XERO
- Brand
- 10 Chambers
- Year
- 2023
- Objective
- Product Launch
- Industry
- Entertainment
- Mechanic
- Adventure & Quest
- Platform
- Web
- Agency
- North Kingdom
Objective
10 Chambers needed to announce Den of Wolves at The Game Awards to an audience fluent in ARGs and collective clue-hunting, where a trailer alone wouldn't hold attention in that crowded week. The goal was to spark curiosity and conversation at the moment of reveal, pull that audience into uncovering the game's lore together, and convert the attention into an active community on Discord, Reddit, and Steam wishlists.
Solution
Scrolling down the Den of Wolves announcement page triggers a break-in: the screen glitches and drops the visitor into XERO, a fictional hacking tool that looks like it's tapping the network of the game's fictional setting, Midway. A live 3D map of the city fills the screen, dotted with numbered nodes and crossed by the cursors of other visitors browsing the same map in real time. A command console on the left lets players target a node and run a short mini-game to strip away the noise scrambling it; solo nodes reward a brief glimpse of a hidden image or 3D model, while others only decrypt when several players attack the same node at once, each controlling a different variable. A session ends whenever a player logs off — the map and its unsolved nodes stay live for the next visitor. The toughest nodes never cracked under one person, so players took their partial finds to Discord, Reddit, and Steam forums, piecing scattered fragments — like a mask split across three separate files — into a single picture.
- 1
The game opens as an ordinary announcement page for Den of Wolves, with a trailer, a wishlist button, and social links — nothing hints at what follows.
- 2
Scrolling down breaks that surface: the site appears hijacked by a hacker and rebrands itself as XERO, a crude-looking terminal tool for tracking and breaking into the network of Midway, a fictional dystopian city where hacking is a means of survival.
- 3
Players explore a 3D map of Midway's districts and nodes, each with its own URL for sharing, while the cursors of other simultaneous visitors appear on the map, marking it as a shared space rather than a solo site.
- 4
Opening a node drops the player into noise-corrupted, glitched content and a side console where typed commands — 'help', private decryption attempts, targeted attacks on a node — drive the interaction.
- 5
Each node carries its own lock pattern; solving it in a short mini-game that manipulates the noise clears the static and reveals the hidden material for about 20 seconds before it re-encrypts.
- 6
Some nodes resist solo play entirely and only decrypt when multiple players work different parameters of the puzzle at the same time.
- 7
Cracked nodes yield lore fragments — interrogation footage, mask and weapon imagery, facility plans, surveillance stills, news audio, incident reports, and cargo manifests — including a node that hands over three mask model files named YOU.stl, FOUND.stl, and IT.stl, another with a LifeCache Technologies cryo-scan, and a weapon image captioned 'LET'S PLAY RUGBY'.
- 8
Because pieces of the same object are scattered across separate nodes, full assets — such as a complete 3D mask model — only come together when different players' finds are combined.
- 9
Nodes that resist decryption get carried off-site, with players posting finds, codes, and theories to Discord, Reddit, Twitch, Twitter, and Steam discussions, turning holdout puzzles into a collective effort.
