Introversion's ongoing Prison Architect treasure hunt and ARG continues to confuse the hell out of us. The game's being teased in a series of grim Polaroids, with the latest very briefly appearing in the Dungeons of Dredmore Humble Indie Bundle reveal trailer .
This one's numbered four of five, and shows a man - possibly a prison warden - sitting at his desk with a cup of coffee. We received image one of five, showing a gun being held by an arm in a green sleeve. Image two was found by PC Gamer forum user The_B in Introversion's Subversion city generator, and it shows some canoodling violently ended by a man in a green shirt. Image three was sent to Rock Paper Shotgun , and it shows a man - probably the same man - kneeling in front of a priest (not like that!), possibly begging for forgiveness. The final image, also found by The_B, shows the man sitting on the electric chair.
So, clearly, this is telling the Shawshank-esque story of a man who's sentenced for murdering his wife, gets sent to prison and ends up taking a seat on 10,000 volts. It ties into the shots we've seen in Graham's preview of the game, where the story is told using Polaroids. So, case closed.
But there's more. Each of the Polaroids so far has had a series of numbers or letters at the bottom. So far, in numeric order of the Polaroids, these are:
- 3612
- ghdn
- 3id7
- nawn
- 38dh
There's a distinct lack of vowels here, so it's unlikely that these spell out words in their current form. The numeric codes all start with the number three, too, which could indicate that these are some kind of level code, or something.
If that's not enough, users on Introversion's forums are uncovering yet more images, apparently tied to two new series of four images. The images are the same as the one's we've previously seen, but the codes are new, and punctuated this time - m.e.? and e.x.t.i., which seem more like proper words.
Finally, a brief image flashes up before the main Polaroid image in the Humble Indie Bundle trailer. It's very distorted by noise, but using the “enhance” feature on PC Gamer's CSI-style crime lab (OK, we used paint.net), we were able to come up with this. A slightly less blurry mess. It could almost be the figure one, or a map, or nothing at all.
We've been thinking so hard about all this that our ears are bleeding. Let us know what your cyber-sleuthing skills bring up in the comments below.
