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.

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.

Max and Nina meet up with
Oleg at the airfield. It’s a brief reunion. Nina’s escape
is discovered, Russian soldiers appear on the scene and the party
is separated. Nina sets off in the jeep to find her father’s
old base camp.

Odds & ends:
Outside the hospital gate, Max can also examine the hospital itself.
Outside the cellar door, the contents of the trash container. Back
toward the hospital gate, the ambulance and the hospital’s front
door. In the storage room, the wheelchair and the dictation machine
on the gurney. (You can play the tape in the dictation machine with
a right-click and get a diary entry for your trouble. It refers to
patients with problems similar to those experienced by Manuel Perez.)
In the operating room, the bloody sheet, bucket of blood and bloody
swabs to the left and the x-rays to the right. In the lobby, the TV
(initially in tuned-in color and later with a rolling black-and-white
display) and the central door.

– In addition, Max can
try to talk to the downstairs guard, try to use the tote bag (sans
berries) on Oleg, try to hand up to Nina the sedative and syringe
and try to use the blowpipe on the guard — both in the lobby while
he’s watching the soccer game and through the window beside
the dish. And Nina can try to open her cell door.

Berlin

Cut to the dark tower.
Kalenkov is still missing, but it’s now revealed that Vladimir
is believed to possess some missing piece and that the plotters are
aware of “the others” (presumably the Black Robes). The
man in the penthouse suggests the caller focus on Vladimir’s
past. We’ll see the result of that focus when Max gets to Ireland.

Tunguska

The
Shepherd

Nina stops at a little
tent for directions. The gentleman on the bed within is an Evenk shepherd
and he’s in a bad way. He needs his medicine and the medicine
recipe seems to have fallen into the fire. It hasn’t been destroyed,
but the charred pieces are so brittle that they’d fall apart
on contact. Your first job here is to restore it.

It’s a pretty involved
operation and you won’t get any clues en route. But a little
real-world experience in such things will stand you in good stead.
You want to create a lacquer that will hold the pieces together and
in place and a brush to apply it.

We’ll start with
the brush — just because it’s easier. You’ll need bristles,
a handle and something to hold it all together.

The bristles might well
come from the sweet reindeer grazing to the left of the tent, but
it’s keeping its distance. (Hell, I would, too. Right-click
on the creature to learn Nina wants to turn it into a rug.)

You’ll need to give
it a good reason to move within clipping range: Add water to the trough.
To do so, you’ll need to find a way to channel water from the
barrel to its right.

There’s nothing lying
around that begs to be used for this purpose. But the old tree at
the far right seems to be losing a section of bark along its left
side. With the shovel attached to the back of the jeep (here called
a “spade”) , you can knock off a long piece. Use the bark
on the barrel, pull the plug and the thirsty reindeer’s your
pal.

Now you need a way to give
it a haircut. A pair of scissors is hanging on the left of the two
pillars in the tent — concealed in plain sight as in a hidden-object
game — but a right-click in inventory or an attempt to use them on
the reindeer suggests they’re none too sharp. So you’re
off to look for a whetstone.

Just to the right of the
tree, the scene changes: Here you’ll find a steam vent, a pair
of plants and, to the left, a sharp stone. Use this on the scissors
and they’ll be replaced by “sharp scissors.” Use
these on the reindeer to be rewarded with a tuft of soft, stinky hair.

The brush handle and connecting
thread are both in the tent. The spoon on the cabinet at the left
functions as the first and a left-click on the lowest of the rightmost
set of hanging tassels liberates a single thread. Use the thread on
the reindeer hair to bind it together and the spoon on the threaded
hair and you have a makeshift brush!

Now for the lacquer. The
cup on the stump beside the old man’s bed will do for a container.
And you’ve already unearthed the raw material. It’s behind
the bark you knocked off the tree. Simply use the cup on one of the
yellowish patches to collect a sample of resin.

According to Wikipedia,
most plant resins take the form of “a viscous liquid.”
However, this one appears at least semi-solid. Hence, you’ll
need to melt it down into a brush-ready state.

No, you can’t start
a fire in the tent just now — the as-yet-untakeable recipe is still
in the campfire site — but you’ve already found an alternate
heat source: that steam vent. Nina votes against holding the cup over
the steam, but the old gentleman won’t object if you borrow
the rusty grill in the tent. Take it and place it over the vent.

One more step: The resin
is not akin to unsweetened chocolate. You can’t just melt it
in the cup. You’ll want to mix it with water from the trough.

Then put the cup on the
grill and pick it right up again to find the two have blended to a
rather coffee-like brew. (Take the grill with you as well, as you’ll
be needing it again.) Dip the brush into the resin and use it on the
parchment pieces. Nina reads off the recipe and the reassembled parchment
appears in your inventory.

The recipe:

5 parts of the Source of
Life
2 parts of Root of Tears
1 part Blood of the Night
3 parts Drops of Intoxication

And it’s to be taken
“shortly before it unites with the wind.”

Don’t fret over the
number of parts. That’s just for color.

But how to mix them? And
how to decode the components?

The mixing’s easy
enough: Show the complete recipe to the Evenk and he’ll provide
you with a special vial for this purpose.

And the ingredients aren’t
that difficult. If you’ve gone around grabbing everything loose,
it’s quite possible you already have two of them and the source
of the third.

The Source of Life:
This one you don’t have, but it’s easy enough: water.
Simply dip the vial in the trough to collect it.

Root of Tears:
Trickier. Trek back to the steam vent screen and you’ll see
a flowering plant called Siberian gentian leek off to the right. Leeks
are members of the onion family. (Hence the tears.) Use the shovel
to uproot the plant.

This isn’t exactly
what the doctor ordered. (You can’t just force the plant into
the vial. ) You’ll need to extract its essence and there’s
just one way to do it: Return to the Evenk’s tent, use the vial
on the nutcracker atop the cabinet to the left and then the gentian
on the nutcracker to squeeze out the juice in the bulb.

Blood of the Night:
This one may have you venting a little steam.

On the steam-vent screen,
you’ll see a tomato plant in the background. A right-click reveals
it’s a member of the Nightshade family, so tomato juice could
be construed as “Blood of the Night.”

But you can’t uproot
the plant manually or use the shovel or vial on it. (Nor, frankly,
do you see any evidence of actual tomatoes. If you left-click on the
plant, you’ll learn it’s a “drought victim.”)

That’s a hint that
this is just a hint. What else comes from tomatoes? Ketchup. Did you
bother to look in the jeep’s front seat? If so, you found a
remainder of an order of fast-food French fries and a packet of ketchup.
That’ll do.

And the Drops of
Intoxication? If you found the ketchup in the jeep’s
front seat, you very likely found the adjacent green first-aid kit
that contains a bottle of vodka.

That’s it for the
ingredients.

And yet if you try to give
the medicine to the patient, Nina says it’s not ready. You still
have to sort out that “unites with the wind thing.” What
could that mean but evaporate? The vent is no longer steaming but,
with the recipe in hand, you can now build a fire in the Evenk’s
tent. Replace the grill over the ring of stones, place the vial on
the grill and …

… and you’ll discover
you’re missing a critical ingredient for a fire: wood.

It’s not far. Beside
the tent, you’ll find a crate. It doesn’t contain anything
of use, but here you just want the crate itself. Smash it up with
your shovel, take the debris, use it on the campfire site and then
the matches on the wood. When Nina finally stops chattering, take
the brew off the fire and hand it to your host. A couple of minutes
later, he’s all better.

Apparently he had a run-in
with the guards from the research station. He quickly identifies Nina
as Vladimir’s daughter, tells about his son’s disappearance
after finding a strange piece of metal in the woods and how Vladimir
sought him out and then “entered the cursed realm of the Agdy
— the evil thunderbirds that have been sent to cause endless sickness
since the year of the great catastrophe. Your father ignored my warning
and his companion [presumably Perez] must have paid dearly for it.”

He issues directions to
Vladimir’s old camp and warns Nina to be careful. “Things
happen here that no one can begin to imagine.”

Odds & ends:
Nina can examine the fast-food paper in the jeep’s front seat
and try to use the jeep. She can also try to offer the vodka to the
Evenk and try to use the bark on the campfire, the scissors on the
reindeer (without first letting water into the trough), the cup on
the steam vent (without first filling the cup with water), the gentian
on the nutcracker (without first using the vial), the crate debris
on the campfire (before the parchment is reassembled) and the brush
with the parchment (before dipping the brush in the resin).

Why’s the Evenk having
words with research-station guards?

The
Cabin

At the end
of this trail, Nina finds a run-down cabin. Let yourself in and look
around.

You’ll notice an
oddity: There’s a compass to the right of the fireplace. What
use is a compass at a static location where the directions are always
the same? Of course, it could be just an ornament … but this particular
compass is installed atop a gray concrete pillar and as such is a
major feature of the room. And the metal pins in the four cardinal
directions are interactive.

You can’t do anything
with this just yet. So take your cue instead from the movie projector
to the right — try to use it and you’ll learn the power is
out — and start by restoring the electricity.

Step outside and walk around
to the left side of the cabin to find a generator. Out of gas. You
can find more nearby. Take the hose at the near end of the drinking-water
tank to the right — you’ll need it as a siphon — and then
follow the misty path in the background. You’ll find a log bridge
across a stream and a giant wrecked truck. It’s been cannibalized
for parts but some diesel fuel remains in the tank on the its near
side and a pair of nuts on the hub of the missing left rear wheel.

Take the nuts with a right-click
on the wheel, drop the hose and then the vodka bottle on the tank
and then return to the generator and load it up with fuel. It starts
automatically.

Note that the generator
has two components: the generator itself to the left and the coil
to the right. Right-click on the coil to learn it is … well, not
expressly magnetic (which in fact it is) but involved with magnetism.

And that should direct
your thoughts back to the compass. A compass needle responds to the
presence of magnetic objects, and such objects placed on the four
pins must influence the needle’s direction. Use one of the nuts
on the coil to magnetize both.

Return to the cabin and
experiment a bit. You’ll find you can now control the compass
needle by placing the nuts on different pins and then pushing the
central button. With a single magnetic nut on a pin, the needle will
point at that pin. With the two nuts at adjacent or opposing locations,
the needle will point to a spot in-between.

And why is this important?
Because some combination of needle-pointing presumably will do what
every other stand-alone puzzle in the game has done: open up a secret
compartment filled with new Tunguska trivia.

So where is that combination?
Close by, and yet possibly hard to find if you’re relying on
the hints the game offers. Right-click on the fireplace to zoom in
on it and again to examine the rear wall. Nina observes that it’s
“pitch black in there.”

Clearly, you need to shed
some light on the matter. There are actually a couple of ways you
can brighten the room, but only one will work here: the oil lamp hanging
from a post between the generator and the water tank.

And yet when you use the
lamp on the close-up view of the fireplace, the hearth still seems
pretty nondescript. “I can’t see, or find anything special,”
says Nina. (Not entirely true: A piece of aluminum foil, hard to see
at the lower left, is identifiable and take-able even without the
lamp.)

It’s stated only
when you actually try to clean it up, but the fireplace’s rear
wall is plainly black with soot. The rag on the planter to the right
isn’t adequate for the cleanup in its native state , but douse
it in the vodka (until you use the vodka bottle to carry diesel fuel)
or the kerosene in the lamp and then use it on the rear wall exposes
four numbers: 7 1/2, 3, 10 1/2 and 6.

You may not immediately
connect these numbers with the compass. But if you’ve experimented
a bit with placing the magnetized nuts, you’ll see these numbers,
transposed with clock times (3 = east, 6 = south, 9 = west and 12
= north), can be duplicated on the compass.

7 1/2: Place nuts on the
south and west pins and push the button at the center of the compass
to redirect the needle to a point halfway between 6 and 9.

3: Remove both nuts and
place a single nut on the east pin. Push the button again. The needle
moves to 3.

10 1/2: Remove the nut,
place nuts on the west and north pins and push the button again. The
needle now moves to a point halfway between 9 and 12.

6: Remove the nuts, place
a single nut on the south pin and push the button one last time. The
needle moves to 6.

The compass close-up fades
away and a secret compartment opens above the fireplace. Right-click
on the interior to pull out a reel of film and a sheaf of Tunguska
notes.

The notes from 1958 amount
to a series of I-don’t-knows. Vladimir couldn’t explain
the changes in plant growth in Tunguska. He didn’t find evidence
of a meteorite and thus his and Ken Morangie’s conclusions were
ambiguous. (Oleg seems to have played only a small role.)

The file also refers to
Vladimir’s later examination of a strange piece of metal found
in the region. (This sounds very like the one that the shepherd’s
son found in the woods.) It reports that Vladimir established its
“non-terrestrial origins” and the meteorite theory thus
gained credence.

But further analysis by
Vladimir and Manuel Perez showed the metal had been “worked.”
(In other words, we aren’t alone in the universe!) When they
sought to publish this conclusion in the Kalenkov report, it was rejected
and Vladimir and his team were denied further opportunities to examine
the metal.

Things went downhill from
here. When Vladimir sought to continue his Tunguska research, he was
booted out of the Academy of Science. His 1977 trip was an independent
one with a view to turning up additional fragments.

The film comes from this
trip. Slap it on the projector and activate the projector to learn
the bulb has burned out. You need an alternate light source.

This gets a little confusing.

No, the oil lamp isn’t
an adequate replacement. But the projector is backed up against the
window to the left of the door and examination reveals that the window
is filthy. Clean it inside and out with the rag, with or without the
vodka/kerosene, and you’ll find (after a resentful Nina holds
forth on housework) that there’s pronounced beam coming in one
of the central panes. That can only be a good thing and though the
game doesn’t tell you so, this is in fact the light source required
to complete this puzzle.

However, you still can’t
run the projector. The game doesn’t say why. (It feels as though
there are a few explanatory lines missing in this part of the game.)

But note that the the beam
hits the back of the projector at a shallow angle. Presumably this
prevents the light from reaching the lens on the near side. You must
find a way to reflect the light through the length of the camera.

Individually, neither the
glass shard on the floor — the back of the charred chair in the foreground
is pointing straight at it — nor the foil from the fireplace is up
to the task. The glass would just refract the light and the tin foil
is usable only when folded about a solid shape. But combined in inventory,
they’ll do handily. Simply use the foil-wrapped shard on the
projector, then activate the projector and the film plays.

Manuel Perez and then Vladimir
can be seen working over a triangular hump of earth. Manuel excuses
himself and exits to the left. There’s a flash. A tree falls,
knocking the camera on its side, and there’s a distant cry.
Vladimir goes off to see what’s happened. There’s some
shadowy movement to the left and then a body (Perez, it appears) falls
right into the foreground. One of the most effective scenes in the
game … but what does it mean?

Back to the present day.
Nina’s wondering if the flash was lightning or “sheet
lightning”when she hears a loud explosion and runs to a promontory
for a view of a badly-damaged research center. There’s been
another attack like the ones Nina read about in Sidorkin’s office.

And then there’s
a kind of assault upon Nina herself. A pair of Black Robes appear
behind her and sift through her mind with whispery voices. They back
off when soldiers arrive. Just ahead of them, Nina vaults into the
soldiers’ jeep, has a rather Indiana Jones-like encounter with
a troop truck and finally is pulled to safety at cliff’s edge
by Max. We find her on-board Oleg’s plane. She’s not sure
the Black Robes were human — they anticipates a revelation at the
games end — and says they seemed to be searching for an answer. (The
question is never made clear.)

Oleg speaks up. Sergej
has learned Vladimir wasn’t in Moscow. But Nina thinks the trip
wasn’t all a waste. She is now sure her father was kidnapped
for some reason related to the Tunguska blast and thinks he was onto
something big. Perhaps the companions from his expeditions can identify
it. They drop off Max in Dublin to find Morangie while Nina continues
on to Havana and then an asylum in the small town of San Christobal
in search of Perez.

Odds & ends:
In front of the cabin, Nina can also examine the swamp to the right.
To the left, the drinking-water tank. On the truck-wreck screen, the
truck itself and the river.

– If you follow the path
straight into the screen from here, you’ll come upon an oddity:
an exposition screen without usable items or puzzle elements. In the
distance, you can see the research station and its private airport.
Nina rambles on about this for a while and, afterward, can examine
the station itself and the river below. She returns here, noninteractively,
at the end of this segment.

Cuba and Ireland

The Nina-in-Cuba and Max-in-Ireland
segments can be completed side by side. (You can switch between the
characters at will, but they don’t interact until an automatic
sequence at the end of the Cuba segment.) However, they overlap in
one spot and you’ll need to complete Cuba first to bring the
Ireland segment to an end.

Cuba

Needless to say, Nina can’t
simply march in and see Perez. While the dancing nurse at the front
desk confirms his presence at the institution, she says a visit would
require a special permit and that’s not happening. And you can’t
find your way in unassisted. A gate on the left side of the lobby
blocks access to his room.

But knowing what we know
about the favor system, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to explore
what sorts of things the nurse values highly. Try her “music”
and “politics” topics to learn she’s been poling
the electorate (joke stolen from The Simpsons episode “Separate
Vocations”) and is now running for mayor.

Maybe you could make her
some campaign posters? Once you’ve talked to Sabrina — the
nurse is identified by the gate keeper’s “Nurse Sabrina”
topic only after you’ve talked to her — you can drop back to
the artist watching the entrance to the asylum grounds and suggest
a portrait for this purpose. He’s fine with the project — with
two stipulations.

1) Sabrina’s dancing
awfully fast to serve as his model.

2) He needs some black
pigment.

The first is easy enough
to remedy. The record player can’t be turned off entirely —
Nina doesn’t want to alienate the nurse — but it can be slowed
down. Head right through the courtyard and enter the kitchen. Take
the small weights on the corner of the table in the room’s near
right corner.

Then find our way back
to the lobby and head right and down to a room where an inmate is
building a house of cards. The turntable’s here. Drop the weights
on the record. The pace drops off and when you get back to the lobby,
you’ll find Sabrina has followed suit.

You won’t find any
black paint lying around. But it’s not the only option. Charcoal
will work as well. You’ll have to make it yourself. Think fire.
Grab the eyeglasses (always a reliable fire-starter) from the table
in the record-player room, a magazine from the stand in the lobby
and some logs from the pile in the far left corner of the courtyard.

Then head back to the kitchen
and pop the wood and then the magazine into the stove. Nina’s
matches have flown south with the move to Cuba, but note the strong
light coming in the rear window. Simply use the glasses on the stove
to light up the contents.

No waiting required. Use
the sausage tongs hanging from the left end of the shelf at the right
side of the rear wall to pull a charred log from the fire. Drop it
on the painter and ask after the portrait. If you’ve already
weighted the record, it’s as good as done. Bring the picture
to Sabrina and she’ll ask for more copies (and separate out
the original from the plastic bag supplied by the artist).

You probably noticed the
copying machine in the upper left corner of the record-player room.
Perfect for this purpose. But there’s no way of getting to it,
as the patient’s under-construction house of cards is in the
way. Can you help the process along?

Naturally. Talk to the
patient about “House of cards” to learn that, every afternoon
at the same time, he loses all his work to an “earthquake.”

A daily earthquake seems
unlikely. The only earth-shaking event that goes on at the asylum
is in the courtyard: A worker (currently taking a siesta) is using
a jackhammer to break up the concrete surface in preparation for repaving
as per the direction of new asylum owner Massimo Gartuso. (Ask Bernard
about “work” to get as much of the story as he knows.
It’s a rush job — supposed to be complete in three days —
and a rather strange priority for an American billionaire.)

Ask Bernard about the first
of his two “break” topics for a palpable hint about how
to bring on this afternoon’s quake: His break lasts only until
black smoke replaces the white cooking smoke currently coming from
the kitchen chimney at the upper left.

You already have the perfect
black smoke-producing item on-hand: the plastic sleeve for Sabrina’s
portrait. Pop it into the stove. Black smoke pours from the stack.
Bernard starts his jackhammer and you’ll hear a distant “Noooo!”
as the house of cards collapses. (If Nina refuses to shorten Bernard’s
break, you haven’t talked to the patient in the record-player
room. If she objects to the potential smell and fumes of a burning
plastic bag, you either haven’t talked to Bernard or to both
Bernard and the patient.)

Retrace your steps to the
record-player room to find the patient gone and the cards scattered
about. Use the portrait on the copier. Drop the copies on Sabrina
and she’ll open the gate to Perez’s room.

Enter the hall and use
the near door on the right. Empty. You’re inclination is probably
to run back to Sabrina, and it’s a good instinct — but you’ll
have to look at everything you can look at here in order to leave.
Examine the bed to find a newspaper article about the appointment
of Nicole Charlesroi as the new asylum director. (Nina’s diary
adds that it’s rumored the change was made at the request of
a foreign investor — presumably new owner Gartuso.)

Also check out the surveillance
camera in the upper right corner (a key element in the next sequence),
the missing tiles in the left wall (which seem to have a certain arrangement
and thus suggest Perez is not as inarticulate as he may later seem)
the blood stains on the floor, and the desperate scratch marks higher
on that same wall.

Now check in with Sabrina
on “Perez’s cell” to report him missing. This is
news to the nurse, who takes alarm and raises the issue with off-screen
caretaker Ramon. He sounds blase about the whole thing and indicates
he’s already brought it to the attention of the doctor … and
that now he’s going to change the patients’ bedding.

That should connect with
you: There’s a laundry cart out in the courtyard. And sure enough,
it turns out this exchange has kicked Ramon into action. Each time
you return to the courtyard, you’ll now find him depositing
bed linens in the cart and then returning inside. No, Nina can’t
slip through the door in his wake — whenever Ramon’s on-screen,
the interface is disabled — and the closed door can’t be opened
from this side. Shame you don’t have the wedge from the Russian
hospital.

Now, why do you want to
go in there? Yeah, yeah, because the game’s made the door difficult
to open. But there’s also a practical reason: This is the control
room. Ask Sabrina about the new topic “surveillance camera”
after you leave Perez’s room to learn recordings from the camera
in the missing patient’s room could be viewed there … and
that she can’t get you in. Only Ramon and Charlesroi have keys.

You can’t steal a
key, but now that the door is opening and closing on a regular basis
(once every time you visit the courtyard), you can stop it from closing
all the way.

Pay special attention to
the scoring of the wood to the right of the door. This may seem to
speak to the darker passions of the inmates, but it is essentially
a bullseye for the player. The only thing that interacts with this
spot is Sabrina’s portrait and the only thing that’ll
make it stick there is the meat fork found beside the dirty dishes
in the kitchen. kitchen. Spear the portrait with the fork and then
use the combo on the doorframe. It protrudes slightly into the path
of the opening door, but slides out of the way when the door opened
and then drops back into a position to stop the door from closing.
Following Ramon’s next appearance — which occurs the instant
the painting is in place — you’ll be able to enter the control
room. (You can set up this mechanism as soon as Sabrina removes the
portrait from the plastic sleeve, but the door doesn’t open
until Sabrina talks to Ramon about the missing Perez.)

The three VCRs here are
inoperable without a tape and, naturally, the tapes are secured in
the safe at the right. The combination must be incorporated in the
painting at the left — being that there’s nothing else even
vaguely cryptic here and that you can’t leave the room without
opening the safe.

This depicts pirate, cat,
parrot and spider — or, by number of legs, 1428. Use this combination
on the safe and Nina automatically retrieves the surveillance tape
for Perez’s room. Use it on the VCRs and you’ll see two
shots of a suffering Perez and then a third of Ramon helping him from
his cell.

When the tape ends, Ramon
appears. He’s prepared to do Nina violence … but calms down
when it becomes clear she means Perez no harm. After some background
— the most notable detail: Gartuso’s investment in the asylum
suggests he’s after something big — he takes her to the troubled
man, who has been hidden in a shallow seaside cave.

You can question Perez
about the asylum, Vladimir and Tunguska, but only the “Father”
topic is required. Clearly Perez wants to say something about his
former colleague, but his condition has rendered him inarticulate.
He needs access to a non-verbal medium. (Remember the missing tiles
back in his room. It looked as though Perez had been trying to draw
something.) So you just need to do for him what’s you’ve
already done for the gatekeeper/painter: Give him a brush and a canvas.

Leave the cave. You’ll
find yourself entering the left side of the starting screen. You just
need to recover the nurse’s portrait from beside the control-room
door and another sample of charcoal from the kitchen stove (again,
using the tongs).

Retrace your steps to the
beach and give both items to Perez He’ll draw a strange symbol
or diagram. Nina takes a picture of it with her cell phone and sends
it to Max. The scene now switches to Ireland. If you’ve freed
Morangie, the action picks up on the upper level of his study. If
not, wherever Max left off.

Odds & ends:
Out front, Nina can also examine the easel. In the lobby, the poster
on the pillar. In the record-player room, the canvases beside the
door and in the upper left corner, the list to the left of the shelves
at the back, the shelves themselves and the teddy bear. In the courtyard,
the two notes beside the control-room door, the scoring on the right
side of the doorframe, the loudspeaker above the far corner and, until
Bernard resumes his drilling, the jackhammer. In the kitchen, the
dirty dishes to the left, the onions hanging beside the window, the
right-hand shelves and the soup ladle hanging below them. In the hallway
outside Perez’s room, the face design on the wall at the end
of the hall. In Perez’s room, Nina can inspect the mattress
a second time. And at the seaside cave, the cave itself.

– There’s a fair
amount of stuff here that can be taken but has no actual role in the
game: the teddy bear in the record-player room (once the house of
cards has been demolished) and an onion and ladle in the kitchen.
(Given the one-to-a-customer notice on the wall beside the stuffed-animals
shelves, it’s a fair bet that at least the bear is an artifact
from some earlier stage of the design.)

– Nina can try to use the
jackhammer, the fallen playing cards, the glasses on the stove (when
it contains the wood, but not the magazine), the magazine on the stove
(without first using the wood), the stove itself (without using the
tongs) and the nearest three doors on the left side of the hall leading
to Perez’s room. In the courtyard, she can try the control-room
door (after completing her business with Ramon) and try to talk to
Bernard (after burning up the plastic bag).

– Did you notice the custom
design on the playing cards? Once you explore Perez’s room,
you’ll realize the woman on the queen is asylum administrator
Nicole Charlesroi. And who’s the guy on the king? Not Gartuso.
(At least, not the version of Gartuso who ended up in the game.)

– One of the notes beside
the control-room door refers to the Black Robes. This makes it clear
that the “sect” is separate and distinct from Gartuso’s
operation (whatever sort of operation that may be).

– The whole issue of repaving
the asylum courtyard is never firmly settled. It’s implied that
Gartuso has something to hide and is in a hurry to do it. But hide
what?

Bernard can’t help
you — he’s an outside contractor — but conversations with
the gate keeper, the nurse Sabrina, the patient building the house
of cards and, eventually, Ramon suggest that a bad fate awaits people
who don’t follow the rules or ask too many questions. The patient
alludes to someone who met that fate, Sabrina names such a person
as Pedro and Ramon reports that two patients have vanished.

Put it all together and
it’s easy to assume Gartuso wants to dispose of the bodies of
the folks he or Charlesroi made disappear — or whose disappearance
he is contemplating. (This would also explain why Ramon freed Perez.)

– Did you notice that most
of the article on Charlesroi appears to have been censored? Her name
and the part of the headline are the only things that are readable.
What’s been hidden … and why? This is never made clear, but
it’s suggested later in the game that Charlesroi was once less
well-regarded.

Ireland

Drop down the stairs at
the right and talk to the fisherman. You’ll establish that Ken
Morangie lives on an island off the coast and that the fisherman will
lend you the boat off to the right in exchange for whiskey.

The cellar to the topside
pub — reached through the door in the cliff behind him — is a likely
source of the booze, but it has an intimidating padlock. The key’s
hanging on the pillar at the bar and the proprietor’s not letting
it out of his sight. So Max’s job here is to remove the bartender
to a position where he can’t see the key.

The key to the key is the
sleeping man at the left rear. Try to talk to him and then check with
the bartender. He reveals Klaus will wake up if you bring him something
to eat.

Not hard. You’ve
just met a fisherman and he’s happy enough to supply you with
a fish from his pail. (Just try to take one.)

But you’ll want to
cook the fish first. The fireplace at the rear of the pub will do,
but you’ll need some kind of pan for the purpose. The sign for
sightseeing tours (beside the stairs across the road from the pub)
will do. Place the fish on the pan and then the pan it in the fireplace
to flash-fry it. (It’s ready instantly.)

Only now you’ll discover
the sign’s too hot to grab barehanded.

There’s a makeshift
oven mitten just outside. Take the red flag to the right of the exterior
side of the pub’s door. If you try to use it in its initial
state, it turns out to be plastic and would just burn or melt if used
on the sign. But you can wet it down in the sea. Max can then take
the fish and present it to Klaus, who now raises his besotted head
and asks for lemon.

Of course the bartender
doesn’t have a lemon. But you have to ask in any case. Ask about
the pub also and he’ll drop a hint about his walk-in crowd —
the drivers of fruit and vegetable trucks who stop in and get tanked
up during their rounds.

No one’s going to
stroll in and just drop a lemon on you, either. This tidbit is meant
to suggest that trucks hauling lemons might be found in the neighborhood.
Put this together with the two road signs outside — the top a 30-kph
speed limit for the curve and the bottom reporting road damage —
and you may get an idea how to bounce a crate out of one of those
trucks.

Cover the top of the sign
with the flag and step back inside the bar. You’ll hear the
sounds of an approaching truck and then some kind of minor mishap.

Leave the pub again to
find a crate in the road. It contains a lemon. You think it here,
it comes out there. Back inside, give it to the bartender. He’ll
attend to the cutting and squeezing and then temporarily abandon his
own drink on the bar to join Klaus … which distance still doesn’t
allow Max the freedom to take the cellar key.

However, it does allow
Max to mess with the bartender’s drink. Take the tumbler on
Klaus’s table, fill it with sea water down at the dock and then
use the tumbler on the fireplace to boil off the water. Retrieve the
tumbler (no flag needed this time) and establish with a right-click
that a layer of salt remains — now a separate inventory item.

Use the salt on the bartender’s
tumbler back on the bar. The bartender doesn’t seem to notice,
but he does get up to retrieve the drink — which now makes him sick
to his stomach. He’ll step off-screen and Max can take the cellar
key from the pillar.

Across the road and down
the stairs, you can now deal with the padlock and, inside the cellar,
grab a whiskey bottle from the shelves at the rear. Outside, drop
it on the fisherman. The boat-for-booze deal still holds and you just
need to click on the boat for a cut-scene on Max rowing across the
channel. (But first, refill Klaus’s tumbler with water. This
may save you a trip later on.) Let the scene play out, as it gets
you the only exterior view of the castle.

Max arrives in the castle’s
inner courtyard to find Morangie trapped in the central well — “locked
in” by nameless visitors. Ropes and ladders aren’t the
answer You’ll need to extract the lord of the manor by opening
a hatch down on his level and Morangie has no idea how to bring that
off. Getting him out is one big puzzle that involves everything in
the castle and a few items on the mainland as well.

Three passages lead away
from the well: the right one to a crypt, the upper right one to a
study with an upper level and the upper exit to a hallway that leads
in turn to bedroom and a torture chamber.

The bedroom should excite
your interest. Beyond the curtain on the room’s right side is
a secret passage leading down to four closed portcullises (only two
initially visible) and a raised bridge.

The mechanism for raising
the portcullises, lowering the bridge and unlocking the door at the
passage’s end is back in the bedroom. On the left side of the
room is a statue. Examine it and the diary grows a new hint: In its
current state, the statue is not “worthy of a true Irish lord.”

How should it look? If
you’ve already poked around the castle, you may have found a
lordly model. Return to the well, use the exit at the upper right
and, in the study, check out the portrait of William Morangie above
the desk. You’ll see he has a sword, shield, helmet, greaves
(leg armor) and an amulet.

Also, hard to detect, a
ring on his sword hand.

The statue in the bedroom
has none of these things.

Perhaps you should play
dress-up? Equipping the statue with these six items opens a path into
the bowels of the castle, via the secret passage, and unlocks the
round door to the trapped lord at its end. These items can be acquired
in just about any order — exception: the amulet can be collected
only after Max has placed three items on the statue — and each presents
a somewhat different challenge.

Sword:
The only challenge here is having your damn eyes open! It’s
stuck in the stone to the left of the well. Just pull it out.

Shield:
Not everything has to be exactly as pictured in the portrait. In fact,
the shield, helmet, greaves and ring are all doppelgangers. Only the
sword and the amulet are real. And the shield is just the moldy shutter
in the upper left corner of the courtyard.

Greaves:
This one is difficult to find: You’ve got to trek back the pub
exterior after reaching the island — moving off the lower edge of
the courtyard screen — and notice the one item that’s different
from your pre-boat trip visits. (Other differences: Everyone’s
gone — Foley the fisherman and his pail of fish , the bartender and
Klaus — and the fire’s gone out!)

A rain gutter to the left
of the pub door has fallen down. Right-click on it in inventory to
establish it consists of two stuck-together pieces. You just have
to find a way to pull them apart — and what’s a torture chamber
with a rack for if not for pulling apart stuck-together bits of rain
gutter? Use the gutter on the rack and it’s done. (Do remember
to pick up the pieces.)

Helmet:
Not hard to find. It’s right on the well screen. Right-click
on the chimney cover in the upper-right corner just below the parapet.
“It almost looks as though the chimney has a helmet on,”
Max opines.

To remove it, you’ll
have to assemble a mechanism.

The chimney’s above
the fireplace in the study. Climbing the inside and popping its top
is not an option, but an attentive player can’t help but notice
the interesting juxtaposition of objects down in the study proper.
The lever on the left wall on the upper level raises and lowers the
chandelier. And the hassock in the room below and the chandelier are
so aligned with the fireplace that a chandelier descending onto one
end of a seesaw might send an object on the other rocketing up the
chimney.

No seesaws or rockets of
any description can be found at Castle Morangie. But, as with the
greaves, you’re not limited to the castle.

However, for this visit
to the mainland, you’ll need some tools … and not all the
tools immediately look like tools. From the torture chamber, take
the tongs (here called “pliers”) from the table at the
left. And take the spearheads from the display case on the upper floor
of the study.

You’ll have to retreat
to the pub’s cellar to find a suitable plank. At the far right,
you’ll find a long board supporting the rack of whiskey barrels.
Use the pliers to liberate it.

This fits just fine into
Max’s inventory, but he’ll immediately run into trouble
if he tries to leave the cellar. The long plank is too long. Evidently
it never occurs to Max to carry it through the door short-way first.
You’ll leave it beside the door when you leave the cellar and
will have to cut it down to size to take it with you. (A second potential
problem: If for some reason you’ve already grasped the coin
with the pliers — see the “Ring” section below — you’ll
leave to first complete construction of the gold ring.)

That’s what the spearheads
are about. Use them on the vice below the whiskey bottles to create
a makeshift saw edge and then the plank on the vice and it’ll
be whittled down to a manageable length. This’ll fit nicely
over the hassock in the castle parlor.

But don’t return
to the castle just yet. What object gets the honor of knocking loose
the makeshift helmet? Halfway between the cellar door and the stairs
up to the pub, you’ll find a large flat stone. Take it. (In
fact, you can grab this at any point.)

In the castle study, use
the plank on the hassock and the stone on the seesaw. Upstairs, throw
the lever on the left wall and you’ll be treated to quick in-game
scenes of the chandelier smashing down on the seesaw and the helmet-like
chimney cover landing just to the right of the well.

Amulet:
This one requires patience — it can’t be claimed until you
recover the small key from the niche in the secret passage — and
a bit of research. There’s a clue to the item’s location
and the means of retrieval and you’ll have to find it in order
to take the amulet. (Otherwise, Max will balk at grave robbing.)

Inspect the books above
the spearheads display case in the upper level of the study to learn
that the castle is haunted. A William Morangie of the 13th and early
14th centuries was interred in defiance of custom — he was denied
the traditional funeral pyre — and buried in a simple robe with his
family amulet. Now he’s said to walk the castle after midnight
in search of intruders.

So the amulet’s in
Morangie’s sarcophagus in the castle’s crypt. And there
seems no way into it. If you explore the crypt — down the passage
to the right of the central well — you’ll find the heavy stone
lid won’t budge

What did the book say?
Morangie was denied a funeral pyre. It’s too late for a proper
pyre, but you can still give Morangie a fiery send-off.

On the upper level of the
study, just to the left of the top of the stairs, is an oil lamp.
Take it and, down in the crypt, pour the oil into the groove that
runs around the top of the sarcophagus. (If you can’t do this,
you haven’t checked out the haunted-castles book.) Use the torch
on the groove. After the fire burns itself out, something seems to
escape from a newly-revealed hole at its left end: Morangie’s
spirit evidently, for Max suddenly feels cold.

The hole isn’t declared
as a keyhole, but a key is what’s required. You can’t
find it until you’ve placed three of the six items on the statue.
(Sword, shield and greaves are the easiest three.)

Once you’ve done
so, enter the secret passage behind the curtain on the right side
of the bedroom. You’ll now find that the first two portcullises
have been raised and that the central bridge has been lowered. This
allows you access to the niche in the wall above the bridge.

Within, a small key. Insert
the key from the secret-passage niche in this new hole and the lid
rolls back to reveal William Morangie’s remains and the amulet.
Take it.

Ring:
Potentially, this could give you even more trouble than the amulet.
It’s difficult to identify the presence of the ring in the study
painting. Only the most careful observer will note the golden bump
protruding above Morangie’s sword hand.

You’ll have to play
blacksmith and fashion the ring using the gold coin found in the nightstand
(“commode”) to the left of the bed.

That means relighting the
forge and that’s slightly tricky. The only fire in the castle
is the lit torch in the crypt and that torch isn’t going anywhere.
You’ll have to import fire from crypt to forge using the unlit
torch from the pillar in the pub’s cellar.

Once the forge is lit,
use the pliers on the coin and pliers + coin on the forge. It’ll
turn red hot and Max automatically removes the combo before the coin
starts to melt.

The thing is, it’s
still just a coin — not a ring. Use it on the Iron Maiden to the
left of the entrance to punch a hole in the middle and dip it into
the tumbler to preserve the ring’s shape. (If you neglected
to refill the tumbler after the salt episode, you can simply dip the
ring into the sea back on the mainland. The water in the secret passage
— or whatever that is down there — is out of reach.)

Your problems aren’t
quite over. Five items can simply be dropped on the statue. Not the
amulet. Max says there’s no way to make it stay in place.

Perhaps a chain? There’s
one hanging just to the left of the door in the torture chamber.

Yeah, that’s half
the story. But amulet and chain do not play friendly. You’ll
need a middleman to connect them — that bit of wire hanging off the
right of the two candle holders in the hall leading to the bedroom
and torture chamber. Use the amulet on the wire and then the amulet
+ wire on the chain. Now you can hang the amulet on the statue.

With all six items in
place, Max can open the round door at the bottom of the secret passage
and free Morangie. And here’s where the connection between the
Cuba and Ireland segments kicks in.

If you’ve haven’t
finished the Cuba segment, the Ireland segment ends here — it’ll
pick up again later — and control switches to Nina.

If you have completed the
Cuba segment — Nina obtaining a diagram from Manuel Perez — Max
and Ken Morangie move to the upper level of Morangie’s study
and Morangie discloses that he has seen the symbol before: It was
engraved on the metal fragment Vladimir and Perez studied. (That’s
why Vladimir believed it had been “worked.”) Vladimir
at first wasn’t sure the symbol was a symbol because the fragment
was so badly damaged.

But he was persuaded by
a report in the archives of Moscow’s Academy of Science: In
1947, an English scientist named Evans had discovered disc-shaped
objects with the same properties and symbols as the Tunguska fragment.

When Vladimir failed to
uncover the location of these finds in the archives, he contacted
Morangie to bid on the late Evans’ records. Morangie succeeded
and sent Vladimir an encoded copy of Evans’s journals. (This
was the handoff mentioned in the invisible-ink letter.) You’ll
see these in the next segment.

Next thing you know, Max
is on the phone to Nina asking if her father visited the Himalayas
— this is where Evans found the disks — and offering that what Vladimir
found there might explain his disappearance. He’s sending the
records he’s received from Morangie to Nina’s cell and
they’re to meet back in Berlin.

Odds & ends:
On the starting screen, Max can also examine his rented motorcycle
and the menu board to the left of the pub door. Down at the dock,
the bottles to the right of the fisherman. In the pub cellar, the
whiskey barrels to the far right. In the hallway leading to the castle
bedroom and torture chamber, the candle holder on the left. In the
castle bedroom, the left window, the pictures in the upper left and
upper right corners and the bed. (Max says he could get any woman
with a bed like this. Yeah, that’s what women are looking for
in men these days: four-poster beds.) In the torture chamber, the
cage to the right. In the study, the chair and the clock. (So why
is the chair out in the middle of the room?) In the secret passage,
the raised bridge. In the close-up view of the door at end of the
secret passage, the rubble to the left.

– Max can try to use the
sea (sans tumbler), the pub fireplace (sans fish dinner) and the rack
(sans rain gutters), use the sign on the fireplace (sans fish), use
the uncooked fish on the bartender, sleeping patron Klaus and the
fireplace (sans sign), use Klaus’s empty tumbler on the fireplace,
use the salt on the bartender’s tumbler when the bartender is
present, use the shutter/shield, oil lamp and coin (sans pliers) on
the lit forge, and use the sword on the sarcophagus.

– Did you notice the little sign to the left of the pub door? It’s
non-interactive and the printing is too small to read with definitive
accuracy. But it appears to read, “Hunger keep out.”

– Given that Morangie can’t
tell Max how to reach the hatch into the well-bottom, he must have
meant that he was pushed down the well rather than “locked in”
as claimed. (That’s also consistent with Morangie having sprained
his ankle.) But the freed Morangie doesn’t say one more word
about how he came to be imprisoned. And why is he dressed like Sgt.
Pepper?

Berlin

Cut scene. Max arrives
at Vladimir’s place first. Nina’s not here. He does get
a voicemail message , but it’s from Kanski, all of people. The
detective thinks he’s being followed, says he’ll try to
lose his pursuers and meet Max at the museum, and closes by stating
his belief that Max is in danger.

What follows will probably
prove confusing.

A final shot of the dark
tower. “We’ve managed to track them down,” says
the caller. (This caller sounds a lot like Oleg!) “We know where
the hideout is!”

Who’s this “them”
— and what hideout? The Black Robes? If so, this is the first indication
anyone’s been trying to track them down or that they have a
“hideout.”

When you realize it’s
Oleg talking, you’ll realize “hideout” is just the
wrong word. The caller evidently means the hiding place for one of
the metal discs Evans discovered and, actually, his report of success
is premature. (Nina won’t find a hidden room in the Himalayas
until the next segment.)

In any case, the well-dressed
man orders the caller to go to this location immediately and to “take
care” of Max and Nina. And he indicates he’ll tell Dr.
Charlesroi to prepare for the final phase of her experiment. (This
link to Charlesroi pretty much identifies the well-dressed man as
tycoon Massimo Gartuso. Who else could it be?)

Meanwhile, Max arrives
at the museum to find Kanski dead and wearing an amulet like the one
worn by the Black Robe captured on film at the beginning of the game.
(So what exactly is Kanski’s deal? We’ll get better context
for that in the game’s final segment, so I’ll save it
for the final “Odds & ends” section.)

Max is suddenly worried
he’s in over his head and leaves the museum. A dark car stops
to collect him — the same one that followed Nina back at the beginning
of the game — and Max gets in without objection.

This sets up the scene
at Vladimir’s place. Oleg scapegoats Max, tries to persuade
Nina he’s “playing some kind of evil game” and,
playing the “save your father” card, pushes her to leave
for the Himalayas. And they do.

The Himalayas

Nina can’t do anything
with the three holes in the wall at her starting position just yet,
so send her down the tunnel to the left to a large room with a waterfall.

At the bottom of the falls,
you’ll see a body and a pack. Nina can’t get down there,
but the pack will float up to her level if she can close off the flow
of water using the large rock on the upper edge of the precipice.

Return to the starting
point and take the yak’s skull from the post beside the path.
With the skull comes the wooden peg on which it rested and that turns
out to be an ideal pry bar. Use the peg on the rock. It falls down,
more or less closing off the opening below the falls and the pack
obligingly surfaces at the edge of the newly formed pool.

Right-click on the pack
in inventory to extract a bone that looks as though it might have
been a key in a previous life. This can be inserted in the lowest
of the three holes in the upper wall back at the starting location
and this in turn opens up an entrance in the upper wall of the waterfall
room.

Enter to find a giant face
like the one on the Black Robe amulet sculpted in the upper wall,
cave paintings that show the fall of a “huge unshapely object”
in a Tunguska-like setting and human figures fleeing from same, symbols
similar to the one Perez drew for Nina in Cuba and, beneath the head,
a puzzle.

Right-click on the puzzle
to start. You’re supposed to move 11 pieces about on this 5
x 8 grid to recreate a picture — but what picture? Perez’s?

No. The picture is concealed
in your inventory. Which new item have you had no occasion to put
to use so far? Evans’s journal. Open it up with a right-click.
The five pages of text are an account of his 1947-49 expedition, his
search for a mysterious Dzopa tribe and, eventually, his rescue by
Tibetan monks. The sixth page is blank and you may not even notice
you can turn the page again to a diagram.

The large circle here corresponds
to the immovable red stone in the puzzle. You just have to adjust
the light-colored stones to (almost) the positions seen below. (The
piece at the extreme lower right still needs to be dropped down one
space. I brake for screenshots.)

Once the puzzle is
complete, the usual secret compartment opens above. It contains one
of the stone discs Evans found. Take it. Oleg appears, congratulates
and then punches out Nina — hey, what did I tell you about Oleg way
back when? — loads her aboard his plane and brings her to Sergej.
Your erstwhile allies are your enemies.

Odds & ends:
At the starting location, Nina can also examine Oleg and try to use
the exit. In the waterfall room, she can examine the falls and the
relief carved in the upper wall. In the puzzle room, the chasm to
the right.

Somewhere Out
in the Cold

The scene is an icy restroom.
Oleg and Sergej are under instructions to kill the still-unconscious
Nina — evidently, Oleg has a punch like Popeye — and they mean to
drown her in this tub.

But they can’t turn
the water on. A piece has been removed from the pump system.

“Sabotage?”
asks Oleg.

Apparently. We’ll
find the saboteur in a bit. In any case, good news for Nina, who comes
to in their absence and steps out of the tub.

Listen to her, difficult
though that may be. She doesn’t know where she is. And she’s
freezing her ass off. Let’s make it our first order of business
to get her some cold-weather clothing. This widens her horizons. She
can then leave the station, sort out her whereabouts and explore two
(eventually, three) outdoor screens.

That’ll take some
work. Nina is effectively locked in. Leave the tub room, take the
key beside the door at the left end of this workshop and try it. You’ll
discover the lock is iced-over. (A little puzzling, since Oleg and
Sergej must have just used this same door.)

Mercifully, you do have
a way of generating heat: the electric drill at the right side of
the room. Take the metal sheet to the right of the vice, use it on
the drill and then activate the drill. Sparks. Can we get those sparks
onto the lock?

Sure. The most combustible
substance you’ll find in these two rooms is the toilet paper
to the right of the tub-room door. Use the metal sheet on the drill,
the TP on the metal sheet and activate the drill. Fire!

Nina’s as sensitive
about holding metal objects in a flame as she was about holding resin
in steam back in Tunguska and requires some kind of key-holder. Right-click
on the alleged “armoire” above the workbench and liberate
a tube of silicone, a thread-cutter (here called a “tapper”)
and a “piece of something” that recalls the slingshot
found at the train station in Moscow. (The first two come into play
in the second of the station’s three segments.)

The “piece of something”
will not interact with the key in this condition, but a little squeeze
in the vice (or vise) turns something into something else. Use the
key on this key-holder, then the combo on the fire and then the orange-hot
key on the iced-over lock. (Before you scoot, note the camera above
the tub in the tub room and egg in the incubator at the left side
of the workshop. You’ll deal with these later.)

On the other side of the
door, you’ll find yourself on a curved platform with an inaccessible
door across a gap (note the keypad) and exits and inaccessible elevators
at either end. (The lefthand lift won’t come into play until
after Max’s arrival.)

Focus on the freight on
the right-hand elevator below. You can’t raise the elevator
to your level and if you drop down the stairs at the right to the
exit level, you’ll find the contents out of reach from below
as well.

However, on the lower level,
you’ll also get a better sense of the contents. Just below the
broken elevator switch, you’ll see a pile of salt — currently
un-take-ably small.

And said dropping-down
gives you the means to extract a couple of items. Against the wall
between the elevator and the station exit is a fishing rod. Take it,
climb back up to the curved platform and use the rod on the elevator
platform. Winter clothing! Nina instantly put this on.

Do it again? Yeah, the
game lets you! This time you come up with a “laundry ball”
— a bundle of terrycloth bedding. (This’ll eventually help
you collect the salt.)

Completion of one objective
leads quickly to completion of another: Dressed for success, Nina
can go outside and quickly identify her location (albeit in a speculative
tone) as Antarctica. She can also explore left and right, but to no
real purpose at this time.

To restore a sense of purpose,
climb back to the curved platform and use the left exit. You’ll
find yourself in a control room and privy to a cut-scene with Oleg,
Sergej and our first glimpses of Dr. Charlesroi and a strange rotating
machine.

Sergej reveals the saboteur
has been found and met with an unfortunate accident. He asks after
the water situation and before Oleg can answer Charlesroi shuts him
down. Gartuso is expected and she wants to have everything ready to
go. (A fair question: What’s the rush? Gartuso’s been
in a big hurry all along, but it’s not like the experiment relies
on some planetary conjunction!)

Nina then gives you a new
agenda: “mess up their plans, but big.”

Of course, that’s
a rather broad mission statement, so let’s extract specifics
from the exchange we’ve just witnessed. What did Sergej mean
about the saboteur’s accident? And can you fix the water system
yourself? (Oleg hasn’t found the missing piece.)

You’ve now seen all
that’s currently available to see of the facility’s interior,
so it’s time to venture out onto the tundra. To the left of
the entrance, you’ll find a penguin sitting resolutely on what
must be an egg and a deep crevasse. A right-click on the pit establishes
there’s a body down there.

Sergej’s saboteur?
Must be. He seems to have been abandoned down there to die.

Nina has no way down to
check the body, but she can take the warning sign at the edge of the
precipice. This seems a rather strange response until you realize
the sign leaves behind an inconspicuous hole and thus raises the issue
of what might go in that hole and what effect it might achieve.

What about a modest explosive
charge? Something similar to a grenade can be found in the locker
just to the left of the interior side of the control-room door. Drop
this down the sign hole. The avalanche this sets off creates a slope
that becomes Nina’s path down to the dead man. A right-click
on the body liberates three items: an amulet like the one found on
Kanski, a cigarette lighter (sans fuel) and some pages extracted from
Charlesroi’s journal.

The extract ends where
the game begins, but it does provides a useful thread for events as
seen from The Other Side. The first page reveals what’s going
here. More than 50 years earlier, another researcher — is this the
British scientist Evans? — laid out his theory:

“Take the waves
of our radio transmitters. They are on the streets, in our homes,
they are everywhere. But we don’t see or feel them. Once we
turn on a radio and set it to the right frequency, we suddenly hear
that there are news reports or music. It will be possible to send
thoughts into the human brain the same way. We just have to find the
right frequency.”

Mind control.

On page 2 is the first
reference to an “energy emitter” — that must be the big
machine Nina saw from the control room — and page 3 refers to Charlesroi’s
modest successes in experiments with animals. But on the following
page, the project seems to be dead in the water: The emitter can’t
create radiation fields sustained enough to influence the subjects’
brainwaves.

And this is where the Tunguska
fragment eventually creeps in. According to information bought by
Gartuso from a former KGB agent, the fragment still in Russian hands
allows generation of stable radiation fields. Charlesroi sets out
to acquire a fragment, takes an interest in Perez (whose condition
she connects with Russian experiments on the fragment) and then in
Vladimir. Gartuso was convinced Nina’s father had one of the
artifacts.

But Gartuso’s people
didn’t kidnap Vladimir. “The old scientist has disappeared
without a trace. Someone appears to have kidnapped him right in front
of our noses.” She doesn’t know who, but speculates
it’s someone working toward the same goal. (i.e. The Russians.
That explains Nina’s visit to Siberia.)

Finally, Nina’s been
used by Gartuso all along. You’ve known this since the Himalayas
segment, but Charlesroi doesn’t offer Gartuso’s rationale
for this decision or elaborate on exactly how extensively she’s
been used. (For instance: Was Oleg telling the truth? Is Max just
another part of the conspiracy?)

While interesting, none
of this grand-scheme stuff pushes us along our path. Back to the mundane:
We still have to get the pump system up and running.

It sure would help if you
knew exactly what’s missing from the machine just inside the
base entrance, but this is nowhere hinted. But it does stand to reason
the object might be near the dead saboteur — that he deposited it
somewhere for safekeeping before he was done in. And that assumption
turns out to be on the mark: The penguin near the abyss is sitting
atop the missing part. You’ll have to distract it from its motherly
duties and offer a reasonable substitute.

What do penguins like?
Fish. You have a fishing rod — it survived its bundle-lifting duties
— but no place to use it.

However, if you head right
from the station entrance, you’ll find an ice-locked whaler
and, just to the left, what was once a hole in the ice. It’s
frozen over again but you can safely assume the ice is far less thick
here and that you could break through again with the proper item.

You don’t have the
proper item. The sign won’t beat, the lighter won’t heat
and the journal won’t burn.

But the salt you found
beside the freight elevator might work. There wasn’t enough
of it for Nina to collect, so the answer here is to find something
that will increase the flow from the broken bag … like dropping
something heavy onto the bag from the curved platform above.

I hate to sound like a
broken record, but you don’t have anything heavy, either. But
those terrycloth bedclothes you’ve been lugging around since
our first encounter with the elevator would become immensely heavy
if immersed in a liquid.

That may seem a Catch-22.
It feels as though we’re trying to get through to the very water
that might weigh them down. But there is another liquid available.
The barrel on the forward deck of the whaling vessel contains whale
oil. Dunk the bedclothes in here to make the bundle super-heavy and
then retreat to the curved platform and drop the bundle on the elevator
platform.

Smash. The remaining cable
snaps and platform crashes down onto the boards below. At the same
time, the pile of salt grows large enough to become take-able …

… if you have the right
container. Nina can’t just carry the salt in her hands. But
this is an easy one: Just outside the station entrance is a bucket
very like the one outside Vladimir’s place back in Berlin. Use
the bucket on the salt and the salt bucket on the would-be hole.

And nothing happens. Salt
melts ice slowly. Nina will have to retreat into the facility interior
— not the simply the exterior side of the entrance or the penguin/crevasse
end of the tundra — and then return for the hole to appear. Try to
use the rod on the hole …

… and, again, nothing
happens. Oy. Nina suggests bait.

C’mon now. We’ve
now seen virtually everything there is to see and that includes nothing
that looks remotely like bait. What’s actually required is a
shiny lure and the cigarette lighter from the saboteur’s body
will do the job. Rod + lighter @ ice hole = one skinny fish. Plus
you get the lighter back. (This’ll come into play again in the
station’s second segment.)

(While you’re out
here, also have a look at the frozen jacket hanging on the left side
of the whaler’s forward cabin. A right -click liberates a corked
flask. Boy, that cork’s really in there!)

Drop the fish on the penguin.
The distraction works. The penguin gets busy (in the digestive sense)
with the skinny fish. But Nina can’t keep the metallic egg —
if you try, she does take it, but returns it when the penguin gets
all squawky — and for some reason the cat-taping, doberman-frustrating,
reindeer-rug desiring Nina this time cares what a critter wants. You’re
going to have to come up with an egg substitute.

Now, you’ve seen
an actual egg. At the left end of the workshop is an incubator with
a single egg inside. It’s electronically locked and you’re
not permitted to try out a keycode here — meaning there is none.
You’ll have to break in and a casual break in — just smashing
the glass or using the red gem on the amulet to cut it — would destroy
the contents. You need to find a way to hold the glass in place —
say, the plunger to the left of the basins at the right end of the
tub room. Use the plunger and then the amulet on the incubator and
Nina automatically reaches in to take the egg. Back on the penguin
screen, simply use the real egg on the metal one and, back inside,
the metal egg on the pump. The red lights go green. The place starts
to warm up.

And why have you done this,
exactly? Conceptually, because once Nina was out of danger (i.e. out
of the tub) what was good for the goose presumably became good for
the gander … and because, as intimidated earlier, the camera above
the tub might be of more than passing interest! In any case, simple
curiosity should send you hustling back to the one spot you have good-faith
reason to believe this might have an impact: the tub room. (The tub’s
the only thing that can be turned on until Nina “thanks”
Max at the end.)

Turn the tap and the water
flows … and drains right out of the tub. The tub needs a plug.

There’s no way to
reason this out. It’s one of those odd items that turn up in
a location with no special relevance: the seriously-stuck cork in
the flask from the frozen jacket.

You’d think the vice
back in the workshop might prove helpful here. It doesn’t, but
this puts you in the ballpark: Use the flask on the electric drill
and then activate the drill. The cork appears in inventory. (Alas,
the flask is empty and never does find a use.) Use the cork on the
tub drain. Turn on the tap and the tub fills.

Again, to what purpose?
So you freeze it. Drop back downstairs, pull the egg from the pump
and by the time you get back to the tub, ice has formed over the top.
This permits Nina to step up and extract a video cassette (here called
a “strap” for some reason) from the camera.

This can be played on the
VCRs in the control room. The tape’s not particularly interesting
in and of itself. It shows a glimpse of the tub room and then a short
sequence that must have been recorded in a different camera: Charlesroi
and a “really elegantly dressed guy” (who can only be
Gartuso) out on the curved walkway. (Where, just FYI, there is no
evidence of a camera.)

But playing it kicks off
events down below. Gartuso shows up in the experiment chamber The
demonstration of Charlesroi’s mind-control device is about to
proceed. And Nina now commits to creating “a huge ka-boom”
but says she needs help. The ka-boom must wait a bit, but Nina can
now set about enlisting help.

How? If you search the
station, you’ll find nothing has changed. The elevator down
to the experiment chamber and the door across the gap are still inaccessible.

Were you paying attention
at the end of the cut-scene? Then you noticed the new diary entry.
Have a look. You probably already know more about what’s going
on than is mentioned in the text here, but the key is the close-up
shot from the video-tape exchange: It shows the keypad across the
gap from the inaccessible door and the keycode: 2513.

Pretty sneaky.

Out on the curved platform,
plug this sequence into the keypad. A bridge extends and Nina can
enter a rather low-tech control room on the far side. Look at the
the central radar to see potential help is close at hand. Nina assumes
the plane is friendly (which is kind of a leap, given that the station
isn’t) and wants to get the pilot’s attention. The beacon
and matches in the crate against the rear wall are the means.

Naturally, there is a new
problem: Use the matches on the beacon to learn the fuse is wet.

The solution is an unlikely
one: Get the fuse even wetter. Coat it in whale oil from the barrel
on the whaler’s foredeck. (Whale oil is flammable — it was
originally used in oil lamps — but you have to wonder how well its
flammability would hold up after a century or so of exposure to sub-zero
weather.)

Problem #2: You now discover
that trying to light the beacon with the matches is no longer satisfactory.
Nina says it wouldn’t make much sense to simply put the beacon
on the floor (irrespective of whether the location has a literal floor
or not.).

In other words, you’re
to send it airborne. The solution is right here: Use the beacon on
the harpoon on the bow and the game goes on automatic for an eternity:
The plane picks up the beacon, lands and disgorges Max … and a trio
of Black Robes. (Here you get your one glimpse of what’s under
the robe: They’re human — albeit in a vaguely Sith-ian way.)
Max embarks on The Big Explanation. Some of it you know. Here’s
the new portion:

– The Black Robes want
to help our heroes. They did kidnap Vladimir but for his own good
and despite the head-holding and falling to floor we witnessed in
the intro, he’s OK.

– Despite what Nina heard
from Oleg, Max wasn’t working against Nina. He was also “kidnapped”
by the Black Robes upon his return from Ireland — actually, we saw
that abduction and it appeared a bit more voluntary than a kidnapping
— and its members explained everything. (They were in the car that
followed Nina back at the beginning of the game and met Max outside
the museum.)

– In his research into
the Tunguska disaster, Vladimir learned something that mustn’t
be made public: The Black Robes believe they are the offspring of
extraterrestrials.

– The Tunguska explosion
was a spaceship. It blew up when trying to extract the Black Robe
survivors from Earth.

– Vladimir’s research
was stopped by the Russian military.

– Perez fell victim to
a military experiment involving the fragment. (This was hinted in
the extract from Charlesroi’s journal.)

– Gartuso has been buying
up shares in all the telecommunications companies and will soon control
the worldwide mobile network. Implication: He’s planning to
use mobile phones to spread the mind control signals. (See, this is
why I still don’t own a cell phone.)

– The Black Robes will
destroy Gartuso’s transmitter. Nina and Max must stop the mind-control
experiment.

Max then returns Nina’s
cell phone (found by him in the caves in Himalayas) and follows her
to the control room. Presumably Max here activates the previously-unseen
elevator at the left end of the curved platform, which leads down
to the experiment chamber. Nina leaves. The door closes before Max
can follow. You won’t control him here but he’ll automatically
help Nina when she performs certain actions.

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!”).