Eye Sigil ARG/You Have to Win the Game

Main Page > List of Investigations > Eye Sigil ARG > You Have to Win the Game

You Have to Win the Game is a free platformer exploration game with a retro aesthetic developed by J. Kyle Pittman (Minor Key Games). It was originally released in May 2012, but was added on Steam on 12 May 2014 with a new remixed campaign called "Extra Spicy mode".

The sigil was added in an update on 20 Aug 2015.

Sigil

The sigil can be found in the Extra Spicy mode, near the end of the game, on a screen called Listen to the Wind. It will later appear several times again once the player is solving the puzzle further.

Alternatively, it is available in the list of sprites in the editor (press ` in-game to open the console and type edit)

Piece

The room with the sigil has a changed title, the original title being Point of No Return. The changed title Listen to the Wind is a clue to a different room, Chimes. If you visit Chimes after seeing the sigil in the first room, it will also have a sigil and a different title. This trail of clues unravels as follows:

1. "Point of No Return" is named "Listen to the Wind"
2. "Chimes" is named "Cartography and Mythology"
3. "Maps and Legends" is named "Somewhere You Can Never Go"
4. "yeah but why u jelly tho" is named "Back to Square One"
5. "You Have to Flip the Desk" is named "Go Now"
6. "Linchpin" is named "So I Went"
7. "Eponymous" is named "Backmask the Myth"

The last 7th clue is in the end of the campaign, the room with the "win" orb. It refers a room from the original campaign, Hydra is Myth.

Backmasking hydra means using ARDYH as the magic word / password in the original campaign. By doing this the player is teleported to a series of secret rooms marked, once again by the sigil.

Progressing through them, the player gets to the room Sadness (an infinite fall) and can see the piece in the pause menu. Leaving the pause menu will teleport player back to the password room.

Discovery process notes

Sadness is not the only level with a pause menu secret. There's another secret in the The Books Will Not. It is a QR code with a link to a song Sycamore Drive - Kicks on youtube. The way it's located suggests it was added as a red herring by the developer.

Data Mining

The piece was extracted (by Discord user ecstaticeggplant) by datamining the game files before it was recieved legitimately.

The piece is a texture called sigil_end.dds in the Volver.npk resources file.

The red herring QR code is sigil_egg.dds in the same file. The game has a feature (available from the console) to dump all its resources. While doing so sigil_egg.dds is dumped, but not sigil_end.dds.

The rooms of the Extra Spicy campaign are marked with sigilrank attributes with values from 1 to 7 in Rooms_Remixed.xml, the changed titles are in sigiltitle attributes. The secret rooms of the original campaign are marked with secret="true" in Rooms_Normal.xml with onpause attributes on the two special ones.