The who’s who of Batman’s rogues gallery have joined forces in the final installment of Rocksteady’s Arkham trilogy. That’s not all though, this latest trailer for the upcoming game lets you do a little detective work yourself to unlock a bit of content on the Arkham Knight website.
Cool trailer, what’s this about a puzzle?
Ok, fair warning. The “puzzle” embedded in the trailer is unfairly difficult for a number of reasons, and the pay off is pretty disappointing. So I’ll get you started, and if you want (as in, you’re not a crazy person), I’ll outline the solution below so you don’t have to go through the trouble.
Sounds fair, let’s do this.
In short, some ridiculously eagle-eyed fans found three code phrases hidden in the trailer. Each string of text is not only super hard to read, but they also appear for only a single frame of video. To find them, you basically have to download the trailer and scrub through it frame by frame.
Fuck that, right? Here are the frames:
If you can’t read that (because you don’t have cybernetically enhanced vision like apparently some people on the internet), they read:
- Poison Ivy: pPL2a3Mn Ppi3mAMpyL2
- Scarecrow: c Rcn3n3 N2Jn3tjHn2
- Harley Quinn: qeL e2uLEE2 zul2e
That’s technically all you need to solve the puzzle for yourself, but like I said, the pay off is pretty underwhelming. So if you don’t feel like wasting a few hours on code-breaking this morning, I’ll outline the solution.
Let’s hear it.
SixSided on Reddit was one of the first to figure it out. Here’s how he did it:
“The key thing to notice was that the ciphers only contained letters used in the names of the characters, which people had already noticed, but more importantly that the numbers only came after letters that occurred MORE THAN ONCE in the name. This doesn’t account for the lowercase / uppercase, but after trying a few things I found taking the name in lower then upper and lining it up with the alphabet like so worked nice. From here you then take the cipher text, and pick out the letter below, taking the Nth occurrence if it was followed by a number. For example ‘c’ -> ‘I’, ‘n3’ -> ‘L'”
Using that information, he was able to create a key for each of the three strings.
So what do they spell?
Cracking the code gives you:
- Harley Quinn: “Her first line”
- Poison Ivy: “Asylum sanctuary”
- Scarecrow: “I will unleash”
And then?
Then, fans (who by now were congregating on NeoGaf and Reddit to solve this) had to figure out the “answers” to these riddles. They are:
- Harley Quinn: “Yeahright”
- Poison Ivy: “Botanicalgardens”
- Scarecrow: “Yourgreatestfears”
Wow… and then?
Finally, you need to take those answers and plug them into the Persons of Interest section on the Arkham Knight website.
And I assume win a hefty cash prize?
No, you actually just unlock some character bios, which will probably be included in the actual game.
Seriously?
Seriously. Aren’t you glad you didn’t waste your time?
