nancy drew 6: secret of the scarlet hand
Jan. 12th, 2024 03:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
porticoi took a break to do nothing but play powerwash simulator for a while but we're back on the nancy train now.
this is the one game in which nancy does something which i have also done: gotten an internship at a museum in washington dc. i'm sure i replayed this game at some point after one or all of my various museum internships there, but i cannot remember my reaction. my reaction this time was mostly that the game's choices about where various things were located on the metro were VERY funny. the museum? red line, practically in maryland. nancy's hotel? other end of the red line, also practically in maryland. the art dealer was extremely far south on the green line while the mexican consulate was over by the pentagon (which is in virginia, for the record. i have not checked but i assume the consulate is not). i did remember being charmed by the overlay of images from gallery place and metro center whenever nancy traveled, and that rang true. but that's about the only thing in this game that feels like dc, to me.
this game takes place in the fictional beech hill museum in washington, dc, which is a gallery of mayan art. nancy gets this gig not through any legitimate channels (which i assume would be closed to her, due to her lack of higher education) but due to old fashioned nepotism: her dad knows a guy on the board, who gives her name to the curator. this game is full of firsts for nancy: first inclusion of a laptop (complete with portable zip drive!), first appearances of the hardy boys, AND first appearance of sonny joon. sonny is a perpetual intern/temp who seems to hold a lot of nancy's placements right before she does. he loves aliens and koko kringle chocolate bars and getting fired from jobs. (he eventually shows up in person which is inevitably disappointing.) the museum has just acquired a very rare jade carving of king pacal (a real guy! this game is full of depictions of real art and objects), as well as a monolith on loan from the mexican government. it is temporarily closed while they finish putting up the exhibition, so nancy has the run of the place.
now the cast. we've got joanna riggs, curator. joanna is passionate and driven, and has made herself an enemy of the board by over-committing the museum in her quest for acclaim. she swears by...
taylor sinclair, art dealer. he finds you on your first day to raise the alarm about the security at the museum. he's CONVINCED that beech hill is in danger from thieves because of a break-in at a museum in new mexico. this seemed like a stretch to both nancy and me. he is the enemy of...
alejandro del rio at the mexican consulate. he's the museum's contact for the loan of the monolith, which he hates will have its debut outside of mexico. he's also convinced that taylor has been forging provenance paperwork which joanna has--knowingly or not--been complicit in. he's virulently pro cultural restitution, which lil ol nancy has never heard about. the game's position on this has aged very well. nancy is pretty radicalised by the end.
finally, there's henrik, the museum's conservator and translator. he's a whiz with glyphs and he dropped everything and took a pay cut to come to beech hill when he heard about the monolith. his previous job was at....the museum in new mexico which was previously robbed....
this game throws a lot of information at you, and you've got to remember a ton of it in order to get through each level of the replica maya temple in the museum. i'm a researcher, so i love this shit. read every placard in the museum? listen to every audio explanation? take copious notes? don't mind if i DO. mostly i love all of exhibits and the ways they use them (from a gaming standpoint and not a museum standpoint, it must be said), but one thing that confused me was the maya codex on display. there isn't a placard for it (there are placards missing for many objects, i assume for the simple reason that it would be a whole lot to ask a game player to click on and read), but at the end of the game a maya codex becomes important, so it's sort of strange that the game offers no explanation for them? especially considering how focused on glyph translation the game is. the maya codices are the reason we know any of the written maya that we do.
this game came out in 2002, so there's some very fun tech stuff about it. nobody at the museum has a computer (although henrik DOES have a HAM radio), so whenever nancy has to look at a disc (she finds both a floppy and a zip over the course of the game) she has to go back to her hotel and use her laptop. i can excuse her not wanting to lug her laptop around with her as i too had one in 2002 and it weighed 13 pounds. presumably the museum is not interested in shelling out for long distance calls, so she has to go to the hotel for that, too. she's asked to do some ordering for the museum, which is naturally done over the phone (from people who inexplicably have very thick new york accents begging the question if anyone at her interactive--in seattle--has ever spoken to someone in washington dc). just 2002 things!
the climax of the game is good and a little tricky (my nancy died twice), but after she escapes the culprit's trap the other characters are randomly present and they recite like. a little poem? very strange, especially considering that one of them has been hospitalized for days and should probably still be there. as i recall none of the other games pull this, which makes me wonder about the creative conversations which went into this one lmao. anyway the moral of the story is cultural restitution.
this is the one game in which nancy does something which i have also done: gotten an internship at a museum in washington dc. i'm sure i replayed this game at some point after one or all of my various museum internships there, but i cannot remember my reaction. my reaction this time was mostly that the game's choices about where various things were located on the metro were VERY funny. the museum? red line, practically in maryland. nancy's hotel? other end of the red line, also practically in maryland. the art dealer was extremely far south on the green line while the mexican consulate was over by the pentagon (which is in virginia, for the record. i have not checked but i assume the consulate is not). i did remember being charmed by the overlay of images from gallery place and metro center whenever nancy traveled, and that rang true. but that's about the only thing in this game that feels like dc, to me.
this game takes place in the fictional beech hill museum in washington, dc, which is a gallery of mayan art. nancy gets this gig not through any legitimate channels (which i assume would be closed to her, due to her lack of higher education) but due to old fashioned nepotism: her dad knows a guy on the board, who gives her name to the curator. this game is full of firsts for nancy: first inclusion of a laptop (complete with portable zip drive!), first appearances of the hardy boys, AND first appearance of sonny joon. sonny is a perpetual intern/temp who seems to hold a lot of nancy's placements right before she does. he loves aliens and koko kringle chocolate bars and getting fired from jobs. (he eventually shows up in person which is inevitably disappointing.) the museum has just acquired a very rare jade carving of king pacal (a real guy! this game is full of depictions of real art and objects), as well as a monolith on loan from the mexican government. it is temporarily closed while they finish putting up the exhibition, so nancy has the run of the place.
now the cast. we've got joanna riggs, curator. joanna is passionate and driven, and has made herself an enemy of the board by over-committing the museum in her quest for acclaim. she swears by...
taylor sinclair, art dealer. he finds you on your first day to raise the alarm about the security at the museum. he's CONVINCED that beech hill is in danger from thieves because of a break-in at a museum in new mexico. this seemed like a stretch to both nancy and me. he is the enemy of...
alejandro del rio at the mexican consulate. he's the museum's contact for the loan of the monolith, which he hates will have its debut outside of mexico. he's also convinced that taylor has been forging provenance paperwork which joanna has--knowingly or not--been complicit in. he's virulently pro cultural restitution, which lil ol nancy has never heard about. the game's position on this has aged very well. nancy is pretty radicalised by the end.
finally, there's henrik, the museum's conservator and translator. he's a whiz with glyphs and he dropped everything and took a pay cut to come to beech hill when he heard about the monolith. his previous job was at....the museum in new mexico which was previously robbed....
this game throws a lot of information at you, and you've got to remember a ton of it in order to get through each level of the replica maya temple in the museum. i'm a researcher, so i love this shit. read every placard in the museum? listen to every audio explanation? take copious notes? don't mind if i DO. mostly i love all of exhibits and the ways they use them (from a gaming standpoint and not a museum standpoint, it must be said), but one thing that confused me was the maya codex on display. there isn't a placard for it (there are placards missing for many objects, i assume for the simple reason that it would be a whole lot to ask a game player to click on and read), but at the end of the game a maya codex becomes important, so it's sort of strange that the game offers no explanation for them? especially considering how focused on glyph translation the game is. the maya codices are the reason we know any of the written maya that we do.
this game came out in 2002, so there's some very fun tech stuff about it. nobody at the museum has a computer (although henrik DOES have a HAM radio), so whenever nancy has to look at a disc (she finds both a floppy and a zip over the course of the game) she has to go back to her hotel and use her laptop. i can excuse her not wanting to lug her laptop around with her as i too had one in 2002 and it weighed 13 pounds. presumably the museum is not interested in shelling out for long distance calls, so she has to go to the hotel for that, too. she's asked to do some ordering for the museum, which is naturally done over the phone (from people who inexplicably have very thick new york accents begging the question if anyone at her interactive--in seattle--has ever spoken to someone in washington dc). just 2002 things!
the climax of the game is good and a little tricky (my nancy died twice), but after she escapes the culprit's trap the other characters are randomly present and they recite like. a little poem? very strange, especially considering that one of them has been hospitalized for days and should probably still be there. as i recall none of the other games pull this, which makes me wonder about the creative conversations which went into this one lmao. anyway the moral of the story is cultural restitution.