In Scene 4 of Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong, Emem Louis plays the role of diplomat when she’s sent to have a conversation with the Tremere sorcerers who haunt the Jefferson Library in Boston. The Tremere will never be famous for their hospitality, however, and Emem finds herself in a surreal prison. Here’s how to solve the elevator puzzles and escape, as well as uncover one of the Tremere’s most closely guarded secrets along the way.
This guide will involve some mild spoilers for the events of Swansong. It also deliberately doesn’t discuss anything else about the level, such as various side missions.
How to Escape from the Memory Trap
Job one is simply getting to the central tower. Fortunately, this is a straightforward process and primarily involves playing hopscotch across the gaps with Emem’s Celerity Discipline. You’ll need to eat a few rats or drain a couple of your fellow prisoners along the way, but the path is mostly linear.
Once you’ve reached the Tremere’s weird little reading room, you’re almost out. From here, you can jump across the gap to the central tower, where you’ll find the first stage of the elevator puzzle.
As is a trend with Swansong, it’s not immediately obvious what you’re trying to do, but it’s also a lot simpler than it looks. To raise the elevator platform, you must solve three consecutive puzzles, which connect the grooves on the floor with the supply of blood in the altar.
The solutions you need are below, and once you know which pieces are the most relevant, the rest should fall neatly into place.
1st Floor
This is easy enough to do, as the dais only has one moving part.
2nd Floor
This is a little trickier, but there are only so many ways the puzzle could work.
3rd Floor
There are a lot more moving parts on the 3rd-floor puzzle, so it can take some time to figure out.
Once you’re on the 4th floor, you can go through the glowing door to escape the prison. You’re not quite home-free, but you’re close.
How to Free the Tremere’s Prisoner
You may have noticed a couple of files throughout the prison that mention there’s another vampire being held captive here, the most obvious of which is on the wall behind the elevator’s control altar on the 1st floor.
You have the option to reach and free that prisoner if you like, just as a little extra payback towards your captors. As fans of the tabletop game know, this is generally the right attitude to have towards the Tremere.
This will require you to backtrack down the elevator shaft to the 1st floor and rearrange the puzzles again, this time connecting the central altar on the platform with one of the runes drawn around the edge of the room. The rune you’re looking for is the same one drawn on the pedestal you’re standing on.
On the 1st floor, you need to connect the rune at roughly the 9 o’clock position to the central altar, as below.
On the 2nd floor, you need to connect the rune at roughly the 12 o’clock position to the central altar. Notably, it’s not the lookalike rune to its right.
You may need to wiggle the puzzle a bit before it connects. The outer ring doesn’t like to lock neatly into place.
On the 3rd floor, you need to connect the rune at roughly the 2 o’clock position to the central altar. This is where some of those strange patterns on the outer ring actually come in handy.
Once you’ve completed all three optional puzzles, you’ll be able to reach the 5th floor of the tower, where you’ll have a choice to make.
You can either just go back downstairs from here, or opt to erase the markings on the floor that keep the Tremere’s vampire captive under wraps.
If you erase the markings, you’ll receive the Friend or Enemy? trait, which is a mixed bag; it gives you a 10% bonus on Psychology ties during a conversation at the cost of a 10% penalty to Rhetoric ties.
This would be really handy for Leysha, but Emem won’t get quite as much mileage out of it; even so, it does give you an extra impetus to focus on Psychology over Rhetoric when you’re spending your experience. Alternatively, if you already got A sin confessed in Scene 1, by convincing Journey to flee and telling Hazel the truth about it, that trait will cancel out Friend or Enemy‘s downside.
More importantly, at least if you’re an achievement hunter, completing the elevator puzzle and choosing this option sets Emem up for a confrontation later in the game that’s required to unlock the Face the Music achievement/trophy. For more, head over to our Swansong guides hub.
