Nancy Drew: Labyrinth of Lies (Part Four)

Previously on Nancy Drew: Labyrinth of Lies: We did an insane amount of puzzles, and found out that several of the museum artifacts are fakes. But which of our extremely shady suspects is the culprit? Like, one of them is a murderer, but I guess that doesn’t necessarily also make him an art thief.

We call Melina with this disturbing information, but instead of being grateful, she yells at us that the earrings are DEFINITELY NOT FAKES and EVERYTHING IS FINE and NO CRIME IS HAPPENING AT ALL. Nancy’s like, “What the fuck?” and Melina snaps that we should just accept that we’re wrong and go home. So…the two things Nancy never does.

For some reason, we can’t talk to the Hardys about that particular weirdness — we can tell them that Melina made it sound like she practically grew up at the museum, so it’s not likely that she’s stealing from her second home. The Hardys say that they found out that Melina didn’t even move “here” until she was a teenager, so she couldn’t have spent her childhood here. I mean, at some point, you start thinking teenagers are children, too. Which is probably why the FBI doesn’t want you helping them, Hardys.

Talking to Niobe again will let us accuse her of counterfeiting the art. Jesus, okay, so let’s go through what we suspect everyone of right now: Niobe is possibly making copies of the art, Grigor is possibly stealing it and selling it to people, and Thanos is…possibly hanging around in case he gets to murder anyone. And Xenia is just aggressively Type A. Does that cover it?

Niobe is weirdly not mad at us anymore, even though we’re doing the exact same thing that pissed her off earlier. She cracks and admits that she is copying — but only for herself! Because she loves the art so much, she wants duplicates! Niobe, they sell prints and miniatures and shit in museum gift stores. She tells us about the paintings of hers that are in the Met — she painted them under a less-talented friend’s name as a favor, and her friend got famous off them, and Niobe got nothing. Again, doesn’t this reflect badly on Niobe’s friend, not her? And didn’t the docent at the Met know that Niobe painted them anyway? I don’t know what’s happening anymore. Anyway, Nancy says that we have to tattle on Niobe for the greater good (the greater good!) and she tells us that if we have to tell, we can only tell our closest friends. I mean, I like to think we’re cool with that police chief in River Heights who arrested Nancy. We really bonded when he let us out of our cell to solve our own crime.

So we call the Hardys to update them on this. Joe is all thrilled to find out that Niobe isn’t a bad person, because you’ll recall that he’s a fanboy for obscure Greek artists for some reason. Frank cautions him that she might still be up to shady deeds: they found out that Niobe is deeply in debt, and she’s not exactly paying it off the legal way, if we get their drift. “See what she says,” Joe tells us. Dude, Joe, we JUST got done talking to her. You couldn’t have told us this earlier?

Well, anyway, let’s see if Melina’s changed her mind on the whole “Nancy Drew is wrong about something” issue. Nancy Drew is always right, Melina. Learn to accept it. But nope, Melina tells us that we’re fired and she wants us gone. Nancy cottons on that Melina is trying to get us to leave, and Melina’s like, “Fucking duh, the Greek mafia is after you.”

Sadly for Melina, though, Nancy is like, “Well, let’s go talk to the Greek mafia about this right now!” So Thanos, what’s with you wanting to kill us? I thought we were really getting along earlier! We tell him that we know he scared Melina, and he’s like, “Sure did.” He tells us that he threatened to frame her for the theft if she didn’t back off, and Nancy’s like, “Wow, that’s insanely suspicious, I’m calling the police right now.” Thanos tells us to go ahead, because he has lots of friends within the police force. Corruption? The police? I never.

Damn, you guys. I’ve never met someone less intimidated by Nancy Drew’s sanctimony before 🙁 And it’s our strongest weapon! What do?

When in doubt: do puzzles. SIGH. So Grigor’s tablet mentioned that Xenia had a suspicious box, which is different from the suspicious box that he was hiding in the coin display.  Sorry if I didn’t screencap this bit from his tablet? By the time I get to that “famous Greek figures” puzzle in the underworld, I’ve completely lost my will to live.

So this puzzle is, uh…well, let’s see. We have to enter all the letters of the alphabet (to X) in order, in connecting lines — the lines go diagonally, horizontally, and vertically. The letters around the squares indicate which letters go in which row or column. A is already filled in for us, and we can see that B is in the far left column. So B is either in the top left corner or in the square left of A. The correct place for B is the top left corner, but anyway, that’s how the logic of this puzzle goes.

We find some VERY INTERESTING notes inside the box.  The pertinent bit is the part where Xenia whines about how annoying the set is to deal with. A thought — maybe don’t build A RIVER THAT YOU HAVE TO LIFT UP ON STAGE, XENIA. Am I ever going to be over that? I don’t think so. Anyway, she goes on about how annoying the cage is, and how they have to remember the activation code to open and close it, which is 72914. Good to know.

Let’s pop backstage for a minute to see if Grigor has any more salty diary entries on his tablet. We find two new ones: one notes that if the play fails, all of the actors are screwed. As we know, Niobe is deep in debt; Grigor has no money because he is generally a failure at life; and Xenia actually isn’t as rich as she seems, because her parents got burned by a Ponzi scheme or something. As for Thanos, he might need money or he might just be here because he is a human cyclone driven purely by chaos. Grigor apparently also did some investigating into Xenia to see if she’s as shady as the rest of them, but all he found out was that she is indeed from a wealthy-ish, artsy family, just like she claims. “I don’t get it all,” he writes. HMMM. What’s there to get, Grigor?

When we go back, Xenia has returned to her post, except she’s wearing a new dress now. Oh my God, is it FINALLY time for opening night?

But first, chores. The first thing Xenia says when we rock up to her is, “Hey, want to help me out?” LOL, do I have a choice? Apparently Xenia is supposed to be running lights, and Thanos is supposed to be her backup. Bold of you to rely on Thanos for anything except murder, Xenia. Anyway, she wants us to learn the light cues just in case Thanos decides to run off and do something else during the show, as these actors are wont to do.

We’ll do that in a minute, but we can chat with Xenia about a few more things, so let’s do that first. We compliment her dress, and she gushes that it’s a Niobe original. Homegirl might be a total fuckup and terrified of the stage, but she’s a great designer! Then we tell Xenia that we found out that there was forged art on display, and we’ve already called Melina. Xenia COMPLETELY LOSES IT and starts yelling at us that she has to EXPLAIN EVERYTHING TO MELINA, RIGHT NOW, because Nancy has RUINED HER LIFE FOREVER. She keeps pushing us for Melina’s number, and Nancy has the sense not to give it to her — we promise to call Melina ourselves, and Xenia’s like, “NO! GIVE ME THE NUMBER, RIGHT NOW.” We manage to compromise and tell her that we’ll get Melina to call her, and Xenia fumes that she GUESSES that’s fine, but Nancy should just ADMIT THAT SHE’S A LIFE-RUINER.

Ooookay, so let’s call Melina. Because Nancy Drew is not great with subtext, we ask if her whole meltdown and firing us is because someone threatened her. Melina’s like, “Dude, YES, I already told you that. GO HOME, NANCY.” She explicitly says that it was Thanos who threatened her, and once again tells us to leave. We don’t get to tell her about Xenia, which I guess is fine, since we’re almost to the end of the game anyway.

The lighting board puzzle is actually pretty easy. Xenia’s script shows the cues, with the first letter of the color written next to the arrows. The number of dots above each letter indicates where we should put the sliders. At the final entry of the puzzle, though, we get a warning that the board has been overloaded and a circuit’s been tripped. We have to go manually flip it backstage.

We go backstage, and we see the lift coming up. Standing on it is Grigor and a bunch of Greek vases. Oh snap! What are you up to, Grigor?

(Also, look at that lift! IT IS NOT BIG ENOUGH TO HOLD ANY OF THOSE SETS!)

When we cut back to regular play view, Nancy frets that this isn’t good. No, Nancy. Pretty much nothing that’s been happening at this museum since we got here has been good. Nancy notes that we should test the vases.

In order to test the vases, we need a blacklight. We don’t have one, but the sets do, so we take a hex key from Niobe’s workshop and use it to rip the light out of the set. We just do not give a shit about this play anymore, do we?

Back up in the museum, we use the blacklight on the vase that we saw Grigor move (the purple one in the picture). We see that the other vases on display are blue, meaning that they’re real. The one Grigor was carrying, though, is purple — which means it’s fake. Dammit, Grigor! I thought your sob story meant I could trust you!

So the vases are fake and the jewelry is fake. The giant statues aren’t fake, though, because I guess those would be really difficult to haul out of the museum.

So, let’s confront Grigor. Again. Some more. We accuse him of copying the art and selling it — again, some more — and he’s like, “Yes, but also no.” Okay, real talk, we have accused everyone multiple times of making forgeries, and yet the game hasn’t ended. Could something else be going on? Grigor panics and tells us that we shouldn’t be worried about confronting him, we should be worried about what will happen when Thanos finds out what we know. Doesn’t Thanos…already know that we know? Whatever. Nancy’s like, “Thanos like, lives underground, I’m not worried.” Grigor panics that Thanos is ALWAYS WATCHING! Like Santa!

After learning this, we can trigger a cutscene by going down to Niobe’s workshop. We overhear her refusing to do…something…and Thanos telling her that she has to. Niobe threatens to stop making reproductions for the show (or for crime, whichever), and Thanos laughs his head off at her thinking she has any leverage over him. He tells her that she better think about making herself useful, because he never liked her. YIKES.

So hey, Niobe, did Thanos threaten to kill you? He totally also threatened to kill us! Let’s bond! Niobe cries that they can’t have her work, not with “what they’re planning.” Nancy wants to know what, exactly, they’re planning, but Niobe just wails that she tried to keep us safe, but we ate the seeds and now there’s nothing she can do.

Niobe confesses all: she has “bad people” coming after her, and she was forging the art for survival, not money. The real art will be gone “long before” the curtain drops. And now Thanos and Kronos know that Nancy is onto them, and they’re gonna set us up with some cement boots, and Niobe can’t help us at all.

Except then she tells us that she left something for us on the stage that will help us, so…are you afraid of getting murdered or not, Niobe?

We go up to the stage, and can find the object Niobe left for us in the flowers. It’s this key-looking thing, which I guess…she thinks is helpful…somehow.

Well, we won’t know until we back up and turn around, because once we do that, the end of the game will trigger. Which of our equally-shady suspects is the true villain?

Oh look, it’s Thanos. I, for one, am SHOCKED. The screen goes all blurry, and Nancy panics and falls into the open lift. Then I guess she hits her head or something, as Nancy is wont to do, because we black out.

We wake up in the cage in Tartarus, where we see Grigor coming towards us. He’s like, “Wow, Nancy, I feel real bad that you’re in this cage. Not bad enough to help you though.” Fucking Grigor! He’s so useless, he might as well be a Hardy Boy. He tells us that Thanos is nearby, but also not nearby enough that Grigor doesn’t have time to tell us his whole sob story. He lays out the plot for us: the whole thing started when some sus-ass friend of Grigor’s told him he could make ten grand a week acting in this shitty play. Grigor knew it sounded shady, but he didn’t expect it to be THIS shady. He says he can’t get caught helping us — if we manage to make it out of the cage, he’s left something with Charon for us, but that’s it. You know, Grigor, Thanos is going to kill you either way, so you really should just commit to the whole helping-us thing.

So the key that Niobe left for us unlocks a panel in the case, which opens to reveal…another puzzle. For fuck’s sake, are the actors supposed to be able to escape from this cage or not? Okay, anyway. We have to make a path for the spider to get from the web to the bottom of the panel, and we want to do that by moving the dark rows of tiles along the bottom. The gap in the tiles has to align to make a path for the spider, and moving the tiles also moves the green and yellow rings around the web. There’s also a gap in the rings, which has to be aligned to make a path.

I do actually like this game — I think the actual mystery is very well-done, which we’ll get to — but the amount of puzzles is stupid, and the total lack of relation to the plot is also stupid. I mean, I guess this might loosely be related to Greek mythology (Ariadne?), but it has nothing to do with the Hades and Persephone myth, or any of the Greek characters that we’ve talked about so far. The sheer amount of puzzles and the total randomness of them is really killing me.

Anyway, once that’s done, the cage opens and we can escape. We go to the dock where Charon is and look for whatever Grigor has left us. We find a note from him — well, originally from Thanos, who’s getting his threat on that he hears that Grigor doesn’t quite have the situation under control, and their VIPs wouldn’t be very happy if they were made to wait. Underneath, Grigor has added a note for us to “Look to the Romans”, and to take the “full order” and put it on Charon’s staff. Grigor, we just narrowly escaped death. Now is not the time for more puzzles.

So! Remember that note we found when we did that puzzle associating the Greek figures from history? It had a bunch of letters in a row: J, M, M, D, M, V, N. That’s the letters of the Roman gods (Jupiter, Minerva, Mars, Diana, Mercury, Venus, and Neptune), and the order we have to put them in.

Completing the puzzle opens up Charon’s hand, and we get another note from Grigor, explaining how to solve yet another puzzle that we’ll get to later.

Sadly, we can’t just lift ourselves out of the underworld. The remote lift isn’t working, so we have to find another way out.

Hey, Hardys, we’re stuck underground, possibly with a murderer from the Greek mafia. Now would be a great time for you to come through with your FBI connections…Hardys? HARDYS?

Yeah, they’re not picking up. Okay, so all the doors that shortcut back to the museum are locked. We go through Tartarus into the room with the cage, then through there to the room with the river of fire. We see the door and the panel that Grigor’s note is referencing: it has a design on it similar to pomegranate seeds, but it’s missing some of the seeds that we have to find in order to complete the puzzle and OH MY GOD, THE BACK THIRD OF THIS GAME IS SO HEAVILY PADDED IT’S MAKING ME CRAZY.

So we have to find the missing seeds, which will help us complete the puzzle, and then we can escape through that door. We leave the fire room and go back into the cage room, and — oh look, it’s Thanos. You know what, if he wants to put me out of my misery so I won’t have to do any more puzzles, I won’t complain.

Recalling the code from Xenia’s box — 72914 — we close the cage on Thanos and taunt him. Thanos snarls that he may be caged, but he is caged like a MAD DOG, the blood still wet on his teeth! Are we sure that Thanos wasn’t born for the theater? He missed his calling. He tells us that, like Cerebrus, he is but one of three heads. If the other two are Niobe and Grigor, I’m not really that concerned.

But then we leave for like five minutes and come back, and he’s gone. Oops.

Cool, so we’re stuck underground, and Thanos is coming after us. Admittedly, that’s exactly where we started, so whatever. We look in the cage, and we find a bunch of marbles on the ground, which we are going to use for a puzzle. Not the pomegranate puzzle. A different puzzle.

Yes, there is yet another puzzle to do! Way, way back when we first explored the underworld set, we saw this set piece with the judges on their thrones, and a box that we weren’t able to open. We have to put the marbles that we found onto the scales. Nancy somehow knows that just one of these marbles weighs more than the others, and we have to figure out which one.

No offense, but you know what would be easier than having these bizarre puzzles where Nancy improbably knows what the puzzle is about at first glance? Not cramming so many unnecessary puzzles in this game in the first place. Just a thought. SO ANYWAY, this is a puzzle that has popped up in Nancy Drew games before — we want to put all the marbles on the scales, and then shuffle them around until we find the heaviest one. I think a similar puzzle was in Last Train to Blue Moon Canyon and Tomb of the Lost Queen.

Once we identify which marble is the heaviest, we drop it into the slot on the judges’ throne. This opens up the locked box, where we find proof of the actors’ dastardly plans: Xenia and Thanos are plotting to steal the art together; Niobe is meant to be making reproductions; and Grigor is using his connections to fence the art. They’ve set Niobe up with a Brazilian passport and her own studio, and if she doesn’t obey them, they’ll burn both of them and leave her to deal with all the shady people she owes money to. Man, what did Brazil ever do to deserve all the Nancy Drew criminals bailing to that country? At some point, it looks like Grigor tried to back out, so they’re cutting him out and fencing the art themselves. Xenia promises to take care of it all. As for the art Melina is tracking, they’re going to put it in her office and frame her. And then Xenia and Thanos will rule together with their ill-gotten wealth!

So…Xenia is the culprit. And Thanos is also the culprit. And Grigor and Niobe are kind of the culprits too, by association. EVERYONE IN THIS GAME IS THE CULPRIT! I love it. I don’t know if it’s a twist that they can pull more than once (like the phone friend being the villain in The Deadly Device), but it was such a delight to discover when I first played this game. In previous games, there were always several red herrings where each suspect was up to something shady — but only one of them was ever actually involved with the crime that we were investigating. Having all the suspects actually be guilty is a new one, and it’s really well-played in that it makes sense for the plot and brings the different clues together. It almost makes up for the insane amount of puzzles this game hurls at you to prevent you from doing anything in a logical order.

(Yes, we already had a game where a woman assembles a group of thieves and masterminds art thefts that they carry out for her. Shhh.)

We also find a blueprint showing their route for loading the art onto trucks during the show. Take a good look at it, because once we close the box, the actual end of the game will start.

This dude turns his head to look at us, and a spear drops on Nancy’s head. We black out again. Somewhere, Deirdre Shannon is laughing.

Nancy comes to to see Xenia lounging on the throne on the Tartarus set. We’re all, “Thanos trapped us down here! Help!” Nancy, did you even read — nevermind. Xenia snarks that she knows we don’t really think she’s going to help us. She dramatizes that she has everyone where they want them: Niobe is under her thumb, Thanos is wrapped around her finger, and Nancy is under her heel. Grigor is going to take the fall for their crime — he figured it out and tried to back out, but it’s too late. She cackles that she’s too many steps ahead for anyone to stop her: “People always forget the end of Persephone’s story. She came into Hades a trembling maiden…but in Hades, she became the Queen of Death. Me? I’ve always been the Queen.”

Xenia is such a theater kid, you guys.

We look down to see that Nancy’s chained at the ankles, and there are puzzles on the chains, because why not. Xenia waltzes out and lowers the bridge so that Nancy can’t leap over the RIVER OF FIRE THAT SOMEHOW EXISTS UNDER A WOODEN STAGE, and leaves us to die.

The rings each have letters on them, and we want to turn the rings so that the letters will align to form words. They should form “LETHE-CHAOS” going horizontally, and “HADES-MINOS” going vertically. This frees Nancy from her shackles, and now we have to escape the underworld.

First, we go look at Xenia’s throne, where we find the pomegranate seeds for Grigor’s puzzle. While we’re up there, there’s a path that leads from the throne room to the loading dock, where we can see the van that they’re going to use to steal the art. Why don’t we just…exit through the loading dock? I feel like that would be easier than jumping over a river of fire. Whatever.

In this area, we also find a letter from Grigor, confessing to everything and apologizing for being a criminal while he was alive. Oh, right, he’s assuming that if this letter makes it to the police, it’s because he’s dead. It’s pretty much the same stuff that we already learned from Xenia, so let’s move on. Sorry, Grigor, but your deathbed confessions aren’t that interesting to me. Also, you totally ditched us to get murdered by Thanos, so…bye.

And now we have to raise the bridge so we can leave the fire room. The point of this puzzle is to arrange the shapes so that they’re aligned with the correct color and rotated correctly to match the shapes attached to the bars. The shapes can be slid one after each other, and can be rotated by inserting them into the wheel at the bottom.

Finishing this puzzle raises the bridge, and we can cross to the door, where we can do the pomegranate puzzle. We have to fill in each hexagon with the correct color seed, and we can see hints as to which seeds fill which space, as some of the spaces have dots indicating which colors occupy the adjacent squares. So for example, a space with three red dots in it indicates that three of the surrounding spaces should be filled with red seeds.

When all the spaces are filled in, the door opens and we’re back in the cage room. We can hear from abovestage that intermission is ending, so we only have a little time to catch them. We go back out to where the judges’ throne is, and we can find a Wi-Fi router in the box. When we pick it up, Nancy will say that we have to fully charge the signal, which will connect the remote back to the lift. The goal is to click on the circles that have the most connections, so they’ll charge the remote faster. I…don’t really know how. Each piece rotates to make more connections, so I think the goal is to click on ones that already have a few connections so that more pieces can rotate. I think? I don’t know. It happens pretty fast, so it’s hard to see. Anyway, you have to click the correct three dots to charge it all the way — otherwise, time will run out.

Alright, time to go back to the lift and ride it up to the stage! We show up in the middle of a scene, and promptly interrupt the entire play to tell the audience that the cast is involved in theft. We’re like a Greek chorus breaking the fourth wall! It’s authentic! Nancy dramatizes that “a killer, a mastermind, a grifter, and a lost artist will tell the tale of how they almost stole a museum’s worth of rare art.” They’re like an evil Breakfast Club. Nancy asks Grigor how the play ends, and Grigor gets all dramatic about how the forces of evil won’t prevail today. LOL, despite her plan backfiring, I can see why Xenia roped these people into her heist. They’re just as dramatic as she is.

I swear to God, if we have to do one more puzzle, I’m going to lose it. Thankfully, this is the end of the game, and we cut to Nancy’s ending monologue. Apparently Persephone in Winter was still a hit, because that dumbass audience thought that Nancy accusing them of art theft was part of the show. They were like, “What a twist! Some rando accusing Persephone of being a modern-day art thief was inspired!”

Nancy tells us that Xenia started selling stolen art in college. Damn, dudes, I could’ve been doing that instead of getting a liberal arts degree like a chump. She met lots of shady people, and eventually made contact with Kronos and Thanos. She hired Thanos to scare off everyone at the museum — remember how all those museum employees disappeared, and Melina couldn’t find them again? Spooky. It’s never explicitly said that he killed them — seems unlikely — but they probably fled the country or something.

The cast gets arrested, but Thanos is released in like five minutes because he does in fact have connections with the police. Nancy hopes he’ll be brought to justice soon, since he’s on “the Network’s” radar. Nancy, the Network is made up of the Hardy Boys. It’s not happening. Grigor, on the other hand, is stuck in jail for at least a few years, and is going to use that time to become a less shitty person. Nancy is all proud of him, because apparently he made some plea deal that helped Niobe get off fairly lightly. She’s also working on self-improvement, even though she’ll never be taken seriously in the art world again. Rough life, Niobe.

The opening exhibit gets plenty of publicity and the museum gets lots of new memberships and visitors. Melina gets all the credit for this, despite losing all her staff and nearly losing all the museum’s art.

Nancy cornballs that she and the Hardys are working on a heist of their own — they’re going to smuggle out one of Emerson College’s “priceless Nickersons” soon. Ugh. Thanos should’ve killed us before we had a chance to say that line.

God damn, I forgot how many puzzles were in this game. Three puzzles just to escape from the culprit! Every step you take in this game throws another puzzle at you: a puzzle to open a box that contains a piece for another puzzle, which holds a key that helps us unlock another puzzle later. I was contemplating my own mortality by the end there, my dudes.

I can’t lay the blame for the mediocrity of this game entirely on the puzzles, though — that underworld set is the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen in these games. THERE IS A RIVER OF BOTH WATER AND FIRE UNDER THE STAGE, WHAT THE FUCK. It’s a pity, because the actual mystery plot is pretty realistic and gritty, and the characters vibe pretty well. These later-era games were really excellent when they stayed grounded in reality and told stories shaped around human emotion (mostly grief, if we’re being real) — Niobe and Grigor’s stories about opportunities that they lost because of their own cowardice had potential, and could’ve been more effective in a less bizarre game. Thanos was appropriately spooky, if not particularly deep. Xenia was a fun villain — I was in my high school’s drama club, so “Type A theater kid” is a personality that I am deeply familiar with, and it was fun to see it pop up here.

The mechanics of this game were just…stupid, though, and it was hard to appreciate the story when it was interrupted every five minutes to do a puzzle. It was also really repetitive, now that I’ve written it all out. Like, how many times did we have to accuse everyone of art forgery before it stuck? Oh, well. At least it’s not The Shattered Medallion.

THE END.