¿Quién es Sombra? The mystery that lurks as Overwatch ever launched has caused many to speculate she was one of the possible new hero to be added post launch of Overwatch. A voice line, the name Sombra found in the clutters of Dorado, and a picture of what we know now as Ana in Temple of Anubis were the hints we had of the sly character. After Ana launched, more voice lines hinted at a possible stealth hero hints more of the Sombra connection (the word sombra means shadow in Spanish).
As the Overwatch community digs deeper, they found a whole ARG (alternate reality game) where clues and codes are hidden in recent promotional videos, taking the smart sleuths at the Game Detective Discord channel to crack some crazy codes. For the uninitiated, ARGs are a sort of game outside of a game where a story or a trail can be found by figuring it out how to solve the puzzles and codes that are not directly apparent at first glance. Developers Blizzard are clearly testing the community as each successful attempt only leads to messages in Spanish, presumably by Sombra herself, teasing it to be easy.
The community poured a lot of work, and some crazy cryptography skills as each code is broke or deciphered in impressive ways. However, the trail went cold for a while when the community was stomped by one piece of code that could not be cracked, and later went to odd directions in order to find any sort of new leads.
But yesterday, the trail is starting to pick up heat again as new clues propped up. A sticked forum post on the Overwatch forums titled in a binary formed that translates to 23- hinting Sombra would be the the 23rd hero for Overwatch, with picture of a skull similar to some of the clues already gathered, with the name Skycoder. The forum post is written in Spanish with unique purple text, then glitches out to form a code that once deciphered, produced another ASCII code.
The forum post interestingly is a countdown, instead of its last posted time increasing over time, it decreases. When the countdown finishes..the post just disappeared. Many anticipated it would be the big reveal, but it seems developers Blizzard still wanted to toy around with us and keep the ARG going. Further investigations leads now to website called A Moment In Crime, used to be a reference to a promotional video highlighting heroes Junkrat and Roadhog’s criminal hijinks across the globe. It seems another countdown is in progress, but it slowly ticks.
Here’s a rundown of the Sombra ARG so far in video form by One Amongst Many:
Will we see Sombra, or any new content for Overwatch reveal after the ARG is finished? How long will it keep going? We may not know for sure, but rest assured that there the many folks involved in the investigations are on the case. Check out the Game Detectives’ Wiki page on the Sombra ARG for all the details on all the methods used to crack the codes so far. Cryptographers can appreciate all the hard work the community has done to get this far. But for the rest of us, just don’t get hyped too much as we still have no idea even if the ARG ties to any new content reveal.
(header image source: Twitch, on Twitter)