Walkthroughs: Black Mirror II

As puzzles go, this one is easy. Rotate each piece with right-clicks so it is in its proper orientation, then assemble the border on one side of the screen and fill in the interior.

What exactly passed between them? Fuller’s wording is sufficiently vague (“visit,” “our time together,” “fun”) to permit multiple interpretations. But the threat is clear enough: Fuller will expose Mrs. Biba unless she pays him off.

(Take a picture of the dumpster to unlock minigame #2: Letter.)

The Secret Room

The hard part.

Darren believes that whatever Fuller had on Mrs. Biba must be concealed in the secret room behind the photo backdrops in the cellar. But there are multiple barriers to entry. This will take a while.

The Photo Shop

Darren arrives back at the photo shop to find both doors blocked with yellow police tape. Suddenly respectful of authority, he won’t break the seals.

But the grate covering the well outside the basement window has no such seal. Perhaps the cops thought it impassable. With a little art, Darren can raise it. 

The key is the grate’s proximity to an effectively immovable object -- the grille over the window above the window well. Use the tow rope from the car hood at the left on either to connect the grate below to the grille above.

Now you need something durable with which to twist the rope. Try the fallen-down piece of the upper railing on the promenade outside the souvenir shop. (It’s on the ground outside the shop’s far-left corner.) Use it on the rope loop and Darren inserts the tube, twists it and pries up the grate.   

In the cellar, you’ll find the photo backdrop has been lowered again. You’ll need to raise it to expose the door by pulling in a certain order the five control ropes in the backdrop’s upper-left corner. If only because this is an adventure game, you can be fairly sure that order must be noted down or encoded somewhere.

First step: Pull each of the ropes once. This changes their designations from numbers to place names. When you’re done, they should read (from left to right): Beach, Castle, Great Wall of China, Monument Valley and Sphinx. (This is not  strictly required, but it will allow you to identify the ropes more readily in the sequence that follows. Hints to the proper order in which you’ll need to pull the ropes can be found upstairs, but they are keyed to the locations of the associated scenes rather than the rope numbers.)

Check Fuller’s office. There are two levels of clues here: the note on the right side of the map behind the desk (which provides positions for three ropes and a hint at a fourth) and the map itself. It’s visible only in part in the closeup, but Darren’s spoken description gives all five locations: Utah/Arizona, Hawaii, Egypt, China and Germany.  This translates into Monument Valley on the Utah/Arizona line (rope #4), Beach (#1), Sphinx (#5), Great Wall of China (#3) and Castle (#2).

(And while you’re upstairs, pop into the dark room and take a picture of the chalk outline that marked the position of Fuller’s body. This unlocks picture #17.)

Pull the ropes in that order and the backdrops lift.

Now you have access to the door, but still need a code for the keypad to the left. Left-click on the door twice to learn this requires a search of Fuller’s belongings at the local morgue.

The Morgue

The morgue’s off the left side of the hospital waiting room. This can play out a couple of different ways, but they both work out the same in the end.

- Try to talk to the morgue guard (previously seen at the counter at Biba’s) and the nurse speaks up and shoos Darren away. Darren says to himself that he has to find some way to distract her. (See below. Once Darren has a delivery note, the nurse no longer intercedes.)

- This is a bit more direct: Try to enter the morgue. The guard stops you, asks if you’re making a delivery and, when Darren confirms, asks for his delivery note.

Needless to say, Darren doesn’t have one. And, just to cut to the chase, he’s also missing an actual parcel and a hospital ID badge. (You can acquire the delivery note and parcel without first talking to the guard, but you’ll need to talk to him with the first two in inventory to set up collection of the ID.)

- Delivery notes. They’re on the corner of the counter at the left side of the nurses station. Darren won’t take one with the nurse sitting here. You’ll have to distract her by unplugging the monitor in your Mom’s room -- first left-clicking on the monitor itself and then on the cables. This sets off an alarm, the nurse comes running and Darren can use the interval to slip back out to the lobby to grab the note.

- Parcel. The parcel doesn’t have to be an actual parcel. The empty box on the floor at the near end of the shelves in the souvenir store will do just fine.

- ID card. With the slip and box in inventory, talk to the guard and discover you still need a visitor’s pass.

This is a bit more obscure. The nurse won’t provide one. (She knows you to be a family member of a patient and they don’t require passes.)

Maybe the doctor? He isn’t here -- but you did run into him at Biba’s Diner in Chapter I. Check there. Yup: A badge-wearing Dr. Newhouse in his usual booth.

You need to get the doc to lose that coat. Its simple: Talk to Mrs. Biba, order coffee and use the cup on the doctor. He heads for the restroom to clean up and Mrs. Biba leaves his soiled coat on the end of the counter. Click on it twice to take the ID badge. Your way into the morgue is clear.
 
The top deck of the trolley in front of Darren has nine little containers for the belongings of the departed. You’ll have to examine with a left-click each of the six clipboards on the wall above to sort out what number has been assigned to Fuller’s belongings and then return to clipboard #448 at the lower left to ascertain that this is the right one. Then left-click twice on the boxes of personal effects below and once on the one at the back center to identify it as Fuller’s. Open it to take the keys -- among them a hexagonal brass stick that might be used for winding.

(Also snap a picture of Fuller’s covered corpse at the rear. This unlocks picture #16.)

The Photo Shop II

The winder fits in the hole in the lower right corner of the cuckoo clock just inside the rear door. Examine the clock face in close-up and use the keys on the hexagonal hole. The clock clicks and chimes once, the doors at the top open and out pops a little box. Right-click on it to discover it contains four negatives -- all with apparent defects in the form of bars or stripes.

Can you examine them in closeup? Head to the shop’s front room and use the negatives on the light box to the left of the register. The content is nondescript, but the bars could Rotate the top two and the one at the lower left so they are displayed in their real-world, right-side up orientation and the one at the lower-right (a shot of the hospital) so it’s upside-down. Now drag them on top of each other and the bars will spell out “2482.” Plug this into the keypad and hit the return key at the lower right  to elicit a promising bright sound.

But the door remains shut.  The code isn’t enough. Something is missing.

If you explored down here earlier in the game, you may have noticed a certain sponginess to the floor in front of the backdrop. Left-click on the floorboards now to find a scale concealed here. The weight on the scale must match Fuller’s weight to unlock the door, and Darren has no idea how much Fuller weighed.

Odds & ends: Unless he was willing to adjust the locking mechanism every few days, Fuller would have had to watch his weight assiduously!

Morgue II

But you’ve seen a scale under your mother’s hospital bed, right? Right. So it’s back to the hospital. You can take the scale and, irrespective of the absence of a box and delivery note, reenter the morgue without a hitch. But try to weigh Fuller’s body and Darren anticipates a “racket” and suggests distracting the guard first.

Actually, you’re going to try to drug him. Here the game harks back to a sanitarium sequence in the original The Black Mirror. Take the syringe from the lower shelf of the cart under which you placed your faux parcel upon first arriving in the morgue and the laxative from the bedside table in your Mom’s room, buy a soda from the machine outside the guard booth and, in any location save the hospital lobby, combine the syringe and laxative and then the loaded syringe and soda in inventory.

Drag and drop the laxative-laced soda onto the suspicious guard. (Don’t just talk about it; he won’t accept it that way.) Seconds later, he takes off -- evidently not for the bathroom -- and Darren’s free to weigh Fuller and his gurney and then the empty gurney in the foreground. Encounters with the lunatic guard and annoyed police captain follow swiftly -- after which Darren is free to return to Fuller’s cellar.

Photo Shop III

Don’t worry about the math. Simply left-click on the scale in front of the door and Darren automatically assembles sufficient cellar junk to supplement his own weight. (Too bad about the “automatically” part. That might have been a fun puzzle.) Plug in the “2482” code again, the door clicks and you have only to activate it to enter Fuller’s hideaway.

The blackmail material is in the locker at the left. It’s unlocked using the hexagonal recess in the metal plate behind the curtain at the right. Simply take the brass ball off the lower left bedpost, use it on the recess, open the locker and take the compromising photos of Mrs. Biba within.

Odds & ends: Darren doesn’t speculate aloud what Fuller did down here, but the knockout drops on the table beside the bed are a dead giveaway.

Police Station

Enter the police station for a long sequence. Mr. Mascara appears, identifies himself as British private eye Reginald Borris, and asserts that Angelina did have a motive to kill Fuller: Fuller had photographed her. Darren thinks he’s framing Angelina for the murder and it does appear that way. Borris claims the photos he produces were received from Fuller, but Darren recognizes them as photos he took the previous day -- meaning Borris must have stolen them from Angelina’s hotel room. After a quick chat with the police woman, that’s your next destination.

Odds & ends: Conley’s questioning of Borris takes no time at all. Having left the station, you can march right back in, talk to Conley about “Stranger” and learn he now smells a rat. However, you won’t get the full story on Fuller’s dungeon until after Darren completes his mission at the hotel.

Hotel

Darren arrives outside the Wild Coast to find the owner/porter screaming hysterically at the sea gulls on the left-hand porch. He’s not going to let Darren up to Angelina’s room so you’ll have to distract him, and what better way to the demonstrated one: Bring back the gulls. Gulls love bread and, as mentioned earlier (in context with grabbing the vinegar), you can find some on the counter at Biba’s Diner. The intact slices would draw down only one bird (or so Darren thinks) so right-click on the bread in inventory to crumble it and use the crumbs on the hotel veranda. The birds fly in, the shrieking owner/porter emerges to chase them away and, behind his back, Darren is free to step inside, grab the key from behind the desk and climb to Angelina’s room. (If you miss your window, you’ll have to retreat to Biba’s Diner and collect more bread.)

Left-click on the lamp beside the bed to discover a microphone and then twice on the ventilation grate above the dresser to find a transmitter. Right-click on the transmitter in inventory and Darren suggests checking with Eddie at the junk shop. (You’ll recall that it was the inquiry about his radio that got him to open up a bit.) Let yourself out for another display of hysterics by the owner/porter. 

(Also use the camera on the wine glasses on the table for Darren to snap a picture and unlock picture #1 -- a candid shot that appears nowhere in the game. Is that Angelina? You would think so, being that it’s her hotel room, But given the shadow on the back wall of a man preparing to strike a blow, I think it’s supposed to be Mrs. Biba.)

Odds & ends: Actually, even if he has completed this sequence, Darren can collect a second helping of bread from Biba’s, squish it down to crumbs again and take it all the way to England in Chapter III. But it never finds another use.

Junk Shop

Get back to Eddie and ask about the transmitter (or just use the transmitter on him). He reports that he picked up some Morse code the previous day from a stranger who transmitted that a certain girl is “now safe” (which could mean “locked in a cell”) and that he’d be in touch again at 6 p.m. today.

Eddie suggests you use directional antennas to locate Borris’s transmitter. Eddie has one and will build another for Darren if Darren collects the necessary raw materials: a metal bar, headphones, compass and a length of copper wire.

- Metal bar. Simply pop into Fuller’s back yard and disengage the piece of railing from the rope. (You can do this even before you get the antenna assignment from Eddie.)

 - Headphones. To the right of the TV at Mom’s house.

- Compass.  On Mom’s telescope.

- Copper wire. You can retrieve it from the same chain of lights where you earlier found the red light bulb, but you’ll need some way to cut off a section. Buy the wire cutter on the rack on the front of the junk-shop counter and use the cutter on the wire at Biba’s and then on the wire in inventory to strip off the plastic.

Odds & ends: Note that Eddie now gives Darren a 50-cent discount on the $2 he charges if Darren buys the wire cutter prior to the coin and cane favors. (Albeit a meaningless one -- money being an intangible in BM2.)

- This is the last sequence where Darren has the run of Biddeford -- once the antenna is assembled, you’ll be limited in the regions you can explore -- so if there are people with whom you want to speak or locations to examine or shoot with the camera, now is the time.

In particular, ask both Captain Conley and the police woman about “Secret basement” to learn the police search of the dungeon has borne fruit. Conley now says “there’s a lot of people with reason to cut Fuller up.” And the police woman gives you a taste of Borris’s cover story: He’s supposed to working for an insurance company and watching Angelina over a matter of some stolen books. 

- And what about that business with the late Carrie? The game lets it go once you’ve questioned everyone with a “Carrie” topic. Given the Fuller connection, the implication seems to be that she too was blackmailed over some prurient photos and took her life.  

With all these components in inventory, drop back to Eddie’s shop and talk to him. He’ll give you instructions and Darren automatically removes to a spot outside the Wild Coast Hotel. Use the mouse to adjust the compass to 73 degrees and, with the gadget now beeping rapidly, press the red button at the lower right. Darren jumps back to the junk shop to plot the coordinates (again, automatic) and discover that Borris must be on a boat two miles offshore.