SoulStorm ARG - Piece 3

[Connell]

Tweet from Ed an hour ago:

bzzbzzzzz* ** - dibeh -

— ed (@edmudokon) April 7, 2016

Any ideas? dibeh? The caesar cipher returns "qvoru" so I don't think it's that...

They've had over 22,000 followers for the last couple of days.. Methinks the end of this whole ARG will be when they hit 23K, then they'll reveal the face and what this whole thing has been about.

EDIT: Piece 3 on the message box is now a question mark. THIS NOT A DRILL GUYS. Another puzzle for us to solve

I tried assuming the characters around the word "dibeh" was morse code (e.g asterisks were dots and hyphens were dashes) and that returns "EITDIBEHT" when fully translated into morse code, which is just as much gibberish as "dibeh" is in the first place. None of those things, forwards or backwards, work as URL's on the soulstorm site. Any ideas?

[Pirfsich]

Nope, no idea...
Maybe that's just a distraction and/or automatically generated tweet.

[Connell]

I wonder how we find the task for piece 3 then. I think they must be related in some capacity as I believe 3 changed to a question mark at the same time as that tweet came out.

[Connell]

na-zz-tso-zz

— ed (@edmudokon) April 7, 2016

EDIT: sorry for the double post

[Pirfsich]

Just wanted to post this. No idea what this means...

[Varrok]

...ed wants nachos?

[Pirfsich]

...ed wants nachos?

and sleep.

oddworld.com/soulstorm/ed/nachosleep.jpg

lel.

[Varrok]

You and me both, Ed. You and me both. . .

[Connell]

These recent tweets do read like he's fallen asleep at the keyboard and melted cheese has poured through the letters. It's a hard live being a captive Mudokon. At least he can get wifi and Twitter updates where he is.

[Pirfsich]

Necrum Nachos.
...
THEY ARE NOT TELLING YOU EVERYTHING.

[Connell]

We've done it guys, ARG is over. Brew is being replaced with Nachos for Soulstorm.

[Pirfsich]

"dip'eh nachos"


I'm crying

[FennecFyre]

The Magog's new tagline for the switch:

"Don't sip, DIP!"

Annnnd that was a horrible joke.

[Pirfsich]

The opportunity is too good to not make fanart out of this..

[Connell]

The ARG suddenly took a mexican twist. What do you call your bones that now belong to Glukkons?

Nacho-bones! Get it? Because nacho sounds like "not your"... I'll just leave.


I feel like we need another clue before we can crack this bit. To recap:

. The message box on the soulstorm site now displays a ? on piece three.

. 2 new tweets from Ed:

bzzbzzzzz* ** - dibeh -

— ed (@edmudokon) April 7, 2016

na-zz-tso-zz

— ed (@edmudokon) April 7, 2016

As far as I can tell, these are our only leads for piece 3. I like that different tasks can go on simultaneously, whilst we wait for the remaining scrub shots, which by my count, there are 22 of. Nearly there!

[acedude]

Every time I see edmudokon's profile picture I am reminded of the damn spoderman meme.

I declare this is what Ed actually looks like.

[FennecFyre]

Headcanon accepted.

[Pirfsich]

I'm way too bored today.

[Varrok]

Okay, that's enough, guys.

Are "na" and "tzo" similar to anything we've managed to decode from the morse-coded mp3s?

[Connell]

Not that I know of. I've tried putting it through so many ciphers and nothing that makes any sense comes back; no anagrams of anything either. Normally when he sends these clues there's a sort of guide or key to how to decipher them, or a change in the source code on the soulstorm website to point us in the right direction, but we've got nothing at the minute. Perhaps there was another layer to heard.mp3?

I even tried translating them from Japanese because OWI had a tweet on about a fix for Japanese subtitles in N'n'T today haha.

I feel like the way the layout of the first tweet is intentional, e.g the placement of the asterisks and so on means something.

It's also a possibility it could be pointing us towards a page on the actual Oddworld website, like when piece 2 was located at the bottom of Lorne's "about" page.

The problem is, until we figure out what it means, we can't go looking for anything.

[acedude]

The z's in Ed's tweets are obviously static, right? Unless the number of z's matters...

[Connell]

The z's in Ed's tweets are obviously static, right? Unless the number of z's matters...

I was thinking that as well. I don't know if this ARG is just making me scrutinize every detail but I was thinking maybe the "bzz" parts are part of the answer as well, rather than merely static.

But then, what do they mean?

[Varrok]

It's probably static.

The "zz"s might obscure parts of a word:
na'ZZ'tso'ZZ'

[Connell]

It's probably static.

The "zz"s might obscure parts of a word:
na'ZZ'tso'ZZ'

That's a good point, perhaps "dibeh" fits in those gaps in some form, and his message was interfered with and sent in 2 parts?

EDIT: na-dibeh-tso is an anagram of "Abe nod sith"

Abe is a jedi.

[Manco]

I feel like the gap between the tweets indicates the original tweet was solvable on its own, and the more recent tweet was a hint to help us out.

[Connell]

If that's the case, I wonder what the first tweet means on it's own? It doesn't come back as anything from the caesar cipher. I was looking over the OWI website to see if any of the stuff on there had a paragraph where the first letter of each line started with "d,i,b,e and h" going down. I think I'm in this too deep guys.

[Manco]

Well I don’t know how to solve it, but it could help for us to take a step back and assess the possibilities.

• None of the puzzles we’ve solved so far have relied on content from previous puzzles, so it’s safe to assume this will be standalone as well.
• DIBEH means nothing on its own, the standard Caesar cipher turns up nothing, and it’s not an anagram.
• Every letter in DIBEH is unique, so if it’s encrypted with a substitution cipher we won’t be able to crack it. This means it can’t be a substitution cipher, as OWI wouldn’t give us an unsolvable puzzle.
• None of Ed’s previous tweets have used asterisks and dashes in the way these tweets have. Either or both may be significant. They could be a reference to morse code, although previous messages from Ed have used . instead of * to represent dots.
• DIBEH is a very short message, so it’s unlikely to be a direct clue such as a URL.
• The second tweet is possibly meant to help us solve the first in some way.

[Xavier]

I fully agree with Manco.

Also I would appreciate it if you guys could try to keep this topic clean, so if you don't have anything useful to contribute please don't post.

[Connell]

I also agree with all those points. I'm absolutely stuck for ideas though. Hopefully Ed will take pity on us in the morning and point us in the right direction. I'm excited to find out what the next task is going to be.

[Manco]

bzzbzzzzz* ** - dibeh -

If we substitute * for . and take the buzzes as distorted . and - (based on length), we get:
.-. .. - dibeh -
r i t dibeh t

But I can’t see where else that could go – it’s still gibberish, and doesn’t cipher or anagram to anything meaningful either. So I’m not sure if morse code is the right way to look at it, but I feel the punctuation is definitely significant in some way.

Edit: bzzbzzzzz and na-zz-tso-zz are both 9 characters. Perhaps the full message is meant to be na-zz-tso-zz* ** - dibeh -?