// Aporia News 2.5

Not every puzzle within a game comes directly to you in and e-mail or is hidden in the source code of a page. Sometimes they’re not even in the most obvious of places or if they are they may not appear to be a puzzle at all. Sometimes these puzzles go unnoticed by even the most hardcore of the players, but will you be the one that finds it and/or figures it out?

During Ny Takma we had several puzzles from an extinct language that was a mask for a word for word cipher, to simple binary codes, and even one imagery puzzle that players didn’t understand was a puzzle. In many of the grassroots ARGs being thrown to players today there are many puzzles that are made with simple binary, hex, morse, and ceaser codings. These aren’t really that difficult for the trained ARG-o-naut, they are in my opinion a minor distraction for them.

There are a number of tools out there readily available to the experienced ARG-o-naut such as the decryption/encryption tools at snarkles.net. New players may face some difficulty with them until they find their own decryption tools, but one thing is for certain - when you find these codes you know you’re most likely playing an ARG.

For me I like to try to use puzzles that players will appreciate for the way the puzzle fits naturally into a game, or if I just have to have a puzzle because I know the players are dying for one then I’ll try to make one that isn’t as easy as plugging in the code into a decryption tool. I will admit now that there is a binary easter egg in Aporia Agathon, along with other easter eggs that we have added as tributes to key players within the genre. Oh and for those of you who don’t know how to open a webpage to find see if there is a puzzle hidden in the source code, just right click on the page and select view source. This method lets you see the code for the page, but unless you see something that really stands out to you, you may not understand what you’re looking at.

Sometimes a puzzle may simply be a poem whose first letters spell out a particular message, or various added letters in the text of a page, capitalization where it doesn’t belong, even a key phrase that guides you through text to uncover the nefarious message. In some imagery puzzles you may not see anything at all out of the ordinary. The following example shows an image with text that you can’t see, but if you save the image and open it in a photo-editing program and adjust the levels you can see the message:

That looks like a normal image… a few books, a globe, some glasses, all on a white background.

The thing is that there is a hidden message right in front of your eyes, zooming in on the text in the book won’t help you though. Take a very close look at it. You see nothing out of the ordinary right?

Try right clicking on it and downloading it. Once you’ve got it, open it in a photo editing software that gives you the ability to adjust the levels of the image. Play with it some and see what you get (I’ve put the adjusted image at the bottom of the post).

This method can be used to hide communication between characters, passwords, and the such in the most obvious place - plain sight.

Now here’s another imagery puzzle:

Yeah so you basically just look at the images and determine what they are to get the message. This is the one that troubled some of the Ny Takma players. They saw a series of images, but never found out the title of the images (they were saved as something other than the title) so many missed out on the message delivered by the images. The above is only symbolic, if you hadn’t looked at the name of the files - the solve for it is Aporia Agathon Rocks.

So you want a text based puzzle to try out? You’ll have to wait on that one. We’ve already built a good text based puzzle to get your feet wet with and we’re going to release it soon, be prepared and remember to use your community - it’s to everyone’s advantage.

Oh yes you wanted to see the solution for the first imagery puzzle: