Category: Game Launch (Page 1 of 46)

The Devil is in the Paperwork: The SCP Foundation Has a New ARG

SCP: Afterworld gameplay, through an echonet computer terminal at the end of the world

It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I’m sitting in front of an antiquated computer trying to pull up shipping records from a logistics company hoping it might explain how things turned pear-shaped. How did a single missing delivery turn into the apocalypse…and are there any clues to give the survivors a sliver of hope for surviving another day?

SCP: Afterworld is a browser-based alternate reality game created by Those Beyond that starts its tale after a Total Containment Failure at the SCP Foundation. Episodic chapters allow players to piece together what went wrong with the world. For the first chapter, gameplay which focuses around exploring the intranet of echonet, a logistics company that specializes in the “ultra secure transport for high risk samples + specimens”, told through a point and click interface.

The difficulty level is scaled to make this accessible for players approaching the game as a single-player experience in a way that feels reminiscent of Alice & Smith’s The Black Watchmen ARG, although built-in chat features do allow for more collaborative playthroughs.

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The Flipbook Creator With a Hidden ARG

Future Andy, sending a cryptic message from the year 2059

Andy Bailey is a stop-motion animator who worked on films like ParaNorman, The Boxtrolls, Kubo and the Two Strings, Wendell & Wild, and the most recent Chicken Run movie. When he’s not working on feature films, however, he runs the YouTube channel Andymation, which celebrates animated flipbooks as a creative medium. Over the years he’s created a series of flipbooks using invisible ink, created microscopic flipbooks, dove into the history of some of the oldest flipbooks, and even holds an annual flipbook festival. He’s also spent the last few years slowly injecting a narrative about his future self into his videos…and whatever has been going on, seems to be escalating.

Future Andy Emerges, With Really Cool Sunglasses
It all seems to have started in 2019, when Andy made a flipbook of a flux capacitor which caused him to time travel to the 90s, allowing him to reflect on how he fell in love with stop motion animation as a kid. After returning to the present, he brought back a pair of sunglasses and portable FM radio headphones. Later that year, Future Andy came back in that same iconic outfit to celebrate Andymation crossing the 1 million subscriber milestone.

Beard hair powered time travel, with Present and Future Andys. Robin is part of it too, somehow.

Every now and then, Future Andy would return to visit the Andymation channel. In 2021, Future Andy traveled back in time using a beard hair-powered flux capacitor to warn present Andy to enforce strict guidelines for Flipbook Fest 2022, or risk injuring his thumb. He’d also make a return for the Flipbook Fest 2024 announcement, although this time he was explicitly there to observe (and open a pack or two of Garbage Pail Kids cards).

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

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.

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Unpacking MatPat’s New LoreFi ARG

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.

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Project KURI: Interdimensional Doors in Your Neighborhood?

Interdimensional Doors found in Salt Lake City UT, Phoenix AZ, and Charlotte NC.

Starting on March 27th, a series of “Interdimensional Doors” were erected in cities across North America. No two doors looked exactly the same: a door installed near Salt Lake City Utah’s Gallivan Center featured the kind of traditional wooden door with frosted glass that wouldn’t be out of place as the entry to a professor’s office, while a door along the Piestewa Peak Summit Trail in Phoenix Arizona featured a more minimalist frame painted to look like glimpsing into a nebula of swirling purples and pinks.

While each door was unique in appearance, there were still a few details inextricably linking them together. Along the top of each door, the text “Interdimensional Door” was paired with a seemingly nonsensical hashtag. And underneath that text, a QR code was present that, when scanned, sent curious onlookers to the website ProjectKuri.org.

Interdimensional Doors found in Toronto ON, Vancouver BC, San Francisco CA, and Tierra Del Mar, OR

The Key Unconsciousness Research Institute (KURI) Project
The Project KURI website explains that it is an organization interested in studying how dreams can serve as doorways to alternate dimensions. In order to pursue that research, Project KURI is actively soliciting members of the public to share their dreams. As the organization explains in an Instagram post:

At KURI, we’re turning imagination into exploration. Our dedicated team of scientists, psychologists, and visionaries are pioneering research into the subconscious mind, decoding the messages hidden in our dreams. But this journey is not ours alone – we invite you, dreamers, thinkers, and seekers from all over the world to join us. Share your dreams. Become part of a global community by pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.

Website visitors are encouraged to share their dreams through a form on the ProjectKuri.org website or to message audio submissions to the project’s Instagram account, with promises that “The Kuri Tapes” will be coming in the near future. Curiously, the site also features a block of ciphered text, with no other explanation for its presence.

Project KURI’s cryptographic message

Untangling this message in particular helps provide a few hints of things to come. And while it’s possible to solve this phrase as if it were an unclued CryptoQuote from the daily paper, there’s a more elegant solution hidden within the doors themselves.

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Sifting Through Field Studies Institute Records is Surprisingly Fun

Last night, I received a package in the mail from the Field Studies Institute, containing a cassette tape that shouldn’t exist. Helpfully, the institute also provided a cassette player to help me listen to the tape that shouldn’t exist, along with instructions on how to use a cassette player to help me feel even older than I already do. But before we discuss the contents of the package, let’s talk a little about the Field Studies Institute, itself.

The Field Studies Institute: Finding a Narrative through Bureaucracy
The Field Studies Institute was founded in 1970, slightly after an incident occurred involving an object retrieved during the Apollo 12 mission. Eight Department of Defense researchers were charged with investigating the object, but something happened in the early hours of January 1st, 1970 that led to three of the researchers disappearing. The remaining members went on to found the Field Studies Institute, dedicated to investigating “transient objects” resulting from “Spacetime Deviations”.

According to a corporate training video, these transient objects provide glimpses into alternate timelines, both past and present. And that brings us to the heart of The Field Studies Institute‘s storytelling: much of what can be gleaned about the alternate reality game is told through pseudo-governmental paperwork, spanning decades.

The Field Studies Institute website featuring internal emails, training manuals, and paperwork

And while poring over training manuals and research reports might sound a little dull, the documents are filled with personality. Take, for instance, the story of Filed Studies Institute staffer Casey Pennington (FC-081-A). Players are invited to peruse notes from his excursions tracking down anomalies, which takes careful notes of where he ate and how much he paid for the meal, for expensing purposes. After scrolling through his scrawled notes, an addendum to his file notes Mr. Pennington’s ultimate fate at the company:

After multiple complaints from the Archives Department, a thirty-day “Performance Improvement Plan” was created to help improve the legibility of Mr. Pennington’s hand-written notes in April of 1983. At the conclusion of the “Performance Improvement Plan”, no improvement was shown and Mr. Pennington was relieved of his duties.

Players didn’t just learn that the Field Studies Institute turned to Performance Improvement Plans to force employees out of the company for poor handwriting – they got to experience exactly what sort of bad handwriting would drive the Archives Department to force the institute’s hand.

While The Field Studies Institute is still relatively new, the records are littered with similar glimpses into the bureaucratic mess that powers the institute’s research. The employee handbook references the company’s generous policy of providing “five deviation-induced discomfort days” in addition to standard time off policies. Which sounds great, until a chat between two Archives Department employees notes that the head of their department up and vanished for a few months, only for him to return to work like he’d never been missing in the first place.

Documentation of the Surveyor 3’s discovery of the anomalous object, in 1969

The artifacts and records are meticulously designed, but it’s the personality that’s injected into them that makes poring through the files a genuine delight. While both organizations share a passion for paperwork, The Field Studies Institute is no SCP Foundation – they seem to at least care about maintaining the illusion of caring for their employees. They just need to make sure everything is documented with the proper forms, first.

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