Secret Files: Tunguska Walkthrough by Peter Olafson

But the station guard’s
not about the lend you his paper. Sergeant Yushin’s attached
to a serialized romance called “The Siberian Saga” and
is taking his sweet time with it. But given that it’s nighttime,
what do you suppose he’d do without the 60-watt bulb overhead?

Poke around a bit and you’ll
find a solution. A left-click on the rubble pile beside the Volkswagen
bus on the manhole screen turns up a Y-shaped piece of metal and a
single metal nut. A right-click on the sewer worker’s bag, even
in close proximity to the worker (and not as out of his view as Nina
suggests), liberates a lunch box containing a butter sandwich and
secured by a sturdy rubber band.

Put the metal Y together
with the band and then use either the nut or the pebble from the pavement
in the right near corner of the station-entrance screen, and you have
an operating slingshot. Use it on the bulb above the station entrance
and the frustrated guard drops his paper in disgust. Take the paper
with the guard’s blessing — and his explanation of the administrative
procedures involved in the bulb’s replacement.

Now just use the pencil
you found on Vladimir’s desk to tweak the newspaper a little
— closing the losing “3” into a winning “8”
— and show the paper to the worker.

(Suppose you didn’t
take the pencil from Vladimir’s desk. You’re screwed,
right? Nope! If it was required, you wouldn’t have been permitted
to leave Berlin without it. Pencil-less players will find one on the
window sill on the right side of the building at the station entrance.)

Off goes the worker! And
down goes Nina — only to be stopped by a heavy door. Try it. You’ll
get it open — but only a crack. Nina needs leverage.

Leverage is available:
There’s a jack under the VW bus. It’s rusty but the sewer
worker’s butter sandwich works fine as lubrication.

Alas, the right rear wheel
is missing. Nina’s not a Russian weight lifter and can’t
support the bus with one hand while winding down the freshly-buttered
jack with the other. She needs a support to place beneath the missing
rear wheel — say, those bricks just upscreen from the manhole. Nina
can then remove the jack and use it to push open the door below.

Within, a ladder up to
the station. Unfortunately, it’s missing a pair of rungs. Back
up a bit and you’ll find them. Topside, you can take the sewer
worker’s barrier (just above the manhole) and the green hose
running in from the right. In inventory, the former breaks down into
a strip of tape and two iron bars.

Sad to say, the bars are
too long to be used as rungs. They’d have to be bent first.
Show them to Sergeant Yushin. With a little goading from Nina, he’ll
supply the appropriate curvature. The replacement rungs will now fit
on the ladder and Nina can climb up into the station’s restroom.

Head left into a locker
room to listen to an exchange between two soldiers. The woman is dying
for a smoke and there’s no smoking in the station. Clearly you
need to cough up a cigarette. And you haven’t seen anything
like a cigarette.

It’s a bit tricky.
You may already have found matches in the detritus beneath the hole
in the sewer ceiling. (The small box is located between the sewer
channel and the pipe in the upper wall that’s shaped like an
inverted U.)

But for the cigarette,
you’ll need to backtrack to the station entrance and inspect
one particular location to trigger a new conversation topic for Sergeant
Yushin: the cigarette butts just below and to the right of the stairs
leading to the building beside the station entrance. Then ask Yushin
for a cigarette and then descend into the sewer again.

Up in the locker room,
use the matches on the cigarette and then place the cigarette on the
little coin dish on the bench around the corner. The soldier’s
comrade returns, spies the cigarette, reams out this pal and then
leaves with her. Nina has the locker room to herself.

Check out the two lockers
against the left wall. The left one is locked — we’ll get to
that one shortly — and the right unlocked. Right-click on the interior
of the latter locker and take the uniform from the hanger below–
Nina puts this on directly — and the stocking and radio from the
shelf above.

The uniform allows Nina
to enter the station proper and approach the train. (She’ll
remove it automatically when she moves back toward the street-side
manhole and put it back on when she climbs to the restroom-side manhole.)

At the train, she’ll
be stopped from boarding for want of the proper papers (not the same
thing as the deployment orders). Nina must now complete two tasks
in any order to blow the whistle and set the train in motion.

1) Distract the two secret-police
guards flanking the door across from the locker-room entrance.

Talk to the right-hand
guard to learn there’s someone in the room beyond the door.
It stands to reason this is Sergej’s contact — the guard who
was so unceremoniously removed from duty upon Nina’s arrival
— and that he either has or can provide access to Nina’s travel
papers.

You’ll need three
pieces of information to send the guards on their way.

The key is the two-way
radios.

Use the train guard’s
“departure” topic to learn the engineer is missing. (See
#2.) The guard then radios the dispatcher to page the engineer —
Nina learning in the process that each radio is assigned a number
and that the dispatcher is #48. That’s one.

Nina’s radio must
have a number as well. You can learn with a right-click in inventory
that it’s #15. That’s two.

Now you just need the guards’
names so #15 has something to discuss with #48. This is easy — you
can do it once Nina sees the guards — but it takes you out of your
way. Return to Sergeant Yushin and ask the names of the two FSB officers:
Fetisov and Radenkov.

That final bit of info
permits you to use the radio on Nina to request their dispatch to
the freight car at the rear of the train. Note that Nina can make
this call only when out of view of the guards and the hearing of the
engineer (who’s hiding out in a restroom stall) — i.e. in the
locker room, one of the two sewer screens or the manhole screen.

Now Nina can enter the
guarded room and claim dog tags from Solotov’s prostrate form.
And it just happens that his service number (31545) is also the combination
to the left-hand locker back in the locker room. Activate the interior
to locate Nina’s travel permit.

2) Help the engineer.

He’s in the crapper
and he’s not planning on coming out. Right-click in the space
beneath the door to the far stall and left-click on either of the
feet to establish that he’s lost the train key down the toilet.

You couldn’t find
it before this exchange. Now you can. Descend into the sewer and look
through the round window in the distributor box to the right of the
ladder. You’ll see the key.

How to extract it? If you
turn the valve on the pipe to the right of the distributor, you’ll
establish there’s no water in the pipe to flush the key out.
So you need to get things flowing upstairs.

Coaxing the engineer into
a courtesy flush is not an option. But you can run the sewer worker’s
hose from the faucet on the sink to the urinal at the base of the
restroom’s left wall and then turn on the faucet.

Now you’ll get a
different description if you try the valve downstairs: The key would
be flushed out and lost in the sewer.

But not if you could somehow
filter the outflow — and you do have access to a kind of filter:
that stocking on the shelf in the right-hand locker. Use the stocking
on the curved outflow pipe to the right of the exterior side of the
sewer door and secure it in place with the ribbon of boundary tape.
Now turn the valve, recover the stocking and hand it over to the engineer.
He can fish out the key himself! (If Nina refuses to turn the valve,
you haven’t yet looked in the distributor.)

Now simply drop your travel
permit on the train guard to complete the segment. (If you haven’t
yet turned over the train key to the engineer, the guard will urge
you to search for him.)

Odds & ends:
At the station entrance, Nina can also examine the gate and the guard
tower. On the manhole screen, the sign on the building. Below, the
hole in the ceiling, the garbage below it and the sewer channel. At
the base of the ladder, the red-painted base plate. (Evidently a literal
red herring. This is not a path to the lost key.) In the restroom
and the locker-room hiding-place screen, the no-smoking sign. In the
locker room, the no-smoking sign, trash pail, samovar (i.e. tea-maker)
and vending machine. In the close-up of the right-hand locker, the
four pictures within. (Nina ooos and ahs over the guys in each.) In
the station proper, the crane, surveillance camera and no-smoking
sign. In the close-up of the train exterior, the tank in the background.
In the interrogation room, the car battery beside the vent in the
upper wall, the ashtray on the table, the blood stains on the table
and upper wall, the syringe beside the table and the stretcher in
the lower left corner.

– On the starting screen,
Nina can also try to use the manhole, barrier, hose and VW bus, the
pencil on the newspaper (without first talking to the sewer worker
about the lottery) and the rubble pile a second time (after extracting
the slingshot components); in the locker room, the samovar and an
unlit cigarette on the dish; and in the restroom, the urinal trough.

– She can also use the
walkie-talkie with different numbers for sender and receiver. If you
misidentify Nina’s number, the dispatcher threatens to report
her for using the wrong frequency. If she targets the wrong receiver,
there’s no answer.

– If Nina talks to the
engineer again after delivering the key, he reports he’s “almost
finished.”

– The deployment orders
in the locker aren’t required but provide a few tempting details:
a reference to terrorists who may interfere with the mission and “special
guests.” Nina wonders if this includes Vladimir.

– The FSB, quartered in
the same Moscow building that once housed the KGB, is Russia’s
Federal Security Service.

The Train

We rejoin Nina as the train
approaches the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk. Listen to Nina’s
discourse on the sleeping soldier. It’ll prove important.

Drop back one car to find
the scientist Lesniak and his assistant Alexei. Talk to Alexei. He
explains that his boss is under a lot of pressure. He typically relieves
stress by eating bread and jam. But the scientist dropped his jam
jar on the station platform and there’s no jam to be found on
the train.

Hence, Nina’s first
job is to pour jam on troubled waters. There’s a kitchenette
at the back of the starting car and you don’t have to work for
any of the ingredients. Take the orange juice and dried fruit from
the table in front of the sleeping soldier and one or two pieces of
white bread from the basket on the table in the scientist’s
car (depending on which approach you select below). In the kitchenette,
take the honey and use it, the OJ and fruit on the pot on the stove
and you’ve got jam.

You can stop there for
now or skip down five paragraphs and fast-track this segment by adding
an extra ingredient before you feed it to the scientist.

If the former route, use
one slice of bread on the pot and feed it to Lesniak and, out of gratitude,
he’ll talk to you politely for a while — long enough to reveal
that his work involves the regenerative properties of plants (again,
consistent with things you’ve learned about Tunguska earlier
in the game) and that the chief scientist, Sidorkin, has a list of
everyone contributing to the project. If Vladimir is on the train,
his name will be on that list.

Lesniak is a pussycat next
to Sidorkin. Non-essential: Drop back one more car and use the intercom
beside Sidorkin’s locked office door. He’ll practically
explode over the interruption. What can be done to draw him out?

Actually, Sidorkin just
told you what’s required: He doesn’t want to be bothered
over anything less than a breakthrough in Lesniak’s research.

Nina’s no biologist,
but she’s really good at cooking up distractions. And to make
Lesniak and his helper think they’ve achieved a breakthrough,
and thus force them to consult with Sidorkin, Nina’s going to
need the lab to herself for a while.

You’ll recall from
Nina’s initial speech that the sleeping soldier at the starting
area bent her ear before talking himself to sleep — including some
discussion of the uses of castor oil. Castor oil is an old-fashioned
laxative that will quickly send the user running to the bathroom.

I wonder how well it mixes
with jam?

The castor oil’s
in the soldier’s backpack. You can’t just steal it. The
soldier’s wearing the pack and would catch Nina in the act.
But you can wake him just remotely enough to avoid the consequences
and with sufficient rudeness that he shakes off the pack.

The trick is in the light
fixture overhead. It’s only a 25-watt bulb, but turn it on,
using the switch to the left of the kitchenette entrance, and the
soldier turns his head restlessly. What might be achieved with a higher
wattage?

Remove the bulb. (Turn
it off first it need be.) There aren’t any manipulable lamps
in the lab car, but a very nice 100-watt bulb can be found just outside
Sidorkin’s door. Take it, install it in the socket above the
sleeping soldier and turn the light on. Nina whisks quickly into the
kitchen to avoid the guard’s rage at being so brutally awakened.
When she steps out again, the light’s out, the soldier’s
asleep … and he’s thoughtfully removed his pack! Remove the
castor oil, dump it in the jam pot and dip a slice of bread into it
to cover it in “laxative jam.” Deliver it to Lesniak.
Once he’s run through his conversation topics, he’ll instantly
race off to the bathroom.

It’s easier to banish
the assistant Alexei. Run through his post-Lesniak topics, return
to the kitchen, use the OJ bottle on the faucet and then pour some
water on the surge suppressor against the right wall in the lab car.
It shorts out, Alexei runs out to replace the fuse and Nina has the
place to herself.

Don’t over-think
this. You don’t even need to know what the scientists are doing
here. All Nina can do is mess with the samples and hope the mess results
in an unexpected result. So take the one sample from the table and
another from the rack on the floor, open each, mingle the contents
together, place the mixture in a single container and replace this
container on the assistant’s table. Alexei then returns, runs
his tests and thinks he’s split the atom. Next thing you know,
Sidorkin’s out of his cave and Lesniak out of his stall to debate
the findings and Nina can creep into Sidorkin’s unlocked office.
She’ll reappear there automatically and move to a closeup view
of the desk.

She does not find the list
of scientists. However, a note on the computer monitor refers to a
safe and Nina here speculates the list might be in that safe. (No,
you can’t back out of the desk view to look for it. That view
is locked-in and you’ll have to come back later.)

You’re going to get
caught. You can’t prevent it and can only set off the arrival
of an FSB agent. This is done by examining everything on the desk:
the aforementioned note on the monitor, the file folders at the right,
the book and documents at the center of the desk and the giant ant
specimen on the left.

The documents add new entries
to Nina’s diary. Here you’ll learn of attacks of research
facilities by black-robed figures. They’ve destroyed documents,
set off bombs and lit fires. The FSB has investigated, but hasn’t
apprehended anyone or indeed produced any “solid results.”

Once you’ve examined
all of these bits, one of the men in black from the station appears
and takes Nina into custody.

Odds & ends:
In the starting location, Nina can also examine the soldier, the map
behind his head, the window and the rifles fastened to the partition
between the seats. In the kitchen, the eggs on the far counter and
the menu and duty roster in the right near corner. In the lab car,
the blackboard and incinerator to the right and the desk in the left
near corner. In the corridor outside Sidorkin’s office, the
two doors. In the close-up view of Sidorkin’s desk, the locked
drawer. (You’ll find the means to unlock this in the second
train segment.)

– At the starting location,
Nina can try to use the rifles, talk to the sleeping soldier and turn
on the light to awaken him a second time. In the lab car, she can
try to use the surge suppressor and take a third slice of bread and,
in Sidorkin’s car, try to use both locked doors.

The Museum

A long non-interactive
sequence. The scene now switches back to Berlin — a recovered Detective
Kanski smoking outside the museum and then moving off to the left.
Max arrives from the right, says he has a “bad feeling”
about Kanski and wonders what he’s doing here in the middle
of the night.

Max now enters the museum
and checks his email. He’s received a response from an Irish
colleague to an inquiry about those blank pages under the letterhead
of an Irish foundation.

The outfit was once operated
by a Ken Morangie — evidently the Irish biologist that Oleg mentioned
— and had something to do with plant fertilizer. (Hence Morangie
would definitely have had an interest in the abnormal plant growth
in the Tunguska region.) The company suddenly shut down, but Morangie’s
still around and lives on an island off the Irish coast.

And the letter? Written
in invisible ink!

“Hello Vladimir.

Received the documents.
Copy is underway. We still have to settle the question of the handover.

Ken

P.S. The whiskey is
still waiting.”

Documents? Handover? This
won’t become clear until Max visits Ireland later in the game.

The Train: Part II

Back to Nina — now in
the freight car behind the car containing Sidorkin’s office
and destined to be turned over to authorities at the next stop unless
she can make her escape.

The two doors are locked.
However, someone’s removed the steel hatch from the central
skylight and it’s a simple matter to shatter the glass dome
with the metal tube from the industrial vacuum cleaner at the right
end of the car.

It’s another to get
Nina to climb up there. She doesn’t want to tear up her hands
on the remaining glass around the edge.

Think the utility shaft
scene in the movie Die Hard. The metal tube is John McClane’s
machine gun. You just lack the strap on which he lowered himself.
And there is such a strap here. Take the leash hanging between the
two halves of the dog cage at the left, combine it with the tube in
inventory, use the leash + pipe on the busted skylight and left-click
on the hatch to climb up. You’ll find Nina surfing on the car’s
narrow roof.

You’re headed for
Sidorkin’s office. That’s the window to the lower right.
It is closed, and you need it open. No way Nina’s going to manage
that while hanging off the side of speeding train. Sidorkin must be
encouraged to open it for you.

The solution can be found
in the two small pipes jutting from the roof forward from Nina’s
current position. Respectively, they’re an exhaust (the left
pipe) and evidently an air intake (the right pipe) for an air conditioning
unit. (You can inspect the inoperative controls for this down in the
freight car.)

Right-click on the exhaust
to learn that it’s a source of a stream of stuffy air. Feeding
it back into the car via the intake pipe is an option and the plastic
tube from the vacuum works admirably for this purpose. However, Nina
says, “It doesn’t seem to have any great effect.”

See, the heat by itself
isn’t the point. You want to combine the hot air with something
else to create a stink. If you don’t have anything suitable,
you haven’t looked that far.

The obvious choice is a
steak from the cooler in the middle of the car. Alas, sieves inside
each pipe prevents its insertion.

But did you really look
at the vacuum cleaner? In addition to the metal and plastic tubes,
there’s a flap on its side. Nina can’t open it by hand.
You’ll need a pry bar.

The only suitable candidate
turns out to be the bone in the dog cage at the left end of the car.
(This is the cage mentioned by sewer worker via the “soldiers”
topic back at the train station.) The dog’s rather attached
to the bone. Once again, Nina needs to work up a distraction.

It’s not hard. I
already mentioned the steaks in the open cooler. You can feed these
to the Doberman ad infinitum — inserting them at either end of the
cage. But you can’t keep the critter away from the bone long
enough to grab it. In other words, at the same time as you attract
the critter’s attention, you need to thwart it in some way.

Try putting the steak in
the sample container the secret policeman somehow permitted Nina to
keep and then placing the container at the right end of the cage.
Pulled away from the bone, the pooch can’t figure out how to
get at the meat and that buys you time to grab the bone. Use the bone
to open the flap, right-click on the interior to take the vacuum bag
and again on the bag to liberate some animal hair and a hairpin.

Ah. Burning hair should
do it. Place the animal hair in the farther of the two pipes and then
connect the two pipes with the vacuum hose. Wait a bit for the hot
air to do its thing. Sidorkin opens his window and then leaves his
office.

Descend there just as you
climbed: Retrieve the pipe + leash from the skylight and use it on
the pipes instead. The leash now extends down to Sidorkin’s
window. Activate the window and Nina slips into the office just before
the train enters a tunnel.

The room is as you left
it. However you’re no longer limited to the desktop and the
hairpin permits Nina to pick that locked desk drawer.

Within, a statue. It’s
identical to three others on pedestals around the room, and that’s
where this one goes, too. Remove the vase beside the office door and
install the statue in its place. It’ll stick here. You can turn
it, but you can’t remove it. You’ll need to turn all four
so they’re facing left — just like the face in the portrait
on the far wall. This requires one left-click each for the three rightmost
statues and two for the one by the window. The portrait then slides
back and you can enter a secret room.

Not much here: a torture
chair and a big framed picture of a sailing ship. Come to think of
it, it’s an odd place for a big framed picture and it stands
to reason this is concealing something.

Clearing it out of the
way is a two-step affair. Take the pirate book from the torture chair
to the left and, back in Sidorkin’s office, place it in the
empty space in the middle shelf to the right of the secret-room entrance.

This triggers another mechanism.
Back in the secret room, you’ll see a new niche has opened in
the wall to the right of the door.

What goes here? Well, there
are only so many things it can be, and it sure isn’t the ugly
vase. But you can take the skull from atop the skeleton in the near
left corner of the office. Place this in the niche and the picture
on the right wall opens up to reveal a stand-alone puzzle. Right-click
on it to start.

You’ll find yourself
looking at a 5 x 5 panel with eight pale blue circles illuminated.
You want to turn off all the blue lights to open the safe. A left-click
on a given circle turns the light in that circle and adjacent circles
off if it’s on and on if it’s off. (“Adjacent”
here means the circles above, below and to the left and right of the
clicked circle. Diagonals don’t count.)

Here’s the layout.
The circles that are initially lighted appear in Cyan-colored text
below.

1 2
3 4 5

6 7
8 9 10

11 12
13 14 15

16 17
18 19 20

21 22 23
24 25

And here’s a five-step
solution:

Click on 9 to turn off
the lights in 4, 9 and 10 and turn them on in 8 and 14.
Click on 12 to turn off the lights in 7 and 11 and turn them on in
12, 13 and 17.
Click on 13 to turn off the lights in 8, 12, 13, 14 and 18.
Click on 22 to turn off the lights in 17 and 23 and turn them on in
21 and 22.
Finally, click on 21 to turn off the lights in 16, 21 and 22.

The safe opens. Yes, there’s
a list. No, Vladimir’s not on it. So what are you doing here?

This hasn’t been
a total waste of time. Included with the list is a “Tunguska
Project” file that references a Kalenkov Report. This establishes
that in 1976 Vladimir proved an object found in the Tunguska region
was of “alien origin.” On the strength of this report,
the Russian government green-lighted further research on the artifact.
This resulted in the discovery that the artifact could influence animal
behavior and the Tunguska Project was initiated to improve the technology.

Once Nina completes her
review of these documents, the game moves to a cut-scene of the train,
an explosion in its path and the train’s derailment with a Black
Robe looking on. Back in Berlin, Max gets a call from Oleg. Max gets
pissed — as though Oleg was supposed to single-handedly prevent Nina’s
capture or the derailment! — and learns Nina is now being held in
a military hospital.

Odds & ends:
In the freight car, Nina can also examine the dog, both halves of
the cage and the dials and button to the left of the right-hand door.
(Nina can push the button — “no visible effects” — and
examining it with a right-click gets a weird response: “Not
to be confused with Jenson.” Come again?) In Sidorkin’s
office, the portrait and the pirate books on the shelves to the right.
In the secret room, the torture chair and the picture.

– Now this is strange:
The picture in Sidorkin’s office is supposed to be Vladimir
Ilyich Lenin, who led Russia’s Communist revolution in October
1917. But to all appearances, it is actually Sidorkin himself! (This
is obvious when you see Sidorkin leaving his office after opening
the window.)

- And what’s the
meaning of the cross that appears next to some names on the list?
Nina speculates it means they’re dead, which would fit in with
the reports of terrorist attacks, but this is never clarified.

The Hospital

You can use the intercom
on the right gate pillar to establish that “tourism” is
not the password. You’ll have to be a doctor or badly hurt to
get on the grounds.

You can’t fake the
former, but you can the latter. Remember that Oleg lost two fingers
in his attempt to rescue Nina and her mother and use this fact to
sell the story. You’ll find a tote bag on the bench in the shelter
at the rear and red berries in the bush to the right. Combine them
in inventory in fair simulation of blood-stained rags and use them
on Oleg to wrap them around his missing fingers.

Unfortunately, the intercom
has now been turned off — even if you haven’t already used
it — but you’re not stranded out here. Look through the hospital
gate at the ambulance to get the phone number to summon it. Use Max’s
cell phone on Max and dial the ambulance. When it comes out, Max slips
in. You’ll find him in a recess beside the locked basement entrance.

There is a shadow of a
key on the ground near the locked basement door. Just one possible
source: The light fixture to the left of the door. Once you’ve
looked at the shadow, you can identify the key inside the fixture.

The lamp’s too hot
to manipulate with your hands, but a pair of “surgical pliers”
(which looks more like a forceps) can be found just to the right of
the opening in the trash bin to the right. Use this on the lamp, then
the key on the door and you’ll find yourself in a storage room.
Max can make his way forward one room (a horrific operating room)
only to be stopped by a door with voices on the other side.

Take the stethoscope from
the right-hand operating table and use it on the door to establish
Max is actually hearing one voice — one end of a phone conversation
between guards. The one you can hear is watching a soccer match in
the lobby and is having some trouble with a sensitive satellite dish.
The other seems to be up at Nina’s cell (where the new inmate
is sleeping soundly) and is experiencing trouble with rats.

Once this exchange is complete,
you can advance past the door and get the lay of the land in the lobby.
You can’t explore this room as long as the guard is on station
or has a line-of-sight from an adjacent room. But you’ll notice
that the door to the room just around the corner from Max’s
hiding place is a safety door that opens only from this side. It’s
propped open by a wedge.

In other words, if you
could lure the guard into that room, you could pull out the wedge
and contain him there.

Max’ll come out of
this sequence with the idea of contacting Nina. (Actually, you can
embark on this project as soon as you collect the stethoscope.) This
may not seem at first to lead to said containment, but Max can’t
actually trap the guard until he has the means to not simply contain,
but sedate him. And that’s where Nina comes in.

Nina no longer has her
cell phone, so your best bet is the sewage pipe that runs up the outer
wall to the left of the cellar entrance. Use the stethoscope on the
pipe to learn from nocturnal mutterings about a train and Daddy that,
rather too miraculously, this leads straight to Nina, who’s
sleeping too soundly to be awakened by Max’s dulcet tones.

So turn your thoughts to
something that might wake Nina. You have access to ammonia. There’s
a jar on the shelf in the operating room beside the door to the storage
room.

But when you use this on
the pipe, the fumes wind up more at Max’s end than at Nina’s.
You need some way to blow the fumes up Nina’s way — say, using
that portable fan atop the file cabinets in the storage room. Nina
then quickly wakes up and you can now switch between the characters
at will.

Stick with Nina for the
moment. If you right-click on the pipe, she says she can talk to Max
this way. But this is misleading. The pipe is actually a conduit for
small items and it’s up to Nina to make this possible.

Collect the loose items
in her cell: the knit place mat that serves as her pillow, the bowl
at the foot of the mattress and the small rock beside the rat hole.
The sharp edge in the middle of the exposed brickwork in the rear
wall works wonders on the ties that bind the place mat — reducing
the braid to one long thread. Weight the thread with the stone to
the right of the rat hole in the far wall and lower the combination
down the pipe in the floor. Now Nina and Max can swap more than snappy
repartee.

What about the remaining
leg on the overturned chair on the left side of Nina’s cell?
Clearly, the designers mean for Nina to take it. But she can’t
simply snap it off, being that it’s made of a resilient plastic.
What cutting tool might the free-roaming Max obtain downstairs that
the locked-in Nina could use upstairs?

In the operating room,
you’ll find a scalpel beside the sink in the foreground. (A
syringe, too, so take that as well.) Pass the scalpel up the pipe
and, as Nina, amputate. Turns out the hollow chair leg has a couple
of uses.

– It’s part of a
rat trap. (Nina’s clearly going to catch the rat that lives
in the hole in the wall.) Try to use it with the bowl and Nina says
she needs bait first. But you can’t take the bait until you
complete #2.

– It’s a blowgun.
Hand it down to Max and try to combine it with the syringe to find
you have a weapon. All it lacks is ammo.

The ammo is atop the storage
room shelves just inside the cellar door … but you can’t take
it yet. First, Max has to identify it as a sedative.

You’ll find the identification
in an unlikely spot. Check the file cabinet opposite the cellar entrance.
Max looks for info on “Nina Kalenkov,” then checks under
her pseudonym “Nina Perkova” and in the PERs finds an
intriguing file on a Manuel Perez — Vladimir’s companion on
the 1977 expedition to Tunguska. He suffers from “extreme behavioral
and consciousness disturbances” and his treatment sounds more
like torture. He’s recently been transferred to a Cuban facility
run by a Dr. Nicole Charlesroi. You’ll be hearing more about
her soon.

But the immediate point
of all this is the identification of a drug used in Perez’s
treatment. Once you’ve read the file, you can take a jar from
the top shelf across the way. Use it on the blowgun to transform it
into “poisoned blowgun.”

However, when you reenter
the hospital lobby, you’ll find that, in Max’s hiding
place, he’s too far away to hit the guard and can’t move
closer.

But you’ve already
collected some intelligence that suggests you can get the guard to
move. In the overheard exchange between the guard, the lobby guard
complained that, on the previous day, he had to keep adjusting the
sensitive satellite dish because of the wind. Adjust the dish yourself
and you’ll adjust the guard’s position.

Retreat out your the cellar
and then head left . You’ll see the ambulance off to the left
… and the fragile dish on an ivy-covered wall.

You can adjust the dish
by hand. The scene then cuts to the lobby — the annoyed guard getting
up and moving left toward the safety door. From Max’s vantage
point, you can see his protruding forearm grappling with the dish
to restore a signal. But by the time you get Max back to the lobby,
he’s fixed the dish and returned to his station.

You want to keep the guard
out of position, where he can be trapped, and so need to do a real
number on the dish: Use the surgical pliers to force it into a new
position. (You can move directly to this step without first adjusting
the dish by hand.)

Ah. The scenes repeat …
only this time you’ll find the guard still gone when Max pokes
his head back into the lobby. But Max still can’t cross the
lobby or pull the wedge from under the safety door. Even though the
guard’s out of position, he’s apparently still alert to
movement in the lobby — and a trapped guard would just raise an unwelcome
ruckus.

But the guard’s now
in a potentially vulnerable spot. You need just a quick way to shut
him down after you slam the door behind him.

Now you can trap the downstairs
guard in the room where he’s adjusting the satellite dish. Just
remove the wedge beneath the door — Max does not keep this — and
you have the run of the lobby. However, the trapped guard’s
now making an awful racket, so shut him up by using the blowgun on
the door’s closed peephole. Max can now advance up the stairs
to find a second guard planted right outside the door to Nina’s
cell. (Said racket has no impact beyond preventing Max from advancing
up the stairs to Nina’s cell. However long you permit the racket
to continue, the second guard never ventures down to investigate.)

You’ll recall from
the exchange between the guards that this one is having rat issues.
Nina has a rat hole in her cell. It stands to reason she’s going
to catch a rat and hand it off to Max, who’ll use it to lure
away the rat-obsessed guard. And we already know that the main body
of the trap consist of the bowl and the chair leg.

The issue: How to bait
the trap? Simple. Max now has access to the lobby guard’s cheese
soup. It’s just to the left of the rolling TV.

Naturally, there’s
a problem: The suddenly fastidious Max won’t take it. However,
Nina can provide an alternate means of conveyance: With the scalpel,
cut a slice out of her foam mattress and pass it down to Max. Use
the foam on the soup and the foam becomes “cheesy foam.”
Pass this back up to Nina.

This doesn’t fix
things entirely. When Nina tries to combine the bowl and chair leg
in inventory, she acts as though she doesn’t have the bait —
even if she does have it. Why?

The bait hasn’t been
properly prepared. After all, you can’t count on the rat to
simply knock over the chair leg in its haste to eat cheesy foam. The
leg needs to be connected to the bait so movement of the bait triggers
the trap. So first use the remainder of the place-mat thread on the
foam, then the chair leg on the bowl, the cheesy foam on the bowl
+ chair leg and the whole kit and kaboodle on the rat hole.

The rat turns up almost
immediately. Just left-click on the overturned bowl to grab it. Pass
it down to Max and, as Max, head up the stairs at the right side of
the lobby and use the rat on the second guard. Off he goes in pursuit.

He’ll be gone just
as long as you need him gone. Don’t look for keys. Prepare the
chair for his return. Drop back down to the lobby and left-click on
the bulletin board on the wall to the right of the TV to take a thumbtack.
Use the thumbtack on the anesthetic and then on the chair. Max retreats
to the the lobby before the guard retreats to his chair. Ow! When
the guard falls silent, return upstairs and right-click on the drugged
guard to take his key and then release Nina.