Our group did it again.
We made you believe the free games would end.
Well maybe,
these might make your brain mush,
but the puzzles aren’t that serious.
Take your time and don’t stress,
and you might get a game for free.
Now ready, steady?
Hello and welcome to my second ARG. Had this in my back pocket for a few months, but now that my time has freed up and its nearly the end of the steam sale it is time to get this going.
First a FAQ
FAQ
-
Are you giving away Britney Spears games?
No I am not giving away Britney Spears Dance Beat or any other games associated with her, sorry to disappoint you. -
Do we have to do puzzles to get games? I am no good at them
Nope, again we have something for you a little further down in the post -
Are the puzzles harder this time, last time they were too easy/hard?
The first few puzzles are a about on par with last time, the last few may be a little harder depending on your knowledge, but not much harder. Fear not though, like last time I will likely have a day where I give out hints to people who are stuck or I may just randomly give them out as well, we’ll see how it goes.
Story Time
So before we took a break for a bit I had slacked off in helping out with the giveaways again and in the picture above you can see the responses of the other Community Giveaway members.
@Punkster’s recently acquired penguin puppet was replaced with a puppet of me which he used to imitate me constantly mentioning how lazy I was.
@Gnuffi resorted to threatening me with a club.
@delenn13 just gave me a exasperated look all the time and thew her hands up in the air
@YQMaoski just had his mouth agape at my noncommittal atitude
and although @yoshirules and @DanosaurJr expressions might look nice and cute there, I know that they mean trouble.
I felt bad about all this so I thought I should make things right by doing another one of these ARGs.
Now I know that most ARG’s have a theme or a story to tie them together and although I don’t really have one here I guess the theme could be Peter’s ineptitude.
So many things have gone wrong with these puzzles:
Puzzle 1 when I first got it play tested had a really bad mistake in it that had me redo part of it.
Puzzle 2 I had a different idea for that didn’t work so I scrapped it and came up with what is there now.
Puzzle 3 I had to leave a message with because of troubles with uploading it.
Puzzle 4 was my only positiver here. I did not have to redo anything on it.
And finally puzzle 5 is just a mess, you will see what I mean when you get there.
So I guess follow along with my failings and have some fun solving the puzzles.
The Prize
Same prize as last time so…
One person will win:
- One game of their choice $20 USD or less in value from Steam or the Humble Store
OR
- One Humble Bundle at a $20 USD or less tier from Humble Bundle
OR
- The Humble Monthly Bundle for the Month
If you win we will get in contact with you, to organise what you want.
ARG Rules
Slightly changed the rules so read these carefully:
-
You have 7 days from the time of this being posted to solve the puzzles, after that entries are closed. Countdown till entries close
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There are 5 puzzles to solve, each puzzle solved will get you one entry into the draw (so you can still win even if you don’t finish the ARG) and each puzzle solution will lead you to the next puzzle. Any web addresses you need to use will be all in lower case.
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Each puzzle after the first one will give you a PM code (5 in total), it should be easy to find (its not hidden or anything), send each code to me in a single PM via the Chrono website (you can send them as you find them just keep them to one thread please) with the title" ARG 2.0 ", if you do not send me the PM code for each puzzle you will not gain the entries for solving the puzzles.
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Please don’t post any solutions or spoilers for the puzzles, doing so will immediately disqualify you from winning. I will be strict on this. I will post all solutions to the puzzles after the ARG is finished.
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If you think something with a puzzle is wrong, isn’t working or you have other questions please PM me. Due to my timezone and living my life I may not get to your post promptly but I will do my best to respond as soon as I can.
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Please don’t spam me or the other giveaway members with requests for clues, you may PM me if you are stuck but I will not necessarily give you a clue, that will be at my discretion.
-
At the end of the giveaway, it will take us a little time to collate the entries and find a winner, once we have got a winner it will update this post.
Other Giveaway
We have 5 other games to giveaway:
- Domina
- Orwell: Keeping an Eye On You
- PixelJunk Nom Nom Galaxy
- and 2 copies of Alter Ego
I have made this ARG and these puzzles as a creative exercise for myself as I am not good at arts/music etc… So to win one of the games above I would like you to show/tell us about what you use as a creative outlet, so post in this thread along with the games you wish to enter for and we will pick a winner from them (if you are not super creative maybe just show us something creative that you enjoy viewing/observing/participating in). If you are participating in the ARG you can enter for these games as well.
General Rules
To win any of the prizes from both giveaways you must:
- Been a active member of the community for at least 4 weeks prior to the posting of this thread
- Have 6 badges
- Actually want to play the games
If you want to participate in either of these competitions and don’t want the prizes just say so in you post/PM.
Also if you don’t meet the requirements but do want to play along feel free, you just won’t be eligible for the prizes.
The First ARG Puzzle
You know they say that mirrors always reveal the truth, if so there is something real wrong with these dice
Honestly you would have to be blind to miss the puzzle here, so that is all the clues I will give you.
NOTE: some people seem to be having issues with bit.do if this is the case I have set up the same link on tiny.cc, so just replace http://bit.do with http://tiny.cc in this puzzle.
Puzzle Solutions
Puzzle 1
Link:
Right here in this post
Solution:
Spoilers for Puzzle 1
The text around the image is meant to give you clues on how to solve this. Talking about mirror is to remind you to mirror flip the reflection to get the correct orientation of the dots and “blind to miss the puzzle” is saying the dots in the reflection are braille.
If you translate it it should take you to Pete's ARG 2.0: The Code - mmmbop.
Puzzle 2
Link:
Pete's ARG 2.0: The Code - mmmbop
Solution:
Spoilers for Puzzle 2
The title of this puzzle and the way it looked were meant to throw you off the scent of how to actually solve this puzzle. Many thought it was some type of scan code or data matrix or that is needed to be folded in some orientation or overlayed, but it was much simpler than that. there are small pink crosses in the image if you link them up and make a grid like so
Each square is a letter and read from left to right, top to bottom spells out the link morepuzzles
Puzzle 3
Link:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UegSf30bnZCCH3FcFdDeprKtfs0p88QC/view
Solution:
Spoilers for Puzzle 3
I made it so that you had to download the file because some sites I uploaded it to create their own copy of the file which would not allow the second part of this puzzles to work.
For this puzzle the picture wasn’t super important, it was all about the text.
The main clue was the section talking about a long running feature of mad magazine and I was hoping this would lead you to find about the fold in feature that has appeared in the magazine since the 60s.
Taking the image and folding it so that the two triangles pointing at each other on opposing side of the picture told you would get this
Which says to open image in notepad and read the text at the bottom. As I said my art skills aren’t great but hopefully in the image you can also see a tick a small thumbs up and a badly drawn smiling face.
Opening the image in notepad you find the following text:
_HEY YOU! Yeah I put caps here to tell you you found the message. _
There are IT types people who will look at this puzzle, those who can undertsand it and those who dont:
_TIIIITTI TIITIIII TIIITITI TTITTTTT TIITITTT TIITTTTI TIIITIIT TIITTITI TTITTTTT TIITTITT TIITTITI _
_TIITTTII TIITIIII TIITTITT TIITTITI TIITTITT TTITTTTT TIIITITT TIITITTT TIITTITI TTITTTTT TIITIITI _
_TIITTITI TIIITTII TIIITTII TIITTTTI TIITTIII TIITTITI TTITIIIT TTITTTTT TIITTIII TIITIIII TTITTTTT _
_TIIITITT TIITIIII TTITTTTT TIIITITT TIITITTI TIITIIIT TIIIITTI TTITIIIT TIITTTII TIITTTII TTITIIII _
_TIIITTII TIITITTI TIITTITT TIITTITI TIIITITT TIITIIII TIIITTII TIITITTI TIITTITT TIITTITI TTITTTTT _
_TIIITITT TIITIIII TTITTTTT TIITTIIT TIITITTI TIITIIIT TIITTITT TTITTTTT TIIITITT TIITITTT TIITTITI _
_TTITTTTT TIITIIIT TIITTITI TIIIITTT TIIITITT TTITTTTT TIIITTTT TIIITITI TIIIITIT TIIIITIT TIITIITT _
TIITTITI
The line about IT people looking at the puzzle is playing off of an old geeky joke which is
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who know binary and those who don’t
I was hoping this would lead you to understand the text was binary and I=1 and T=0.
If this didn’t help you one of the portal turrets in the image spelt out “later” in binary in it’s speech bubble.
Translating the binary the message said:
you have decoded the message. go to tiny.cc/sidetoside to find the next puzzle
for those interested here is the first incarnation of this puzzle:
Puzzle 4
Link:
https://imgur.com/a/bLfAl0r
Solution:
Spoilers for Puzzle 4
Again the look of this puzzle along with the text was meant to throw you off a little, but the interpreting the text correctly was key to solving this puzzle.
“Find the words” was meant to make people think this was a word find, but that was not how this was meant to be taken.
The first thing you had to figure out was what “Minotaur’s domain” meant, some thought is was a website, but really it was just alluding to the fact that in ancient Greek mythology the Minotaur lived in a labyrinth or maze. Then the word “past” was meant to make you look at older puzzles. In puzzle 2 I put a big picture of a maze there. So in order to solve the puzzle you had to overlay the maze on the letter grid and “escape” the maze “quickly” by taking the shortest path to get to the exit. Every letter that that path went by would help you “find the words” you needed to get to the next puzzle. The solution looked like this:
and when the letters were read in the order that the path took to get from start to finish it said
congratulations you have solved the puzzle next go to tiny dot cc slash thefinaldestination to continue your puzzling quest all the best buddy
Puzzle 5
Link:
Pete's ARG 2.0: The Picture - mmmbop
Solution:
Spoilers for Puzzle 5
All the text not in the note on the page was written as if someone was typing on a qwerty keyboard but the computer was setup to use the dvorak keyboard layout.
There were a clues in the letter on the page to help you figure this out.
- Using someone elses computer and it spits out gibberish
- Mans last name beginning with D
- Looked for name and all I found was a composer
There were some more subtle hints to this as well
In the handwritten letter if you take the first letter of every sentence it spells out “dvorak is the way”.
and in the source code I left 2 hints. The first was “BROKE YARD VODKA” which is an anagram of dvorak keyboard and “AFTER 11 AND OR 12 BADGER” which was a reference to the the badger song (Badgers : animated music video : MrWeebl - YouTube) which would help you with the solution to the riddle (see below).
In essence though this encoding method is just a basic substitution cypher so some people brute forced it to decode the riddle.
One you decoded the text on the page you could then go ahead and solve the riddle which was:
I can be as small as a button or as big as a field,
the greater the darkness the more I yield,
no matter what I still wear a cap for protection,
If I’m red I may not be good for your collection.
The answer to the riddle was mushroom, which you then had to encode back into dvorak keyboard text which would be mgodprrm.
Doing this would take you to the final page with the final code which you would have to decode from dvorak.
I actually tried to obfuscate the source code for the place where you entered the code to get to the final page, but after the arg had started I found out this did not work so people could actually just find the answer to the riddle in the source code or just bypass that completely and find the link to the last page. I actually changed the code to make it a little harder to find part way through the ARG but for those who solved it via the source code, kudos to them a solve is a solve no matter which way you do it.
In my eyes!!!
I figured out how but I’m working atm so I’ll crack it later. I hope it’s pretty on the other side and that you crack 'em all. 
