The Rise of the Golden Idol: Chapter 3 The Machine Walkthrough

In this guide, you’ll find all the hints and solutions for the Chapter 3: The Machine in The Rise of the Golden Idol.

The Rise of the Golden Idol: Chapter 3 The Machine Walkthrough

Hints and solutions for all cases in Chapter 3: The Machine.

Ignition

Scene 1, Locker Room

• Cork board: Tests, Lab
• 2nd Locker: Self Help Book: Baird
• Harmony foundation pamphlet: Enter
• 3rd Locker:
  • Coat: Jack
  • Pictures: Both hands, One Hand
• 4th Locker:
  • Leadership tensing: Activated, Opportunity
  • Crumpled paper: Westlake, Spender, Nathan, Hoyle, Follow, Accuse
  • White Paper: Board Inspection, Oriel, Jack, Eugene, Unlocked
• Trash barrel: Whiskey
• Oriel Toussiant: Access Card

Scene 2: Lab

• Man by door: Marie, Tim, Bickered
• Machine: Controls, Device
• Jack Nowak: Access Card
• Book on Shelf: Nowak, Toussiant, Marmot, Reconstict, Revoked, Approval
• Man on Fire: Fire
• Balding Executive: Responsibility
• Redhead woman: Touch, Access Card

Hints:

• According to the note in rightmost locker, the lab staff, with the exception of Eugene, have access cards.
• The board inspection note says that the lab is usally locked, but will be unlocked on the 18th. What day is it?
• ID’ing the fingerprints will be a challenge and a test of figuring out who does and touches what, but one’s easy: the man opening the door left his print right there.
• The lockers have, in order: a spare pair of glasses and Lemurian history books, a orange powdet stain, Jack Nowak’s coat, and a letter to Dr Westlake and a labor distribution sheet. This should be enough to ID which if the 4 lab staff they belong to.
• Whoever’s on cleaning duty is making a mess with those nacho chips
• The fingerprint scroll has places for four names, but only 3 of them are prints. The forth is an orange stain. Is that enough to ID someone?
• According to the Westlake note, there have been repeated allegations of Spender drinking on the job
• The photos in Nowak’s locker allege that both the button and runes need to be touched at once to activate the effects
• If that’s true, then the only person that could have set off the device would have had to have a fingerprint or other trace on both the button and the runes.

There’s a couple fun touches here if you remember the first game

• The blue pen notes say that the lab has been weirdly cold as of late, and that’s because the idol works by giving and taking. For it to make fire, it must suck in heat, chilling the surrounding area.
• If we remember the first game’s runes, the panel says Increased Matter Heat

Protest Movement – A Hippie Circle Refuses to Roll Over

Scene 1, Pool Backyard

• Table in left yard
  • Shot glass: Piece of Ice
  • Ribbon spools: ribbon
  • Cardigan pocket: Coolidge
• Grandpa: Tobias
• Old Man’s Note: Lana, Peet, Leonidas, Agency, Jack, Amstel, Closure, Corbyn, Broke
• Bicycle wheel by tree: wheel
• Notebook by binoculars: Foundation, Rolled, Gathered, Shaw, Hill
• Grill: Barbecue
• Man under Grill: Odetta
• Child in Pool: Hit
• Woman: Tobias, Jeffrey
• Newspaper in her inventory: Injure

Scene 2, Outside the former Harmony Foundation

• Protest Circle: Recruit, Steal, OPIG, Harmony, Andi, Penny, Protestors, Protest
• Hippie giving pamphlet: Marmot, OPIG
• Bird Bath: Bird Bath, Fall Over
• Jack Novak: Eugene
• Note on Jack: Laboratory, Westlake, Toussiant, Nowak, Marmot
• Bikes: Bicycle, Cycled

Hints:

• That’s the old Harmony Foundation garden where Tesa buried Arthur. The inbetween chapter note said they replaced her and OPIG took over the building.
• The old man’s keeping an eye on the hippies and the foundation, but he’s also observing his neighbors
• The nosy old man’s journal says that his daughter is with the hippies. Is anything on the backyard table connecting to a hippie?
• Whatever there’s one track through that blue flowerbed and a second track past the tree to the right. It looks like two things rolled down the hill and went in different directions
• What’s a moon gazing bath? Whatever it is, Andi’s trying to move it
• The schedule on Jack says that he and Marmot work afternoons, so it must be the afternoon at the time. Then how is that ivy so cold it’s freezing?
• The bird bath is broken and theoretically could be the source of the item that rolled down the hill, but it doesn’t look like there’s any missing pieces.
• The round item in the pool is light enough to float, so it can’t be stone. What else could it be?
• It’s mentioned in the last scenario that the inside of the lab had been weirdly cold recently. Maybe it’s starting to breach the window and affect what’s outside?
• The wheel by the house is tangled up with blue flowers, so that explains one track

The Procedure – A Bizzare Operation Ends in Bloodshed

Scene 1, Bloody room

• Symbol Over Door: Empathy
• Injured Guard: Taser
• Healthy Guard: Bruce. Tweet
• Morning Orders: Spender, Marie, Taser
• ID Card: Billy, Greer
• Bloody ID Badge: Myson
• Injured Man: Neil, Remington
• Screaming Woman:
  • Cat Poster: Mittens
  • Letter: Hall, Harmony, Foundation, Procedure
  • Agenda: Elminage, Replenish
• Reader machine: Crystal

Scene 2, Harmony Foundation

• Black board: Order, Empathy, Justice, Chaos, Hatred, Injustice
• Trash can: Dedicants, Seize, Enlightenment, Crabbed, Stabbed
• Tesa’s Level Readings: Procedure, Sam, Alex, Charlie
• Tim: Tesa, Pen
• Marie:
  • Pen
  • Reason Institute Letter: Reason, Institute, Westland, Nevari, Harmony, Foundation
• Blue Dresser: Illuminate, Replenish, Purify, Eliminate, Obscure, Contaminate
• Yellow check blazer: Tim, Spender,
• Answering Machine Call 1: Hatred, Shot
• Blonde lady: Robinson, Harmony, Foundation, Procedure

This ones gives you an Events scroll, and then a Motive scroll when you fill in the first

• The clock says 9:25 PM, so, according to the cult agenda, they were measuring their levels at the time of the incident
• Have you ever played Eternal Darkness? In that game, you cast spells by making sentences out of runes, each representing a word. So heal was Absorb Self and attacking was Protect Area. The idol operates on similar principles
• The Runes scroll asks for what Tesa BELIEVES the runes to mean. That’s not to say that she’s absolutely right. They reflect her spiritual views more so than they reflect the magical system
• Tesa’s notes assign names to empathy/hatred values. Is that enough to ID people?
• It’s hard to see what happened in the room with the attack, but someone lost a flip flop, broke a crystal off the table, knocked over the stool, attacked the guard, and dropped the crystal
• We already know from the chapter select and scenario 2 that Spender/Westlake evict Tesa and the Harmony foundation. The Hippies didn’t seem pleased about it last time, so it’s unlikely they went quietly
• The phone messages state that a person filled with hate is being abruptly brought along to the event. This person is new and likely wasn’t formally invited like the others.
• Does the enlightenment reading on the machine match anyone?
• The procedure room, when combined with the agenda, appears to be set up for someone to have their levels read at the stool, and then they’re placed in the chair to have their empathy/hatred manipulated with the idol.
• If that’s the case, then remember that it’s 9:25 and they were still doing readings. Why is someone in the chair early?
• Tesa believes that every day, her dedicants are closer to enlightenment. That is, their empathy goes up and their hatred goes down. If that’s the case, someone’s values correspond to the length they’ve been in the program
• The guard’s radios show the injured one message for police and the uninjured one deploy something.
• The woman on the phone has a nasty mark on her wrist. Where’d that come from?
• When the bloody crystal hit the floor, it rolled a pattern of its facets. Whoever used that bloody crystal would have a distinctive stain from its facets.

Motive Scroll

• The phone messages show someone asking to bring a second person along, abruptly. Two of the dedicants must already know one another
• It’s possible for a picture to portray the same person at a different age than they are at the present or in another photo.
• Remington’s note says that he was taught to always stand up for family. Is anyone here related?

Chapter Scroll

First, let’s recap:

1. Scenario 1: 6/18 (Marmot’s calendar). Eugene Marmot activates the device and sets himself on fire, impressing the board and getting further funding for the research lab
2. Scenario 2: 6/13 (organizer note). A group of hippies evicted from the Harmony Foundation sit outside protesting. One of them knocks over a bird bath, sending a frozen disc of water down the hill. It’s icy even though it’s summer. A member of the group hands Eugene Marmot a pamphlet
3. Scenario 3: Unclear date, but chronologically first. Tesa fails to impress Spender and Wakefield, leading them to evict her and seize the Harmony Foundation. A dedicant stabs security

New Evidence:

• A letter to Nathan saying that the Emotion Studies project has been repurposed and that a new person is replacing Tesa as the head
• A letter, dated 6/4/74, from Jack Nowak to Issac Nowak, complaining about how he wants to swap roles with Marie
• Oriel Toussiant’s analysis of Tesa’s idol. The pieces are not connected properly and Tesa mistranslated the symbols
• A phone call from Eugene Marmot, who has taken Westfield’s job. He wants to hire someone back, as he would have never got where he was without their insight

Story 1 and Hierarchy Hints:

• The hierarchy scroll has a trick: it’s dated to 7/12/75. The most recent scenario is 6/18, so the question is asking for who does what after the fire and restructuring
• The idol Tesa has in scenario 3 is the one she spent all the time and effort on from Chapter 2. The security orders in scenario 3 say that all Harmony Foundation assets were claimed by OPIG, so they still must own it in some form.
• Back in Garden Retreat, Tesa had a message saying someone was going to confiscate her credit card for reckless spending. What organization was her card from?
• When the device works, the runes glow blue. We can use this to tell when it’s working and we can flip it to see when it’s not working.
• Marmot says that he’s going to hire someone “back”, so whoever he’s hiring was previously fired by the company

Story 2:

• Tesa’s interpretation of the runes isn’t right. It’s always a shame when someone influential believes something wrong; it’s going to rub off on and influence others
• Tesa isn’t only a scientist: she’s a spiritual leader. The harmony foundation hippies are familiar with the device and believe it does what she thinks it does
• The obvious interpretation of Case 1 is that Eugene Marmot is kind of dumb and set off a dangerous machine by accident. What if he thought what he was doing worked?

The event scroll wants you to understand how the device works. I’m going to give two different answers. If you played the first game, you know how the idol works and have a glossary of what its runes mean (if you forgot, check case 7 of my guide for the first game, linked at top). If you haven’t played the first game, you need to think through these three scenarios to figure out how it works

I played the first game. How does the idol work?

• In scenario 1, the device is set to Increased Matter Heat
• In scenario 2, the device is set to Decreased Matter Heat
• In scenario 3, Tesa has it set to Increased Heat. It didn’t work for Tesa, because she needs a subject, such as Matter, for the ritual to work, in addition to the fact that the idol was connected incorrectly

I haven’t played the first game. How does the idol work?

• Tesa’s translation of the runes is noted to be off base by Oriel. He notes that her interpretation of hatred is metaphorically true and would more precisely be fiery. Her translation of Eliminate and Replenish is straightforwardly wrong
• There’s a concept in thermodynamics that always confuses people. Let’s say you put an ice cube in a glass of water. What’s happening, from a scientific perspective, is that the ice cube has a deficit of energy and is absorbing energy from the water. That is, the ice is absorbing heat from the water. Many people, especially laypeople unfamiliar with chemistry, will say the opposite. That is, the ice cube is adding cold to the water. These both adequately explain the process, but only one of them actually explains the mechanism.
• Think of the Eliminate and Replenish or Give and Take commands as being the same thing with opposite signs. A Replenish is a negative eliminate and a Take is a negative Give. It all depends on what you define as a starting point
• Tesa is defining the runes as if the idol receives and the subject gives (Eliminate Hatred by sucking out hatred and Replenish Empathy by shooting back empathy).
• That doesn’t make sense with the tests we see, where the idol gives and the subject receives (Scenario 1 is, from her perspective, Eliminate Hatred, but the device shot out heat; Scenario 2 is, from her view, Replenish Hatred, but the device is sucking in heat).