Nancy Drew’s on the case again, this time in our nation’s capital. Her first stop is in a Maya museum, which is neat all by itself. (We checked, and the Maya elements — including the fact that it’s “Maya,” not “Mayan” — seem to be pretty accurate, which means we now know more about Maya culture, history and religion than we did a couple weeks ago.)

In fact, except for a few foreboding glimpses, there isn’t even a mystery until you get about a third of the way into the game. You have plenty of time to explore Beech Hill Museum, talk to its staff and even complete your first list of interning chores. The museum is prepping for the first-ever exhibition of a monolith dedicated to the seventh-century Maya ruler Pacal.

Quick side note. The interface is identical to previous Nancy Drew games. In fact, to repeat from our last review: your cursor (a magnifying glass) glows red when it rolls over a hotspot, and turns into an arrow pointing in the appropriate direction when you can turn, back up, move closer, and so forth. The music is nice without being intrusive, the sound effects are good (giving you clues at times), and the animations are as good as they’ve been for the last two or three in the series (3-D animations; better than cartoons). If you’ve played earlier games in the series, you probably won’t need to look at the manual. And one addendum to the note: you can only look left, right or back, until one crucial point when you have to look down. That’s almost cheating, but it does help clear our consciences for resorting to the walkthrough.

The travel interface deserves particular recognition. It’s a map of the Washington rapid transit system, and you click on the transit map to move from location to location. It’s both realistic and intuitive. And one plea to Her Interactive: Please, please open the clock so we don’t have to click to check what time it is. When we get involved in exploring a room, we usually don’t know whether the time is A.M. or P.M. until we stick our head outdoors, and that can be a pain at times.

You begin the game by meeting Joanna Riggs, Beech Hill curator and your new boss for the summer. She gives you a list of tasks, which gives you the opportunity to explore the museum and meet most of the characters. (Or, as in our case, you can thoroughly explore the museum before you even get to the list.) While you explore, be sure to write down everything that might be important; you’re going to need it, especially when you tackle the puzzles in the pyramid at the center of the museum.

In Beech Hill’s lab you meet Henrik van der Hune, hired to translate the monolith’s glyphs. Although he’s not there, you also get to know Sonny Joon, the intern you’re replacing, and you get a pretty good idea why he needed replacing. (His theories on alien interaction with the Mayas are … interesting.) You take a trip to the Mexican Consulate to get final approval from Alejandro del Rio, and you you have an interesting conversation with Taylor Sinclair, who negotiated the loan of the monolith to Beech Hill.

And then … alarms go off as the museum’s prize permanent exhibit, a jade carving of Pacal, is stolen. You discover Henrik with a lump on his head, and he’s immediately hospitalized with an irritating case of amnesia. Shortly thereafter, Joanna is suspended by the Beech Hill board, leaving one person — you — to continue prepping for the exhibit and searching for a solution to the theft. (The board’s directory, Franklin Rose, knows your dad and what you can do, so he thrusts the entire problem on your shoulders.) While it’s enjoyable to be given the run of the entire museum (we’re used to having to snoop around behind people’s backs), it’s a little daunting to have to tackle the whole case alone.

But no one does Nancy Drew as well as Nancy Drew, so she (and we) are up to the task. With a little help from the walkthroughs. Basically, you’ve got to figure out who stole the carving, but doing that involves a whole lot of other sleuthing as well. You must provide clues to help Henrik regain his memory, track down five related jade carvings (across the country and even into Central America), draw clues out of Alejandro and Taylor, and do a whole lot of snooping on your own.

One of the things Dad really appreciates in a game like this is a convincing sense of reality, which can be tough. How are you going to design a game with only a handful of people to meet, in the middle of a bustling city? Scarlet Hand accomplishes it by focusing the action on the museum, while it is shut down to prepare for a major new exhibit. How are you going to scatter puzzles throughout the game, when real life is pretty-much puzzle-free? Scarlet Hand has an interactive series of puzzles in the museum, introducing patrons to Maya civilization and testing them on what they’ve learned during their visit. This game passes Dad’s reality check with flying colors.

Evie doesn’t care so much about reality as she does about the puzzles — are they fun? Are they too easy? Are they impossible? Scarlet Hand doesn’t seem to have as many puzzles as others in the series, but (more often than not), they require you to apply information you’ve discovered in other parts of the game, which is neat. We only went to the walkthrough for one puzzle solution, and if we’d been patient, we wouldn’t have had to do that. (Who knew about Sonny and coatimundis? Apparently Henrik does … once he remembers.)

All in all, Scarlet Hand does a fine job of weaving together all these different threads, and different types of investigation, into a satisfying whole. It’s definitely at or near the top of our list of the Nancy Drew games we’ve played so far. Evie still ranks Royal Tower as her favorite, but this is close; for Dad, Scarlet Hand is as good as Haunted Mansion, his previous favorite. The puzzles aren’t quite as involving as in either of those two games, but the conversational investigations might be the best so far (especially with the special guest stars!).