Previously on Nancy Drew: Mystery of the Seven Keys: We crossed a suspect off our list…kind of; I’m a little less convinced than Nancy is. As we know, however, this is not a democracy, this is a Nancyocracy, and my opinion on the matter is not going to be respected.
After our chat with Adela, we get a new task to call Agent Zane. He earns my respect by telling us that he’s in Rome to check that Leo actually arrived on his flight, because he doesn’t trust the Prague police to actually follow up — then he immediately loses said respect because he’s like, “Of course I believe you, you’re friends with the incredibly competent Hardy Boys!” Sigh.
So we found a mysterious journal down in the alchemy lab, which Adela has translated for us. We check our journal to find the translations, and can see that they’re a bunch of riddles. Well, alright, nothing like a random journal that just so happens to have all the clues we need to crack the case! We haven’t had one of these in a while, but they were a feature of such well-written games like, uh…Legend of the Crystal Skull? Warnings at Waverly Academy? Okay, nevermind.
Anyway, the riddles are as follows:
The last one is pretty obviously “time” (or a clock). The first one is…candles, maybe? (Do candles have heads?) The second one is steel of some kind. Each riddle notes that they hold a key (except for the last, which holds three keys, presumably because they knew nobody could be fucked to do seven riddles, especially for this game.
If you talk to Patricie, she’ll give you the answers to the riddles: we have to find candles, a suit of armor, and a clock. We can also ask her about Leo (she notes she hasn’t seen him in several days either), and the weird ghost knight we’ve been seeing around. Patricie’s like, “Idk. Be careful though.” Thanks, Patricie.
Alright, first, to the candles. In order to activate the puzzle, we have to put the coin we found in the alchemy lab in the slot to the side. The symbol on the slot stands for copper, and if you check out the magazine in Leo’s office, you know the Latin word for copper is cuprum. Thus, we need to click on the candles so that only the letters for cuprum are illuminated.
Once we do that, we get a page showing one of the keys.
Now for the second riddle. The only suit of armor we’ve seen is the one in the cathedral-museum-exhibit-whatever, so we want to start the haunted tour for like the tenth time and go check it out. The tour guide is probably like, Jesus Christ, why are you here every night, go to a club or something.
I’m still not super sure how this puzzle is solved. What you want to do is arrange the knight’s various limbs and his head so that he’s positioned like in the above photo; the GameBoomers walkthrough points out that he looks like he’s holding a violin (as he’s meant to be the Dalibor Knight). But like…I’m not totally sure if there are any hints to help you get there? The first strategy guide I found indicated you’re supposed to arrange it so that the moonlight carves an unbroken line over the suit of armor, but it doesn’t when you have him arranged properly so…whatever. I cheated. Let’s grab the key schematics from inside his helmet and move on.
Finally, our last puzzle is for the clock clue. Fortunately, we don’t have to try and mess around with the giant clock built into the side of Prague Town Hall; there just so happens to be a model replica of the clock in the cafe. You know, if I were trying to protect priceless crown jewels by forging seven different keys that had to be brought together in order to unlock the jewel vault, I would also not leave all the schematics for the keys within half a square mile of each other.
So, if you’re not sure how to figure out this puzzle yet, you can text Ned! Ned will explain that the rings of the puzzle represent different ways of telling time (Bohemian time, German time, and Zodiac symbols). We basically want to arrange the rings to correctly display certain dates and times. Ned uses the date/time of his and Nancy’s first date as an example, and they have some mildly corny banter about it. You know, I wrote a whole thing here about how the writers noticeably tried to incorporate Ned into the game more — there are bits when Nancy says “I should tell Ned about this” or “I’ll take a photo for Ned” when looking at the sights of Prague — but honestly, it all feels kind of forced because Nancy and Ned’s actual interactions are still so dorky and corny, and all I really want is for them to just have better dialogue.
But then I tried to envision what said dialogue would sound like, while still being in character, and I remembered — Nancy is dorky and corny. She spent the first twenty games wearing horse shirts and she can still barely tamp down on her urges to ask people about their dead mothers. So actually, maybe that’s the real reason Ned is perfect for her.
Anyway. If you inspect the clock, you’ll see that it was commissioned by King Rudolf II upon his coronation; thus, the date we need to set the clock to is 6:00 on November 1st, 1565. You have to use both parts of the clock to set the dates and…I don’t really know which is which…and tbh I looked up an Arglefumph walkthrough to remind myself how it’s supposed to go and he didn’t really either, so…
Yeah. Whatever. Here’s the solution.
After you solve the bottom half of the clock, you also have to solve a puzzle on this tube…thing…where you have to align all the lines with each other. As with the other puzzles in this game, there isn’t really enough information to figure out how to do it without guesswork — there’s a correct position for the end pieces, which will let you correctly align the rest of the pieces, but I can’t see a way to logic out the correct positioning as opposed to just guessing or cheating. Sigh. Yet another overly complex puzzle without a manageable solution.
Checking off the puzzle tasks will trigger a cutscene of the black smoke creeping out of the side door of the cathedral. Nancy will then text Ned, telling him about getting chased by the Ghost Knight in the tunnels for the second time. She muses that it’s weird that he found us again, since we came in a different way than last time — it’s like the Ghost Knight always knows where we are. Ned cracks a joke that he always knows where we are, which twigs Nancy to the possibility that the Ghost Knight is tracking our phone. He’s managing to track our phone while we’re in a bunch of medieval subterranean tunnels? Alright, I guess Patricie has a right to brag about Loutkari’s Wi-Fi after all.
So our new task is to use our phone to lure the Ghost Knight to us and find out who they are. Hey, Adela, since we’ve decided you’re not evil now, do you wanna help us?
“I have nothing more to say.” Jeez, okay.
Now, I didn’t realize this during my first playthrough since I was so confused and had no idea if I was progressing or not, but — trying to bust the Ghost Knight is where the end of the game starts; once we lay the trap for him, we can’t go back and make latte art or annoy Oskar anymore. So, get that out of your system if you haven’t already!
So what we want to do is go over to this area that is full of construction equipment in the castle square, and steal a screwdriver (“I gotta have some torque”, Nancy says, haha, get it).
Then we use the screwdriver on this gate, which starts a lockpicking puzzle. I will say, this is a big improvement on the last time this puzzle featured — in Midnight in Salem, it was a weird, clunky puzzle where you had to push pins in order, and somehow gauge that some of the pins were being pushed more slowly than the others. This time, they’ve changed it so that there’s a ball zooming back and forth, and you have to click or press spacebar when it’s in the green zone to push one of the pins down. If you miss, the last pin you pressed will go back up and you have to do it over (if you miss multiple times in a row, you’ll have to do the whole puzzle over). The screen rattles and makes a jarring noise every time you miss, which is kind of unnerving but in a classic, adventure game kind of way. I think it’s a big improvement!
Once you successfully pick the lock, the game will cut to nighttime. We now have to lay the trap for the knight. To do this, we need to grab the cardboard boxes over to the right, and a hammer from a table in the construction area.
Then we go up the scaffolding, and the game will very helpfully tell us where to put the boxes by showing us these weird, glowing white translucent boxes where they’re supposed to go. It’s especially funny because it looks so low-quality — like, this is the kind of thing I’d expect to see in the Diamond Mystery of Rosemond Valley.
Anyway, once we put the boxes down, Nancy will note that the hinges beneath us aren’t locked — which I guess means that we can basically knock them to the side with the hammer? Anyway, that’s what we do, and we now have to be careful not to step over there, because if we do, the scaffolding will collapse and we’ll die. Instead, we want to just turn to the side and put our phone down, which will summon the ghost knight.
Damn, that’s a really good costume.
We knock the boxes onto the knight and confront him. It’s Radek! Are you surprised? He’s such a theater kid.
So, Radek! Explain how you seemed to have an actual skull in place of your head, and also how you were basically turning into a noncorporeal smoke monster back there. Also how have you been following us? Radek opts to only answer the last question, and tells us that he’s been tracking us with some app linked to our phones, but he wasn’t the one who set it up. He wails that he can’t tell us who’s telling him what to do.
Just as he says that, Marek comes walking out of the shadows. Oh, is it just Marek? ‘Cause like, I’m not saying we should beat senior citizens up, but we could totally beat him up.
Just kidding, Marek isn’t evil either. He explains to us that he and Radek are both part of the Rezidente — Rezidente, as they tell it, is a secret society that they’re born into, and they protect Prague from “those who would seek to take advantage”, whether that be regular criminals or, say, certain government regimes. (Not the rest of Czechia, though. Just Prague. Can’t be everywhere, you know.)
Anyway, the Rezidente are now being blackmailed by Loutkari, who have been using their internet security business as a front to spy on people. (Radek and Marek seemingly confirm that the Rezidente do commit crimes, but only “in the interest of the Czech people.” What exactly those crimes are is never clarified.) Anyway, Loutkari have been forcing them to stalk Nancy, and they had Radek chase her in his ghost knight cosplay to keep her interested in the case, so she’d find the seven keys faster. “I’m embarrassed to say it worked,” Nancy says. Heh. You’d really think she’d know better by now.
We ask if Elka is involved, and Marek says that she isn’t — he won’t let her get involved, not after her mother died on some mysterious mission for Rezidente. Somehow, Nancy holds herself back from zooming off to Aparát to be like, “Elka!!! My mom also died on a secret geopolitical mission and my father figure let me think it was a car accident!!! Let’s bond!” Nevertheless, Nancy points out that Elka might be able to help against Loutkari, and Marek seems to accept that he should tell Elka the truth.
We can ask if they’re after the crown jewels, which Marek and Radek deny — and in fact, they want to protect the crown jewels from Loutkari, since they’re Czech history and all. Nancy says she can help them, if they give her proof she can trust them. Marek gives us a Rezidente pin that says “Irena” on the back. Nancy says (assumes, really) that this is Elka’s mother’s Rezidente pin. Also…how is this proving we can trust them, exactly? (Nancy even asks this, but Marek says it will help because only the Rezidente are allowed to have these pins. Yeah, but like…I’m not worried about infiltrating the Rezidente, Marek, I just wanna know if you’re gonna murder me for The Good of Czechia or something.)
We cut to Aparát, where Nancy lays out her plan: they’ll make the keys, just like Loutkari wants them to. They’ll then use them as bait and catch the Loutkari agent who picks them up.
So, to make the keys! We have the schematics and the labels for each key, so we have to match the label to the key schematic. There’s a logic puzzle (e.g. Emerald is the heaviest key, only two keys are heavier than the Pearl key, etc.) to go along with the weights listed on the schematics. We want to arrange them like in the photo above.
Once that’s done, Marek goes off and somehow forges seven keys in like ten minutes. Sure. He comes back and is like, “What, like it’s hard?” Nancy says that we’ll deliver the keys to the drop point, then follow the Loutkari agent to wherever they’re taking them. Radek’s like, “Okay, but what if the Loutkari agent gets away with the keys?” Excuse me? Are you saying Nancy Drew would let that happen, Radek? Because like…we have, but only a few times!
Marek says that he’ll rig up a tracker to ensure we can follow the agent, and with that, we have our bag full of keys, one of which has a tracker inside. Nancy’s like, “Wow, Marek, I thought Elka was the tech expert. How are you so good with technology and inventing shit in the like ten minutes we’ve been here?” Marek gives the only explicit reference to the Czech Republic’s history in the whole game, saying that the Rezidente had to be good at inventing things to stay ahead of their enemies during “the country’s many takeovers.”
Speaking of, did Elka notice us rock in with Radek wearing an entire suit of armor and then proceed to smelt a bunch of keys in the next room over? Apparently not.
Anyway, we have the keys, the tracker, and a little geopolitical controversy. It’s now time to catch our culprit, so I’ll end the post here. Up next: we meet the culprit, get pulled into the Strojnik family drama, and Agent Zane and Adela try to hook up.
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