Nancy's ski vacation in an old castle has been interrupted by a fierce blizzard! Snowbound inside the castle, Nancy learns of an elaborate plot devised by Marie Antoinette over 200 years ago to hide a royal treasure. Nancy begins to uncover the rich history of the lodge, and some mysterious events, all leading to the hidden treasure. When Nancy is around, there is much more to the story than first appears!

Nancy's off to the glamorous Wickford Castle Ski Resort in … Wisconsin. (Sure, it snows there, but skiing?) This time, there's no specific objective, but once you get snowed in, there's nothing to do but follow up on vague clues and suggestions that not everything's right in the heart of the dairyland.

Being snowed in limits the number of suspects and witnesses - there's Dexter Egan, the gruff but lovable (?) manager; Jacques, the ski pro with lots of time on his hands; Lisa, who is … well, she's lots of things; and Professor Hotchkiss, who has quite a bee in her bonnet about how misunderstood Marie Antoinette has been. (Remember her "Let them eat cake!" bit? Well, she was taken totally out of context, or else simply misquoted.)

You've got to sniff around a bit to even realize that there's a mystery to be solved … well, you're playing the game, so you know at least that much, but what mystery? You discover that everyone has one thing or another that he or she doesn't want to talk about, that Wickford Castle's tower was transplanted stone-by-stone from France, and that the castle's builder included secret passages, hidden doors and many dead ends in this triumph of architectural whimsy.

There is the usual collection of puzzles and riddles that we've come to expect in a Nancy Drew mystery, some variations from previous games, others entirely new. And as with previous games, we would have been totally stumped a few times without the walkthroughs. One note here - as usual, the Kuderna and Shaw walkthrough is good, but (as far as we could tell), their map of the inn isn't quite right.

In fact, that's one of the problems with this game. We don't [i]think[/i] the map is quite right, but it's hard to tell because the game's angles and directions don't always seem to make sense. There are times that you can move forward a screen, but turning around doesn't let you retrace your steps; it's possible to get totally lost with just a few clicks of the mouse.

And that's not the only thing that doesn't make sense. According to the walkthrough, we were supposed to meet Lisa at least twice before we actually tracked her down. And that third time, we deliberately parked ourselves where the walkthrough said she was supposed to appear, so that we could catch up on several necessary conversations.

But the thing that makes no sense at all is the fact that the hidden treasure is tucked away behind a series of elaborate false panels and other puzzles, in a tower that was transported [i]brick by brick[/i] from France … and then was blocked off. How did it get transported and set up again (with all the puzzles completely reset) without anyone finding the treasure in the process?

It's hard to construct a small mystery like this and make the whole thing believable - the series so far has varying success in doing so - but [i]Treasure in the Royal Tower[/i] falls the furthest short of that goal. A second problem is that some of the rooms (particularly the shed in back of the inn) are so dark that you can only wave your cursor around in the hopes of running across a hotspot, without any idea of what you're pointing at.

On the plus side, as we said before, [i]Treasure in the Royal Tower[/i] delivers the expected puzzles and riddles. Without saying they're all realistic situations (they aren't), they are fun to solve. We only had to look up one in the walkthrough to understand what we were trying to do. (Make that two; we got to one - the ski-lift in the shed - before we were supposed to, which will always get you in trouble!)

One thing we've become real accustomed to with these games is doing things out of sequence. We tend to take a while checking out each new room, and it seems like that's not what the game intends. For example, by the time we'd thoroughly cased our own bedroom - the first room - several game hours had passed, which is probably why we missed Lisa the first time we were supposed to run into her, on the stairs outside our room. We could have gone ahead and started wandering around after only a few minutes in our room, but … we're sure we would have missed some important first clue. By the time we did start checking out the rest of the inn, it was the middle of the night. That part is frustrating with each of these games we play.

Despite these complaints, overall it was a lot of fun; maybe more fun than the others we've played so far. Once we got over the fact that it was totally unrealistic, we just devoted ourselves to solving everything. The animations and voices were as good as we've seen in any other game in the series, and Professor Hotchkiss was definitely … interesting. And it was nice to find out that Marie Antoinette wasn't such a bad gal after all.