I had some free time recently, so I’m finally getting around to the Nancy Drew game that started it all: Secrets Can Kill, 1998. I’ve played this particular game — and by that I mean the OG version, not the remaster — exactly once, sometime back during college when I was marathoning all the ND games. I remember it being incredibly shaky and technologically challenged, but on the whole not that bad for 1998.
However, upon replaying it, I stand corrected. Goddamn, this game is bad. I played the original version I had on my computer, disc-switching and all, and I was this close to ending it all when I switched discs for the eightieth time.
The good news is, I have now played this game four times across its two incarnations, so I didn’t have to spend too much time looking for clues or solving the puzzles. From installation to completion of the game, I think took about an hour and a half.
Anyway, let’s boot up our Windows 95 computers, pop in our floppy disks, and get down to it!
In total fairness, having played the game the above-mentioned four times may also have something to do with my disenchantment with it. I know who the culprit is! I don’t want to click through endless stacks of books looking for clues when I already know what they are! I don’t want to go through the FARCE of pretending I don’t know what happened to Jake Rogers! But I must admit that I never recapped the original version of the game, and thus, here we go.
A disclaimer: I am going to recycle at least a few of my comments from my recap of the remastered game, because they are honestly really similar — moreso than I had realized at the time I did the remastered version — and there are a few observations that I think are still pertinent/that I’d like to try and say again more eloquently.
As always, I choose to play on “Junior Detective” because I don’t need to demonstrate how embarrassingly crap I am at all of the puzzles. Also, as an additional note, the graphics aren’t quite as crunchy as they appear: I realized I had a “Sharpen” step in the action I was using to process the screencaps and didn’t want to go through the trouble of dragging the original files back off my USB again. I ALREADY SWITCHED DISCS LIKE TWENTY TIMES. I WAS DONE WITH THIS GAME.
Also, this way, you get the fun pixellation effects that were present in most ’90s computer games. Historical accuracy!
Anyway, you know the drill: Nancy writes to her father, with completely inappropriate enthusiasm, about a student (“Jake Rogers”) who has been murdered at Paseo Del Mar High School. Nancy’s Aunt Eloise works at said school and was like, “You know who should really be involved in this? My 18-year-old amateur detective niece!” Nancy chirps that she’s going to call this case “Secrets Can Kill.” Ha ha, because a literal teenager has been murdered, get it? I bet his parents aren’t upset at all.
Annoyingly, only the dialogue between Nancy and the suspects is subtitled in this game, so I’m having to watch a few playthroughs to recreate the voiceover script.
Paseo Del Mar High School, apparently not understanding the concept of suspects, has assigned the student who found the body (“Daryl Gray”) to be Nancy’s contact. We’ll meet him in a minute, but first, let us begin where this game always begins: in Aunt Eloise’s Victorian-pattern nightmare of a house.
Our first goal is to get into Aunt Eloise’s safe so that we can find the keys to the library at the school. The clues to the safe combination are in the end table next to the couch; there’s a letter to Aunt Eloise with a “Sigma Phi Kappa Delta” sorority header. From the same drawer, we can also nab a remote control for the TV, so let’s do that.
Before we use that, we can poke around a bit more — one mildly neat thing about this game that I never noticed until now is that you can actually look up and down. I don’t believe this feature came back until Midnight in Salem, although like in that game, it is completely useless — there’s really nothing to look at. Still, it’s kind of cool that this game wasn’t quite as graphically limited as it looks.
We can also find a hollowed-out book on the right side of the TV cabinet, which has a key inside. This key unlocks a trunk in the living room where we can find a quarter, which can be used for a bunch of Easter eggs around the game. I did not use said quarter because I don’t really gaf about listening to tunes on the jukebox, but that’s how you can do so if you want to.
Back out in the hallway, we need to grab a phone card(!) from the table with the lamp on it, otherwise we won’t be able to call anyone.
We go to the safe, which has Greek letters locking it. We press the letters for “Sigma Phi Kappa Delta” in order, which opens the safe. We grab the key hanging to the right (which will open the library), and then we have to do a slider puzzle to open the wooden box. Opening the box gives you a note saying that Aunt Eloise’s username/password to the school computers is “Eloise Drew/O WISE ELDER.”
Unlike in the remastered version, our first move in the original game is to go see Daryl at the diner. Going to the school also requires us to switch discs, so let’s put that off for as long as possible.
Ah, OG Daryl, with your floppy blonde hair, high-rise jeans, and boyish 2D animation. You were really hard done by the 2010s, much like Tori Amos and the Die Hard franchise. He calls himself a “professional escort to pretty new students” and Nancy’s like, “Professional escort?” Daryl’s like, “Ohoho, in that I am escorting you around school.” All the 9-year-olds playing this game in 1998 remain ignorant to the double entendre. Anyway, we have a couple of questions to start out with, but once you pick one, you can’t go back to the others. I’ve mentioned this before, but here it is again: I go back and forth on dialogue trees that do this; on the one hand, I do kind of like when games force you to stick with your dialogue choices. On the other hand, this means Daryl just says some shit that’s meant to be exposition, but we never find out what it means because we can’t explore it further. Like, it’s one thing when you have to pick just one suspect to gossip arbitrarily about, it’s another when you can’t ask them about everything in their literal introduction.
But I digress. The gist of it all is that Daryl thinks that Nancy isn’t like other girls (because that was still considered a compliment in 1998) and would love to hit on her whilst she investigates him for murder. He also works here at Maxine’s Diner (and apparently doesn’t have to go to class, since he’s here while everyone else is at school?) and is supposed to be helping us with the case, but we literally talk to him twice over the course of the game.
As in the remaster, there are some Easter eggs hidden around the various signs in each location — for example, the red letters on this sign spell out “SOUP LADLE” and “BOLT CUTTER.” This is a hint for the exploding diner sequence, which is coming up in a minute.
This is pretty much the biggest difference between Secrets Can Kill and all the games that came afterward: later Nancy Drew games established a pretty strong integration between the story and the puzzles; puzzles are always treated like something that the characters can see and the story always (sometimes clumsily) comes up with a reason for the puzzle’s existence, like being built by an eccentric billionaire or something. Any hints for how to progress or how to use the items you find are worked into dialogue or realistic props like newspapers and books. The puzzles and hints in SCK, on the other hand, are much more in the tradition of Cluefinders or Carmen Sandiego, where they exist in the environment for the player to notice, but the characters never comment on them and they aren’t treated like an actual part of the story.
We wander into the back room — you can do this even before you talk to Daryl, hilariously enough — and if you look down between two of the prep tables, you can see the infamous bolt cutters. Golly, I wonder what will happen if we steal them?
Gas leak, imminent death, etc. It wouldn’t be Secrets Can Kill if the diner didn’t blow up, though, so let’s try to exit the kitchen, just for old times’ sake:
Oops.
And with that, the most interesting part of the game is over. We click the second chance button, pick up a soup ladle from another counter in the room, properly plug the gas pipe with it, and saunter outside with clearly zero worry that our solution isn’t technically sound.
Hey, I wonder if we can tell Daryl about someone trying to blow up the diner where he works?
No, no we can’t. Well, whatever. See ya, Daryl!
The 3rd of our 4 locations is “Vandelay Pharmaceuticals”, but we can’t do anything here, and it’s really just the location for our showdown at the end of the game. Let’s move on.
🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃
One disc-change later, and we find ourselves at Paseo Del Mar High School, home of the Manatees. We can find more clues hidden among the signs and posters in the hallways; I won’t recap them because they’re all pretty boring anagrams hinting about where to find things and that Jake was in trouble, but we already know all of that. Just generally, I’m not going to bother describing all the varied environmental hints and anagrams, I’m only going to mention the clues that actually move the plot along.
We wander down the hallways and meet football bro Hector “Hulk” Sanchez. Despite being from Florida, he speaks with the cadence of a California surfer bro. He calls us a new girl, and Nancy derps, “How did you know I was new here?” Instead of being like, “Because I’ve literally never seen you before and it’s nearly the end of the year,” Hulk smarms at us that he’s a football god and he knows all the hot girls at school.
There are a couple of conversation trees about his football career, so let’s do that for completion’s sake. Hulk tells us that he currently plays for the PDMHS Manatees, and scoffs at Nancy for not being familiar with manatees. Bizarrely, Hulk gushes that manatees are underrated, since they’re super cute and friendly, then adds that he’s been trying to get the mascot changed since manatees are actually lame. What? Make up your mind, Hulk.
Hulk needles Nancy over being afraid of manatees — hey, fuck you, Hulk, Nancy isn’t afraid of anything! Not even orcas or ghost dogs or wolves! — and we ask if there’s anything he’s afraid of. “When I walk down the hall, it’s punks like Jake Rogers who fear me,” he says. Ah, I was wondering when we were going to get to dissing the murdered high school student. Hulk tells us Jake was killed, and claims to have known Jake, but not very well.
“Is there anything else I can enlighten you on?” he smarms. No, that’s it for now!
As I mentioned in the remaster recap, this original game takes place near the end of the school year, but the remaster is set towards the beginning. The Senior Prom banner in the hallway is a Homecoming banner in the remastered version — possibly because the plot of this game makes marginally more sense if the characters aren’t just about to graduate and leave this popsicle stand behind.
Down another hallway, we find Hal Tanaka in the “study dome.” He tells us that we’ve arrived on a day with “a lot of activity.” “Activity?” Nancy asks, since there are only 3 people in the entire school we can see. (There are, I guess, supposed to be a bunch of police milling around the school that we can’t see, since we can also mention the presence of cops to Hulk.)
Hal explains to us that someone was murdered at the school last night, and everyone is very “stressed out.” Murder will do that to you, I guess. Hal has the grace to call the whole thing “frightening,” so at least he has a little more empathy in his bones than Hulk. He tells us that he heard Jake Rogers was pushed down the stairs, but like Hulk, he claims not to have known Jake well — “only by reputation.” We try to press for more info, but Hal clams up and tells us he has to get back to studying. Because he’s Asian.
We then head over to the student lounge. Right in front of us is a soda can lying on the ground because these kids don’t give a shit about the environment. Kind of weird that a school that has a “Save the Manatees” poster on every wall is so blase about littering, but whatever. Anyway, if you click on the can on the ground under the table, we also find Hal Tanaka’s library card, although we can’t do anything with it.
Over in the corner, we find Connie Watson. She immediately starts gossiping with us about how wild it is today at school, what with all the invisible police. She tells us that a student was found pushed down the stairs — and his face was all messed up, like he’d been in a fight or something! Intriguing. When we asked who was killed, Connie says that it was “just some wannabe stud named Jake Rogers.”
Look, I don’t know — I was lucky enough to have never experienced the deaths of any of my classmates in high school; maybe if it was someone I really disliked, I would have chirped that they were a total dick and I didn’t care that their life had been ended before they could even vote. That said…I can’t imagine feeling that way about anyone I knew at 16, even the ones who were indeed assholes. Like — 23-year-old spoiler alert — Jake Rogers was blackmailing his classmates, so I can certainly imagine they’d be relieved if he’d miraculously disappeared from their lives — but dying is a little far, right? Like, they should feel a little disturbed that he was horrifically beaten to death, right? At the very least, I’m surprised that they’re not even pretending to be sad.
ANYWAY. Now that we’ve met all of our suspects, we can now ask everyone about each other, so let’s go back and do that. Hal fanboys over Hulk and how he’s the greatest high school football player of all time, but he injured his shoulder a few weeks ago and that might hurt his chances of getting a sports scholarship for a good school. Er, if it’s already the end of the school year, then hasn’t Hulk already been accepted to a university? Unless he’s a junior. Whatever, I don’t care that much. (That said, this is what I meant when I said that the game makes slightly more sense if it takes place at the beginning of the year.)
We then bring up Connie, and Hal says that he thinks she was dating Jake. And yet she called him a creep! Interesting. As for Daryl, Hal tells us that he’s very popular and a good politician, “like his father.” That segues into Hal explaining that Daryl’s dad used to be a senator, and he was good at that, but he was less good at running a business. His company — whatever it is, no one really explains — went bankrupt a while back. Hal is weirdly informed about everyone at this school.
Back to Connie. Now that we’ve met everyone, we can ask her about them. She doesn’t know much about Hulk, but she tells us that Hal is taking the max amount of classes possible and has been having a slow mental breakdown all year. Re: Daryl, Connie has a big embarrassing crush on him, because he drives a Porsche and is student council president and has hair like Millenium-era Nick Carter. Nancy is confused as to how Daryl owns a Porsche, considering his only source of income seems to be a part-time job in a permanently empty diner. Connie says that Daryl’s family used to be rich and he used to throw lots of parties, but not anymore. That…that doesn’t really answer my question, Connie.
I chose not to ask her about dating Jake straightaway, but I think the option disappears if you end this conversation without mentioning it. Well, whatever, we can suss out what happens either way and it doesn’t make a difference in the game.
Let’s talk to Hulk again. He tells us that he’s seen Connie at the gym a lot, and he’s heard that she’s having a “cash flow” problem. He also thinks Hal is cool — mostly because Hal is a total Hulk fanboy for some reason — and he doesn’t know why he would hang out with Jake Rogers. You can either ask about Hal’s bizarro interest in high school football or skip to asking about his friendship with Jake. Embarrassingly, it took me until I was writing this recap to realize that you’re probably meant to just click the dialogue options in the order that they appear: if you ask the first available question, about Hal being a “fan” of Hulk’s, Hulk’s answer will mention Jake, directly leading you to ask the second question in the queue. If you ask the second question, then the first one will disappear. WELP. That’s what I get for trying to be avant-garde and nonlinear with my dialogue choices.
Anyway, Hulk says that Hal used to come to all of Hulk’s games, but he stopped around the time that he started hanging out with Jake. Aw. I bet that made Hulk sad. He mentions that Hal and Jake’s lockers were right next to each other, so the two of them talked a lot — and the last time he saw them together, Hal looked pretty upset. Hmm.
We can also ask him about Daryl, and Hulk tells us that Daryl’s family used to sponsor the annual football awards dinner, and Daryl was the one to find Jake’s body (which we also knew from the intro to this game.)
So Hulk! We heard you were injured, that must really suck for someone who’s angling for a sports scholarship. He denies it: “Where did you here [sic] that? I’m as strong as ever!” he insists. Uh-oh, Hal better watch out, lest he end up getting his lunch money stolen for spreading rumors about Hulk.
Aaaand back to Connie. So, Connie, what’s this about you dating Jake? She shrugs that everybody makes mistakes. Okay, well, Hulk told us you were having money problems, what about that? Connie’s like, “Ugh, he’s such a dork!” She seethes that he needs to “get a life” instead of gossiping about her. But is he a loser, expressed by making the letter “L” with your fingers? It is 1998, after all.
Anyway, that’s all we can talk to her about for now. “Good Bye,” we tell her, capitalized for no reason that I can see. “I’m outta here, Nancy,” Connie says. This is one of her standard goodbyes, which is funny because the game engine obviously won’t let her move from this spot.
A little ways past Connie, we find this phone book(!). It’s good through June 1998! When we open it, we see that someone has torn out the contact info for Vandelay Pharmaceuticals.
Then we back up and click the pay phone(!) above the phone book. I love the technology in this game so much. We can now use the phone card from Aunt Eloise’s house to call our phone friends for hints. Bess advises us to use Aunt Eloise’s login to get into the school admin computers; George tells us to explore the library; and Ned tells us find Jake’s locker for more clues. So those are the things we need to do for the game to progress.
We can’t get into the teachers’ lounge to find the admin computers yet, since Connie is blocking us. We also can’t access Jake’s locker because we don’t know his combo yet. Thus, let’s go to the library. At the front desk, we find these floppy disks(!!!) as well as some blue SAT prep papers. The papers have several bolded and italicized letters that reveal the message Sabotage should cause concern, but with the gloves you will not burn. Okay, so that’s a hint that we need to pick up gloves at some point in this game.
We wander around the stacks and pick up some books with more coded messages, but none of them are actual clues in the traditional sense, so I’ll ignore them. The pertinent things we can find are: a magazine that opens to an article about steroid use, a catalog card(!) for English Essays Through the Ages, and a book of Japanese kanji. The kanji book includes the character for the word “crane.” After that, we leave the library. Going back down the hallway to talk to Hal, we pass by a poster for the “Crane School of Self-Defense.”
We ask Hulk how to get into Jake’s locker, and he tells us to talk to Hal. Hi again, Hal! For like the third time in fifteen minutes!
First, let’s be gossipy and tell him that Connie’s talking shit about him. More specifically, she said that Hal allegedly studies too hard. What a harsh, scathing rumor. High schoolers are so cruel. Hal’s like, “How very dare she! She doesn’t know my life!” Then we ask him for the combination to Jake’s locker, and Hal says he doesn’t know it, but he knows that Jake once said he needed his phone to open it. Hmm, okay. Good talk, Hal.
We go back to see Connie again. Just in case, let’s ask her if she knows anything about Jake’s locker. Connie’s all snippy that she only went out with Jake ONCE and she CERTAINLY didn’t spend enough time with him to know his locker combo. Oh my God, Connie, I’m not judging you. Calm down. Connie gets all suspicious that we’re asking so many questions because we’re working with the police. I mean…why are you worried that we’re with the police, Connie?
Anyway, Nancy then really aggressively points out that Connie is wearing a necklace shaped like the kanji for “crane”! And we saw a poster for a judo school called Crane! Connie’s like, “What’s your point?” My point is…uh…well, when I figure out what it is, I’ll be back!
Okay, so let’s look at Jake’s locker. Hal’s hint about Jake’s phone meant that we need to look at a phone keypad to figure out the combo. Or, if you’ve played this game a million times before, you know that the combo is “5253” (“JAKE” when entered in a phone keypad).
Inside the locker, we find tons of clues, which the police apparently all overlooked because they are useless. First, we look at a magazine called Judo Today, which as an article about a recent judo competition. The winner was some dude called “Nineco” (just the one name, I guess, like he’s Cher), who showed up in a mask and shook everyone by winning his very first tournament. “Nineco” definitely sounds like a real name and not at all like an alias, perhaps even an anagram of someone we’ve met at this school.
We also find a copy of English Essays Through the Ages — the book whose catalog card we looked at in the library — which opens to an essay titled “A Treatise on Etiquette.” (In the remaster, they made a reference to another game by crediting the essay to Prudence Rutherford; in this game, it’s just by some random dude. Similarly, the judo magazine in the remaster makes reference to the von Schwesterkranks, while the articles in the original are just random, judo-related filler.)
Finally, at the bottom of the locker we find a video camera, an empty VHS case, a glass cutter, and a newspaper with an article about a break-in at the local pharmacy. Several vials of dianabol (an anabolic steroid) were taken. In the remaster, this was changed to the fake steroid of “hectinol”, I guess because they thought it wasn’t obvious enough who had stolen it.
Alright, so we’ve finally made some progress on this mystery and are closing in on the word limit for this post, so we’ll end here. Up next: Someone tries to kill Nancy for no real reason at all. Daryl manages to hit on us even while confessing to crime.
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