The community has successfully solved the first stage of Marathon’s challenging Cryo Archive ARG puzzle.
Bungie’s Marathon is gearing up for the release of its highly-anticipated fourth map, Cryo Archive–which is expected to be the game’s most challenging map yet. However, before unlocking access to the Cryo Archive, Bungie is putting players to a test with a tricky ARG (Alternate Reality Game) puzzle to solve.
The PvE and PvP extraction shooter may pit players against others, but for this particular instance, players have allied to solve the community-wide puzzle, with discussions and theories sprawling across the internet.
The first phase of the Cryo Archive ARG solved
The first steps that lead to the discovery of the Cyro Archives were when players spotted activated terminal walls on the Perimeter map–like those from the original Marathon trilogy. These activated walls can be found on the Data Wall, Hauler, northwest of the North Relay, Station, Overflow, and South Relay.
Marathon sleuths eventually pieced together crumbs of information to find the CyroArchive.system website, which shows broken CCTV footages from across the Cryo Archive map.
Players knew they had to do something to fix the feeds, and after widespread community effort, it was then discovered that interacting with the walls in a specific sequence, within 15-minute intervals, would unlocke audio messages–believed to be of crucial character, AI Durandal from the original trilogy.
With the first stage of puzzle solved, several broken footages have cleared up to reveal several areas of the next map including a subtle sighting on what many believe is the S'pht, a cybernetically enhanced alien race from the original Marathon.
As of now, six more CCTV feeds are showing "re-establish connection". This likely means that players need to do some final puzzle-solving on the remaining maps– Dire March and Outpost–to finally crack the whole case and unlock the Cryo Archive map.
