That would explain why I had problems hearing them. I believe I don't have a problem with high frequencies yet.

For what it's worth, I support the motion of creating seperate threads for the different parts of the ARG. It's overkill to make a seperate subforum - just prefix the name of the thread with 'ARG'.

So to continue some speculation I'd made in the Soulstorm thread in a more appropriate place...

I think that the ways that we see the person on the other side interact with us, our "Ed", could be more than just bad signals and the like. The kind of steganography we've seen so far seems more like a desperate attempt to get any kind of messages through than someone purposely trying to be cryptic.

The scenario I imagine involves a mudokon workforce with strict enforcements on censorship especially following the events of AO/NnT to make sure little to no communication regarding Abe is able to cause enough of a stir.

This is entirely just speculation on my part and what would seem to make good narrative sense, though I could be entirely wrong.

This is honestly a really cool premise. I really hope you're dead on with this theory, because it's quality!

There may be hints of this in Exoddus too, if you remember there's spray paint on the walls which signal when you've found a secret area. Including the shamans who help Abe around the Tear Extractors, it feels like they're hiding to help out.

But I may be interpreting it wrong. It'd be cool if there was subtle storytelling in Soulstorm, kinda like Dark Souls.

Three Weirdos perhaps?

Gee, I hope not...

Not sure if anyone else has tried this... I was trying to find some meaning behind the "there's got to be a wa_" in the Soulstorm page source, so I tried to go to http://www.oddworld.com/soulstorm/y and it brought me to an article.

Then I tried every other letter of the alphabet. It seems for every letter, there's some page in oddworld.com it redirects to, except for the letters k, q, x, and z.

Trolling, perhaps?

Edit: Probably not. Seems to do the same for oddworld.com/y

The only other clue that may add weight to my "censorship" theory is that the ARG has progressively gotten more and more difficult as we progress. What started as simply finding messages in the page source, and doing a Rot13 cryptography has turned into full steganography with words and letters hidden in text files and music documents.

Yeah, I encountered this early on when we were still speculating about this being an ARG – something in oddworld.com’s redirect settings makes certain URLs redirect to pages on the main site, usually if the URL you visit has a keyword or number related to a news post on the main site. For example, oddworld.com/soulstorm/0451 goes to this page, which if you check the URL is article #451 on the main site.

It's just the way WordPress tries to serve you a relevent page if you stumble across an address that doesn't exist. The number 0451 is meaningless in that context, you could change it to any number; it's just matching 'soulstorm' in the address to the slug of that news article. You can see the same thing with any of those letters, matching the first slug it comes across alphabetically.

Yeah, I tried /soulstorm/404 and it took me to article 404, coincidentally about a Soulstorm Brew shirt design.

NO, number is meaningless!

I would have guessed it'd have taken you to the store page where it'd have said that shirt was not found.

Oh I understand what you meant, I read your last post wrong previously, my apologies.

- Announcement created to guide newcomers to the wiki
- Wiki page updated with the html comments in the "following the trail" section
- Dedicated thread created for the analysis of the lsot.mp3 file: http://www.oddworldforums.net/showthread.php?p=617861

I tried contacting OWI through facebook, but to no avail, unfortunately.

http://i.imgur.com/j7MCTGC.png

Inb4 someone tells me I spelt "immediately" wrong, I know. I was living a lie.

Ha, nice.

“are you alive” returns BARELY, CAN YOU SAVE ME?.

Clearly it's a reference to Barely Alive.

This is probably a very long shot, but this always makes me think of regex. I'm not an expert, so I'm not sure, but I don't think 'l/' at the start of a regex string is meaningful. But I'm just throwing this out there in case someone knows better.

Someone just made a reference to Fahrenheit 451 to me and I thought of this thread. Has anyone read the book? Are there any hints that they can put together?

(and credit mlg man for mentioning this already)

EDIT: Whoops. Didn't realise it was a double post. Sorry.

I've read it. Good book actually! The dystopian quality is very similar to Oddworld, if you imagine the characters as goofball aliens.

Spoilers for a sixty-year-old book:

The story is about a book-burner who learns an appreciation for literature, fights against the system and escapes, finding himself in a community of book-loving rebels who have memorised all of the literature in the world—kind of like Denzel Washington in Book of Eli (heh, double spoiler)—and aim to fight back against the powers that be.

I'll read through it again tomorrow and see if I can find anything important. It's been a few years and I've read far too many books since, so nothing stands out in-particular. I'll ask my fiancé too, because she read it only last month.

Out of interest I think I've found a new generic response today:


[RJF NARRRVFFYY]VG UBVPLJRY Q CQNBVZGZ

comes back with

[NIX PQNNNUXXGG]UE STUDYING A CAPTURER

...I don't know.

I was just explaining to my girlfriend where we're at with this, was discussing the message response for ed on the form. I just entered it and it came back with attemptseventyfive.jpg, which is an oddity (I had only just opened up the window). Does this mean that there could be something missing in either 0451.jpg or spiritof1029.jpg?

Not sure how about you, guys, but I'm starting to feel a little lost. We've got multiple leads, but no hints on how to take any of them on. Like that /ed/ message. I thought that maybe its a cipher, but since in another coding its just a glitchy message we already heard, there doesn't seem to be anything more there. Logic tells me that we should focus on the message itself, and it's probably about a secret message in lsot.mp3, but can't see anything more in the file.

Not to mention it was the file itself that brought us to /ed/. I'm not even sure if it was supposed to bring us there in the first place. Maybe it was just a huge coincidence that bleeps in morse code meant ed.

The 0451.jpg is another mystery. I don't see *anything* interesting in the picture.

0451.jpg contains another clue toward ED. It might not be its only purpose, but so far every clue we’ve unearthed has led toward ED.

Right now there’s enough we don't know about in lsot.mp3 to make it likely there is more to find, and there’s some cryptic messages coming back from the message box to imply that we’re still missing something, but that’s all we have. 0451 might contain more clues, but it seems very unlikely.

There’s so many clues pushing us towards sot.mp3 as well – the message box keeps talking about us hearing its message and asking if we got it, the HTML comments on the site tell us to listen and even drop a hint about the filename.

I hate to say it, but what if the next clue isn’t even there to be found yet? Maybe they’ll only add it after Abe’s face is revealed? I think that would be a bad move, which is why I think there’s still something we haven’t solved yet.

Oh, you mean the text in itallics? I must have missed that before. I literally just noticed that.

I do agree that waiting is a bad idea. Furthermore, looking at the twitter count it's safe to say Abe's face is NOT going to be revealed anytime soon.

I've been thinking this based on the response where they're like 'I'm trying to show you'

I'm not entirely sure where to go anymore. How can the ED page just be a dead end? The only thing you could possibly take away from it, is the UI (the only non-strange letters in it, once you save the page as a .txt). The audio is literally gibberish, only ED prove significant.

I'm still combing through the audio, and I just tried combining the first R and L channels together, whcih gave me -- . or .. - or . .. (it's hard to tell the tones with the beat n the backround. Which gives us: ME IT EI being the three possibilities.

The only substantial thing I learned, was the MC at the very end was indeed reversed. Once I re-reversed it, you could hear the subtle drumbeat in its backround, so it does translate to: ET

Edit: I really dislike this stage of the ARG.

Perhaps the next reveal will contain more letters to add to "ED", and like others have said, it's just been cracked too quickly so far? Which would be a shame because it's really damn fun to watch everyone crack this.

The wiki page has quickly become a pretty big mess of constant add ons. If someone finds the time, please properly rewrite the portions of the ARG that have been solved so far so it becomes a little more light hearted to read. Thanks!