Previously on Nancy Drew: Secrets Can Kill: Jake Rogers has been murdered! We surely have never experienced this before! And so Nancy has traveled to Paseo Del Mar High School in Florida and met a bunch of teenagers who I guess are our only suspects, because…like…they’re here, I guess.
We now want to get into the teachers’ lounge. In the remaster, this involves some fuckery with the soda machine alarm, but in the original, we just have to go around the side of the school and break through a window. More specifically, we use the glass cutter we just found in Jake’s locker to cut through the window and open it from the inside. I love how a glass cutter gets treated like top-secret spy technology in The Silent Spy, but in this game some rando high school student just has one in his locker.
Look at this computer with its two CD drives! Paseo Del Mar must be rolling in money. (I remember the computers at my elementary school could only take floppy disks. Good times.) So we enter Aunt Eloise’s username and password, which we learned from the safe, and we can look through her computer.
In Aunt Eloise’s emails, we find a message from the head of security, telling her that the library lights have been left on for two nights in a row. I think this is meant to be ominous, but it’s never revealed that Jake was doing anything in particular in the library. Maybe Aunt Eloise just doesn’t give a shit about wasting electricity.
There’s also a note on her to-do list that they need to order a replacement for English Through the Ages, as it’s missing from the library — meaning that, however Jake got his hands on it, he didn’t properly take it out from the library. Again, this is meant to be ominous, but doesn’t directly explain anything about the crime. Actually, this means that Aunt Eloise is the only person we’ve found a motive for, so far. I bet she murdered Jake for not observing proper library etiquette! Case closed, let’s go home.
The pertinent information on the computer is a list of passwords. We want to notice the password for the maintenance/boiler room, which is “NOTE.” We can also see that there’s a list of things that the maintenance crew needs to do, such as changing the password for the boiler room door (not that they do it during this game, so we can still use the password we found) and calling “Dillon HVAC” to check on the boiler.
We can then click on the printer icon to print whatever was in the queue. When we go to the actual printer, we see that it’s printed a security report for the night Jake died. Both Hal and Daryl were in the school that night (Hal allegedly to retrieve his homework, Daryl to do a senior prank with a bunch of other kids). The security guard also mentions that he caught two people arguing in the video lab: one was a teenager with red hair* and one was a grown man. They both ran away before the guard could catch them. The guard notes that the nearest exit, through(?) the boiler room, had already been locked, so he suspects that the older dude had a key.
* I think this might be Jake, but we never see a picture of him or even get a description of him from anyone else, so it’s hard to be sure.
We then go over to the filing cabinet and open the drawer marked “Senior Final Papers.” Inside, we find Hal Tanaka’s final paper, which is an essay on etiquette — the very same essay, in fact, that we saw in the English Through the Ages book in Jake’s locker! Hal is a filthy plagiarist! Turnitin.com hadn’t been invented yet, though, so Hal got an A+ on the essay and a recommendation that it be submitted to a scholarship foundation. That’s gonna be really embarrassing for his teacher.
Alright, armed with our new clues, let’s go talk to everyone again. Hulk is useless for information: when we ask about the video camera in Jake’s locker, Hulk just blusters that Jake was a loser and he doesn’t want to talk about him. Once again, it kills me that these kids will gleefully proclaim, to someone they just met, that they don’t give a shit about a murder victim because he was too fucking lame to be bothered with. Anyway, Hulk, do you perhaps know about the robbery of steroids that took place recently? Hulk, of course, does not: “Why would I know about a robbery? All I know about is football!” Heh.
Connie also doesn’t know shit about Jake’s video camera, so I’ll skip my screencaps of her and go to Hal. Hal doesn’t know anything about the video camera, either, but we have another conversation option, which is to call him out for being a plagiarist. Busted by Nancy Drew! Are you not embarrassed, Hal?
Hal cracks and confesses all: He had piled on way too many courses in an effort to bring honor to us all and didn’t have the time to do the English essay, so he just plagiarized it. Jake found out about this, somehow, and started blackmailing Hal to do all of his homework for him. Hal begs us to have pity on him — if he doesn’t get a scholarship, he’ll have to return to Japan, and oh, the tragedy that would bring! His family is depending on him to succeed! What? Look, I know Japan’s economy declined in the ’90s — as Morning Musume imparted to us in their politically-charged song “Love Machine” — but people weren’t exactly fleeing the country en masse to feed their families. I don’t know. Maybe Hal just means that his parents are bragging to all of their friends that their son is studying abroad, and if he gets kicked out for plagiarism, they’re going to be really embarrassed.
(Sidebar: “Love Machine” is just the ’90s Japanese version of “Down” by Jay Sean, isn’t it? “Love will be our inflation” and “I’m down like the economy” have the same energy.)
Anyway, we accuse Hal of killing Jake, and Hal’s like, “I would never kill someone because I respect human life! I want to become a doctor!” Nancy’s like, “Oh, okay, there’s no way you did it, then!” I mean…yeah, whatever, let’s roll with that as his alibi. Investigating him further would only prolong this game, and none of us want that. We ask if Hal knows who might have killed Jake, if not him, and Hal says that Jake was meant to be meeting with Daryl Gray shortly before his untimely death.
The other clues in the teachers’ lounge led us to the boiler room, so let’s go there next. We know from the password list that the password for the boiler room is “NOTE”, which we want to enter onto the keypad on the door. The keypad is in Braille, so if you don’t know Braille, you’ll need to look at a book in the library to find the letters. Once we enter the password, the door swings open, and we can…
Oh, you’re kidding me.
So in my recap of the remastered game, I tried to be nice about the disc-switching, saying that perhaps the game devs thought that players wouldn’t be switching the discs every two minutes, as you only need to switch the discs when going in and out of the school. I completely forgot that only the main interior of the high school is on Disc 2; every other location — including the boiler room, which is also inside the school — is on Disc 1. So in order to do anything in the boiler room, you have to switch discs to get into the main part of the high school, then switch discs to get into the boiler room, then switch discs a third time when you leave the boiler room. Holy Jesus.
I should also add that, annoying as it is to keep minimizing the game to load the different disc images, this was probably even more annoying back in 1998. I don’t know about you guys, but I remember the process of loading a CD-ROM on my Compaq to be something like this: the computer took a few seconds to register that I had pressed the “open” button (several more seconds if it had to unmount a disc that was already inside), then the disc tray slooooowly opened, then I put a new disc in, then it sloooooowly closed, then the computer took like half a minute to read and mount the new disc. Can you imagine doing that three times in ten minutes? I would have lost my damn mind.
Anyway, so here we are in the boiler room. We want to open the toolbox on the ground, to the left of the boiler. The toolbox was left behind by Dillon HVAC, as noted in the Aunt Eloise’s files. We don’t find any clues inside, though; we just find a pair of gloves, which we steal.
Time to leave the boiler room!
SIGH.
Alright, where should we go next? The diner, perhaps? We haven’t talked to Daryl in a while.
SIIIIIIIIIGH.
“How can I help my number one detective?” Daryl asks. I don’t know, Daryl, can you time-travel and take me to 2010, when this game has only one disc?
Okay, so since we haven’t spoken to Daryl in a while, we can run down pretty much everything we’ve learned with him. Let’s see:
- Hulk is the sole reason Paseo Del Mar’s football team has ever won a single game; his dream is to play college football and then play for the Miami Dolphins. I guess Hulk thinks dolphins are less lame than manatees.
- Daryl’s seen Connie around, but doesn’t pay much attention to her. Sucks to be Connie. He doesn’t think she’s ever come by Maxine’s. For some reason, Nancy’s like, “What could possibly make you think that?!” like…he works here, Nancy, maybe he’s never seen her come in? This is a clumsy set-up for Daryl to hint at Connie’s
secret judo alter egopart of the mystery, so he elaborates that Connie is “very private” about what she does after school. - Hal’s real first name isn’t Hal; he just goes by Hal because his Japanese name is “way hard to pronounce.” That just reminds me that I once spent a solid hour trying to explain to my classmates that “Hana” wasn’t pronounced “Hannah” in fourth grade. I bet Hal’s name is something super basic, like Haruto, and he just couldn’t convince anyone that it wasn’t pronounced “Hair-ruh-to.”
- As we know, Hal studies a lot. Daryl thinks that he needs to chill. Maybe you should’ve given him that advice earlier than two weeks before graduation, Daryl.
- We ask if Jake did judo, as we found the judo magazine in his locker. Daryl scoffed that the only physical activity Jake did was “think up new ways to get other people to do his work for him.” That’s…that’s not physical at all, Daryl.
- Jake was in the film club and was filming some kind of personal project at the time of his death. Daryl doesn’t know what it was about, although he assumes it was a documentary, since he never saw Jake with a script or actors.
- Unlike Hulk, Daryl’s breadth of knowledge covers slightly more than football, and he knows about the theft at the drugstore. He tells us that a “steroid or something” was stolen.
- For some reason, we then tell Daryl that Hal, Hulk, and Connie all have some kind of connection to Jake. Nancy! Daryl is also a suspect! Why are we giving him information like this?! Nevertheless, Nancy cannot be stopped by anyone, least of all me. She tells Daryl that we know Jake was blackmailing Hal; he was dating Connie; and Hulk seems “awfully touchy about that break-in at the Drug Depot.” Okay, so…Hulk isn’t explicitly connected to Jake at all, then. Daryl tells us we should either hand the case over to the police or “keep pressuring each of them until somebody cracks.” That’s pretty ominous advice considering that Daryl is also one of our suspects.
After we run through that conversation tree, Daryl tells us that some guy gave him a note for us. “What guy?” Nancy asks and Daryl’s like, “IDK.” Helpful! You can’t even like, give me a hair color, Daryl? Anyway, the note tells us to meet the mysterious person in the boiler room, because that’s not sketchy at all.
So, off we go, back to the high school.
🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃
Back into the boiler room…
🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃
When we get to the boiler room, we see that the boiler…looks about the same as it always does, but all three levers are up, so I guess that means it’s hotter than usual. Nancy doesn’t even say anything when we walk in, so I’m actually not sure how the player is supposed to know that they’re in danger if they haven’t already played this game three times before. Anyway, the levers are chained together and the button for the elevator breaks as soon as we get down to the boiler room, so there’s no escape. There are two solutions here: one is to use the bolt cutters from the diner to cut the chain; if you didn’t take the bolt cutters from the diner, you can instead put on the gloves and enter the padlock combination to unlock the chains. (The combination is “1967” — there’s a plaque on the wall with this number.)
Once the chains are loose, you have to adjust the levers to turn the boiler temperature back down. There’s a diagram on the wall showing the correct positions for the levers. The levers have to be pulled in a particular order, otherwise some of them can’t be pulled. The right order is left-right-left-right-left. You don’t have to touch the middle lever at all.
Before we escape from the boiler room, we can see that there’s now a Maxine’s cup and matchbook lying on a crate. We find a phone number, 555-3784, written inside the matchbook. This number is for Vandelay Pharmaceuticals, but no one will pick up when we call. They claim that, due to a shortage of drugs (just…in general?), they’re closed until further notice. Ahead of the curve on supply chain issues, I see.
We now need to escape through the vents, which we can find to the right of the boiler. On our way out, we find this VHS tape.
We go back to Aunt Eloise’s house and pop the VHS in. We see proof of everyone’s dastardly deeds: Hulk breaking into the drugstore (and pocketing like 3 vials of drugs? that was enough to shut Vandelay down?); Connie sliding into her car with the judo competition trophy; Hal copying an essay in the library; and Daryl meeting up with some guy to give him some papers in exchange for money. The guy smokes, which is how you know he’s evil. I’m guessing this was Jake’s “film project” that Daryl told us about.
(The remaster, by the way, tries to make the tape more realistic by having Jake hide a camera in everyone’s locker, where we see them stash the proof of their crimes, instead of him mysteriously capturing multi-angle footage of everyone committing crimes around town. That said, this game isn’t very realistic either way, so it doesn’t matter much.)
Alright, so clearly we’ve got lots of aggressive confrontations to do. Daryl’s conveniently disappeared, so let’s switch discs and go over to the high school instead.
Hal tells us to fuck off because he’s not into pushy girls, but whatever, Hal! You’re a video game character, so you can’t run from this location to escape me!
We confront him over his steroid-thieving ways, and Hal confesses that he was injured in a football game “a few weeks back.” I can only assume that he means a few weeks before Jake started blackmailing him, since football season must be long over. He needed to keep playing, though, in order to impress college scouts, so he started taking steroids to recover quickly. Jake found out somehow — it’s never explained how he actually caught everyone at their various shady activities — and started blackmailing Hulk into being his personal servant. Hulk bitters that it wasn’t worth it: “I was still in pain and all my free time was spent playing errand boy for Jake.” You heard it here, kids! Steroids aren’t worth it! Say no to drugs!
There are two conversation options here: to ask “Errand boy?” or to ask “Did you kill him?” I clicked “Errand boy?” because it was the first option, and also because it was the most natural follow-up to what Hulk just said, but this causes “Did you kill him?” to disappear. So…we don’t actually clear Hulk as a suspect at all. Weird. Anyway, asking about Hulk’s errands will have him elaborate that Jake’s final task was having Hulk deliver a note to Daryl. Hulk suspects Jake was blackmailing Daryl, too.
Now for Connie. She admits to cross-dressing her way to judo glory; the women’s competition prize isn’t as much as the men’s, so Connie entered the men’s competition to help pay for college — she’ll be the first person in her family to ever go to college, and she’s willing to do whatever it takes to get there. Some subtle commentary on the sexist pay gap and college affordability! Perhaps the real reason this game was remastered was because it was too spicy politically. Wake up sheeple.
Anyway, Nancy zeroes in on Connie saying that she’ll do “whatever it takes” to achieve her goal, and asks if that includes murder. Jake was threatening to expose her, which would’ve caused Connie to lose the prize money. Connie’s like, “Nah, I wouldn’t kill someone” and Nancy’s like, “Cool, solid alibi.” Heh. Oh, Nancy.
By the way, Jake was blackmailing Connie to make her date him, specifically. I think I missed the conversation option that explained this.
Daryl should reappear at the diner once we’ve talked to everyone else, so let’s switch discs (sigh) and leave the school.
We tell Daryl that we know he’s some kind of sketchy dealer of mysterious papers, and Daryl heaves a sigh: “You got me there detective. But I wish it didn’t have to be like this. I wish we had met under different circumstances.” I mean…you’ve been doing shady shit for the better part of the year, Daryl; it was never not going to be this way. Also Nancy was never gonna hook up with you anyway, you smarmy weirdo. (In this game, at least. I think she tragically slips Daryl some tongue in the book that the game is based on.) Anyway, he confesses that he needed extra money — to afford college, like everyone in this game. Biting subtext about the college-industrial complex, or obvious attempt to give all the characters a moral reason for needing money? You decide!
We ask Daryl what he was selling: “Drugs? Trade secrets?” Daryl dodges the question and just wails that he didn’t know what he was getting into. Mitch Dillon told him that all he had to do was pick up “a package” at Vandelay Pharmaceuticals. So…drugs. That’s not at all what Jake’s tape showed, but sure, whatever. Daryl doesn’t know how Jake found out, but shrugs that maybe he overheard Daryl talking to Mitch. Jake was blackmailing Daryl for money, and Daryl thinks that maybe Jake also tried to extort Mitch, thinking he could get more money out of him. “That was a big mistake. Mitch is in a different league than Jake.”
Daryl doesn’t know that Mitch killed Jake for sure, but he thinks Mitch is capable of it. We ask if Mitch also tried to kill us, via luring us to the boiler room, and Daryl just bleats at us that we don’t know what kind of danger we’re in right now. Daryl! Just answer the question! Anyway, Daryl tells us we should just go to the cops. “Do you really want me to do that?” Nancy asks. Daryl’s like, “Actually, my ideal scenario is that you just forget this whole thing happened, so that I don’t get in trouble too, but I guess that’s unlikely.” He offers to help us take Mitch Dillon down. Nancy muses that we need to somehow get a confession out of Mitch, and Daryl says we can try to grab him when Daryl makes another delivery at Vandelay tonight.
This is the start of the end of the game, so let’s pop in Disc 2 for the last time and head over to Paseo Del Mar High School.
We now want to try and get our ex-suspects to help us take down Mitch. We approach each of them with the same line of dialogue: “Hulk/Hal/Connie, we’re going to find the person who killed Jake. If you help out now, this case will move a lot quicker.” I like how Nancy is suddenly completely certain that Mitch killed Jake, even though the only proof we have is the word of one of our other suspects. Also, all these kids hated Jake, so I can’t imagine they care that much about catching his murderer.
Predictably, they all reject us, not wanting to risk their skins to catch a murderous drug dealer. (Hulk at least is funny about it: “Listen, my body’s my temple. I can’t risk it for anyone!” Hee.) We tell Connie that Daryl’s in danger, and maybe he’ll date her if she saves his butt from his own bad decisions, but Connie still refuses.
And thus, we leave Paseo Del Mar High empty handed. To Vandelay Pharmaceuticals, and also our final disc-switch of the game, thank God.
Going to Vandelay starts a cutscene. We watch Daryl meet up with some tiny, pixellated man, who I can only assume is Mitch Dillon. They argue and start fighting, then Mitch pulls a gun on Daryl. Then Connie comes flying in from nowhere and manages to knock Mitch down with her mad judo skills. She goes to help Daryl, who’s bleeding from getting punched by Mitch or whatever, and Mitch gets back up again. (He gets knocked down! But he gets back up again! We’re never gonna keep him down!)
Mitch’s gun will get knocked out of his hand when Connie first jumps him, and it will magically appear in Nancy’s inventory. The game cuts to a close-up of Connie and Daryl, and Mitch briefly disappears from the frame. As soon as he reappears, we want to click on him with the gun. This will cause him to turn around and put his hands up for great justice. And then I guess we just…hold him at gunpoint while Daryl and Connie…go find the nearest payphone…and call the cops? Sure, why not.
And thus, the game ends, and we cut to Nancy telling her dad how it all worked out: Mitch is going to prison; Connie is giving Daryl judo lessons so he can at least defend himself the next time he gets involved with drug dealers. Hulk has agreed to pay for the damages to the pharmacy, and I guess…that gets him off the hook? Even though, if he admitted to stealing steroids, that would certainly raise the question of if he was using them, and then he’d probably not be able to play college ball with steroid use on his record? This game predates both the Barry Bonds and Lance Armstrong scandals that brought steroid use into mainstream discussion, though, so maybe that hadn’t occurred to anyone.
Hal also gets his scholarship because I guess Nancy doesn’t reveal his plagiarism to the school. I don’t think she actually outs Connie’s secret identity, either. That’s very uncharacteristically circumspect of her. I don’t know what to do with a Nancy who doesn’t sanctimoniously shame our suspects into revealing all of their unrelated secrets to the authorities.
Finally, Nancy closes out her letter by saying that Aunt Eloise has a friend in New York who’s been receiving death threats, which is a lead in to the next (and much-improved) game. Aunt Eloise’s proximity to so much crime baffles me. This woman is a mystery unto herself.
Also, in the remaster recap, I believe I incorrectly said that “Detective Beach” is an actual beach shown in this game. This was a misremembering on my part (I know, I know, I didn’t religiously play through the original game before recapping the remaster, I’m so ashamed). “Detective Beach” is actually the name of a TV show from “Paseo Del Mar Studios” shown on a billboard as the game ends. Again, this is the kind of weird background clue/joke that this game scatters around its environment, but isn’t meant to be taken as a real part of the story.
Anyway! Playing the original has actually given me some appreciation for the remaster — while the remaster isn’t a huge improvement, it at least manages to weld the plot elements together into a coherent (if not thrilling) story. By contrast, the plot of the original barely makes sense on its own: we never actually get any proof that Mitch Dillon killed Jake; instead, we find out that he’s a bad guy, and Nancy decides that that makes him the murderer. The boiler room trap also just sort of happens with no preamble or explanation, either — while we can assume Mitch did it because Nancy was investigating him, there’s nothing that actually confirms that. On that note, it seems like they were crunched for time, money, or both, because they were clearly trying to avoid recording separate responses for all of Nancy’s questions — the characters will often give vague replies that move the main plot along, but don’t directly answer the questions we ask (e.g. Daryl not confirming that Mitch was the one who lured us to the boiler room, Daryl not actually explaining what he was selling to Mitch).
Some other stray thoughts:
- We never find out what the diner explosion is all about, either. Like, was someone trying to kill Daryl? Was someone trying to kill Nancy? Was it just a random event thrown in the game to spice it up a little?
- Vandelay Pharmaceuticals at night was kind of a cool location for a showdown. I feel like maybe it shouldn’t have been cut from the remaster.
- At no point do we actually talk to Mitch Dillon, which means that they intentionally wrote and recorded that “You better stop your nosy nosing, or it’ll get bent way out of shape!” line in the year of our lord 2010. How embarrassing.
I guess this wasn’t too bad for what it was — I probably would’ve found this mystery challenging until at least the year 2004 — but…it was still pretty dire. Let me remove Secrets Can Kill from my computer, and we’ll never speak of this again.
THE END.
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