Bungie has a new website, and on a sub-site you can find (spotted by IGN) a puzzling game that seems to be building up to a proper reveal for upcoming game Destiny. At the moment, the site displays the word MONDAY with the numbers one to seven counting down across it. The number seven is lit, suggesting that today (well, yesterday for me here in the U.K., but I guess this is working off one of the North American timezones) is the first of seven days of puzzles, at the end of which – hopefully – will be a reveal of some kind.
As for the puzzle itself, we're presented with four rows of diamonds, each of which can be clicked to switch it from one diamond to two or vice versa, and told to “Begin by aligning the day's pattern to the light.” Make sure each row displays two diamonds (though why that means the puzzle is aligned to the light I have no idea – anyone know?) and you'll be sent to the next screen, which looks a little more complicated. We see the messages “Pattern Active. Array Element Online.” and “Coordinate. Combine. Clarify.” followed by two images, one with the filename “geomask” and one called “output”.
The geomask image looks pretty meaningless to me – just a lot of white marks – though maybe it'll make sense to somebody and prove to be another puzzle itself, and is accompanied by the following text: “Frequency gaps detected. Additional global observatories required.” Potentially more people need to solve the puzzle and get to this page in order for the image to be made clearer. And that may also be the case for the other image, which looks like a symbol with some blurry text inside it, and is accompanied by: “[Note: (x,y) visibility limited. (u,v) analysis might prove useful.]”
And at the bottom of the page we have another message:
“Your node will remain active for 5 minutes, but may be reactivated as necessary. Distributed, synchronous effort required.”
So basically, we need lots of people in different locations (“distributed”) to solve the puzzle at roughly the same time (“synchronous”). It's a shame that for you guys in North America Monday is nearly over – I'll see you when you get to Tuesday!