then how come Nancy was able to crack them in about five minutes with an “Ancient Egyptian for Dummies” book? Nevertheless, despite Abdullah’s jerkiness and all the peer jealousy between them, Professor Boyle doesn’t think Abdullah was behind his attack. They’ve argued plenty of times, and sneaking up on someone isn’t Abdullah’s style.
We switch to talking about the rock collapse again, and wonder if maybe the cave-in was triggered on purpose, and it was meant to kill Nancy. We mention that Lily doesn’t seem to like us very much, and Professor Boyle shrugs and says that if she really wants to pretend to be in charge, we should just let her, as it’ll save us some grief. Professor Boyle’s quite surprised that Abdullah put Lily on his team — not that he knows Lily personally, but the archaeology community is pretty small, and he has heard…things. Not things that he’ll repeat to us, as that would be inappropriate, but…THINGS. Thanks, bro, that was helpful.
We then mention Dylan, and how he’s made up his own tour guide credentials. Nancy’s like, “He told us that tour guides do it all the time!” and Professor Boyle’s like, “Uh, no. They don’t.” Hee. Nancy gets all self-righteous about how she is going to call Dylan out for being a lying liar, and shame him into walking the path of truthiness and great justice, but Professor Boyle advises against it. After all, we’re in the middle of the desert — we wouldn’t want to give anyone a reason to make us “disappear”, as it were. He gets all ominous that none of our suspects seem like murderers, but “When people feel like they can get away with anything…they change.” Spooky.
But how is Dylan gonna kill us, anyway? He’s in the hospital after nearly being crushed to death. Oh, and speaking of, does Professor Boyle know anyone who could’ve brought Dylan to the site? Dylan told us a bunch of random dudes gave him a lift. Professor Boyle says no one else knows how to get to the site except the people working there — he didn’t tell anyone, but Abdullah, Lily, or Jamila might have. Wait, so how did Jamila get out there?
We can also bring up Jamila — like everyone, Professor Boyle thinks she’s full of shit, but he gets suspicious at the mention of her archaeology textbook. If she’s lying about why she’s at the site, then she must be up to something.
Finally, we can tell him that someone slashed the water tank, and Professor Boyle says he’ll arrange for some to be dropped off. In the meantime, we should see who has some extra water stashed away, as they’re the likely culprit. Cool beans.
Let’s call Bess. Our friends haven’t heard from us in a while. We can recap the game so far for her — when we get to the curse part, Bess says, “Is it contagious? Don’t worry, we can still hang out! I’ve always wanted to use those walkie-talkies George got me!” Hee. I love her. Bess thinks we should get the hell out of there, but Nancy says we kind of can’t — the rest of the crew bailed with Professor Boyle, taking all our modes of transport with them, and it looks like they’re not coming back. Wait, what the hell? They just abandoned the rest of their dig team to die in the desert? That has to be a breach of like…something. They better have an academic hold on their account so they can’t sign up for classes next semester, at the very least!
We can bring up all our suspects with her, as well. Bess, of course, only wants to focus on whether or not Dylan is cute. I think he might be less cute now that he’s been slightly smushed by a rock pile. Nevertheless, it’s suspicious that he’s here as a tour guide, considering the site won’t be open to the public for years. That’s what I’ve been saying. “Maybe he’s some kind of avant-garde tour guide,” Bess says. “Like that jazz musician you made us see who only played awful notes.” Nancy: “In my defense, that was for a case.” Bess: “And in his defense…there is nothing. Long-distance burn, jazz guy.” Hee. Anyway, we can then tell her about his accident in the caves, and Bess freaks out that the rock fall was meant for us, and the curse is coming after Nancy. Way to not freak me out, Bess.
Nancy tells Bess that Lily is weird but otherwise unremarkable. Lily really is pretty boring, as far as suspects go. And then there’s Jamila, who thinks aliens built the pyramids. (Bess: “I think if aliens ever came to earth, they’d like me. Dogs love me. Kids love me. I just think we’d be pretty simpatico is all.”) Nancy muses that she can’t tell if Jamila is crazy for real or if the alien thing is just a cover-up. Bess suggests that if we read between the lines, Jamila might be saying more than she intends to.
And now, let’s call Professor Hotchkiss. You’ll recall that she gave us a book on ancient queens, so we can pick her brain about Nefertari. She’s like, “How do you know about Nefertari?” and Nancy’s like, “You…gave me a book? You even signed it?” “I sign and send lots of things,” Professor Hotchkiss says. Professor Hotchkiss is rude as hell. Anyway, we tell her a bit about the dig site — it turns out she’s heard of Abdullah, as he’s December in her “Men of Archaeology” calendar. Nancy’s like, “Is that…is that a thing?” “It existed the second I made it,” Professor Hotchkiss says. HA! I was a little pissed at her for not knowing who Nancy was earlier, but her lowkey perving on her academic peers is making me love her again. Anyway, she confirms that everyone else has been saying about him: blah blah brilliant but also an arrogant dick blah.
As for the curse: Hotchkiss is like, “Well, lots of archaeologists die out there. It could be a curse, or it could be that the desert is inhospitable and the tombs lack structural integrity.” A logic burn from Professor Hotchkiss? This game is crazy. Speaking of logic burns, when we tell her about Jamila’s theory that aliens built the pyramids, she advises us to ignore her: “Some of us have keen observational skills and a rigid adherence to the scientific method, and some of us have thought processes that best resemble a piñata explosion at a sugar-fueled child’s birthday extravaganza.” Well, damn! I mean, I don’t disagree, but this feels rather unusually pointed for a Nancy Drew game.
After a brief interlude where Professor Hotchkiss mistakes us for a chicken restaurant employee, we can ask her about Nefertari. She tells us that Ramses II and Nefertari’s love was hella epic, they were the OTP of Ancient Egypt, people wrote fanfiction about them. Nevertheless, they sensed that their kingdom’s future might be unstable, so they were buried separately, because that…would help with the instability…somehow. Anyway, for those of us still confused about this whole mess with real tombs and fake tombs and missing mummies and which grave belongs to who (e.g., me), Hotchkiss explains that the dig site everyone thought was Nefertari’s tomb was fake (and they didn’t find her mummy), so it’s possible that the site we’re at now is the real one. An expedition went looking for the real one ages ago, but they all died. The fake tomb might’ve been built to misdirect thieves, as Nefertari’s tomb was very valuable, both then and now.
We can also call Sonny Joon’s alien organization, but no one answers. To Dylan!
Dylan…sounds like he’s on an insane amount of painkillers. I guess that’s understandable. Anyway, he tells us that he heard a woman’s voice in the tomb, speaking some sort of mysterious ancient language. Like…Ancient Egyptian? Or can Dylan just not understand Arabic? Nancy’s like, “That’s nice and all, but you have a concussion, so…” and Dylan’s all, “I HEARD WHAT I HEARD.” Sure, Dylan. He also tells us that Jamila’s bag is weird — one moment it seems empty, but then she reaches down and pulls shit out of it! That’s why her bag is so big, it’s full of secrets! So we need to get back into Jamila’s bag, because clearly we didn’t find everything in there.
Oookay, Dylan. Anyway, let’s go back into the tomb and see what else we can do. We find this puzzle on the wall, which is one of those pushing-the-tiles-across-the-board puzzle. You’ll recognize it from The Final Scene, Curse of Blackmoor Manor, and probably several others. It’s a Nancy Drew staple.
The puzzle comes down to reveal this wall. There are four empty circles, which we can fill in with the discs that we found around the tomb. These are the four sons of Horus, and we can use the translation we did earlier to figure out where the discs go. For example, one of the lines is, “I am the cry that soars towards the setting sun,” so that would be the bird disc, which faces west. Once they’re all in, we click on one of the discs, and the little dude on the bottom suddenly turns slightly, and we hear a rumbling sound coming from the rest of the tomb. Oh shit, we’re gonna die in here.
Just kidding! The tomb’s columns have suddenly moved. When we go back and click on the discs, we see that they adjust the columns’ height. We want to arrange the columns so they’re in ascending order, like the little picture in the center of the wall panel.
This is how all the discs should be facing, in order for the columns to be adjusted to the correct height.
Let’s chat with Jamila. Nancy, queen of subtlety, immediately says, “Everyone here seems to be hiding something!” Sure, let’s not reveal our hand too fast or anything. Jamila immediately turns it around and tries to pin suspicion on Dylan: “Why do you think he was here?…[The tomb is exciting] could be said of anywhere. Dylan has been lying to you.” That’s a weirdly specific answer to our statement. Jamila suggests that Dylan’s business would become very popular if he were to, say, offer valuable artifacts from the tomb along with his tours. Nancy clutches her pearls all, “He would never!” “Never trust the cute ones,” Jamila deadpans. “They know what they can get away with.” HEE.
Abdullah freaks out about the moving columns. He’s all, “This tomb is even more mysterious and exciting than I thought! How did they have the technology to move the columns?” to which Nancy chirps, “Maybe aliens did it!” “Very cute,” Abdullah says dryly.
And now, it’s time for Nancy to disregard all thoughts of safety and maintaining the integrity of the dig site. You know what’s cooler than keeping the dig site as intact as possible for archaeological research? Parkour, that’s what.
Nancy hops her way up to this ledge here, where we discover another chamber. What secrets does it hold?
I DON’T LIKE SAND >:(
We find this letter on the floor, from a woman who’s been trapped in the tunnels and can’t find her way out. She’s all, “I’m definitely going to die in here.” Creepy! Then, in the last entry: “If you are reading these pages, it is too late for you. You’re in her tomb. She’ll never let you leave.” SPOOOOOOKY!
Up next: Someone won’t let us leave the tomb, but it’s not the mummy.
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