I think I solved the blinking lamp puzzle
Outside Wake’s apartment!
Reposting this since my original post was removed for having a spoiler in the title.
I’ve seen a few threads about this lamp and people trying to make sense of the flashes, so I thought I’d share what I found.
I tried a few different approaches and tested several theories about how the flashes might be encoded. After comparing the patterns, I eventually landed on an interpretation that seems to fit both NG and NG+.
I'm not 100% sure these are the intended messages, but here's what I came up with:
Not sure if this has already been solved, but I think the two messages are:
NG: >!THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR!<
NG+: >!BARRY WHEELER WILL RETURN!<
The weird thing is that the lamp doesn’t send the Morse correctly. Each letter gets the right number of flashes, but it repeats the first symbol of that letter instead of using the full Morse pattern.
For example:
D should be -.., but becomes ---
A should be .-, but becomes ..
W should be .--, but becomes ...
Letters like H (....) and O (---) still come out correctly, since their symbols are all the same anyway. E and T work too. That’s why some parts look like normal Morse while others seem to go nowhere.
There also aren’t proper pauses between letters, so each word ends up as one continuous group.
Here’s the NG sequence, starting from THE:
THE -.....
DEATH ---...-....
OF ---....
THE -.....
AUTHOR .....-....---...
And NG+:
BARRY ----........----
WHEELER .................
WILL .............
RETURN ....-......--
That gives 46 flashes in NG and 59 in NG+. Depending on when you start watching, you’ll catch a different part of the loop first.
The NG+ message explains those really long runs of short flashes. Every letter in WHEELER starts with a dot in Morse, so the whole word turns into 17 short flashes. WILL becomes another 13.
One catch knowing this rule doesn’t let you uniquely decode everything. D, G, K and O all turn into ---, for example, and without letter gaps there are even more possible readings. So I wouldn’t claim these are the only sentences you could make fit the flashes. But applying the rule to both messages reproduces both sequences exactly.