There is an indie ARG on the loose

Coils within coils—there is an impenetrable mystery at large connecting a series of ostensibly unrelated indie games. The Reddit hivemind is currently at work cracking the meaning of the strange sigil that has been added to various games since as far back as 2014 but is only now coming to light, accompanied by map-like puzzle fragments.

After the discoveries appeared separately on assorted subreddits, user MachMatic made the connection. In The Magic Circle, the sigil appears on an airlock. Dying and leaving the airlock with some clever platforming reveals a puzzle fragment in all its neon glory. In May, eye.jpg was added to Crypt of the Necrodancer, and having a crack at it with a hex editor reveals another puzzle piece. A hidden map, Canberra, accessed through an eye concealed in the credits, was added to MiniMetro in February. As discovered by nint8835, arranging your stations correctly (or cheating) unlocks one more chunk of puzzle.

Non-Steam browser game Kingdom of Loathing also features the eye, a relic of an October 2014 update, as does the beta build of Legend of Dungeon, from which good old-fashioned datamining extracted yet another map fragment. There the investigation has stalled. How many more fragments could there be? What connects the games, and where on Earth or elsewhere could this be leading?

If you'd like to lend your expertise to the hunt, there are a number of discussion hubs accessible through MachMatic's original post. The meat of the investigation looks to be taking place on the /r/gamedetectives' Discord channel.

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