Fans of the the popular God of War series likely know by now that the original God of War had a phone number hidden inside it that, when accessed by the player, actually resulted in a recorded message from none other than Kratos himself. They also discovered that both God of War II and God of War III included secret website urls hidden within the torturous tales of Olympus. Well, with a series of secret messages resulting in real-world interactions, it appears that the newest game in the series, God of War: Ascension, continues the tradition with a cryptic message players can find deep inside the game.



The message is found on a painting of Mount Olympus. The caption to the painting reads:

Of all the prophecies I have seen, this one haunts my dreams.
QUJIKPHIUEEEKMJQUJ
The full truth of this nightmare yet remains hidden. – Aletheia

What does it mean? So far only the game's developers know, and they aren't saying. But we here at the GT offices have been putting our minds to work and have parsed out a few clues:

Aletheia is the Greek personification of truth.
It is not a Caesarian Shift or a single letter substitution cipher. There are a limited number of keys for these kinds of ciphers, and none of them create a readable message.
The code starts and ends with QUJ. If it is a cipher the key may only be three letters long.

There are many possible ciphers and solutions and some of these result in the following messages, none of which are probably the right answer:

BIG TO A STILL LONG BIG
RUN FISH FULL LION RUN
TBA USE DUB III SCA TBA
KEY NUMBNESS SUZY KEY
BEG LUCKLESS SUNG BEG
GET LOCKLESS SORT GET
HER DAY NEVER YET HER

One possibility is that it is a string of acronyms. QUJ means “reversing a bearing” and IK is an animation term “Inverse Kinesis” EEE may mean E3 and PHI may mean the Greek letter. But together they still don’t make much sense.

Going into the options menu and changing the text language for the game changes the string of text:

English: QUJIKPHIUEEEKMJQUJ
French: QJFTRFJRQTEUCJTUNFRJHQJHQJFTRF
Portuguese: MHDILMMLKHNHOKHDRLHMHD
Spanish: QJFLTORJPJFOJIQJF

Each of these samples start and end with the same letters. In French it is a six letter string, in the others it is a three letter string. In each language the number of letters in the string is different. That they are different but still share some traits would suggest the message is a phrase translated into multiple languages, rather than a code designed to be entered somewhere in the game.



For the time being the code remains unbroken. But undoubtedly amateur code breakers, and perhaps even professionals, are crunching numbers and testing keys at this very moment. No one knows if the code will be solved quickly (the collective intellect of the internet excels at breaking codes) or if it will stand the test of time (shorter codes are much harder to break than longer ones). If or when the true meaning of the message is revealed we will let you know here on Side Mission.