The Sky is Haunting is a short horror game that got a bit of traction after the italian streamer Yotobi tried it and found, among other things, the code “M17 M24 M2 M99 M0 M16 M78” whose meaning is still uncertain.
The game itself doesn’t seem to contain much more but the developer has a twitter account with some dubious posts and a public mail that someone messaged with the code and got replied:
“There is an exit from the simulation, and you are on your path to it. Record M0002 and await instructions. {/…}”
Honestly i have no idea how deep it actually gets as it just got discovered but i figured some of you could be interested in joining the search.
The game itself is free and works flawlessly with proton.
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Makes me wonder how many attempted ARGs exist out there that were just never picked up upon…
The original book of “Ready Player One” had a secret ARG, not unlike the one the main characters in the book take on. But as far as anyone can tell, no-one found it or even thought to look for it. Ten months after publication, the author Ernest Cline finally made an announcement about it.
The “trailhead” (starting clue/puzzle) was hidden in an almost identical way to the one in the story, and there was an empty leaderboard on his website just the same, too, but somehow no-one picked up on any of it. It must have been driving him and the publishers mad.
i think this happens with every form of media not just ARGs; there is a lot of music, movies, youtube channels, artists etc. that get no attention if not years later
I remember this happening for an itch game called Flowers.
You’re a young woman exploring the Texas countryside to find good shots of flowers or other rustic locations. There’s mild interaction with a frightened rabbit but not much else going on.
You eventually find the rabbit butchered. You run, as the sky turns dark. When taking one more photo, suddenly a man in a black tank top holding a knife grabs the camera from you.
You run to a home in the middle of nowhere. An old lady answers, and you beg for protection. She calls on the assistance of her grandson, who is a giant hulking monstrosity who’s stitched a human face over his own. He’s holding a chainsaw.
Pretty impressive ARG for the Texas Chainsaw Massacre game.
What’s ARG?
Alternate Reality Game, sort of a meta-game outside of the actual game. Usually they involve vague hints, cryptographically encoded hidden clues, URLs linking to random sites with more hints hidden in the page’s HTML or images, and a bunch of steps all leading into each other to solve the full riddle. They normally need a large number of people working together to solve and are popular as a form of viral marketing.
Alternate Reality Game. It’s a game or puzzle hidden in the “real” world or the rest of the open internet, often framed as a real-world mystery. Many but not all have their “trail heads” or first clues hidden in a video game. They’re often used for marketing or promotional purposes, or to reward fans wtih some extra fun gameplay.
The one I’m most familiar with was the one Valve did to tease the release of Portal 2. One day they pushed an update to Portal whose patch notes included a bizarre line about FCC frequency compliance. Jump in game, and…if you’ve played the game, you know the radio playing the Muzak version of Still Alive at the beginning? Well there’s one of those in every test chamber now, and they’ve all got a glowing red light on them. If you pick it up and carry it around, you might find somewhere in the room where the light turns green and it starts making a strange sound. Sometimes it’s morse code, sometimes it’s a weird warbling sound, which turns out to be slow-scan television. Put these images together, and it pointed to a phone number, which if you called responded with modem tones. Players realized that it was an old school bulletin board system, which contained weird fluff text and ASCII renditions of concept art.
Those are firearms.
In order: Pistol, Sniper Rifle, Heavy Machine Gun, Anti-material Rifle, could be mk0 underwater defense pistol or something similar (lots of M0s out there), Assault Rifle and Light Machine Gun.
I’ll take my reward now for solving that shitty puzzle.
IDK I found the wired red and black polygon the developer posted, I keep getting sucked out into space within 30 seconds or so
after you beat the game by entering the door on the other island that you reach by riding items you unlock the option to turn the monster off
