the premise of nancy drew: the secret of the scarlet hand is that nancy’s wealthy and powerful father has pulled strings with a personal friend on the board of directors to get nancy an internship as the deputy curator of a prestigious washington DC museum entirely based on her fleeting curiosity about how archaeologists and historians do their jobs, and in doing so presumably takes an extremely valuable learning opportunity/resume builder from someone who actually wants to work in the field or any adjacent one.

the beech hill museum is currently closed, nearly ready to open an museum-wide exhibition on Mayan culture. nancy’s first task as deputy curator is to go down to the Mexican consulate and have one of the ambassadors there sign some paperwork for the exhibit. after nancy greets this man, Alejandro, with an extremely condescending “BWAYNOSE DEEYEZ, MAY YAHHMO NANCY DREW” he jokes that she must be the museum’s newest pirate, and when nancy is offended by this, he must explain what colonialism is to her. when she says well hey man that was hundreds of years ago idk what you’re so mad about he must also explain to her what museums actually do and how they get their shit. nancy’s response to having the united states’ and many other mostly European countries’ ongoing systematic dismantling of dozens of other countries’ histories and cultures for profit, almost always at the additional violent expense of their peoples revealed is to say “i see, well, i need you to sign this new loan agreement that’s been edited by the museum so they’re only gonna pay your government 1 million dollars instead of 5 million for the monolith they stole from you now.”

this is the eternal push and pull of the politics of this game, and i suspect it will be for all of them, when they choose to engage in such overtly political topics as this. it’s clear that someone on the dev team really cares about this issue; we get REALLY nitty gritty on some of this shit like, edutainment game levels of detailed about some of the processes of the legal and political sides of archaeology, like the duties of government representatives in the transfer processes, the roles provenance documents play in the lives of curators, dealers, and excavators, and how basically none of these rules apply to you if you’re from the united states and you have enough money or clout to get the government to be on your side, because on what level is Mexico gonna pick a fight with you at that point and win? this stuff is all in the game and it’s all clearly Bad right like nobody is on the side of the scummy art dealer who unsurprisingly turns out to be the villain and tries to murder nancy in a VERY FUNNY turn towards maybe the single most horrific thing that’s happened in any of these games so far after two and a half hours of, basically, shenanigans (most of this game involved helping a guy recover from amnesia after he falls down a staircase that is like three steps big and bonks his head and I’m not kidding).

at the same time though the only way they either know how to communicate this stuff or were allowed to sneak it in there is by having it explained to nancy by other people, which has the side effect of framing nancy as the most defensive liberal white asshole imaginable. she’s always going to bat for the worst takes so someone can explain the good opinion to her, and either because she can never express an opinion considered to be Overt Politics or she’s supposed to be something of a blank slate (i suspect it’s more the former?) she never ends up disagreeing with an argument or ceding any ground. she just says or implies that she thinks awful things and then never reassesses in either direction.

and to some degree this is fine, i think it IS just part of nancy’s character at this point that she just desperately dreams of that harris/buttigieg 2024 ticket, it’s just who she is. where i start to chafe, and where these games are ultimately held back is that their overall worldview always warps to accommodate her too. see, it turns out at the end of the game that working with the shitty art dealer was the museum curator’s only real crime, she said she was sorry and now everything with her is good! the US government is actually happy to cooperate with the Mexican government in their archaeological work, AND to compensate them fairly! the entire museum industry and the culture it has created and the systems that support it aren’t evil after all, it was all literally just this one bad guy making everything fucked up in this particular scenario! probably there are some other individual bad guys doing shit like this but it sure seems like colonial oppression is a thing of the distant past after all.

of course, we know better, we don’t need media to tell us what our political beliefs should be or to be our sources of information on the ills of the world. but it’s frustrating to see these games be so bold and tackle such thorny themes head on only to waffle them at the finish line, especially when this one had been so successful until then. then again i’m like, pretty sure these games are for twelve-year-olds? AND this came out in August of 2002 so honestly the fact that it’s even willing to be as critical of US government structures as it is in a post-9/11 cultural climate is a minor miracle.

oh, extra half star for being the first one the hardy boys have been in, i know even less about them than i do nancy drew but they are also famous

PREVIOUSLY: THE FINAL SCENE
NEXT TIME: GHOST DOGS OF MOON LAKE

ALL NANCY DREW PIECES

This was one of the six Nancy Drew games I owned has a kid. I remember liking it the least out of the others I had and relied a lot on guides to get me through to the end. So I was pleasantly surprised to like it so much during my current playthrough. Like, yeah a lot of the puzzles do feel like activities you’re required to do on a 5th grade field trip to your local museum but apparently that’s like peak game design to me idk. Note taking is honestly one of my favorite parts of these games and oh boy does Scarlet Hand excel in that area. I was kinda disappointed that The Final Scene resulted in only half a page of notes, but I’m happy to report that I ended Scarlet Hand with two full pages of notes. Story was enjoyable, I particularly liked the whole repatriating artifacts storyline and the amnesia side plot was…unexpected but interesting. Ending felt weird even for a Nancy Drew game tbh but overall I enjoyed this more than I expected to!