It appears that things are once again happening in the No Man's Sky 'Waking Titan' ARG that began way back in May 2017. As noted by Game Detectives (via Eurogamer), the Atlas Passes that were promised in an earlier stage of the ARG have begun to arrive, and rather than answering questions they are deepening the mystery.
In late December, the tenth of 15 glyphs along the bottom of the Waking Titan website unlocked, leading to a password prompt and a Google Drive folder called 1.5 that's filled with images of the NMS logo reflected in various arrangements of mirrors. The names of the images, when strung together and converted from hex, decode to the letters "moirrr," an anagram for "mirror." The Myriad website, uncovered during an earlier stage of the ARG investigation, also contains the hex code for the word.
An image in the background of the most recent glyph link makes reference to the completion of 10,000 passes, and says that "you should have them in time for the next phase." The first of those passes reportedly turned up on January 17: It was made of cardboard with a "textured pass" on it, a CSD category ranking, and another hexadecimal number that translated to "Phoenix." More numbers, including a CSD-ID and serial number, were on the back.
Those numbers are now being collated in this Google Docs spreadsheet. All the entries so far appear to originate in Canada, although whether that's a matter of timing or something more significant is impossible to say. Gaming Detectives recommends that anyone submitting a pass includes all numbers on it, and a photo of the front as well.
No Man's Sky creator Sean Murray contributed to the tease with a January 10 tweet that also referenced mirrors, and contained an image of the Netflix series Black Mirror and an excerpt from an interview with Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker, in which he says he's playing No Man's Sky and "there's an idea for the second season that's sprung from a procedurally generated universe."
If you fall asleep with a mirror on your face you wake up in your dreams. An app but its evil. I have more ideas @charltonbrooker pic.twitter.com/wKOxAqjoOyJanuary 10, 2018
The whole thing seems incredibly complex, and there appears to be quite a bit left to come, as five glyphs on the Waking Titan site are still locked. The 1.5 references are also perplexing, because there hasn't been a 1.4 update yet: That could suggest that 1.4 will be a surprise drop, or too minor to warrant all this fuss, or perhaps will be skipped altogether. Or it might mean something else entirely—I'm bad at ARGs so while I find them interesting, I'm rarely much use when it comes to moving things forward.
I am, however, happy to see that No Man's Sky is still a going concern, and I continue to hold out hope that it will eventually evolve into the game we were promised—or at least as close to it as we can reasonably expect. A full rundown of what's happened so far in the Waking Titan ARG is available here.
