Step by Step : Transparent Mirrors in Aargon BlackBox

Transparent Mirrors is an easy level, but it's also the first level in Black Box where a player might get thrown for a loop. The reason is that Transparent mirrors forces you to do a little extra deduction.

A basic puzzle playfield

First just a quick explanation of the playfield. The middle area is the mystery section we need to figure out. The grey area provides us clues to help us understand what's hidden in the black box. In the picture above you can see 1 white laser firing into the box. I placed the white laser myself. If you look carefully you'll see a white arrow on the right hand side. That's where the white laser SHOULD be exiting the box IF the pieces inside are placed correctly. That suggests there's a mirror deflecting the white beam. My white beam continues through the box, but it only shows MY guess.. not what's really happening.

Two mirrors found!

Pictured here is the level with a few lasers and mirrors set up. Almost everyone figures out right away that there are two mirrors in the level where I've placed them. The arrows are the clues showing me where the beam SHOULD be coming out of the black box if the pieces are in the right spots. So look at the red laser. It fires up and right as if there was a mirror in the spot where I've placed one. Same with the blue beam. It fires down and left as if being deflected by a mirror. Just to be sure they aren't slit mirrors I've placed a couple of green lasers to show that the beams don't come out of the box. If you look carefully you'll notice there are no green arrows exiting the black box. The setup looks correct but it is NOT the solution.

  No More Clues. The mystery of this level.

In fact. No matter where else we shine another beam we don't seem to get any extra clues in the form of arrows exiting the box. (That's a bit of a lie.. there are some clues but most people don't spot them.)

That brings us to the central problem in this level. We KNOW there are 4 mirrors and not 2. How do we know? There's another clue pictured below.

Shows us we need 4 mirrors and not 2.
Also shows that 2 mirrors are regular mirrors and 2 are slit mirrors.

This section at the bottom of the screen shows us how many pieces we have to place, and in this case also what kind of pieces we need to place. There ARE two regular mirrors just as we've discovered but confusingly there are ALSO two slit mirrors. So the question becomes, how can we place the slit mirrors in such a way as it appears that there are no slit mirrors?

Solved!

This above image shows the solution. With the above configuration the arrow clues coming out of the box behave EXACTLY as they would if the level only had 2 mirrors. The other mirrors in the middle are cleverly hidden forcing you as the player to deduce their locations using the piece counter on the bottom of the screen.