About a quarter of the way into Control, you’ll have a mission called Old Boys’ Club which tasks you with solving a punch card puzzle inside the HRA Lab.
If you’re struggling to find the solution to this room, here’s how to solve the puzzle.
How to solve the HRA Lab puzzle in Control
First of all, enter the lab and interact with the HRA machine at the top of the room. You’re tasked with restarting the punchcard terminals to activate the machine. If you look around you’ll find these five cards littered around the floor as well as five card machines that are numbered. Here are the locations:
- By the yellow forklift
- On a desk with some equipment and pencil drawings
- On top of a white cardboard box
- On a central desk next to a bunch of filing boxes and paperwork
- Upstairs on a windowsill next to the 4th punchcard machine.
Once you’ve collected these cards, you can start solving the puzzle. First, take a look at the whiteboards. There are two on the ground floor and one upstairs. These whiteboards hold the clues to figuring out which order you should place the cards into the punchcard machines.
Simply interact with the numbered machines and place the card you think is right in there. The first card in the sequence goes into the first machine, the second card into the second machine, and so on and so forth. Once you’ve placed them all in the correct machines, a sound effect will trigger to show you can go and activate the HRA Machine.
That’s how you’re supposed to solve the HRA Lab punchcard puzzle. Scroll below to get the spoilerfied answer.
Spoiler solution to HRA Lab Puzzle
Here are the punchcards as you have them, and we’ve written the corresponding numbers below in the order they should go in the machines. Once you’ve placed the fifth and final punchcard into the machine, the HRA Machine will activate and a sound effect will occur to let you know. Now all you need to do is interact with the big machine one more time.
Be sure to check out our other Control guides here. We’ve got details on how to collect every outfit in the game, as well as how to unlock every supernatural ability.
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Featured Image Credit: Remedy Entertainment