Nancy Drew Curse of Blackmoor Manor is a popular mystery adventure game where players must solve puzzles and uncover clues to unravel a dark secret. The game is set in a creepy English manor, full of hidden passageways and ancient mysteries. One of the key aspects of the game is the wide array of puzzles that players need to solve in order to progress in the game. * One of the main puzzles in Curse of Blackmoor Manor is the cryptogram puzzle. Players need to decode a secret message by figuring out the pattern behind a series of symbols. This puzzle requires logical thinking and attention to detail.
5) Solve a puzzle on the "Betty" card game machine and then beat it at cards. (You'll need an inventory object and some additional information first.)
If nothing seems to match, note that there are four star charts on the wall, not one-- you have to click on the folded corner of each map to turn to the next page. Movement The movement controls in the Nancy Drew games can be inconsistent--sometimes it is hard to see an exit to your left, right, or even straight ahead.
This puzzle requires logical thinking and attention to detail. * Another puzzle in the game is the chemistry set puzzle. Players must mix different ingredients in the correct order and proportions to create potions and unlock hidden doors.
Nancy Drew: The Curse of Blackmoor Manor (Part Three)
Previously on Nancy Drew: The Curse of Blackmoor Manor: Linda is a werewolf for real! She has fur and everything! Or maybe she just has excessive body hair, Nancy. We found the Penvellyns’ secret underground forge, which is somehow related to our mystery. Ethel vaguely threatened us, or maybe she was just being pretentious. It was hard to tell! We also walked in on Ethel and Jane performing a secret ritual in the middle of the night. Are they evil, though, or just British? Let’s find out.
When we return from making Nigel piss himself by moving the statue in the library, we overhear a conversation between Mrs. Drake and Linda. Mrs. Drake is like, “Are you sure you don’t want me to bring you like…meat that’s cooked? Maybe?” and Linda snarls that NO! SHE IS A MONSTER, AND MUST EAT WHAT MONSTERS EAT! Not in those words. Interestingly — supporting the psychosomatic, self-fulfilling theory of Linda’s illness — Mrs. Drake mentions that Linda won’t get better if she won’t eat all of her food groups. But of course Linda won’t, because she thinks she shouldn’t, and so she’ll keep feeling sick. Mrs. Drake puts a little charm above Linda’s door before she leaves. When we question her about it, though, she merely says she’s just trying to help. Fair enough.
In the library, meanwhile, you have to take the wand off of the Mercury statue. Yeah, let’s just jack shit from this house! Why the fuck not?
Let’s go visit Jane, shall we? She’s received a threatening note and is freaked out, as an eight-year-old might be. She tells us that the rune painted on the note means “protection” when it’s right side up, but as it’s upside down, it actually means she’s in danger. Creepy! AND THEN! Nancy promises to protect Jane, and this frickin’ kid is like, “None of these weird things started happening until YOU got here. How do I know you’re not the one behind all this?” Excuse you, Jane! I know I’m not the culprit because I’m the protagonist of this game! She mumbles a little sadly about how she hates it here and she wishes she hadn’t come back. She won’t talk to us any further after that, although you can still play a game with her if you back up and click on her again. Heh.
Nancy goes to sleep and has another ~*~spooky~*~ nightmare. This one is actually kind of trippy, with all the faces on the portraits melting, and the Great Hall ~shifting~, and we dream of SPOOKY RED EYES staring in through the window.
Creepy nightmare, or drug trip? You decide!
Nancy wakes up at 3 AM, as always. Now, the original walkthrough I was reading said you’re supposed to go outside and see the lady in black in the hallway (SPOOKY!). This has never happened for me — apparently it just happens randomly, and it won’t ruin the game or anything if it doesn’t happen. Still, I feel rather put out. Anyway, we’re currently 4 for 6, re: keys. Let’s get the fifth one, shall we? It involves a puzzle box in our room, and a moon chart. There are four different colored circles on each side of the chart, and you have set them in the shapes of phases of the moon. One of the sides is the “Draco” side, and I laugh forever. You know, I didn’t want to make Harry Potter jokes just ’cause this game is set in the UK, but it’s too easy. I choose to believe one of the Penvellyn ancestors had “Draco Dormiens” as their motto. Or that one of them went by Señor Draco. Sorry, got distracted. ANYWAY. Once all the moon phases are correctly set, the box pops open and we get a telescope lens. Of course, the actual telescope is now missing. SIGH. To Jane we go!
Jane’s actually already over being mad at us, and we just have to put together a puzzle for her, and she puts the telescope back in our room. That’s that! But wait, let’s poke around a little more.
“I bet this book can help me figure out how to get that old forge going again!” Nancy says, looking at a picture book of some dudes pointing at a tree. I don’t know. We don’t even use it, so whatever. Anyway, back in our room, we can use the lens to get the moon key — you just have to stick it in the window seat, and a puzzle pops up. It’s based on the astrological signs, and you have to press them in the following order: Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, Pisces. We now have the moon key! 5 for 6!
The actual telescope is used to look at the Sun God mural on the wall, and the lens reveals hidden pictures in the mural. Of course there are. There are five muse symbols, all numbered. We need this for the next puzzle, which involves the wind-up lady in the hallway. I think I forgot to mention her. Well, anyway, here’s a picture:
So “Betty” here has the last key that we need. Unfortunately, she doesn’t work anymore. I guess this is fine for me since this part is turning out much shorter than the other two, and I’m a little anal about all the posts having about the same word count, but UGH. Mrs. Drake can help us out here; we have to rearrange her seedling box and then she’ll give us a crank to wind Betty back up. Although funnily, we tell her that the machine is broken, and she immediately snips, “IT’S NOT BROKEN, FOOL!” O! Kay! Apparently she took the crank off because Jane was having fun instead of studying Latin or whatever. I can kind of see why Jane is so snippy now. It sounds kind of like a rough life here.
You know, I was enjoying this game at the beginning, but now it is just boring. I think it kind of sucks because after the first half or so, you just spend all your time running around finding the keys, and can’t actually talk to any of the characters much. There are some events that don’t happen every play through (finding an ominous note with a WOLF TOOTH in it, finding a pair of red goggles, etc), and I think they should’ve been made mandatory, if only to mix it up a little. Some of them also explain the stuff that happens in this game, and if they don’t pop up, then it just sort of gets left unsolved. I’ll go ahead and tell you that if you do get the cutscene with the lady in black and the red goggles, Nancy will muse that the goggles are how she’s been seeing those spooky red eyes everywhere. Interesting stuff.
(While googling, I found a comment that said if you call Hugh enough, eventually he’ll pick up and you can hear his ex-wife in the background. I don’t know if that’s true, but that is exactly the kind of dramatic shit I want in this game.)
All of the cards are the muses we saw in the mural. Betty will wager the key that we need, so we just need to win against her and we’ll get it. It’s basically Go Fish, and the goal is to get a set of three of the muses. The AI in this game isn’t actually much of a cheating bastard, so it’s fairly easy to win. Betty gives us the last key. 6 for 6! Before we head down to the end of the game, though, let’s go talk to everyone. Unfortunately, the only person we can talk to is Nigel. Let’s have one last screencap of him:
He says that he’s leaving, because this manor is haunted FOR REAL and he doesn’t fuck with that shit. Fair enough. He has enough to write his book, and he is never coming back here again. Whatever, Nigel! We didn’t like you anyway! So he’s gone and technically is ruled out as a suspect, although it’s so close to the end of the game that he could just have disappeared down into the forge. But he didn’t. Anyway.
Now that we have all the keys, we put them in their appropriate columns in the main hall (the arrow in Cupid, the lightning bolt in Jupiter, etc.) They’ll open up to reveal a bunch of pipes, and when you rotate them correctly, there will be a noise. I don’t know what’s happening, and neither does Nancy, ’cause she’s just like, “Oh, that sounds like I did something right.” Whatever, though, we’re getting close to the end and I want to finish this game. I guess the pipes activate the gargoyles? I don’t know, but the next thing you have to do is run around tapping the three gargoyles in the house with the wand of Mercury — there’s the one in front of the secret passage in the hall, the one in the green dragon room, and the gargoyle in the main hall. Once you’ve tapped those three, then you have to skedaddle to the hole in the floor and light it.
Not dangerous at all! I wonder what would happen if someone accidentally dropped something hazardous into that hole with all the oil and fire and all.
So the forge is lit, so we can go underground and finish this game. The chunk of metal in the forge is all melted now, and we can pour it into a mold to make the key to the Penvellyns’ secret treasure. What could it be? I mean, we’ve seen giant diamonds, gold bullion, gold hearts (twice!), and ancient Mayan writing (seriously, I don’t know why Nancy is freaking out over 300-year-old letters when she’s held a 1,000-year-old diary in her hands, but whatever), so this has to be impressive.
The mold is a bunch of different crosses, the order of which corresponds to a drawing of each of the Penvellyns’ crests. The actual crests in the hall have a line next to their motto, showing which line to fill in the mold. I’m assuming if you’re not using a walkthrough, you have to run up and down between the forge and the main hall to solve this puzzle. That is some bullshit. I’m just going to cheat, as I always do.
Success! We have the key. And now we can shove it through the big-ass keyhole, find the Penvellyn treasure, and meet our villain! Let’s see who it is.
It’s Jane! I…guess that makes sense? Because…eight-year-olds are known for their ability to hatch complex schemes? I don’t know. Was she the lady in black? ‘Cause in the video I watched, that person was way taller. But okay, I’ll roll with it. Jane snips that she should be the one to have the treasure, because she’s the Penvellyn. I guess it’s understandable that she would think Nancy’s after the treasure, since Nancy hasn’t investigated the thing with Linda since like, the first ten minutes of the game. Anyway, Jane peeks into the safe, and is all disturbed: “What is THAT?”
So the Penvellyn treasure is…a meteorite, I guess? Way, way back, during a boring conversation with Nigel that I didn’t bother to post, he mentions that the very first Penvellyn was given the Penvellyn lands because of his skill in battle, and he believed his luck was due to a rock he found. So this is the aforementioned lucky rock and that’s basically all it is. Jane backs me up on the lameness of it all: “Six hundred years of secrets, and mystery, and puzzles, all because of a stupid ROCK?” Word, Jane. It’s not even a shiny rock. Nevertheless, Jane wants it, and she reaches in to grab it. This activates the forge’s trap, which was also mentioned earlier in the game, and I also didn’t bother to include. Oops.
A giant metal box falls down on Jane and she starts suffocating. She asks us to help her and says she’s sorry for “everything,” which Nancy immediately latches onto: “What do you mean by ‘everything?'”
A lot of stuff gets left unexplained because Jane is running out of air, but the gist of it is that Jane was lying when she said she likes Linda. She wants her parents to get back together, so she planted the idea of the Beast of Blackmoor in Linda’s head, then she gave her Mrs. Drake’s allergy pills (which you will recall make the person taking them very tired), and she put hair growth medicine in Linda’s moisturizer. (This isn’t mentioned, but you can put it together: earlier in the game, Jane mentions that her Uncle Roger wears a toupee. The letter in the well is Roger sending medicine for Jane’s guinea pig, who has been dead for a while. Jane was putting Roger’s hair medicine in Linda’s lotion.) So Jane is a brat, but Nancy Drew isn’t gritty enough to let an eight-year-old die. Getting the box off her is actually pretty easy, you just go over to the wind puzzle and move the piece all the way to the left. See, ’cause the piece actually represents that huge-ass statue (the one Nancy weirdly hits on when she first finds the forge), and there’ll be a little picture of the metal box, so once the piece is over there, the real statue will move and lift the box off of Jane. The mystery is solved and we don’t have the blood of a third grader on our hands! This worked out well.
And thus the game ends. Everyone yells at Jane for traumatizing Linda like that, and the Penvellyns all try to be a better family. Hugh gets super into the whole Penvellyn history thing and makes Ethel teach him all the family secrets too. And they are indeed secret, and nobody is supposed to know — they made Nancy swear not to tell anyone, which is why she’s blabbing this all to Ned right now. Oh, Nancy.
The mold is a bunch of different crosses, the order of which corresponds to a drawing of each of the Penvellyns’ crests. The actual crests in the hall have a line next to their motto, showing which line to fill in the mold. I’m assuming if you’re not using a walkthrough, you have to run up and down between the forge and the main hall to solve this puzzle. That is some bullshit. I’m just going to cheat, as I always do.
This puzzle requires experimentation and trial and error. * The mirror puzzle is another challenging puzzle in Curse of Blackmoor Manor. Players need to manipulate a series of mirrors to reflect a beam of light onto a specific spot in the room. This puzzle tests spatial reasoning and problem-solving skills. * The organ puzzle is a unique and challenging puzzle in the game. Players need to play a specific sequence of notes on an organ to open a secret compartment. This puzzle requires musical knowledge and a good ear for pitch. * The jigsaw puzzle is a classic puzzle in Curse of Blackmoor Manor. Players need to assemble a picture by fitting together different puzzle pieces. This puzzle requires patience and attention to detail. Overall, the puzzles in Nancy Drew Curse of Blackmoor Manor add an extra layer of challenge and excitement to the game. They test players' logic, reasoning, and problem-solving skills. Solving these puzzles is key to progressing in the game and uncovering the truth behind the curse of Blackmoor Manor..
Reviews for "Navigating the Riddles and Puzzles in Nancy Drew: Curse of Blackmoor Manor"
1. Alex - 1 star
I found the puzzles in Nancy Drew: Curse of Blackmoor Manor to be incredibly frustrating and poorly designed. Many of the puzzles were illogical and required obscure solutions that were nearly impossible to figure out without a walkthrough. The lack of clear instructions made it even more difficult to progress in the game, and I often found myself stuck for hours on end. Overall, I was extremely disappointed with the puzzle aspect of this game and would not recommend it to others.
2. Sarah - 2 stars
While I enjoyed the storyline and graphics in Nancy Drew: Curse of Blackmoor Manor, I found the puzzles to be overly challenging and not very intuitive. Some of the puzzles were so convoluted that it became more of a chore to solve them rather than an enjoyable challenge. Additionally, the lack of hints or guidance made it difficult to progress in the game without resorting to external sources for help. I was disappointed with the overall puzzle experience in this game and would have preferred a more balanced level of difficulty.
3. Mark - 2 stars
I found the puzzles in Nancy Drew: Curse of Blackmoor Manor to be unnecessarily complicated and frustrating. It felt like the developers were more focused on making the puzzles difficult rather than enjoyable. The lack of clear instructions and obscure solutions made it difficult to progress in the game, and I often found myself becoming frustrated and losing interest. While the storyline was intriguing, the puzzles detracted from the overall enjoyment of the game. I would not recommend this game to those who prefer more straightforward and logical puzzles.
4. Jessica - 1 star
The puzzles in Nancy Drew: Curse of Blackmoor Manor were a major disappointment. They were poorly designed and often required random trial and error rather than any real logical thinking. It felt like the developers were just trying to make the game longer by including complex and unnecessary puzzles. The lack of guidance or hints made it difficult to progress, and I often found myself feeling stuck and frustrated. Overall, I would not recommend this game to anyone looking for enjoyable and well-designed puzzles.