ARG:Forest Through The Trees

This page contains spoilers about the Heartbound ARG. If you want to solve the puzzle yourself, avoid reading this article.

Forest Through The Trees was found by solving Brain Drain, which led to the page https://www.gopiratesoftware.com/games/Heartbound/CORE_DUMP/MEMORY_ALPHA/.

The page is seemingly dark, but it has a background image called ForestThroughTheTrees.png.

Finding the "trees"

The image appears to be completely black, but there is more on it than what we can immediately see. If we look at the image very closely, we can notice that there is two slightly different tones of black. In order to clearly see what the image hides, we can open it in an image editor (it can be even Microsoft Paint) and fill the background color with white. This is what we obtain:

The actual "forest through the trees".

Ogham alphabet

This image does resemble some trees, thus its name, but the correlation with trees goes further than that. Our image is actually a text written in an old alphabet called Ogham, and it is believed that Ogham characters were inspired from trees.

Ogham is an early medieval alphabet, which origins can be traced back to the 4^th century. It was originally used to write the early Irish language. The Ogham alphabet has characters: 15 consonants, 5 vowels, and 5 supplementary characters called forfeda (the vowel pairs that form a single sound, or diphtongs).

Text in Ogham can be written either vertically (bottom to top, and left to right) or horizontally (left to righ, and top to bottom). The text of our puzzle is written vertically, however our image is actually mirrored horizontally. Before translating the text, we first need to mirror the image horizontally:

The puzzle image mirrored horizontally.

now let's put our Ogham text in the usual English reading order (left to right, top to bottom):

ᚉᚏᚐᚄᚆᚂᚑᚌ

ᚄᚐᚃᚓᚃᚏᚑᚋᚑᚒ

ᚆᚓᚄᚄᚐᚃᚓᚅᚑ

ᚔᚇᚑᚅᚈᚃᚓᚓᚂᚐᚅᚑᚃᚈᚆᚔᚄ

ᚔᚈᚇᚑᚓᚄᚅᚈᚋᚐᚈᚈᚓᚏᚆᚐᚈᚑᚒᚇᚑᚈᚑᚋᚓ

Using the Ogham alphabet, the text translates to:

CRASHLOG

SAFEFROMOU

HESSAFENO

IDONTFEELANOFTHIS

ITDOESNTMATTERHATOUDOTOME

Notice that a couple of letters are missing from the words above, that is because Ogham does not have equivalents for all English letters, like "Y" or "W". If we add those letters and separate the words, our translated text reads:

crash log

safe from you

he's safe now

I don't feel any of this

it doesn't matter what you do to me

Those words seem to be from OScar, since we have dumped his core and we are going through his data. At the current time it is unknown who is this "he" that OScar is talking about. The first line of the text, however, is the clue for the next page where we need to go: https://www.gopiratesoftware.com/games/Heartbound/CORE_DUMP/MEMORY_ALPHA/CRASH_LOG/.

This leads us to the next step of the ARG: Truncated.