Secret Files: Tunguska Walkthrough by Peter Olafson

Version:
This is version 1.0. It’s based on the US edition of the game.

Contact:
Lingering questions? Mistakes? Something unclear? You can write to
me at .

Copyright:
This document is copyright 2010 by Peter Olafson. You may not post
it, distribute it, edit it, excerpt it (except for “fair use”
purposes in news coverage), sell it or publish it in any fashion without
my prior written consent. At this time, the only site with permission
to post the walkthrough is JustAdventure.com.

Introduction

Vladimir Kalenkov is conducting
an experiment in his office when a hooded form appears through the
glass in his door. The scientist doesn’t see the silhouette,
but he does see the door open. Vladimir steps into the hallway. No
one’s there, but snowy footprints lead down a hallway to an
open window. When the overhead light fails, he takes a flashlight
from a bracket on the wall, closes the window and, in the reflection,
sees the hooded visitor behind him. The flashlight falls and, again
in silhouette, we see the hooded figure extend an arm. Vladimir holds
his head and falls to his knees and then to the ground.

The Museum

Daughter Nina arrives to
find her father’s office a shambles.

The only thing you have
to do right now is call the police using the phone on the table in
the foreground. No help there, but you can’t leave the office
until you do. Then see if there’s anyone around who might know
what happened.

(However, note that once
Nina talks to Vladimir’s neighbor Max, she’ll be prevented
from conducting a more thorough exploration of Vladimir’s office
until a little later in the game. If you’d rather get this scut
work out of the way early, hold off on that interview until you complete
your search of Vladimir’s office. )

Vladimir’s neighbor
seems to be in — read the name beside the door to identify him as
“Max Gruber” — but he’s rocking out and can’t
hear Nina’s knock above the music.

You can turn off the music.
There’s a fuse box above the fire extinguisher. Of course, it’s
locked and now you’re off to find a key. It’s downstairs
in the museum proper. Move toward the back of the hall — just left
of the Triceratops — and you’ll be treated to a closeup on
the base of the Tyrannosaurus Rex display. There’s a faint outline
of a door in the fake stone.

Left-click on it and you’ll
find Gareth from the English edition of The Office. Actually, this
is Eddy, the museum’s caretaker. He’s frightened — going
on about creatures with “black capes and bony fingers”
who seemed to float in the air (though the one who visited Vladimir
left footprints) and filled his head with voices. He clears out —
leaving behind the fuse box key. Take it, unlock the fuse box and
left-click on the interior.

You may discover now that
you can’t tell which fuse goes with which office. There’s
a fix for that, too. Back downstairs, you’ll find a magazine
rack in the left near corner. On the wall to the left is a clipboard.
Provided you’ve supplied a name for Vladimir’s neighbor,
you can right-click on this to learn Gruber’s is #4.

Left-click on the fuse
box to pull the relevant fuse and set off a tirade by Max (who apparently
was working on his PC). Nina then unleashes her own nails-on-a-blackboard
voice and the two meet. The only useful nugget you’ll extract
is the Vladimir wasn’t doing the museum’s planned inventory.
Something had come up. (The reference to the caretaker here is a red
herring. You’re done with Eddy.)

That runs through the available
help from Max. But Nina can’t leave the museum without a better
sense of what’s become of her Dad, so it’s back to Vladimir’s
office.

Here you’ll find
Detective Kanski. Kind of a surprise, given the outcome of Nina’s
earlier phone call to the police. This hard-boiled cop doesn’t
tell Nina much (except “this thing really stinks”) and
doesn’t ask her much before he boots her out and you’ll
find her and Max outside the museum with a new agenda: Check Vladimir’s
apartment. They say a tender goodbye and then you can left-click on
Nina’s motorcycle.

After an interval, she’s
followed by a dark-colored car.

Odds & ends:
There are a few forward-looking references here. Above the sofa at
the left is a picture of Vladimir’s wedding and an award he
received from the Russian Academy of Science for an expedition in
the 1950s or 1960s. And above the desk is a map of Siberia.

– Over by the window in
Vladimir’s office is a torn-in-half photo. Nina doesn’t
need to take it to make progress here, but doing so gets you another
diary entry.

Who is the expedition member
depicted in the missing half? This is nowhere declared — the other
half of the picture never appears — but given that the game at this
stage is dedicated to concealing the identity of a certain Oleg Kambursky
(with whom we’re about to become acquainted) and it turns out
that Oleg did take part in one of Vladimir’s expeditions, it’s
a fair bet it’s supposed to be Oleg.

– And while it’s
easy to jump to the conclusion that Vladimir’s mysterious visitor
also searched his office, it’s a reasonable inference that this
was also Oleg’s work — and that he tore the photo to cover
his trail. As you’re about to see, Vladimir’s house is
in the same wrecked state. The intruder is still there and Nina gets
sucker-punched on entry. And that’s not the way Vladimir’s
kidnappers operate! (Late in the game, we learn this is precisely
Oleg’s style.)

– In Vladimir’s office,
Nina can also examine the sample analyzer to the right of the door,
the file cabinet to the left, the desk, the radiator and the coin
showcase (and the coins within) beside the window. (This last is the
location of a stand-alone puzzle a little later in the game.) In the
hall outside, the bulletin board, the two radiators and Vladimir’s
replacement nameplate. At the front of the museum, the Tyrannosaurus
display. At the back, the triceratops to the right and the diagram
at the rear. Outside the museum, the banner above the entrance.

– In addition, Nina can
try to use her keys on Max’s door and the fuse box, the fuse-box
key on Max’s door, the sample analyzer in Vladimir’s office
and the telephone a second time.

– Nina starts the game
with only a bunch of keys. These have one use: They let her into the
compartment beneath the seat of her motorcycle. This contains Nina’s
cell phone, which stays with her for most of the game and figures
in a couple of puzzles, and her sunglasses, which will be cannibalized
for another puzzle during the second visit to the museum. The keys’
description suggests Nina lives with her Dad — “mine and Dads
apartment” — but other references refer only to Vladimir’s
apartment and thus suggest Nina lives on her own.

– Nina’s reference
to “two fingers” in her tirade at the police dispatcher
foreshadows a later discovery about Oleg Kambursky — one that finds
a practical application after you reach Russia.

- The car? This’ll
turn up again at the same location after Max returns from Ireland.
Its occupants are identified only in the game’s final chapter.
Right now, it’s here to just muddy the issues.

– And Kanski? Strange him
turning up that way after the dispatcher blew Nina off. It’s
too early to say much about him — except that he’s clearly
based on the late German actor Klaus Kinski.

Vladimir’s Apartment

Watch carefully. There’s
the barest flicker of activity on the staircase before Nina opens
the door. Upstairs, she’s knocked out by an intruder and comes
around to find the place in the same wrecked state as her Dad’s
museum office.

Search the place. You’ll
quickly focus on the password-protected computer on the desk at the
left. The password must be somewhere in the apartment, but a search
may leave you feeling stymied. You’ll come up with:

– a crack in the floorboards
beneath the left near corner of the carpet. Nina sees something in
the crack, but can’t pull it out manually and you don’t
have anything in inventory that could be inserted there.

– an apparent book in the
armoire drawer on the bed. Right-click on it in inventory to see it’s
not actually a book, but a locked “book casket.”

Is there a key? Sure: In
the fish tank at the right rear. And Nina’s prevented from simply
reaching in and grabbing it by a grate on top of the tank. (Simply
removing the grate isn’t an option.)

So now you’re looking
for potential extraction tools. The one for the crack in the floorboards
is close at hand. Just step outside — a scene skipped over on Nina’s
way to the apartment — and rummage through the trash can in the right
near corner. You’ll come up with a rubber glove and a bicycle
spoke. Back inside, insert the spoke in the crack to produce a cassette
tape.

Where can you play it?
The best candidate seems to be the portable cassette player on the
floor to the left of the armoire (here called a “closet”).
But if you try to use the cassette on it, Nina complains it’s
“ready for the junkyard” and that the headphones are missing.
(It really is junkyard material. Right-click on the player in inventory
and Nina discards it and keeps the two AA batteries. You’ll
use these to power up a camera a little farther along in the story.)

The other alternative is
the short-wave radio — clearly identifiable only in the close-up
view of the desk. This contains a cassette player as well. Use the
cassette on the radio and then activate the radio for this message:

“The first and
last on the car, a fourth of the openings in the entrance to the underworld,
and finally, the guardians of my work.”

Hints to the components
of a numeric pass code? It looks that way. What can we make of them?

Vladimir’s car is
in the garage downstairs. Just move left from the door and you’ll
see the old clunker. The first and last numbers in the license plate
are 2 and 3.

The “entrance to
the underworld” sounds endgame-spooky but here it’s clearly
a euphemism for the sewers. There’s a manhole right in front
of the car with 16 small holes around the rim. A fourth of those would
be 4.

Finally, Vladimir’s
work is at the museum. If you need a reminder, jet back there to find
it’s still closed and that two distinctly guardian-like creatures
flank the entrance.

So: 2342. You’re
in. Once past the spam, Nina finds a reply her father wrote to someone
named Oleg.

Subject: Tunguska.

Hello Oleg, haven’t
heard from you in a long time. I’m doing well again. It took
me quite some time to come to terms with the whole thing.

To answer your question:
It’s been a long time since I thought about that. And honestly,
I’m rather happy about it. I under-estimated those guys once
already and my wife paid with her life.

I swore back then to
drop the subject for once and for all. Please don’t take offense,
but I’m just going to leave it at that.

But now that you’re
living nearby again, we can meet in person. I would like to see you
again. Get in touch and let me know, when and where would be convenient.

Vladimir Kalenkov

This raises all kinds of
questions. What “whole thing”? What was Oleg’s question
— and why is he suddenly contacting Vladimir after this “long
time”? What “guys” did Vladimir under-estimate?
How does it all relate to his wife’s death (which we now learn
Nina understood to have occurred in an accident)?

Ultimately, most of these
questions will go unanswered. But it stands to reason you’re
going to follow up with this Oleg. Email’s not an option and
we don’t have his last name or real address. But you still have
that locked “book casket” and the key in the fish tank
and it’s a fair bet they all go together.

Alas, the spoke that pulled
out the cassette won’t work with the fish tank, being that there’s
no hole in the key handle to snag.

Have you tried returning
to the museum exterior? Talk to the little girl sleeping on the bench
to the left of the entrance. Lisa seems to have encountered the black-robed
men who scared Eddy and may have pictures of them on her Dad’s
allegedly broken camera. The old adventure-game favor system works
fine here: Fix Lisa’s bike and camera and you’ll get a
reward that helps you track down Oleg.

Bike first. Lisa says she
ran over a glass shard at a construction site — this turns out to
be an important clue — and the bicycle has a flat tire. When you’re
done talking, left-click on the bike to get the deflated inner tube.

You’ve repaired a
leak in a tire in real life, right? If so, and you kept your eye peeled
outside Vladimir’s house, you probably have some ideas on how
to go about its repair now. There’s another bicycle and a pail
of water just outside Vladimir’s front door. Activate Vladimir’s
bike to detach the pump and use the pump on the deflated tube. Then
immerse the tube in the pail to locate the leak. (Amazingly, the tube
remains inflated for the duration.)

Nina doesn’t have
a proper rubber patch, but the rubber glove from the trash can should
do. She just needs some glue. See that crate over to the left of the
car? Right -click on it to come up with some double-sided tape and
a tube of glue. (Nina here talks like a character from Speed Racer.)
Use the glue on the glove, the glove + glue on the reinflated tire
and, back at the museum, the repaired tire on Lisa’s bike. Then
just talk to Lisa again to get the camera.

This is harder in one sense
and easier in another. You knew about the flat from Lisa, but she
offers no such diagnosis for the camera and a right-click reveals
simply that it doesn’t work. You don’t have an opportunity
to actually test it.

In fact, the camera isn’t
broken. The batteries are dead. Just sub in the ones from Vladimir’s
cassette player for a glimpse of two small robed figures and an amulet.
(This appears in Nina’a diary.) Give the camera back to Lisa
for a small reward: a “microwave hamster.”

Don’t skip through
Lisa’s dialogue here: She offers a better description for the
item than Nina’s own: “a little magnet in the shape of
a hamster.” If you miss this, tough luck, for said magnetism
is nowhere implied until you use the hamster on the fish tank.
Then use the newly-liberated key on the book casket to reveal Vladimir’s
address book and a little note about a diadem from the museum.

The museum’s still
closed, so we’ll come back to this later. But read the diadem
note now. It’ll make things clearer when you come back to the
item in conversation with Max. The key line: “The diadem
will illuminate the real princess, and she will realize that money
is not the greatest treasure.”

Right-click on the address
book in inventory to locate Oleg’s house. Before you set out,
collect the pizza and salt shaker from Vladimir’s desk; left
click on the pail outside to detach the handle; and use Nina’s
keys on the motorcycle seat and then activate the seat to extract
her cell phone and sunglasses. This’ll save you some traveling
and searching during the upcoming segment.

(You can also find a pencil
just left of the computer keyboard. However, this don’t need
it. You won’t find a use for this until you get to Russia, where
a pencil-less player will find another.)

Odds & ends:
Note the cigarette butts near the manhole cover. Vladimir is a non-smoker.
Somebody’s been watching his place.

Detective Kanski? It’s
a leap, knowing as little about him as we now do, but yes. He has
a cigarette in his mouth in his first scene.

This suggests his involvement
goes deeper than simply responding to Nina’s call to police.
Is he also responsible for the break-in? Unclear. (We’ll soon
pick up some info from Nina that’ll make you wonder.) But my
bet’s on Oleg for the one at the museum and it thus stands to
reason he’s also to blame for the one at Vladimir’s home.

– In the apartment, Nina
can also examine the bed, the closet and the files to the left of
the door. In the closeup of the desk, the notes tacked to the rear
wall. Outside, the broken rungs in the lattice work beside the garbage
pail. It appears someone climbed up here and through the window over
Vladimir’s desk.

– Nina can try to use the
files, the refilled inner tube on the fish tank and on the porcelain
bowl (provided she’s filled it with radiator water) and the
patched inner tube on Lisa.

– The car in the garage
is a Wartburg — a brand (named for a castle near the plant) that
was produced in East Germany until 1991. This one appears to be a
312 model from the mid 1960s. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wartburg_312.jpg)

Oleg’s House

Zoom in on the front door
and press the doorbell to the right. Oleg is not exactly helpful.
He denies knowing Vladimir and quickly closes the door.

Weird. What’s going
on? “Did I say something wrong?” Nina asks herself. “Or
exactly the right thing?”

A little nosiness goes
a long way here. Repeated attempts with the doorbell are unavailing,
so make your way around to the back and peek through the little gap
in the blinds. In this view of the kitchen, you’ll find a perturbed
Oleg off to the left, making call after telephone call. You’ve
thrown him into a panic somehow — but Nina can’t hear anything
that might identify the source of the panic

Fly on the wall? We’ll
have to settle for a cat on the floor. Did you notice the pet door
and the food dishes indoors and out? When you return to the front
of the house after peering through the back window, you’ll find
a little gray cat outside the front door.

Approach the door again
for a closeup view. You’re going to enlist the critter as your
spy, and the adventure-game favor system is in full flare here: You’ll
have to do something for the cat first.

In the front-door closeup,
you’ll find the cat standing over its dish. Clearly it is hungry.
I’m not sure if it’s hungry for gross tuna fish pizza,
but that’s what you’ve got. Use the pizza on the dish.
That’ll keep the cat in position.

Now set up your “European
roaming Dictaphone.” Use the double-sided tape on your cell
phone and then the taped phone on the cat to attach the phone to its
back. Quite a load for a little cat, but effective. It’ll provide
Nina with a recording of Oleg’s agitated phone patter.

Now you just to have coax
the cat inside. Maybe you noticed a second cat dish on the floor when
you were spying on Oleg through the rear window. That one’s
a combination food and water dish. In other words, the cat would have
to go back inside for a drink if it were to get thirsty.

And you have something
to make it thirsty. Use the salt on the pizza. The cat prances away.
Nina removes to the rear window automatically and sees the cat inside
lapping away at the water half of the indoor dish. The plan’s
coming off perfectly.

But how do you get the
cat outside again? Call it. Use that yellow phone booth out front.
The cell phone’s set on vibrate so as not to raise Oleg’s
suspicions, but the poor cat’s in for a shock.

Here comes the cat. And
there goes the cat — right up the tree at the left side of the front
yard, leaving the phone behind on an inaccessible branch. (It’s
that shiny spot one branch down from the cat.)

You’ll have to put
together a gadget on the spot to bring it down. Just pretend you’re
going after one of the game’s animated butterflies. You’ll
need the unused blue trash bag (just to the right of the booth), the
handle from the pail outside Vladimir’s house (which holds the
bag open), the broomstick beside the green barrel at the side of the
house and the remainder of your double-stick tape (which is applied
automatically to connect the stick and bag).

The combo is a “brailer.”
Anyone heard of a brailer? Me neither. Anyway, it works. The recording
(which now plays automatically) refers to Kalenkov’s absence
and Tunguska and dealing with a certain matter (Nina?) needs to be
dealt with. The person at the other end is to call back.

By the way, the poor little
cat’s still stuck up in the tree.

You still have a lead on
which to follow up — the exhibit tag — but when you click on the
motorcycle and then the museum, Nina reminds you it won’t reopen
until evening and decides to take a nap.

Cut-scene of a dark building:
A well-dressed man stands at the window of a penthouse with his back
to us. We don’t know who’s speaking — he’s not
identified by name until Nina reaches Cuba in the latter half of the
game — or to whom he is speaking. Bottom line: The caller hasn’t
procured something the man in the penthouse wants. Kalenkov still
hasn’t appeared and says they may have to take “other
options” into consideration.

Odds & ends:
In the closeup of Oleg’s front door, Nina can examine the pet
door. At the back of the house, the hose.

– Nina can return to the
gap in the blinds after listening to the recording and find the kitchen
empty. And she can try the phone booth before and after scaring the
cat back outside. She can also try to use the broomstick to knock
the cell phone down from the tree.

– And Oleg’s panic?
We’ve already suggested that he’s behind the break ins
at the museum and Vladimir’s apartment and this is just more
evidence to support the theory. Suppose you were in this position
— and then the daughter of the man you burglarized shows up at your
door? You’d freak and call whoever ordered the break in.

– The only definition for
“brailer” that Google turned up is at http://www.fishing.mosaicprojects.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=73&Itemid=107.
It’s “a large dip net used to scoop fish from the
seine net into the boat”.

- Nina also mentions that
the recording includes reference to “something in the mail for
Oleg” and asking Max about it later. Ain’t gonna happen!
This appears to be a discarded plot element.

– The dark tower is in
Berlin. You can see that city’s Fernsehturm television tower
in the background to the left of the structure.

– And that’s significant
in itself. When the man in the tower asks about Vladimir, the man
on the other end says, “Still nothing here, either” —
meaning he’s calling from some other location. In other words,
there’s a fairly widespread search afoot for Nina’s father.

– So where is “here”?
Where might these people be expecting Vladimir to reappear? Probably
Moscow. Nina will soon be headed there.

– And to whom is penthouse
guy speaking? The easy inference from proximity is that this is his
call back to Oleg. You’ll recall from the “Dictaphone”
recording that Oleg was expecting a return call. But the nervous man
on the other end doesn’t sound like Oleg (or like anyone else
in the game) and it doesn’t necessarily have to be someone we’ve
met.

The Museum

Nina arrives for her second
visit to the museum with the feeling she’s being followed. When
she returned to her own home (which we never see), she thought she
saw the face of “that Kanski guy” in the window.

More mud in the water.
Even if he’s not involved in the break ins, what would Kanski
be doing inside Nina’s place?

Make your way up to Max’s
office. Inside, Nina talks to him automatically. You won’t get
anything material on Oleg or caretaker Eddy, but the two other topics
kick up some dirt.

Tunguska:
Max has a working knowledge of the vast explosion that occurred in
Russia’s Tunguska region in 1908 and mentions that Vladimir
once took part in an expedition there.

He briefs Nina on what’s
known about the incident. The shock wave from the blast — the Hiroshima
bomb times 2,000 — destroyed a huge area and killed most of the native
Evenk shepherds. Expeditions to determine the cause turned up nothing
and theories about the event run to a meteor, the detonation of an
UFO and the appearance of a new form of energy. Max then volunteers
to collect articles on the subject. He’ll run off to do so once
you’ve exhausted his four topics. When you talk to Max again
after Nina completes the museum’s puzzle sequence, they’ll
appear as two new entries in the diary.

Diadem:
The note Nina found with the address book relates to one of the museum’s
exhibits. Max tracks it down from the reference number and turns it
over for her inspection. It’s essentially a tiara minus its
three jewels: an emerald, a ruby and an amethyst.

Listen carefully to what
Nina thinks afterward: The note looks like a hidden message. Vladimir
used to call Nina “the true princess” — close to the
“real princess” in the note.

If you haven’t already
done so, read it to take some direction on what comes next: “The
diadem will illuminate the real princess and she will realize that
money is not the greatest treasure.”

It’s not going to
illuminate a thing in this jewel-free condition. While Max retrieves
the Tunguska articles, Nina’s job is to restore the diadem to
something like its original state and then find the appropriate place
to use it to achieve “illumination.” She’ll have
to find one jewel, a facsimile of another and combine items to supply
the appearance of the third.

The facsimile is right
here. I’d humbly suggest that stealing from the guy who’s
helping you is not the best way to start this little quest. But about
midway up the totem pole to the left of the refrigerator is a round
bit of red glass. Nina can pry it out with the bicycle spoke with
the thin justification that the gem was looking at her in “an
evil way.” (Isn’t that the same justification crazy people
use for committing assaults?)

You may already have the
actual gem — just not in usable form. If you’ve searched Vladimir’s
office, you probably found a rock atop a cloth to the right of the
telephone. (If not, go get it now.) Take it and you’ll see in
inventory that a violet gem — a real amethyst, it turns out — is
embedded within it.

Alas, the bicycle spoke
is history — it broke extracting the red bit of glass — but a look
inside Max’s fridge turns up an unlabeled but apparently corrosive
liquid that might eat away the surrounding stone. (Also a bag of Plaster
of Paris. You get both automatically.)

Using the acid requires
some kind of container. The porcelain bowl at the opposite end of
the same table is unsuitable for the purpose — it’ll acquire
another one shortly — but the flask atop the sample analyzer at the
right side of Vladimir’s office works nicely. Just use the rock
on the flask in inventory, then acid on the flask + rock, and you’ll
be left with the jewel.

Finally, the emerald. It’s
really just a question of recognizing that you already have a blue
lens — from Nina’s sunglasses — and so need to combine it
with a yellow one to produce a green tint.

That may be hard to sort
out unless you fastened onto young Lisa’s line earlier about
getting her flat tire when running over broken glass at a construction
site and realized the site was just right of the museum. See the intact
reflector atop the striped post? A broken one can be found on the
ground just to the left. Use this piece on the sunglasses to find
the result has “a green shimmer.”

So you have the “gems.”
But if Nina tries to use any of them on the diadem, they simply fall
out. Alas, the glue went south with Nina’s repair of Lisa’s
ruptured tire. But you did find Plaster of Paris in the fridge. The
instructions are right on the package. (Right-click on it in inventory.)
Water, vegetable oil and the plaster itself. Not to mention a container.
That’d be the porcelain bowl at the left end of the table in
the foreground in Vladimir’s office.

You’ve already seen
water — the fish tank at Vladimir’s place and the bucket outside
— but that’s out of bounds. You can’t leave the museum
until your business is complete and ordinary faucets therein seem
in short supply.

But radiators use water,
don’t they, and while the ones out in the hallway can only be
examined, a radiator below the window at the left side of Vladimir’s
office is usable. A right-click on the valve at its right end gives
you the misimpression that it’s filled with air but a left click
suggests otherwise. Nina says she’d “ruin the whole floor”
were she to use it and that has to mean water. Use the bowl on the
valve to fill it.

No vegetable oil can be
had here, but the “vegetable” part is meant to be interpreted
loosely. If you right-click on the plant outside the offices, you’ll
learn it’s aloe vera — widely used in moisturizers and hence
likely to contain some kind of oil. (Inspect a piece in inventory
to learn it’s dripping oil.)

Add the water, aloe vera
and putty to the bowl in any order. Use the diadem on the bowl and
then the three gems on the diadem and everything’s in place.

And for now the riddle
on the diadem tag: How will it illuminate the “real princess”?
Nina noted after her conversation with Max that her father used to
call her a princess, but using the diadem directly on her is unavailing.
It stands to reason you’ll have to shine some light through
it and the only usable light source in the place is the one on the
right side of the entry level — in the foreground just above and
to the right of the Triceratops head. Right-click on it to learn it
“brings a little illumination into the darkness.”

Use the diadem here and
a rainbow of colors strikes the museum’s floor plan just across
the hall. Look at the floor plan now to see a room has been marked
in invisible ink with an “8.”

You do NOT have to go looking
for this room. When you back out of the floor plan, Max appears. Nina
automatically talks to him, and you can ask about Tunguska again and
Room 8.

“Tunguska”
nets you the promised two new articles in Nina’s diary: one
a general wrapup on the event and the other a 1938 news item on a
Russian mineralogist’s discovery of a substance of apparently
extra-terrestrial origin. Oddly, this piece doesn’t linger over
the discovery but notes that the mineralogist also made headlines
in 1927 when he found a giant object of an unknown material between
two overgrown plants near the Tunguska blast site.

Via “Room 8,”
you learn that the exhibits from that under-renovation chamber are
being stored in Max’s office. You’ll automatically reappear
there. While Max fiddles with a crate to the left, Nina can inspect
a raft of new hotspots.

The only one of note is
the “relief disk” that hangs at the center of the bookcase.
Zoom in on the disk and then remove the coin in the niche below the
central face. Nina says the coin’s not part of this exhibit.
But then where should it go?

If you conducted a thorough
inspection of Vladimir’s office, you already know. Just to the
right of the window is a coin display with the glass top smashed and
a single missing coin. In the closeup view, place your new coin in
the open space at the left end of the bottom row to see it matches
the others in that row. “The coin seems to complete the set,.”
says Nina.

But that’s not enough.
A note at the upper right corner of the display reads: “And
the prince said to the princess: whether vertical, horizontal or in
both main diagonals: make sure there is never a repeat within a line.”
In other words, you’re to swap the coins so that two of the
same type don’t appear in a line.

There are many ways to
solve this. The quickest I’ve managed is six moves. With the
spaces numbered as below …

1 2
3 4

5 6
7 8

9 10
11 12

13 14 15
16

… my coin swaps were
as follows:

1< > 8
3 < > 11
4 < > 13
5 < > 12
6 < > 14
9 < > 16

When the coins are in the
proper alignment, the scene zooms out again and a hidden cupboard
opens below. This contains notes on Vladimir’s 1958 and 1977
expeditions to Tunguska. Nina reads them automatically.

The ’58 trip found
evidence of abnormal plant growth. (The jibes with the report in the
diary entry about the Russian mineralogist.) Evidently its findings
were covered up and further research prohibited by someone in authority.
The second trip in the company of a Manuel Perez and an unidentified
local guide (both of whom you’ll meet later in the game) ended
with the arrest of the the two principals under mysterious circumstances
and the subsequent disappearance of Perez.

There’s also some
apparently blank stationery from a “Roscommon Foundation”
in Ireland.

Nina and Max are about
to check out Vladimir’s records when Detective Kanski puts in
a second appearance — this time with his gun drawn. “It really
would have been better if you’d kept out of it,” he says.
“Now I have no one choice but to–“

At that point, he’s
knocked out from behind by Oleg.

This is getting weird.

Nina, Max and Oleg meet
at Vladimir’s place. Oleg here apologizes for his earlier rudeness
— explaining that he believed himself to be followed — and reveals
he’s known Vladimir a long time and accompanied him on a trip
to Tunguska with Perez and an unnamed Irish biologist. (This will
eventually connect up with the Rosscommon Foundation stationery.)

Oleg’s curiously
vague on the expedition’s purpose, but says “someone appears
to be very interested [in that expedition] just now” and that
Vladimir and other expedition members may be in danger. He points
a finger at the Russian secret police — the people behind earlier
attempts to stifle Vladimir’s research — and suggests the death
of Nina’s mother wasn’t actually an accident, though he
doesn’t offer any meaningful evidence beyond the suddenness
of the accident. (The exact circumstances behind her death are never
straightened out.)

And he says he’s
gotten in touch with old contacts — notably a fellow named Sergej
[sic] who “knows just about everything that no one is actually
supposed to know.” This individual reports a train is soon leaving
Moscow for a research station at Tunguska and that some of the scientists
involved are participating against their will. Is Vladimir’s
disappearance linked to this trip? Nina’s off to catch a train
while Max reluctantly stays behind to search Vladimir’s records.

Odds & ends:
After returning to Max’s office to examine exhibits from Room
8, Nina can examine the three vases at the rear and the mask and shield
in the foreground.

– Remembering what Oleg’s
cat dragged out earlier, you may feel disinclined to take any of Oleg’s
spiel at face value. (Not that you have any choice.) His surprise
appearance in Nina and Max’s moment of need practically begs
to be read as the “other options” raised in the chat with
the man in the penthouse. (You may even wonder if this is a collaboration
with Kanski, but I see no solid evidence to suggest this is true.)

Conceivably, Oleg’s
desperate phone calls were to the contacts he mentioned and the matter
to be addressed was his sense that he was being followed. But why
should Nina’s visit set off those phone calls? That doesn’t
quite follow.

– And what about Kanski?
Things seem to to have been accelerating on that front. Beginning
with an almost inconsequential (though hard to explain) appearance
at the museum, we’ve picked up on his apparent surveillance
of Vladimir’s place and then his appearance inside Nina’s
— and now he’s drawing his gun on Max and Nina? What the hell,
Kanski?

If you pay close attention
to the details, it does make a kind of sense and I’ll offer
an interpretation farther along in the game.

The Station

Sergej seems more interested
in hitting on Nina than helping her and has an awful lot of questions.
But he does eventually disclose he has a contact at the station’s
side entrance who’ll set Nina up with a uniform and papers in
the name of “Nina Perkova.”

Don’t count on it.
Nina arrives outside the station just in time to watch Sergej’s
contact get taken into custody by the Russian secret police (FSB).
Most of the progress Nina makes here will be purely from the sweat
of her own brow.

Clearly, she’s not
getting in through the station gate. It’s not even raised an
option in your chats with the replacement guard Sergeant Yushin. But
there’s that manhole one screen away … if only Nina could
chase away the sewer worker.

It’s not hard. He’s
already annoyed. Ask him about his anger over working on his day off
and then his hopes of winning the lottery to fasten onto a way of
sending him off in a good mood.

Then take a peek at the
newspaper the station guard is reading. You’ll find the winning
lottery number. It seems the sewer worker missed winning by one
number. On the surface, this is not calculated to improve his
mood, but this is too much of a coincidence to suppose you won’t
be able to fine tune the newspaper in some interesting way.