Frictional games didn't have much to do with A Machine For Pigs, despite it being based in the Amnesia universe, it just published the thing. Obviously in the mean time it's been up to something and if you've been keeping up with the AR game like leaks it's been giving us over the past week or so, it seems it's been sending people to play around with some strangely behaving computer equipment.
The first video released about a week ago is titled, Item =2656 Vivarium and shows female technician Imogen Reed sitting down at an elaborately large CRT monitor, hooked up to a lot of cabling. Nothing much happens for a while, but there's a general feeling of unease around it. Near the end of the video though, our technician panics, as she sees herself on the monitor, slumping out of her chair, before crawling towards the screen mumbling something. [yframe url='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLVOif6CHgE']
This was posted up on the Somasystems.org website, which currently looks like this:
It's designed to look like its malfunctioning, with the per centage indicator letting us know when a new video is due. It moves at around a per cent an hour, so we don't have long to wait before the next instalment. I'll get to the other video in a second though, as there's some other stuff going on with this page that's worth noting. Copying and pasting the background image behind the per cent bar gives you this:
Which looks similar-ish to the one posted up by Frictional on its Twitter:
There's definitely more to this than a face though. What's that underneath the eyes?
Then there's this one as well…
As you might expect, Reddit has taken a liking to this and has been doing some digging. Taking snapshots of some code that briefly appears on the Somasystems website, they've uncovered a couple of strings that need to be deciphered. The first of them is a PGP encoded message:
—–BEGIN PGP MESSAGE—–
Version: GnuPG v2.0.19 (MingW32)
jA0ECQMCOZMp4iR4ULWu0loBVLEt7zgQyTJONONNcynZhdoO0lp2FC6h8/54NRAu 4Xfw/BWV5tCx12mTO20H1TPSgXKRIcinurBqqlZxCU6G7rdTmrHkkh2xQMt1c6Qj dYp9aHDw05qLwsw= =c66i
—–END PGP MESSAGE—–
This translated out to:
“Don't trust Raznik. He's an impostor.”
To add further to the oddness, Frictional has been tweeting some messages this morning that seem to have some relation to the ARG:
START Intercepted Transmission]
[thet-upsi, 67%, 001.9131/3/17/4.5]
A: The walls started bleeding structure gel yesterday.
B: It's like an oily substance, right?
A: Yeah, exactly.
B: Don't worry about it. Stick with the plan, ok?
B: You know that structure gel leakage? That’s going to be a problem. In fact, it is a problem.
[END Intercepted Transmission]
The only other information we have the moment, comes in the form of the second video, where our pal Imogen talks to a different entity, described as a “standard UH3 articulated” robot, yet it seems to have a personality of its own and a lot of knowledge about one particular man: [yframe url='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eytOzwyfiCA']
KitGuru Says: There's only a few hours to go until the next video. Is there anything you guys can spot that everyone else has missed?
From my own digging… does anyone think those numbers at the start of the tweeted “transmission,” could be coordinates? The first numbers (001.9131) are referenced here.