Black Mirror II - Walkthrough
BLACK MIRROR II ♦ WALKTHROUGH ♦ CHAPTER 1 ♦ CHAPTER 2 ♦ CHAPTER 3 ♦ CHAPTER 4 ♦ CHAPTER 5 ♦ CHAPTER 6 ♦ PUZZLES ♦ SCREENSHOTS ♦ DIARY
CHAPTER 2
Cutscene
Darren is awakened at his mother’s house by the doorbell. Captain Conley from the local PD reports that Fuller has been stabbed to death and that Angelina, caught literally red-handed at the scene, has been arrested. Darren offers such little exculpatory evidence as he possesses and is invited to come to the station and describe Mr. Mascara. When he leaves the house, he’ll reappear directly in Town Hall. Run through the conversation with the police woman and you’ll find yourself in a mini-game.
A brief exchange with Angelina (en route to the cells) and then the police woman, and Darren has his next goal: Obtain evidence of Fuller’s blackmail operation. This has two stages: finding the material Fuller was using to blackmail Mrs. Biba and obtaining proof of the actual coercive act. — i.e. a statement along the lines of “You give me $1,500 or I’ll …” You can perform these tasks in either order.
The Blackmail Letter
Simply visit Biba’s Diner. Outside, you’ll find Mrs. Biba dropping something in the dumpster over at the right — evidently something she couldn’t trust to the indoor trash can even on this rainy day. When she returns inside, open the bin to retrieve the pieces of a torn-up letter — evidently the one Darren delivered in Chapter I — and right-click on them in inventory to put them together in another mini-game.
What exactly passed between them? Fuller’s wording is sufficiently vague (“visit,” “our time together,” “fun”) to permit multiple interpretations. But the threat is clear enough: Fuller will expose Mrs. Biba unless she pays him off.The Secret Room
Darren believes that whatever Fuller had on Mrs. Biba must be concealed in the secret room behind the photo backdrops in the cellar. But there are multiple barriers to entry. This will take a while.The Photo Shop
Darren arrives back at the photo shop to find both doors blocked with yellow police tape. Suddenly respectful of authority, he won’t break the seals. But the grate covering the well outside the basement window has no such seal. Perhaps the cops thought it impassable. With a little art, Darren can raise it. The key is the grate’s proximity to an effectively immovable object — the grille over the window above the window well. Use the tow rope from the car hood at the left on either to connect the grate below to the grille above. Now you need something durable with which to twist the rope. Try the fallen-down piece of the upper railing on the promenade outside the souvenir shop. (It’s on the ground outside the shop’s far-left corner.) Use it on the rope loop and Darren inserts the tube, twists it and pries up the grate. In the cellar, you’ll find the photo backdrop has been lowered again. You’ll need to raise it to expose the door by pulling in a certain order the five control ropes in the backdrop’s upper-left corner. If only because this is an adventure game, you can be fairly sure that order must be noted down or encoded somewhere. Pull each of the ropes once. This changes their designations from numbers to place names. When you’re done, they should read (from left to right): Beach, Castle, Great Wall of China, Monument Valley and Sphinx. (This is not strictly required, but it will allow you to identify the ropes more readily in the sequence that follows. Hints to the proper order in which you’ll need to pull the ropes can be found upstairs, but they are keyed to the locations of the associated scenes rather than the rope numbers.) Check Fuller’s office. There are two levels of clues here: the note on the right side of the map behind the desk (which provides positions for three ropes and a hint at a fourth) and the map itself. It’s visible only in part in the closeup, but Darren’s spoken description gives all five locations: Utah/Arizona, Hawaii, Egypt, China and Germany. This translates into Monument Valley on the Utah/Arizona line (rope #4), Beach (#1), Sphinx (#5), Great Wall of China (#3) and Castle (#2). Pull the ropes in that order and the backdrops lift.
Now you have access to the door, but still need a code for the keypad to the left. Left-click on the door twice to learn this requires a search of Fuller’s belongings at the local morgue.The Morgue
The morgue’s off the left side of the hospital waiting room. This can play out a couple of different ways, but they both work out the same in the end.Try to talk to the morgue guard (previously seen at the counter at Biba’s) and the nurse speaks up and shoos Darren away. Darren says to himself that he has to find some way to distract her. (See below. Once Darren has a delivery note, the nurse no longer intercedes.)
This is a bit more direct: Try to enter the morgue. The guard stops you, asks if you’re making a delivery and, when Darren confirms, asks for his delivery note.
Needless to say, Darren doesn’t have one. And, just to cut to the chase, he’s also missing an actual parcel and a hospital ID badge. (You can acquire the delivery note and parcel without first talking to the guard, but you’ll need to talk to him with the first two in inventory to set up collection of the ID.) Delivery notes. They’re on the corner of the counter at the left side of the nurses station. Darren won’t take one with the nurse sitting here. You’ll have to distract her by unplugging the monitor in your Mom’s room — first left-clicking on the monitor itself and then on the cables. This sets off an alarm, the nurse comes running and Darren can use the interval to slip back out to the lobby to grab the note. Parcel. The parcel doesn’t have to be an actual parcel. The empty box on the floor at the near end of the shelves in the souvenir store will do just fine. ID card. With the slip and box in inventory, talk to the guard and discover you still need a visitor’s pass. This is a bit more obscure. The nurse won’t provide one. Maybe the doctor? He isn’t here — but you did run into him at Biba’s Diner in Chapter I. Check there. Yup: A badge-wearing Dr. Newhouse in his usual booth. You need to get the doc to lose that coat. Talk to Mrs. Biba, order coffee and use the cup on the doctor. He heads for the restroom to clean up and Mrs. Biba leaves his soiled coat on the end of the counter. Click on it twice to take the ID badge. Your way into the morgue is clear. The top deck of the trolley in front of Darren has nine little containers for the belongings of the departed. You’ll have to examine with a left-click each of the six clipboards on the wall above to sort out what number has been assigned to Fuller’s belongings and then return to clipboard #448 at the lower left to ascertain that this is the right one. Then left-click twice on the boxes of personal effects below and once on the one at the back center to identify it as Fuller’s. Open it to take the keys — among them a hexagonal brass stick that might be used for winding.The Photo Shop II
The winder fits in the hole in the lower right corner of the cuckoo clock just inside the rear door. Examine the clock face in close-up and use the keys on the hexagonal hole. The clock clicks and chimes once, the doors at the top open and out pops a little box. Right-click on it to discover it contains four negatives — all with apparent defects in the form of bars or stripes. Can you examine them in closeup? Head to the shop’s front room and use the negatives on the light box to the left of the register. The content is nondescript, but the bars could mean something. Rotate the top two and the one at the lower left so they are displayed in their real-world, right-side up orientation and the one at the lower-right (a shot of the hospital) so it’s upside-down. Now drag them on top of each other and the bars will spell out “2482.” Plug this into the keypad and hit the return key at the lower right to elicit a promising bright sound. But the door remains shut. The code isn’t enough. Something is missing. If you explored down here earlier in the game, you may have noticed a certain sponginess to the floor in front of the backdrop. Left-click on the floorboards now to find a scale concealed here. The weight on the scale must match Fuller’s weight to unlock the door, and Darren has no idea how much Fuller weighed.
Morgue II
But you’ve seen a scale under your mother’s hospital bed, right? So it’s back to the hospital. You can take the scale and, irrespective of the absence of a box and delivery note, reenter the morgue without a hitch. But try to weigh Fuller’s body and Darren anticipates a “racket” and suggests distracting the guard first. Actually, you’re going to try to drug him. Take the syringe from the lower shelf of the cart under which you placed your faux parcel upon first arriving in the morgue and the laxative from the bedside table in your Mom’s room, buy a soda from the machine outside the guard booth and, in any location save the hospital lobby, combine the syringe and laxative and then the loaded syringe and soda in inventory. Drag and drop the laxative-laced soda onto the suspicious guard. (Don’t just talk about it; he won’t accept it that way.) Seconds later, he takes off — evidently not for the bathroom — and Darren’s free to weigh Fuller and his gurney and then the empty gurney in the foreground.
Encounters with the lunatic guard and annoyed police captain follow swiftly — after which Darren is free to return to Fuller’s cellar.Photo Shop III
Don’t worry about the math. Simply left-click on the scale in front of the door and Darren automatically assembles sufficient cellar junk to supplement his own weight. Plug in the “2482” code again, the door clicks and you have only to activate it to enter Fuller’s hideaway. The blackmail material is in the locker at the left. It’s unlocked using the hexagonal recess in the metal plate behind the curtain at the right. Simply take the brass ball off the lower left bedpost, use it on the recess, open the locker and take the compromising photos of Mrs. Biba within.
Police Station
Enter the police station for a long sequence. the strange man appears, identifies himself as British private eye Reginald Borris, and asserts that Angelina did have a motive to kill Fuller: Fuller had photographed her. Darren thinks he’s framing Angelina for the murder and it does appear that way. Borris claims the photos he produces were received from Fuller, but Darren recognizes them as photos he took the previous day — meaning Borris must have stolen them from Angelina’s hotel room. After a quick chat with the police woman, that’s your next destination.
Hotel
Darren arrives outside the Wild Coast to find the owner/porter screaming hysterically at the sea gulls on the left-hand porch. He’s not going to let Darren up to Angelina’s room so you’ll have to distract him, and what better way to the demonstrated one: Bring back the gulls. Gulls love bread and, as mentioned earlier (in context with grabbing the vinegar), you can find some on the counter at Biba’s Diner. The intact slices would draw down only one bird so right-click on the bread in inventory to crumble it and use the crumbs on the hotel veranda. The birds fly in, the shrieking owner/porter emerges to chase them away and, behind his back, Darren is free to step inside, grab the key from behind the desk and climb to Angelina’s room. (If you miss your window, you’ll have to retreat to Biba’s Diner and collect more bread.) Left-click on the lamp beside the bed to discover a microphone and then twice on the ventilation grate above the dresser to find a transmitter. Right-click on the transmitter in inventory and Darren suggests checking with Eddie at the junk shop. (You’ll recall that it was the inquiry about his radio that got him to open up a bit.) Let yourself out for another display of hysterics by the owner/porter.
Junk Shop
Get back to Eddie and ask about the transmitter (or just use the transmitter on him). He reports that he picked up some Morse code the previous day from a stranger who transmitted that a certain girl is “now safe” (which could mean “locked in a cell”) and that he’d be in touch again at 6 p.m. today. Eddie suggests you use directional antennas to locate Borris’s transmitter. Eddie has one and will build another for Darren if Darren collects the necessary raw materials: a metal bar, headphones, compass and a length of copper wire. Metal bar. Simply pop into Fuller’s back yard and disengage the piece of railing from the rope. (You can do this even before you get the antenna assignment from Eddie.)
Headphones.
To the right of the TV at Mom’s house. Compass. On Mom’s telescope. Copper wire. You can retrieve it from the same chain of lights where you earlier found the red light bulb, but you’ll need some way to cut off a section. Buy the wire cutter on the rack on the front of the junk-shop counter and use the cutter on the wire at Biba’s and then on the wire in inventory to strip off the plastic. With all these components in inventory, drop back to Eddie’s shop and talk to him. He’ll give you instructions and Darren automatically goes to a spot outside the Wild Coast Hotel. Use the mouse to adjust the compass to 73 degrees and, with the gadget now beeping rapidly, press the red button at the lower right. Darren jumps back to the junk shop to plot the coordinates (again, automatic) and discover that Borris must be on a boat two miles offshore.
Borris’s Boat
You’ll suddenly find Darren at the aft end of Borris’s sailboat. Let yourself into the cabin and left-click twice on the picture on the far wall to reveal a safe. The dial is similar to a compass and the combination consists of a sequence of six compass headings. Is this written down somewhere? Not exactly. But the folder to the right of the laptop computer contains a transparency that fits over the map of Africa on the wall to the left. You want to align the transparency so its lines fill the gaps between similar lines on the map to complete a route around the southern tip of Africa. That may give you some trouble. The lines don’t all sync properly. But the process can be simplified: Only one line needs to fit perfectly. Right-click twice on the transparency to rotate it so no line appears in its upper right-hand corner and then slide the foil so the line in its lower right corner completes the link between the line at the bottom of the map and the one above it and to the right. (The latter line ends in a circle.) This completes a route, the view drops back to the cabin and Darren reads off the combination from the pictured directions: SW, S, SE, E, NE, NW. Plug this into the safe — as with the safe at Fuller’s shop, the direction in which you turn the dial first doesn’t matter — and liberate a ring bearing a tree symbol and a computer disk. Pop the latter into the laptop to discover the computer’s internal battery is dead and that the boat seems not to have electricity.
A generator can be found under the right-hand sofa. Naturally, the seat turns out to be locked down so you’ll need a key. It’s in the third drawer from the top beneath the laptop. And, naturally, the generator is almost out of fuel, so you’ll need gas. (You’ll have to try to start to generator in order to take the gas can.) It’s in the drawer under the left-hand bench up on deck. Start ‘er up and activate the laptop again for evidence that Darren’s mother wasn’t hurt in a car crash after all and that Fuller was killed by Mrs. Biba’s husband. Naturally, this is where Borris shows up. Darren automatically clubs him with the bust but not hard enough and when he retreats to the deck the private detective is still at his heels. Darren can die in this standoff — the first of several such encounters — and there’s only one way out: Within five seconds, try to conk Borris in the head with the sailboat’s boom. Darren then automatically wallops him with the oar and sends him overboard. (If you miss the window or click on anything else — Borris himself or the oar — Borris shoots Darren and you’ll have to replay the scene from the automatic save.)
CUTSCENE
BLACK MIRROR II ♦ WALKTHROUGH ♦ CHAPTER 1 ♦ CHAPTER 2 ♦ CHAPTER 3 ♦ CHAPTER 4 ♦ CHAPTER 5 ♦ CHAPTER 6 ♦ PUZZLES ♦ SCREENSHOTS ♦ DIARY