Welcome Home ARG is the latest alternate reality game making the rounds. Centered on a children’s puppet show from the 1970s, Welcome Home ARG appears innocent at first. As you play through the content, however, a darker story unfolds. Here’s how to play Welcome Home, as well as the clues we found along the way.
Welcome Home ARG Explained
The story of Welcome Home starts sweet enough. The Welcome Home website is brightly colored and showcases the show’s characters.
This is where the bulk of the gameplay occurs, where you’ll discover hidden letters in the images and text of the site. There’s hidden voice messages, invisible notes and more concealed throughout the pages. Lets get started!
Welcome Home ARG Landing Page
The landing page is pretty straightforward. If you look at the website link, however, you can notice that it ends in “welcome home you.” This is a bit odd, but not overtly outstanding.
In the website updates section, however, there’s something that stands out. The “Y” in Your is superscript compared to the rest of the text. When you highlight over this section, there’s a double “Y” in that space.
Screenshot by GameSkinny
Welcome Home!
If you click the first link presented, which is Welcome Home!, you’ll be taken to a page about the history of the show. We can see a subscript letter, the “W” in Wally under the image of Howdy Pillar. If you scroll to the bottom, there’s a link to the About page for the Welcome Home Restoration Team.
About Us
The “O” in About Us is off on this page. That gives us Y, W, and O as letters out of place with their neighboring text. This page also has a whole section with double text In the FAQ section.
When highlighted, the text reads: “When I unwrapped the first letter, I felt it. I heard it. Open. Open. Open. I want it out. I’m going to get it out.”
Screenshot by GameSkinny
Under that entry, there’s an entry for “Do you know how many episodes of Welcome Home there are?” This clue seems straightforward, but there’s hidden text here as well.
It reads: “The numbers are so hard to read. Sometimes I can’t see them.” The entry “How did you begin your research into Welcome Home?” also has “But it hurts” hidden at the end.
Neighborhood
This page has loads of stuff on it. The first thing is that the “you” in you’re is clickable. When clicked, it takes you to another page titled “You” that has slow typing. The sentence “Wally is your best friend” is typed. Nothing else comes up on this page.
You’ll notice that Wally’s Home is sentient with moving eyes. While that may be surprising, what’s hidden just below Wally’s Home is the real shock. If you click the end of Wally’s pathway, you’ll be taken to the “So Below” page, which shows a sketch of Wally inside his home.
The note at the bottom of the page has a superscript X. The off kilter letters are now Y, W, O, and X.
News
The News page seems relatively nondescript compared to the others. However, the E in the News header is not aligned with the rest of the word, bringing our letters to Y, W, O, X, E.
Along with the letter being out of place is the general feeling that something is not quite right when reading the news posts. The entry for February 25 has the line, “You will see as we do, neighbor.” There are more instances of this throughout the updates.
Image via Clown IllustrationsÂ
Guestbook
The opening page for the Guestbook is straightforward, but things start to happen once you click to go to the Guestbook. Not only are the file names for the doodles secret messages, but there is another letter to find.
Head to Page 5 of the Guestbook and scroll down to find the entry “Silly mc Billy.” The doodle over it in response has a V just above the other letters. That gives us Y, W, O, X, E, and V. These letters in various combinations can be used to find hidden links attached to the website.
The Voice Update
The latest update for Welcome Home ARG, which gives up the official start of the main game, focuses on the voices of the puppets. Most of the new content comes in the form of voice messages on hidden pages. For those that are hearing impaired, Clown did include transcripts of all audio content, making this update more accessible.
Another change is the main page has an update to the hub text, though the Y is still out of place, not changing the work we previously did. Along with the new text comes two new eyes, one on each side of the page, staring at you. They greet you at the homepage but stay with you throughout the website.
What you’ll find is the most interesting thing, however, are the new content pages.
- The Playfellow Exhibition
- Media
- Merchandise
- Stickers
The Stickers page appears to be a “rebrand” of the shareables page previously linked on the website. It features the same banners and moving icons that were included. There’s no hidden text on these pages, as far as I have discovered. Each page, including the old pages, happen to have moving bugs somewhere on them. Clicking these bugs brings you to a new, hidden page that features one of the voice messages.
Those are the main things we found while playing through Welcome Home ARG. The game is still in its prologue stages, so more is coming in the future. Now that you know how to play, you may want to find all of the hidden links in Welcome Home ARG.
Featured image via Clown Illustrations.
