Throw on your best soiled bathrobe, check the tinfoil lining your detective’s hat and hit the Steam pages, the game is afoot! For the last couple years people have been discovering these secrets in popular indie games. What players are discovering are puzzle pieces that have been hidden in seemingly unrelated games. Five puzzle pieces have already been found and all seem to be related to this image here, called eye.jpg.
A whole community has banded together to crack this secret. One of these detectives is MachMatic, who helpfully summarized all the games involved, so far, and the pieces that have been found.
- Crypt of the NecroDancer – Around May 29th 2015 a file called eye.jpg was added to Crypt of the NecroDancer directory. Using a hex-editing application Puzzle Piece #1 was found inside of eye.jpg. This image seems to be a circular puzzle piece.
- The Magic Circle – I’m unsure when this “eye” was added. /u/Tambox discovered “eye” in The Magic Circle and provided this image and video. In July 15th Puzzle Piece #4 was found and discussed here, but was only connected to this ARG now.
- Mini Metro – Around February 13th 2015 a secret map was added, and could be accessed by following these instructions to find and click “eye”. An email sent to the developer confirms that there is a puzzle, a solution, and that it is solvable. The secret map has stations shaped like the “eye”, and the puzzle seems to revolve around recreating the “eye”‘s shape by drawing lines. My progress for the puzzle is here, but was solved to reveal Puzzle Piece #2. /u/Pentamerous has provided video tutorial to reveal the piece.
- Kingdom of Loathing – A non-Steam webgame. The eye-sigil was found looking like this, and dates back to October 2014. No puzzle piece has been found yet.
- Legend of Dungeon – Clicking on a dwarf in the Options menu pops up a version of the eye-sigil. Datamining lead to Puzzle Piece #3. Portalcrafter found the puzzle piece in-game.
- Neon Struct – Eye-sigil was found on Stranger’s shirt in-game. Puzzle Piece #5 was first revealed through data-mining, but I’ve heard that it might be shown in conversations in-game
According to Kotaku, MachMati went on to contact one of the Mini Metro devs who replied with this cryptic message.
There is a solution—you’ll know when you find it. You have all the information you need.
No word on if this statement was given while the developer was looking over their glasses with a devilish smile as they sipped on a tumbler of scotch, but there’s also no evidence that they didn’t, so y’know, it probably happened.
Does this mean that all the pieces have been found? So far the best lead is this map of Canberra, the capital of Australia. The additional markings on the map are all the puzzle pieces that have been discovered so far, but it looks unfinished leading some to believe that there are still pieces that have yet to be discovered.
Of course people are speculating as to what they will find at the end of this trail of breadcrumbs. Guesses range from a much awaited Half-Life 3 announcement to absolutely nothing. Hopefully whatever comes of this is better than Steam’s winter sale ARG.