Previously on Nancy Drew: Mystery of the Seven Keys: We spent about eighty-five years doing useless puzzles and then suddenly the plot showed up and now we’re at the end of the game. Sure. Why not. In order to capture the culprit, we’ve decided to make the seven keys they need in order to open the crown jewels’ vault and hand them over, then follow the culprit and hopefully catch them before they actually make off with the jewels. You know, it just occurred to me that we could’ve just…made fake keys, instead of actually handing the culprit a way to pull off their heist and just betting that we can stop them. Whatever, Nancy.

Alright, so we’ve rigged up a tracker, so now we’re going to deliver the keys to the culprit and follow them once they pick the keys up. To do this, Loutkari gave Radek and Marek a designated drop spot for the keys — by the statue of St. George in the cathedral square — so we go there and leave the bag for the culprit. Then Nancy will say that we need to go back to Marek to let him know the keys have been picked up. Oh, we’re…not going to wait and see who picks up the keys? We can’t just text Marek? Okay, whatever.

We can also pet this cat hanging out by the statue. Hi kitty!!! We’re just handing the culprit a way to pull off their crime on a silver platter and just, like, hoping we manage to stop them in time. The usual Nancy Drew things <3

So then we haul ass all the way back to Aparát to make sure the tracker is working. Marek confirms that it is and gives us a receiver, and now we have to haul ass back to the square to follow the signal. Could Radek not have brought us the receiver while we waited for the culprit? It’s not like he’s doing anything.

By the way, look at Marek’s computer. There’s like, five pixels in that entire image.

So back we go to the square. We’ll hear a beeping noise as we walk around, which will speed up when we get closer to a place that the culprit has been. We have to hit 14 random spots; there’s nothing really special about them (some of them are basically just like, a blank spot in the middle of the courtyard) but you’ll know you’ve reached a spot because Nancy will say something like, “Now what?” or “I’ve gotta hurry” or “One step closer.”

What’s up random generated NPCs. Kind of late for you guys to be out.

Finally, the beeps will take us to one of the cathedral doors, beyond which we find ourselves in the tunnels again. These tunnels look far more in-use than the ones before, and if you check out the computers (although you can’t interact with them) you can see that they have Loutkari wallpaper. We follow the beeping back through the tunnels we’ve seen before, and we end up back in front of the secret alchemy lab.

We don’t have to do the light puzzle again, we just have to use Patricie’s snowglobe to open the door again. Alright, time to meet our culprit!

Oh, hey, what’s up Vladena. You’re our culprit, I guess. Can’t say I care that much about it since we barely explored you and your descended-from-alchemists backstory, but you’ve been a dick so I’m not mad about getting to ruin your plans and then moralizing at you about how Crime Doesn’t Pay at the end.

Vladena cackles and reveals her evil plan to us: she used us to make the keys for her; she stole the gems out of Adela’s necklace (and lied about having a buyer to begin with), and suggested Adela hire Nancy to lure her to Prague. I feel like there had to be someone else, in all of the Czech Republic, that could’ve done this for her instead of importing a detective all the way from the US. Like at least she could’ve found someone within the Schengen area.

Anyway, Vladena also claims to be running Loutkari. You’ll recall that Vladena is bad with computers; if you check Nancy’s journal after this, she’ll wonder if Vladena was just pretending to be technologically inept. We’ll get to that aspect of her story in a minute. (Although if Loutkari is just a front, how are they still providing Wi-Fi to all of Prague? Whatever.)

Vladena tells us that she’s descended from a long line of jewel thieves who have been stealing gems from across Czechia “for centuries.” Oh, so is she…not actually descended from alchemists? Like, was that a lie and they were actually thieves? Or are both things true? This reveal would be a lot more climactic or interesting if we actually knew anything about Vladena’s ancestors or their history as royal jewel inspectors, or indeed if we’d had any hints that there was a history of jewel thievery in Prague beyond “oh yeah the crown jewels were stolen 20 years ago (but we somehow got them back and they’re here now and everything is fine).” Which, by the way, are we implying Vladena’s family is behind that, or that Vladena is behind the recent string of jewel thefts in Prague? I don’t know.

Vladena also adds that, once her plans are in place, she’ll wrest the gem-inspector position away from all the rich nobles and then she’ll be in charge of “any jewels [she wants] to be” which like…how does that work if she’s a known thief? Or is she trying to make Oskar take the fall for the crown jewels disappearing and then she’ll take his job and…steal the rest of the jewels she’s allowed to inspect and hope nobody notices the pattern? What does any of this mean???

ANYWAY. Nancy says she won’t stay quiet about this, and Vladena cackles and says, “Oh, but you will!” and throws some powder at us, which turns out to be the sleeping draught potion we found the recipe for earlier.

So now we have to mix an antidote before we pass out and presumably die. When we pick up the bottle Vladena threw, Nancy will note that it smells like fish, which is a hint as to which poison it is.

We want to go over to the alchemist’s worktable and look at the paper hanging above it, with the herbs. We want to make the cure for (or called?) “Vodnici Scales.” (The paper is kind of confusing because it’s not clear if you’re looking at the poisons or the cures, but you just have to follow the recipe based on the symbols and that will make the antidote.)

So blah blah doing more alchemy that I don’t really understand. The corners of the screen start getting darker and darker, to indicate Nancy’s vision, which I think is a pretty cool and creative way of showing how much time we have left.

When we’re done with the antidote, Nancy will automatically chug it and say, “That was almost very bad.” Heh. Let’s not understate the situation or anything. We can’t go back out the way we came, so instead we find a door in the wall and follow Vladena through that.

We come out into this room, where we can find Vladena’s little villain room (it’s very Brenda Carlton of her). There’s also a sleeping bag in the corner that has one of Leo’s cards near it.

Over on the desk is Vladena’s laptop, which just happens to be open. Crazy how no one in this game has a single passcode locking their computer. When we click on it, we somehow manage to call Marek and Elka. We tell Marek that Vladena is our culprit, and she has Leo and the keys. Elka’s like “Tf are you guys talking about” and Marek’s like, “Oh yeah, I’m part of an ancient secret society and so was your mother and that’s how she really died and I lied to you about it for like fifteen years. Helping Nancy is how I make up for it,” he adds. Heh. Maybe you should make up for it by, like, fixing your relationship with your actual granddaughter, Marek.

Elka volunteers to go to the police, and we hang up on her and Marek to go confront Vladena. Again.

(Some extracts from Nancy’s journal at this point in the game: “Ned believes that I can trap the whatever [sic] is following me! I can’t help but admire how much faith he has in a girlfriend who is constantly traveling around the world without him. <3” I’m…not even going to touch that.

More importantly, however: “After having to figure out who was behind all of this, I think I have a knack for criminology. Deirdre would be proud.” Is this incredibly clunky and shoehorned in? Yes. Am I completely forgiving it because it mentions Deirdre Shannon? Also yes.)

We find the actual jewels from Adela’s necklace and take them with us. We also find a scroll that tells us that “Vodnici Scales” was the antidote to the poison she gave us — I’m not sure if you could’ve come into this room before making the antidote, if you weren’t able to figure it out? Also, according to Google, the Czech phrases mean “Protect our family” and “The secret of the symbol is our heritage.”

Once we check out everything in Vladena’s lair, we can move on to this next room.

This is presumably the door to the vault, as we now need the seven keys to open it. Vladena has, for contrivance some reason, left the bag with all the keys in front of this door so we can use them. So now we want to put all the keys in their proper places and turn them.

You can tell which key is which from the shape of their teeth, and then you want to put them into the keyhole with the correct symbol — so for example, the key we found using the map sketch in the cafe goes in the keyhole with a compass on it (compass, map, get it). The key whose schematic was found in the Dalibor Knight’s armor goes in the keyhole that has a knight’s helmet on it, the key found in the candle case goes in the keyhole with the flame, and so on. The three keys that were found in the model clock are a little trickier since they were found in the same place — for those, what you want to do is look up their planetary associations (God, writing that phrase gave me White Wolf of Icicle Creek flashbacks) in the alchemy book we got from the cafe. Or, since there’s only three (and the gold key is pretty obviously the sun), you can narrow it down by process of elimination if you’re lazy and dumb like me.

Then you have to click the keys in the right order to turn them. The answer to this is also in the alchemy book: each metal material is associated with an alchemy symbol, which in turn is associated with a planet. There’s a list of the planets from left to right in the book, and you want to turn the keys following that order. The order is: copper, silver, iron, lead, cobalt, and bismuth.

(Hey, remember how in the beginning of the game, they mentioned the keys all had to be turned simultaneously, so one person couldn’t just gather all seven keys then turn them one by one to open the vault? Yeah.)

The doors open up into yet another hallway, which another locked door at the end. When we click on the lock, we turn to see Elka run up behind us, saying that she wants to help. “You don’t have to. Vladena is dangerous,” Nancy says, and Elka says that she still wants to, nevertheless: “I do it for my mother. I always wanted to make up for her past.” She reveals that she knew her mother was working with Rezidente all along, even though Marek tried to keep it from her. “You are not the only detective.”

(Okay, but like…aren’t we supposed to be thinking that Rezidente are the good guys, or at least like, noble thieves? Kind of odd that Elka would say that she’s trying to make up for her mother’s actions.)

We note that the security system has reset, and we need to get past it (as for needing one of the keyholders, Elka handwaves that by saying the biometric security has already been bypassed, presumably because Vladena’s kidnapped Leo). We’re like, “Hey, Elka, it sure is convenient that you and your computer science degree are here, do you want to help with this?” and Elka’s like, “What do you mean, a life-or-death kidnapping situation is the perfect time for you to fuck around and lose at Cyber Block like eighty times in a row.”

We have two puzzles we need to do: one is a pretty basic, moving-one-piece-moves-the-others puzzle, where we use the dials to turn each light until there’s an uninterrupted path of light across the board. When we’re done, Nancy will say, “It’s powered up” (presumably the security system…? If it wasn’t on before, how was it holding us back? Whatever).

Then we have to do another few rounds of Cyber Block to bypass the actual security pad. Again, it’s not too bad; these two puzzles aren’t nearly as frustrating as some of the other puzzles in this game. You have to beat Cyber Block three times.

When we’re done, we turn around and Elka says, “I taught you too well. Step away from the door,” to which Nancy gasps, “Elka, no! Elka, why!” Oh — wait, are you evil, Elka? And were you expecting us to just not open the door, or…?

(This bit feels a little weird and anticlimactic to me. Elka doesn’t immediately say anything that weird or and her delivery of the line “Step away from the door” isn’t even that threatening, so it feels like we should’ve had a slower realization that she’s our second villain. Whatever.)

The next bits of dialogue are better done, though, and appropriately sinister: we tell Elka that the police will catch her, to which Elka snarks, “What police?” Ah, you’ll recall that we were relying on Elka to call the police. Also, the part where we fully put her on speakerphone with Agent Zane is super embarrassing now.

Nancy asks why Elka helped us with our computer if she’s actually evil, and Elka creeps, “Did I? Or did I use it to keep track of you, like with your phone?” Oooh. Nicely done. Elka reveals that she’s actually behind Loutkari, and Vladena is just her hapless sidekick. Elka recruited Vladena for help with swapping the jewels, since Marek never taught her anything about gems. We ask if Elka is also involved with Rezidente, and Elka scowls that Marek wouldn’t have allowed her to join, after he got her mother killed — which is why she’s going to frame him (and Radek) for the jewel heist once this is over. Speaking of, she never had a crush on Radek either, and was just pretending to be into him to make herself seem less suspicious. I mean, that’s a relief, honestly. I can overlook framing your own grandfather, but I draw the line at being attracted to a theater kid, Elka. (She calls Radek a “tool”, which I think she means in the literal sense, but also. Heh.)

Anyway, we can chat a bit more and establish that Elka is trying to get revenge on Marek for getting her mother killed, hiding her real cause of death from her, and…maybe…for getting her mother involved in the Rezidente in the first place? It’s a little odd; Elka doesn’t seem to hold her mother in high esteem, snapping that she was a thief, but the dialogue then implies that Elka is upset over her death and wants revenge on Marek for causing it. Maybe Elka overall blames Marek for turning her mom into a criminal; I don’t know.

Elka points out that we committed lots of crimes when we tried to find out the truth about our mother’s death, like nearly unleashing a bioweapon on the city of Glasgow, and also some light burglary. Glass houses and all that. Nancy says that she thought she wanted to be like her mother, too: “She was investigating a crime when she died.” “Then you really will be just like her,” Elka creeps. Jeez, Elka! I thought we were just doing a jewel heist here, you don’t have to murder me.

(Also, what is Nancy trying to imply with “I thought I wanted to be like my mother”? Do you not want to be like your mom anymore, Nancy? Because you’re still running all over creation solving crime and dying in pursuit of Great Justice every time I fuck a puzzle up.)

This exchange is nicely creepy, but it’s also totally nonsensical — Nancy and Elka keep throwing out one-liners that have absolutely no logical conclusion, like Elka being furious that her mom was in Rezidente but also mad that Marek didn’t tell her about Rezidente and also Nancy tries to convince Elka that investigating her mother’s death won’t bring her closure, except Elka clearly doesn’t want closure by coming to peace with what happened, she wants revenge on her family for lying to her, except I can’t tell if she would’ve been okay with this if Marek had made her his protege instead of Radek or if she just hates Rezidente overall.

None of this makes sense, which bothers me because I conceptually really love it! I’m always an apologist for angry young women who are incapable of processing their emotions and past struggles and end up lashing out inappropriately (not to reveal my childhood damage in a Nancy Drew recap or anything) — Elka is a lot like Clara from Ghost of Thornton Hall in that regard. She’s a villain, but there’s something sympathetic in her anger at being pushed aside — as she sees it — by her own family. It makes for some interesting potential tension between her and Radek, too, as Radek has sort of usurped her as Marek’s heir. I don’t know. Maybe I should just write Elka fanfic instead of continuing to ramble.

Anyway, we distract Elka by telling her that there’s one last puzzle before getting to the crown jewels, and when Elka’s like, “What? Where?”, we grab her taser ring and shut the vault door between us. (This is all a cutscene, you don’t actually have to do anything here.)

When we turn around, we find Vladena and Leo in the vault. Vladena has the knife and tells us to switch the gems in the crown for her, or she’ll stab us and Leo. I mean…aren’t you the master jeweler here, Vladena? Why do I have to do it? The real reason she and Elka aren’t going to get away with this is because they’re both lazy as shit, honestly.

We can try a few different dialogue options on Vladena, like claiming that Elka’s already been arrested and she totally sold Vladena out, or that the police are on their way, but she’ll just blow off all of them and insist we swap the jewels for her. Fine, fine, let’s just switch the jewels so we can all go home. I’m so tired.

When we go over to the jewel case, a cone of light will start sweeping over the screen, indicating whether or not Vladena is looking at us. (There’s a very similar puzzle in Secret Agent Barbie, by the way.) We have to put several of the jewels in the crown (they’ll suddenly be in our inventory), then we want to wait until the crown isn’t in her line of sight, and add Elka’s taser ring to a slot near the rim of the crown. You can do this in any order; you don’t have to put Elka’s ring in last.

When we’re done putting in the taser ring and all the gems, Vladena will automatically put the crown on and get electrocuted. Once she’s passed out, Leo comes to and tells us that she snuck in through the passageway in his office, knocked him out, and presumably dragged him into the tunnels. Jeez. Vladena must lift because he is not a small dude.

Nancy notes that Elka is still outside the vault, so we have to find another way out. We can get out by running around and clicking on the candles — one candle holder only has one candle, another has two, etc. We want to click them in order from one to five, and then another door in the wall will open.

To freedom!

Oh wait jk, we’re back in the tunnels and we have to do yet another puzzle to escape. The door to get out is locked, so we have to do the lockpicking puzzle one more time.

After we escape, we double back to find Elka still trying to get into the vault. Marek and Radek join us, and Elka tells them (in Czech) that Nancy tricked her into coming here. Nancy tells them that she’s lying, then the police show up.

We cut to having a chat with Marek and Radek in the tunnels. Marek sorrowfully says that he didn’t believe it when Nancy told him, which I guess means that Nancy suspected Elka all along? There are, admittedly, some hints to this earlier in the game: you’ll recall that Elka was looking up flights to Rome when we snooped on her computer, and she had Vladena’s missing purple pen on her desk (which is the pen Vladena used to fill out the fake appraisal report). Marek blames himself for not noticing Elka’s anger earlier and walks off, saying he has to fix what she’s done.

That leaves us with Radek. We give him the seven keys, saying that we trust him to destroy them. We also ask him to have Marek repair Adela’s necklace with the real gems and return it to us. Radek says he really did think of Elka as a kid sister and apologizes to us for what she’s done. Nancy says at least Radek and Marek have each other. Yeah…I feel like this is part of why Elka was so mad at them to begin with? Read the room, Nancy.

We then cut back to the cafe, where Nancy and Adela recap the end of the game. Leo’s given his testimony to the police and they have enough evidence to convict both Vladena and Elka, as well as locate several other members of Loutkari.

Nancy says she should let Zane know about this, but then he rocks up in person. (He and Adela are kind of eyeballing each other throughout this scene. It’s weird.) Zane explains that, since Rezidente are thieves instead of computer hackers, Elka had to use a jewel heist to successfully frame them, and Vladena just went along…for the hell of it, because she’s just into jewel thieving in general? I guess. Zane also explains that Rezidente primarily committed thefts and breaking and entering against large companies and wealthy merchants, because they’re Good Thieves and For the People. Zane says that he’s electing to leave investigation of Rezidente up to the local police, and Adela notes that the Prague police are useless, so he’s essentially letting Rezidente go, again, because they’re Good Thieves. It’s nice as the ending of a story, but I must say that I’m questioning Agent Zane’s ethics here.

Nancy notes that, despite everything, we still haven’t solved the original mystery: Adela was only trying to sell her necklace to begin with because she was trying to find the original owner, and we don’t know who that is*.

Before we can discuss it further, Radek and Marek show up. Marek is awkward on account of his granddaughter, you know, masterminding the theft of Adela’s necklace and also trying to kill us, but Radek tells him he has to finish what he started. And apparently what Marek started is…giving us back our phone? (You know, since we apparently left it in the construction site when we were toppling boxes over on Radek. Good times.) Our phone starts buzzing with missed messages and everyone laughs really weirdly. Then Marek also gives Adela her necklace back with the original gems put back. Adela thanks him and the screen very abruptly cuts to black.

We have a last final task to check our messages, and that’s it. All of our friends have disappeared from the cafe…

Patricie is still here, but we can’t talk to her further.

We have a couple of texts from Ned and Carson, but we can only call Ned back. We recap the end of the game for him again, some more. Oddly, Nancy lays all the blame on Vladena, claiming she manipulated Elka into using her cybersecurity knowledge to help Vladena steal the jewels. This is very much not how Elka presented it, so that’s interesting. Ned mentions that he tried to call earlier and Marek picked up, and Nancy’s like, “Oh yeah, that’s the elderly Czech guy I befriended after I caught him and his theater kid protege stalking me while dressed as a knight.” Ned: “…this is me not saying a word.” Hee. We go over everyone else’s fates — Leo has been reunited with his cat, which is the most important thing; and Oskar has been super embarrassed by nearly letting the gems under his supervision get stolen again. Yeah, that is embarrassing. One might even say it’s a fireable offense, but apparently not. And then Nancy confirms that Adela and Agent Zane are into each other, which, sure, whatever.

I gotta say, I kinda miss the ending from Midnight in Salem? I wish we could’ve gone around and talked to our gang of ex-suspects one more time.

After the credits roll, we get one last text from Agent Zane, saying that the police didn’t manage to catch Vladena, so she could still be on the loose. Vladena/Helena Judgmental European Villain Team-Up 2029?

And that’s the end of the game, or at least the end as I played it!

*HOWEVER. Remember how I said we don’t know who the original owner of Adela’s necklace is? There is an apparently quite difficult ending scene to get, wherein you find out that Patricie’s family is the real owner of the necklace. This makes sense, given Patricie’s repeated implications that her family is deeply connected to Prague’s history, and it’s a nice tie between her and Adela. It’s a cute ending, but it seems like nobody can figure out quite how to get it, and it definitely doesn’t show up if you’re like me and wasn’t invested enough in the game to try and get the various achievements.

So, lettuce discuss! I struggle to decide whether this game is better than Midnight in Salem. It’s more even, for sure — none of MID’s incredibly low lows (the interface, the lack of clues and puzzles, g r a p h i c s), but I’m really fond of MID’s story and characters, and KEY definitely doesn’t reach the same high there. MID’s clunkiness also feels a little more forgivable when you consider that it was actually pretty ambitious, for a Nancy Drew game — it had voiced NPCs! a sidekick following us around! animated driving scenes! All of this stuff was rolled back for KEY, which was kinda disappointing. Also, for all its flaws, MID never actually locked me out of an entire dialogue and made me go back and redo the entire scene oh my God.

I do think KEY has some really good moments sprinkled in: the laptop jumpscare, the shadow outside Aparát, the knight chasing us, us capturing Radek, Elka’s reveal at the end — all of those were really atmospheric and often genuinely scary or sinister. That said, KEY feels pretty half-baked overall: there’s a lot of potentially interesting stuff about Czech history, and as I said, I really love the concept of the Marek-Radek-Elka end of the story. Even Vladena’s family of thieves-slash-jewelry appraisers could’ve been interesting, but the issue with all of these things is that they’re not really developed much, or are developed in weird, nonsensical ways. What was Elka’s real motive for getting revenge, anyway? Some of the characters weren’t interesting at all; you probably could’ve cut Oskar without making much difference to the story, and while Patricie has a more interesting backstory, she also does nothing but stand behind that coffee counter and exposit at you all game. You could also barely call any of your phone friends, so the story felt a lot thinner without getting to check in with Ned or the Hardys every now and then — not to mention the lack of Bess and George, whom we haven’t seen in 10 literal years at this point.

Also Jesus Christ were the puzzles in this game gnarly. Part of it was the framing — as previously mentioned, I might have bothered to finish Vladena’s safe puzzle if I gave a single fuck about her, but I didn’t. That said, a lot of the puzzles — like the puzzle in Leo’s wall — were just hard, and from what I can tell from others’ posts, there were actually multiple solutions that the game wouldn’t accept. The key puzzle at the end of the game felt unnecessarily long (you can’t just figure out which key goes in which hole, you also have to turn them in order! And if you fuck up, you have to do the entire puzzle all over again). And then, three puzzles to escape Vladena and Elka! Game, I am tired.

I remain optimistic about these games, though, or at least, I’m going to keep playing them as long as they’re still coming out, since I have yet to find another game that hits quite the same spot for me. A lot of things about the Nancy games have just become familiar to me — the UI system, the puzzle/dialogue mix, the particular way of finding clues and exploring the environment, the phone friends — and even with some of the uncanniness of the new games, these elements still feel comfortable to me. And once again, KEY managed to escape having the worst plot of the series, so I got along with it just fine. Once I found a walkthrough, anyway.

THE END.