A beautiful shot of the Milky Way constellation full of stars in space

Go:Ares Alternate Reality Game

A Project in Collaboration with Fridays For Future

Three Weeks. Two Planets. One Story.

Official Website

Fridays for Future commissioned the Go:Ares Alternate Reality Game as a mobilization effort for the global strike on 23.09.2022.

Together with a team of three project leads, three game designers, two web developers and one graphic designer, the event was planned and live for three weeks before the global strike. Overall we prepared 15 puzzles across websites, Discord and social media sites to create an immersive experience in which the players investigated the fictional company Go:Ares.

 

FormatAlternate Reality Game (ARG)
GenreFuturistic, Mystery
LoglineIn 2048 a young technician from Mars collaborates with earth internet users from 2022 to save the people of their colony from a failed mars mission.

Synopsis

After the social media channels from Fridays For Future get hacked, the trail leads to the website of a formerly unknown company named Go:Ares. Their goal is to start a colony on Mars. Even though Go:Ares is a young company, its technology allegedly can bring people to Mars sooner than all its competitors.

Not long after, someone hacks the Go:Ares website. They ask for information about the company, and when invited to a discord server, they introduce themselves as Sola. After talking to journalist Alice and finding evidence on the Go:Ares website, it becomes apparent that Sola is from the future and lives on Mars. They found a time machine and are investigating why their colony leadership acts strangely.

Together they work out that the Mars colony steals resources from Earth.
Mars leadership wants to use these resources to evacuate, but only themselves.
The only option to stop Go:Ares is to sever the ties between both timelines, even if that would doom Mars.

After initial success, Go:Ares sets a trap and takes over the Discord server, where players gather and lock up Sola. However, the players persuade a Go:Ares employee to free Sola and join their side. Together their take back the server.

To stop the future for good, they have to stop the present. By planning their own trap, the players get the younger version of Mars colony leadership detained by police and thrown in jail.
Sola confronts leadership’s future version and brings him to admit his plan in front of the entire Mars colony.
Leadership gets apprehended, and the people on Mars work together to get back to Earth. Luckily, they can use the time machine to buy them more time before they can make their way back.

Puzzle 1 - Breakdown

Script Excerpt - Act I

The following script describes the game’s first act and includes links to websites, assets and updated links to posts made during the live phase.

Example Asset - Protocol

After gaining access to a locked database, players got rewarded with the following example asset. It contains multiple hints for future puzzles and explains how time travel functions in the game’s universe.