ImTheBlueRanger on YouTube has spent week or so obsessing over Asemblance, a puzzle thriller designed to screw with your head. It’s also full of secrets! And thanks to modern video capture devices, we get to watch what it’s like for a superfan to discover one in real-time. It’s awesome.
Warning: There are spoilers for Asemblance to follow, but they won’t really make much sense unless you’ve played the game.
First, some context. There’s multiple endings to Asemblance and only one of them is obvious. The others are deeply nested into the game in ways that casual players are unlikely to ever find on their own. The most secretive ending—so far, anyway!—was basically impossible to stumble across; it required players to participate in an ARG that gave them more clues about where to experiment.
That’s all they were, though: clues. ImTheBlueRanger became one of the lead researchers on Project Figure Out What Asemblance Is Hiding, and recorded his attempts to unearth its secrets. It’s not often that we’re able to see the discovery process happen in real-time, but in this case, we see everything.
Though the whole video is nearly 15-minutes, the important bits happen a little over halfway through. Using the clues players have collectively discovered—notice the whiteboard in the background?—ImTheBlueRanger continues to try (and fail) at unlocking what players are now calling the white shift ending.
Most attempts ended in failure, of course.
ImTheBlueRanger kept plugging at it, but the problem was that he didn’t know exactly what he was trying to do. You can see him playing with everything needed to trigger the ending, it’s just not coming together in the right way.
Eventually, though, it does.
There’s something beautiful and touching about getting to see that moment.
Congrats, ImTheBlueRanger!
(If you want to reproduce it yourself, follow the steps here. I wasn’t able to get it to work—it’s really finicky—but people have been able to make it trigger.)