Being ‘the world’s greatest detective’ is one of Batman’s things, so it makes sense that the new Arkham Knight trailer had a rock hard mystery hidden inside.
This post originally appeared on Kotaku UK.
Here’s the trailer, see if you can spot the clues:
No? Don’t worry, the codes are insanely hard to find, apparently only appear in a single frame and are almost impossible to see on YouTube compression.
Now: be warned, only read on if you want the puzzle solved.
The codes were found near Harley’s leg at the beginning of the trailer, when Batman first meets Poison Ivy and when the Scarecrow stares down the camera at the end. Fans were quick to postulate that the codes were tied to an as of yet un-accessed ‘Person Of Interest’ section of the official Batman Arkham Knight website.
This is the sort of thing you’re looking for, if you want to go through the trailer:
You can see one other code, as well as some excellent analysis of the trailer in this video by Batman Arkham Videos:
Ultimately, if you have the eyes and a decent copy of the trailer, then there are three codes to find (so far):
- ‘qeL e2uLEE2 zul2e’ for Harley Quinn
- ‘pPL2a3Mn Ppi3mAMpyL2’ for Poison Ivy
- ‘c Rcn3n3 N2Jn3tjHn2’ for Scarecrow.
This set a gang of Redditors off, trying to crack the cipher. Fans were quick to notice that each code only contained letters from the name of the character associated with it, but the use of upper and lower case, and numbers, stumped many.
That is until SixSided posted their excellent breakdown of the solution:
“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’”
So each code has a separate key:
And, if the letter in the code is followed by a number you read off the code letter attached to the nth version of that letter. So for Jonathan Crane, ‘n’ equals ‘c’, but ‘n’ followed by a ‘2’ equals ‘h’.
Got it?
From there, that gets you the following answers for each character:
Harley Quinn - “Her first line”
Poison Ivy - “Asylum sanctuary”
Scarecrow - “I will unleash”
But it doesn’t end there. Those are only questions, the answer of which will get you the codes to unlock character bios in the Persons Of Interest section of the Arkham Knight website:
Harley Quinn - “Yeah, right”
Poison Ivy - “Botanical gardens”
Scarecrow - “Your greatest fears”
Phew, no wonder Batman keeps detective vision on all the time. No, wait, that’s me. I keep detective vision on all the time.
This post originally appeared on Kotaku UK, bringing you original reporting, game culture and humour with a U from the British isles. Follow them on @Kotaku_UK.