Previously on Nancy Drew: The Haunted Carousel: We’ve been called to Captain’s Cove Amusement Park in New Jersey to investigate…uh, I’m not sure what we’re investigating. A carousel horse has MYSTERIOUSLY DISAPPEARED, but there’s also a thing going on with the roller coaster, and we found a strangely sentient robot in Joy’s office. And the missing carousel horse might have stolen jewels hidden inside it, because of course it does. Of course it does.
It is still, presumably, the day that Nancy arrives at the park — this game doesn’t really have any sort of timekeeping system at all, events are just sort of triggered after one another, and the scenery never changes to indicate a different day or time. So really, Nancy basically solves this entire mystery in one day. She is a super sleuth, after all.
So we spent the first third of the game running around doing errands in order to open the door to the roller coaster ride, which was the site of a SUSPICIOUS ACCIDENT — apparently the roller coaster stopped in the middle of the ride. Clearly this could only be sabotage! We go over to check out the emergency stop button, and find a chewed-up pencil on the case. Doesn’t Joy chew her pencils? We’ve totally busted her. We should go confront her with this totally damning evidence.
Unfortunately, as we leave, a piece of the track like…falls? From where it was lying on the ground? Onto Nancy’s foot? I don’t know. The point is, we’re trapped! And the roller coaster has mysteriously started working again! Is someone trying to kill us? Man, can’t Nancy Drew solve a mystery in peace?
Luckily, Nancy has like, orangutan arms or something, and can somehow reach the track-switching box that’s five feet away. So we rearrange the wires inside the box (blue on top, then green, then red), and press “A”, and the track moves, and we can escape.
Of course, I electrocute myself the first time around, and Paula proceeds to yell at me and kick us off the case. It was super irresponsible of us to almost die, right?
Anyway, if our mysterious villain thought that trying to kill us would deter Nancy Drew from the case, they were sadly mistaken. Let’s go snoop around the carousel.
Now that the card reader works, we can go into the operating room inside the carousel. There isn’t much in the room itself; what we’re looking for is a trapdoor that leads underneath the carousel, where we find a suspicious transmitter. What is it transmitting? We have no idea. Let’s just push the button and find out.
Aaand pushing the button turns the carousel on, so now we’re stuck under the carousel while it’s turning. Oh my God, I’m going to die again.
Just kidding! I escape from under the carousel, and also escape another unnecessarily rude phone conversation with Paula. On the way up, Nancy notices a letter in the carousel rafters. We can’t reach it from here (I guess Nancy’s Slenderman arms have shrunk?), so we’ll have to figure out a way to get to it later. Moving on! We can also check the music box outside of the operating room, which has a little note on it. We have to call “Tink” before touching anything. We’re calling a lot of people in this game. I hope Nancy has a lot of minutes on her phone. Anyway, we can still look at the organ pipes on the side — Nancy will note that something’s missing. Thanks, Nancy. Junior Detective mode is hard for me, you know.
This part of the game is really boring. In order to get the letter in the carousel room, we have to win some prizes at the arcade. One is this red…thing…you know those rolls of paper on a stick where like, if you flicked it out, the roll would shoot out and get longer? And that was the entire point of the toy? And you just like, stood there, throwing it back and forth until you realized it was the 21st century and you could be playing a video game or something? That thing. We also need a harmonica, but unfortunately, we didn’t win enough Captain’s Cove fun tokens to buy it. Boo 🙁 We have to fix a broken arcade game in order to get the token we need, because I guess Ingrid just assumes that Nancy Drew knows how to code, too.
We can actually have a pretty long conversation with Ingrid, so let’s do that. She tells us that Elliott and Joy both have very dark auras — she suspects Joy’s is on account of the fact that she “eats way too many carbs. To say nothing of pencils.” Heh. She tries to take the transmitter from us, but Nancy’s like, “No, I don’t think so,” because who does Ingrid think she is, trying to get her hands on our evidence, right? And then we bring up the weird noises in the haunted house, and Ingrid says that our imagination is very good. Suspicious! That’s what the villain always says. I’m onto you, Ingrid. We also ask about Elliott and the soldering gun — she doesn’t say why he borrowed it in the first place, but she does mention that he’s not very mechanical.
Finally, we can ask about the broken arcade game. Ingrid says we have to reprogram it, but unfortunately, she lost her portable keyboard. Jesus Christ, Ingrid, get your shit together. Luckily, we’ve just been lugging around the keyboard this entire time, so we can go straight the arcade and reprogram the game. Both the reprogramming of the game and the having to win it are super boring; suffice to say, we get the harmonica and can now move on.
Over at the carousel, we use the red thingy to knock the letter from the rafters. It’s from Rolfe Kessler. I don’t know what it’s doing in the roof, of all places. Anyway, he mentions that his workshop is underneath what’s now the haunted house. The secret doorway was where the radiator is now. Alright alright alright.
We’re out of fun credits on our card, so we have to go see Harlan for a new one. We can also talk to him a little about what we’ve found so far. For some reason, Nancy like…asks his permission to hang on to Rolfe Kessler’s letter and the transmitter. Isn’t he one of our suspects? Why are we giving him our clues? Get it together, Nancy.
Back at the carousel, we have to ride it and grab a brass ring from one of the gazebo beams. Again, I don’t know how the hell Nancy’s arms are long enough to reach over there. If you fail, you fall off the horse and Paula Santos berates you for getting injured, as usual.
We don’t have to use the brass ring until the end of the game, so let’s just put it to the side and go harass Joy.
A couple of things: you will recall that wayyy back in part one, before the attempted murder and the engineering lessons, Nancy found a note in shorthand about one of the carousel horses. So we can ask Joy if she can read shorthand, but she says she doesn’t know how. This is clearly a job for one of Nancy’s sidekicks. I mean, it’s not like Bess and George have anything better to do.
We tell Joy about what happened at the roller coaster and she’s like, “You probably just tripped a switch or something.” Man, why is everyone trying to blame Nancy for her own attempted murder? The Captain’s Cove employees are stone cold. We show her the pencil and she huffs that just because her pencil was found at the scene, it hardly proves her guilty.
You’re being awfully defensive, Joy! I’M WATCHING YOU.
Then Miles busts us for snooping around in Joy’s office. Snitches get stitches, Miles! For some reason, Joy decides that this means we really want to hear more of her depressing backstory. Her dead father was an aspiring inventor, and created Miles in order to help Joy recover hidden memories from her long-lost childhood, in the form of making her solve riddles. I don’t know why he didn’t just send Joy to therapy. Apparently Joy has been repressing all of her memories from before her mother died, when Joy was 4. Nancy sympathizes, as her mom is also dead. Joy’s like, “Oh, well, since that we have that in common, we’re best friends now,” and tells Miles to give us the first riddle.
Wait, no, Joy, that was just us being nice. We’re not actually friends. I’m not actually interested in solving riddles of your childhood.
Miles gives us the riddle, which is about the “silvery remains of a four-bit day.” So I guess we have to go solve that, instead of the original case we were hired for, on which lots of insurance money and people’s jobs are riding.
Let’s go through Harlan’s stuff, shall we? Nancy is super sneaky here and tells Harlan about our near death at the roller coaster, so when he rushes off to check it out, we can poke through his personal belongings. We find a planner in his locker, and we see that he is supposed to call someone named “Luis G.” Suspicious! Only a villain would have friends that Nancy doesn’t know about! We also find a security tape, and when we view it, we see that he’s been spying on Ingrid. On the one hand, creepy. On the other hand, now we also know the key combination to get into the engineering workshop when Ingrid’s not there. Thanks, Harlan!
We immediately go to the workshop, since we’re on a roll in regards to going through everyone’s stuff. Ingrid has a note on her table reminding her to call “L.H.” “Lance Huffington?!” Nancy says, because that’s the only person with those initials in this game. There’s also a bag with a receipt inside for a $20k watch, and an ad for a luxury car. Oh, Ingrid. Conspicuous consumption is not a good look. But now Nancy’s suspicious: where could Ingrid possibly be getting this money from?
Also, I’m not sure if you have to talk to Elliott, or if you can figure it out on your own, but anyway, Elliott helps us figure out Miles’s riddle: it refers to the souvenir spoon you get when you buy a sundae at the Captain’s Quarters Hotel. Conveniently, that’s where we’re staying! Let’s go back there. We could use a change of scenery.
The sound effects for eating ice cream are weirdly crunchy, but whatever. So now we have the souvenir spoon. When we bring it to Joy, she gets all misty-eyed and tells us how her mother used to bring her to the hotel to eat the sundae every week. If only she could remember what she looked like! Miles is like, “Yeah, that’s because you flipped out when she died and destroyed all the pictures of her.” Joy is sad. Yeah…well. Miles gives the second riddle, which is a blank piece of paper. OR IS IT? Joy, as usual, is like, “Idk.”
Let’s call Luis G. It turns out he’s a parole officer! “You mean, Mr. Guerra works with people who’ve just been released from prison?” Nancy exposits, for the nine-year-olds playing this game. She asks the receptionist to have Mr. G call her back. “That’s my cell phone number; he can call me anytime.” The future is now!
Since we’ve got our phone out, I also call L.H., because I’m hella efficient. L.H. is indeed Lance Huffington, and as soon as we vaguely imply that we know Ingrid, he spills the beans: their plan is working out great! Once the trial is over, they’ll be multimillionaires! I thought he was only suing the park for a million? And he has to split that with Ingrid? Lance isn’t very good at math. You’d think Ingrid, the engineer, would have corrected him on that.
We also call Paula to tell her that Harlan used to be in jail. I feel like she should already know this, as job applications usually ask if you’ve ever been arrested. But I guess Nancy wouldn’t know that, since people just seem to call her up begging to hire her for her mad sleuthing skillz. Paula is indeed already aware that Harlan is an ex-con, and wants to give him the benefit of the doubt. Yeah, Nancy. We don’t even know what Harlan was arrested for. Anyway, we can also ask her about the rest of the employees, but she says she doesn’t know them very well: “I’m a very hands-off employer.” Really? Because she calls us every time we get injured to personally insult us. Whatever, Paula.
Also, this is yet another game where we can call the Hardy Boys and not Ned. I feel so cheated. They’re pretty useless in this game, so I’m just going to call Bess and George instead. Bess is disappointed that Nancy isn’t a sexy movie theater employee named Matt. Nancy asks what happened to Bess’s Caller ID. Continuity!
We can catch them up on the case, and ask for hints, but I’m too cool for hints. Also I’m using a walkthrough. What we really need them for is figuring out the stenography note. They agree to research stenography for us, because…I guess we can’t do it by ourselves? You know, on our laptop? Well, anyway. We also mention the blank note to them, and Bess suggests that it’s written in lemon juice, which would make the ink invisible. Why does Bess know this and not Nancy? This is shameful.
Anyway, the way to make the lemon juice visible is by ironing it, and there’s conveniently an iron in our hotel room. The message says: “The first eight notes of your favorite band organ tune + 1 mouth organ + 1 smidgen of talent = 1 happy Miles.” I’m going to go ahead and tell you that Joy, as usual, has no idea what any of this means.
Luis Guerra calls us back and tells us that Harlan served time in Bayside Prison, not New Jersey State Prison (where Chas Dunning was). It’s almost like that vague description K.J. gave us could have been anybody 🙁
We have to figure out Joy’s favorite band organ song, and she helpfully tells us, “I never rode the carousel. I always thought it was stupid. I thought all the rides in the park were stupid.” Is Joy going through a delayed emo phase or something? Miles tells us that the song is on roll #3 of the paper rolls that the organ uses to play the songs.
So we call Tink to get the combination to the lock on the cabinet where the rolls are kept. Then we find roll #3, and then the take-up dowel breaks when we try to put it on. Of course it does. The good news is, we can make a new dowel in the art studio. Has Nancy Drew ever used a lathe before? Of course not. Is Elliott going to stick around and supervise her to make sure she doesn’t cut off a finger? Of course not. But hey, now that he’s gone, we can look around for clues. Elliott has an interesting article on the value of carousel horses — in particular, people will pay a lot of money for an original Kessler horse. Like the one that was stolen! Except I thought that was a replica? This game moves too fast for me.
Elliott has also been ordering a shitton of wood, and Nancy finds a box of horse tails in the studio. What could he be up to? What could it possibly be?
Harlan calls us to the security booth to yell at us for telling Paula that he’s a “jewel thieving Peeping Tom.” Well, okay, it sounds bad when you say it like that, but it was for the greater good! (The greater good!) Nancy apologizes, since we now know that Harlan is innocent. He says he knows he’s trying too hard, but he doesn’t want to screw this job up. Aw! I feel really bad now, which is weird because this is a computer game.
If you try to talk to him again, he snips, “Sorry, I don’t feel like talking right now. My back’s kinda sore. Probably ’cause somebody just got done stabbing me there.” Burn!
So once we make a new dowel, we can play the song from roll #3. We already won the harmonica at the arcade, so we go back and play it for Miles. Success! Oh, but wait, now he wants to know the name of the horse Joy always rode on the carousel, because apparently she didn’t think it was that stupid after all. Joy’s like, “Idk.” But Joy’s mother bought the horse for her, so that stenography note about selling one of the carousel horses is probably about the same one.
Bess and George emailed Nancy a tutorial about stenography, and within five minutes, Nancy Drew is a master of stenography and can translate the horse’s name, which is Glory. “The Drewster scores again!” she writes in her journal. What a nerd.
Back in Joy’s office, she tells us that her mother bought Glory for her for her fourth birthday. Jesus Christ. I think I got a Barbie and some Little Golden books when I was four. Joy says that she made her father destroy Glory, on account of the painful memories. Wow, Baby Joy was really dramatic. But Miles corrects her: her father actually put Glory in storage, in the hopes that Joy would one day come to terms with her past, and also probably because that was a really fucking expensive horse.
Miles gives us the third and final riddle: we have to find Amelia Kessler’s nickname and enter it on “Spook #10”, and then put the brass ring on its forearm. Nancy says that Joy should help us solve the last riddle, but she says she has something to confess: it was she who shut down the roller coaster! Quelle shock! She wanted to punish Paula for causing her father’s death, but she realizes now that blaming Paula for that was dumb. She’s going to go call Paula and apologize. “Keep going without me, Nancy!” I mean, you were never with us in the first place, but okay.
Up next: We accuse everyone of everything, solve the mystery of Joy’s childhood, and also the actual mystery. And Mercury is in retrograde!
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