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.

Borris’s Boat

It might have been fun getting out there, but that’s automatic, too — Eddie cashes in a favor with a fisherman — and you’ll suddenly find Darren at the aft end of Borris’s sailboat.

Let yourself into the cabin and left-click twice on the picture on the far wall to reveal a safe. The dial is similar to a compass and the combination consists of a sequence of six compass headings.

Is this written own somewhere? Not exactly. But the folder to the right of the laptop computer contains a transparency that fits over the map of Africa on the wall to the left. You want to align the transparency so its lines fill the gaps between similar lines on the map to complete a route around the southern tip of Africa. 

That may give you some trouble. The lines don’t all sync properly. But the process can be simplified: Only one line needs to fit perfectly. Right-click twice on the transparency to rotate it so no line appears in its upper right-hand corner and then slide the foil so the line in its lower right corner completes the link between the line at the bottom of the map and the one above it and to the right. (The latter line ends in a circle.) 

This completes a route, the view drops back to the cabin and Darren reads off the combination from the pictured directions: SW, S, SE, E, NE, NW. Plug this into the safe — as with the safe at Fuller’s shop, the direction in which you turn the dial first doesn’t matter — and liberate a ring bearing a tree symbol and a computer disk. Pop the latter into the laptop to discover the computer’s internal battery is dead and that the boat seems not to have electricity.

A generator can be found under the right-hand sofa. Naturally, the seat turns out to be locked down so you’ll need a key. It’s in the third drawer from the top beneath the laptop. And, naturally, the generator is almost out of fuel, so you’ll need gas. (You’ll have to try to start to generator in order to take the gas can.) It’s in the drawer under the left-hand bench up on deck. Start ‘er up and activate the laptop again for evidence that Darren’s mother wasn’t hurt in a car crash after all and that Fuller was killed by Mrs. Biba’s husband. 

Naturally, this is where Borris shows up. Darren automatically clubs him with the bust but not hard enough and when he retreats to the deck the private detective is still at his heels. 

Darren can die in this standoff — the first of several such encounters — and there’s only one way out: Within five seconds, try to conk Borris in the head with the sailboat’s boom. Darren then automatically wallops him with the oar and sends him overboard. (If you miss the window or click on anything else — Borris himself or the oar — Borris shoots Darren and you’ll have to replay the scene from the automatic save.)  

Cut to a scene of Darren and Angelina on the rocks overlooking the Wild Coast — it’s established here that Angelina is returning to England without Darren to continue her investigations — and then Darren alone at Biba’s Diner a few days later. (No evidence of Mr. Biba in the kitchen; he’s evidently been arrested.) Mrs. Biba approaches and reports that the hospital has called looking for Darren. It’s the only place you can go — the Biddeford postcard is broken and all other exits are locked out — so enter the lobby and then Mom’s room to find the bed unoccupied and monitor off. The doctor enters and tells Darren that his mother’s heart gave out. 

Darren dreams are followed by a real-world sequence — an alarming message from Angelina on Mom’s answering machine — and Darren’s flight to England.

Chapter III

Gordon’s Palace Hotel

We find Darren outside a hotel. This location will be familiar to those who’ve played the first game. (This is the Ashburry sanatorium from the original The Black Mirror.)

Enter. Darren automatically talks to proprietor Murray — again, a familiar name: he ran the Willow Creek pawn shop in the first game — and takes a room and and learns Angelina has the one next door. Use the double doors to the left and Darren automatically drops off his backpack. (This contains most of the leftovers from chapters I and II: the letter from his mother’s bankbook, the photo from the casket and the ring from Borris’s safe. They all vanish permanently from your inventory but you’ll nevertheless be able to raise questions about the ring a little down the road.) 

First things first: You need to get into Angelina’s room to see what’s going on with her. Proprietor Murray won’t just give you the key — and you’ll have to ask him about Angelina and then her room key so he can say so — so you’ll have to create another diversion: a smoky little fire in the pile of leaves outside. 

For this purpose, you’ll need the matches from the ashtray in the middle of the table in the lounge outside your room and, since the leaves are wet, some kind of kindling. The newspaper at the left edge of the table will do admirably. Place the paper in the leaves, use the matches on the leaves and then go back inside and tell Murray about “fire.” (This may feel like another timed sequence, but isn’t. Murray stays outside until Darren has the key.) 

Use your new key on the door to Angelina’s room or simply try the door. Inside, you’ll find an oddity that seems designed to attract Darren’s attention: a framed picture of Angelina on the left wall. Take it down with two left-clicks and you’ll find two seemingly blank sheets of paper behind it. Darren speculates they contain a message written in invisible ink. 

So they do. Angelina used lemon juice as her ink and the wood sliver on the table as a pen. You just have to make the message visible by oxidizing the ink. A little heat should do the trick — as you’ll learn if you use the matches on the paper — but the heat source will have to endure longer than your average match.        

Take the Schnapps from the table in the hotel lobby, pull a woolen thread from the ratty blanket on the bed in in Angelina’s room and use both on the glass on the table beside the window in Angelina’s room. Then use the matches and finally the papers on the glass over on the table. Then right-click on Angelina’s singed message in inventory to read it. It’s series of short diary entries that sketch out a little about Willow Creek and Black Mirror castle, supplies details about the ring Darren recovered from Borris’s safe (evidently the symbol of a secret society that “wants to summon up dark powers”) and refers to Borris’s appearance at the hotel, Angelina’s desire to “investigate the passage” and her intention to “send off some insurance.”

Darren assumes that Angelina is being held prisoner by Borris — remember the answering-machine message — and suggests putting an ear to the ground in Willow Creek.

Willow Creek

Which you can now do. Take a postcard from the display in the lobby — this isn’t required, but, as in Biddeford, enables instant travel between previously-visited locations — and exit right from the hotel exterior to reach the village.

Odds & ends: There is one task you can still complete at the hotel — finding the entrance to Angelina’s passage  — but it’ll keep. You can’t open that entrance until you locate Angelina’s “insurance.”

In Willow Creek, Darren almost runs into the town librarian, Miss Valley. She’ll give him an obligatory (and rather plodding) tour of the place to the tune of Darren’s conversation topics and finally bolt when he asks after the symbol on Borris’s ring and she discovers Darren is from Maine — as though she’d suddenly put 2 and 2 together and the answer frightened her. 

Odds & ends: Talk to Tom at the chili stand about Miss Valley for a rather unsympathetic take on her sad history: She’s the sister of young Vic Valley — murdered by Samuel Gordon in the original The Black Mirror — and seems to have been almost as much a victim as her brother.
 
– And snap a picture of the street to the left of the central tower in Willow Creek. This unlocks picture #6.

That little freak-out sets your agenda. You want to learn more about The Order. You can do so at the museum. Enter, listen to the German tourist complain and then left-click on the display case initially just off-screen to the right and in the closeup read the Gordon Family Chronicle within. It supplies the rules of the Order, but not what the society is about. You’ll need to read the earlier pages to sort that out. A quick chat with guard Bobby establishes that he’s not permitted to remove the book from the locked case — but that he does have the key.  
 
Distractions make Darren’s world go around and he needs to distract Bobby twice to steal his key. Bobby’s initial three topics don’t suggest avenues for distraction, but he grows additional topics as you examine locations around the museum: the broken display case to the left of the door (which quietly becomes relevant in Chapter VI) and, more importantly here, the “bubble mixture” on the front counter. Use the latter topic and it turns out Bobby is hungry and would accept something to eat.   

Leave the museum, cross the canal to the chili stand and order a bowl from Tom. Give the bowl to Bobby or just talk to him about it. He’ll provide a sparkler in exchange and remove his jacket. However, he remains in his chair. To coax him out, talk to him again about the bubble mixture and Darren volunteers to refill the container with soapy water. Take it with you.

The soap can be found in the supply cupboard to the left of the display case. (Darren automatically squirts some into the bubble container.) 

You’d think the water would be easy, being that there’s a river right in the middle of town, but the surface of the reveals no hotspots. The closest thing is the rope tied to the little pier off the left side of the waterway. Reel it in to find that there’s a bucket at the end and that, naturally, it’s full of water. Use the bubble mix container on the bucket and Darren’s work is done. Give the mix back to Bobby, who promptly stands up and starts blowing bubbles out the window. While his back in turned, left-click on his jacket to take the key.
  
Odds & ends: Check out the broken the display case to the left.This is explained in Chapter VI. 

Also take a picture of Bobby when he’s blowing bubbles. This unlocks mini-game #5: BigHead Mode.

This is notably different from the other four mini-games, which simply enable the player to replay mini-games found in Black Mirror II. It activates this gag mode in the “Options” menu — including a sliding scale, initially set at the normal size, that allows you to control how huge or pinhead-sized the characters’ heads appear. (Try it; it’s funny for a while.)  

Look at the display case in the close-up view and use the key on the lock at the top … only to learn the museum is closing for the evening. Browsing in the Chronicle will have to wait until Chapter IV. Darren leaves automatically for a run-in with a bedraggled man who calls him “Death” and refers to “the curse.”

You can now return to the hotel, where a new task awaits. 

Odds & ends: However, you can also follow up with the bum, who has removed to the bench outside the pub on the left side of the canal, and now learn that Darren is the Antichrist. 

– Moreover, the pub is now open and you can poke around a bit inside — albeit to no useful purpose. (Inside, snap a picture of the mugs in the foreground. This unlocks picture #7.) And note that the high-score on the pinball machine includes an entry for “Vic” — one of the murder victims in the original The Black Mirror.

Gordon’s Palace II

Outside the hotel, you’ll find an agitated Miss Valley. She doesn’t say much that is coherent — except to disclose that, every 12 years, something terrible happens here.

Inside, Darren finds Murray fiddling with a letter. Turns out its for Angelina. Could this be the “insurance” she mentioned in her diary? Naturally, Murray refuses to turn it over and, once again, you’ll have to find a way to get around him and into the lockboxes behind the central columns.

Darren automatically moves to the lounge outside the rooms. The next time he returns, he’ll find find Murray reading the paper and drinking tea. 

If Darren could drug the tea, he’d have the run of the place. Happily, there is a sleep aid in the cabinet under the TV in Angelina’s room. Simply use it on the tea. No special stealth or prep work required. However obvious the maneuver, Darren automatically leaves again and returns to find Murray catching Zs. He’ll be out of commission until wakened by the tourists later in the chapter.

Left-click on the lockboxes to the right and you’ll learn Darren’s reluctant to risk waking Murray by searching his pockets for a key. 

That leaves a lockpick. Who around here might have a lockpick? If you spoke to Bobby and Tom only on the necessary topics, you may be a little vague on that. But if you asked Bobby about himself and then Tom, it’ll be crystal clear: Tom is a burglar. 

Return to Willow Creek. At the pub, talk to Tom and simply keep up the cycle of “shops” and “beer” topics until he’s sufficiently drunk to turn over the lockpicking tool.
 
Back at the hotel, use the lockpick on the lockboxes to start another mini-game. You’ll need to configure its shape so it simultaneously depresses the four tumblers to align the top of each with the central red line. The tumblers are set up randomly each time you play, so there’s no fixed solution. But, honestly, it’s pretty easy. Insert the pick, note which sections of the pick depress the respective tumblers and then configure each section — somehow, it’s as flexible as a pipe cleaner — to the right position. When you have it right, you’ll hear a click and the scene will switch back to the lobby. Open the lockbox, remove the letter and open it with a right-click. 

As we guessed earlier, it’s the “insurance.” Angelina is scared of noises coming from a space beneath her floor and seems to be trying to smooth Darren’s path in that direction with an entry code should she disappear. “The solution was known by two story-telling brothers from Germany,” she writes. “GFT/62/17/1/25.”

Odds & ends: Isn’t it a little strange that Angelina knows the solution ? (If she’s scared of the sounds from down there, why was she opening the manhole?)

But let’s begin at the beginning. Where’s the entrance? If you played the original game, you probably have guessed: Angelina’s hotel room was James’s room at the asylum and there’s still a sewer-access hole under the bed. Just move the bed to expose the manhole — now equipped with a cover and an intricate locking mechanism.

However, you can’t inspect it in closeup until you decode Angelina’s clue. “GFT” has to be Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Sure enough, there’s a copy in the bookshelf out in the lounge and, sure enough, the four numbers in Angelina’s insurance correspond to page numbers in the table of contents — 62 to “The Queen Bee,” 17 to “The White Snake,” 1 to “The Frog King or Iron Henry” and 25 to “The Seven Ravens.” 

And now for the puzzle. If need be, rotate the central circle so the four relevant numbers are adjacent to the four outer circles and then rotate those four circles so the appropriate pictures appear in the space adjacent to the related Table of Contents numbers. (The overall orientation of the numbers doesn’t matter; they ) The frog and raven are easy to identify, the snake and bee a bit harder. When the last circle is properly adjusted, you’ll hear a click and drop back to the view of Angelina’s room — now with a dark smelly hole. 

Accent on dark. Darren won’t descend without a light source, But you’ll have to make him look down the hole twice in order to mention the darkness and thus set up the next task.    

Darren needs a light. That may give you pause. The Schnapps ‘n’ thread candle on the desk has gone out and the game won’t let you waste a match on Bobby’s sparkler. But given that Willow Creek is pretty much shut down for the night and the rest of the map currently inaccessible, there are only so many places you can look. Check the lobby. The “soul keys” on display  between the masks and the postcards — left-click three times on the souvenirs to take one — are supposed to light up.

Alas, they don’t come with batteries. 

Odds & ends:  After you’ve picked up a soul key, ask Murray about them to learn that the originals vanished with Samuel Gordon’s suicide at the end of The Black Mirror. I suspect the designers -meant- to have him say that the soul keys were never found. (How would anyone know they had vanished without entering the summoning chamber at the end of The Black Mirror? In fact, they’re still down there.)

– And after the German tourists have finished waking Murray and complaining about the stench from the open sewer, snap a photo of the hotel proprietor to unlock photo #8.

The clock atop the bookshelf in the lounge does contain batteries — and I’d venture that they’re probably dead, being that the clock is only right twice a day– but Darren can’t simply remove them, being that the clock is screwed to the shelf. No screwdrivers are in evidence so he’ll have to improvise, using the butter knife from the little table in the lobby. (Click on “Dishes” to take it.) Use the knife on the clock and the batteries on the soul key and drop down into the sewers.

Sewers

This is a small maze. You’ll have to find a metal gate — and the means to open it and keep it open — and beyond it the entrance to a World War II bunker. (You may have read about this earlier if you clicked on the rolltop desk at the right side of the museum.)

1) At the bottom of the ladder, you’ll find yourself at the near end of a dark corridor. You can go only one way: “round the corner” to the left at the far end. 

2) Here you’ll find a ladder. Presumably this leads up to the manhole from The Black Mirror — now hidden under the fountain outside the hotel. In any case, Darren can’t open the lid at the top.  

From here, head right to find two sets of stairs flanking a channel. Grab the metal bar from the right side of the bridge between them. You’ll need this shortly to pry up the gate.

3) The path continues right from here. That’ll work — but this much longer route has greater potential to get you all turned around, being that it includes two extra four-way intersections.  

So instead,  return to the ladder from   #2 and head left (“back that way”) . You’ll find yourself at the front-right portion of a screen with pipes on both walls and two exits to the left (front and back) and a third to the back-right.

4)  Use the back-left exit. You’ll find yourself in a dead-end corridor with an oblong hole near the floor in the right near corner. Follow it to the end, where you’ll find a short, sturdy bit of wood leaning against the right wall. Take the beam — this is your gate support — and retrace your steps to the four-way intersection.

5) Following the rat that passes through this scene, use the right rear exit and you’ll come to a gate. Pry it up with the metal bar. This is the another spot where Darren can die, so be sure to use the little beam to prop up the open gate. 

6) On the far side, you’ll find yourself at the front-left exit of another four-way intersection. The right exits loop around and reconnect, so use the back-left exit and then go right twice to an impassable gate. You’ll find a pipe protruding from the left wall with a piece of green fabric on its rim. Left-click on the pipe once to take the fabric and again to slide down the pipe.

Tank Room

In your fall at the end of the pipe, the soul key shatters and Darren thus finds himself in total darkness. You can use the flash on your camera (right-click) to sort out your surroundings, but it’s not strictly necessary. Just skate your cursor around the screen. In the process, you should locate several “??” spots. Just left-click on them to identify them by feel. The important ones are:

– a metal door over to the left (important right now only as a reference point for the bucket below)
– a bucket containing oil (to the right of the door)
– a rag (lower right corner)
– a metal tube (lower left corner)

You’re going to make a torch. Take the rag and tube, combine them in inventory, dip the combination in the oil bucket and light the torch with your remaining match. 

Escape now is simple. Try the metal door, remove the blocking metal bar (which Darren does not keep; he’ll be able to take it later in the game), reconnect the cables below the switchbox to the left and activate the box with one left-click to turn on the lights and another to open the door. 

Odds & ends: The indicator lights on the box were glowing before Darren reconnected the cable Why couldn’t we see them in the darkness?

– Take a picture of the giant water tanks to unlock picture #14.
\\

Cell

Leave the room to discover you’re still locked in — the door leads to a cell — and for a brief exchange with a masked man (who quietly uses some levers to close the door back to the tank room).

Your lockpick won’t work on the rusty padlock. However, look at the padlock and Darren will come up with an alternative: creating welding powder that will melt the lock. This consists of iron oxide (i.e. rust) and aluminum powder. Simply use the butter knife from the hotel lobby on the rusted cell bars to scrape together the one and (in inventory) on one of the aluminum trays on the table next to the camping stove for the other. Darren collects the powder on the table of contents page from the Grimm Fairy Tales book. (We’ll overlook the issue of how the scraping from the tray were pulverized into a powder.) Then use the powder on the lock, the igniter hanging from the left side of the shelf to light the stove, the stove to light the sparkler and the sparkler to light the welding powder. 

Success! (And some well-considered comments about the potential unhappy consequences of trying this at home.) Simply open the door and Darren has access to the bunker’s dark outer room.

Odds & ends: The game pretends you’re under the gun here — trying to get you to turn off the stove and use the sparkler quickly.  In fact, no time limits apply. Take your time.

The Big Room

Try the big steel doors at the left end — en route, Darren flicks on the light switch left of the compressor (this’ll happen before any action in the big room) — to discover you’re still locked in. You can’t go back the way you came. That is, you can get back into the tank room — throw the leftmost of the three levers to the left of the shelves to open the door — but the pipe is too slippery with oil to climb at this stage of the game. The only way out is the closed hatch.

Open it and descend the ladder to find a second hatch in the floor. The wheel on this one won’t move. You’re going to need explosives.

Dynamite can be found in the left of the three lockers topside, fuse cables in the right locker and a detonating device amid the junk atop the crate in the corner to the right of the steel doors. Use the dynamite on the stuck hatch and Darren tapes it in place with I don’t know what tape. Use the cable on the dynamite, return to the main room, use the other end on the detonator and activate the detonator.. 

Kaboom. 

Well, sorta. The places rocks and rolls a bit, but when you descend again to see your handiwork you won’t find much more than scorch marks.

So you’re going to do it again with the second stick and second cable — but this time plant the dynamite on the overhanging beam. (No, you can’t plant it here the first time around.) The hatch is gone. But the beam now blocks the hatchway and Darren must find some way to raise it. 

A self-inflating dingy can be found upstairs beneath the shelves to the right of the levers. But if you try to simply squeeze it under the beam, Darren opines that it will slip out when inflated. You first need to connect the raft to the beam. The chain in the middle of the shelf in the cell is ideal for this purpose, as this is connected automatically to the eyelets on the dingy. Use this on the beam, then the dingy (or vice-versa) and activate the dingy with a left-click to raise the beam out of the way. 

Enter the hatch to find a raft (groan) of new problems. This clearly wasn’t intended as an exit. The ladder leads down to a short tunnel and the tunnel to a shaft up to a grate outside the steel door — a shaft not equipped with a ladder. Left-click twice on the grate and Darren suggests flooding the passage. 

That’ll require access to the giant water tanks in the room where our boy landed with so little ceremony so, if you haven’t already done so, use the leftmost lever to open the sliding door to the tank room.

Now you have to find a way to get the water from the tanks down to the hatch. Neither of the two hoses — one beside the left-hand tank and the other beneath the levers — is of adequate length, so combine them in inventory, hook the combined hose up to the outlet at the bottom of the left tank and drop the other end down the lower hatch.

However, you can’t turn on the water just yet. Should you try, you’ll be reminded that live wires are still present in the shaft below the blasted hatch. Two are visible just to the right of the ladder. needless to say, you can’t handle them without protection. A pair of gloves can be found just left of the base of the first ladder. Take them — at the same time claiming a wrench. (Remember this: It’ll be important in the final stage of your escape.) 

Alas, the gloves are in bad shape and require repair. And that brings us to the middle locker — the one with blood pooling outside. How is it that we haven’t opened this? It contains a dying Reginald Borris.  “Don’t  … let it happen!” he implores Darren with his final breath. “You have too [sic] … stop … the evil!”

Hmm. If the masked man is with the Order (as the Gordon Chronicle suggests)  and Borris was working for the Order, why would the Order kill Borris? It’s another early clue that things are not quite what they seem.

In Borris’s pocket, you’ll fine part of a poem — you won’t hear the whole thing until Chapter IV– and in the locker a roll of insulation tape. Use the tape on the gloves and then the repaired gloves on the wires to remove them to the room above.

Odds & ends: Take pictures of Borris’s body in the closeup view of the locker and the compressor to the left of the lockers to unlock pictures #5 and #27, respectively.

Time for the water. Turn the valve atop the left tank outlet, then return to the lower chamber and drop down the hatch. The scene changes to the chamber outside the steel doors with Darren struggling below the grate — which turns out to be bolted in place. Another do or die spot: You have a few seconds to select your newly-acquired wrench and use it on the grate or Darren drowns.

Did you think yourself free? You’re still locked in. The big gate upscreen can’t be opened.

Odds & ends: … though, confusingly, the cursor remains red after Darren has elicited a full description of said gate. Usually, that means you’re not done with a location — and indeed on a second click Darren does allude to a possible control room. 

But it’s all a red herring. There is no control room — the levers back in the bunker are now non-interactive — and the gate never opens for you. (Presumably, it stays red because you’ll be back here in Chapter IV, when the gate will be opened from the other side.)  

However, the crevice to the left of the gate is blocked only by a grate, and it’s pretty clear you’re supposed to pull off the grate with the wagon downscreen. But first you’ll have to repair the wagon, which is missing a wheel (as you’ll learn on a second left-click) and connect it to the grate.

There is nothing even vaguely wheel-like in your inventory or this new chamber — but you may recall seeing a wheel against the wall to the left of the compressor back in the bunker. Alas, this remains as non-interactive as ever, but the neighboring compressor has an interactive flywheel that’s just a little smaller. 

And, no, you don’t have to swim back through the drowning pool to get there. Simply press the button above the steel doors back into the bunker (i.e. to the left of the doors, in-scene) to open the way, use the wrench on the flywheel and the flywheel on the wagon. (If the flywheel resists your best efforts, you haven’t inspected the wagon yet.)

Give the wagon a left-click to test it out. (Shucks. You’d think they would have made the wheels turn.) 

In the process, you’ll dislodge the boards atop a mine shaft. (You can also do this by simply approaching the shaft sans wagon — but you do need to try out the wagon in any case.) Clear away the remainder.

Odds & ends: And then snap a pic of the cleared shaft to unlock picture #15.

Now you need to connect grate and wagon. You had a nice chain connecting the concrete beam and raft, but if you drop down into the bunker’s lower chamber you’ll discover the beam, raft and chain have all vanished into the drink and that Darren has no taste for further diving. 

But there is another chain — initially hard to spot, as Darren’s standing right on top of it after he exits the bunker. It’s below the lower railing on the landing outside the bunker doors. Just connect it to grate and wagon. (If you can’t connect it to the wagon, you haven’t installed the wheel and tested it yet.) 

Is the wagon by itself heavy enough to rip out the grate when it falls? Maybe not. As Darren observes, he won’t have a second chance so you’ll want to make sure beforehand. Pile those stones just upscreen into the wagon. (If you can’t, you haven’t yet cleared the top of the shaft or tested the wagon.)

And now of course the wagon is too heavy to push over the edge unassisted. You’ll need one of the cleared-away planks to the left of the wagon to gain some leverage. Take one with two left-clicks, use it on the wagon and over it goes, taking the grate with it. 

Darren can now crawl through the crevice and emerge in what appears to be the Order’s meeting room with a large portrait of Marcus Gordon (the same one that hangs in the main hall of Black Mirror castle in the original game). Not much to do here beyond inspecting the cloaks and banner,  so try the door, which opens in response to Darren’s tantrum. Is that good or bad? 

It is bad. As Darren stops in the doorway to ponder the meaning of life, a masked man like the one from the bunker appears out of nowhere and shoots him with a blow gun.

Darren’s dreams include a burning display case — a metaphorical reminder that our boy still hasn’t read the rest of the Gordon Chronicle.

Chapter IV

Darren wakes tied to a chair in a disused room. Happily, the chair is on wheels and Darren can scoot about the room collecting with his bound feet (and, hence, one at a time) the few items required for his escape.

For starters, grab the green bottle against the back wall just right of the chair — Darren automatically drags it into the light — and have a look at it. Kerosene. Then take one of the glass shards beneath the right side of the boarded window and use it on the plastic bottle to produce a pool of this flammable liquid. Take the cloth over to the left and use it on the pool to soak up the kerosene and a second glass shard on the cloth as a magnifier to start a merry little blaze. 

Darren can’t use the fire directly on his bonds, but can to light the thin wooden strip beneath the middle of the desk built into the rear wall. Take this and use the burning strip on Darren’s bonds in inventory. He’s free. 

Open the door. Darren then descends the stairs automatically.  If you’ve played the original game, you’ll recognize the chamber below as the parlor of the Gordon estate in Wales. 

But it’s a strange scene. There’s a slash of ghostly lightning. A woman over at the piano calls Darren “Samuel.” 

Odds & ends: Stranger still: This isn’t a ghost — more like psychic residue, I guess — for that’s Eleanor from the original The Black Mirror and she’s not dead!

The scene corrects itself: The woman is replaced by museum guard Bobby watching cartoons. He takes a phone call and we learn that the house belongs to the person at the other end — hence either Eleanor or her husband Richard — and that Tom is out shopping.

To escape, Darren needs to lure Bobby upstairs. This requires:

– a distraction. Experience shows that Bobby distracts easily. In the middle of the rear wall, just left of the desk, is a secret compartment (“Strange place”). Open it and retrieve the toy car within. You’ll eventually skate this down the stairs, but the room must first be prepped for an ambush.  
 
– laying a trap. You’re expected to drop the big bundle on Bobby’s poor head. Pick up the bigger of the cast-off ropes and tie one end to the bundle and sling the other over the beam overhead.         

– setting up the room so, at a glance, nothing appears amiss. You want to make it look as though Darren is still tied to the chair so Bobby doesn’t take alarm. Take the clothes dummy at the far right, the head (somehow called “carton”) on the shelves on the far wall and the sheet covering the Gordon family tree at the right. And if you haven’t already done so, open the door to set off the strange scene in the parlor. (This scene enables you to assemble the dummy.) Then use the dummy, the head and the sheet on the chair in that order.

Now just use the toy car on the door and the whole trap unfolds on automatic. (Wouldn’t you like to play an adventure in which the devil is in just these details?) Bobby winds up unconscious and in Darren’s former spot in the chair — tied up with the rope from the bundle — and Darren is free to explore the parlor downstairs. (To save yourself a trip later, take the short rope as well.)  

Odds & ends: After Darren retrieves his camera, return upstairs and take a picture of the room’s closed door to unlock picture #9. (This is one people tend to miss.)  

Darren’s belongings are in the chest in the right foreground. Left-click on the top of the chest in the closeup view until Darren suggests the decorative lines-and-circles motif is music-related. 

However, he can’t read the notes directly off the chest — there being (as another left-click reveals) too many of them. You’ll need to transcribe the notes.  Take the sandwich paper off the right corner of the table and a charred bit of wood from the fireplace. (The latter takes three left-clicks.) In the close-up view, use the paper on the chest  and Darren traces the musical notes. Then use the traced carving on the badly out-of-tune piano to set off a mini-game. 
 
No, it’s not as hard as it first looks. Only the middle eight keys on the piano are interactive. You have to play a sequence of eight notes and you can start with any of the left four keys. So if you were to start with the leftmost key and the keys were numbered 1-8 from left to right, you’d hit: 1, 3, 3, 2, 5, 3, 2, 3.

The piano answers back. It produces one note three times, another twice and a third five times. And that is the combo for the lock on the chest: 3, 2, 5. Then left-click on the chest to recover your camera, picture of Angelina, postcard, room key, lockpick, poem, display-case key … and, bizarrely, a metal bar — presumably the one you used to pry up the gate in the sewers. (Missing and gone forever are the two notes from Angelina, the butter knife from the hotel, the bit of cloth  from the sewers and conceivably the screwdriver you may have picked up in the bunker cell (which has no use in the game as far as I can tell). You’ll also want to retrieve the toy car, as you’ll be able to trade it for an axe a little farther along in the segment.)

Odds & ends: Take a picture of the piano to unlock mini-game #3: Piano.

Leave the house via the door at the left rear. (This is a switch from the original game, which had the exit to the right.) Outside is a small boy who identifies himself as “Van Helsing.” He’s almost invisible in the weeds near the left corner of the house. Talk to him — at a minimum about “castle,” “abductor” and “Angelina.” (Later on, this last one allows Darren to work out a way into the right-hand sarcophagus in the tomb on the property.) He learns he is at the Gordon estate in Wales, that a blonde Angelina had been here weeks before (that is, before she bumped into Darren by accident/on purpose back in Biddeford), that she took away with her blood samples for “research” and seems to have been interested in both the tomb and a ruined summer house that housed the late Sir Richard’s lab. (Hence, it can only have been Richard’s wife Eleanor on the phone with Bobby.) 

What is going on? Is Angelina really girlfriend material or has she been working for The Other Side (whatever The Other Side may be)?

Odds & ends: Take a picture of the statue at the lower right to unlock picture #24 — a picture of the  estate c. 1981.

Let’s find out what so interested her. Head down and left to reach the side of the summer house, around the corner and over the fallen tree to reach its non-interactive front door and then left again through muck & mire on this scrolling screen to reach the tomb. Look at the right-hand sarcophagus once to note that the lid is out of position and a second time to find stone chips nearby. It’s been opened and imperfectly re-closed. Can you open it again?

Odds & ends: Snap a picture of the monolith in the background between the summer house and the tomb to unlock picture 

– And click on the left-hand sarcophagus for a line that will amuse graduates of the original The Black Mirror. (They’ll recall that a stairway beneath that sarcophagus led down to the trapped tomb of Dergham Gordon.)

You’ll get in the same way Angelina did. A lot of her gear is still lying around — notably, the carrying slings in front of tomb’s central statue and the pulley outside and just to the left of the entrance. 

You can install the slings on the lid now, but something seems to be missing. Use the pulley on the sling and Darren makes a joke about forgetting his crane. He’ll need to cobble-together a support structure.

The three slender trees just right of the tomb entrance are suitable tripod material, but you don’t have anything with which you could cut them down. However, if you retreat to the mansion exterior of the old mansion, you’ll notice that Van Helsing  (standing closer to the house than before) is now holding a hatchet. Give him the toy car from the parlor — either use it on him or talk to him about it —  and he’ll leave the axe behind. (It’s just to the right of Darren.) 

Use the axe on the trees outside the tomb and Darren fells them diligently. Use the short ropes from the upstairs room where Darren was held to bind together the stacked trunks and then activate them with a left-click to automatically set up the tripod over the sarcophagus. Then use the pulley on the tripod and activate the pulley with two left-clicks to to raise the lid. Enter the sarcophagus to squeeze through the gap into poor Richard’s ruined lab.

Odds & ends: There’s an alternate path here with a bad ending. Suppose instead you use the pulley on the dilapidated ceiling overhead? Darren then says he’s missing a hook needed to hang the pulley there.

And there is a take-able hook in the game. It’s secured to the wall just left of the door to the summer house. Too well secured to detach with just Darren’s hands, but easy enough with the hatchet. Use it on the ceiling before assembling the tripod … and the ceiling caves in and kills him.

Richard’s Lab

There are two significant locations here. The poster on the wall to the left of the blocked passage at the right lists blood types — AB, B, A and O — and those letters in that order just happen to be the combination for the other location (the safe). Plug in the letters and examine the safe interior to sort out that Angelina made off with the blood of William and Richard Gordon. (William Gordon was murdered at the outset of the original The Black Mirror.)

It’s now clear to Darren that Angelina has deceived him — though not why — and he can now exit the lab for a short chat with young Van Helsing, who reveals that Tom has returned. 

Odds & ends: A non-essential item can be found in the right lower portion of the ruined shelves. Left-click on the folder twice to take it and right-click on it in inventory to inspect the contents. It’s Darren’s first non-museum opportunity to acquaint himself with events of the original The Black Mirror: William Gordon’s apparent suicide, the murder of Vic Valley at a stone circle in the woods and Samuel Gordon’s suicide.  

Make your way back to the mansion exterior, where you’ll find Tom ordering Bobby to “get that old cow on the phone” (presumably Eleanor) and setting out to search for Darren. Our hero then returns to the side of the summer house and lays out a plan: trap Tom and steal his car.

Darren has already stepped into the would-be trap himself — the stretch of marshy ground between the summer house and the tomb — and noted upon exit that he might not have been able to escape a wetter marsh unassisted. So you need to pipe in some water from the tap –located at the far right at the side of the summer house.

Unfortunately, the hose just to the left of the tap is in terrible shape. Fortunately, you have the means to repair it. In inventory, use hatchet on hose to cut out the damaged section. Unfortunately, each of the remaining pieces is too short to reach the marsh. Fortunately, you can rejoin them in the ruined lab: the plastic tube  on an open book just below the shelves. 

Unfortunately, you can’t do so straightaway. The hose and tube openings don’t match. Fortunately, you can change the size of the tube openings. Use Angelina’s welding set (at the right side of the lab) on the tube and then the heated tube on the hose (or vice-versa). Drop one end of the mended hose in the swamp, connect to the tap, drop the other end in the marshland, turn on the water and move back toward the mansion to get Tom’s attention.

The rest is automatic. Darren calls to Tom and runs. Tom follows, gets stuck, gives up his gun and car keys and answers questions. He doesn’t know Angelina and doesn’t know much about the Order — beyond the fact that they hang out at the mine and that his contact on Darren’s kidnapping sounded “quite old.” 

Darren automatically returns to the hotel to find a letter from Angelina waiting. He reads it automatically. She comes clean, or seems to, and proposes a meeting to set things straight at 11 p.m. at the lighthouse. In the meantime, Darren wants some straight answers and is determined to get them from the chronicle at the museum. You can head there directly.    

You’ll arrive to find the guard post unmanned (not surprising)and the place still haunted by the German tourists. You can’t very well open up the display case with them around. Look at it anyway and Darren suggests hiding until the museum closes. Left-click twice on the cupboard behind the case and it’s done: Darren scares off the lady tourist, makes himself scarce and resurfaces at 9 p.m. 

Use the key on the case or in closeup on the lock at the top, use the curled lower-left corner of the book to turn back one page and read. You’ll come away with a picture of the Order rather different from the sinister one painted by Angelina. It’s dedicated to preventing the re-ascendance of evil in the person of Mordred Gordon by guarding over “the academy and the key, the sacrifice room and the scriptures.” (This first reference to Mordred sets up events in chapters V and VI.)

Now to find a way out. Everything seems to be locked and alarmed but, with the right gear, you can get through the narrow window above the shredding machine in the rear “Black Museum” section with no one the wiser. You’ll need the board (“wooden plate”) from the left side of the sewing-machine display and the chewing-gum wrapper from the waste basket just right of the guard post. Use the board on the shredder to give Darren a solid platform on which to work and, left-clicking on the window first, the  the aluminum-foil wrapper on the window to preserve the electric circuit when the window is opened. The window then becomes an  exit. Use it. 

Around front, another encounter with the institutional bum, who this time recites a poem. It should be familiar — it’s the complete version of the one you found in Borris’s pocket — and the bum says he heard it from “spirits of the forest” (i.e. Order members) near the old mine.

Mine

Darren reappears automatically in the Order’s meeting room and has the first of what will be several encounters with a ghost — this one of Vic Valley. (The body — rather large for a small boy’s — is sprawled on a stone slab.) Darren hears members approaching and must take cover. But there’s no rush at all. This sequence and the ones that follow are not timed. You just have perform certain tasks to kick the sequence forward.

Your first stop is the elevator over to the left. Here, you’ll watch the five members gather — all masked, save operational leader Miss Valley — and pick up some interesting comments about “the boy” (presumably Darren) not being in his grave and “drastic action” (which seems to mean murder). 

When Darren edges forward (automatically, what else?) to hear more, he’s spotted and flees out the crevice at the far left. Reenter the bunker at the right — there are no other options on this screen — and, before doing anything else, close the door behind you and bar it with the metal rod. Thank goodness for the unexpected return of rogue inventory items, I guess!

You’re going out as you originally came in. But the door to the tank room has been closed again and the known method to open it — pulling the left of the three levers between lockers and shelves — no longer works. This time you’ll have to pull the middle and right levers. (Someone has visited the bunker, tidied up Darren’s mess and rejiggered the mechanism.) (Either order will do.) 

The door now open, enter the tank room, use the switchbox to the left to close the door again and take both the metal bar beneath the switchbox and the re-coiled hose. Combine these two in inventory as a makeshift grapple and use it on the pipe at the right and Darren finds himself back in the sewers. 

Ostensibly the pursuit by The Order continues here. When Darren start to exit the screen on the far side of the heavy gate, two Order members appear from the wings. But this is just for appearances. You should have no further problems. Go left three times to a four-way intersection and then use the front-left exit to reach the gate. You can take the wooden block that’s holding it up to elicit an extra line or leave it in place; it doesn’t seem to matter. Go left again to another four-way, use the front-right exit and then head left to reach the ladder up to Angelina’s room — where you’ll find an angry Murray, who boots you out of the hotel. 

Darren automatically heads for the lighthouse. Left-click twice on the tall grass at the base of the tree to find a burned corpse. Darren believes this to be Angelina — and though we can’t see much of her face, who are we to say different, based on the available evidence? (After all, Darren was to meet Angelina here and the corpse is wearing the same bracelet on its left wrist that we saw her with in chapters I and II.) 

Grief stricken, he collapses — Darren is supposed to be a guy, isn’t he? — and dreams his end-of-chapter dreams. The wildest: Darren stabbing with one hand a prone form while seeming to hold Angelina’s hand with the other.

Chapter V

Darren wakes, or seems to wake, at night beside a fog-shrouded lighthouse with two new features: skulls underfoot and a tombstone at the right. In fact, he’s still dreaming and Darren just has to summon three resurrected corpses to move the story forward: Fuller (via the gravestone on the left), Darren’s Mom (the upper portion of the tree) and Borris three times over (the lighthouse entrance). 

One interesting comment here: Darren’s Mom says, “You aren’t my son anymore.”

The Academy

When Darren finally wakes, it’s on a new location (and a real one): just inside the entrance to the ruins of the Academy, which is adjacent to the lighthouse site. He’ll automatically talk to Ralph, who has a little corrugated-metal hovel in the left corner.

Ralph is a character from the original The Black Mirror. Unseen there save as an eye seen through a hole in a wall — and here, save as a conversation icon — he occupied the room next door to James (the illegitimate son of William Gordon) in the asylum that now serves as a the Gordon’s Palace hotel. 

You don’t actually have to talk to him right now. But his “fire” topic, along with establishing how Darren got to the Academy, should cast a little doubt on what Darren thinks he found at the lighthouse, while the “Angelina” one (which appears after you ask about “fire”) establishes that you’re following in her footsteps. She was looking for a door that led underground,    

That’s easy to find. Head up and right into the ruins to reach a circular door and a chessboard atop a stone pedestal. Four holes around the board are empty and you’ll need to fill the right ones with the right chess pieces to open the door. 

Two are right here: the queen in the grass at the base of pedestal and the pawn beneath the rocks to the right of the door. A clue can be found back at the lighthouse about where they should go — a note with the positions has conveniently been pinned to the tree — but, criminy, there are just four holes and trial and error will take just a few seconds to determine the queen goes in the left hole and the pawn in the near one.

The others? After you’ve left-clicked on the chessboard, return to Ralph and talk to him about “Chess pieces.” It turns out Ralph’s imaginary pal pal Mr., Bubby has a knight and Ralph makes clear that Mr. Bubby might loan it out in exchange for music. 

You don’t have anything like that and you’re not going to find it lying around in the academy ruins. But the bush to the right of the entrance seems to want more interaction than you can provide right now and the description suggests Darren needs a tool to cut off the branches. 

It’s hard to see, but a knife is sticking out of a beam not quite halfway up the left side of the lighthouse entrance. Take it, use it on the bush to cut off a branch and then on the branch in inventory to fashion a whistle. (Actually, it sounds more like a recorder.) Talk to Ralph about “whistle” and the knight is yours. It goes in the right hole on the chessboard.        

And the last piece? The game messes with you a bit here. The appearance of a raven and Ralph’s confirmation that the bird is a thief seem to suggest the missing king is in a nest somewhere. 

But note Ralph’s exact words: The bird seems to like shiny things.  I guess that could include a glossy chess piece, but not these particular chess pieces. That means the king must be here someplace and so it is. Just let of the lighthouse entrance is a ladder, and just right of the ladder is a crevice. Reach in to take the king and plop it down in the remaining (upper) hole to open the door.  

Odds & ends: Snap  a picture of the stone head over the exit from the Academy ruins.  This unlocks picture #19 which, uncharacteristically, includes Darren’s figure. And return to the lighthouse to snap the patch of the burned grass at the base of the tree to unlock #26, which, also uncharacteristically, is simply of the in-game shot of the corpse (minus Darren).

Step inside. You’ll disturb a raven that was picking at a backpack. (Did it make off with something?) Left-click twice on the pack to liberate Angelina’s diary and a note. Darren reads the diary automatically. 

The key revelation: Angelina believes Darren to be a Gordon. “His mother had an affair. And after the fire she went to the USA” (Of course, that doesn’t explain how Darren’s mother doesn’t look pregnant in a picture when she’s supposed to have been five months pregnant.)   

And the note? An admonition to Darren to complete Angelina’s work by destroying the soul keys and a summoning chamber beneath the Academy. 

To open the gate, you’ll need three mosaic tiles. Angelina is supposed to have one in her knapsack and the two others are believed  hidden in Black Mirror castle. She has one clue to their location: the name Maximillian Mortimer Gordon   

The thing is, the promised mosaic piece isn’t in the knapsack or the sleeping bag to the right. (You’ll have to check both to leave.) Darren then fastens onto the raven as the culprit. 

Odds & ends: Snap a picture of the “stone plinth” (the chessboard)  in the Academy ruins to unlock picture #25.

Black Mirror Castle

Leave this enclosure and Darren appears outside the castle gate. The main gate is impassable and the hinges (“braces”) on the smaller one to right are so badly rusted that it won’t move — until you give it some help using the invisible branch in the lower right corner. Use it on the small gate to pry it open and enter to reach a unique close-up view of the portico outside the front door. Here Darren is intercepted first by Louis (gardener at the Wales estate in The Black Mirror) and then by long-time Gordon family retainer Bates.

Run all his topics — Angelina’s picture seems to resonate with him — and Bates will usher Darren inside and, after the appearance of a spectral form in the mirror in the room’s upper right corner. introduce him to ladies Victoria (Samuel’s grandmother in The Black Mirror) and Eleanor (Samuel’s host at the Wales estate). 

You won’t learn much — but Darren, pretending to be a police inspector investigating the lighthouse murder, does receive permission to roam the castle.

Odds & ends: If you played the original The Black Mirror, you’ll quickly discover the castle has been pared down significantly. The family bedrooms, Robert Gordon’s study, the attic area, dining room and parlor are all missing — the parlor will turn up in the third game — and the library has been scrunched down to one screen. The exterior now consists only of the front view and the stables to the left of the castle. (The greenhouse and the castle gardens appear in the third game.)

Mosaic Piece 1

You can go after the first piece of the mosaic directly. The raven’s nest is atop the well near the stables. (You can reach this either by going left from the portico or out the kitchen door.) Take the ladder to the left of the stable door and use it on the well.

However, the raven’s going to fight off any attempt to get at its nest and you’ll have to distract it first. 

Remember your conversation with Ralph. It likes shiny things. You don’t have anything shiny, but you can take a teaspoon from the counter in front of the cupboard at the right side the kitchen. (Use the right exit from the main hall.)  

The spoon can’t be used directly on the raven. You’re going to have to secure it somewhere to keep the critter occupied while you retrieve the mosaic piece, and you don’t have anything suitable for this purpose. 

Eleanor does. She was knitting before your earlier conversation. Either in the full-room scene or the closeup, simply left-click twice on the knitting basket at her feet to secure a bit of yarn (“thread”) with her blessing. Use the thread on the spoon and then the “Spoon on thread” on the stairs to the right of the big stable door. The bird flies down to grab at the spoon and Darren now can climb the ladder to the nest and mosaic piece without further obstruction.

Mosaic Piece 2

You’ll find the clue from Angelina’s note ( “Maximillian Mortimer Gordon”) engraved on the stone plate on the pedestal at the center of the main hall. Presumably the mosaic piece is behind it. But Darren doesn’t have the tools for this operation — you can try the knife from the lighthouse, but it’s not sturdy enough — and in any case he can’t go to work with the two old ladies in attendance.

Distraction? Distraction. Enter the kitchen . On the stove in the far corner, you’ll find a teapot. Left-click on it twice and, provided you’ve checked out the plaque in the main hall, Darren will suggest ringing for teatime. As you may have intuited from the tea table in the library (through the main hall’s left exit ), the ladies have their cup in there. 

But a third left-click with a view to taking the pot is greeted with alarm by the maid Sally, who lets drop in the process that fact that Bates has gone into Willow Creek for some fresh tea. Darren won’t be able to claim the teapot until Sally is out of the kitchen. 

Distraction? Distraction. If you’ve been upstairs, you doubtless noticed the highly polished bathroom floor. Look at it and Darren marvels at the work required. What if you were to get it dirty? Take the rubber boots beside the kitchen’s rear entrance and use them on the muddy patch beside the base of the ladder out at the stables. Then take the muddy boots upstairs and use them to foul the bathroom floor.  Now tell Sally about it (via the “dirty bathroom” topic). She runs off and Darren can take the teapot. Drop the pot on the tea table at the left side of the library and Darren hatches a plot to venture into Willow Creek for some tea — first luring the Order to the hotel. Phones were notable in their absence from the castle in the original The Black Mirror, but now there are two — one on the right side of the library and the other on a bureau in the upstairs hall. Use either to call Murray with the news that Darren will be checking out.  

Odds & ends: In the library, reached via the left exit from the main hall, take a picture of the Gordon family tree at the far right to unlock picture #12.

Then off to the village — both to spy on Bates and to collect the tea. The spying part is automatic. Darren arrives near the museum, spots Bates coming from the library — not exactly a likely source of fresh tea — and follows him  to a rendezvous with Tom outside the Three Kegs Inn. Tom’s off to find Order leader Valley.

Which is convenient, because Darren now needs to get into Tom’s locked pub — the only place in town likely to have anything resembling tea. Use Tom’s own lockpick on the door — ah, the mocking laugh of fate! — just as you did on the lockboxes back at the hotel and take the tea from the table nearest the window. When you leave the building, you’ll jump straight back to the castle gate. Return to the library, use the tea on the tea table and, despite the reference to the missing hot water, pop back to the kitchen to ask Sally to announce that tea is served. When Darren returns to the main hall, he’ll find the ladies absent. Time to get to work.

You’ll quickly discover that, even with the old ladies off guzzling caffeine, you can’t do anything with the slab. It does seem as though the low fence around the globe must play some part — the cursor remains red even after you elicit its description — but no explicit hint is provided for your next step. 

However, if you’ve already been meticulous in your inspection of the castle, it stands to reason that the hint will appear in connection with some new feature — i.e. something activated by Darren’s having distracted Sally. 

That’d be in the bathroom. Left-click on the mirror for a vision of Samuel’s ghost and a second time after Darren smashes the mirror to verify that Samuel was holding a book and pointing at a particular tile on the opposite wall. 

Darren can’t dislodge this tile on his own, and you’re going to have to go looking for tools. Bet you have an idea where to find them. On each of our visits to the stables, we’ve found Louis working under the car — presumably not entirely with his bare hands. Sure enough, just right of the rear of the car (and almost invisible in the rain) is a toolbox. Inspect it and Darren grabs a hammer. Use this on the tile and Darren knocks it out, automatically reaches into the gap behind it and pulls out a page of William Gordon’s diary with some annotations by his grandson Samuel. 

Look at the page. The only part we can see is a drawing of six little pyramids — the second, fourth and fifth from the front crossed out. These correspond to the ornaments atop the little fence around the pedestal. Return there and click on the fence to discover that the pyramids can now be depressed. Darren automatically does this to the nearest one. That’s not among the ones pictured, so left-click on it to raise it again, depress the three crossed out on the diary page, activate the stone slab with a left-click to open it and reach inside to claim the second mosaic piece.

Mosaic Piece 3

The diary reports that Darren has no idea where the third piece is hidden.

But you do by now, don’t you? If you tried the locked double doors in the lower left-hand corner of the main hall while the ladies were present, Victoria warned you off. And if questioned about them, Sally reports that Bates angrily told her off when he caught her listening at there. Twenty-four years after the fire, this all speaks more to a hidden secret than an actual danger.
  
The diary pushes you toward Bates, who has retired to his room on Victoria’s instructions. You can question him and get a lot of good background info. But he’s loyal to a fault on the whole “fire damage” story and you’ll get only the party line. 

Instead, just decoy him out of his room. Head for the bathroom, take the head of the mop Sally left behind, stuff it in the bathtub drain and turn on the water. Then tell Bates and Sally (in either order; it doesn’t matter) the bathroom is flooding and enter Bates’s room, 

Left-click twice on the bedpost above the medical gear on the bed to extract a small key. Use it on the top drawer of the dresser in the corner. You’ll find a locked metal box that uses symbols in its combination lock, another photo of Darren’s mother outside Black Mirror’s gate (this one taken of a slim young woman in December 1969 — two months before Darren’s birth) and documents that include transfers matching the ones in Ms. Michaels’s bank book, Right-click on the documents to extract a four-part memory-aid for the combination to the box and again on the memory-aide to read it. It consists of four references that Bates used to remind himself of the correct symbols.    

“The nymphs’ numbers:” We’ll start here because it’s where Darren starts after his exit from Bates’s room.

Voluptuous naked women make four appearances at Black Mirror and each is now numbered. The painting in the upstairs hallway is marked with the Roman numeral XVIII (18) while the three statues at the gate (from left to right) display numerals for 20, 19 and 1. 

Once you’ve left-clicked on all four locations, Darren weighs the possibilities and finally translates the numbers into the letters A, R, S and T which, rearranged, spell out “Star.” (Shame we’re not allowed to do it ourselves.) 

“On Sir Egmont’s portrait:” The “portrait” part is bound to confuse. The castle is full of pictures. But none of them have anything to so with an “Egmont.”

Sally, now back in the kitchen, is  your contact on this one. But she won’t help you until “Inspector Falk” has helped her brother with his speeding tickets. Darren figures he can just pretend to help Rupert Wood and put one over on her. 

It’s a little tricky. At this stage, a call to directory assistance (only available via the upstairs hall phone) will establish that there are 18 Rupert Woods in England. Naturally, you’ll want to narrow that down and here Bates is your man. He’s now on the sofa at the upper side of the main hall and, at one remove from the original question about Sir Egmont, it’s fine to talk to him on this topic. Ask him about “Speeding ticket” and he says Sally’s family has a farm in Sussex.

Armed with this info, use that upstairs phone to reach the Sussex Rupert directly. With a bit of deception, Darren establishes that his age is 34. 

Back for another chat with Sally. Darren’s knowing Rupert’s address and age convinces her “Falk” has done as she asked and she reveals that Sir Egmont’s is a a brand of breakfast cereal — its emblem a small cross.

“The builder’s eldest sister:” Victoria can get you started on this.  Go see her in the library and ask about “Builder.” She’ll offer that the builder most responsible for Black Mirror’s current appearance was Frederic Arthur Gordon. Then check the family tree on the room’s right side and left-click on the centrally-located pairing of Frederic Arthur and Andrea to learn that the oldest of Fred’s four sisters was named Rose.  

“My Christian name:”  Tough one. No one seems to know it — not Victoria, not Eleanor, not Sally. (She loathes Bates and suggests “Lucifer.”) Asking isn’t an option with Louis and of course you can’t ask Bates himself. 

The diary suggests the name might be written down. Did you notice the mailbox between the two gates at the entrance? Empty before, it now contains a letter. The envelope is addressed simply to “Mr. Bates” but the contents — a bill for a gravestone (as the medical gear in his room suggests, Bates is dying) — reveal that his given name is “Edward Bartholomew.”

Darren’s unclear how that will translate itself into a symbol, but Victoria knows the story of the apostle St. Bartholomew — a martyr who was skinned alive and whose symbol is thus a knife. 

With all four symbols now noted in the diary, get back up the Bates’s room, left-click on the box on the dresser and plug in the symbols — starting at the top with the cross and working clockwise with rose, knife and star. Inside, a key and half a locket containing a picture of Darren at 3 or 4. Only it’s marked “Adrian ” (of which “Darren” might be a glaringly imperfect anagram).   

The large key opens the double doors in the lower left corner of the castle’s main hall. (Bates has vanished from the hall and seemingly from the game.) Darren enters automatically and follows the corridor beyond to a large disused room with a spooky mirror frame at the far end. A second left-click reveals a mechanism at the bottom that seems to want a small ball. 

No such ball here. However, you can take a “wooden plate” from the floor beside the covered picture leaning against the right wall. When Darren picks it up, he suggests it goes with a game and reports that “Ralph” is written on the back. 

Odds & ends: Take a picture of the mirror to unlock picture #11 — a shot of Darren and Samuel that appears nowhere in the game. (It was used in early promotional materials.)

Return to the Academy and talk to Ralph about the plate. He’ll turn over the rest of the game and say he received it from a “a nice lady.”  “I couldn’t recognize her,” says Ralph, “but Mr. Bubby says she is ‘a holy one’.” 

Odds & ends: “Couldn’t” being the operative word.

The game is unplayable in its broken condition, but use the plate on the sliding tile puzzle and it proves to be the missing piece. Darren automatically sets about solving it.

The Sliding-Tile Puzzle

This is a different type from the one that unlocked the roll-top desk back in Biddeford. No picture. And no randomness. Here you arrange 15 pieces — eight silver ram heads and seven golden lion heads — so that the designated numbers of silver pieces appear in each column and gold pieces in each row.

It’s actually quite simple and can be completed in three discrete steps. Part of the solution (the left column) is already in place at the start and the remaining portion of the puzzle can be solved by simply rotating the pieces counter-clockwise in ever-smaller formations.

1) The top row must be all silver heads. Simple rotate border of the  the 4 x 3 array (i.e. the four right most out the golden heads here and bring in three silver heads — two from the rightmost column and one (when a vacant space appears above it) from the second row.

Afterwards, the puzzle should look like this:

2) With the top row and left column now in place, you’ve solved almost half the puzzle. Now we’re just going to rotate counter-clockwise the pieces around the rim of the 3 x 3 unsolved region to complete the second row.

Stop when the puzzle looks like this:

 3) Finally, just rotate counter-clockwise these five pieces ….

… until the puzzle looks like this:

When you move the final gold head into the third row, you’ll see you’ve exposed a recess beneath the square in the lower-right corner. Within, a small steel ball. Take it, use it on the mirror in the castle old wing and left- or right-click on the mirror to kick off a second puzzle.  

Ball Maze Puzzle

Here, you just have to enable the ball to reach the center of the five-ring maze by pressing the side buttons to lower the walls between rings at the appropriate times. This is beyond easy and gravity will do most of the work.

Press the round button at the lower left to release the ball. It’ll rotate clockwise between the two lowest openings between  the fifth and fourth  rings. 

You want to break up this go-nowhere cycle, so, as the ball approaches the entrance to the fourth ring, press the uppermost button on the left side of the maze. This lower the third wall from the center and changes the ball’s course. It now goes over the top of the maze, down the right side and then toward the middle. 

As the ball approaches the entrance to the innermost ring, press the lowest button on the right. The ball drops down the hole at the center and the mirror slides back to reveal an entrance. 

Use it to enter what appears to be the well-kept up room of a young girl. Left-click on the left drawer of the desk at the right to retrieve a music box and the third mosaic piece.

Odds & ends: Take a picture of the music box to unlock the final mini-game (#4: “Turning Discs”).

Your natural inclination will be to return to the Academy and insert the mosaic pieces in the plinth — and you can’t. Try and Darren says “This room … it holds the answers:” Something remains undone. Left-click on the music box. Darren has a fit of some kind and falls into a restless sleep.