Hermann’s House

Now you can travel to Dr. Hermann's morgue as well. He'll reveal Vick wasn't killed by animals, won't say anything new about Henry's case and hasn't seen Robert since William's funeral. (It's important to ask about this last one, though, as it gives Victoria a "Robert" topic a little later.)

No close-up view of the body this time, but, even from a distance, you can tell that Vick’s right foot is missing.

Odds & ends: Even if you never found the footprint beside the fountain in Chapter II -- or found it but never discussed it with Morris or Dr. Hermann -- when Samuel asks the doctor about Henry, he’ll nevertheless refer back to a “strange thing” (meaning the absence of blood in Henry’s body) he’s somehow learned telepathically from Hermann.

Black Mirror

And here you'll probably hit a dry patch. You’ve run through your leads. No one's talking. Nothing's happening. Bates, in the kitchen, says only that Victoria's gone to her room to rest. You can't visit her there just yet. Is there something you’ve missed?

One small thing has changed. Invisible to the eye, a letter to William is waiting in the mailbox out at the front gate. It's from the asylum inmate James, who seems to be contemplating escape from “this horrible place” (which would explain Robert's recent emergency and subsequent AWOL status) and indicates he’ll explain it all when they meet at “our place.”

It begins: “Dear father.”

William was James father? The old dog! Resting or not, this would be a good time to confront Victoria with this intelligence. Go bang on her bedroom door. Show her the picture again and she now confirms James is William's illegitimate child.

This topic isn’t actually required in order to progress in the game, but it did get you a foot in Victoria’s door, didn’t it? And that’s a good thing. For if you’ve asked Dr. Hermann about Robert, you can now ask Victoria about him, too, and she'll commission you to visit Ashburry and sort out what happened to her eldest son. This writes Ashburry to your map.

Odd & ends: We’ve been referring to Robert as your uncle all along, but this is the first occasion on which it’s actually implied. And it won’t be expressly stated until Samuel talks to the maintenance man at the asylum.

A curiosity: Victoria’s use of “eldest son” implies that William and Victoria had three sons. (If just two, Robert would be the “elder” son.)

You already know the couple had at least one other child: Samuel’s father Randall. He was identified at the beginning of Chapter III when Samuel introduced himself to the caretaker Louis at the gate of the Wales estate.

So who’s this putative third son? It’s a mystery ... or just a mistake. The Black Mirror isn’t Crime and Punishment and perhaps a game script shouldn’t be parsed word by word.

Finally, note that the game has just quietly introduced a plausible suspect in the murders: a Gordon who also happens to be mad.

Ashburry

Ashburry’s on the south edge of your map. Scoot down there and hit the intercom to the left of the gate. After a short exchange with the nurse, you'll be admitted. Samuel then automatically walks into the hospital and asks after his uncle.

Odds & ends: A couple of fine points. The game refers to Ashburry as a “sanatorium.” That word and its synonym “sanitarium” typically refer to health spas and convalescent hospitals. That’s not the case here. “Asylum” seems closer to the mark and that’s the word I’ve used here. But note that this disparity between name and the hospital’s current purpose is explained in Chapter V.

And the nurse has a name: Marie. But it turns up only in the credits.

No news on the Robert front. The nurse last saw him two nights back. That’d be after the end of Chapter II. Ask to visit James to learn that, as predicted, he's escaped -- probably through the sewer system. (There's a manhole out front -- currently non-interactive.) She goes on to say that James was anxious over something involving the head doctor. He wanted to go home (i.e. back to to Black Mirror) but didn't want this request mentioned to Robert.

Nevertheless, the nurse had to consult Robert to obtain consent for James's release and Robert was adamantly against it. And then James vanished. Samuel suspects a connection between James' fear and Robert’s resistance.

To figure out where James was going, you'll want to see where he's been. And to do that you'll have to sneak into the asylum through the side door. (An authorized visit to his empty cell is out. The metal gate on the left side of the lobby won’t ever open to you and the wooden one in the left side of the front counter won’t for a little while yet.)

Other hotspots: the fountain (which comes into play a little later) and the trash can near the lobby entrance.

The Grounds

When you leave the lobby, you’re not auto-piloted back to the front gate. You can walk freely around the hospital exterior. The manhole out front won't be open to you until you've found the exit at the other end of the sewer line, so head all the way left to the side entrance. Click on the beer bottles beside the door -- this sets up a future topic -- and then on the door to set off a little rant by (and eventually the appearance of) a maintenance man.

Odd & ends: Did you notice the graveyard to the left of the asylum on the map? You can visit this by heading left from the side door. (And, once you’ve poked your nose in here, you can ask the nurse about it as well.) There’s nothing much to do here at this stage of the game, but it’ll keep you well-occupied in Chapter V.

This gruff gentleman isn’t impressed by Samuel’s name-dropping (i.e. him being the head doctor’s nephew) and won’t let him into the hospital. But he’ll tell you just enough that you can figure out a way around him.

Technically, you only have to use the “beer” topic to make progress here. But the “boiler room” topic establishes that the furnace guy keeps the rear door shut so he can wet his whistle freely and that the new regulator handles the hospital’s temperature automatically.

Odds & ends: The game uses “boiler” and “furnace” interchangeably. It’s all “boiler room” and “boilerman” in dialogue but the sign behind the doctor’s desk in the hallway points to the “furnace room” and the device is to all appearances a conventional forced-air furnace (though, confusingly, there’s steam gushing from a pipe nearby).

The other topics are unimportant. The “Robert” one just makes explicit what Victoria’s implied earlier: Robert’s your uncle. And inquiries into James’s escape are an elaborate red herring. Sprinkled with more or less meaningless positive/negative choices, this dialogue suggests that if James had made it from his cell into the hallway, he wouldn't have had a hard time getting out through the sewers. Samuel then wonders whether he had help from Robert -- an odd assumption, given that the nurse told you Robert was opposed to James’s release -- or the sympathetic Irish nurse.

Except for the sewer part, these are false leads. The hallway and third-party assistance weren’t involved. It’ll develop that James’s cell has an escape hatch into the sewer system.

Once you’ve asked after the beer, you’ll be able to talk to the nurse out front again. And Samuel here gets an idea: Distract her by asking her to call Black Mirror for you. (Funny; in all my time at the castle, I never saw a telephone.)

I’m not sure why he gets the idea -- Samuel’s inner monologue doesn’t reveal what he’s looking for -- but the instinct proves to be a good one. The nurse vanishes through the rear door and you can let yourself behind the counter via the wooden gate in the left side of the counter. In a replay of your diversion at the morgue, you'll have exactly as much time as you need to look around.

Said looking-around is very limited. (I guess the designers didn’t want players to get hung up finding the non-existent key for the metal gate.) All you can do is look at the supply cabinet. Locked. The only other interactive object in this close-up is the little vase on the left. Take it and right-click on it in inventory to learn it has a groove in the bottom. Right-click on your wallet to find a coin and then use the coin to unscrew the bottom of the vase.

Bingo: There’s the key. Unlock the cabinet and take a jar of sedatives from the middle of the middle shelf. Samuel then makes a quick exit and the nurse then returns with word that Robert still hasn't come home.

Other hotspots: the three other medicines in the cabinet and, once the cabinet is open, the brown bottle on the left side of the counter in front of the cabinet.

So who’s getting a big fat dose of sedative? Pretty clearly the furnace guy who’s refusing Samuel admittance. And how will you administer it? Well, it was the beer topic that won you the opportunity to grab the sedative, right? You just need a way to get the sedative into the beer bottles.

You may have found it already if you poked around in the trash near the side door. But maybe not. You have to click twice on the trash can beside the left post of the little tin-roofed shelter to the right of the door to come up with a syringe. Use the syringe on the sedatives or vice-versa and then the loaded syringe on the beer.

With any luck, you won’t give furnace guy a fatal overdose.

But how to make him drink it?

Make him hot.

What did the furnace man say about the temperature in the hospital? It’s regulated automatically. Perhaps you could get a look at that new regulator.

Try the little barred window to the left of the door. There’s the regulator on the right.

Think on it a bit: If you could bring something cold in contact with this sensor, the device would read the hospital’s temperature as being colder than it actually is, the furnace would work harder to heat the place, the hot furnace room would get even hotter and the janitor thirstier for a cold one.

The only thing you have in inventory that might have a cooling effect on the regulator is that black sphere from William’s study. When Samuel picked it up, he said it was cool to the touch. Well, the designers apparently changed their minds later. Once it dropped into your inventory, the sphere became “strange to the touch.” And you can’t collect the rainwater.

Check out the fountain in the hospital lobby. Like the syringe in the trash can, it’s functionality is hidden behind a second click. This establishes that the water within should be "pretty cold." Dip the Gordon handkerchief in the water and then get back to the little window. (You can do this before you even learn about the regulator.)

Rats. You can't quite reach the thermostat. You'll need a bigger opening.

And this is where things get interesting. For unlike most of the other object-oriented puzzles, this one can play out in different ways.

The second bar from the left is loose. Three clicks establishes that it’s fastened firmly to the brick below and that you can’t remove it unassisted. You'll have to take out the brick below first, and two clicks there will determine the brick is firmly secured to the surrounding masonry. Bet you wish you still had the hammer from Chapter I.

Well, there’s another. It’s on the tin roof of the little shelter -- just above the left post. Smack the brick with the hammer three times to remove it, remove the bar and you’ll be able to plop the cold wet hanky on top of the regulator.

At least, in theory.

It’s possible the puzzle will play out in just this way even if you don’t know the mechanism behind it. It depends on the happy accident of your timing.

But, more likely, the furnace man will overhear your attempted deconstruction and come outside to shoo you away from the window. Subsequent attempts will be intercepted by Samuel's "Not now, he would hear me!" and you may have to wait as long as 30 seconds for hammer time.

Is there a way to prevent this intercession? Yup. This is a sound-based puzzle. Once Samuel kneels beside the window, pay close attention to the background noise and use it to conceal your attack on the brick.

About 15 seconds after you move to the close-up view, you’ll start to hear a scraping sound. It doesn’t last more than a couple of seconds -- it will return periodically -- but it’s just enough to obscure any brick-banging that occurs in the period from shortly before the scraping starts to shortly after it ends. That’s more than enough time to get in the three whacks required.

The bar gone, drag the handkerchief onto the regulator, back out of the close-up and wait. After about five seconds, the furnace guy pops out, grabs a beer and 15 to 30 seconds after he vanishes back inside, you can open the door and find him sleeping like a baby.

Other hotspots: At the side of the hospital: the garbage cans in the right foreground and the coal pile and bucket just around the corner from the side door. In the rear section of the graveyard: the two large tombs, the central monument and the left of the two cross-shaped stones in the right foreground.

The Furnace Room

The way to James’s cell lies through the electronically-locked door in the rear section of the furnace room. You’ll need a key and a keycode to pass through it.

The key’s easy enough. See the bulletin board above the table at the back of the room? It’s hanging from the lower right edge.

The keycode’s here, too, though not identified as such. Note the prominent number on the “Follies” poster at the center of the notice board: “1918.”

Then just look at the panel to the left of the electronic door, insert the key in the opening at the top, plug in the numbers and hit the big key at the bottom right. A light on top glows green and you can enter the hospital proper.

Odds & ends: You can plug wrong numbers into the panel to your heart’s content with no bad consequences.

You’ll find three click-able areas on the notice board. Most of the stuff here falls under the general rubric of “leaflets and newspaper clippings,” but you’ll find the maintenance man’s schedule to the left and an ad for “Messenger of the Gods” below it.

“Sounds familiar,” says Samuel of the last of these.

I’ll bet it does. It’s a minor Easter Egg. “Messenger of the Gods” was the subtitle for the European release of Black Mirror developer Unknown Identity’s next adventure: Nibiru (released as Nibiru: Age of Secrets in the US).

You won't stay long on the other side of the door. The hall is being watched by a doctor. You need him gone.

How? You’re only in the cell block for about one non-interactive second and it’s difficult to gauge the doctor’s circumstances before Samuel disappears back into the furnace room.

But you only have to notice one thing: The hallway is connected to the hospital’s intercom system. The speaker there is just around the corner from the doctor’s station. The furnace room has one of these as well as well and also a transmitter to broadcast messages through the system. (This is the panel just left of the bulletin board in the full view.)

Click on this panel and Samuel says he doesn’t know what message to send -- meaning you can go out and find him one!

The nature of that message is hinted at on the bulletin board. Remember the furnace guy’s schedule? You’ve disposed of that fine fellow already. But what if you had the doctor’s schedule? You could send him somewhere else.

But where would you get that info? Well, that nurse in the lobby has been helpful, hasn’t she? Talk to her and ask for the duty schedule. It being the end of the week, she'll turn it right over with no questions asked.

Hustle back to the back to the furnace room. Use the schedule on the intercom and you'll send Dr. Smith (the doctor on duty) off to the lobby. Like Dr. Hermann in Chapter II and the nurse earlier in this chapter, he’ll remain out of position until you’ve completed your business.

Other hotspots: In the front section of the furnace room: the “boiler” and the locker against which the furnace attendant is leaning and the attendant himself. (A right-click on the furnace guy elicits the fact that “he’s sleeping like a rock” -- meaning you have nothing more to fear from him.) In the rear section: the “switchboard” to the left of the electronic door, the small table against the rear wall and the vent above it.

The Cells

Head down the hall to the left. After the scene changes, you'll be stopped from a voice from a cell. The inmate Ralph wants your help: He's lost his friend Mr. Bubby. Get him back in Ralph's hands and he'll help you -- regardless of how unpleasant or threatening you may be in your two positive/negative choices en route.

Samuel intuits correctly that Bubby isn't a person, but a toy. A crude doll, actually. Torn in two, it seems to have been mistaken for rubbish and thrown away.

You won’t have to look far. The head’s in the trash can just to the left of the bench across the hall.

Or is it? If you’ve been poking around independently and in the process turned off the light above the fountain, you won’t be able to find it there. In that case, the bin will appear to contain only trash. The light must be on and you’ll have to right-click on the can to find the head.

And the body? That’s a bit farther afield. You’ll have to right-click on the coal pile beside the furnace (not the one outside) to come up with it. (You can grab this earlier as well.)

But presenting the components to Ralph won’t get you anywhere. You’ll have to reassemble them as well and for that you need needle and thread.

You’ve already found the thread. Just right-click on the doll’s body (or on the body and head after they’re combined in a single icon) and you’ll come up with a sturdy piece. And you may have seen a surrogate needle when you grabbed the key for the keypad: The lower left border of the bulletin board is home to a slew of pins and one of them will function well as a needle.

Put the head and body together to form one icon in your inventory and the pin and thread together to form another and then use one combined item on the other. Head restored, Bubby's himself again. Use the reassembled doll on the door to Ralph's cell and Ralph spills his guts -- revealing in one long speech that the locked cell next door was James's and that the same Dr. Smith you coaxed out of position earlier has the key.

This is bad news for Dr. Smith. You’re going to have to take him down.

How? The solution must be close at hand, as your movements are suddenly limited. The doctor has returned to his station down the hall and you can no longer retreat to the furnace room.

There are just five interactive objects in the area and three of them go together: the fencing over the window to the right, the light switch above the bench and the wire linking the switch and the overhead light. Turn off the light, pull down the wire between the switch and the light and reconnect the wire to the fence.

Samuel then says no one will notice. He means “what’s a mousetrap without the cheese? You need bait and that’s the music box. Use it on the fence. Samuel then places it behind the mesh, turns on the juice and takes cover behind the pillar. Dr. Smith hears the tinkling music, comes to check it out, reaches for the box and takes a nasty jolt. Samuel then recovers the music box -- he’ll need it again soon to save himself from James -- and can right-click on the doctor’s unconscious form to get his keys. One unlocks James’s cell.

Odds & ends: No, you can’t unlock the other cells. Shame. You’d be doing them a favor.

Other hotspots: the trash can beside the doctor’s desk, the interior side of the gate leading to the lobby, the door of the rightmost cell, the trolley outside James’s cell and the dry fountain beside the fenced window.

James’s Cell

You have two tasks to complete in James’s cell: learn why James wanted so desperately to escape the asylum and get a sense where he might have gone.

A third task turns up after those two are complete: You must secure your own escape.

The first is pretty obvious -- just look around at the bugs and filth -- but there’s much more just out of sight. Right-click on the rip in the mattress to retrieve James's diary. This provides the context for the letter to William you found in the Black Mirror mailbox. The key line is in the 2/27 entry: “When we meet, I will tell him everything! William must learn of the evil things Robert is doing to us here.”

No wonder Samuel’s uncle freaked when James declared to the nurse that he wanted to go home.

There’s more. At the end of the diary is a picture of a frowning eye. There's a similar one on the cell's left wall. Right-click on it. It peels away and you'll find a small hole and a spooky roaming eye that recalls the cover of DreamForge’s 1998 adventure Sanitarium. As you can't currently leave the cell, this is your only means of communicating with Ralph. Here you'll learn the specifics of the “evil things” mentioned in James diary: Robert has been running drug experiments on the asylum inmates.

You still need a sense of where James might have gone. Where is the “our place” mentioned in his letter to William?

Click on the picture on the easel. Cut scene. You'll take this picture with you. It opens up a new location (the lighthouse at Sharp Edge) a little down the road.

Once you have the picture and the diary, Dr. Smith recovers. He closes the door behind you, trapping you inside James’s cell, and heads off to get help.

Time for you to make your exit. Talk to Ralph again and you'll now have an “escape” topic. (If this is the first time you’ve spoken to Ralph through the wall, you’ll have to run all of his topics.) He tells you James got out through a hole under his bed.

And, really, it's that simple: Place the cursor over the lower left corner of the mattress and you'll now find a door symbol. Click on it and you'll surface beside the manhole in front of the asylum and automatically make your way back to Black Mirror.

You'll find yourself hemmed-in here as well. You can't visit other locations or even leave the house. The door to Robert's study is now non-interactive, Victoria is sequestered in her room and doing her no-talking thing again and Bates, still in the kitchen, has just one new topic: the picture you took from James's cell. He'll identify it as the lighthouse at Sharp Edge. This writes the location to the southeast corner of your map. Go there now.

Odds & ends: A couple of references in James’s diary are never explained clearly within the game. You can nevertheless make an educated sense about what’s going on: James seems to be in close contact with the spirits of his ancestors.

Read the first entry to learn James paints to quiet the whispers in his head: “The strokes of my paintbrush connect into a coherent image in the end -- without my thinking about it at all. It is as if someone guides my hand.”

Look at what he’s drawing with that guided hand. The pictures on the cell’s left wall form a fascinating subtext. (Just ignore Samuel’s description: “images of terrified faces”. My guess is that this is a mistake and should be “terrifying faces.”)

One is a self-portrait very like the torn-up photo from Chapter I. Of course, we already know that James is the man in the picture ... so why is this here? My guess is to inform us that these aren’t fantasies. He’s working from actual models.

Another recalls the skeletal remains you found in Marcus’s and Dergham Gordon’s tombs in chapters II and III. It’s as though James was right there with you.

One shows a hollow-faced creature with a dead, skull-shaped face but living eyes. And the one in the upper left displays a monster with a human face but the orange eyes of a beast and a mouth streaming with blood. A vampire? That’d certainly be a unified way to explain both the guttural sounds we heard in William’s study and the absence of blood in Henry’s body.

The rightmost drawing is hard to make out at a glance. But focus on it for a bit and you’ll see a faint face in the lower half and a kind of crown above. It may take a moment to realize you’ve seen such a face before in the main hall at Black Mirror. This is a spectral picture of Mordred Gordon.

So what does all this mean -- if indeed it means anything? Are these just a madman’s fantasies? After all, James lived at Black Mirror as a child and so has seen Mordred’s portrait.

But it’s worth noting that in his diary (and later in conversation) James seems not at all mad. What if he really does hear voices? And if spirits do guide his hand, do they do things for James in return?

For instance, who delivered James’s letter? James answers this question himself in his 3/8 entry: “It’s been ten days already since I sent my letter by the old Warden.”

“The old Warden”? No such character has been introduced. This reference won’t make sense until Chapter V, when the “old Warden” is obliquely identified, and its implications are spooky indeed.

On a separate note, the dates in James’s diary are out of sync with those in William’s and Robert’s diaries. (You’ll find the latter in Chapter V.) The entries in James’s diary end on 3/8. And that date is supposed to be recent. As noted above, it’s 10 days after James sent the letter to William that’s only just arrived.

But William’s diary covers a period from March to May and Robert’s the first half of May.

Other hotspots: the light switch to the left of the door, the papers on the right wall, the “big glass” in the niche on the far wall, the toilet and the table.

Sharp Edge

Click on the broken wall before you and Samuel says he'll have a look around first. In fact, there's nothing of substance to be found to the right of the structure -- see “other hotspots” below -- so cut to the chase: Position the cursor to the left of the lighthouse and click to "go around the lighthouse."

Samuel vanishes from sight. There's a thump and a cry. He's been ambushed. When he comes around, you'll find him bound and James digging what will shortly become Samuel’s grave.

This is another of the game's timed sequences. You have 15 seconds to select the right item from your inventory (the first of two needed to escape) before James pulls Samuel down into the grave and presumably buries him alive.

Select the roof knife and use it on Samuel to cut his bonds. When you see Samuel’s hands (meaning he’s free), select the music box and use it on James. Distracted by the familiar tune, he stops digging, the scene changes and, after some give and take, you'll be able to talk to this wraith-like figure about William, Robert and your key collection.

This sequence works just like other timed ones: You only have to select the knife from your inventory to stop the countdown and take the death penalty temporarily off the table. James then continues digging ad infinitum -- until you cut Samuel’s bonds. That takes a few seconds, the countdown restarts and you have another 15 seconds to select the music box.

The chat with James turns a lot of our conjecture into fact. The "William" topic reveals that James's placement at the Ashburry asylum was Robert's idea. The "Robert" topic elaborates on what you've already learned from Ralph about that doctor's "atrocities" -- that the injections he gave to asylum inmates sent some to their deaths. (You can now intuit that Robert sent the bodies of his victims to Dr. Hermann for disposal.)

"Everyone in those cells is a guinea pig to him," James says. Robert kept James at the asylum because "he knows very well I could tell and ruin everything."

And, finally, James reveals he hid his own key -- the third of the five symbolic keys -- in the sewers beneath Black Mirror’s cellar.

Odds & ends: A couple of practical questions.

Why does James attack Samuel? James never volunteers a reason and Samuel never calls him on it. It’s a strange transition: One moment, James is digging Samuel’s grave and the next Samuel is questioning James about Ashburry and the location of his key as though nothing much had happened.

Then again, James doesn’t need a motive. We’re supposed to be entertaining the idea that he’s our killer -- the most recent in a long line of mad Gordons in thrall to the family curse. You’re not supposed to look any farther for reasons. (We’ll do so later, after we’ve learned more.)

And how does James know the melody from the music box? We know he lived at Black Mirror as a child. He probably heard it there--maybe on this same music box.

Then again, Victoria didn’t paint the “orphan” as a particularly intimate member of the household. Remember: James stayed “outside by the stable.” Perhaps it is this distance and William’s failure to openly acknowledge James as his child that allowed him to be so easily farmed out to Ashburry.

Other hotspots: the lower window on the right side of the lighthouse, the cans hanging from the tree to the right of the lighthouse and the cliff edge (to the right of the tree). In the grave-digging scene: Samuel (which reveals his arms and legs are bound) and James. (Samuel just belabors the obvious and says he has to stop this somehow.)