Previously on Nancy Drew: Sea of Darkness: We made it to Magnus’s cabin and went through all of his stuff. He was pretty deep into finding the treasure, which also means that ~*~someone~*~ is after him, trying to find it, too. Oh, and we did some work for Gunnar while he sat on his ass, as is par for the course with Nancy Drew suspects.
You know, this game is really clipping along. The pacing is much better than in previous games, and the plot is a lot more linear. Like, I can actually figure out what happens via my screencaps, instead of having to watch videos or replay the game.
So Magnus had some HIGHLY SUSPICIOUS photos of the ice caves on his wall, so let’s go see if we can find what he was looking at. You know how ice caves are full of distinctive features, and we definitely won’t get lost and die in there.
Since we bought batteries at the gift shop, we can use the flashlight that we found on the ship to light up the caves. We go tromping through the ice caves until we come to this wall of ice. Nancy says we can probably break through with a sharp enough object, so we use the hook we found at the fishing stand to break a hole in the ice.
After you break through the ice wall, there’s a whole network of cave paths and stuff you can go down, and there are dead ends and you can get turned around, blah blah usual Nancy Drew exploring shenanigans blah. There are ladders we can go up and down, and going down one of the ladders will drop us into this room with a pool. There we find another bag full of drawing pieces, which we need for the puzzle on Magnus’s trunk. We still don’t have all of the pieces, though, so let’s not try to do the puzzle yet.
We head back to town, and as we approach the ship, we see Gunnar speeding off in the dinghy. Is that dinghy just like, a communal boat for whoever feels like using it? Anyway, Nancy’s all, “Wasn’t Gunnar being super dramatic about how he’d never go back to the sea? The fuck is he doing?”
In the meantime, let’s chat with Elisabet. We ask her about the festival sound system — recall that Soren told us he was doing audio for the festival — and Elisabet says that it’s been broken for ages, and there was no sound at the festival. Omg, did Soren lie to us?! Never trust a guy who talks like a British person from the 1930s, unless they actually are a British person from the 1930s.
We also tell Elisabet that we heard her mildly crazy messages on Magnus’s machine. She tells us that she was super mad after they first broke up, but she’s moved on, and she’s not proud of losing her shit on tape. Fair enough.
Magnus’s note indicated that there was a puzzle he was trying to solve in the crow’s nest in the center of town. We climb up there, and wipe some snow off of one of the railings. That will reveal a panel that has this puzzle in it. The goal of this is to create groups of six dark shapes around the shapes that have a nail in it — so you start off with just the dark shapes that have nails in them, and then you have to click around them to turn the light squares dark and create groups of six, without any of the groups touching each other.
When we finish the puzzle, the panel pops up to reveal wooden gear. Before we grab it, though, we see Soren walk by holding an ice pack. “He looks injured,” Nancy notes. Maybe the townspeople finally lost their patience and jumped him. He fared better than Captain Lawrence at least!
Anyway, between his busy schedule of beating Soren up and lying to our face about never sailing again, Gunnar clearly doesn’t have any time to be sitting around at the pub today. Let’s go look through his stuff! You’ll recall, way back at the beginning of the game, that Dagny said that Gunnar is using one of our clues as a coaster. Let’s take a look at it.
We pick up the disc from under his mug — literally this entire game just revolves around finding various discs, doesn’t it? — and Nancy will point out the hole in the center. Kind of looks like a face that’s missing a nose.
We also pick up the sheaf of papers on the table (to the right of the mug). They’re letters between Elisabet and her friend Asa from college. Asa is off living in Paris and having a grand old time not living in a racist small town that may or may not have bodies under the town hall. Elisabet tells Asa that she sometimes thinks about just bailing on Skipbrot and sailing all over the world with Magnus. Also, Soren apparently recently demoted Elisabet from whatever job she held at the festival.
I went over to Soren after that, to see if we can talk to him about demoting Elisabet, but we can’t. We can, however, talk to him about his injury, so let’s do that instead. He tells us that Gunnar threw a bottle at him (again, some more), and bitters that a “lesser man” would have packed up and moved to a nice beach years ago. I mean…you could also just do that, Soren. I feel bad for him and all, but I also suspect that he makes a lot of posts on the Internet about how nobody in his small town uNdErStAnDs his genius.
We ask him about the treasure’s origin, and Soren mentions that it’s somehow from the Dutch East India Company — but how it ended up on the Heerlijkheid is a mystery, because the company didn’t have any sailing routes near Iceland (no tea for Iceland!), and Captain Lawrence was English, not Dutch. Suspicious! Maybe the British East India Company wasn’t paying him enough.
Nancy also has been keeping a bunch of notes on her phone, which we don’t really need but are mildly entertaining anyway. The most recent note is Nancy reflecting on Elisabet feeling trapped in Skipbrot: “I wonder if I’d feel the same, had I never left home.” What? Nancy, you still live with your dad. Also, Nancy wrote about Soren’s nautical limericks: “Sounds like he and Ned would get along…swimmingly. Get it? Get it??” Oh, Nancy.
Also, here’s everything I bought in the gift shop. What do you think would be the best gift ford Ned? I’m leaning towards the mug. Or maybe the postcard. 50-cent pieces of cardstock are the most romantic gifts.
We go to the Skip next, where we can see Gunnar. He apparently hasn’t noticed that we’ve jacked his coaster, and he’s all excited to see us. I love how everyone in this town likes Nancy after knowing her for a few days, and it’s been twelve years and they still hate Soren. I bet he’s pissed. We bring up that Gunnar threw a bottle at Soren, and Gunnar’s like, “How very dare, I haven’t done that in MONTHS.” He insists that Soren lied to us about the origin of his injury. We’re like, “Well, you lied to us about never sailing again, so why should we believe you?” Gunnar admits that he’s been looking for a treasure. When we press for more information, though, he kicks us out.
Ned still isn’t picking up. He might be dead. Oh, well.
Let’s chat with Dagny some more. We tell her that Elisabet seems like she’s withholding information, and Dagny’s like, “She’s still totally hung up on Magnus, it’s embarrassing. That’s why when I have a breakup, I just move to a different continent and change my phone number.” Heh. I love her so much.
We also mention that we found her threatening messages to Magnus, and Dagny’s like, “Okay, but did I actually set his cabin on fire? No, I did not. I was just trying to scare him with empty threats about killing him.” Fair enough. Nothing like a good empty threat to scare people.
Now, we wanna go through Dagny’s luggage. We tell Soren that someone’s been stealing his super-stylish sweaters from the gift shop, and he’ll run off to look, abandoning his desk. I feel like this ruse shouldn’t actually work, since the gift shop is literally two feet away, but whatever.
We open up his desk drawer, and Nancy will notice the glove to the right. It’s the same as the glove in the ice caves! What were you doing up there, Soren? One of his Post-Its also has the note, “Create volcanic winter.” Like…control the weather? By himself? Can you do that?
We open up Dagny’s luggage next, and we find more pieces of drawings to put on Magnus’s trunk. We also find a book called “Heroes of Land and Sea”, and inside is a note from Moira. Moira’s giving the book to Dagny as a sympathy present, as apparently Dagny has been through some rough times. “There are times when we all fall prey to monsters of our own,” Moira writes. “Like that time I got my friend killed because I lured her to Scotland and away from her family to do spy work for me,” she doesn’t add.
That’s it for Dagny’s luggage. Soren’s “volcanic winter” note is actually hint as to how to get into his tablet, which is on the desk. We start off with the four elements on the left, which we then combine to create new weather phenomena. It’s similar to Little Alchemy, if you’ve ever played that. The goal is to put together elements and reactions to create volcanic winter — so, for example, air and earth combine to make a desert, and air and fire combine to make energy. Then we put energy and desert together, which makes a dust cloud. Then a dust cloud combines with an eruption (I think that comes from energy + lava, and lava comes from fire + earth) to create volcanic winter. And that unlocks Soren’s tablet!
Let’s go through all his notes. They go backwards chronologically; the first note is a visitors log and mentions Nancy’s arrival. Apparently, this game is set in January, and a few months ago, someone named “Alicia DeSoto” came to see Dagny. (“Purchased a gift for her. Gift shop sales quota for the month achieved.” Hee.) Soren’s other notes are about the festival — he looked into the festival’s finances and found out that they’ve been losing money on it for a couple of years, so he had to take Elisabet off of handling the finances, which is what her “demotion” was. There’s also a note about a message he found on the ship’s hull, referring to the lion figurehead. I’m sure we’ll be needing that later.
The rest of the notes are from way back when Soren first moved back to Skipbrot, and a little before that, as well. Apparently he was trying to get some funding when he was in school to investigate the Heerlijkheid going missing. Apparently it was supposed to land in France, and Soren thought that the treasure on board belonged to Louis XVI (the one that got beheaded in the French Revolution). See, he thinks that, France being bankrupted after the American Revolution and its own issues, they finally turned to digging up Louis XVI’s personal fortune to keep France together, and they enlisted a Dutch East India ship to bring it to France, since their ships were trusted in every port and wouldn’t be attacked. But the ship somehow never made it to France — and crashed in Iceland instead — and without the money, France had no food, the peasants revolted, and a bunch of people got beheaded. So Soren wanted to investigate this, but his proposal wasn’t approved, and he got mad salty and left Harvard to move back to Skipbrot.
Academia is vicious, guys.
We step out of the culture center, and see that Dagny is gone from her usual spot — and the area looks wrecked. Nancy’s like, “Dagny would not leave that heater unless she had a good reason.” We get closer and see that Dagny’s phone is lying in the snow, and there are footprints everywhere.
But hey, Dagny’s phone still works despite presumably lying in water for like an hour, so let’s go through it! We enter her password (“scuttlebutt”), and we can access her messages.
First up is her texts with Magnus. Magnus is freaking out that someone is following him, and Dagny’s like, “Whatever, dramatize.” Magnus tells her some vague hints about how the bed frame on the ship is a puzzle involving overlapping circles.
The texts from Soren are about the festival. Apparently the Alicia DeSoto who visited Dagny was Dagny’s wife, but they broke up. I remember at the time this game came out, there was controversy in the fandom because you couldn’t even reference homosexuality on HER’s message boards without getting your posts removed with the reasoning that they had to keep the boards “family friendly”, or something like that. I think some forum users that kept asking for a gay character in a game eventually ended up getting banned entirely, and the whole thing was really homophobic and a bad policy on HER’s part. I can’t be fucked to go look at the boards now, but I suspect the reason was that Nancy Drew is one of those fandoms that are popular amongst really religious kids and their parents because the games are reasonably wholesome. And you don’t realize it until you’re all posting together and you casually diss Jesus as a joke and they all jump on you. (I never posted on the HER boards, but I was briefly involved in Anne of Green Gables fandom, so I know of what I speak.)
Anyway, them putting a gay character in a game was a big deal after that whole debacle. If I recall correctly, the writer of this game, Katie Chironis, was the one that really pushed for it, so good for her. I also solidly respect that they created a lesbian character instead of a gay man. Dagny’s sexuality is a kind of nothing aside compared to the big heterosexual love story arcs in other games (including Magnus/Elisabet in this one), but we might’ve gotten more gay/bi characters if the games had continued. Oh, well.
The final text thread is from a bank, asking Dagny to confirm her deposits. She’s deposited thousands of dollars from the “Gulf Coast treasure find” (this is the one that she’s wanted for in the US, for skimming money off of the treasure), “Santa Fe investigation results”, and “Petra extraction.”
We can also look through Dagny’s pictures, and see that she’s taken a bunch of pictures around the ship and town. One of the pictures is of a blank wall in the hold, and Nancy muses that Dagny wouldn’t have taken a picture of a random blank wall unless it was important.
We also peer more closely at the footprints, and Nancy will note that they’re huge. “Only one guy in town has feet this size,” she says.
Let’s tell Elisabet that we know she ran the town into bankruptcy. I bet she’ll really like hearing that! Elisabet gets mad at us and refuses to speak to us.
So we go into Magnus’s room and look at the bed, and we can now look at this puzzle. Nancy says that we need to place the numbers inside the circles so that they add up to the totals in the overlapping sections. Once that’s done, a compartment opens up and we get more drawings.
When we go back up to the deck, we overhear Elisabet singing. We ask her about the song, and she accuses us of spying on her. You were singing out loud, Elisabet! Sing in the shower if you want privacy! Anyway, she admits to us that it’s a family song that she learned from her mom, who died when Elisabet was young. Nancy’s like, “FINALLY we’re getting to the dead moms. Same, girl.” Elisabet says, “Then you understand. It’s how I remember her.”
Okay, so the discs that we were finding everywhere were parts of the original helm. They get placed on the wheel, and we have to rotate the outer and inner circles to create compound words. So, for example, the sun and flower discs go together to create “sunflower”, and the star and fish discs go together to create “starfish.”
When the proper words are all aligned, the center of the helm will open up, and we’ll get the missing piece of broken locator. We found the first piece on the captain’s desk, so we automatically fit them together and now we have the full locator. We still have to find one of the numbers, though, which Magnus mentioned has something to do with the barnacles on the dock.
Since we’re going back into town, let’s chat with everyone. We ask Soren about the town’s financial troubles, and Soren admits that it is: “We’ve always had a bit of trouble attracting tourism out here. No spas. No ski resorts. We’re a little…uh…barren.” But they do have pamphlets! Soren says that selling the rights to the Heerlijkheid put the town’s finances back in order — and the ship restoration project also sold a ton of tickets to the festival — but no one is grateful.
We then bring up that we found one of his gloves in the ice caves. He blusters that he found a super cool wood carving in one of the caves. Nancy asks to see it, and Soren says it has to be treated before it can be exposed to air, but he’d love to show it to us later. Sure you would, Soren.
Nancy’s remark about “large footprints” at Dagny’s post is meant to lead back to Gunnar, so let’s talk to him. We bring up that it looks like he might’ve abducted her, and he’s like, “Why would I ever hurt the minke, she’s one of the few people I like.” He adds that where would he even hide her, his only home is at the pub. Nancy’s like, “Oh. True.”
Okay, and now we gotta go upstairs and sleep so that we wake up to low tide.
We get in the dinghy and use the fish stand hook to scrape barnacles off of one of the dock posts. I like that we use the tools we’ve found more than once in this game. Anyway, we see the number “26” on the post, which is the number we needed for the puzzle.
So the numbers we found on the ship and around town are 86, 14, and 26. 86 is the sum of the numbers we’re supposed to find; we still need to find two more numbers to go with 14 and 26. We have enough information to go to the sounding chart now, so let’s do that. We place locator on the map and can move it around to find the right numbers. We know that two of the numbers are 14 and 26, and the other two numbers in the locator’s circles have to combine to make 86. The right solution is 11, 35, 26, and 14.
So we go into Magnus’s room and enter those numbers from lowest to highest in the lock here. We hear a mechanical noise from elsewhere in the ship, so let’s go investigate that.
Oh, and Nancy’s also updated her notes with some of the things we’ve found out about our suspects. She notes that Soren is in desperate need of cash so that he can fund his academic dreams, while Elisabet apparently can’t manage money for the life of her, so she could also use some money. “As someone who frequently arrives at international destinations with zero cash in hand, I totally relate.” Hee. The humor in this game is maybe a little too meta — you’re just gonna keep joking about Nancy not getting paid for her work, and never write a game where she actually gets paid — but it’s much less “lol random XD” than previous games, while still being pretty genuinely funny. Nancy sounds much more like a teenager when she’s allowed to be a little sarcastic.
Also, we lift up the pillow in the dog bed in the cabin, and we find another key. Cool cool cool.
The puzzle opened up that wall in the hold — the one Dagny took a picture of — so now we can head down there. As we enter the hold, Nancy will say, “The bilge is open? But why?” We go closer to look, and then someone shoves us in and closes the bilge grate over us. Water’s rising, we’re trapped down here, we’re probably going to die unless we can solve this puzzle. Let’s get to it! So we want to rotate the dials so that the numbers in each section add up to the right totals on the sections on the large dial. The numbers we need are written in the lower right corner — in this case, it’s 15/21/21. So we want to rotate the dials so that all the dots on the top left add up to 15, all the dots on the top right add up to 21, and all the dots on the bottom center add up to 21 too. This game is really fond of its “create a total out of separate sections” puzzles.
That stops the water, but we’re still trapped under the grate. We call for help, and Elisabet shows up and frees us. We cut to a conversation with her, and she tells us that she heard a motor pulling away from the dock, but figured she should probably help us first. Nancy’s like, “I knew we were going to be buddies!” Elisabet’s like, “Okay, just because I didn’t let you die, that doesn’t mean we’re friends.”
Elisabet found a metal crank that she says must have been dropped in the hold by whoever attacked us. Nancy chirps that she’s really bad at the “not getting locked in things” parts of mysteries, but she’s great at finding places to put all the random junk she finds! “Everyone has their talents,” Elisabet deadpans. Hee.
Alrighty, so now let’s explore the secret room behind the panel in the hold. To open it, we have to press the sections of this circle to light up all the numbers. The numbers indicate how many touching sections are meant to be pressed down.
When that’s done, the panel pulls back to reveal another panel, with gears in it. We want to place the wooden gear from the crow’s nest, the metal gear we stole from Gunnar, the rubber star from the langspil, and the crank that Elisabet just gave us on the panel. We still don’t have enough pieces to get whatever this is working, though.
Incidentally, it was at this exact point while playing that I was like, “Another fucking puzzle?” I take back what I said about this game clipping along. The first two thirds are great, and then you suddenly can’t take a step in the last third without the game hurling a puzzle at you. LET ME LIVE, GAME.
On our way out, we can peek at one of the cannons in the hold, and Nancy will note that it’s full of duct tape and rope: “These aren’t just supplies. This is everything you’d need to kidnap a full-grown man.” Oh snap!
We walk back to the Missti Skip, where we come across a cutscene of Elisabet kicking Gunnar out. She yells at him that she never asked for him to intervene, and she just wants to him to leave her alone.
Somehow, in the five seconds after that fight, Elisabet manages to teleport back to the Skip, so we can talk to her about the fight. She tells us that Gunnar runs his mouth, and clearly he doesn’t care about her or respect her, and she’s been a fool to care about him and let him live in her pub. Nancy says that she thinks Gunnar does care, he just, uh, has a weird way of showing it. Gunnar apparently told Elisabet that Magnus doesn’t love her enough to come back, and which hit uncomfortably close to home. Nancy’s like, “Well, I blew off my boyfriend on our anniversary and he still likes me, so don’t give up!” Elisabet tells us to leave her alone.
Speaking of boyfriends, Ned finally picks up when we call. He tells us that he was trying to give us our anniversary gift, but he panicked. See, his anniversary gift isn’t a physical gift, it’s actual a big speech about how much he loves us, ending with him actually saying the words, “I love you,” which apparently he’s never said before. We can either say, “I love you too,” or we can say, “I’m not sure how I feel.” I choose the second one, because I’m a bad person and seriously Ned, the fuck kind of anniversary present is this? Ned’s like, “Oh. Didn’t think you were gonna say that,” and Nancy says we should talk about this in person. Ned’s like, “Cool,” and we hang up.
Real talk, I actually enjoy some interpersonal drama in these games, and I like Nancy and Ned together — I liked their little subplot in The Captive Curse, and I like calling him when he’s a phone friend, usually. But this whole thing is so dumb and corny. Nancy and Ned have been dating since the ’40s — or at least for thirty games, if we’re ignoring book continuity — and we’re supposed to think they’ve never said “I love you” to each other? Really, I think Nancy and Ned are best when they’re just bantering or discussing the cases. Every time the writers try to get mushy — like Ned’s whole speech about Nancy’s safety in The Silent Spy — it ends up being unbearably corny.
Anyway, I felt bad about that after about five seconds, so I made Nancy call him back and say that she loves him too. Actually, Nancy gives a pretty sweet speech about how she’s always heading off to dangerous places where she can’t trust anyone, but she always knows Ned has her back. Aw. See, they’re capable of writing non-cheesy dialogue for Nancy/Ned, they just choose not to.
We go back to the Skip, where we find Gunnar being all emo in the hallway. He tells us that Elisabet kicked him out of the pub, and whines that people always turn on him in the end. He insists that he doesn’t need her or anyone’s friendship…but he did leave a box full of personal effects in the pub, so if he could ask us to do him a favor and bring it to him, that would be great. He tells us that if we bring him the box, he’ll give us the only clue he has to Magnus’s disappearance. Well, I can’t say no to that.
There’s a small tin on the shelf behind where Gunnar usually sits. We take it and open it, and we find this picture of a girl. Nancy says, “She looks like me.” Uh…does she? I wouldn’t know, Nancy! No one has ever seen your face!
We also find a birthday card to Gunnar from his daughter, Edda — presumably the girl in the photo — and then a newspaper clipping about how Gunnar’s wife and daughter drowned when they were all out at sea one day. Aw. Poor Gunnar.
We bring the box to Gunnar and admit that we looked inside. He tells us that he feels bad for how he treated Elisabet, and he knows his daughter wouldn’t want him to act like this. He still hasn’t gotten over his wife and daughter’s deaths, and he’s incredibly lonely and sad. Aw, man. I’ve said before that this game is very atmospheric and quiet, and Gunnar’s grief is made much more effective by how muted the dialogue about it is. Gunnar says that he sees now that there are still things to live for, like ships and festivals and new neighbors. He says he’s going to apologize for Elisabet, and presumably embrace tourism in Skipbrot. He tells us to come see him later, and he’ll give us the clue he has.
So we can just go up the stairs and go to sleep, then come right back down and see him in the pub. He gives us some more drawing pieces, and these are the last of the pieces we need. To Magnus’s cabin!
We arrange all the drawing pieces to create an image, and Nancy will note that she’s seen this design at the lighthouse.
We turn around to leave the cabin, and we see Elisabet walking around, pushing a cart with a tarp on it. OMG, is that Magnus’s body? Did Elisabet kill him? Is she going to dump his body in the sea?
We storm back to town all ready to confront her about what she’s keeping in that room on the deck. This time, we can open the door even though Elisabet tries to stop us. You don’t need a key or anything, and the door swings open, and Magnus’s rotting corpse falls out.
Just kidding! Remember how there was a dog bed in Magnus’s room on the ship, and also in his cabin, but no dog? That’s because Elisabet’s been hiding Magnus’s dog in that deck closet. Elisabet admits that, during the festival, when she was all mad at Magnus for ignoring her, she decided to steal the dog because she knew Magnus would look for him. Then Magnus actually went missing, and Elisabet’s been taking care of the dog ever since. Aw. Nancy points out that dognapping is a pretty weird and stalkery way to handle a breakup, and Elisabet’s like, “Yeah, it sounds bad when you say it like that.”
She distracts us by giving us another clue: that song we heard her singing earlier is related to the treasure that Captain Lawrence was hiding — she’s not sure how, but somehow the song is supposed to lead to the treasure. Elisabet gives us some sheet music, which I’m guessing we’ll have to use on that music box.
But first, let’s go to the lighthouse and solve that puzzle made by the drawings. We can’t, though, because as soon as we make it up there, Dagny pops out of the hatch in the lighthouse floor, and she’s like, “What up, Nancy! I know you thought I was kidnapped, but I wasn’t, and it’s a very long and wacky story that you’re going to have to sit through.”
We cut to Dagny’s usual spot by the heater, and she tells us that she faked her disappearance — and the large footprints — so that she could find the treasure. Nancy notes that Dagny must really have a good lead, otherwise she wouldn’t have left the heater. Dagny tells us that the ship itself is a map to the treasure, but as we’ve seen, the original ship has been taken apart and parts of it are scattered around town. Dagny’s been putting them together, but she’s still missing a key to decode the map. She thinks Nancy knows where to find it. Nancy’s all, “You faked a disappearance without me, I thought we were friends 🙁 I can’t trust you anymore :(“
Since we’re here, let’s accuse Dagny of kidnapping Magnus. Dagny insists that she’s being honest about trying to find him and the treasure, and gives us a token with a lion on it as collateral. It looks like part of the puzzle on the ship figurehead, so we’ll go do that in a bit.
We have one more conversation tree to go through with her, so let’s do that. We bring up that Elisabet hates the treasure, since it’s tied to the brutal murder of her great-great-whatever I can’t write out this many great-grandparents. Is it really right for us to profit off of this? LOL, who’s “us”, Nancy? You’re not seeing a damn cent of that money, as ever. Dagny’s like, “Look, we can let the treasure stay buried, where it won’t do anyone any good, or we can dig it up and let it make a difference to my checking account.” Hee. Dagny asks who we think the treasure rightfully belongs to — we can say Elisabet because it’s her family’s, Dagny because she’s trying to find it, Magnus because he put the actual work in, etc. It’s actually a pretty sticky question, and I’m not sure I like any of the justifications the dialogue gives for each character, so I just say, “Give it to me!” Hey, I could be serious. I think that treasure could constitute back pay for all 30+ mysteries that we solved. Dagny just laughs at us.
If you’ll recall Dagny and Magnus’s letter exchange from his cabin, they referenced making a fake dog bone to hide clues inside. So we take the dog bone from the closet and open it up, and we find a note from Magnus. He writes that Lawrence didn’t hide the treasure on the ship, and it’s instead hidden in the ice caves. He’s figured out the first few steps to take, but he thinks Lawrence’s diary must have the rest of the map. We just have to find the diary.
Which we will do, once we do even more puzzles. So we use the token that Dagny gave us on this puzzle behind the figurehead. Dropping the token into the slots at the top will turn some of the tokens right-side up. The goal is to drop the token into the slots and get all of the tokens rotated properly. Each slot controls some of the tokens, so you want to do it in the right order to rotate them all. When that’s done, we get another gear for the panel in the hold.
We go down to the hold to place the gear, and we get a call from Dagny. She snarks at us that she noticed something was missing from her luggage, and she’s just so curious as to who would go around stealing her stuff. Nancy’s like, “Gosh, me too,” and she and Dagny passive-aggressive at each other about how they just know it wasn’t Nancy. Is that all you called us for, Dagny? I’m kind of busy.
Anyway, we place the final gear, and the panel opens to reveal this not-at-all creepy skeleton holding a box. Well, I guess it’s not that creepy. How many skeletons has Nancy run into at this point?
So there are two halves to the box. We open the left half, but there’s a piece missing from the puzzle. We can, however, do the right half. Magnus’s notes told us how to solve this puzzle; we want to place each design into the rows and columns, with each row and column not having more than one of each design. Designs can cover up other designs if they’re large enough — i.e. designs with filled-in shapes can cover up squares with outlines on them, but outline designs can’t be placed over squares with opaque shapes already, and designs can be placed over different squares on the board as long as the design is larger, like a circle over a diamond.
When we finish the puzzle, we get a few pages of Lawrence’s diary, including part of the song lyrics that will lead to the treasure.
The rest of this game is basically solving puzzles to put the diary together. So we go to the lighthouse, and we notice the star pattern from the drawings on the panels on the wall. Clicking on one will reveal this puzzle underneath, and we have to fill in the numbers — one of each number in every triangle and row that’s marked by a light. It’s basically Sudoku, but slanted. Completing this puzzle gets more diary pages.
Then we take the sheet music Elisabet gave us, and go all the way up to Magnus’s cabin in the mountains to use it on the music box. We have to arrange the tines on the music box to play the notes. There’s a music book in the Missti Skip lobby that explains how to do this. When box is correctly set up to play all the music, we get yet more diary pages and also a bright green fish token.
Which we have to use on yet another puzzle! Sigh. Okay, when we get back to the ship, Elisabet is gone and the alarm is going off. We go down to the secret room, but nothing appears to be amiss. So let’s just ignore that weirdness and do this puzzle! We have to use the green fish to slide our way to the X in the top right corner. The path is blocked by barriers, and we can only pass through the barriers if we’re a similar shape or color. The fish will change color if it passes over a color square — so we can pass through all the fish barriers easily, but we have to change color to get through a blue star barrier, for example.
Completing that puzzle will give us the last of Lawrence’s diary pages, and Nancy will put them together. We find out that Lawrence was, in fact, a pirate — he used to sail for the British Empire, but as we know, sailing for the Royal Navy was fucking miserable, and when their ship was boarded by pirates, he defected. Their pirate captain was like, “So there’s this ship called the Heerlijkheid that’s got hella money on it, and we should definitely take it over and go retire to England.” They took the ship over and found the treasure, but decided it was too dangerous to sail a Dutch ship into port with this much treasure, so they buried it in the ice caves and sailed away. That’s when the volcano erupted and Lawrence was brought to Skipbrot. Hilariously, apparently the Skipbrotters were assholes even in the 18th century; Lawrences writes that he gave them enough of his supplies to make them want to keep him alive, but no more. He swears they’ll never get their weird xenophobic hands on his treasure. Still, he thought that the mayor’s daughter was super hot, so they got married and had a kid, and that’s who Lawrence is writing his letter to. Sorry, dude, I’m not your daughter, I’m just a nosy American detective here to steal your treasure for great justice.
Anyway, the last few pages of the journal are directions through the ice caves. Lawrence writes that he buried a decoy treasure as well. Then he writes the full lyrics to Elisabet’s song, which will tell us how to open the treasure box. Off we go!
We follow the directions in to the caves, and come to a big ice wall. We chip away at it with the fish hook — man, that hook is getting a lot of mileage — and we see a pair of feet inside. We’ve found Magnus, dudes!
Magnus, dude, how’ve you been! Magnus says that he’s okay, but we have to get out of here, because Soren is coming back. Yup, Soren is our culprit. All this drama was because of a lack of funding in academia, which further cements my decision to never go to grad school.
Magnus explains that Soren brought him here and tried to get him to talk. At first he was being all friendly and acting like a hostess in an Agatha Christie novel, but when he found out that Magnus really doesn’t know where the treasure is, he started losing his shit. Magnus doesn’t know where he’s gone now, and he’s afraid of what Soren might do. Magnus blames himself — and the town — for making Soren a villain by bullying him for twelve years. I mean…yeah. Obviously Soren is responsible for himself and had delusions of grandeur way before then, but it might not have devolved into kidnapping if Skipbrot hadn’t lost their shit over one (1) new resident. Nancy clutches her pearls and says that Soren’s behavior is still wrong. Magnus says that he doesn’t know what it’s like to be treated that badly for so long. “Do you?” he asks. Nancy’s like, “Everyone I meet bows down with fear and respect, so…no.”
Magnus is worried about Elisabet, too, and Nancy says that she’ll call someone to get us out of here. We call Alex, our friend in the control tower, and tell her that we found Magnus and Soren is responsible. We’re breaking up — although Alex does hear us mention Soren — and she says she’ll call for help before the connection is lost.
As soon as we hang up with Alex, Soren rocks in holding a giant-ass axe. Nancy’s all, “Soren, you lied to me! Nobody threw a bottle at you at all!” She accuses him of using everyone in town — including us — to find the treasure, and Soren’s like, “Yup! And we’re going to dig it up now — you, me, and Guthrún here.” Yeah, Soren named his axe, because dude is lonely as fuck. So the correct move here is to point him towards the decoy treasure, and let him waltz out of here with it. Soren snarks at us that we’ll be fine, if we can make it out before we starve or freeze to death. Then he knocks a bunch of ice in, trapping us.
Is this a treatise on why you shouldn’t bully people? I went to elementary school with this one dude who we all brutally mocked for having a bowl cut in 2001. If he’s out there threatening people with axes for not supporting his doctoral thesis proposal, I’m gonna feel real bad.
Anyway, we could work on getting out, or we could go find the real treasure, since we came all this way, you know? We go deeper into the caves and use the hook yet again to break through a sheet of ice. We find the real treasure chest, and we have to press the images on the chest in order to open it. The order is listed in Elisabet’s song — we want to press the images in the order that the song mentions them.
The chest pops open, and we can see hella gold and jewelry inside. Is this the most impressive treasure we’ve found? I think it beats the gold bullion and gold hearts from Ghost Dogs of Moon Lake and Secret of Shadow Ranch, respectively. I don’t remember the treasure from Ransom of the Seven Ships that well, because I’m repressing everything about that game.
At this point, Magnus comes back and frees us from the ice. Then we get a call from Alex — the reception in the cave is conveniently working now — telling us that they caught Soren as he was leaving the caves. We can either tell her to go easy on him, or tell the cops that Soren is an attempted murderer and they should be harsh. I choose the second one, because honestly, there was crazy lurking those eyes.
So Soren’s been apprehended, and the treasure is turned over to Elisabet, since it was her family’s. She and Magnus decided to go sailing all over the world, and Elisabet left the Missti Skip in Gunnar’s hands.
Dagny bailed after receiving her cut of the fortune. She left a note for us saying, “Catch ya later, friend.” I knew we were friends, Dagny!!! If we were speaking Spanish, I’d be using the informal tú with you right now!
I forgot to buy Ned an anniversary gift — I mean, I did buy stuff at the gift shop, but the way to trigger the game into recognizing it as a gift was to have Soren gift wrap it, which I did not do. The game also tries to nudge you into buying the most expensive item in the shop — a sword — for Ned, but like, no. Oh, well! I mean, Ned’s present was three fucking words, so neither of us put in that much effort, when you think about it.
And that’s the end of the game! Gosh, it’s bittersweet, and not just because this is the last game in the series. I’ve been playing the Nancy Drew games since I was a kid — I mentioned that I got Secret of Shadow Ranch for Christmas when I was about 11 — and I had my big, playing-them-religiously phase all through high school and college. This last game came out during my final semester of college, so the ending of these games kind of coincided with the end of my childhood, too. I was lucky enough to not have to work a real job in college, so the grind of paying bills and working 9-5 didn’t start for me until after I graduated — and after these games ended. (Actually, the span of these games — 1998-2015 — aligns perfectly with the entirety of my academic career, which is a little spooky.) It really has been a bummer to not have these games to look forward to anymore, and I really do think of this series ending as my official “entry” into the gritty world of adulthood.
This was a great game for the series to end on, though. It’s much more tightly plotted than the previous games, while still being a little more mature than early Nancy Drew games. I could do without the constant puzzles in the last third, but that’s really my only complaint. The scenery and atmosphere was just gorgeous, and so impressive considering the way these games started out, graphics-wise. Part of me thinks it would be better for them to just let the series go here, instead of trying to push out the development hell mess that Midnight in Salem is likely to be.
Speaking of — they’re supposed to release MID in spring of next year. We’ll see if that happens, although given the rumors about the outsourcing, them using the writers’ drafts as promotional material, and only like 10 people working at HER anymore, it seems like it’s going to be a mess even if they do manage to release it. But if it comes out, I’ll give it a whirl!
Big big thanks to everyone who’s read these recaps! I love Let’s Plays, but I don’t usually have the attention span to watch videos, so I hope these text-based recaps were entertaining to at least some people. I’ll try to do more similar games soon, like maybe the Agatha Christie mysteries or Miss Clue. Fingers crossed!
THE END.
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