How to get to the Main Hall through the locked door

In this guide you'll find instructions explaining how to open the locked door that leads to the Main Hall in Resident Evil 7. At this point in the game you will see the following objectives: "Get out of the house" and "Get to the main hall", once Zoe has hinted that the Main Hall is your route to escape.

The locked door in question is located inside the Main House map/area, on the eastern side of the map at the end of a longish corridor:

Main hall locked door map

The image below shows what the door looks like. It has two large circular panels, one gold and another one metallic/silver with ancient carvings drawn on the surface.

Locked door to main hall

Let's recap briefly to see how we got to this point...

Recap

After escaping from Jack via the hatch door and crawling through the tunnel underneath the house you came to a small room (the laundry I think) where there was a nice convenient save game cassette tape and a crate to store some of your abundance of inventory items.

Around this point in the game, Zoe calls you again via the black telephone and says:

"Shut up and listen if you want to stay alive"
"You gotta get out of that house"
"There might be a way through the main hall"

Now your immediate thoughts at this stage in the game are to try and get the main door open with some kind of key, but trying to open the door shows the following message: "There's no keyhole anywhere".

Let me just put you out of some of your misery now, it's not time to open that door just yet! If you want to avoid any potential spoilers then my advise is to continue searching the house for a new character, and a chance to acquire something important. Then come back to this guide when you're stuck trying to open the door again...there's still something important to find but keep progressing the story until you absolutely must open the door again.

Step by Step

READY? When you're happy to continue with the guide then let's go...

Until now the garage door control panel (south western side of the map) has displayed the dead end message when you try and interact with it: "It's secured with tape that can't be removed by hand".

Work your way towards the window of the dining room (where the feast was) and a policeman will appear briefly. He gives you a knife to help you fight on and not only will this item help protect you but it's also the only way to get into the garage. Head down the small flight of stairs and cut the tape that's obstructing the garage door controls. Head inside for a great boss fight!

Now the most important part of this guide...

Following the boss fight with Jack, climb up the only ladder leading out of the garage and up onto the platform above. There is a small stack of shelves that must be pulled to the side to allow you to slip onwards. After pulling the shelves to one side, look immediately to your right for a picture frame of an Ox:

Ox picture frame

Examine the frame by rotating it until you see the back. The little icons will appear to signify that there is something else that you can do with this item. Press the interact buttons again (X for PS4) when the time is right and you'll undo the screws behind the picture frame.

Pull out the Ox Statuette.

Now head back to the locked door which leads to the main hall and place the Ox Statuette into the empty hole. The door is somehow mysteriously unlocked and you have access to another even great section of the game. Good luck!!