Previously on Nancy Drew: Mystery of the Seven Keys: We were attacked by a puppet…OF DEATH! I bet Radek is jealous. Getting chased down by someone in a puppet suit seems like the shit he’d be into.
After that spOoOoOky encounter with a shadowy figure at Aparát*, we cut to the next day at the cafe (no word on how we managed to get home safely). Our first task is to investigate Vladena some more, but before we can do that, we get a call from Ned. He tells us that he and Carson couldn’t find anything sus about SecondShine, which causes Nancy to muse that the only other person could’ve messed with the necklace is Adela. (Oh, are we just ignoring Oskar now?) Nancy asks Ned to get Carson to investigate Adela’s insurance situation, in case she’s trying to commit insurance fraud. Ned says he’ll ask Carson and then when Carson tells him what he’s found, he’ll tell us. Is there a reason Carson has all this time to talk to Ned but can’t call his own daughter? Sexism >:(
*By the way, it like, just occurred to me to google if “Aparát” means anything in Czech. It turns out it just means “apparatus”, which…fair enough for a computer store, I guess, although I was hoping for something cooler.
Anyway! Let’s make some small talk, because I’m a good girlfriend. How are you, Ned? Ned’s like, “Oh, you know, just waiting for this girl in Prague to call me. You know, you can call me. Anytime. Whenever you feel like it. Seriously, please call me.” First of all: Jesus Christ, Ned. Second of all, I can not call you whenever I feel like it, because I have been doing so and you are not picking up! Don’t lie to me, Nedwin!
After hanging up with Ned, Adela calls us, wanting to meet so we can update her about the investigation. We ask if she had insurance on the necklace, and she acts super cagey and tells us not to worry about it, and just to find the gems. Suspicious!
We now know she brought the necklace to Aparát, so we press her about showing the necklace to anyone besides SecondShine and Vladena. Adela admits to going there, but claims she only went there to check on the status of some other items she sold to them. We know from Marek’s ledger, however, that she did indeed get a quote for the necklace from him.
Nancy says she wants to follow up on a few more leads before meeting with Adela, and Adela gets super pissy and impatient that we don’t have an update for her. Do you want to solve this mystery, Adela? You can spend your time chasing down puppets and getting condescended to by Vladena for all I care.
I also say hi to Patricie, because I’m nice. We can ask her a little more about the history of the cafe, and Patricie will give us another info-dump about the history of coffee in Bohemia. She adds that her family has been making coffee nearly ever since, and have owned the cafe for generations — although it’s technically not always been theirs, particularly when the Czech Republic was under, uh, certain government regimes. Interesting. In Patricie’s case, she seems to be alluding both to the monarchy and to the various occupations of Czechoslovakia in recent history — but the latter, in particular, will come up again.
Then I do a little more coffeemaking because I feel super-smug about killing it with the latte art. Let’s see, where to now?
Let’s say hi to Radek while we’re on our way to explore the rest of the square. Fortunately, there isn’t another puppet show today (or ever), and he cracks a joke that he won’t make us work for free again. A noble sentiment, but somewhat undercut by the fact that he did it already. Radek says that he’s working on the script for a new puppet show, so all other puppet shows are on hold until he can debut his new show. I feel like that can’t be good for his business, but whatever. One of our other tasks is to investigate the marionette theater, so let’s just waltz in with Radek standing right there. We don’t actually want to go into the theater itself; we want to go into Radek’s little workshop in the green caravan he’s standing in front of.
In the workshop, we find some fliers and scripts and things — the important thing we want to look at is inside the red toolbox. (It’s locked, but we can just use a paint scraper on the table to open it.) Radek has a new script inside, about the history of a mysterious group called the Rezidente. (Not a real part of Czech history, at least that I could find. Also the name just makes me think of the reggaeton singer.)
We can also see a clipboard of the theater’s expenses, with a note that Loutkari recently made a huge donation. Hmm. We can also see that Radek only has ten puppets listed in his inventory, but he had that weird, suspicious conversation with Marek about a twelfth puppet, so clearly something is up there.
The natural thing to do would be to ask Radek about it, but I was still trying to finish all the other tasks I hadn’t checked off before starting anything new, so we’ll put a pin in this for now. I was also still under the mistaken impression that we could still talk to Leo, so I went back to his office in the cathedral. We can now go into the lobby, but it’s still empty because they didn’t want to have to render the secretary. The secretary’s note says he’s out for coffee, but of course if you go back to the cafe, you won’t be able to find him. Maybe he’s the one person in all of Prague who doesn’t patronize Patricie’s cafe?
The only thing we can do in the secretary’s room is snoop through his desk, not that there’s much to snoop through. We can pick up another one of Leo’s playing cards (which again, we cannot actually use for anything), and check out the manila envelope on the desk. Inside is a list of instructions Leo left for taking care of his cat (aw!) while he’s in Rome. Wasn’t Elka also looking up tickets to Rome? Everyone’s hanging out in Rome without us 🙁
Alright, so that’s all for the secretary’s desk. Kind of anticlimactic. We also now have his number, but we can’t call him yet.
We’ll swing by and hit Oskar, too, since he’s right downstairs. What’s up, man? I totally fucked with that priceless artifact you just left out in the middle of the exhibit while a tour group of randos was walking through. Very embarrassing for you.
We ask him if he ever examined Adela’s necklace. He gets all snippy about how he’s not a ~commercial appraiser~ like Vladena, but when pressed, admits he might’ve been in Zlaty Jewelers at the same time as Adela and her necklace. Nancy’s like, “Why were you hanging around Zlaty Jewelers if you aren’t a commercial appraiser?” and Oskar’s like, “Stop asking questions.” Oooh, I hope he and Vladena are having a torrid affair! It would be very “We have Alejandro del Rio and Joanna Riggs at home.”
Alright, I went through my list and still could not check anything off, mostly because a lot of the tasks I have left (“Find Leo”, “Investigate the puppets”, etc) basically hinge on getting to the last third of the game, not that I knew that at the time. Sigh, you’ve defeated me, game. I guess I have to talk to Vladena.
“Oh, you’ve made yourself comfortable. Should I get you a coffee?” Vladena snips at us. Hee. We ask her about Aparát, and Vladena immediately calls it a “glorified pawn shop” and sniffs that Marek definitely could’ve, and probably did, remove the gems from the necklace since he needs money so bad. Jeez, Vladena, what did that man ever do to you? Maybe she visited Aparát and got freaked out by the fact that his surrogate grandson is a theater kid with a freaky puppet kink. (I like this bit a lot, though! Sometimes there isn’t much overlap between the suspects in these games, so it’s cool to get the sense that Vladena and Marek are aware of each other and have opinions about each other, which are even colored by their different social classes and ambitions.)
We can then ask her about the safe she has in the corner, and she huffs that it’s a super expensive, exclusive safe that we’ve probably never even heard of. She snarks that she bets not even we could open the safe — “Go ahead, try.” I mean, sure, thanks for the invite.
At that moment, Oskar drops in, huffing at Vladena that he wants to chat with her. Vladena steps out to talk to him, assuring us that “[t]his won’t take long.” Of course, she’ll stay away for as long as it takes you to break into the safe, so…sorry, Vladena, I suck at puzzles. Hope you enjoy talking to Oskar for a solid hour. The game will cut away and back and Vladena will disappear (we can hear her and Oskar talking outside, but their voices are too muffled to make out what they’re saying. Aw, come on, I want to hear if they’re gossiping like Kit and Kyler).
(By the way, you might think that you can look at the folders on top of the safe because the cursor turns into a magnifying glass when you hover over them, but clicking on them will just bring you to looking at the safe lock. Very annoying.)
Since solving the safe puzzle will bring Vladena back, let’s snoop first. We want to poke around to find pieces of this tool here, which is a fan gauge we need to solve the safe puzzle. There are three pieces lying around the shop.
One piece is lying on Vladena’s desk, which we also want to check out. Here we can find some notes that will tell us how to solve the safe puzzle as well. We can also note the box of pens on her desk and their colors.
Over on her table, we also find this magazine, which contains an article that is quite critical of SecondShine and Hans Feiersinger. It notes that SecondShine initially refused to use DEGAS to track the provenance of its pieces, and also that they’ve refused to disclose their financials. Huh. Well, that’s suspicious. Is there a reason Ned or Carson didn’t find this out in their Googling session? Nancy has to do everything around here.
(The front of the magazine says, “Vladimir Thanatos speaks out on the beauty of the Sadal Melik sapphire”, which is a callback to Phantom of Venice, by the by.)
Over by the table near the safe, we can find this chart of gems, which is what we’ll need to crack the code. If you overlay the appraisal tool onto the chart, you’ll see that it corresponds to the colors of the gems. You want to overlay the tool so that the circles overlay numbers that make the equations true, and the colors will give you a hint as to which rows to look at.
So the solution here, as you can see, is overlaying the tool onto a row of numbers that creates the equations (4.5 x 3) x 4 – 9 = (7.5 x 6), and (7 x 5) x 2 = 10 x (7). Then, to actually get the numbers to enter into the lock, we have to use the tick marks next to each circle. What we need to do is calculate the equation inside the circle (e.g. 4.5 x 3 = 13.5), then use the tick mark to note which digit we need. There are three purple tick marks, and 13.5 is the solution for the purple-encircled equation, therefore the solution is 5.
God, I hate math.
When we’re done, that leaves us with the numbers 5, 4, 5, and 7 (going from left to right, from the top row of the tool to the bottom). Now…this is the correct solution for the safe (5457), so I just entered it and unlocked it and went on my merry way. However, if you weren’t going purely off vibes and Western writing order like I was, you’re also supposed to look at Vladena’s notes one more time to figure out the correct order to put the numbers in. The safe has four sun and moon symbols for each number, and this sheet of notes here will tell you which circle in the appraisal tool corresponds to each symbol.
Jesus, finally. This puzzle bothered me: after reading a walkthrough and figuring out how it was meant to be solved, I could totally see how it fit together and was annoyed at myself for not being patient enough to figure it out — but I don’t know, in the moment, the game was so boring that I couldn’t be fucked to wander around Vladena’s shop or inspect her clues more closely. Having chewed on the plot a bit more, I really like the Marek/Radek/Elka end of the story, but Jesus Christ I could not care less about Vladena or Oskar or Leo, and I got impatient pretty easily with anything involving them. (In contrast, frustrating as it was, I did bash my way through Radek’s puppet show puzzle without cheating, and I was fully engaged with the laptop shenanigans with Elka.)
Before we can really look at anything, Vladena will come back and gasp, “You! I did not think it was possible.” We’re…we’re a private detective, Vladena. Like, of all the bizarro things Nancy can do, cracking safes is on the more plausible side.
Anyway, she’s like, “Fine, whatever, just take the appraisal for Adela’s necklace, I don’t even care anymore.” O! Kay! She’s so weirdly aggro about this. She also notes that, at the time she was working on the necklace, she briefly stepped out and left Oskar alone with the appraisal log — but she doubts he would’ve tampered with it. OR WOULD HE?
Speaking of Oskar, what were the two of them arguing about? Vladena says that Oskar won’t let her evaluate the crown jewels for the exhibit — which seems a little odd, since Oskar is the one who came over here, and I don’t know why he’d pick a fight over this. Whatever. Nancy’s like, “I mean, isn’t appraising the jewels his job?” to which Vladena says, “It was also his job when the jewels were replaced with fakes.” Ooh, burn. Vladena notes that Oskar wasn’t directly responsible for that — he was only an assistant at the time — but there was another “incident” when he was living in London. Vladena says that this is the first time Oskar has ever been directly in charge of a jewel exhibit, so perhaps his irresponsible attitude towards security will finally catch up to him. That’s all we can talk to her about, so let’s go ask Oskar what he thinks, shall we?
Dig this angle! We’re so tall, we could crush Vladena like a bug.
Over at the exhibit, Oskar sniffs that their argument was just a “professional disagreement”, and Nancy clutches her pearls all, “You went all the way to her store for a professional disagreement?” Nancy, Vladena’s like right there. It didn’t require that much effort on his part. Anyway, Oskar repeats once again that Vladena wants to look at the crown jewels but he doesn’t want or need her help. Then Oskar clarifies that actually, though, he isn’t the appraiser for them — the appraisal is being done by the same family that has been doing it for centuries; he is merely overseeing the exhibit. Oh, okay. You could’ve told us that earlier, Oskar.
Oskar explains that Vladena’s family allegedly were the original appraisers of the crown jewels, but they were ousted when the alchemists were kicked out, and now she’s trying to reclaim her family’s place in the royal hierarchy like this is Game of Thrones. We’re like, “How do you know all of this anyway?” and he’s like, “Uhhh people talk, gotta go now.” Then he quite literally disappears from his spot. “That was abrupt,” Nancy says. HEE.
Alright, so we ought to take a look at the DEGAS file on our laptop, and compare it to Vladena’s appraisal log. On our way back to the cafe, I stop to talk to Radek again. We ask him about how many puppets he has, and he says he has ten — and yet, we heard him ask Marek about repairing a twelfth puppet, so what was up with that? Thanks for having that conversation in English so we could call you out on it, by the way. Radek gets all cagey and sweaty and says that haha, no, he only has ten puppets, he’s just a simple actor, he’s not good at math (fair, admittedly) — anyway, Marek knew what he meant! “Yes, I suspect he did,” Nancy deadpans. With that, the conversation ends, and we can tick off the “Explore the marionette theater” task.
Back at the cafe, we open up the DEGAS file (you have to do the image puzzle again, but nothing scary will pop up this time). Vladena’s written appraisal will appear next to it, and we have to click all the matching information in the files — e.g. both the DEGAS file and the written appraisal record the same number of gems in the necklace, approximately the same value, etc. However, the date of the two appraisals is different. Once we find all the matching information and also click on the date, Nancy will gasp that the date is different and the puzzle will end.
(Also, note that Vladena’s notes are written in purple pen. You might recall that we found her pen cup in her shop, though, and there wasn’t a purple pen among them. On the other hand, Elka had a purple pen at her desk.)
Um…okay, not really sure what to do now. Hmm. Well, we’re in the cafe. Patricie, have you ever heard of El Residente the Rezidente? Do you like reggaeton, too? Patricie says that the Rezidente are allegedly a mysterious group of criminals, but the way she says it, it sounds more like a legend than anything else.
Okay, well, maybe we can…okay, nevermind, we can’t ask Radek about them. Uh…Vladena?
We can’t ask Vladena about the Rezidente, but we can confront her about the mismatches in the DEGAS file. Vladena says that she tried to alter the DEGAS entry because it didn’t match her log. Nancy clutches her pearls that Vladena would’ve tried to tamper with the entry, but Vladena argues that the entry needs to be fixed because it’s wrong. I think the implication here is that someone else messed with the DEGAS file, and Vladena is saying her appraisal is correct…? I think.
Vladena once again gets all offended that we’re suspicious of her, and says that she’s the one who suggested Adela hire us. Apparently she heard Nancy on a podcast (“My Favorite High-Stakes Heist”, which is definitely not a reference to My Favorite Murder) and thought Nancy sounded more competent than the Prague police. Heh. (A few other characters bring up Nancy being on this podcast, which I think is cutely modern. Nancy’s always been locally famous, in the books, and this seems like a nice way to adapt that to the times — and I always like anything that grounds Nancy and gives us an idea of what her life might actually be like between cases.)
Finishing the conversation with Vladena will trigger a text from the Hardys, asking about the DEGAS file. They note that Agent Zane will want to know if there’s anything weird about the file, so Nancy will say that she should give Zane a call.
We tell Zane that the DEGAS file didn’t match the physical log, and Zane is surprised that Vladena made a physical file at all, instead of just entering the necklace’s information into DEGAS. Zane notes that either the physical log is accurate and the DEGAS file was entered (faked?) later, or whoever entered the DEGAS info just fucked it up. Nancy admits that Vladena isn’t great with computers, so maybe it was just a mistake. I mean…I know the stuff with DEGAS is meant to be suspicious, because this is a mystery game, but it is weird that everyone is making such a big to-do over the fact that, basically, a computer system that relies on manual data entry (in an industry that does not exactly skew towards young, tech-savvy people) has incorrect information. Whatever.
We can ask Zane about the Rezidente, and much like Patricie, he notes that they’re an alleged crime ring, but he didn’t think they were operating “in this day and age.” Nancy muses that they might be connected to the jewel thefts somehow.
Finally, Zane warns us that he’s heard, through the black-market grapevine, that there’s a “big score” coming up soon. Nancy wonders if that could be the crown jewels, although whoever’s trying to steal them would have to get the seven keys first. Zane adds that the vault holding the jewels now has biometric security, since it’s not the 1300s anymore — although he suspects that the biometric scan only needs one keyholder to pass it. Nancy gasps that someone might be after Leo — after all, he’s the only keyholder we’ve met leaving town, so no one will miss him, and it’s not like he has any security. A new task appears to “find the Dean” (which continues to trip me up — can the game just pick whether Nancy calls this guy Leo or not?), and the music gets all frantic. This would hit harder if, you know, we hadn’t been to his office like twice already. We know he’s not there! There is no urgency to this!
Well, whatever, this is a sign to go back and look at his office again, some more. We can now go past the secretary’s room and into the office proper, where — surprise, surprise — Leo isn’t there. We do hear a cat meowing, though we can’t see it. We also find another playing card, although once again, we do nothing with it.
When we turn to the door, we’ll hear Oskar outside, who has come back and is trying to get a meeting with Leo again. He’s insistent on being present when the crown jewels are inspected by Leo and the keyholders — which is meant to be suspicious, but I guess makes sense if he’s overseeing the exhibition. I don’t know, I’m old and in middle management now, so I understand the worry that, if something were to happen, his bosses aren’t going to accept “Well someone else told me the jewels were fine :^)” as an excuse. Let the man do his due diligence!
Anyway, the secretary once again passive-aggressively stonewalls him, and tells Oskar that in fact that the inspection of the jewels has already happened — without Oskar’s knowing — and Leo has peaced out to Rome.
When that dialogue ends, we can keep exploring the office. Over at Leo’s desk, we find a flier for his Rome trip, as well as a calendar. (I don’t recall the game ever giving us the exact current date, so we can’t tell if Leo’s disappeared before his trip, or if he might really be on the trip after all.)
Interestingly, we also see that there’s a “Biometric Scan Appointment” listed after he returns from Rome. When we play his phone messages, though, we hear a voicemail from someone from the President’s office: she says that the appointment to inspect the jewels has been moved up. There’s a second message on the phone as well, thanking Leo for helping inspect the jewels and confirming that they’re ready to be exhibited.
We turn around from the desk and see this puzzle on the wall. Sigh. This is another puzzle that I had a really hard time with. It seemed pretty simple at first — the panels on either side of the puzzle give you hints as to which symbols go where, but naturally it’s incomplete so you have to use logic to figure out the exact placement of each symbol and color. Adding to that, the hints aren’t arranged in the same layout as the puzzle (you’ll notice the wall panels are in a straight grid, while the puzzle has a cross shape), nor are they actually arranged in the same location — e.g. you’ll notice that the bottom right panel lists symbols at the top of its grid, but that’s actually a hint for the bottom part of the puzzle). In retrospect, the key seems to be to fill in the column with four symbols first, then fill in the rest of the hints around it. As with the safe puzzle, once I saw the solution I kind of wished I’d been patient enough to crack it myself…but in the moment, I just found the whole thing really obscure and frustrating; I just got so sick of squinting at the wood panels and I couldn’t tell the cross and the sword apart.
Anyway, solving the puzzle causes a bookcase on the other side of the room to move. We see that Leo’s cat has been trapped behind the secret door, and we can pet her a few times before we go off into the secret tunnel. (There are a couple of cats you come across in the game who you can stop and pet, which I think was a very cute thing to add — it really adds to the coziness of the game.) Hmm. Why was the cat behind the bookcase, though? Could Leo have gone through the secret tunnel (through the mountain)?
Welp, off we go into the tunnel. At the foot of the stairs, we see some footprints and another playing card, which seems to confirm that Leo did come this way.
As soon as we walk a little further, though, we see a bunch of black smoke curling towards us from the hallways. Oh, are we suddenly in an episode of Lost? Is that where we’re going with this?
Anyway, so now we’re in a timed race to get out of the tunnels before the black smoke catches us. HER actually provided a map to help people escape, but even after I gave up and used the map, I ended up getting killed about ten times because I didn’t realize I was at the exit — as with all the doors in this game, you have to get really close for it to let you out, so even though I’d reached the exit, I thought I hadn’t found it because the cursor didn’t change when I hovered over it. SIIIIIIGH.
We also find some mysterious carvings down here, which we’ll come back to later, when we’re not running for our lives.
During one of my (many) deaths, the smoke gets close enough to look like this creepy skeleton in a…priest costume? Knight costume? We’ll find out in a bit. Since this is meant to be the same person as whoever was chasing us outside of Aparát, I suppose they aren’t the Puppet of Death after all, and are just…leaving us Puppet of Death cards? (Because they have a puppet kink??? I’m onto you, Radek.)
Anyway, yeah, the exit is at this gate, which I had passed about ten times and I just never got close enough to click on it. LOLLL.
Alright, well, we finally make it out of the tunnels. Nancy immediately calls the Prague police, who are like, “Oh, are you Nancy Drew, the detective?” HEE. Of course the police in Prague have heard of us. Do you think various countries’ police forces tip each other off about how there’s a nosy American girl wearing a horse shirt who will rock up to your city and promptly start desecrating all your crime scenes? Perhaps that’s why they actually take our call seriously and say they’ll investigate Leo’s disappearance. (Not that, you know, it’s going to do any good.)
We then get a message from Adela, telling us to meet her: “I’ll be waiting.” Jeez, Adela, I’m recovering from being murdered like eight times by a villain from a 2000s TV show here, you could at least say please.
Up next: She blinded me with jewel thefts (and bad graphics), and this game turns into Curse of Blackmoor Manor redux.
Leave a Reply