Who is Sombra? The alternate reality hunt for Overwatch's new character
Codes, video snippets and 'hacked' twitter accounts are all being used to tease Sombra, the next character to join Blizzard's team-based shooter.
It started with a post on the Blizzard forums and a single line of text: "La que tiene la información; tiene el poder." "She who has the information, has the power" in Spanish. After a few seconds, the locked post glitches and leaves behind string of gibberish.
Since then, the puzzles have included distorted images, "hacked" twitter accounts and forum posts and snippets of code in trailers. For every step in the puzzle so far, check out the Overwatch wiki.
A screenshot on the Overwatch gallery was intentionally warped to include a secret message. Decoding the digital artifacts, sleuths found a message that read, "Why do you look to the sky? The answer is not above your heads, it's behind you. Sometimes, you need to analyse your previous achievements."
Yes, I checked out the achievement page:
Before you get too deep down the rabbit hole, after weeks of teasing the initial countdown wound up pointing to a website (with yet another countdown).
The latest breadcrumb on the trail is amomentincrime.com, a website with little more than a few lines of code and a slowly ticking progress tracker (5 percent at the time of writing. Cocktail napkin math means it's about a week to hit 100 percent at the current rate). The text on the page roughly translates to "Shadow Protocol v1.9 started", and references "omnicos." Omnics are the robot army on one side of a major conflict in the game's backstory.
The latest website might mean the epic chase for Sombra is finally coming to a close.
The slow drip feed on information fits in very nicely with Overwatch's understated storytelling, most of which is shared through tie-in material and brief snippets of dialogue between characters during matches.
Ana, the first new character since launch, made her way into Overwatch last month, the Summer Games event added a plethora of cosmetic items to the game and Gamescom in Germany saw a new map being announced.