A "nudge" for Finding Martin

Playing Game Hints
1

I’m a little over four hours into this game (a.k.a. I’ve barely started) and feeling like I’ve hit a dead end for the first time. I’d really appreciated what Familiar Problems refers to as a “nudge” rather than a hint - i.e. not a solution to a puzzle, but just a steer towards which of the various options available to me are solvable at the moment.

Progress so far (45/360 points)

I’ve gained access to the living room, bedroom, bathroom, dance studio, dining room, kitchen, laundry room, pantry and upstairs landing, as well as Martin’s workplace. I’ve stopped the packages arriving, befriended the dog, filled the bath and read the email on the computer.

I’ve figured out how to use the watch to raise and lower the TV screens, turn on the speaker system (not sure what this actually does yet), watch cartoons and find out where a towel is.

I don’t think I can do anything at Martin’s workplace yet as I think I need some way to stop the office door squeaking so I can get in without alerting Mr Pendergast.

The game is hinting that I should take a bath, which requires a towel, but I assume the towel is in the dryer, which I can’t open without a matching pair of socks. Socks might be in the closet in the bedroom but I think that I need to get the red and green darts off the ceiling to open it.

Here’s the list of things which look like puzzles I should be aiming to solve, but I assume some of them will require items I don’t have access to yet:

Things to work on

Getting the darts off the ceiling
Doing something with the cuckoo clock
Solving some kind of puzzle involving the dance studio and ballet shoes
Getting through the padlocked door in the courtyard
Finding out what Slinky has hidden behind the bookcase
Getting past the thorn bushes in the front garden
Doing something with the model train
Opening the stone door in the kitchen
Opening the black box in the kitchen
Getting through the locked door on the upstairs landing
Doing something with the pillar device on the upstairs landing
Doing something with the glass shelves
Doing something while transmogrified
Providing a fuel source for uplifting the phone booth for the second time

If anyone can give a gentle nudge as to where I should be focusing my efforts, I’d really appreciate it!

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2

Reading through the walkthrough, it looks like the next step is in fact one of the things on your list, although I’m not sure whether or not you’ve fulfilled the prerequisites for it.

The item on your list most directly related to what you need to do is:

Finding out what slinky has hidden behind the bookcase.

The reason I don’t know whether you can do this or not is because I’m not sure what some actions do and some things the walkthrough mentions you haven’t listed. So here’s a vague question for you that is less revealing then the question above but might help organize your mind (and the question is also something I dont’ know the answer to):

What is everything the phone booth is currently capable of doing?

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Not sure if you intended me to answer this ot not, but a bit of further experimentation hasn’t got me anywhere with the bookcase yet, so I figured no harm in listing out loud:

Answer

I’ve obtained a battery and a fifty dollar bill. The battery I’m pretty sure needs to be given to the receptionist but I need both the right screwdriver and a way to get past Mr Pendergast.
I’ve charged up my hair with static electricity but I can’t find any way to transfer the static charge to anything else or otherwise take advantage of this.
I can keep turning up the lights until they break.
I can travel to the upstairs landing (no further because of some issue with fuel).
I can transmogrify myself (while wearing only my undershorts) but then can’t do anything else except wait for detransmogrification, as far as I can tell.
I can travel to Martin’s workplace, but I don’t have the right object to go anywhere else (unless I’ve missed something I can bring into the phone booth).

If one of these is relevant to the bookcase puzzle, the hair thing seems most likely, but I’ve not figured out how to make use of it yet.

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Your idea is completely right. A hint for the next step might be that it works on any type of hair

Explicitly, the combination is make the ferret get static too.

After that (including an item I don’t know if you have) you use the duck to get the ferret to come out from behind the bookcase. This isn’t a hint but an explicit solution and is only useful if the previous two hints are solved.

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