Part 2: Update II: Slider Puzzles, Busted Locks And Confederates
Update II: Slider Puzzles, Busted Locks And Confederates
So, last time we explored as far as we could going from the right door in the winter garden,
so this time, let's take a look at the other side...
...and make our way over to...
Room #07 - The Main Sitting Room
Neat. I see a safe, but walking up to it we find something else first:
"Look, a page from Duncan W. Adams' diary: 'April 19th: The world of business is truly a world of sharks, thirsty for money and power. I've had enough. I would still prefer being just a stock broker, like I was in the beginning of my career, to being the CEO of a multinational petroleum conglomerate. I was much happier and had fewer enemies. Luckily my family has always been there for me and my passion has allowed me to escape from time to time. But now I've decided to leave my job and dedicate my time completely to my passion: Safes.'"
DWA sure wasn't getting any younger, and the life of a CEO isn't exactly easy street, I presume. Won't blame him for just saying "fuck it" and holing up in his mansion, working on his safes. Anyway, let's take a look at that safe...
Our MC mentions something about this looking like the encoding method used by the Confederates in the civil war. This isn't quite right, as this is a simple Caesar cipher and not the Vigenêre cipher the Confederates used.
This safe annoys me, because quite honestly, it's just dumb. If you take a look at it, you can pretty easily figure out the few permutations that make sense, try them and then figure out the right one - simply equate the first letter in the code to O (for "One"), T (for "Two" and "Three"), F (for "Four" and "Five") and S (for "Six") and decode the first few letters to see if it makes sense. Boom, you're done.
In a way, I wish they'd have used the Vigenère cipher instead - at least that would have necessitated finding a clue (the codeword) beforehand. If they didn't want to make it too complicated, they could have given us a tabula recta with it to ease the process. Anyway, while we could solve this right now, let's move on until we find the clue the game believes we need.
Through the door we make our way to...
Room #08 - The Study
What the hell? This isn't a study at all! There isn't a desk in sight, just a few chairs and a whole load of African stuffs. This could have very well just been "The African Room" in the same way Safecracker 1 had an "Egyptian Room".
Anyway, we find a postcard laying on a chair:
"A postcard written by a child: 'Dear great uncle, I hope you are fine. I am having fun with my friends here at the holiday camp. The food is good and we are allowed to climb trees, just like in your garden. Hugs and kisses, Sarah.'
This introduces us to the first character besides DWA (well, the second if you count Elizabeth as being introduced as a character with her name below the first letter), his young niece, Sarah. How relevant will this be to the overall plot going on? We'll see. Moving on, we've got a chest with a big red glowing light on it, which seems to mean "PUZZLE HERE" in this game, so let's check it out!
Puzzle #03 - The Ice Path Safe
Remember the Ice Path in Pokemon Gold/Silver/Crystal? Imagine that with the ability to fall off the end of the world and respawn at the beginning and you've basically got this puzzle. We have a metal ball placed on a plane with four magnets surrounding it. You can pull the ball towards any cardinal direction by pressing the magnet buttons. The goal is to get the ball into one of the three holes, although two are actually unreachable.
The basic strategy is to once again work backwards and eventually figure out the path, which goes as follows:
Up - Right - Down - Left - Down - Right - Down - Left - Up - Right - Up - Right - Up - Right - Down - Right - Down - Left - Up - Right - Down.
With that done, we get a four-pin circuit as our prize...
...which immediately goes into the broken keypad. And with that, I notice that we are fresh out of options beyond "sequence breaking" the cipher safe, so that means it's now time for...
Puzzle #04 - That Fucking Slider Puzzle
Right, so it's finally time to approach this one. Basically, the way it works is that we have to get the picture back together. If we push one of the buttons, the four surrounding tiles move one step in a clockwise fashion. However... what is the picture we're supposed to put back together? Normally, slider puzzles show you the picture before scrambling themselves, but this one starts scrambled.
Even the MC remarks "This reminds me of a pattern, but where did I see it?". Well, guess what, we've actually already seen the picture. Let's take a trip back to the main menu...
And there it is. Have you spotted it? It's right below the phone - yes, that small sheet of paper that's half-obscured by the cable is actually the only clue we get towards this puzzle. That is what we in the trade call a "dick move". It's not enough that the puzzle is obnoxious to begin with, but even figuring out what you're trying to do is a lot tougher than it should be. Anyway, thanks to a walkthrough I read later, I found a strategy that turns this puzzle into something not quite as obnoxious:
First, do the top two rows. This shouldn't be too hard, given the large amount of room you've got to fuck around with.
Then, put the blank spaces on the left side.
From there, do the rest of the two rightmost columns. This leaves you with a simple 3x3 field where three tiles are interchangeable. Go from there...
...and you'll eventually solve the puzzle.
Inside, we find a piece of paper that tells us L=E (which I already picked up), and a lever. If we pull the lever...
...three things with screens shoot out of the ground. We'll take a look at those eventually, but first, to the main sitting room.
Puzzle #05 - The Cipher Safe
Now that we have the code, it's even more trivial to decode the whole thing. The codeword then comes out to SIXFOURONETWO, so that's what we enter.
And the safe opens to reveal a six-pin circuit, a photo and a note from DWA. The note reads as follows:
"'Not bad at all! But the worst is yet to come!' It's signed Duncan W. Adams. Still a joker, even after he's gone..."
Looks like everything has very well been set up for us to go along. This sort of explains the railroading going on in the game, but it's still quite annoying compared to how much more open the exploration in Safecracker 1 was. Anyway, we've got another piece for the keypad, so let's head over there...
...and stick that sucker in!
That appears to have done the trick, as the display starts going crazy until it eventually settles on the correct combination.
With that, the door opens to reveal...
Room #09: The Workshop
Yep, this sure looks like a workshop alright. Three safes in sight, so let's take a look...
This one lets you set the wavelength of a laser (more lasers!). Apparently, the right wavelength will open the safe. But we don't have that, so let's move on.
Not only do we not have the combination for this one, but we need a key card as well. Moving on...
Puzzle #06: The Broken Safe
The trick behind this one is rather simple. At first, you'll push the keys and think you're getting a random assortment of numbers, but there is logic behind it. Essentially, every number has an array of five numbers it goes through one at a time every time you press that key. Some experimenting reveals the following:
1 = 27948
2 = 68431
3 = 75525
4 = 28927
Using that information, we can then analyze the situation:
- Three presses of 1 means we get 2, then 7, then 9, and we then know the next number when I press 1 will be 4, a number we need for the combination.
- One press of 4 means we get a 2 and an 8 is up next.
- One press of 3 means we get a 7 and a 5 is up next.
- Four presses of 2 mean we get 6, 8, 4 and 3, and a 1 is up next.
- After the last presses, we currently have one number entered on the display (9 total presses modulo 4 for complete inputs equals 1), so we press three unrelated keys to clean the slate back to four empty spots.
- With an empty slate and the numbers "stored up", I can then simply enter the correct code of 5841.
Put all of that together, and the solution comes out to 1-1-1-4-3-2-2-2-2-5-5-5-3-4-1-2.
And with that, the safe opens, revealing a magnetic card. However, it seems I was in a hurry because I already know where the card goes and forgot to screenshot the open safe. Oh well, time to move on to the study again...
...because there's a keypad that requires our attention. We shove the card into the slot, realize that three keys stand out from the rest, fiddle about with it for a bit...
...and then figure out the combination.
And with that, it seems like the game has opened up, but not quite yet. But we'll see where that goes next time.