Nancy Drew: The Shattered Medallion (Part Three)

Previously on Nancy Drew: The Shattered Medallion: Who cares? Nothing in this game has any bearing on anything else that happens because it’s just a bunch of random events linked together by the flimsy reality TV format. We clicked through a few more conversations because we had to, but they were all really random and made no sense. Then we arranged the labels on some sheep models, which presumably captivated the show’s audience. I don’t know. Anyway, we’re almost to the end of the game, so let’s just keep going. 

I feel like I’m being really harsh about this game? It could be just that, nonsensical as it is, playing it is at least something to do. The environments are really beautiful and the puzzles are okay. The dialogue and plot are even worse than I remember, though. Like, at the time that I played it — when it came out in 2014 — I remember feeling let down by how confusing and anticlimactic it was, but it wasn’t the worst game in the world to click through. Recapping it, though? Ugh. UUUUGGGHHH. Like, for the millionth time, the plot makes no sense. I’m just sitting here telling you what happens because I have no idea what any of it means.

Okay, so Stage Three ended, we placed our medallion peace, and now we’re tied with the rest of the visible characters (Leena/Patrick and Kiri) for medallion pieces, while the rest of the irrelevant characters get whittled away.

Let’s check in with Bess, who hasn’t done shit during this stage. She tells us that she’s scared of Leena — for some reason; it’s not like Bess has ever tried to talk to her — and she like…thinks Patrick is too good for her. Uh, Leena’s a jerk, but at least she can string a sentence together.

Anyway, Bess is still tragically and embarrassingly pining for Sonny. She didn’t even try to talk to him the second time; she just walked on by. Oh, Bess. She says she’s going to try again. In the meantime, she did manage to find a bonus 100 points card for us to give to Leena. We muse a little over how weird it is that Sonny called Leena her to help him solve codes, and wonder if maybe he needs her help. Bess is like, “Idk” and then, “Get out of here, ya old so and so!” Yeah, that’s never gonna stop being weird.

We go back to Leena and she gives us the translated letter from Jin. It’s a story about a boy learning to play a Chopin etude, and the following phrases are written in red: “gold mine,” “lit a lantern,” “mined,” “jagged,” “ankerite,” and “hidden below.” Okay, so we’ll want to remember those.

Leena tells us about how one time she followed Jin into the rare books room, and he told her, “This is my etude.” Then she saw that he was reading a book about codes and rare artifacts and WHO EVEN CARES, THIS IS SO BORING. After leaving the orchestra, Jin sent Leena a note saying that he knew she understood.

We kind of try to hint that maybe Leena’s love of riddles is why she’s dating Patrick. Leena’s like, “OMG, thank you for pointing out that my boyfriend makes no sense when he talks, I never noticed that before.” She snipes that intelligence isn’t everything, and Nancy shouldn’t judge her relationship. Whatever. At least Ned can swim. Wait, can he? Maybe I shouldn’t assume.

Let’s talk to Patrick, because we have to. He’s like, “Oh, hey, Leena says I’m supposed to say that there was someone else near the bridge.” Heh. Okay, Leena, I know smarts aren’t everything, but at least get you a guy who’s smart enough not to give away your whole evil plan. Patrick emos that his whole family is really smart, and he’s dumb. I mean, that’s sad and all, but I can’t really argue. On the other hand, Patrick tells us that his parents are teachers and belong to an order that helps people learn how to not exist, so maybe this whole family is just kind of weird. I don’t know. I don’t really care, either. “I tried to understand it, but no luck,” Patrick whines. Yeah, well, I must be as dumb as Patrick, because I don’t get it either.

Over in the med tent, George advises us to keep sending Bess to talk to Patrick, as they have some sort of spiritual connection. Also, Bess has nothing else to do. Fair enough. Then we have some really short blunt exchanges about everything we’ve learned so far, and it’s nothing new, so I’ll skip it. George brings up that this season of Pacific Run is really weird — like, usually they run all over the Pacific, hence the name, but this time they’re just bumming around this campsite shearing sheep and looking for flowers. Oh. And here I thought this show was just really shitty. Anyway, Nancy promises to do more investigating, and George promises to keep researching and building Sonny’s machine, after she takes a nap. Heh.

George has found out some stuff about Jin in the meantime, namely that she found some posts from him on music forums. He wanted to know how to join an orchestra without actually playing an instrument, and he was interested in the security at the concert hall. Suspicious, I guess. We kind of already knew all this.

Meanwhile, Kiri has decided that it’s time for her sudden but inevitable betrayal. Given that we have worked together exactly once, and otherwise have completed the tasks completely on our own (without Bess, even), this is…not that big of a deal. Kiri asks if she can play our breakup a little differently for the cameras, and Nancy’s like, “Whatever.” This is dumb. Are they not being filmed right now?

So…let’s talk to Sonny, I guess. We’re like, “So this show is kind of fucked, huh,” and he’s like, “Yup. This job is not going on my resume.” Nancy notes that he doesn’t seem very concerned — it’s almost like he doesn’t care about Pacific Run! Sonny’s like, “Yeah, I don’t.” Sonny and I have that in common. We bring up that Bess told us that our sidequest is basically just the world “turtle”, and Sonny’s like, “Wow, she is really bad at delivering messages.” We tell him that Bess has a huge, embarrassing crush on him, and he’s pretty gracious about it — he thinks Bess is cute, and he thinks it’s sweet how much she cares about Nancy. Also, apparently Bess made a photo edit of Sonny holding a puppy. How? Does she have a laptop that can run Photoshop in our tent? Anyway, our quest is apparently to figure out the inner life of the leatherback turtle, which really is not any more clear than the original hint we got.

Sonny gives us more wacky comics. The last frame has more symbols in it. We’ll get there when we get there, I guess. Man, this game has absolutely nothing tying any of these events together.

In addition to our side quest, Stage Four is also open, so we have to mine gold for our next medallion. WHO EVEN CARES ANYMORE? It occurs to me that one thing that is really annoying about this game is that it brings back the random chore format of the earlier games with a vengeance. I had gotten really used to not having to run around doing BS side work while trying to solve a mystery — and at least the chores in the earlier games were under the pretense of buttering up our suspects. The challenges in this game have no purpose except to fill up time.

As we’re chilling on this path, we overhear Sonny somewhere nearby, talking to…someone. He’s going on about someone called “Mystic,” who he knew was the perfect person to rope into his plans when Mystic started babbling about rivers. I’m guessing Mystic is Patrick.

We come across this cave, which Nancy notices looks like a spot from one of the comics we’ve seen. Let’s go inside! Getting lost inside a cave and dying would…probably still be an improvement over the rest of this game.

We go down the path in the cave and encounter a waterfall, which must be where Leena was hanging out earlier. Behind the waterfall, we find this suspicious alien-related door. Nancy notes that we need a key to open it, because of course we do.

We also find a card for 50 points. Cool cool cool.

We can’t do anything else with the door for now, so let’s go do the turtle puzzle. There’s a big old model of a turtle in the underwater observatory, so we go there and write “Blubba Gum” on its back. See, ’cause in Sonny’s comics, we found out that whales like Blubba Gum, and…look, man, I don’t know. I’m just following a walkthrough at this point because I just want to get to the end of this game as fast as possible.

We get a note from the turtle’s mouth about finding a “colony of black and red” underwater, and reaching into “the rocky steep.” Okay, so we’ll have to get back into the submarine and investigate what that could mean. The posters on the wall will tell us that there are red and black coral in the area, so that’s what we’re looking for.

So what you have to do is troll around underwater until you find a big patch of red and black coral. It’s surrounding a little rock cave that we can reach into, and we’ll find a box containing this here ring. Mysterious! Nancy notes that the ring doesn’t look like it’s part of the competition.

This is dumb. Why doesn’t Jin just find this stuff himself, since he clearly knows where it is? What’s the point of hijacking a reality TV show to find it? How is all this mysterious ancient alien shit intertwined with the mechanisms of a reality TV show set that was built like yesterday? Aaaagh.

WHATEVER. Okay, now to pan for gold in Stage Four. In order to do it, we have to go buy a pan from the auction house using our tokens. Dumb Thing #290290: Why would you make contestants buy their own equipment for the challenges?

We also have to get a pick from the little mining setup in the play field, so we go do that, too.

Can we talk to Bess about anything? Ah, yes, she’s still bemoaning her failure to flirt with Sonny. Bess’s low self-esteem and feeling like she can’t contribute to winning Pacific Run would be a more interesting plot thread in a better game. As it is, it’s just kind of random and distracting. Bess wails that she’s usually good at being the social one and flirting information out of suspects for us, but she’s been off her game ever since we arrived in New Zealand. Maybe it’s because we’re south of the equator and everything is backwards down here, Bess. Anyway, we leave her to her existential crisis, because no offense but I can’t be fucked to care right now. Nancy tells her to try talking to Patrick again.

Weirdly, Patrick is the voice of reason. We pop by to say hi, and he’s like, “Your friend thinks she’s in love with Sonny, but she’s just infatuated with him because he’s the only single guy on this island and he’s got quirky hair.” He immediately ruins this solid deduction by telling us that “love is infatuation plus bees,” whatever the hell that means.

I decide to talk to Bess again, and…she brings up our calling Jamila. What? Bess, that was all the way back in part one, please get with the times. Bess is all mad because Jamila’s part of SPIED with Sonny, and Nancy’s like, “Can you focus?” We send Bess off to go distract herself in Puzzle Palace and try to boost our score, although spoiler: it doesn’t make one bit of difference.

Let’s go talk to Kiri, since it’s been a while. She acts all over-the-top aggravated with us, and I guess we’re meant to think that it’s for the cameras? Except it’s been implied, through previous dialogue, that there are no cameras over here? WHATEVER. Kiri tries to trash talk us and it’s really embarrassing for her. She’s all like, “You best stroll on out, less you want to roll on out.” I mean…we’re on an island, Kiri, there’s not a lot of places to go. We try to get information out of her, but she’s all like, “How very DARE you come into MY house and ask ME for information.” Okay, whatever, I’m sure it wouldn’t have made a lick of sense anyway.

So clicking on Cromwell on the map and entering the password will take us to this area with a mine in it. We enter the mine, because that seems safe, and we see this bizarro writing on the walls. We’ll check that out later. For now, we are just here to scoop up a bunch of dirt to carry back to the gold mining area so we can sluice it for gold.

Naturally, the sluice isn’t working on the first try, so we have to fix the fans before the water will run. Another fan puzzle? Is there some kind of blade shortage on this island? Anyway, the sets of blades have to be matched so that they form a complete fan with four blades. The pink, white, and yellow boxes have to be placed in rows across the squares, and the yellow, blue, and brown fans are placed over them in columns.

With that, the faucet turns on and we can pan for gold. We successfully sluice a panful of gold, and I proceed to have a bunch of flashbacks to fourth-grade history class. If you didn’t go on a field trip to pan for fake gold at Sutter’s Fort, are you really from the Bay Area?

We go back inside to explore the mine because why not. There’s a random lantern just chilling on a box on the path inside, as you do. Nancy’s like, “Let’s try to light this lantern!” even though we’re like two feet from daylight. When we light the lantern, we get a key. OMG, could this be the key to the alien door? It better be, because I’m losing my will to live over here.

A little further back in the mine, we find a diary from…Jin? It’s unclear. He tells Sonny that he needs to complete the task that the “Testers” left for them, which involves assembling a team and building…something. The diagram looks a little like the ring we found, and we recognize the symbols from the comics.

What, so Jin hauled ass all the way to New Zealand just to leave behind mysterious clues and didn’t bother to do any of this himself? WHATEVER.

Outside the mine, we see a bunch of scales. We put our pan of gold on the Team Tui scale, and that will give us our medallion. Then we have to haul ass back to the base camp and place the medallion.

And holy shit, this game has finally let us win a stage! Probably because if we kept losing, Bess would swim out to Loser Atoll herself and possibly drown on the way. The announcer snarks that the other teams’ spirits must be broken, since you have to be really sad to lose to Bess Marvin’s team. Wasn’t the announcer just pulling for us, since she has a completely unexplained thing for George? Anyway, the other two irrelevant teams have been eliminated, so now it’s just us and our suspects, as it probably should’ve been from the beginning.

We cut back to the base camp, and get a text that the Final Stage has started. OH THANK GOD. Alrighty, so we have to “activate” the symbols inside the caves at Lake Te Anau.

Bess is high off the thrill of victory, and she’s like, “I see the appeal of this now! I want to win more stuff and DESTROY OUR COMPETITION EMOTIONALLY!” Okay, Bess. Nancy tells her to chill out a little, and Bess emos that she wants to win because she’s feeling a little lost: George got the opportunity to be on one of her favorite reality shows (never mind that her entry was completely rigged), and Nancy of course gets to jet all over the world whenever she feels like it, and Bess feels like a loser in comparison. Oh, man. This is probably the only genuinely emotional bit of the game, and it’s ruined by…everything else about this game. And of course Nancy’s just like, “I don’t get it. Anyway, help me solve this mystery.” Oh, Nancy.

We go over to talk to Patrick, and he’s all mad at us for “trying to distract [him].” He’s like, “Every time you talk to me, I get confused!” I’m not sure that’s Nancy’s fault, Patrick. He notes that Bess seems to be going through some shit and offers to cheer her up, probably by telling her lame zebra jokes. Nancy says that that’s nice of him, since clearly Nancy’s not going to bother to do it herself. Then Patrick’s like, “Oh, and Leena wants me to spy on you.” I really doubt Leena’s commitment to winning this game, given that she keeps entrusting sensitive shit to Patrick Star over here. Patrick tells us that Leena caught us in the producers’ area, but she was back there too, so whatever. She’s also obsessed with the rules book, and “that’s why [they’re] here.” Nancy finds that intriguing, and Patrick realizes he said something that he shouldn’t.

I didn’t mention this at the time, but while we were in the mine, we kept getting thirsty-ass texts from Bess asking us to see if Sonny’s single. We go over to ask him, and he just…tries to smolder at us? Whatever. Who knows. Anyway, the point is, he might be single and he might not be, but he’s not into Bess. Bess texts us that she was watching the whole thing and she’s just going to mope forever and die now. You do that, Bess.

So we go back to the waterfall and use the key we found on the alien door. This opens up to reveal a puzzle, which harkens back to the code we found in Leena’s tent at the beginning of the game. If you can remember that far back — and if you’re not already repressing everything that’s happened in this game — she’d deciphered the code and written down instructions as to how to solve the puzzle. We have to place the “spaceships” on the board, with the numbers on the sides indicating how many green dots are in each row and column. The stars indicate places where spaceships can’t be placed.

Completing the puzzle gets us this…thing. Nancy wonders if it’s one of the relics that Sonny’s looking for.

Who cares? Let’s just go to the caves and finish the Final Stage so we can peace out of here. The caves are too dark to see inside, so we have to do a puzzle to turn the lights on. The dots inside the circles indicate how many squares they can light up, so we want to send the circles into parts of the grid to light the entire grid up. It’s really easy because when you click on a circle, an empty circle will pop up to show you where it can go.

We light up the cave and go inside, and we find this MYSTERIOUS NOTE on the ground. It’s everyone’s individual tasks, and they’re weird and don’t make any sense, and it’ll all be revealed at the end anyway, so let’s just keep moving.

We find a computer screen with this shape on it, which is actually an overlapping of all the Maori symbols from that book Kiri gave us. We want to click on the parts of the shape to create each symbol that appears on the list at the left.

When we finish making all the shapes, a drawer opens, and we find a note that says “SONNY WUZ HERE.” What? I was so close to being done with this game! So close! F you, Sonny. D:

We also find another comic about a girl finding the mine, and I don’t know if that’s meant to be Nancy or someone else, but I guess that’s a hint to go back there. We also find a card for an extra 100 points, but the rules are made up and the points don’t matter, as we will see in a few minutes.

We go back to the mines and find a peephole, through which we see Kiri messing with weird writing on a wall. There’s a collapse of some kind which opens up another tunnel or something, whatever, my screencaps are vague and I don’t care enough to look it up. Anyway, that tunnel lets us go follow Kiri — how she got there when the tunnel was blocked off, I do not know — and we can inspect the wall she was looking at. We find a note on the ground, wherein Sonny tells Kiri that her quest is to use her acrobat training to go trawling around in the mine fissures and retrieve something for him. So Kiri managed to squeeze into the tunnel, but clearly she hasn’t figured out how to retrieve Sonny’s item for him. So let’s do it and prove to Kiri that Nancy Drew is better than you at everything.

Nancy tells us that the odd symbols on the wall must spell something out. What you have to do is rotate them until they resemble letters, and they’ll spell out “Ominous Omniscient.” When that’s done, a rock will fall away and reveal another relic in the mine wall. Who even — how — WHATEVER.

We get the relic piece and leave. On our way out, we hear Kiri and Sonny arguing suspiciously about something. Their argument is vague, like all the dialogue in this game. Kiri is annoyed that she got the weird “climb into an abandoned mine” task, I guess, and snipes at Sonny that he doesn’t even go here. Sonny’s like, “Whatever,” and Kiri tells him not to mess with her, because she’s still under the impression that anyone cares about her reality TV expertise. Kiri says that she and Sonny are the same, and they can destroy each other. They’re definitely destroying my will to live.

Back at the base camp, we try to talk to Kiri about the mines — I don’t know why we’re revealing to her that we were there, but okay — and she’s just big mad that Sonny’s fucking up her chance at reality TV stardom. Dumb Thing #48902 about this game: the plot is barely about reality TV, and definitely hasn’t touched on the topic since we started our whole alien quest. The conversations with Kiri feel like they’re taking place in some alternate universe, in a game with a different plot. I don’t care about anything you’re saying, Kiri.

Anyway, let’s go confront Sonny about taking our medallion. He’s like, “I might have, for great justice.” We tell him we want just one straight answer from him, and he’s like, “You can’t handle my truth!” Then he gives us our medallion piece and tells us to go beat Kiri. I mean, we still could’ve done that if you had just left the piece for us, but — OH MY GOD, WHATEVER.

We run off to go place our medallion piece, and I guess seeing us running finally kicks Kiri’s butt into gear, because she decides that she has to go place her piece now, too. What, she was just hanging around for fun instead of getting a decisive win? Whatever. We throw the piece to Bess, and she and Kiri place the medallions at the same time. Sonny’s like, “It’s a tie! Time for sudden death!”

Okay, see, remember how we found a bunch of bonus points cards, and we won some quests for extra points, too? NONE OF IT MATTERS. Because in order to finish the game, we have to go into this sudden death round with Kiri, so you can be 500 points ahead of literally everyone and still miraculously be tied with her. IT IS SO DUMB.

Also, you’ll recall that there are no tiebreakers in this game, except there suddenly are, because Sonny said so. Seriously, who cares? I get that the point is to demonstrate that Sonny’s completely hijacked this show, but nearly all of the rules established at the beginning have been broken and/or disregarded over the course of the game anyway, so it’s just like…fuck it. If the gameplay structure and rules had actually been enforced up until this moment, it would’ve felt like a twist, but as it is, it’s just one more thing that doesn’t make sense.

(“How is there possibly more!” Bess wails. I am right there with you, Bess.)

The final game involves placing discs into a tube that match the pattern seen at the right. A tube will pass under the five hanging tubes, and the bottom disc of any open tube will drop into the moving tube. We want to open and close the correct hanging tubes so that the discs will drop and create the pattern to the right. It’s a little tricky just because the tube is moving and we’re under a time constraint, but it’s not that hard.

I bet all of Kiri’s reality TV experience didn’t prepare her for the challenge of SOLVING USELESS PUZZLES! However, as a long-time player of Nancy Drew games, solving useless puzzles is my JAM, and Team Tui easily beats her. So Team Tui wins this season of Pacific Run, and presumably Nancy and Bess’s faces are broadcasted everywhere, ruining Nancy’s undercover cred the next time she gets a job.

The announcer is like, “And Sonny Joon will never work in this town again!” WHY ARE YOU TELLING YOUR ENTIRE AUDIENCE THAT YOUR SHOW PRODUCTION IS A DISASTER?

So can we go home? Can we finally go home? Haha, nope. Sonny tells us that he’s finally ready to give us answers. He tells us to grab a rope and join him at the caves.

There’s a rope just chilling on one of the tables, so we grab it and go to the caves. Sonny’s posted a sign on one of the platforms, and we have to rappel down into the caves to join up with him. We follow Sonny to this weird puzzle in the wall, and Sonny’s like, “This puzzle is the whole reason I brought you here.” Why didn’t you just CALL us, Sonny? Nancy’s taken weirder jobs. Literally all you had to do was be like, “Hey, Nancy, I have a dead mom,” and I bet Nancy would’ve come running.

Anyway, the puzzle has to be filled in with different colors. We get a call from George — man, these remote caves have great reception — who tells us that the top corner of the puzzle has to be filled in with green, and the bottom corner has to be filled in with blue. We do that, and Nancy will magically know that the rest of the shapes have to be filled in with colors that don’t touch. In total fairness, this puzzle has come up in a few other games, so Nancy is just drawing on past experience at this point.

Finishing the puzzle reveals a lever in the wall, which we pull, because there’s nothing else to do down here. Pulling the lever causes all the water in the cave to…drain somewhere? I don’t know.

Then we hear a voice saying, “Want to hear a funny story?” We look up, and we see Kiri looking down at us. For some reason, Nancy’s like, “Whatever you’re upset about, we can talk it through! We could die down here!” even though we have yet to receive any indication that Kiri is going to do anything to us. Kiri evils that she’s going to make us pay for our betrayal — whatever that means — and cuts the rope that we used to get down here. She tells us that she’s going to act like she thought the cave was just part of the show, and she certainly didn’t MEAN to let us die down here. Okay, point to Kiri. It’s very believable that she had no idea what was going on in this show, because nobody has any idea what’s going on.

Oh yeah, and at some point before this — I think if you go look at George’s tablet — we find out that Kiri and Erin were the ones that cut the bridge, but they didn’t mean for George to get hurt. Yawn. Who even cares at this point?

So the lights go out, but luckily there’s like glowing algae to help us find our way around the caves. Sonny somehow has a makeshift raft with him, for reasons, and pushes us in to raft out of the caves. Somehow. The next bit is kind of like the mining cart puzzle in Last Train to Blue Moon Canyon — Sonny will yell at us to steer towards or avoid certain formations of rock, using bizarro descriptions like “the minotaur’s hands”, and we have to figure out which ones he’s referring to. You can also just memorize the order, which is right-left-right-right-left.

We make it to the end of the caves, and Sonny flips out that there’s nothing here. Yes, Sonny, this whole game is pointless. Join me in being mad at about it. He yells, “THERE’S NOTHING HERE, JIN!”, and apologizes to us for letting George get hurt in his quest for alien shenanigans. It’s almost emotionally affecting — again, in a better game, watching this quirky character break down in a moment of human frustration would be interesting, but I hate everything about this game so I won’t be moved by it.

Luckily, Sonny’s yelling has attracted the notice of Patrick. Or not so luckily, because Patrick’s like, “What’s going on, guys?” and hops down into the caves with us. OH, FOR FUCK’S SAKE. He sees something in the water below us, and he’s like, “This is my river! I’ll sink to the bottom, like a gorilla, and retrieve whatever’s under there!” Then he dives in. Nancy’s like, “Do you think we should pull him out?” but then Sonny starts explaining his motivations for this game and we forget about Patrick. Sonny tells us that he believed he was special, because his grandpa told him that they were in contact with aliens, but now he’s thinking maybe he’s just dumb. This sort of ties back to what Kiri was saying earlier, about being told that she was special from an early age, and having to deal with it not being true. I think that might be one of the Deep Themes that this game was going for, but it got lost in the shuffle of the plot making no sense.

It’s also not a great theme, because just as Sonny is coming to grips with not being special, Patrick drains the water from the pool he’s in, and we see a mysterious object at the bottom. So Sonny is special after all, and the lesson he learned was worthless!

Sonny apologizes to his grandpa for doubting him, and Nancy decides that we have to assemble the relic pieces that we found on this thing.

Sonny has been carrying a blue star chart with him this entire time, and says this is why he brought Nancy along. No, seriously, why? If Sonny knew where everything was this whole time, why are we even here? Whatever. So Sonny places the blue star chart, and then we place — in order — the ring we found underwater, the relic piece from the alien door, and the piece we found in the mine wall. Then we have to use the clues that we found in the comics and in Jin’s journal to align the pointer and the relic ring properly. It has to be set a few times for each batch of symbols we found in the comics, and I don’t care enough to explain what each correct alignment is. I’m so done, you guys. I am just done.

The relic lights up, casting stars all over the cave walls and outside. Like the rest of this game, it’s visually beautiful but ultimately nonsensical. Sonny muses that there’s always a piece of truth in his grandpa’s stories. Nancy wonders if, since the relic is real, if maybe aliens do exist after all. Patrick’s like, “I don’t understand any of this.” Me either, Patrick. Me either.

The relic beam attracts Bess’s attention, and thankfully she throws some rope down to us instead of jumping to join us. She basks in the glory of getting to save the day after feeling useless all game, and we FINALLY get to climb out of the caves and finish the game.

Bizarrely, Nancy recaps the whole game in a letter to Ned: “I’m not allowed to tell you what happened until the episode airs, but basically, after George was injured, Bess stepped up and did her best to help us take home the trophy.” What? So…this whole thing was just one episode of the show? I DON’T UNDERSTAND.

Kiri apparently is working on getting a new show airing that will chronicle her redemption arc, and I feel like this is supposed to say something about reality TV and celebrities but it doesn’t really.

Patrick decides to learn how to swim, while Leena decides to research some of Jin’s books. Leena, I think, got the best deal out of this — she gets a bunch of stuff to boost her cryptography cred, and she barely had to be in the game.

Sonny and Jamila keep working on figuring out what the relic ~means~ — Jamila is interested in figuring out where it came from, while Sonny is going to keep looking for aliens, presumably.

Bess got her self-esteem back, while George spent the rest of their time in New Zealand trying to stay awake, much like me playing this game.

Jesus. Okay, where to start? This game is awful. Like, I knew it was bad when I first played it, but I left it alone for a few years and when I started writing these posts, I was like, “Surely it wasn’t THAT bad?” But no, it is. It might actually be worse than I remember. It’s nonsensical, the dialogue is trying too hard to be deep and quirky, and all the characters are ridiculous. I don’t even have much to say about it, because…well, first of all, I can’t explain anything that happens because I have no idea, and nothing in this game makes me invested enough to dig for meaning. So like…I know I zipped by a lot of things that happened, but I just…couldn’t be fucked to try to figure it out. None of it mattered, anyway.

Sonny probably should’ve just stayed a wacky recurring character that we never actually meet. At the most, he might’ve made a good phone friend. HER’s been using him so long as a running joke that trying to coalesce all the bizarre quirks they’ve given him into a coherent character didn’t work very well. Also, way to barely acknowledge that we’ve been following him around the world for like 10 years now.

Then there’s the “culprit.” Kiri is the villain, inasmuch as this game has one. This is dumb, because her villainry has literally nothing to do with most of this game. The reality TV show plot and the hunting down aliens plot never really intertwine together in a way that makes sense. Kiri’s villainous motivation — trying to win this show — is so completely disconnected to what we actually do for more than half of the game. Like, when she popped up, my first reaction was, “She’s still playing this game?” Nobody cares, Kiri! We also never actually find out why she cuts the bridge at the start of the game, nor why our “betrayal” (whatever it was) made her angry enough to attempt to literally murder us at the end. As for the rest of the characters, Patrick and Leena are like…I don’t even know what they’re doing here.

The only interesting thing about this game is that it feels like a really rough draft of a later-stage Nancy Drew game, which really makes you realize how much editing must have gone into the earlier games. A lot of the later games were defined by an overarching Deep Theme that the characters allude to in their dialogue — for example, The Deadly Device has a lot of talk about the responsibility of people who develop dangerous technology. If you squint, you can kind of see some threads about self-esteem (Kiri and Sonny believing they were special, Bess’s existential crisis) running through this game, and my guess was that they were trying to connect that to social media and reality television.

I don’t know why they tried to do that using a Survivor or Endurance-style TV show. If you want to talk about the self-esteem issues that people play out by broadcasting their entire lives via social media, a Keeping Up with the Kardashians-style show would’ve been much more appropriate. I mean, shit, even all of Nancy’s judgy comments about “trashy” TV seem more related to that type of show. All reality TV is a little “trashy”, I guess, in the sense that they’re all heavily scripted and overly dramatic and we just collectively pretend that they’re real, but shows like Survivor are at least theoretically about watching “real” people compete in games of skill. Jersey Shore, The Hills, Keeping Up with the Kardashians — they’re basically TV dramas that are purportedly about actual people and not actors, and turned their cast into what are essentially modern socialites, “famous for being famous.” And in the years since this game came out, it’s gone even farther, with people getting famous off of YouTube and Vine and Instagram. You don’t even have to get on TV anymore.

Anyway, there’s something to be said about the culture of self-promotion brought about by an era of using “real” people as entertainment, but I don’t know what aliens have to do with it.

THE END.