Solving Mysteria’s Brain-Breaker Puzzle: “A World Unfolding”
In Mysteria’s first private event, clicking on the ceiling of the Castle brought players to arguably the most difficult of the 3 puzzles — A World Unfolding:
The first reaction to this image might be something along the lines of “Um…ok? What do I do now?”
The Process
There are many different ways of solving this one. We’ll go through the “canon” way, one that does not require any hints or special knowledge (several smart folks were able to solve this one in just a few hours without any).
Step 1: We do not have much to go on here. It’s unclear what to do with just a single image, so let’s try some searching. You’ll notice that none of the image assets on Mysteria are found on the web (aside from special sponsorship logos), but popping this into a reverse image search does show us a few results:
https://soundcloud.com/therealkow/universal-questions-ft-stephen-hawking
https://hub.jhu.edu/2020/02/26/closed-universe-curve-999-em1-art1-nr-science/
The first is a Soundcloud link — keep that in mind for later. The second is an article that specifies a theory “that contradicts conventional ideas” about the universe.
Step 2: Since we don’t have anything else to go on, let’s try downloading and comparing the two images — from both Mysteria and the web. If we check their file sizes, we see that the Mysteria picture (although identical in appearance and dimensions to the web one) is 134kb. The web one is 127kb. This is the first major hint that something is amiss.
Step 3: From here, there are a few different avenues that can be taken. The canon one is to directly compare the image data to each other. A free program like HxD can be used for this. When we use the Analysis -> Compare tool:
And checking the actual data:
Well then. The images are exactly the same for the beginning of the file, and there just happens to be a payload of extra data at the end of the Mysteria one. Hmm. The beginning of that data starts with the line:
ID3...TSSE...Lavf58If we search those exact words on the web, we’re met with several articles talking a lot about audio tags and mp3 data. Remember the Soundcloud link?
Step 4: Now we have two options, but the first is much easier. We can simply try opening that image in a valid audio player, or we can extract the differing code and create a new file. Both wind up with the same result. Note that it isn’t really necessary to change the filetype here, but it can help with some programs (like VLC). Using a program like Audacity gives us:
Playing this file gives us the sweet sound of victory — “Reach for the stars”.
The Clues
Though clues were not necessary to solve this, there were 3 hints given over the 3-day span:
- Things aren’t always how they appear.
- 🙈🙊
- Our universe can be explained in just 16 “particles”.
The first was a clue (in conjunction with the John’s Hopkins article) that you should try looking at the universe from a different perspective. This file masqueraded as a simple image, but was in fact truly an mp3.
The second expounded on this idea, giving two of the three famous “monkeys”. See-no-evil and Speak-no-evil are both here, but curiously Hear-no-evil is missing. Hmm.
The third indicates that the “source code” of the universe is made up of 16…something. As shown above, hex code is a great way to inspect raw file data, and is comprised of 16 different characters (0–9, A-F).
Putting these all together, we deduce that we need to ignore the actual image, and listen to the hex code hidden inside.
The Conclusion
In total, this puzzle was solved 29 times, and took the longest of the 3 for the first solution.
Note that it was also possible to simply try opening this file in many different programs, without any of the hex viewing listed above. There are only so many common media types — text, video, image, and sound. We might call that “the speedrun approach”.
We hope that gives some insight into how these puzzles are solved. See you in the next game :)
Up Next
The NEXT ROUND BEGINS: Saturday, February 5th, 2022 at 15:00:00 UTC. Details will be posted in our Discord server (and on Twitter).
If you enjoyed our game, please give us a follow on Twitter, and check out our Discord server. And get ready for the next round! Thank you all for playing!
