13 out of 13 people found this review helpful.
Good game, with some annoying bugs
Date of Review: Jan 26, 2008
The Bottom Line: A good game, but the technical glitches nearly rendered it unplayable on my machine.
Treasure in the Royal Tower was my fourth Nancy Drew game. Out of the first few Nancy Drew games Secrets Can Kill, Message in a Haunted Mansion, and Treasure in the Royal Tower, Treasure in the Royal Tower had the most satisfying plot, interesting characters, clever dialogue, and the most cool places to explore.
Nancy is on vacation at a ski resort in Wisconsin built by an eccentric millionaire. The resort is built to look like a castle, complete with a tower that was imported from a chateau in France. French queen Marie Antoinette used to spend a good deal of time in the tower, and one of the hotel guests believes that the tower holds an important secret that could clear Marie Antoinette's name. When you arrive, a killer blizzard leaves everyone trapped in the castle, and the castle's library has been vandalized. Besides yourself, there are a number of suspects: Jacques, the Olympic ski instructor, Lisa, the photojournalist, Dexter, the caretaker, and Mrs. Hotchkiss, the eccentric Marie Antoinette scholar. As the game progresses you will learn a great deal about French Revolutionary history and Marie Antoinette in particular.
The locations in the game are varied and realistic: an imposing lobby, a comfy lounge with a blazing fireplace, the ransacked library, Nancy's room, castle corridors that lead to dead ends, twisty stone stairwells, an antique elevator, a shed, a secret garden and the Royal Tower. Along the way you'll slip along secret passageways, climb elevator shafts, and ascend into the Royal Tower to find Marie Antoinette's secret, but…BE CAREFUL. Someone doesn't want you to succeed in your search: you are deliberately trapped in the elevator, hit over the head, and locked outside to freeze to death. Only your quick thinking and detective skills can save Nancy!
Buyer Beware:
I *loved* this game, but I had HORRIBLE problems getting the game to run. It would crash constantly in the middle of conversations or leave me stuck at a certain point in a hallway before giving me an error message of "Invalid CHUNK file." I had to restart the game 25-30 times before I could beat it, and it would cause my computer to crash as well. I changed a number of settings and configurations and the problem didn't go away. The most frustrating thing was that it wouldn't let me beat the game: after the villain revealed their identity, a chase scene was supposed to follow, but the computer would never return control to me and the baddie got away every time. When I selected the "Second Chance" feature, the game would inevitably lock up and my computer would crash again. Very, very frustrating.
