Hello and welcome to "Thanks for Skyrim!" - a treasure hunt giveaway for - you guessed it - Skyrim :)

Please no giveaway link sharing, and no posting answers in this thread ^_^

This is my second puzzle, and I believe it is a bit more tricky than the previous one.

Giveaway requires $31 contribution value.

Giveaway end countdown.

Good luck and have fun!


SOLUTION

  1. The first challenge was to find the link to the puzzle. There were 6 italicized characters in the announcement text which spelled source - which hinted at the need to view the page source (via right-clicking on the page and clicking view source or whatever works for your browser) in order to find the hidden itstoohard.com puzzle link.
  2. The Nintendo64 puzzle: the next step of the puzzle required you to decipher the text using the base64 decoding scheme, which was hinted at by the Nintendo64 pic in the background.
  3. The decoded text turned out to be a quote from Skyrim: "I used to be an adventurer like you, then..." You had to answer with the last part of the quote which was "I took an arrow in the knee"
  4. The red herring proved to be quite challenging for many people. In order to get past this step you had to understand that the red herring picture was both a solution and a distraction. The actual image of the red fish had nothing to do with the puzzle; the answer was not in the picture, but was hidden in the file instead. Opening the image file with any text editor and scrolling down to the very end of the file (note the filename "Where fish ends the hunt continues") revealed the link to the next step.
  5. The music puzzle. 134 players, 133 solvers. Seriously?! :) The track that was offered was an arrangement of the Super Mario Bros. main theme by Koji Kondo (performed by London Philharmonic Orchestra).
  6. The letters puzzle: you were presented with five lines of text. If you took the first letters of each line the result spelled IMGUR - an image-hosting website. Opening imgur.com/sNzrjxi revealed the last step of the puzzle.
  7. The final puzzle: the giveaway code was hidden in an audio recording, next to the excerpt from the "Dragonborn" theme by Jeremy Soule (Skyrim OST). The five-letter code could be made visible by opening the track in an audio editor capable of displaying sound spectrogram. The spectrogram showed TYYAl. After overcoming the initial confusion between the two similar-looking letters (I and l) and reversing the code (which was hinted at by the reversed musical excerpt) you finally received the giveaway code to use on SteamGifts: lAYYT.

Thanks everyone for participating in my treasure hunt! ^_^

1 decade ago*

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Closed 1 decade ago by SleepyCat.