Black Mirror II - Walkthrough
BLACK MIRROR II ♦ WALKTHROUGH ♦ CHAPTER 1 ♦ CHAPTER 2 ♦ CHAPTER 3 ♦ CHAPTER 4 ♦ CHAPTER 5 ♦ CHAPTER 6 ♦ PUZZLES ♦ SCREENSHOTS ♦ DIARY
CHAPTER 4
OLD GORDON’S PLACE, WALES
Darren wakes tied to a chair in a disused room. Happily, the chair is on wheels and Darren can scoot about the room collecting with his bound feet (and, hence, one at a time) the few items required for his escape. For starters, grab the green bottle against the back wall just right of the chair — Darren automatically drags it into the light — and have a look at it. Kerosene. Then take one of the glass shards beneath the right side of the boarded window and use it on the plastic bottle to produce a pool of this flammable liquid. Take the cloth over to the left and use it on the pool to soak up the kerosene and a second glass shard on the cloth as a magnifier to start a merry little blaze. Darren can’t use the fire directly on his bonds, but can to light the thin wooden strip beneath the middle of the desk built into the rear wall. Take this and use the burning strip on Darren’s bonds in inventory. He’s free. Open the door. Darren then descends the stairs automatically. If you’ve played the original game, you’ll recognize the chamber below as the parlor of the Gordon estate in Wales. But it’s a strange scene. There’s a slash of ghostly lightning. A woman over at the piano calls Darren “Samuel.” The scene corrects itself: The woman is replaced by museum guard Bobby watching cartoons. He takes a phone call and we learn that the house belongs to the person at the other end — hence either Eleanor or her husband Richard — and that Tom is out shopping. To escape, Darren needs to lure Bobby upstairs. This requires:
- a distraction. Experience shows that Bobby distracts easily. In the middle of the rear wall, just left of the desk, is a secret compartment (“Strange place”). Open it and retrieve the toy car within. You’ll eventually skate this down the stairs, but the room must first be prepped for an ambush.
- laying a trap. You’re expected to drop the big bundle on Bobby’s poor head. Pick up the bigger of the cast-off ropes and tie one end to the bundle and sling the other over the beam overhead.
- setting up the room so, at a glance, nothing appears amiss. You want to make it look as though Darren is still tied to the chair so Bobby doesn’t take alarm. Take the clothes dummy at the far right, the head (somehow called “carton”) on the shelves on the far wall and the sheet covering the Gordon family tree at the right. And if you haven’t already done so, open the door to set off the strange scene in the parlor. (This scene enables you to assemble the dummy.) Then use the dummy, the head and the sheet on the chair in that order.
Now just use the toy car on the door and the whole trap unfolds on automatic. Bobby winds up unconscious and in Darren’s former spot in the chair — tied up with the rope from the bundle — and Darren is free to explore the parlor downstairs. To save yourself a trip later, take the short rope as well.Darren’s belongings are in the chest in the right foreground.
Left-click on the top of the chest in the closeup view until Darren suggests the decorative lines-and-circles motif is music-related. However, he can’t read the notes directly off the chest — there being (as another left-click reveals) too many of them. You’ll need to transcribe the notes. Take the sandwich paper off the right corner of the table and a charred bit of wood from the fireplace. (The latter takes three left-clicks.)
Then left-click on the chest to recover your camera, picture of Angelina, postcard, room key, lockpick, poem, display-case key … and, bizarrely, a metal bar — presumably the one you used to pry up the gate in the sewers. (Missing and gone forever are the two notes from Angelina, the butter knife from the hotel, the bit of cloth from the sewers and conceivably the screwdriver you may have picked up in the bunker cell (which has no use in the game as far as I can tell). You’ll also want to retrieve the toy car, as you’ll be able to trade it for an axe a little farther along in the segment.) Leave the house via the door at the left rear. (This is a switch from the original game, which had the exit to the right.) Outside is a small boy who identifies himself as “Van Helsing.” He’s almost invisible in the weeds near the left corner of the house. Talk to him — at a minimum about “castle,” “abductor” and “Angelina.” (Later on, this last one allows Darren to work out a way into the right-hand sarcophagus in the tomb on the property.) He learns he is at the Gordon estate in Wales, that a blonde Angelina had been here weeks before (that is, before she bumped into Darren by accident/on purpose back in Biddeford), that she took away with her blood samples for “research” and seems to have been interested in both the tomb and a ruined summer house that housed the late Sir Richard’s lab. (Hence, it can only have been Richard’s wife Eleanor on the phone with Bobby.) What is going on? Is Angelina really girlfriend material or has she been working for The Other Side (whatever The Other Side may be)? Let’s find out what so interested her. Head down and left to reach the side of the summer house, around the corner and over the fallen tree to reach its non-interactive front door and then left again through muck & mire on this scrolling screen to reach the tomb.
Look at the right-hand sarcophagus once to note that the lid is out of position and a second time to find stone chips nearby. It’s been opened and imperfectly re-closed. Can you open it again? You’ll get in the same way Angelina did. A lot of her gear is still lying around — notably, the carrying slings in front of tomb’s central statue and the pulley outside and just to the left of the entrance. You can install the slings on the lid now, but something seems to be missing. Use the pulley on the sling and Darren makes a joke about forgetting his crane. He’ll need to cobble-together a support structure. The three slender trees just right of the tomb entrance are suitable tripod material, but you don’t have anything with which you could cut them down. However, if you retreat to the mansion exterior of the old mansion, you’ll notice that Van Helsing (standing closer to the house than before) is now holding a hatchet. Give him the toy car from the parlor — either use it on him or talk to him about it — and he’ll leave the axe behind. (It’s just to the right of Darren.) Use the axe on the trees outside the tomb and Darren fells them diligently. Use the short ropes from the upstairs room where Darren was held to bind together the stacked trunks and then activate them with a left-click to automatically set up the tripod over the sarcophagus. Then use the pulley on the tripod and activate the pulley with two left-clicks to raise the lid. Enter the sarcophagus to squeeze through the gap into poor Richard’s ruined lab. There’s an alternate path here with a bad ending. Suppose instead you use the pulley on the dilapidated ceiling overhead? Darren then says he’s missing a hook needed to hang the pulley there. And there is a take-able hook in the game. It’s secured to the wall just left of the door to the summer house. Too well secured to detach with just Darren’s hands, but easy enough with the hatchet. Use it on the ceiling before assembling the tripod … and the ceiling caves in and kills him.
RICHARD’S LAB
There are two significant locations here. The poster on the wall to the left of the blocked passage at the right lists blood types — AB, B, A and O — and those letters in that order just happen to be the combination for the other location (the safe). Plug in the letters and examine the safe interior to sort out that Angelina made off with the blood of William and Richard Gordon. It’s now clear to Darren that Angelina has deceived him — though not why — and he can now exit the lab for a short chat with young Van Helsing, who reveals that Tom has returned. Make your way back to the mansion exterior, where you’ll find Tom ordering Bobby to “get that old cow on the phone” (presumably Eleanor) and setting out to search for Darren. Our hero then returns to the side of the summer house and lays out a plan: trap Tom and steal his car. Darren has already stepped into the would-be trap himself — the stretch of marshy ground between the summer house and the tomb — and noted upon exit that he might not have been able to escape a wetter marsh unassisted. So you need to pipe in some water from the tap –located at the far right at the side of the summer house. Unfortunately, the hose just to the left of the tap is in terrible shape. Fortunately, you have the means to repair it. In inventory, use hatchet on hose to cut out the damaged section. Unfortunately, each of the remaining pieces is too short to reach the marsh. Fortunately, you can rejoin them in the ruined lab: the plastic tube on an open book just below the shelves. Unfortunately, you can’t do so straightaway. The hose and tube openings don’t match. Fortunately, you can change the size of the tube openings. Use Angelina’s welding set (at the right side of the lab) on the tube and then the heated tube on the hose (or vice-versa). Drop one end of the mended hose in the swamp, connect to the tap, drop the other end in the marshland, turn on the water and move back toward the mansion to get Tom’s attention. The rest is automatic. Darren calls to Tom and runs. Tom follows, gets stuck, gives up his gun and car keys and answers questions. He doesn’t know Angelina and doesn’t know much about the Order — beyond the fact that they hang out at the mine and that his contact on Darren’s kidnapping sounded “quite old.”
MINE
Darren reappears automatically in the Order’s meeting room and has the first of what will be several encounters with a ghost — this one of Vic Valley. (The body — rather large for a small boy’s — is sprawled on a stone slab.) Darren hears members approaching and must take cover. But there’s no rush at all. This sequence and the ones that follow are not timed. You just have to perform certain tasks to kick the sequence forward. Your first stop is the elevator over to the left. Here, you’ll watch the five members gather — all masked, save operational leader Miss Valley — and pick up some interesting comments about “the boy” (presumably Darren) not being in his grave and “drastic action” (which seems to mean murder). When Darren edges forward (automatically, what else?) to hear more, he’s spotted and flees out the crevice at the far left. Reenter the bunker at the right — there are no other options on this screen — and, before doing anything else, close the door behind you and bar it with the metal rod. Thank goodness for the unexpected return of rogue inventory items, I guess! You’re going out as you originally came in. But the door to the tank room has been closed again and the known method to open it — pulling the left of the three levers between lockers and shelves — no longer works. This time you’ll have to pull the middle and right levers. (Someone has visited the bunker, tidied up Darren’s mess and rejiggered the mechanism.) (Either order will do.) The door now open, enter the tank room, use the switchbox to the left to close the door again and take both the metal bar beneath the switchbox and the re-coiled hose. Combine these two in inventory as a makeshift grapple and use it on the pipe at the right and Darren finds himself back in the sewers. Ostensibly the pursuit by The Order continues here. When Darren start to exit the screen on the far side of the heavy gate, two Order members appear from the wings. But this is just for appearances. You should have no further problems. Go left three times to a four-way intersection and then use the front-left exit to reach the gate. You can take the wooden block that’s holding it up to elicit an extra line or leave it in place; it doesn’t seem to matter. Go left again to another four-way, use the front-right exit and then head left to reach the ladder up to Angelina’s room — where you’ll find an angry Murray, who boots you out of the hotel. Darren automatically heads for the lighthouse. Left-click twice on the tall grass at the base of the tree to find a burned corpse. Darren believes this to be Angelina — and though we can’t see much of her face, who are we to say different, based on the available evidence? (After all, Darren was to meet Angelina here and the corpse is wearing the same bracelet on its left wrist that we saw her with in chapters I and II.) Grief stricken, he collapses — Darren is supposed to be a guy, isn’t he? — and dreams his end-of-chapter dreams. The wildest: Darren stabbing with one hand a prone form while seeming to hold Angelina’s hand with the other.
BLACK MIRROR II ♦ WALKTHROUGH ♦ CHAPTER 1 ♦ CHAPTER 2 ♦ CHAPTER 3 ♦ CHAPTER 4 ♦ CHAPTER 5 ♦ CHAPTER 6 ♦ PUZZLES ♦ SCREENSHOTS ♦ DIARY