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Low-Spoiler Hints for Nancy Drew: Treasure in the Royal Tower


Welcome to my Nancy Drew: Treasure in the Royal Tower hints page. (-: If you're new to my series of low-spoiler computer game walkthroughs, the idea is to point gamers towards things they might not have thought of in each game rather than divulging puzzle solutions or giving step-by-step instructions. There's not much point in playing an adventure game if you know the puzzle solutions in advance, and there's no point at all in investigating a murder mystery like Treasure in the Royal Tower's if you've already had the story spoiled for you.

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So these pages are as close to spoiler-free as possible while still providing some valuable Treasure in the Royal Tower hints and game recommendations. If you are looking for the solution to a particular puzzle, I recommend UHS--due to their unique website setup you can only see one hint at a time, so you can get the answer to one pesky puzzle without ruining all the others for yourself. Here's the UHS link if you're interested. My site here focuses on exactly the things traditional walkthroughs don't: the non-critical bits of Treasure in the Royal Tower, detours you can take, little things you can do to smooth the gameplay out for yourself, extra details you might miss if you did only what was strictly necessary to complete the game. If you want even fewer spoilers--you're considering whether to buy the game, for example, and want to know whether there's anything you're going to detest in it--please try my Nancy Drew Review page to find all the pertinant information in one convenient spoiler-free package.

Now, on with the game!

Nancy Drew: Treasure in the Royal Tower Hints and Tips
Nancy Drew: Treasure in the Royal Tower Walkthrough
Nancy Drew: Treasure in the Royal Tower Game Spoilers and Easter Eggs
Nancy Drew: Treasure in the Royal Tower Plot and Character Information
Nancy Drew: Treasure in the Royal Tower Cheats and Links
Backseat Game Designer: Nancy Drew: Treasure in the Royal Tower Critique

Treasure in the Royal Tower Hints and Tips



Nancy Drew: Treasure in the Royal Tower is a modern PC adventure game in the popular Nancy Drew series. Like the other Nancy Drew games, Treasure in the Royal Tower offers a simple 1st-person point-and-click interface with which to navigate a small gameworld, solving puzzles and interrogating suspects. This one is set in a Midwestern castle built by an eccentric chocolate milk tycoon and appropriately stocked with secret passages and slider puzzles. These are relatively easy games, designed with young teens in mind, and Treasure in the Royal Tower is very much plug and play. However, there are a number of things you may want to be aware of before beginning to play in order to get maximum enjoyment out of the game. Without spoiling anything:

Difficulty Setting: I've never seen a game with such an irrelevant difficulty setting as the Nancy Drew series has. There are no additional puzzles if you play on Senior Detective--the in-game hint system (i.e. Bess, George, and Ned) is scaled back, and you have less time to complete timed challenges, and that's it. If you've played the game on one setting, there is no need to go back and play it again on the other.

Savegames: Like other games in this series, Treasure in the Royal Tower is well-constructed and does not suffer from serious bugs; in fact, the Nancy Drew games have a "second chance" feature that allows you to automatically replay any scene in which Nancy dies or fails at her mission, so you theoretically shouldn't need to worry about savegames at all. Though there are a few potentially critical glitches in some of the other Nancy Drew titles, I have not found any in Royal Tower. It's impossible to lose this game other than becoming bored and quitting.

Time Management: There are a few timed puzzles in Treasure in the Royal Tower (hiding from an NPC in time, defusing an alarm in time, getting in out of the cold in time, and the endgame sequence.) If you run out of time on any of these, though, the "second chance" feature will restart the timer and let you try again. Except for these timed challenges, Treasure in the Royal Tower proceeds in Ultima-style flextime--the NPCs will move around the castle at set times every day, but if you miss them, you can just sleep for the requisite number of hours and catch them there the next day (use the alarm clock next to Nancy's bed to accomplish this.) It doesn't matter if you conclude this quest in three days or thirteen; except for the routine movements of NPC's, nothing in the castle changes except in response to actions you've taken yourself.

Interrogation: You have a selection of different dialogue choices during most conversations with suspects in Treasure in the Royal Tower, but these choices do not affect anything in the game, so you really needn't waste your time reloading or replaying any conversations. You should, however, make an effort to exhaust every line of conversation with every character (except Bess, George and Ned, who are completely optional), both because it gives you more details so that you can figure the mystery out for yourself, and also because the act of conversing with an NPC often triggers an unrelated plot event to happen somewhere else in the castle.

Movement: The movement controls in the Nancy Drew games are very inconsistent and often unintuitive--sometimes it is hard to see an exit to your left, right, or even straight ahead (!), because the cursor does not shift to show that you can go that way unless it is resting in the precisely correct location (which is not always to the far margin of the screen where you'd expect it). Clicking to the left or right will sometimes rotate your view 90 degrees, and other times cause you to rotate and move. Clicking a down arrow will sometimes cause you to look down, sometimes cause you to move down, and other times cause you to back up. There's no way to predict any of these things in advance, and it can be very disorienting. Luckily the area available to explore in each of these games is very small, so you can get used to the arrows in each location quickly. The only thing that's easy to miss during the first ten minutes of the game is finding Nancy's room again--you need to click on room 204 first, which gives you a closeup from which you can then click room 205.

The Phone: Nancy can only use the phone in her hotel room to call her own friends, Bess, George, and Ned, and (once she has been into the Queen's tower) to call Dexter at the concierge (by dialing 0.) No other telephone numbers work in this game. You can receive phone messages from other guests, but as far as I know cannot call them yourself. Using the telephone at all is optional in this game.

Problem Spots: There's not much that could possibly go wrong as you play Treasure in the Royal Tower. Other than giving up and quitting, there's no way to lose this game. In fact, it doesn't even matter if you never read or pick up some of the NPC-implicating evidence. There is only one ending cutscene, and it is not affected by any choices you make. Of course, the game is more fun and makes more sense if you bother collecting the evidence and conversing with suspects.

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