Alone in the Dark: How to solve the Boiler puzzle

By the time you’re ready to solve the Boiler puzzle in Alone in the Dark, you should have a decent understanding on how these Talisman puzzles work.

Even so, this one brings its own unique challenges, particularly in the vagueness of the image on the Boiler’s Talisman plate itself. This means even after you’ve jumped through the necessary hoops to find all the missing Boiler plate pieces, you still have more work to do. Read on to learn how to solve the Boiler plate picture puzzle in Alone in the Dark.

How to solve the Boiler picture puzzle in Alone in the Dark

The first thing you need to do is make sure you’ve found both missing Boiler plate pieces. Once you’ve done that, the hardest part of this challenge is over.

Once you return to the Boiler and place both the missing plate pieces into the Talisman socket, you can quickly get a general idea of the picture needed, and the format of the puzzle will be familiar from the Astronomical Clock.

The Astronomical Clock puzzle has a simple enough picture, however, while this one on the Boiler is anything but. Figuring out what the image you’re making is supposed to look like will add plenty of unnecessary time, and you actually already have a cheat-sheet that you can reference.

Take a look at the last page of The Commonplace Book, Jeremy’s notebook that you already have from your business in the French Quarter. On the last page, you can find drawings of all three Talisman sockets that you’ve encountered thus far. This page shows you that what you’re after is a sort of muted, minimalist sketch of a cathedral on a hill.

Using The Commonplace Book as reference, rotate and reposition the 12 moveable pieces to match the drawn image. Conveniently, the four “corner” pieces actually don’t move, so you have some of your work cut out for you.

If you think you’ve assembled it correctly but nothing is happening, go ahead and give a closer look to the border pieces around the outside—errors are harder to notice in these outside pieces as they mostly consist of foliage and not distinct imagery.

After the puzzle is correctly assembled, you will hear a halting noise. Leave the puzzle, and walk to the side of the boiler where you placed the valve earlier to turn off the steam. Here, you can see that the Boiler has actually broken, and each of the three pressure gauges have stopped right on a specific number: nine, seven, and five.

These gauges give you the three digit code you need to input on your Talisman, which you can place on the Boiler’s Talisman socket once the picture is correctly assembled. The code goes in order of largest to smallest: 9-5-7.

Place your Talisman on the socket, input 9-5-7, and the Talisman will calibrate itself and show a picture of the cellar in its center. Congratulations: you’re finally finished hunting for missing plate pieces. Head to the cellar to wrap up your Boiler business once and for all.