OH MY GOD HAVE I MADE IT TO THIS GAME?? AM I DREAMING??
Remember how I said Alibi in Ashes knocked Stay Tuned for Danger from its #1 spot in my heart, after STFD managed to hold it for like 10 years? Well, Alibi only managed to be #1 for a few scant months, because then The Deadly Device came out. This is my favorite Nancy Drew game of all time, and unless Midnight in Salem is some kind of non-stop sleuthing Deirdre Shannon show, it’s going to remain that way. It’s funny, because it’s such an unassuming game. Apart from the novelty of Nancy investigating a murder — for the first time since 1998! — the game is pretty straightforward: the location isn’t particularly exotic, the game isn’t trying any new tricks with multiple POVs, and even the dialogue isn’t particularly philosophical or trying to tackle deep themes, a la Shadow at the Water’s Edge or The Captive Curse. But Deadly Device is just so much FUN, with great puzzles and characters. And actually, there is just the slightest twist at the end — but even without that, this game would just be pure Nancy Drew fun, firing on all cylinders.
And really. Who needs philosophy when you have DEIRDRE SHANNON?
It’s a snowy night in Colorado, at Technology Tomorrow Today.
Some dude is in the lab, working on…science…things…
The camera sneaks up behind him, because we’re viewing this from the POV of the murderer. OMG, is Nancy the murderer? Is this The Murder of Roger Ackroyd?
The door slams shut, and we see the flickering lights of electricity, and hear the guy’s screams. Rated E for Everyone!
And now we’re here, talking to Baldhead McBeard. His name is Victor Losset, and he’s the CEO of Technology of Tomorrow Today. He’s hired us to investigate the death of Niko Jovic, so we’ll be going undercover at the company. Our cover story is that we’re auditing the company for a potential new owner. Nancy says we need to look at the murder scene as well, and Victor blusters that it’s too dangerous. “If I can’t investigate everything, I might have a problem on my hands,” Nancy tells him. Yeah, Victor. Don’t hire Nancy if you can’t handle her getting absolutely everywhere up in your business!
So, who will our suspects be? Victor tells us that the prime suspect is a lady named Ryan. Apparently, she built the machine that killed Niko, and she’s threatened him before.
Victor tells us to start in Niko’s office. Pretty much everything in here is locked — we see a bookcase, a candy machine, and Niko’s desk. We also see a media player, but it’s broken.
Let’s start with Niko’s desk, as that’s the only thing we can open right now. Victor’s given us the code to unlock it, so we put that in (171943) and we can poke around.
Victor’s left the police report inside the desk for us to look through. We can find information about Niko — it looks like he was the co-owner of TTT, alongside Victor — and all of our suspects. In addition to Ryan, we’ll also be able to talk to Mason, Ellie, and Gray. Ryan and Mason work the day shift, while Ellie and Gray work the night shift, so we’ll have to switch times in order to speak to them.
And hey, I wonder who our phone friends are for this game?
Oh, for fuck’s sake.
We call the Hardy Boys, and Joe immediately says, “Nancy! Frank was just talking about you!” HER, why must you enable the monstrosity that is Frank/Nancy? He is terrible. Case in point: Joe asks for the “deets” on Nancy’s case, and Frank starts lecturing him about how that’s not a word. Quit being such a prescriptivist, Frank. Nancy tells them that she’s been called in to solve a “cold case” murder. What? Niko’s been dead for like two days, I don’t think that’s long enough to call something a cold case. Anyway, Nancy elaborates: the police have taken all of Niko’s research as evidence, and apparently he was going to revolutionize the electricity industry or something. Victor wants Nancy to solve the case so they can use Niko’s research before another company figures it out and overtakes TTT. Fair enough.
With that done, let’s go explore the building.
Or…not. We leave the office and try to go into the lounge, and the power immediately cuts out. This triggers a call from Victor, who’s like, “Oh yeah, forgot to tell you, we’ve been having a lot of power outages lately. Some of the dangerous electrical equipment starts having problems when the power supply goes out, but it’s probably nothing! Don’t worry! Why don’t you catch up on your sleep!” Oh, sure, I’m gonna sleep fine worrying about being electrocuted to death.
We stumble our way to Nancy’s room, and we can set the alarm to wake up during day or night (you’ll recall that some of our suspects are available during one, but not the other). Aaaand that’s the end of day one, during which I got exactly nothing done. Whoops. That’s okay. You can’t rush art, you know?
No matter what time you set the alarm for, you get woken up in the middle of the night. There’s an alarm going off in the building, flashing red lights, etc. Uh, would this have anything to do with the power outage and the dangerous electrical equipment? Nah, Victor said it was cool, right? He would never lie to us!
As soon as we leave our room, this guy pops up. We recognize him from the suspect file as Gray Cartwright, the head of security. He snaps at us to follow him, refusing to explain what’s going on. Well, what if you’re the murderer, Gray? I don’t know if I want to follow you anywhere.
Just kidding, Gray isn’t taking us anywhere to try to kill us. No, instead he just wants us to do his work for him. Good to know that even in the gritty plot of a murder mystery, there will always be characters pawning their jobs off onto Nancy. We have to turn all these switches from red to green — flipping one switch will flip a couple of others, so we have to figure out which ones to flip to get them all off.
Once we’re done and we’ve saved pretty much the entire building — you’re welcome, Gray — he says he doesn’t care who we are, and kicks us out.
He’s not our culprit, is he? The assholes never are.
Let’s explore a little. The night lights are on now, so we can see the lounge. There are lots of books, a portrait of Nikola Tesla — the educational aspect of this game is all about Tesla and electricity, naturally — a workbench that we can use with our clues later, a cooking area, and a game called “Aggregation” that we will have to play later. One of the books is a biography of Tesla, so let’s pick that up and skim it real quick. We find out he was born in Smiljan, Croatia, was a proponent of the alternating current, and hated Thomas Edison. I feel like an important experience for every American child is having Thomas Edison talked up to you as the inventor of electricity all through elementary school, and then going to high school and finding out that he was a total asshole. I also think edgy kids who act like this is the most fascinating thing they’ve ever learned and continually bring it up like it’s uncommon knowledge are also assholes. We all know, guys.
That’s it for the lounge, so let’s go upstairs. There’s one other person working the night shift, so we should go talk to her.
(Oh, yeah, that big green thing is a gummy bear phone charm you can pick up. There’s not, like, a giant gummy bear statue hanging around in the hallway.)
Say hi to Ellie! Her voice is very soothing. She should do ASMR videos. She tells us that per Victor’s request, she’s going to show us the Tesla coil in the lab.
Ellie puts us in a Faraday cage, and gives us a mildly creepy speech about how the Tesla coil shouldn’t have electrocuted Niko — it was set up wrong, by ~*~someone~*~. But don’t worry, that’s all fixed now! We probably won’t die in here! She gives us a demonstration, and there’s an impressive brief cutscene of electricity crackling.
Then we go back to the office, where we can interrogate Ellie. She’s worked at TTT for about two years, although she sighs that “Some days it feels like decades.” We bring up that the Tesla coil was wired the wrong way, and Ellie says that Ryan was the one who wired it — but also that Ryan claims Niko insisted it be wired that way. HMMM.
We also ask if there’s a way to get into the lab without a key card, but apparently there isn’t. Or is there, Ellie?!
There’s another lounge area upstairs by the cubicles, and we find this book about Tesla coils there. We’ll file this information away for later, as we’ll need it for a puzzle.
On the way back, we can try to go into the cubicle across from Ellie’s, which belongs to Mason Quinto. He’s not here now, and Ellie tells us he wouldn’t like us rummaging through his stuff. Well, no one likes Nancy Drew going through all their business, but she does it anyway. Get on our level, Ellie.
Ellie says that Mason’s being super obnoxious over having the high score in Aggregation (the game in the lounge). If we beat his score, then she’ll let us go though his stuff. Cool, so let’s do that.
Actually, since we’re down here, let’s go see Gray in the security booth. Look at him staring at his blank desktop while pretending to concentrate. I do that at work all the time.
“Don’t know you. Who let you in?” he barks at us. Nancy’s like, “We…just met…like five minutes ago.” Gray gives a bunch of monosyllabic answers to our questions. I’ll summarize: he doesn’t care who we are, doesn’t like that TTT might be sold, and doesn’t want to tell us why he thinks that or what his opinion is on anything else. Helpful! He wants to know why we’re so nosy, and Nancy says we’re investigating for a potential new owner. “Your questions say different. They say you’re lying,” Gray creeps at us. Um, I’ll have you know that Nancy has been in with the law and down with the truth since 2001, Gray!
There’s nothing left to talk to him about — for now — so let’s go play Aggregation. It’s possibly one of the easiest minigames to have ever existed in these games, ever. The goal is to match three of the same objects on the board. You get four different objects on each side of the board, and they get sent to the center of the board, only stopping when they encounter an object already on the board. So the idea is to move the side objects along the correct rows and columns so they connect with their matching object already on the board.
I straight up did not even really know what I was doing, but I beat Mason’s high score. I feel like maybe he shouldn’t be bragging about having the high score on a game that you can win without even understanding the rules.
We also get a text from Ned, who hasn’t quite figured out voice-to-text messaging. Look, I hate Frank Hardy, but you don’t gotta make it so easy for him, Ned.
We go back to report to Ellie that we’ve beaten Mason’s score. “This is me, looking the other way,” she says. “It’s a limited time offer.” Hee.
So this is Mason’s desk. We want to look at the pink sticky note that has the numbers “153472125” written on it. Also note the neatly arranged pencils and markers on the desk.
If you want, you can fuck with Mason by messing up his desk. That’s right, Mason! We beat your score at Aggregation, and now we’re fucking with your highlighters. Accept the superiority of Nancy Drew!
He also has a book on biometrics, which we can read to find out how to make a fake fingerprint. Then we back up and look at the white board next to his desk, which has some letters written on it. The letters are an anagram, and when they’re rearranged, they say “Tesla’s hometown.” We know from our book-learnin’ that he’s from Smiljan, and that must be Mason’s computer password.
Well, that’s not a weird or ominous desktop background at all. Anyway, we can go through Mason’s stuff — he has a program to create 3D designs, as well as a “Record Repository” listing all of his work. The personnel on each file is listed as Niko, interestingly.
And in his trash, we find this note. I too like to type my suspicions about my coworkers out in Word on my work computer, and then not empty the trash. So Mason thinks Ryan is guilty, because of a security video that we’ll have to find.
That’s all for the night shift. We go to bed and set the alarm, and the next day begins.
And we’re promptly woken up with a phone call from Deirdre Shannon. BEST DAY EVER. Look at her contact picture! She’s gorgeous. Deirdre, are you calling to be my friend? Please say we’ll be friends.
(Also, are those Koko Kringle sheets Nancy sleeps on? What a nerd.)
Deirdre’s called purely to needle us that someone asked her for a reference about Nancy. “And you gave him a good reference?” Nancy asks. Deirdre: “Well, I told him the truth.” Heh. Anyway, that’s literally all she called to tell us, and she snaps at us not to make a habit of…putting her down as a reference, I guess. Honestly, this is a very flimsy reason for Deirdre to call us, but I love her presence in this game so much, I’ll overlook it. It occurs to Nancy that Deirdre, who is apparently studying criminology, might be able to help us. “Did you forget that I don’t like you?” Deidre asks, in the most fantastically dry, condescending voice ever. The voice acting in this game is hit-or-miss, but whoever plays Deidre nails it constantly. (Meaghan Halverson, apparently.) Nancy says she’ll return the favor one day if Deirdre helps us out. “A nonspecific promise with the word someday…sounds too tempting to ignore, but here I go.” And then she hangs up on us. HEE. God, I love her.
Aw, yis. And now that Deirdre has called us, the game can actually begin. Let’s go forth!
We go across the building to the tech workshop, which is where we find Ryan Kilpatrick. You’ll recall she’s our prime suspect, and everyone seems pretty sure she’s guilty. We’re walking into the lair of a killer!
Case in point: literally the second we walk in, a huge piece of metal comes flying at our head. Man, Ryan, you haven’t even met Nancy and you want to kill her already? That’s cold.
No, just kidding. Ryan immediately falls all over herself apologizing for nearly beaning us in the head. She could’ve killed us! She didn’t, but she could have! She wouldn’t blame us if we hated her forever! Yeah, I’m…not getting ice-cold killer vibes here.
We give her our spiel about auditing for a new owner, and ask about her job. Ryan sighs that she builds tools, but sometimes tools aren’t used for good things. That makes her complicit in all the not-good things the tools are used for, and that makes her pretty emo, man. Anyway, we know she’s the prime suspect in Niko’s death, but she thinks we should be investigating Gray. Not like, for any real reason — she just thinks he’s creepy. I mean, he is, but I feel like that wouldn’t hold up in court.
Nancy brings up a “part” that was responsible for Niko’s death — I’m guessing a part of the Tesla coil? I don’t know. It was never mentioned before. She wants to know where it is, and Ryan wails that she destroyed it, because she couldn’t live with herself for making it, blah blah THIS IS THE SKIN OF A KILLER, BELLA! blah. And then she kicks us out.
We can still poke around her workspace a bit. We open up one of the cabinets, and to the right we see a blank key card. Cool, so now we just have to find a way to program it, and then we’ll be able to move more freely about the lab. We also find a piece of paper with rainbow patterns, which we’ll need later.
Over on Ryan’s workbench, we find a remote from the security office. HMMMM. Whatcha doing with this, Ryan?
Ryan also rides a motorcycle. Quirky!
That’s it for Ryan — so far — so now we go upstairs to see how the cubicle kids are doing. If we try to go near Ellie’s desk, Mason will yell at us. So hey, we nosed around all his stuff last night, so let’s finally meet Mason, shall we?
He has, uh…a very intense brow ridge, there.
So if I was feeling even slightly bad for messing up Mason’s desk last night, the first five minutes of our interaction only make me regret that I didn’t just flip the whole thing over. Mason immediately starts snarking that he doesn’t have time to be talking to us, because he’s working on some very important science-y things, which he won’t bother to explain because our silly vagina is incapable of understanding it. “It sounds like you’re working on the wireless transmission of electricity,” Nancy notes. Yeah! Fuck you, Mason!
We ask him about Niko now, and Mason claims that they didn’t work together. Uh, but his name is all over your files, Mason. Mason says that Niko never bothered to talk to anyone; he would just root around in Mason’s hard drive to see what he was up to. Hee. Nancy and Niko have that in common. Well, what are Mason’s thoughts on the rest of his coworkers? Ellie? Ryan? “Let me save you some time. I don’t like anyone,” Mason snarks. “Observe.”
He sticks his arm out and makes a thumbs-down sign: “OTHER PEOPLE.” Okay, Mason, go post on your Myspace with the heading “WELCOME TO MY TWISTED MIND”. He does, however, lowkey appreciate that Ellie hates him as much as he hates her. “What did you do?” Nancy asks. Mason: “Why do you assume it was me?” Ha! Let’s be real, Mason. He admits that he doesn’t know.
He tells us that the police came to investigate Niko’s death, and Mason was very put off by how they kept talking about basketball like it was any other day. I mean, I guess if you’re the police and you put off talking about basketball every time there’s a murder, you’ll never get to discuss the game. He remembers that they took Ryan away in handcuffs, but then she came back the next day and they all just pretended nothing happened, because this is an office full of socially awkward nerds. Huh. Well, does Mason know Ryan’s motive for killing Niko? “If I were to have killed Niko, it’d be because he stole my work.” Whoa, hold up, that’s not what I asked you, Mason! Anyway, he doesn’t know why Ryan would’ve killed Niko — he says her thought processes aren’t logical, ergo, he cannot follow them. Nevertheless, the Tesla coil that killed Niko was built (and presumably miswired) by Ryan, so she must be guilty.
As for Gray, Mason merely thinks he’s creepy. Apparently only Niko was friends with him. Mason goes off on another rant about how Niko was a jerky work-stealing jerkface, and he’s not going to pretend to like him just because Niko’s dead. I mean, fair enough, I guess, although I agree with Nancy when she says that it’s weird for Mason to be so blasé. Did Mason graduate from Paseo Del Mar?
Mason, like everyone with a passing interest in history and energy, is a total Tesla fanboy. He tells us that Tesla’s work was mostly confiscated by the FBI, for secret reasons — but there’s still some here, at TTT. (Tesla did indeed have a lab in Colorado Springs.) Mason says he suspects Niko had some of Tesla’s research squirreled away, but he’s never been able to find it. HMMM. Could we have stumbled upon a motive?
Finally: fuck you, Mason, we beat your high score on Aggregation! Mason says “Sun Tzu compels [him] to take [us] down. Prepare yourself, opponent!” Whatever, Mason. Maybe I’ll actually figure out the rules to the game, and then I’m going to crush you.
We then get a text from Ned, apologizing for his texting fuckup earlier. “Voice recognition might not be for me.” Oh, Ned. Sweetie. I know.
Now that we’ve met all our suspects, let’s check back in with Victor. We ask him about Ellie, and he really weirdly says, “She’s got that small town girl act down pat. I guess I just can’t tell who she really is.” That’s just…an odd thing to say about an employee, I feel. We also tell him about Mason’s grudge against Niko for stealing his work, and Victor says it’s troubling that Mason was viewing that work as “his” — nevertheless, he doesn’t have much of an opinion on Mason, apart from thinking that he’s smart.
We bring up Gray, and Victor’s like, “He’s creepy. Stay away from him.” Okay, so if literally everyone hates Gray and thinks he’s creepy, how does he have a job here? Victor says he thinks Gray is capable of murder, although that doesn’t mean he killed Niko. He would have fired him already, if he didn’t want him around so Nancy can investigate him. Victor warns us not to tell Gray he said that. Oh, Victor. You know we’re going to tell Gray that within the next five minutes of seeing him again.
On the other hand, Ryan is definitely not creepy, so what’s with everyone’s conviction that she killed Niko? Victor says that Ryan can get angry when she really feels like it, and he’s heard her cussing Niko out and threatening to hurt him. “Don’t be fooled by her buddy act. She’s not what she seems.” But, but, she’s so fun and quirky! 🙁
Let’s go over all this with the Hardy Boys while we’re at it. We tell them about watching Ellie’s Tesla coil demonstration, and both brothers geek out. They start gushing that they’re the biggest Tesla fans in the world. Uh, Frank I can believe, but in what universe does Joe know who Nikola Tesla was? He didn’t even know who Mark Twain was! This is historical revisionism and fake news, tbh. Anyway, if we need any Tesla trivia, we can probably call on the Hardy Boys.
They also tell us that they’re working with some guys in the intelligence community, so if we need to run background checks on any of our suspects, we can ask them. We can then run down our list of suspects and describe them; we get two choices of description, one of which is nicer than the other. So we can either say, for example, that Mason is a jerky jerkface, or we can say that he’s a little work-obsessed but not that bad. But Mason really is that bad, so I’m going with the “jerky jerkface” option. Frank advises that Mason’s coldness is “a little textbook” (whatever that means); maybe we can find out more about him if we provoke a spontaneous reaction from him.
We pretty much skip over Gray — he’s creepy, everyone thinks he’s creepy, not much to say there. Then there’s Ryan. “What’s his story?” Joe asks. “Her,” Nancy corrects. Joe: “Hang on, adjusting mental image. Removing mustache, change haircut and shoes.” Heh. We tell them that Ryan is ~lol random~, but everyone thinks she’s the killer for some reason. Frank and Joe say that she shouldn’t be ruled out, although the police must have let her go for a reason. Then we mention that Ellie is pretty reserved and quiet. Joe’s like, “She’s probably a serial killer.” Heh.
Let me cleanse the Hardy Boys from my palate by calling Deirdre. Sadly, she doesn’t pick up. I think I knew in my heart that Deirdre wouldn’t take my calls, but I hoped anyway. So we get her voicemail: “If you’re under fifty, why are you leaving me a message instead of a text? Oldsters, do what you gotta do.” HEE! Nancy is eighty years old at heart, we already knew this.
We pass the lab, and Nancy tries to use the blank key card real quick. It doesn’t work, and now the game will register that we have to program it.
Night falls, and now we can snoop around Gray and Ellie’s stuff some more.
But first! Deirdre returns my call!
Or, well, she’s actually calling us, because she needs Nancy’s help: “Apparently, it still counts as plagiarism if you pay someone to write your paper. I mean, is capitalism dead because that’s what it seems like.”
Anyway, Deirdre made a bargain with her professor that she can make up the credit if she assists with an actual murder investigation. And hey! There’s an actual murder investigation going on right now! Deirdre says that she has access to her school’s crime database, and she’s already read up on the case. Wow, it’s been like two minutes and she’s already been more helpful than Bess and George have ever been. Nancy agrees.
So let’s pick her brain about what she’s read. We ask why they let Ryan go, since everyone is so convinced she’s a stone cold killer. Deirdre muses that something didn’t add up with the security video and Ryan’s timeline — someone had to be in the lab with Niko in order to fuck with the Tesla coil, and Ryan’s alibi has her not being in the building at the time. This dialogue is a little weird, if only because so far everyone’s been implying that Ryan built the coil wrong in the first place, so it’s not like she had to be present to mess with it. Whatever.
We can also ask her about surveillance videos, and if it’s possible to fake them. Deirdre tells us that it’s hard to detect a fake video nowadays, what with all the advanced editing technology, but we have to make sure we have the original feed. Analyzing a copy won’t help. So that’s another thing on our list. We then task Deirdre with finding 911 calls from the night of the murder, and she says she’ll text us when she’s found something.
So out in the hallway by the security booth is an alarm that we can pull if there’s ever a security breach that Gray needs to investigate. Or if we just want to get him out of his office! Gray runs out once we press the red button, and now we can go look at the surveillance tapes.
First we have to turn on Gray’s computer. Like all computers in Nancy Drew games, his computer can’t just like…have a power button. No, first we must solve a puzzle. We want to click on the dots in order to turn them all green; we have 5 chances to click on the right dots, in the right order, to light up the entire board.
Once that’s done, the computer turns on, but now we have another puzzle in order to look at Gray’s files. I…will not pretend to understand this puzzle. Basically, we have to put all the numbers in, in binary, with the red and blue dots representing 1s and 0s. If you don’t understand binary, there’s a poster on the second floor that explains it. The idea is to arrange the red and blue dots so that all the numbers are represented, although they’ll overlap. So for example, 15 is four blue dots in a row, and 9 is two red dots sandwiched between two blue dots. So after putting four blue dots in a row, we put two red dots, and then another blue one, and that takes care of both 15 and 9. I think. Whatever. I just copied the solution from a walkthrough.
Now that we’re in, we can look at the security logs, and see which key cards have been accessing the labs. We see four distinct numbers across the logs — we know Mason is 153472125 and Ryan is 203587112, and we can assume the other two belong to Gray and Ellie. But on the night of the murder, 10/25, a new key card number appears (185116518), followed by a system override. HMMM.
The case file we looked at when we first got here tells us that the security video of Niko’s death is LBTY510258. We watch him go in, and a few seconds later, the lights in the lab flicker as the coil goes off and kills him. Creepy. But, Nancy notes, there’s no one else in the video. HMMM.
Let’s look at the video Mason mentioned, in his note about Ryan being released. The video ID is HLLW510257. The video is from 10/23 — a couple of days before Niko’s death — and shows Ryan sneaking in at night and bypassing the security system. SUSPICIOUS!
Up next: Nothing in this entire lab works. It’s a miracle the entire staff hasn’t died already, honestly.
Leave a Reply