Alone in the Dark 2 - Wining and Dining

Written by Andy Panthro

Party time.

I have tried my best to fully explore upstairs, so the only other places to go are locked doors, filled with trigger-happy zombies, or the kitchen. I managed to get past the trident statue by staying as far away as possible, although later I found out that I had just lucked into the solution of how to pass this obstacle (it depends on the colour of tile you step on, apparently). 

In the kitchen, the little chef sometimes wanders in but does not attack. The other chef mentions that wine opens doors, and tells me to eat. There’s food on the counter, and I can indeed eat the eggs without any problem. However, after being in the kitchen for a minute, the larger chef opens what looks like an ice-box, and takes out a blowpipe. Annoyingly, this means I have to try and kill the larger chef, which is easier said than done. After his death, I can loot the rest of the kitchen.

This really looks moveable but isn’t

I pick up some poison, a bottle of wine. These can be combined together, and then I’m kinda stuck. There’s a big room full of zombies nearby, that I lack the combat skills to deal with and hope I don’t have to fight, and then there’s the locked door outside the kitchen. At first I thought I could use the poisoned wine to kill the group of zombies on this floor, but that didn’t seem to work, putting it on the ground near them did nothing.

The clue to this is a line from the chef in the kitchen, “do you know that wine, may open many a door”. This is the sort of thing that makes sense only after you’ve solved it (or in my case, kinda brute forced it). I place the wine on the floor outside the door in the hallway, and the door opens briefly. I think for a minute I messed up and I move away triggering the statue and having to reload. The next time I carefully make sure I am out of the statues line-of-fire, and place the poisoned wine again. This time, I back off slowly and wait, and after a short time a couple of zombies leave the room and die.

Too much wine?

Success! I head through the now open doors, and I guess I expected it to be a dining room or something but instead there’s a kinda bare looking room with an organ or some other device in it. There’s also a couple of guns on the wall. The tokens I got earlier can be used in the organ, and the gold token makes it play I think “Danny Boy” and I have no idea about the tune for the bronze token, but the bronze one does open the door to the next room. There’s another 2 pixel coin on the floor here, this time a golden dubloon.

In the back room there’s some beds and I get a bullet-proof vest, a tommy gun and a loading clip. I guess I have to deal with the other room full of zombies now, but at least I am more well armed now? This is such a confusingly made game. Anyway I reloaded to repeat the section without using the gold token, in case I need it later on. Time to enter the room next to the kitchen! Immediately there’s a message that “my armour is no good any more” and I die. <big sigh>

The most useless videogame bullet-proof vest

OK. Let’s try this again… This time I remove the Santa suit, and let the little chef sound the alarm. This way I can be in a good position to fight the zombies one by one and… the bullet proof vest is crap, and the tommy gun is jammed. What the actual hell. I repeat yet again, and this time use up all my riot gun ammo, and all my derringer ammo. With a bit extra using the sword stick, I manage to kill all the zombies. They drop absolutely nothing, which is annoying. In the room that they were hiding in, there’s a Christmas tree that when searched gives me a billiard ball. There’s also a door to a bathroom that contains nothing at all, which is weird. Couldn’t even give me a health flask?

Another fun little animation.

The only place I can think to go is the game room, and the peg board thing. Sure enough, the  billiard ball rolls down the board and then a nearby bookshelf moves aside to reveal another door. The door, of course, is closed. So I run around again, the little chef just walks back and forth oblivious, the statue gets me again so I have to repeat a bit, and I figure out that the dubloon I found on the ground only appears AFTER you use the gold token in the organ. Perhaps that will open the door, or maybe I can figure out where to use this crown I found ages ago next to the statue.

A flash of inspiration leads me back to a bust in the master bedroom, and the crown indeed goes there. No idea what it did or does. Perhaps I should have done that a long while ago? I check the ritual room, and there’s an amulet on the floor. Taking the amulet seems to warp me to somewhere else? Hope I didn’t need anything else from the previous area. There’s a message on the floor that mentions about red balls for the tree which I guess is a clue for the billiard ball thing I already did. So I hope that’s somewhere I return to later on.

I’m sure this is fine.

Outside of this small creepy looking ritual room, there’s a larger storeroom. Immediately I’m attacked by a zombie with a gun, and some sort of acrobat or something. The gun guy is a standard zombie so I can at least deal with him, the acrobat presumably needs something specific, and so while I kill the first and get a key, the acrobat kills me. A good time to quit and take a break.