The Sunken ARG

The Sunken ARG has an emphasis on player interaction and ciphers.

**The Sunken ARG** was an unofficial alternate reality game primarily taking place within the Official *Oxenfree* Discord Server, beginning with the discovery of a mysterious user named "The Sunken". The Sunken used multiple platforms, including Discord, Reddit, and Twitter, to communicate with the players.

The ARG had used numerous methods of encoding, including Morse, binary, hexadecimal, ASCII, octal, Vigenère, spectrogram, base64, decimal, and anagrams.

## Transmissions

The Sunken's main method of communication was via "transmissions", which is to say, sessions of broadcasted audio in the Discord server's voice chat that will, at times, require players to verbally respond to trigger new audio. One speaker was chosen for each transmission to respond to the Sunken, so as to make audio analyzing easier.

A Tumblr blog logging each transmission and interaction can be found here.

The final transmission occurred on May 20, 2017 unofficially concluding the ARG.

## "Dog9"

The Octal cipher "104 157 147 071" has been a reoccurring phrase in the ARG. The phrase translates to "Dog9", which is presumably a reference to anomaly 97.9 or the messages written on the cave wall ('See a man about a dog' and 'Saw the man but not the dog'). The phrase has appeared as the username for the Reddit user associated with the ARG, as well as the name of the Twitter account. In addition, another user appeared on the Discord server bearing the same name, and was later confirmed to be associated with the ARG by this Tweet from the Sunken.

## Twitter Accounts

Two Twitter accounts were found to be associated with the ARG. One belongs to the Sunken, the other seems to be an account for Alex.

A spreadsheet logging tweets from the Sunken Twitter account can be found here.

## Tumblr Blog

Much like in the original *Oxenfree* ARG, a Tumblr-based site was discovered later in the ARG. This site updated several times, with strings of binary and other ciphers appearing on the blog and in the page source text. The page often featured a video in the center of the page containing numerous codes and ciphers in small frames as well as in the audio. A page was later discovered containing an ASCII art-esque image of the small graveyard in Bridge Stand.

## Hiatus Message

On September 6, 2017, Discord user "104\_157\_147\_071" posted a message in regards to the lull that had taken place in the ARG, causing players to question if the ARG had ended.

> *The Outs in Free-*
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> *It has been some time since the final transmission! Lots of effort has been put into finding every clue and solving every puzzzle presented! This account will be used as to not break much of the immersion. We do not wish to leave you in the dark as to what is happening currently, a formal update would be appropriate. Multiple inhibitions have kept this ARG from being completed both on an audio editing, and crafting standpoint most personal but with a few exceptions. This has caused the ARG to fall behind schedule and unable to finish by scheduled dates. We wish to finish this someday, but it may not be this year. As typical of most ARGs the creator is kept secret until the end. The Sunken ARG is not technically over, but for how much work and dedication was shown it would only be fair. We do not wish to make promises as of yet, but we are highly determined to finish the final step of the ARG in time for next year. If you wish to know who was pulling the strings you are more than welcome to DM The Sunken and in time we're sure they will come back with an answer however creepy. Again We cannot stress this enough: you are a wonderful community to have entertained for so long. There will be more smaller puzzles until the destined time.*
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