nancy drew 5: the final scene
Jan. 2nd, 2024 03:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
portico
wow that cover art is really overselling the color saturation in the theater.
okay!! the final scene, nancy's fifth outing. this is a nancy is on vacation game (in beautiful st. louis missouri). she's visiting her friend maya, who is covering the demolition of a local jewel box. the royal palladium theater, on its deathbed, has the dubious honor of hosting a very CWesque actor's movie premier. nancy and maya are there so maya can interview him.
immediately maya is kidnapped. nancy rushes in after her and receives a phone call from the theater's caretaker advising her to find the secret passageway. yes, the game is assuring you, that's right. we got passages here. this one leads to the women's dressing room in the other wing. useful! there is a person there, who did not see someone hauling a random girl out of the back of the dressing room wardrobe. the game never actually resolves how the culprit got maya away i'm realizing right now. huh.
anyway maya is gone, the kidnapper's demands are that the theater's demolition (happening in 3 days!) is stopped, and nancy is on the case. unike the previous games (ignore this if playing games 1 and 2 makes me a liar), final scene is separated into days. certain things only happen on certain days, and nancy has to get specific things done before she can trigger the day ending.
lets meet the cast. we got joseph, the caretaker. folksy, clearly hasn't left the theater in 40 years. very helpful. suspiciously so??
brady, the cw boy. i remembered him as being secretly very intelligent. i remembered incorrectly. discovered working at a hot dog stand, improbably at 7 am. feels bad that maya vanished from his dressing room and wants to help. does he? no.
simone, his agent. discovered brady when she improbably craved a hot dog at 7 am. delightfully amoral.
finally, we got nicholas falcone, an activist protesting the demolition. in fact, his whole bag is protesting the demolition of movie palaces. you might have read about him in activist quarterly. he's also very helpful. SUSPICIOUSLY SO??
the coolest thing about this game is that the royal palladium was originally built primarily to host magicians, and the game pulls out all the stops. we got them passageways, some built-in illusionist tricks, an automaton who does card tricks, correspondence from houdini himself, and a whole hidden green room just for magicians to use. i remembered the game as being really beautiful, but it turns out i was only remembering the magicians' room. although the zodiac makes another appearance (as does the paul berthon folies bergere print--someone at her interactive loves art nouveau)
the other thing this game introduces is nancy's phone philosophy. nancy firmly believes that if you need a piece of information and you have the phone number of someone who can help you get that information, you call them. what, like it's hard? and to be fair, in nancy's world you can call the library of congress and get the head of a whole department on the line immediately, so i guess it isn't hard. nancy LOVES to call an expert in their field, and throughout the games she speaks with so many experts who are thrilled to help. some of them even show up in later games as characters. one of the most charming aspects of the games imo.
you also get to talk to a lot of real characters, like eustacia andropov, a descendent of houdini's who tells you in heavily accented english when you ask if it's her "who else would it be? everyone is dead." i love eustacia. i remember getting to spend a lot of time on the phone with her, but it turned out i was remembering a later game when you call someone else and discover that eustacia is also there, playing canasta. something to look forward to.
overall i do think the game holds up! some good puzzles in this, with very little note-taking required. and at the end you almost get demolished with the theater. exciting!
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Date: 2024-01-03 02:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-03 03:04 am (UTC)