Resident Evil 2 portable safe guide: Master those puzzles!

Resident Evil 2 out now, and to assist you, we’ve made a handy guide to solve its portables safes.

We’ll try to make our guides as spoiler free as possible — story beats will largely be skipped, but item and room names won’t be — so rest assured we won’t ruin anything for you. With that in mind, let’s get to it!

Resident Evil 2 portable safe solutions

The idea of the portable safes are simple — you need to press eight buttons in order, lighting up corresponding LEDs in a circular pattern. There are technically eight different solutions for the puzzle, depending on where you choose to start the lights with your 8-button solution.

We’ve learned through our various playthroughs that the safes are randomised, so rather than giving you set solutions, we’re here to prepare you to solve your puzzles yourself.

Here’s what to do: get a pen and a paper and follow our handy template, below:

We picked a point on the LED dial (bottom-centre, right) and pressed the buttons until we could find which button lit that specific LED. That button was marked as “1”. We continued to work around the dial in a counter-clockwise rotation until all buttons were marked 1-8.

As an example, here was the result for the first portable safe we found:

Get it? Got it? Good.

Resident Evil 2 portable safe locations

Now that you know how to solve the portable safes, you need to find them.

There are two portable safes per playthrough — and the first big spoiler is right now — and there are 1st and 2nd Games which place the safes in different spots. We’ll help out by giving you the locations of each Game’s safes.

1st Game locations

• Shower Room (2F)
• Linen Room (2F)

2nd Game locations

• Linen Room (2F)
• Interrogation Room (1F)

Solving each puzzle will give you a Spare Part for use inside the Safety Deposit Room (1F). It’s a blank key, so you can use it for either key 2 or 3.

If you’ve unlocked all portable safes — and all the safes and padlocks in the game too — in one playthrough, you’ll be awarded with the Master of Unlocking Achievement or Trophy. Congratulations!

Safety Deposit Room (1F) items

With both Spare Parts items in hand, you can head to the RPD Safety Deposit Room (1F) to place the keys and obtain the following items:

• 102: Gunpowder
• 103: Combat knife
• (106: Film — Spare Key not needed)
• (109: Handgun bullets — Spare key not needed)
• 203: Hip Pouch
• 208: Shotgun shells (Leon), Flame rounds (Claire)

Resident Evil 2 is available now on Windows PC, Xbox One and PS4. Check out our other guides below.

All of Stevivor’s Resident Evil 2 guides

• All Unlocks and Records
• Rankings guide
• All Mr. Raccoon locations
• All Weapons and Upgrades
• All Files (Lore Explorer Record)
• Medallions guide
• Safes guide
• Padlocks guide
• Portable Safe guide
• Circuit Breaker & Hardly Any Resistance Records guide
• Voltage Virtuouso & A Jewel Amongst Joules Records guide
• Young Escapee guide
• Hidden items (Treasure Hunter Record) guide
• Plugs puzzle solutions
• Greenhouse codes
• Chemist & Genius Chemist Records guide