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Getting-started guides for popular games, written from playtime rather than from press kits.

What Is an ARG Puzzle Game? The Complete Beginner's Guide

Beginner's Guide to ARG

An ARG — Alternate Reality Game — is an interactive fiction that hides its story inside the real world. On this site we build it out of simulated websites, encrypted messages, buried clues and chained puzzles, so you can step into a fictional world that behaves like the internet you already use. This guide covers how ARGs play, the puzzle types you'll meet, and how to start your first investigation.

Last updated: October 2026

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What is an ARG?

Alternate Reality Game

• The core idea — The biggest difference from a normal game is that an ARG never tells you "you are playing a game." It plants story clues inside things that look real: a website, a document, a social media post, any digital medium. You collect clues like a detective, piece the information together, break the codes, and the story assembles itself one layer at a time.
• ARGs on this site — Every game on GameStrategists is a self-contained ARG. They run in the browser and are made of simulated websites, fictional company pages, classified documents, and hidden audio and video. You install nothing — all you need is a browser, a sharp eye and curiosity.
• Why it feels good — The best ARG moments are moments of discovery: you notice something trivial, you decode a string of ciphertext, you find a page that was never linked anywhere. That "I found it" rush is hard for a conventional game to reproduce. An ARG trusts your judgement instead of walking you to the ending.

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The puzzle types you'll meet

Bring your brain — these are the forms a clue tends to take

Ciphers and encodings

Base64, Caesar, Vigenère, binary and hexadecimal. If a string of characters looks random, run it through the common encodings before assuming it's noise.

Steganography

Information hidden inside images, audio or video. Check a file's Exif data, look at an audio spectrogram, read the bytes appended after the file "ends" — some secrets sit right under your nose.

Source inspection

Plenty of clues hide in HTML comments, undisplayed DOM elements, CSS pseudo-classes, JavaScript variables or network requests. Get into the habit of reading page source and devtools.

Logical deduction

Conclusions that need several pieces combined. A date, a place and a number together might be the password; three overheard conversations only make sense once you lay them side by side.

Path exploration

Not every page is in the navigation. Try editing the URL, guessing directory names, hunting for hidden routes. Sometimes the right door is simply one bold guess.

Document analysis

PDFs, text inside images, email threads, chat logs — the paperwork of a fictional world usually carries what moves the story forward. Read every line.

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How to start your first ARG

Three steps, then enjoy the puzzle

Pick a game

Choose one from the game list on the homepage. If you have never played an ARG, start with Unclaimed — it runs on a 1996 lost-property terminal in seven acts and thirteen items, carries no horror content, and tells you clearly what to do in each act. If you want the more classic "investigation" feel, pick Room 404: it starts with a rental listing that is suspiciously cheap, and you spend 10 simulated websites working out where the previous tenant went.

Open devtools

Press F12 or Ctrl+Shift+I to open your browser's developer tools. Get comfortable with the Elements panel and the Console. Plenty of ARGs leave hints in HTML comments or in console.log output — it is basic ARG literacy.

Stay curious, take notes

Write down everything that looks off — strange numbers, recurring symbols, character names, dates. Notion, Obsidian or a plain text file all work for keeping your reasoning in one place. Often an answer only becomes visible once you have enough clues on the page at once.

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The toolbox we recommend

These cover most of what you will run into

• CyberChef — The universal encode/decode workbench: Base64, hex, ROT13, AES, archive inspection and hundreds of operations on top. It is the Swiss Army knife of ARG solving.
• Browser devtools — Elements to find hidden DOM, Network to see every request and response, Console to run JavaScript. Learning those three panels solves something like 80% of web puzzles.
• Audacity — A free, open-source audio editor that can show you a spectrogram. Some ARGs hide an image or readable text inside audio — visible to the eye, inaudible to the ear.
• ExifTool / an online Exif viewer — Reads a picture's metadata. Creation date, GPS coordinates, camera model, even the editing software's history have all been used as clues.
• Your own head — The most important tool. ARG designers want you to think, to connect dots, to break the habit of looking in only one place. If you are stuck, rest, turn it over, or talk it through with someone. Some of the best ideas arrive on a walk.

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How to think about puzzles

Advice from the person who builds them

• Nothing is a mistake — Every anomaly has a reason. If something looks "off," it probably is a clue. Coincidences in an ARG usually are not coincidences.
• Write everything down — Information you find now may only become useful three puzzles later. Keep the habit: log the suspicious detail and the inference you drew from it.
• Turn it over — When the direct approach fails, change angle. A password might be inside an image; a hint might be sitting on a page that looks irrelevant.
• You don't have to brute-force it — Step away when the answer won't come. The answer isn't going anywhere, and tomorrow usually beats grinding.
• Enjoy the process — The pleasure of an ARG is the solving, not just the finishing. Savour the surprise of finding a clue and the satisfaction of assembling the truth.

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What order to play our games in

If this is your first ARG, this sequence works well

• Start here — Unclaimed. An old lost-property terminal you navigate purely by searching, with clear guidance and no horror content. The best way to learn the basic moves.
• Step up — Room 404, Midnight Frequency and Last Online. These ask you to cross-check information between several simulated websites: a rental platform, a radio frequency, a device-management console — each with a completely different interface feel.
• Go deep — Rust River (20 simulated websites, 24 clues, 18 puzzles) and Eye of the Abyss (24 simulated websites, 42 clues, 4 endings). Much denser puzzles, far more clues to track across pages, and considerably longer playtimes.
• Shared universes — Only this one connection can be checked against the games’ own text: The name Tide Protocol is still written into the text of Midnight Frequency and Room 404. The corporation called Xinyuan appears in the text of Rust River alone; no second work mentions it. Everything else stands alone — Tide Sound Archives, Sunken City and Room 404 say exactly that in their own in-game "related works" panel. Finishing one game leaves you owing no homework to another.

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