Secret Files: Tunguska Walkthrough by Peter Olafson

Enter the elevator and
Nina reappears in a previously-unseen section of the station: a hallway
leading to the experiment chamber. You have two jobs here: Set up
the huge ka-boom and, in the final sequence, engineer Nina’s
escape.

The source of the ka-boom
is pretty plain. In the storage room at the end of the hall, check
out the warning label on the metal drum that’s lying on its
side on the shelves. Mixed with water, its contents will blow up.

The method is pretty plain,
too: Hang something heavy from the chain hanging to the right of the
barrel and have it swing against the barrel. Presumably the barrel
will then roll off the shelf, be jarred open when it hits the ground
and spill its contents onto the ice that has penetrated the room’s
left wall.

So what’s going to
swing into the barrel? That giant icicle just outside the door to
the experiment chamber. Knock it down with the “Caution, Precipice”
sign from the crevasse or the “extended wrench” formed
by combining the sign and the wrench. (See below.) Use the icicle
on the chain and then the suspended icicle on the pipes to the right.
All Nina has to do now is heat up the pipes.

This raises a few questions.

First off, what did Nina
just knock down? If you watched carefully when she inserted the icicle
between the pipes, you noticed that the additional pressure on the
wall bracket squeezed out a little nut. This lands behind Nina and
you’ll need to move her out of her icicle-inserting position
to expose it. Take it. This’ll come into play almost immediately.

Also, how to heat up the
pipes? Nina reclaimed the metal egg from the pump controls to freeze
the water in the tub. But if she returns topside and tries to restore
the egg to the machine now, she’ll refuse, saying, “I’ve
gotten warm enough now. The bad guys can go on freezing.”

The machine didn’t
work without the egg before. How’s it going to work now?

Surprisingly, this section
of the base is on a different heating system — this one controlled
from the control room by Max.

And, finally, how will
Nina downstairs instruct Max upstairs on what’s needed? He can’t
hear her through the control-room door. And the cell phones don’t
work here.

Ah, but there is that security
camera above the elevator. If Nina holds appropriate symbolic items
up to the camera, she can send messages to Max.

This puzzle can unfold
a couple of ways, depending on how Nina sets out to repair the valve
to the right of the radiator. (Not that it matters much — both routes
involve most of the same steps and have the same end result — but
one is a little more orderly than the other.)

The handle is missing.
All that remains is an unadorned metal rod. Nina must find a way to
turn this to open the way for water and heat to enter the radiator
— and thus start the countdown for the explosion in the storage room.

Here our thread-cutter
(the “tapper” from the workshop) finally comes into play.
Use it on the rod to thread it — meaning something can now be screwed
down onto the rod — and then place the nut from the storage room
on the threaded rod.

Nina can’t turn this
nut with her bare hands. You’ll need a tool. Check the storage
room. You’ll find a wrench wedged into the top of the targeted
drum. Take it, use it on the nut and Nina responds, “Phew, no
chance.”

That’s ambiguous
but the issue (which isn’t revealed until you solve the problem)
is torque or twisting force. If you’re familiar with the concept,
you’ll realize the one changeable part of the equation here
is the length of the lever arm. That is, you can make the wrench handle
longer by combining it with the caution sign’s pipe section
in inventory as an “extended wrench.” This’ll open
the valve.

Test the radiator now to
find it cold and gurgling. Nina interprets this to mean there isn’t
enough water in the pipes, but it’s a touch more complicated:
There also isn’t enough heat.

Now’s the time to
send the two signals to Max. If you’ve followed the approach
outlined above, these can be done in either order. (However, if you
started this sequence by testing the cold radiator and then immediately
sending the “heat” signal, you’ll have to open the
valve as described above and then send the “no water”
one.)

You can send one signal
straightaway: Use the lighter on the camera to signal “heat.”
Max turns on the flame.

No dice. The radiator just
gurgles. Nina must find a symbol that evokes a lack of water.

Visit the storage room
again and look at the rectangular sign on the shelves. It reiterates
the warning on the barrel with a no-water symbol: a picture of water
being poured from a bucket with a diagonal red slash.

Perfect … except that
Nina can’t detach the sign from the shelf.

But maybe she could appropriate
just the part she needs.

Examine the sign. The paint
is brittle and flaking from the cold. This is a clue the surface can
be removed. Use the silicon from the workshop to create a mold of
the sign — with a reverse image of the flaking no-water symbol embedded
in its surface. Use this on the camera. Nina lays out the whole scenario
and Max complies.

And then Nina is taken
into custody by Oleg.

The scene picks up in the
experiment chamber. Gartuso finally introduces himself and, apparently
having watched too many James Bond movies, reveals his master plan:
He’s not going to use his mind-control device to take over the
world. He just wants to sell couches!

Diabolical.

Especially if they’re
really ugly, uncomfortable couches.

Nina needs a couple of
distractions here. Start with Oleg, who’s guarding her. Drop
the metal egg on him. He heads off to reinstall it in the pump controls.

Now for the machine. It
might not react well to another machine — like your cell phone —
in close proximity. Use the phone on it to skate the cell over close
to the gadget. All hell breaks lose. Charlesroi reports interfering
radiation and the monitors off to the right now display “Failure”
on red screens.

With the others good and
distracted, Nina can now send Max another signal. Left-click on the
camera above Nina’s head and then on the crane to steer it straight
up. In the control room, Max gets the message. (We never see this,
but presumably the central joystick on the console him affords him
control over the crane.) Oleg returns. In storage, room, the icicle
breaks loose from the warming pipes and the barrel dumps its contents
onto the ice. There’s a distant blast. The preoccupied billionaire,
scientist and their henchmen have little time to wonder what’s
happening. As Nina makes for the crane, the sea bursts through the
far wall and engulfs the conspirators.

Nina and Max truck back
to the base entrance for a final meeting with a Black Robe. It stretches
out its arms toward Nina’s throat, thus living the dream of
everyone who’s had to listen to Nina’s voice … but it’s
just to take back the amulet. Then it vanishes — just in case you
had any doubts about the Black Robes’ extraterrestrial nature.
Cut to the plane. Nina asks Max if she’s thanked him, suggests
autopilot and the plane waggles its wings. I don’t want to think
about it.

Odds & ends:
On the curved platform, Nina can also examine the left-hand elevator
shaft and the spikes that flank the door across the gap. In the control
room, the window, the monitors to the right and the console beneath.
Inside the base entrance, the broken elevator controls. Outside, the
research station itself, the snow crawler to the left and the antennas
to the right rear. In the crevasse, the pit to the right. In the hallway
outside the experiment chamber, the pipe to the right of the valve.
In the experiment chamber, the control-room window, the exit back
to the hallway and the monitor to the right.

- In addition, Nina can
try to use the left-hand elevator (before Max raises it) and the door
across the gap (before Nina extends the bridge), the console in the
control room, the elevator controls in the entryway, the barrel of
whale oil, the hole in the ice (sans fishing pole) and the harpoon
(sans beacon). She can also try to use the plunger on the bathtub
drain, the grenade on the right-hand elevator and the potential hole
in the ice, the lighter on the fishing pole (after you’ve pulled
in the fish), the bucket on the salt pile after Nina’s opened
a hole in the ice (and successfully, too, though to no purpose) and
the bundle of bedclothes (sans whale oil) on the right-hand elevator.
(Again, successfully. You’ll have to reel it in again with the
fishing pole.)

In the hallway outside
the experiment chamber, Nina can also insert the icicle into the pipes
without first connecting it to the chain and then discover the ring
at the end of the chain won’t fit over the too-thick free end
of the icicle.

– In the experiment chamber,
she can try to talk to Oleg, Gartuso, Charlesroi and Sergej. The only
one who offers a meaningful response is Gartuso.

And it’s a strange
response, too. If you select “sect,” Nina reveals that
the Black Robes are about to destroy his antennas on the surface (an
odd betrayal) and Gartuso just blows her off.

“Who is leading them?”
he asks. “Superheroes who are saving the world?”

In other words, he doesn’t
believe her. But Gartuso knows about the Black Robes. (They
were referred to as “the others” in one of his phone calls.)
Perhaps it’s revealing that the icon for this topic shows a
figure in white robes. Perhaps Gartuso’s ignorance
is an artifact from an earlier stage of the design?

– Why didn’t Oleg
just drown Nina in that pool back in the Himalayas? And why such an
elaborate death? Why not just leave her out in the cold to freeze
a la the saboteur?

– As Max reports, once
Nina leaves the control room for the experiment chamber and the two
are separated, certain doors within the base are closed. This includes
the one to the tub room and the facility exit. Nina can still visit
the workshop and the base entryway. The only possible point to this
is to give Nina a chance to reinstall the metal egg in the pump system
(which doesn’t work in any case).

– There is a little logistical
screw-up down in the hall outside the experiment chamber. If you try
to place the nut on the unthreaded valve rod, Nina says “the
nut would just slide back and forth”.

Wrong. It wouldn’t
have been able to fit over the unthreaded rod. If the unaltered rod
was too narrow to hold the nut, a threaded rod would still be.

– So … Max = good guy.
Black Robes = good guys. But what exactly was the story with the late
Detective Kanski? It appears from the amulet found around his neck
that he was a Black Robe — or at least a human operative working
in their behalf (perhaps like the dead saboteur in the crevasse).

But that’s confusing.
That makes him one of the good guys … and why would one of the good
guys threaten Max and Nina with a drawn gun at the museum at the beginning
of the game?

That said, drawing a gun
is still an ambiguous action compared to aiming or firing one. Remember:
Kanski started to say what he was planning to do — only to be interrupted
by a thump on the back of the head. Sure, it looked as though
he might be planning to shoot the two … but he may have intended
simply to kidnap them for their own protection — much as the Black
Robes kidnapped Vladimir. Remember that it was authentic bad guy Oleg
who offered the dark interpretation of Kanski’s intentions.

I see his role as surveillance.
When Nina saw him in her apartment and Max outside the museum, Kanski
was probably just keeping tabs on them. And I think Kanski’s
death can be interpreted in this same light. In his final communique
from the dark tower, Gartuso instructed the man on the other end of
the phone to eliminate Nina and Max. Did Kanski intercept Max’s
would-be assassin and pay with his own life?

There’s a little
problem with this read on events: Kanski did say Max’s life
was in danger, but he (Kanski) was the one being followed.
So things end as they began: ambiguously.

– Be sure to stick around
for the exit credits. They’re accompanied by a series of funny
“outtakes.” These include one of the Russian “men
in black” borrowing Will Smith’s line from the movie from
the movie of the same name (“I make this look good”) and
Kinski lookalike Kanski performing a variation on Kinski’s famous
line from the movie My Best Friend. (“I was not outstanding,
and I was not exceptional! I was monumental! I was epochal!”).