Category: Features (Page 2 of 37)

Masquerade: NYC’s New Immersive Musical Launched With a Secret ARG

September 29, 2025 / Michael Andersen

Free cherry dipped ice cream from Masquerade was only the start of this particular adventure…

It’s the second night of Previews for Masquerade, and I’ve just finished seeing Andrew Lloyd Webber’s newest immersive musical take on Phantom of the Opera. While comparing notes with a friend from the NYC immersive community, a man dressed in black approaches. Leaning in conspiratorially, he quietly tells me: “You see? Everything I told you was true.”

The man who approached me was a ghost hunter named Sean Hunter, who was at the center of a months-long alternate reality game teasing the release of Masquerade. The musical just finished Previews with a gala event, last night. To celebrate, here’s an overview of how we got to the Masquerade.

The Masquerade ARG: A Popup Homage to New York City
At its core, Masquerade teased the show’s existence with a series of popup experiences, celebrating New York City. As ARGNet previously reported, it started with the immersive show’s historic venue itself: to prepare for the show’s transformation, the windows of Lee’s Art Shop were liberally covered with newspapers. Upon closer inspection, however, many of these papers were referencing the history of Phantom of the Opera in New York City. And scattered in between the real papers from the city were a few in-universe papers about L’Opera Populaire.

Shortly after fans noticed this detail, a series of masks started popping up at locations across the city, with luggage tags bearing MasqueradeNYC.com on one side, and the message “if found please call 212-505-5666”. Calling the number (now Masquerade‘s business line) would trigger a voicemail message featuring a music box playing the song Masquerade, slowly winding down before an ominous voice states “he’s back”. The following day, a series of mirrors with the Masquerade logo appeared across the city. Each time, the MasqueradeNYC Instagram would post a story with a picture of where to go, for those curious enough (and quick enough) to find it. A full accounting of these events is listed below.

KFC Launches Special Blend of 11 Secret Codes and Puzzles

July 22, 2025 / Michael Andersen

KFC’s newest commercial, starring a secret QR code puzzle on celebrity chef Matty Matheson’s arm

Colonel Harlan Sanders was obsessed with fried chicken, even before he convinced a cafe owner to sell fried chicken with his special blend of 11 herbs and spices. Enough so, that KFC’s newest commercial is a 75 second homage to the obsession that gave birth to the Kentucky Fried Chicken brand.

With this focus on obsession front and center, it’s no wonder the commercial snuck a QR code on Matty Matheson’s tattoed arm, kicking off a deviously challenging series of 11 secret codes and puzzles to celebrate the herbs and spices that built an empire. The first person to solve each of the puzzles? They’re rewarded with 11 months of free KFC for their efforts.

The “(one of the) first to solve” message presented to prospective winners

KFC gets extremely creative with their advertising. Celebrity casting for commercials is fairly standard for major brands, but starting in 2015 KFC went out of its way to surprise fans by cycling through a full roster of celebrity Colonel impersonators. Darrell Hammond was the first to take over the finger-lickin’ mantle, but was quickly supplemented by everyone from beloved comedians like Norm MacDonald and Jason Alexander to more surprising picks like Reba McEntire and RoboCop. But it’s the company’s stunt marketing that truly shines: it’s been almost a decade since the release of the free romance novella Tender Wings of Desire to celebrate Mother’s Day, but I still keep a copy on my Kindle. The company doubled down on their thirst trap branding by releasing a free dating sim that’s still available on Steam.

The commonality between Tender Wings of Desire and I Love You Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Sim? They’re highly enjoyable experiences that recognize what makes the source materials work so well, and pay homage to it. And I am happy to announce that KFC’s puzzle hunt for the overly obsessive continues that tradition with a series of challenging yet creative puzzles. So, we’re going to do this article a little different. If you’d like to give the puzzles a try yourself, go to The11Secrets.com, and see what you can uncover. Keep on reading to be spoiled on a selection of those 11 puzzles and to learn why I’m so effusive in praise for them.

Again: what follows will be absolutely riddled with spoilers.

MIT Mystery Hunt and the Case of the Shadow Diamond

May 30, 2025 / Michael Andersen

The custom-built radio was one of many centerpieces of the MIT Mystery Hunt in 2025

It’s late on a Friday night, and our team of investigators have tracked down a lead while investigating the theft of the Shadow Diamond. We’re instructed to send a core group of aspiring detectives to the gala to try and track down the thief. Once our group assembles at the gala event, a helpful bartender tunes our radio to the proper channel, and set us off on a narrative scavenger hunt that weaved across over a dozen buildings on the MIT campus, tracking down the locations of eleven blue paw prints. The twist: since this was a noir detective adventure, our audio helper only saw things in black and white, so many of the colorful signposts along the way were described in shades of gray – fifty, to be exact.

Eventually, our team realized that the film noir world of MITropolis we traced layered perfectly over a map of the MIT campus itself, and that cross-referencing the clues we discovered along the way paired with the locations of those Blue Clues spelled out the identity of the thief.

A map of Downtown MITropolis, used in conjunction with the results of a real world audio adventure

Armed with a name, our full team went up to the gala to confront the thief…only to discover that the culprit was murdered, and the diamond near the body was a fake, covered in scuff marks. Luckily, we were recognized for our efforts and upgraded to trainee detective status.

The MIT Mystery Hunt Means Something Different Every Year
At this point, the MIT Mystery Hunt might be the most covered immersive experience on ARGNet, with articles discussing the hunts in 2011, 2012, 2016, 2018, 2021, 2022, and 2023. And while the site skipped coverage of the annual event in 2024, that was because I was part of the team running that year’s hunt.

Some things have been constant about the MIT Mystery Hunt over that time. Hundreds of extremely smart puzzlers gather at MIT (either in person or virtually) over MLK Day weekend to push the boundaries of what a puzzle can be – both as puzzle constructors, and as solvers. There’s a narrative tying that experience together, structured around “feeder” puzzles, and meta-puzzles that use the answers of those feeder puzzles as inputs into a broader puzzle challenge. Teams have a long weekend in January to make it through the puzzles. And the reward for finishing the hunt first is a coin-like object, paired with the responsibility for running the next year’s Mystery Hunt.

Beyond that, the Mystery Hunt becomes an aspirational exercise in what the event can be, presented by teams that are excited about the event for very different reasons. And one of the most compelling questions asked by Death & Mayhem with their 2025 Mystery Hunt The Case of the Shadow Diamond was what it means to be a puzzle hunt community, in the first place.

A Murder Mystery, Hidden Within the Silent Hill Historical Society?

September 24, 2024 / Michael Andersen

The Silent Hill Historical Society is a small organization dedicated to preserving the small town’s rich history. Which makes their decision to set up shop on the grounds of a prison whose inmates were wiped out by disease a little questionable. Still…lakefront property doesn’t come cheap, so the lapse in judgment can be forgiven. Covering up the murder of a former colleague? Slightly less forgivable.

The Silent Hill Historical Society is an alternate reality game connected to the Silent Hill franchise, created by Konami the team at Daiyonkyokai (“The Fourth Boundary”), the Japanese collective of ARG creators previously behind Project:;COLD. And while Project:;COLD is only available in Japanese, The Silent Hill Historical Society is structured to allow gameplay in English or Japanese, by selecting the preferred language in the upper right corner of the website.

A Deceptively Simple Structure, Obscuring Surprising Depth
On the surface, interactivity with the website is limited: the site’s “Contact” page is down, and the only thing visitors can do is take the Ultimate Silent Hill Quiz: a series of 10 questions that can be answered by closely reading the website, paired with a little research into the Silent Hill games themselves. Fans capable of acing that test are encouraged to tackle the advanced level, an additional 20 questions that go even deeper into the Historical Society’s archives.

Curiously, while the staff pages feature six employees at the Silent Hill Historical Society, staff posts reference a seventh employee, erased from the site. That former employee’s story is told through a series of 36 hidden pages, scattered throughout the website. Some of those links are clickable links that can be found by closely investigating each page of the website, while others require a bit more creativity, finding the right keywords and entering them into the website’s URL, after the domain name.

Gravity Falls and a Decade Long Education in (Bill) Ciphering

August 16, 2024 / Michael Andersen

Image from ThisIsNotAWebsiteDotCom.com, by Eduardo Valdés-Hevia

Starting in 2012, Disney started airing a new animated series called Gravity Falls following the adventures of twins Dipper and Mabel Pines as the twins spent the summer at their “Grunkle” Stan’s roadside attraction The Mystery Shack, nestled in a small town in Oregon. And while the show was targeted towards kids, the show also presented an increasingly complex series of mysteries for its audience to solve along, introducing a new generation to the world of alternate reality games through everything from cryptic messages hidden in the show itself to a global scavenger hunt.

The series’ primary antagonist, Bill Cipher, only appeared in a fraction of the series’ episodes…but the sentient triangle was at the epicenter of the show’s mysteries and many of its puzzles, with many of the puzzles of the last decade revolving around the question: “what happened to Bill, after his dramatic confrontation with the Pines family in the series finale?” Almost a decade later, The Book of Bill offers answers to that question with an epistolary look into Bill’s past, present, and future in a book packed to the brim with puzzles and ciphers to decode. The book also brought with it an alternate reality game that helps provide context and closure to the series.

The hidden title card from the show’s opening

“Solving” Gravity Falls, During the Show’s Initial Run
At the tail end of the opening credits to Gravity Falls an aged page from a journal is shown, prominently featuring a one-eyed triangle that fans took to calling “Triangle Guy”. Before cutting to commercials, a voice whispered the only words in the now iconic theme song: “three letters back”. Applying that shift cipher to the message on the screen, “VWDQ LV QRW ZKDW KH VHHPV”, delivered the first of many messages from the show: “Stan is not what he seems”. The cipher also came in handy during the episode’s end credits. During an extended scene featuring a rainbow-puking gnome, a message in that same cipher greeted viewers with a hearty “Welcome to Gravity Falls”.

This pattern followed for every episode of the series: reversed audio messages in the opening credits might provide a hint at how to solve the episode’s cipher, and a secret message was inserted into the end credits, for those who cared to look. After a few episodes, the messages switched over to the Atbash cipher – but to make sure viewers were prepared, the prior episode’s secret message informed viewers, “Mr. Caesarian will be out next week. Mr Atbash will substitute.” To further reinforce that message, the opening theme song’s reversed audio was swapped out to say, “switch A and Z”. Over the course of the series, these ciphers grew increasingly complex, and viewers were introduced to A1Z26 ciphers, the Vigenère cipher, indexing, and even multiple custom cipher languages with in-universe origins.

A Rumble’s Revenge easter egg, spelling out “thEre are six hints i will give you”

Every now and then, the solving went beyond the bounds of the show itself. Part of the way through the first season, Disney released a Flash game called Rumble’s Revenge, putting fans into the role of Dipper and Mabel as they fought through cryptids the characters encountered. Interacting with 12 objects throughout the game pulled up messages from the Triangle Guy that, when decoded, revealed his name before he officially appeared in the show: “MY NAME IS BILL”.

This interplay between puzzle and theory continued as the show progressed, culminating in a puzzle-laden cliffhanger. During Stan Pines’ final confrontation with Bill Cipher, Bill’s final words are spoken through reversed audio: “A-X-O-L-O-T-L, my time has come to burn! I invoke the ancient power that I may return!” So, in a show when almost everything else wrapped up neatly, the question remains: what happened to Bill?

Unpacking MatPat’s New LoreFi ARG

July 15, 2024 / Michael Andersen

A teaser clip for Lore-Fi, featuring Taylor resting in front of her computer

“Hello. My name is Gregory Daniels. I’m twelve years old. I live at 3251 Spring Lake Drive, and I’ve been kidnapped!”

Not exactly what you’d expect to hear when loading up a lofi beats YouTube channel. Then again, MatPat’s newest alternate reality game LoreFi isn’t only focused on creating a playlist of over eight hours of chill beats that can provide a low-stress soundtrack for your life. It also plans on using that lofi beats channel to deliver a slow burn mystery set to play out over the span of months.

Taylor’s room, as featured in the LoreFi livestream

Meet Taylor: Lore Through Environmental Storytelling
Gregory Daniels may be missing, but we don’t find out much about him through the initial launch of LoreFi. Instead, we’re introduced to Taylor, a teenaged girl chilling out to music in her apartment.

Her interests are laid bare in the objects she’s collected over the years: VHS tapes and a trophy from her time in ballet…a gaming console and toys to show she’s a gamer…a “sweet drawing” her friends found at school…and a binder full of CD mix-tapes she burned after downloading the files off the GrapeVyne, a tongue-in-cheek reference to the peer-to-peer downloading client LimeWire, which was a major source of pirated music back in the mid-2000s.

This particular element of gameplay is reminiscent of the indie game Unpacking, which tasks players with unpacking boxes as the main character moves in to a series of new places. It’s a story that packs a surprisingly powerful emotional punch as you experience the highs and lows of a character, as told through the objects they take with them in life.

And while those stories unfold best over time, LoreFi is already showing some hints of that emotional roller-coaster. Because while Taylor’s dad sends her a message “Hey kiddo, how are you” on the computer, she’s crudely erased him from a family photo with red pen, and added a drawing of an ominous figure opening the door in the same color. “Call Dad” has also been removed from her to do list.

Taylor nods at a shadowy figure in the doorway, just off camera

The stream also has a number of custom animations that add further depth to the story: every now and then, Taylor’s computer enters screensaver mode, scrolling through a series of art pieces likely drawn by her, before she clicks the mouse to return to GrapeVyne. Later on in the night, her door creaks open and the shadow of a figure enters the frame, causing Taylor to take off her headphones and give a silent nod of assent, a slightly less ominous version of the encounter pinned to her corkboard.

The stream is filled with subtler moments, as well. Every now and then, Taylor receives messages from friends and classmates. And at one pivotal point near the beginning of the stream, her computer gets infected with a virus.