Previously on Nancy Drew: Trail of the Twister: We chased one (1) tornado, and were promptly blamed for Frosty’s shitty video skills. We find some hints of sabotage (or possibly just our teammates being dicks), but couldn’t really investigate them since we were busy catching mice. Does Oklahoma not have animal control?
We’re now on day four…I think. The first day lasted a reasonable amount of time, but after that the game pretty much kicks you into the next day after you complete like, three chores. Maybe they’re meant to last longer and it just seems like they’re short because I’m using a walkthrough, but second act of the game is mostly just chores, chores, chores, with very few conversations or sleuthing. It picks up a bit from here on out, thankfully — there’s just as many puzzles (and more mouse-catching, my God) but they have more urgency.
So there’s a huge storm moving in that we’re going out to catch. There’s a flash of lightning that fries the jack for Scott’s phone, and Debbie says we’ll have to stay behind and fix it. Nancy derps that we’ve never fixed a phone before, but Debbie says that we’re smart and she trusts us. Uh, was she not there for the whole Frosty video incident?
So the outlet is on fire, and we have to fix the wiring by…moving a red dot through a maze…somehow. I don’t know. Anyway, the point is to pass through all the gray dots without crossing any of them more than once. Phone fixed, fire averted. See, Frosty? We just saved the entire farmhouse from burning down, and you think we can’t fix a video camera?
We find a wireless headset on Scott’s desk, and realize it’s picking up a conversation that he’s having on his phone elsewhere. He’s having a super shady conversation with some woman about how he needs to keep up his end of the deal, and nobody can suspect what’s he’s up to — which they totally don’t, so get off his back, BROOKE. Uh…as in our mortal enemy, Brooke? Man, is there anyone who isn’t spilling all this team’s secrets to her? How is she getting everyone on her side? Does she have beer-flavored nipples?
Well, now that we know Scott is up to something shady, let’s go through his desk. The key we found at the antenna site unlocks his desk drawer, and we find a letter from Canute College inside. Apparently, Scott applied for tenure, but failed to get it because he doesn’t publish research enough. Honestly, if there’s one thing to take away from these games, it’s that academia is hardcore.
We poke around a little further, and we find a boxcutter on one of this tables. Nancy notes that it smells like coolant, and makes the kind of cut we saw on the car hose. Oh, Scott.
We go to the garage to confirm, and trip over Chase’s boots (the ones that he was yelling about). Nancy muses that they have oil on them. Suspicious!
Going to the barn triggers a phone call from Pa. He’s like, “I hear you’re not doing any chores over at the farm, so why don’t you come over to my store and do some work for me?” Ugh, fine. Because as it turns out, the mouse infestation has spread to Pa’s store, too, and since we’re the closest thing Canute County apparently has to animal control, he wants us to catch them for him.
Let’s be passive-aggressive and procrastinate by calling P.G. Krolmeister. He’s pretty blase about losing the storm data, even though he’s sponsoring the research team to win the competition. I guess when you invent literally everything in the Nancy Drew universe, you can afford some losses. We can have some leaning-on-the-fourth-wall dialogue about how much shit he’s actually invented, but to get to the point: we tell him about the GPS being tampered with, and he muses that our teammates might be actually murderous, not just vaguely shady. He tells us that he’ll try to dig into their backgrounds. Then we ask about Brooke, and he notes that she’s smart enough not to need to sabotage her competition, “but that doesn’t meant that she wouldn’t.”
Then, bizarrely, our immediate next conversation option is to ask if he found anything out about our teammates. What, is he Googling while he talks to us? He snarks that Frosty has “an impressive collection of unpaid parking tickets”, but other than that, nothing. Scott’s lost a lot of academic opportunities because he’s a cranky old asshole and everyone hates him, and Debbie’s ambition might make her do sketchy things, but there’s nothing concrete on either of them.
Once we’re done catching the mice — which I will not show you because we’ve only done it a million times already — we can talk to Pa. We ask if Scott’s team has always had so many accidents, and Pa notes that storm-chasing isn’t the safest job to begin with. Still, they have had more accidents than usual this year.
“Where’s Ma?” Nancy asks. “Still not here?” She’s fucking dead, Nancy! Pa blusters that Ma’s off visiting her sister. Is that a euphemism? Is her sister also dead? How long is this game gonna let us fuck with this mentally fragile old man?
We go over to the spring house to release the mice, and what do we find? Pa’s missing divining rod, and a pool of oil. Nancy wonders if someone around here was trying to find oil.
Chase, j’accuse! He breaks down in half a second under the ice cold judgment of Nancy Drew, and cries that he should’ve never tried to lie and sneak around behind everyone’s backs. He’s no good at it! His mama raised him too well! HEE. He confesses that he heard there was oil on this land, and he also knew Canute College was on the verge of getting rid of it. He signed up to be on the team so he could look for the oil, and he was going to get his dad to buy the land if he found any. He stole Pa’s divining rod, and he feels real bad about it. He’ll give it back right away, and it would be awesome if Nancy didn’t tattle to his mom about all this.
“And you’ve been sabotaging the team to make sure Canute dumps the place,” Nancy adds. Chase denies that bit, and says the accidents are all Scott’s fault, on account of his bad karma. Or, well, maybe not entirely bad karma: Chase went out to check on the lightning rod after Scott’s phone blew up, and found that someone had connected the lightning rod to the wiring inside the house. So either someone was trying to cause some damage, “or this thing was put up by the world’s dumbest electrician.” Heh.
Let’s make some phone calls. We can call the Hardy Boys to brag to Joe that we’re friends with Frosty and he’s not, but that’s about it. The only other conversation option is wondering why Chase has oil on his boots, which we just figured out, so whatever. Keep up, Hardys.
Next we call Krolmeister, and note that in order to cause these accidents, someone would have to know enough about the machines to rewire them. Krolmeister says that’s a good point, but anyone on the team would be able to do that. So that did nothing for us.
We stop by to see Debbie, who wants to talk shit about Frosty’s mouse phobia. “Did you scream when you saw that mouse in Scott’s office? No. He thinks he’s so smooth. First time I heard him do that I thought my little sister was downstairs.” HA! Then, because nobody can go five minutes without giving Nancy a new chore, Debbie tells us to fix the TV. We did such a good job fixing the phone, we’re basically the resident electrician now too.
Before I do that, I pop over to talk to Scott and Frosty. We try to needle Scott about whether or not he knows Brooke, but he snips that he doesn’t really and our team is probably going to lose to hers anyway, so WHATEVER. Man, who hurt Scott? That’s the real mystery here. Anyway, we still can’t confront Frosty over his camera, and he just chirps at us that he got some great shots of that storm we missed. Whatever, Frosty.
But then! THEN! We go up and fix the TV, and we see the footage Frosty shot on the news! Only it’s credited to someone else, which makes me think that Frosty is ~up to something.
We go to tell our suspicions to Debbie, but she blows us off all, “I bet there was totally someone else out there in the storm, and you just didn’t see them recording right next to you. Just admit you screwed up, Nancy.” Hey, Nancy Drew never screws up! I mean, sometimes she does, but then you use the second chance button and it’s like nothing ever happened.
If Debbie won’t listen, let’s go confront Frosty. “Whoa, never seen that look on your face before,” he says. Heh. Nancy Drew is pissed. We accuse him of selling his tornado footage — he’s the one who’s been receiving the requests and money in the metal boxes; he got the scratches on his arm from retrieving the boxes from under the rose bush. He pretended we didn’t get the footage so he could turn around and sell it to someone else. And Debbie was dick to us about it because she’s in on it too, and that’s what they were discussing out in the corn field — they’re trying to drive Scott so crazy that he snaps and does something that will make the college fire him, and then Debbie will rule Canute College with an iron fist. But are they behind the sabotage? We don’t know; maybe we should just tell all this to Scott and see what he thinks.
Frosty cracks and admits to it. “I don’t know why you feel like you need to stick your big fat nose where it doesn’t belong,” he snaps. He insists that he’s just selling his footage to a friend who wants to get started in the storm photography industry. Uh…won’t it end badly for her when she has to start doing her own work and she can’t produce anything of the same quality? Whatever. He says Debbie condones it because she doesn’t think it’s fair that his work belongs solely to the research team, but that’s all they’re up to. So there’s really no need for us to tell Scott this, and he totally didn’t mean that crack about our nose. Joke’s on you, Frosty, I’m Southern European and my nose is huge.
Anyway, he asks us how our cloud photos are going, and we automatically answer that we haven’t gotten a cirrostratus shot yet. He tells us to go to the Frasier Creek windmill and we should be able to get one, as the weather conditions are good for cirrostratus right now.
But first, we have to go to bed. Dude, the days in this game are so frickin’ short.
It’s raining the next day, and we have some more storms to chase, so…I guess we’re not getting that cirrostratus picture. Anyway, we have to drive Scott and Debbie to the storm, and we finally get to ride in the sweet, sweet Weathermobile:
Aw, yes.
Debbie and Scott snark all the way over on the drive — Debbie remarks that Brooke’s team already has six reports on a storm, to which Scott says, “Please. She’s such a number inflator…We could really use the numbers on a non-tornadic supercell.” “Maybe she’ll share what she’s got,” Debbie says. Scott: “Why didn’t I think of that? Brooke, it’d be really cool if you could share your data, I mean really, it’s just the polite thing to do.” Heh. I like the storm conversations: they’re educational, and there’s some effort into giving the characters dialogue that isn’t plot-relevant, but still fun and reveals their personalities.
So even though they’re out in the middle of a severe storm, and Nancy’s fucked up the storm data before, Scott is putting the Doppler machine in her hands. We have to flip three switches at a time until all the lights are blue, but we can only flip one switch in each group (the alternating gray and black panels indicate the three groups of lights). After we flip three switches, we have to press the green button to make the lights stay. The machine turns on for about half a second…then it blows up. OH, COME ON.
Now we have to fix the cables in the machine. We want to put the colors in order as they’re layered in the case — e.g. the hot pink cable is on top (notice no other cables cross it), so that plug goes in the #1 spot. The dark blue cable is under the hot pink one but over all the rest, so that’s #2, and so on. However, all our efforts are for naught. Debbie says we came out too early, and the storm’s not developed yet. She wants to go back and wait for it to get worse back at the farm. OH MY GOD.
Once we get back to the farm, Debbie will say that Scott’s not here. She wants us to go look for him, because it’s the opening night of her play at the Grange Theater, so she, Chase, and Frosty are all going to be there, and someone needs to keep an eye on the storms. I love the random twist of everyone in this town being super big on theater.
Hey, Scott? You in here? No? Cool, let’s look through all his shit. There’s a paper sticking out of his drawer that wasn’t here the last time we went through all his stuff (heh). What could this be?
It’s a note from Brooke, telling Scott that her team is definitely going to win now, so she’ll meet with him to deliver his payment. There’s one more term he has to fulfill in their deal, which is that he has to disappear once Brooke’s team wins the storm competition.
“Brooke’s been PAYING Scott off?!” Nancy gasps, clutching her pearls. I like how paying is highlighted, like it would somehow be less weird if Scott was sabotaging his own team for free.
The last bit of the note is a hint to where they’re meeting. Our first clue is the degrees and weather conditions. There are three: 45 degrees/dewpoint and continuous moderate rain, 85 degrees/light hail, no thunder, and 85 degrees/severe thunderstorm with hail. Remember that storm symbol chart we found in the basement? We have to find the weather conditions listed, then find the symbols in the surface chart binder under Frosty’s desk. The temperature and storm conditions that Brooke mentions are found on the following dates: March 3, 8, 18, and 21; April 3, 6, 10, 23, and 29; May 6 and 12. So then we go back to Scott’s office and check his calendar. He’s written a letter or number on every day of his calendar, so we want to write down the letter or number on the dates from the surface chart. We end up with the following results: WM9A, GV2C, and SH4A. Nancy somehow ~knows~, with her magical detective intuition, that the code involves four characters, I guess. If they look familiar, it’s because we’ve noticed that all of Frosty’s pictures are assigned a four-character code. Or…Nancy did, because I wasn’t paying attention. I got better things to do than stroke Frosty’s ego, you know?
Anyway, we find the photos, and they’re all of the windmill. Nancy realizes that’s where Scott and Brooke are meeting up.
The storm is raging now, and lightning’s flashing everywhere. Hey, Debbie, maybe we should’ve stayed out so we could capture this, right? Debbie panics that Scott’s gone and took the truck with the equipment with him, and they have no way of following the storm. Nancy tells Debbie that Scott’s been selling the team out to Brooke, and Debbie says she’ll deal with that after the storm. She’s trying to track it old-school, and Nancy promises to find Scott and bring the equipment back.
Scott! J’also accuse! He denies meeting Brooke here, but Nancy knows the truth. She needles him that he’s been sabotaging his own team, and how very could he, and the reason he’s meeting Brooke out here is because he KNOWS deep down that he’s letting down the team, Nancy, God, Jesus, and most of all himself.
Scott snaps and confesses that he’s never gotten the recognition he deserves, and Canute College refuses to promote him because he’s not a team player. He’s all like, “So I’m a douche to everyone I meet! IS THAT SO WRONG?” His bad reputation means no one else will hire him, so he’s stuck working at Canute, and so he’s just 100% done with storm chasing — Brooke’s paying him to sabotage his own team, and then he’s going to take the money and run.
Man, I can’t believe the misanthropic asshole is actually the culprit. That never happens! Usually they have a hidden heart of gold and end up accepting that Nancy is better than them. But no, once his rant is over, a gust of wind sweeps by, and Scott creeps that a tornado’s going to be on the ground soon. “And here you are, a novice, out in the field, and all alone…” He knocks Nancy to the ground — I guess it wouldn’t be rated E for him to actually punch her, although surely they could recycle the near-strangulation scenes from past games and fade to black? — and runs off.
Nancy comes around a while later. We hear Debbie on the radio, asking for us. We tell her about Scott and Brooke, and once again she says she’ll deal with that later. Right now, we have to go to the theater, because it has to be evacuated and we have her keys.
The Grange Theater is super pretty! It’s too bad we only see it in this very last bit of the game.
We have to open up the storm shelter, but when we do, we find it has yet another lock. “Who would double lock a storm shelter?” Debbie shrieks. Someone who really needed to pad out a video game, that’s who! As far as I can tell, there’s no way to tell which key it is, you just have to try them until you get it right (it’s the second from the right, in the top row).
Once the shelter is unlocked, we have to go inside and wait out the storm. Once it passes — or passes enough that we can go out without dying — Nancy will leave to find Scott. Before we leave, we have a heart-to-heart with Debbie: she admits that she and Frosty were conspiring to get rid of Scott. He was acting recklessly because he didn’t give a shit about the team anymore, so Debbie knew she had to take over, and was trying to push him into acting crazy enough that Canute would fire him. She admits that she screwed up, and we’re like, “That’s nice and all, but we really have to go find Scott.”
At no point does Debbie appear in these end scenes, by the way. We hear her voice when we’re outside the shelter, and then we switch to the driving map and have a conversation with her over the radio. It’s kind of tellingly lazy of them not to do any cutscenes with her after we leave the house.
Debbie turns on the truck’s tracking device so we can follow Scott. We drive after him until we reach the spring house, at which point he’ll crash the truck.
We have to find shelter, and there’s a conveniently located crowbar right next to the spring house. We pry the house open and wait out the storm, and the game ends. It’s a pretty weird ending. It’s kind of interestingly novel, but also just…weird. The finding and confronting Scott is classic, formulaic Nancy Drew, but then there’s a bunch of dragging our feet with hiding out at the theater, and then having to save Scott. The game gets some good momentum going with Scott disappearing –> having to figure out where he is –> confronting him, but loses it when we have to stay in the shelter and have that long talk with Debbie. I think they could’ve made it work if we met up with Debbie at the theater and talked with her then, skipped the shelter, then chased Scott through the storm. The fact that Debbie only appeared in voiceover also ruined it. It’s weird because Warnings at Waverly Academy, right before this game, managed to do cutscenes with multiple characters (Corine and Mel in her room), so I dunno why they didn’t bother to animate Debbie in this one.
Nancy writes a letter to Ned recapping the game for him. Frosty called the police on Scott, and he was fired from Canute College and sentenced to do community service. Word got out about him working with Brooke, so she’s out of the competition, too. That’s what you get for trying to gossip about us, Brooke!
Debbie takes over as the team leader, and everyone’s much happier. Frosty’s all twitterpated that she lets him sell his own photos on the side, and Chase has given up his oil-hunting ways to focus on storm chasing. Krolmeister sent them new equipment, and they have a shot of winning the storm chasing competition now.
Pa sends Nancy a postcard telling her that he remembered all his lines in the town play. Aw! And no, we were not ever able to confront him about his dead wife. Presumably he continues on in his delusion, telling every person that comes into Ma ‘n Pa’s that she’s alive and well, until one day someone with even less tact than Nancy brings it up, causing Pa to suffer a mental break.
And as a thank you, Krolmeister is going to send us on a vacation where there will definitely, certainly, absolutely be no mysteries. Totally.
THE END.
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