Hey everyone! Hope some of you might have seen my post that got deleted, but whatever. While the whole subreddit is just spamming the same stuff over and over and sucking it dry, an unexpected 197 comeback just happened here, damn. Do you guys even remember that puzzle? It was completely useless, but yeah - it’s back! And now it’s not just one.
Alright, let’s get into it.
On the new de_cache remake, in the “squeaky” spot there are some cabinets with numbers that are out of order, and among them you can spot three numbers in a row. If you convert those numbers you get:
*HHHCHELLGGECCCGGCEBCBLHCELH*
8 8 8 3 8 5 12 12 77 5 3 3 3 7 7 3 5 2 3 2 12 8 3 5 12 8
Do you see anything here besides pure schizo theories? Exactly - CHELL was hidden in there. That’s gonna be important later.
We found 5 schizo dates in total, but we’re only revealing 3 of them.
THE LEGENDARY 197 COMEBACK
In the “haven” position (or whatever it’s called) there’s a cabinet without doors that has the numbers 7 and 17. Don’t you see 197 right there? And if I tell you that 17.07 is the 197th dayof the year… well, that’s our first schizo date, which by itself means absolutely nothing.
Now it gets a bit confusing how the map analysts jumped to November 3, but I’ll try to explain what I think happened. A little earlier I was calling the box with Chell the “Chellbox”. Someone analyzing the map found the November 3 date through the word “Chell”. Most likely they remembered the Steam Controller reveal where Portal 2 was shown, and the last launch of that stream was on November 3 at 0:41. So yeah, that’s quite possibly our third schizo date.
The second one is May 22. I honestly have no idea how they found that one.
Maybe I just gave you some hopium, but don’t get too excited 😂
As I wanted to say earlier: please don’t fully trust these maps. Valve is 100% just trolling us. However, their hints can still be real - who knows!
This is an extremely packed map and there’s still a ton left to find. We still haven’t cracked the football poster on Cache, for example.
So if anyone wants to help - please don’t make separate threads on the sub. Write in the Gabe Follower chat instead. That’s where I get almost all the solutions from - really smart people are chilling there.
Also, just to be clear: this is not an announcement date or anything like that. Yes, they used some assets from HLX in a couple of places, but that’s not important right now.