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- Mental Lock #1
- Mental Lock #2
- Mental Lock #3
AI: The Somnium Files – Nirvana Initiative’s second chapter sees you diving into the somnium of Tokiko, the head of Naix: a secret organisation dedicated to ripping apart the ‘seams’ of reality to prove their theory of the world being nothing more than a simulation.
In Tokiko’s somnium, you’ll discover a few chilling details about the organisations' activities. In order to do so, you’ll need to bypass three mental locks within your six-minute timer. These particular puzzles are essentially riddles written in the cryptic words of Tokiko themselves and may take some lateral thinking to solve quickly.
Mental Lock #1
After gaining control of Tama in Tokiko’s somnium, you’ll be able to freely move around Tokiko’s somnium: a grayscale version of their office that we’ve seen in reality at the beginning of this chapter.
As indicated by Tama, the first thing you’ll need to do is move towards the desk and choose to inspect the book there. This will give you one of the keys to understanding the somnium.
After reading the book on the desk, turn around and head to the new book that has now appeared in the waterfall section of the office. Inspect it again to fill in one more word for the first somnium key. This time, reading the book will trigger the waterfall turning blood red and also unlock the first mental lock of the somnium.
Mental Lock #2
After the waterfall turns into blood, you’ll find that you can now dive into it and swim around. In this first underwater section, all you need to do is descend straight down to fall into a room with a similar layout as the first.
As with regular movement, swimming and descending will also advance the time on your six-minute timer, so be careful not to waste movement.
You’ll find one more book on the ground that you should go and inspect. This one will say: “Where the black light gathers, sadness is born.” Skulls will appear on the ground, and a black doll will appear behind you.
The best way to progress through this section is to first pick up a few skulls nearby. Each will add another word to one of the somnium keys, which will give you the sentence that is essential to understanding the whole somnium: “All of her ideas are poured into her writing and the rules of this dream are strongly tied to those teachings.”
With that in mind, we might look to the phrase “Where black light gathers, sadness is born” and interpret it somewhat literally to progress.
In order to progress through this section of the somnium, you will need to look at the shadow man in the corner of the room and note the direction he is facing. Follow his gaze until you find another shadow man in the middle room, then follow his gaze. You will find a third shadow man closer to the desk. Follow this third one’s gaze and pick up the skull in front of it, which will be ‘odd and misshapen.’
Picking up this skull will show a brief vision of the character Gen, which will then transform into a statue and disappear. It will also open up another body of water in the centre of the room, which you will once again be able to descend through into the next room, which is fully submerged in water.
Float towards the book to get your next hint: “Where the water and ideas flow, love is born.” You will see pairs of hands in this room making the noxtuple symbol, which represents the Naix organization and its fundamental beliefs.
In order to progress this puzzle, move around the room to see how the current of the water moves you around. If you angle the camera correctly, you will also be able to directly see the current of water flowing around the room, denoted by patches of water of a slightly different colour.
You will need to activate the various hands making this symbol, which connect to the ‘water flow’ in this room. There are three hand symbols you need to activate. The first one you need to activate can be found above the doors to the room behind the statues.
If you've chosen the correct one, activating it will make it glow bright red.
The second one is placed slightly behind the desk, closer to the ground. Activate it and it will glow bright red once again.
From the third and final hand symbol, continue to follow the water's current, which will lead you to the bright light of the window on the left side of the room. Activate the final symbol, and you’ll uncover that the dialogue you’ve been hearing has been about an association with the character Shoma. This will unlock the second mental lock in the somnium.
Mental Lock #3
After unlocking the second mental lock, you can once again descend into the next room via a waterfall. This one is quite deep, so moving downwards will remove quite a lot of time from your countdown clock. You’ll arrive in another version of the same room, but vertically aligned. Swim towards the book and inspect it.
The book says, “When the eyes are met, death is born” – another riddle that you will need to interpret literally in the context of this room. To make the eyes meet, you need to flip all of the large eyeballs in the room to make sure they’re all gazing directly at another eyeball.
Firstly, go and flip eyeball A, which is in the bottom right corner of the room. This will make it glow red and shoot a red beam at the eyeball diagonally parallel to it. After this, you can float directly upwards to the eyeball that is 'above' eyeball A and turn this around. You should now have two beams intersecting in a cross shape.
You can now float into the middle of the room and make sure the two books in the centre are both closed. This will turn them into eyeballs and create another beam.
You can do this one more time with the book at the very bottom of the room, on the wall behind the desk. Close it and it will turn into an eyeball, creating one final beam and generating a brand new book in the centre of all the beams.
Float into the centre of the beams and then open the book (choose the 'open' option pictured above). It will have a mirror inside, which will show you a reflection of Tokiko and open up a new route out of this room. This time there won’t be any water to take you down, so you’ll just have to jump into the newly opened chasm.
This new room is just a white void with a book in the middle. This book tells us that “At the end of an incomplete world, truth is born.” The white void will quickly change into a dark void with a large symbol at the end. You'll need to float towards the book in front of the giant symbol in the centre, which will cost you a decent amount of time on your countdown clock.
Reading this final book will tell us about something called the Nirvana Initiative (the title of the game!) and unlock the final mental lock, finishing this somnium sequence.
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