We’ve all been there. You’re trapped in a seemingly-empty European villa while a series of symbolic hallucinations key in on your most deeply-buried fears about marriage and fatherhood. It is a deeply relatable experience. What’s tripping a lot of people up in Resident Evil Village, however, is the part where you’re supposed to somehow fix a music box.
With no hints in the area, this can feel like a trial-and-error puzzle, but there are some subtle clues you can investigate to solve it. Naturally, this involves spoilers for the House Beneviento in Resident Evil Village. Only keep reading if you’re already at this point and have become truly stuck.
How to Solve the Resident Evil Village Music Box Puzzle
So here you are, staring at a suspiciously familiar bloody mannequin. Examine and remove the lid from a compartment in the right shoulder to find the Silver Key.
Remove the ring from the mannequin’s left hand, and you’ll receive the Blood Covered Ring.
Finally, pull off the mannequin’s left leg to find the Winding Key inside.
Unlock the Medicine Room with the Silver Key and turn on the sink. Use the ring on the stream of water to clean it, revealing the Wedding Ring.
If you examine the Wedding Ring from the Key Items menu, there’s an inscription on the inside of the ring that reads 5/29/11. Input that, 052911, into the combination lock on the door to reopen the exterior hallway.
As you go back the way you came, the Storage Room door on the left swings open. Go inside and use the Winding Key on the music box to start the puzzle. The box’s gears are jammed, and you need to reorient them so the box can play Ethan and Mia’s favorite song. (You may remember the same music box from the intro, where you could play the song for a sleeping Rose.)
The box starts off looking like this:
And the solution is to reorient it so it looks like this:
The key to solving it may be to turn up your brightness. The starting point here is to orient the scratches on the cylinders against the near-invisible, matching scratches on either end of the music box, on the immovable parts of the mechanism. They’re genuinely hard to see, especially if you’re rolling in low-light conditions as one typically does with a horror game.
If you number the cylinders 1 through 5 from their starting point, as seen above, you’d want to rearrange them to 2, 4, 1, 5, 3. Play the box to receive Tweezers, the next key item you’ll need to proceed through House Beneviento.
It just gets weirder from here, but that’s how you solve the Resident Evil Village music box puzzle. Keep an eye on our Resident Evil Village guides page for more RE8 hints, tips, and tricks.
