Black Mirror II

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.
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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.)