Do not post clues you yourself have found here. Only confirmed progress will be documented here. Post your findings in your own thread. Answers will get buried.

I've seen quite a few posts of people trying to catch up because they want to join in on the fun. In this post I will try to give you and easy-to-digest, chronological summary of everything that happened, concluding with the current state of the ARG, meaning what we're trying to crack right now. If I have something forgotten or if something is wrong, please let me know.

Here are the sources I used to puzzle everything together:

• Mindmap
• Red Herring badge description
• Google Doc from the Discord chat
• A visual chronology of things that are known - Thread

On the first day of the Steam Sale, a comic appeared on the store front page that would be updated daily. The cover of the comic featured a bar code which when scanned returned the same code as Hitman's Agent 47 has tattooed on his head. Though it changed three numbers of the code to 9s. At the same time people noticed a faded word in the lower left corner of the first page of the comic that spelled out 'nesse' whose meaning has still not been found.

As usual on steam sales, users can earn special cards to craft badges. Each day one card's image would be revealed. Similar to this, blurred backgrounds would get unblurred every day.

First suspicions started that this could be an ARG and this very subreddit was founded.

Some people were not convinced just yet and doubted the existence of this or mocked the detectives. In one instance a user created a fake error message with a code which was later cracked: "You are a bunch of idiots".

The steam detectives continued to believe and shared dozens of theories, clues and suspicions on the subreddit.

On the 25th Valve removed the barcode from the cover by tearing it off which would tighten our case that this could be an ARG.

Meanwhile on the discord chat users were working hard and discovered quite a few things (I'm not too sure about the chronological order here):

A hidden prompt was found in the store: Typing SEARCH and pressing enter will bring it up. Entering the bar code from the cover would bring up “ic/4f21ca7”. Making this code the last part of the comic's url (http://store.steampowered.com/wintercomic/4f21ca7) would yield a sound file on which one could hear a man saying "I was on the right track, I could feel it. Tomorrow, I was going to search again". More is not known about this, though it could be just a confirmation that this is indeed an ARG.

In several instances in the comic a 'Blitzen incident' was mentioned. Searching "Blitzen" on the Steam Store would bring up the game Grim Fandango Remastered. Using the search prompt found earlier and the password Jake uses to get into Twinkle's (Hot toddies and maseratis), another page would come up: Undertale. The store page for this game featured a tag, Bullet Hell, that was the only tag not translated into a non English language for non English Steam users. Using the search prompt again and typing in Bullet Hell, the game Ikaruga would turn up.

At the same time it was discovered that by turning up the brightness on the artwork of the second card, symbols would be revealed. These symbols are Dungeon Master spell symbols and spell out Lo Ya Gor Ku. Using this as the end of the comic url (http://store.steampowered.com/wintercomic/loyagorku) , an audio file in Japanese would be downloaded. "The forgotten road leads to (both) obstacles and reward". Viewing a spectograph of this yielded the code 1v7531.

This code is used on the Ikaruga store page in the search prompt and rewards you with the Red Herring Badge. This lead is assumed to be complete.

Tinkering around with the Santa Baby background revealed a hidden lambdathe logo from the Half Life series and what could be a crow bar.

Let's move on to the clues we are stuck at.

The artwork for card 6 revealed another code in the lower left. "794E2CEA991"

The artwork on card two changed from this to this.

I will try to keep this updated so the people who only follow the whole thing sparsely or people who just heard of it can know what's going on. Also please don't use this post to share new clues or questions regarding clues, create a new post for that. This post will only serve to fill in people. Only 'confirmed' clues and advances in the ARG will be documented. And again: If I missed something or something is wrong, please let me know!