It's not the first time it went down, actually, I noticed it once before. Maybe a bug

Or they are just milking them social medias like we are a bunch of cows! You know, either or.

Suddenly, over night they got a thousand more twitter followers, all of the sudden, it's now close to the face reveal

Thats what I was thinking...

I was looking at the page all morning and I noticed it went up considerably.

This makes me think maybe we missed something in the original files.

For instance I'm not sure we even had a look at the following files:


http://oddworld.com/soulstorm/handtwitching.gif
http://oddworld.com/soulstorm/chesttwitching.gif
http://oddworld.com/soulstorm/headtwitching.gif

http://oddworld.com/soulstorm/handtwitching.gif
http://oddworld.com/soulstorm/chesttwitching.gif
http://oddworld.com/soulstorm/headtwitching.gif

Ok, somebody hear me out here, but I swear to God these images of Abe remind me of those shots of the doctor in Boombots whenever there was a dialog with him before a battle. I can hear the song that played during them and everything.

...Maybe that's a lead?

Things are changing again guys. "abe" now has the response of "*** ABE? YES - ABE. SOON. ***"

With my web dev hat on, I think these are fallbacks for their respective .mp4 versions for browsers that don’t support native video.

With my ARG hat on, I checked out the MP4s frame-by-frame back when this first started out, didn’t turn up anything. There may be something in the GIFs, but if they’re fallbacks then I don’t think they’re too likely to hide something in them.

I think Manco is right. I looked over the gifs and mp4's yesterday frame by frame and couldnt find anything.

I think we should focus on HELL04==five L1PSwhat;

I noticed that earlier on the "what" was not there, using the wayback machine.

Introducing "what" in the form I got this: "VAER XZ*LP B *U**JR B*N AHN*"

To me that message simply pointed to http://www.oddworld.com/soulstorm/0451.jpg

Yes, but HELL04==five L1PS was there at the start... Then they added the what.

Also, I found that if you input HEAD in the form you get the image of attemptnumberseventyfive.jpg IN the form. We already found that but worth noting.

Im looking trough the scripts on the website to try and find the inputs and outputs :D

The source changed again:

Well, im getting new responses from the form.

*** KNIHT I EROM ENO TSUJ - EERHT EVAH I ***
* ZZZZZZZB - REHTONA DNUOF EV'I - YAKO *

I typed "Hello" in the form this morning, and it came up with a new answer :

*** HELLO! BUT THERE'S ANOTHER WAY WE CAN TALK ***

so I suppose the form will probably not be useful for the next step

Another way we can talk?

As long as it's not Oddchat, I'm fine with that

I also think HELL04==five L1PSwhat; was meant to lead us to 0451.jpg

But when I first looked at it a few days ago I thought it might be linked to the gamespeak controls of the original games. We know that L1 is the button we had to press in addition to another to make Abe say something.

So my theory was that we needed to write the inputs to say "hello" ("L1+triangle" or maybe "L1pstriangle", ps for playstation ?) in the form or somewhere else to find another clue.

I tried a lot of combinations with no result so far. It was probably stretching things a bit too far anyway, but I thought i might share the idea, just in case.

"L2 R2" returns:

*** I KNEW IT! I KNEW IT! ***

I believe this is new?

EDIT: The fact I got that on a whim leads me to believe this may be a new generic responses. It's not on the Wiki page.

Generic iirc

Thought so. Should have checked back a few pages, apologies.

Now the source code has this in it as of this morning.

"
!--
too
many
characters
?
--
"
Too many characters? Perhaps we'll be seeing some new faces in the game?

I'm pretty sure it's had that in it since the beginning.

No, that’s new.

“Too many characters” sounds like an error message for a website form submission. Not sure why it’s phrased as a question though.

What if it's referring to what we got from the morse code? "too many characters" may imply we don't need all the characters of the code?

Then why put them in? It'd just be misleading.

Welcome to ARGs, where the puzzles are obtuse and red herrings don’t matter.

Don't blame the ARGs.

Maybe AE had too many characters, and they'll be removing some of them. Like General Dripik.

if they touch those glukkons i’ll fukken riot

If I'm allowed to say, you guys seem to have a hard time solving the ARG.

Then help, Vlam.

Can't we pay someone?

Where's the fun in that?

!--
too
many
characters
?
--

This was apart of:

!-- Far too many video game characters were harmed extremely badly in the making of this experience. In a sane world this would never have happened. We're sorry. --

Could this mean anything?

I feel like they're really trying to highlight that phrase as if we missed something.. too many characters has to mean letters at this point, right?

EDIT: So thinking about removing "characters" as in letters, I thought what could Soulstorm be abbreviated to, and I came up with SOS. I entered SOS and I got:

*** MMMMMMMO - ERUGBAN QAHBS RI'V - LNXB ***

Which caesar ciphers as:


*** ZZZZZZZB - REHTONA DNUOF EV'I - YAKO ***

Which flips round as:

*** OKAY - I'VE FOUND ANOTHER - BZZZZZZZ ***

I'm sure that's new?

That is one of the newer messages. But it isn't correlated to SOS.. if you don't get the response every time you enter the message. If you get ... then it's nothing.

I think the confusion stems from the fact that generic responses can pop up regardless if you have a correct message or not.

Regardless, that message is interesting.. He's found another what? Any idea's what he could be saying? Or any thoughts on what this could mean?

abe has changed response now.

It no gives *** UOY WOHS OT GNIYRT M'I .NOOS .EBA - SEY ?EBA *** when flipped gives
*** ABE? YES - ABE. SOON. I'M TRYING TO SHOW YOU ***

I’ve received what I believe is another generic response: *** I HAVE THREE - JUST ONE MORE I THINK ***

Most likely a reference to three pictures of Abe – the face is the last one remaining. This would appear to confirm that we’re waiting on the face reveal.

Wasn't it 'save' me? I keep thinking that's got to do with saving files. I've got no clues beyond that, though.
Or maybe Soulstorm will involve Abe crossing a desert followed by 300 characters?

O:S confirmed Lemmings clone.

What about the whitespace after ''too many characters?"

LE: Okay, i dont know who did the morse code translations from lsot.mp3 but im getting something totally different.

I am looking at the waveforms. Will post pictures