SoulStorm ARG

[Manco]

Nothing new for a whole day?

I think it’s safe to say we’re stuck. Looks like we might be waiting for Abe’s face reveal.

[V_O_T]

Is it me or is the brew meter going down now? :/ something tells me they're going to need to do one more marketing tease in order to reach Abe's face.

[HOMINIX]

Slow pace for reveals isn't necessarily a bad thing for them this early on in the process, but I do think another string of clues would be nice to keep the fans engaged

[JourneyToJah]

Hello everyone. I just found out about this.

Just want to say I was a huge fan of the game back in the day and I love the idea of a comeback with an ARG, so I am all in.

Will spend some time reading on what's been discovered so far and I hope I can contribute to the progress.

EDIT: I think a real time chatroom could come handy. I made a discord channel. If anyone wants to join: https://discord.gg/0v1vzaDMgLaszbdW

[mlg man]

Anyone notice the html comment at the top of the page now says:

too many characters were harmed extremely badly. experience a sane world

[Babiroussa]

they also added this in the code :

okay, okay...

e : and there is also new generic answers like :

[- PLEASE IGNORE THIS MESSAGE -]

*** UOY OT TEG OT YAW REHTONA DNIF DNA YRT S'TEL ,KO ***

[JourneyToJah]

Did anyone else notice that reveal1 and 2 are exactly the same, just the text is extra.

Also, is it me, or they look like pieces of a puzzle?

[Scrabaniac]

We've seen these already.

[Xavier]

Yeah but...

Also, is it me, or they look like pieces of a puzzle?

They kind of do.

Looks like the hand (reveal2) and arm of the torso (reveal3) are aligned in the picture JourneyToJah posted. Could it be the second hand (reveal2) is actually a continuation of the mudokon seen from behind(reveal4)?

[JourneyToJah]

That's what I meant. I just put them like that in Photoshop, was trying to overlay them with different blending modes.

And the fact that reveal1 and reveal2 are the same, but on reveal1 it says, broken "can you see..." "broken"


Also, when entering the url "/what/" "/0451" they link to other pages.

When entering "SANE" on the form on the site I get gibberish, cant decode it; so far i got 2 different results. This is one of them "VVF]ARZRRFTUEFN[G F R-CRY-TNB

[Xavier]

Well according to the wikia the text is:
"CAN YOU S- HARD TO K- IF BREAKING- THROUGH HA- ON NEED A D-".

http://oddworld.wikia.com/wiki/Soulstorm_ARG

[JourneyToJah]

It also looks like it's cut from the whole picture, missing another half.

We still dont know what "findme, hear me, and rescue me" are for. *Notice the formatting on findme

PS: sorry if this stuff is already known, I'm just trying to make sure we dont overlook something.

PPS: join the discord chatroom so we dont flood the forums.

[Nepsotic]

Well according to the wikia the text is:
"CAN YOU S- HARD TO K- IF BREAKING- THROUGH HA- ON NEED A D-".

http://oddworld.wikia.com/wiki/Soulstorm_ARG

Well that's what I interpreted it as, I assume whoever edited the wiki agreed. I don't know what else it could be.

[Vlam]

I've got a question: who is behind the idea of the ARG? I can't believe it's Lanning.

[Xavier]

It's probaly Alex and a bunch of other guys.

You remember Alex? The guy you drove away?

[Manco]

Anyone notice the html comment at the top of the page now says:

too many characters were harmed extremely badly. experience a sane world

So the original text was:

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.

If we compare the two, the removed words are:

Far video game in the making of this. In this would never have happened. We're sorry.

I don’t know if that’s significant in any way, but maybe someone can find a clue in it. Perhaps it’s just a signifier that we need to subtract something from one of the clues we have?

The “okay, okay...” message is perhaps a signal that either they’ve gotten what they wanted from us, or that they’re aware we are stuck on the current puzzle. Either way, I’d expect more clues to appear shortly.

Also, the face reveal progress bar has filled up pretty quickly, we’re not far from another reveal.

[Michael]

'Experience a sane world' got me thinking. So I used the form, and asked 'Are you The Shrink?'

There was no output at first, so I tried a couple clicks. On the second or third, I got;

*** V XARJ VG! V XARJ VG! ***

Which, through the caesar-13 cipher gives;

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

Is this a generic response or is it something new? I've not seen it before and haven't heard it being discussed

[Manco]

I think that may be a new generic message, it seems that more were added recently.

Remember to document any findings on the wiki!

[JourneyToJah]

Did anyone notice the /headtwitching.mp4 and /headtwiching.gif ?

Also, I think we're missing something here: -- HELL04==five ---- L1PSwhat --

EDIT: I cant format it to appear correctly...



also, did anyone get /bg2.jpg ?
the image is here: http://oddworld.com/soulstorm/images/bg2.jpg

EDIT2: playing around with bg2.jpg i see this:

[hakansson20]

Did someone acknowledge that the reveal meter went down.

earlier this morning (for me) if you inspected the html code it said something like 72.5 % of the meter done with 21.4k-21.6k followers on twitter. Right now it sits at 66.25 % with 21.7k followers.

Are we ahead of their schedule or maybe there is still something to be found before the reveal.

Might not have anything to do with the current state of the ARG but it's worth to noting.

[Varrok]

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

[Havoc]

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

[Varrok]

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

[JourneyToJah]

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.

[Xavier]

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

[Alf Shall Rise]

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.

[Varrok]

...Maybe that's a lead?

[grimGadabout]

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

[Manco]

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

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.

[Varrok]

With my ARG hat on