Rick And Morty has always gone outside the box on the video game front, from the hilariously useless Jerry’s Game to the obvious Pokemon mimicking of the absolutely amazing Pocket Mortys.
That trend continues with the bizarre (or perhaps bizarrely awesome?) Rickstaverse, which turns Instagram into a “game” of sorts. How you ask? By slicing up still images from the show into dozens of images and then setting you loose on exploring the show’s universe via a whole lot of searching and clicking.
Gaming On Instagram? Well, sort of…
The idea is to hunt down a new warp link in each image to find further locations, where you will either discover a mini-game, silly easter egg, or yet another link to a new location.
There’s hundreds of linked Instagram accounts comprising the game and corresponding to different scenes from the T.V. show, all split into multiple squares to explore (for more than 1,800 images in total).
It’s like the Where’s Waldo of Rick And Morty as you scan through picture frames for the hidden links. Whether swiping or tapping, it doesn’t take long to get through an image, so it’s more fun than frustrating.
Want a full breakdown of how it works? Read the instructions here. In the base game you can already explore more than a hundred scenarios with Easter eggs like a Jerrygotchi and even video clips from the show. You can start hunting and pecking at The Rickstaverse’s base Instagram account.
Expanding The Rickstaverse
Anticipation is steadily building for that impending third season (you better not bollocks this up like with Community, Dan Harmon!), so new content is now arriving in the Rickstaverse.
Following previous “expansion” The Smiths Got Squanched, now there’s another expansion-style update with new accounts and locations. At first I was a little concerned about what was going to be found, since this new expansion is based on the only bad episode from each current season: the Interdimensional Cable nonsense on “Rixty Minutes” and “Interdimensional Cable 2: Tempting Fate!”
Thankfully the drunken ramblings of those pointless episodes (fingers crossed we won’t have to sit through one in the next season) are much more palatable as still images.
All that hunting and clicking/tapping will be worth it for uber fans, as the original “game” had hidden clips from season 2 before the season actually aired.
While I haven’t found any season 3 advance clips yet, its a good bet they will be showing up soon, and there’s probably season 3 Easter eggs in here we don’t even recognize as such quite yet. Start hunting ’em down and let us know what you find!
New Areas To Explore
The Interdimesional Cable expansion expansion includes a handful of new items to find, like the Plumbus Factory (remember how Think Geek made an awesome commercial and sold Plumbuses for April Fools this year?) and a Gazorpazorp Comics collectible.
Want to head straight to the Plumbus Factory to begin exploring without going through hundreds of pages first? From the start page, click the second image (the second half of the space station) and find the link to warp to St. Gloopy Noops Low.
From there, click the third image with the “How They Do It” monitor at the center to find the link to the Plumbus Factory.
Or, you know, you could just click here, but that sort of ruins the whole point of this bizarre “game” experiment. Rick would do it without hestitation, while Morty would feel bad and probably say “I don’t know about this Rick…”
Have fun exploring the Plumbus Factory and hunting for new Easter eggs, and stay tuned as we’ll be covering all the new expansion content shortly!
