Ilmo is at it again with his cryptic passwords and riddles in Alan Wake 2, and this time a solution is required to enter a story area in the Kalevala Workshop.
Like all good managers, Ilmo is hell-bent on making everything very, very convoluted. This is the way. By the time you get to the Kalevala Workshop portion of Saga’s story in Watery, chances are you’ve grown accustomed to solving the puzzles and riddles that are so prevalent in Alan Wake 2.
Or maybe, you’ve ignored them all to continue the story. Well, that’s the unique thing about this one—the solution is needed to progress the main story. This isn’t about finding a Cult Stash or solving a Nursery Rhyme, this is about getting answers and progressing the game.
Alan Wake 2: Kalevala Workshop padlock and password explained
After following Deputy Thornton (or what remains of him, anyway) to the Kalevala Workshop, your next objective is a little bit cryptic. “Investigate the workshop.” Sure, I’m doing that. What exactly am I looking for, though?
In the office room on the right of the workshop, you probably found a locked door with a familiar cult-symbol-based padlock. This is the door you need to unlock to complete your objective of investigating the workshop. To find the correct symbols and the correct order, you actually need to stand in a specific spot and look in a specific direction at a specific angle. In other words, the likelihood of chancing upon the correct code for this padlock is close to zero.
The padlock code has a clue on the computer
If you read through the list of emails on the computer next to the locked door, you can learn two things.
- Ilmo is most likely in cahoots with The Cult of the Tree.
- “Look inside the smiley coffee cup” was left by Ilmo as instructions for unlocking the door.
Yeah, that didn’t help Jaakko either, according to his email. No surprise there.
How to find and solve the “smiley coffee cup”
Now, Jaakko must have known that there is a giant coffee cup with a creepy Chesire Cat smile drawn onto it within this very workshop, but you probably didn’t know that. In fact, the cup is just on the other side of the workshop as this office, and looking at it from the right angle will give you the correct password for the lock.
When you first enter Kalevala Workshop, you can see a stack of rafters and hay. Two of the correct padlock inputs are painted on the left side of this haystack, and the third is inside of a giant coffee cup on the left.
Approach the coffee cup, which is easily recognized by the grin drawn onto the front of it. Walk around to the back side of it so that you can see the cup and the haystack. When you shine your light, you should be able to see that a third padlock input is painted on the inside of the cup, and this last symbol forms a straight line with the two on the haystack.
The correct code to unlock the door in Kalevala Workshop
The symbols should be input into the padlock from top to bottom, meaning the symbol inside the coffee cup is the third and final slot. The correct combination and order to unlock the padlocked door in the Kalevala Workshop is:
- An upward-facing triangle stacked on top of a downward-facing triangle.
- An hourglass angled from top left to bottom right.
- A vertical hourglass.
