The first real puzzle you encounter in the indie survival-horror game Signalis is also one of the trickier ones in the game. Unless you yourself are actually a locksmith, it can take a minute to figure out what you’re supposed to be doing here and why. Here’s how to open the locked door in Block A6.
Signalis Block A6 Lock: What to Do With the Lockpicking Machine
When you first enter the second level of the mining colony, the whole place is locked down, which more or less forces you onto a critical path for the next few minutes. From your starting point in Block A7, go north, then west into the elevator room.
One of those elevators is visibly out of service, but the other just requires a keycard. If you look on the shelf built into the elevator’s control panel, however, you can find and take the Service Hatch Key.
From there, go back the way you came and go through the unlocked door marked A6. You can visit a couple of dorm rooms on either side of the hall for files, but we’re here for the lockpicking kit that’s been set up at the far end.
Read the Service Request Form F-29 on the box next to the door, then inspect the door itself. Use the Service Hatch Key on the hole to open the panel.
As the Service Request Form suggests, this puzzle is largely down to trial and error, and there’s no particular penalty for failure. What can be difficult, however, is figuring out what you’re meant to be doing in the first place.
The top four buttons on the lockpicking kit can raise or lower the notches in the kit’s makeshift key. When you hit the Funktion button, the notches move the tumblers in the lock.
If you’re able to come up with a shape for the key where all four tumblers line up evenly, the tumbler spins and the lock opens.
This is one potential solution to the puzzle, as seen on the Xbox version of Signalis:
This is how the screen on the lockpicking kit will look when the puzzle’s been successfully completed:
The proper arrangement for the lockpicking kit is randomized on each run through the game. I’ve run through this puzzle twice on two different versions of Signalis and gotten two different versions of it. You’ll probably need to run some trial and error on your own to get this to work on your own game, but once you know what you’re supposed to be doing, the rest is easy.
