The F.E.A.R. 2 viral marketing continues, and I'm officially stumped. Earlier today, I received the following email from the guy who sent me the mysterious case:
Please help me.
As you know Armacham has corrupted the FEAR 2 game module but it seems they are still determined to unveil LEVEL 3 of their testing whatever the consequences. Despite disastrous results in the initial testing they are currently looking for 13 candidates to test the module in a device called the FEAR LAB in New York City.
I fear for the safety of anyone who becomes involved in this test and I'm determined to stop it all costs.
I've hidden additional evidence at http://www.armacham.com/rf3437 which I've had to encode for my safety. Once you unlock the files you will see what I'm talking about.
After visiting the site, I found a scan of an Armacham-sponsored psychic aptitude test, and a second document made up of a bunch of random-ass letters. Presumably, this confusing message is the "code" that Mysterious Case Dude was talking about, but I have no idea how to break it.
So, I'm asking for your help. Hit the jump for more.
The only other example of confusing-ass code like the kind found in the above PDF file came in the case I opened a week or so ago. I've uploaded full versions of the documents below: one is an Armacham press release in plain English, while the other is a bunch of scrambled gobbledygook.
I initially thought that by comparing the two letters against one another I would be able to decipher the code, but the contents of the scrambled letter don't work that way: certain characters in the readable letter are replaced with seemingly random other characters in the scrambledone, with seemingly no rhyme or reason. There's a pretty good chance that the press releases are actually sort of a red herring (otherwise, they would have assumedly posted those documents on the Armacham site as well, right?), but I'm including them just for the sake of it.
That's really all I've got. The gobbledygook document on the Armacham site probably translates to some code I have to type in on the regular corporate site, or a URL, or something, that will take me to the next stage of the viral-marketing-metagame-puzzle-thing, which I can then share with all of you. Beyond that, though, I dunno what the hell to do.
Contest:
2:40 PM on 12.17.2008
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The mystery deepens...
W.Q.c.T. 2 so if some code makes F.E.A.R out of it - it worked ;).
There's nh and nH repeated few times that suggests it may be simple substitution of letters in which case it's only a matter of time. However there's quite a lot of 2 letter "words" with completely different spelling, which suggests it's not. :D
In the collumns in .pdf with scramlbed letters there a few appearing twice in one column.
M L E (B and T in fourth column) S Q
Also A, C, D and E appear in both first and second column.
I guess it wouldn't hurt to run this text with mlebtsq and mletbsq thru some basic algorithm (prolly first program that will be found on the net to do such stuff, they want it broken, don't they?).
But im not into really such stuff, so someone else gotta break it.
PS
I'm pretty shure it's not letter substitution. if W.Q.c.T. is F.E.A.R there should be plenty of Q and c. Or if capitalization counts W, Q, c, T should be only on starts of sentences and rarely in caps words.
So it was pretty much backwards - someone that knows antyhing about encryption should just type both documents into some program and run widely used algorithms until it's extracted no point in figuring out patterns before scrambled letters get decoded.
Hope I was a little helpful.
Also the word quest can be found in there. So I tink it might be time to call the Copyright Infringement lawyers!!
I get the feeling that in a few days I'll get another Super Mysterious Email, and "THE CHAMBER" will be the password I need to access some new files or something.
If you look at the name of the document(s)
you'll notice that their both named "Press Release_X"
And the coded document has random capital X's
I took the order of the X's in the coded document and
used that on the regular document. I came up with the
phrase: "Search for the word readjustment" when I went
to the Armacham site and clicked, after the little flash
transition to the other page, I searched for readjustment.
I was met with a video called "A visit to the nurses office"
Aaand thats where I'm stuck at so far.
Just thought I'd share it. :P
...what?
Look at the first mail in the inbox, at the attachment. Take that code and use it as the password when you try to look at "My Profile" link in the bottom left hand corner.
After all that shenannigans, there's a video of someone doing hopscotch, but all the timestamps are muddled, like the video's been hacked together.
Password: THECHAMBER
But where do ya log on?
Mildly disappointed. But hey, the game looks awesome.
video. I tried the numbers that the footprints
were jumping to, aswell as the number letter combos
at the top. Got nothing.
@Sage Hat Trick: Dude, really cool. Good work.