It’s interesting to find that as we enter a new, what I assume to be essentially final era for the Her Interactive Nancy Drew series, with the slight graphical refresh and completely overhauled UI that goes along with those shifts, Tomb of the Lost Queen spends a lot of time looking back instead of forward. It’s not weird for this series to look back, like, to the past (that’s kind of the whole thing we do around here) but it IS unusual for a game to be in such direct conversation with a previous entry in the series, Secret of the Scarlet Hand. Both games concern themselves with the museum industrial complex, and both games feature Nancy clumsily and indefensibly insulting brown people whose cultures she’s actively participating in the looting of while acting incredibly skeptical of their entirely, factually correct grievances with her organization of the week. Where Scarlet Hand was a stateside story about the inner workings of the museum system, however, Tomb of the Lost Queen centers directly on the archaeological process at a fictional dig site in Egypt (although in an echo of Treasure in the Royal Tower, this fictional tomb contains a very real and famous historical figure in it lol, but they don’t make up a revisionist backstory for her this time so it’s a lot less weird).

And “Nancy is in Egypt at a dig site” is kind of all you get going into it, which is a jarring change of pace after twenty-five entries of booting the game up to a cute little intro or case file to set up the proceedings. Instead there’s an ominous introductory monologue from Nancy about the last crew who came to check out this tomb decades ago all died mysteriously, and then a cutscene of a sandstorm ravaging the dig site and injuring the lead of the American team there. Only it turns out that Jon wasn’t just fucked up by the storm, he was ATTACKED in the commotion of the storm. So most of the crew is gone, leaving only the uptight and secretive American PhD student Lilly, famous and abrasive Egyptologist Abdullah, who is himself Egyptian and in fact the government liaison to this largely American team, and Nancy herself. Now Nancy is left to at first just do some work without getting in trouble with either of these strong personalities before the dig inevitably gets shut down because of the serious injury sustained there, as everyone has a feeling this tomb is the true resting place of Famously Missing Real Life Egyptian Queen Nefertari.

The thing is, none of this is really told to you? You kind of have to just go by the context of the dialogue, get all this information out of these guys as you go, because without the usual framing device and with the story starting in media res, you’re really thrown into a scenario that is not particularly urgent for what feels like not a lot of reason. What we have then is one of the more freeform Nancy Drews in structure, similar to (but imo much more successful than) Curse of Blackmoor Manor, where you have essentially all of the tomb that you’ve opened available to you at all times along with usually more than one ongoing puzzle or series of puzzles that you can kind of work through at your leisure with some degree of nonlinear progression. There are still key moments that flag big status quo changes, but there is certainly less overt direction on what to do next and little urgency to Nancy’s travails. This is because the threat is more subtle than usual. The acts of villainy in this game that are physically violent are all attributed to a supposed Mummy’s Curse, and no one is making explicit threats, but this is a rare Nancy Drew game where the answer to “whodunnit” ends up being a combination of basically everybody? To greater and lesser degrees. There is one ultimate culprit who goes to jail at the end, but for the most part this is a game about building suspense and suspicion, and I think it might be the single most successful Nancy Drew game in that regard.

Around a third of the way through the game, once you’ve hit the first big event flag, the cast is completed when two new people just kind of suspiciously Show Up at the dig site, Ancient Aliens Fanatic Jamil and Suave Tour Guide Dylan, both of whose stories are immediately, obviously suspicious. Dylan is fine, okay, he’s a charming enough red herring character who is taken out of the action first in the game to make the Supposed Curse seem more dangerous.

Jamila is where I start to sweat a little bit. The ancient aliens stuff is not as bad as it could be, I think, because while the game doesn’t grapple even slightly with that fact that every single one of those conspiracies is rooted in intentionally manufactured racist lines of thought predicated on the idea that nonwhite people and for some reason only nonwhite people could not possibly have made big architectural or technological strides without outside intervention, I didn’t really expect it to? That’s pretty explicitly political stuff to get into for these games, and they do not usually think that hard or do a lot of research when they’re trend chasing, which I assume was happening here. They also specify that their stupid made up alien conspiracy (peddled by Until Now Joke Easter Egg Character Sunny Joon whose increasing prominence worries me as someone who finds his bits painfully unfunny) does not involve aliens literally building the pyramids, only uplifting humanity and inspiring them to do it? Which I don’t really think is much better honestly.

The clincher for Jamila though is her true motive for being at the dig site: she is a member of a cult of Egyptian women that has existed for thousands and thousands of years, passed from mother to daughter, who are sworn to the service of Ramses II and whose mission is to find and protect Nefertari’s mummy. Despite thinking this group she’s in is stupid she is willing to both die and kill for it – there is a light implication that if she tries to cut and run she will be killed by her sworn sisters. I just don’t understand what we’re really going for here beyond adding some vague mysticism to the proceedings? It’s goofy, it’s outlandish. She already hates Abdullah, she already has proof that he’s been planting artifacts he already owned in his dig sites to make his career more prestigious and exciting, and her ending has her happily working with Jon, the same man she would ostensibly have also tried to murder had he been present for the events of the game. It’s all just a little much, for me.

Abdullah is his own can of worms. As the resident Guy From The Country We’re In Who Is Rightfully Mad About What America Is Doing Here he is obviously treated like a crazy person by Nancy, and his portrayal as a blustering, buffoonish guy doesn’t help the dignity of his arguments. But his perhaps overacted dialogue prompts are the only place in the game where you’re offered the perspective that not only are the governments of the countries that fund these digs often doing so with irreputable motives, but that the tourism industry that has sprang up around them has also done irreparable harm to Egypt’s cultural legacy by actively, physically destroying it with their millions and millions of feet and breaths inside fragile ancient tombs and eagerness to steal small souvenirs, again by what adds up to the millions. Looting by degrees.

All of this is equivocated though, in the game’s eyes, because Abdullah is in fact Our Guy, he’s playing on fears of the curse to freak people out, he attacked Jon, he has faked a lot of his career successes, at the end of the game he tries to kill Nancy and Lilly (who is also an attempted murderer by the end of this game but who suffers zero consequences for that hmm weird). He’s a criminal! He’s gotta go to jail! Bye! This is not new right, this happens all the time in these games. It’s not reasonable either to expect Nancy Drew, Collegiate Detective to be able to address structural problems like this. It is interesting, though, how often those problems seem to be understood by the developers of the game and even presented within the game – often by people who turn out to be, within the game’s moral purview, Bad. And if that is what we’re bent on doing than these things should at least be motivators, they should be the thing that the game is ultimately About, they should be at the center of it. Instead Abdullah just wants to be more famous than he is; he’s the most successful guy in his field, everyone says so, but he wants to be a CELEBRITY archaeologist, and I guess he just wants full credit for this discovery? It’s kind of unclear, I never got a moment where he actually explained himself. It’s messy.

The actual good reasons he might have wanted to get rid of the Americans, even if he ultimately profited as well, or was otherwise morally compromised (Dylan, for example, is working for some black market people to scope out the tomb before he’s taken out of the game, but is ultimately portrayed as a sympathetic guy). The best Nancy Drew games understand this or even stumble into strong thematic cores by accident. But Tomb of the Lost Queen, like many other lesser entries in this series, is left with something much worse at its center:

Nothing at all.

PREVIOUSLY: ALIBI IN ASHES
NEXT TIME: THE DEADLY DEVICE

ALL NANCY DREW PIECES