CUBES – A VRChat ARG Experience

Interstitial Space.

Interstitial Space is a VRChat world with a strange title and no clear direction. It presents a single marble-textured room with a staircase, columns, and stone walls. It is adorned with arches that designate blocked passages to nowhere. A blue skybox without clouds shows that the world exists with outdoor intent, as vines creep along one corner of the capsule. Sounds of nature and life play in the background.

We visited Interstitial Space over a year ago. On physical face value, it appeared to be someone’s meaningless world explicity named for something that might mean otherwise; the literal definition of “interstitial space” implies that there is something surrounding it. 

A lot of time was spent in this bizarre arena mulling over the meaning and attempting to establish purpose. Most people would have looked at it and given up within a few minutes to move onto something else.

We probed the room geometry by clicking and shoving our arms into the walls. We attempted to clip out of the environment to see if there was something that could be revealed–a technique we have used in other puzzle worlds to deduce if further content exists. There was absolutely nothing to be discerned. At the time, we wrote it off as an oddity and left it at that. Another weird VRChat world that someone made, likely bugged or corrupt, and forgotten about.

It was a weird fluke of an upload: how could something this basic be about 100 megabytes in size? Was it corrupt? Was it filled with nonsense? Is this world supposed to be philosophical? Does it mean that there is existence all around us no matter where we are? Is it rhetorical? An art piece? A meme?

Between then and December of 2023, trips to other worlds overshadowed the “experience” of Interstitial Space. Some of them contained obscure puzzles and challenges that took us a lot of deduction and brute forcing to solve. Sometimes we were flat out stuck, and sought external solutions. A few of them were with or without language, or were in something we didn’t read or speak fluently. On a few occasions we were forced to have an unsteady treaty with machine learning translation services to cobble together understanding and direction. (The prospect of using “AI” to do translations is tenuous and deserves a discussion elsewhere on another site.)

That was the month we revisited Interstitial Space out of sheer forgetfulness that we had been there before. It brought back memories of time we thought we wasted, unable to determine what obscure course of action would lead to the next thing. That is, until the ‘ladder incident’.

We’re still not entirely sure how it happened. Some mysterious triggerable action exists inside of the that causes a pathway to appear. Irregular shoe prints indicate travel, or at least a previous presence by someone. This effect is also entirely local, meaning that it is not visible to all users who are there. If you stumble upon it by accident, you can make a choice to leave your companions behind and venture into something unknown.

Calamity Code, The Hunt, and the Rabbit Hole

During the year between visits to Interstitial Space, one of the worlds we visited was Macavity Manor, part of an older VRChat contest referred to as The Hunt. The Hunt and its additional chapter were put together by a loose group of creators who called themselves ‘Calamity Code’. This group collectively organized and released some of the other worlds that are a part of the overall Hunt series: Quail’s Head Vineyard, Bumper Girdle Surplus Warehouse, and The Great Pug (yes, that Great Pug.)

A few of the creators behind Calamity Code are somewhat well known in the VRChat community: Naticus, marbleaide, and Owlboy. They are also immortalized in the first volume of What’s in the Box, one of the longest running trivia contest series worlds in VRChat (up to Volume 72 as of November 2023.) A part of The Hunt is Robogenics, Inc: a private-linked, but interesting plot-driven puzzle world with an element of meta-fiction. 

Our visit to Robogenics took us to the Calamity Code Discord, where we found marbleaide, the creator of Bumper Girdle Surplus Warehouse and Interstitial Space. Out of sheer frustration, curiosity, and thirst for some answers, we decided to contact them directly.

Honestly I did not expect a response at around 3:00 a.m. EST close to the middle of December on the Calamity Code Discord after about three years after peak activity on the server. Katchy put forth the query about our second visit to Interstitial Space on a very late Sunday night/Monday morning, and I think both us and marbleaide were a little surprised. The Discord hadn’t seen much activity since the end of season two of The Hunt ended in September of 2020. There had been a few questions and comments since by various contributors, rabbit hole scavengers and those with passing curiosity. The most activity the Discord saw was between April 2018 and the end of season two.

With a little bit of expected disappointment, specific answers were not given. Only more prompts and questions were supplied. “There is a world with a key for the pathway to go unlock the ladder … But that world is a lot of work…” one of the Calamity Code users told us. 

“It’s called Cubes.”

I had seen CUBES listed on the VRChat in-game world browser menu before. The brutalist preview graphic infers not much about what is inside it, except for passing cultural and design references to 1997’s “Cube”. The film takes some inspiration from the short film “The Cube”, produced and directed by Jim Henson in 1969 for NBC. The browser tags for the world don’t indicate much either: “game”, “Approved.” I hadn’t seen the trailer before and never went to the world before this as it doesn’t particularly stand out in the list.

CUBES was first released in May of 2019 by the user PK, and for that time it pushed the limits of what could be done in VRChat. 222 megabytes is still a pretty hefty world size today, but there are some that push almost one gigabyte in size.

The presence of it is mysterious as much as the internals of it are to the unaware.

As a scavenger hunt CUBES relies on being able to identify its contents as derived from the familiar. The scenes in each room are in some cases only vaguely suggestive of where to look for answers. VRChat users had to deduce where to go and what to do based on these clues. Sufficiently navigating the world on the whole required deducing answers. Each room inside has a code that has to be entered before advancing in any direction. The codes could be found in a relatively limited number of worlds all across VRChat. According to PK, at first “…[people] just looked at my maps, which had some but it took longer than expected to make the jump to others’ maps.” The video tutorial came later which only helped users in an incremental way.

Early on, users collaborated together on the official CUBES Discord. They shared information freely when the world was a thing to be explored. However, as more was found out, the race to complete CUBES was on. The discovery of the sheer volume of worlds associated with it was the turning point that caused groups to form. The principal squads were The Dragon Sisters, The Mad Hatters Tea Party, The Adventurer’s Hall, Lag Crew, and the CUBES Intelligence Agency, or CIA. The groups had under half a dozen members, with each searching for worlds having been provided only the hints within. Eventually clues of where to find codes would be posted for all to see, but those that were discovered by the CIA were documented as such.

Each group would complete CUBES by the end of 2019. Until 2023, only a minimal amount of stragglers came to the Discord asking for hints or posting spoilers.

I didn’t immediately visit the Discord associated with CUBES. One of the users on The Hunt Discord, GamingFrenzied, offered their assistance with solving it. They self identified as one of the few people that achieved a 100% completion. Instead I went for a second direct approach, and first stopped at a Discord run by PK called Break. After some back and forth there about my progress, they suggested that I join the official CUBES Discord. Of course I joined and immediately started digging in deep.

The Silver Stronghold

At first glance, CUBES feels big in VR. The environment is cold and prison-like. It is devoid of life and threatening at the same time. The only tip provided is a brief explanation of what the world is and how it works. The mechanism by which you do that however is not fully clear until you start exploring on your own.

My foray into CUBES started with several advantages. I had the benefit of already knowing what worlds have disarm codes in them thanks to GamingFrenzied. They run an ARG information collection world called Silver Stronghold 2.0; it contains a virtual computer which runs a map of CUBES. This computer also spawns portals to the required worlds, which eliminated a lot of manual work. I have two people who are already good puzzle solvers to help reveal codes. The only remaining challenge of finding codes would be on the larger worlds and the ones that have been privatized. Private worlds are not visible through the VRChat world browser nor through the web portal and require a direct link.

Originally all of the worlds within CUBES were public, available to anyone within VRChat. Over time, a few of the worlds turned private or disappeared altogether. The worlds that participated in being a part of CUBES were formed four or more years ago. They either relied on older SDK 2.0 mechanisms that no longer work due to more recent Unity updates(the platform VRChat runs on is currently on 3.0), or the creators might have felt some kind of shame or regret about their prior world creations and made them unavailable for the VRChat public to see.

Unfortunately this is not an uncommon occurrence with creativity. If you search for the phrase “I hate my art” you will find no shortage of results. It’s not something I don’t understand–if I felt that prior art no longer reflected my current skill, I too would probably feel justified in not allowing people to consume it out of concern of judgment. A consequence is that it destroys the publicly accessible historical record. In a time where digital preservation is so tenuous and corporatized, I’m not so sure it’s the best choice. You don’t need to look very hard or far to realize that digital preservation is a massive problem. Many games that required on-line services are no longer available to play, even if hard earned money was spent on them. It doesn’t matter if the base game price was paid, or if there were microtransactions, or subscriptions.

The Concept

At the time of CUBES’ inception, PK privately chose creators that might be complicit in the execution of the concept. The criteria was varied. Some world authors were popular and some were not known at all. Many of the worlds were selected because they were well constructed. Differing world styles was also a deliberate and important choice. Being a creator themselves, music and sound design also played a significant role. If the map was audibly uninteresting or boring, it didn’t meet their criteria for inclusion.

There is no unifying theme across all worlds that are referenced within CUBES. Some of them reference other video games I am not intimately familiar with. Others I have just passing cultural knowledge of, which did not help locate the codes at all. In one instance I had to watch a playthrough in order to deduce where the world author may have put theirs. Sometimes very unique schemes were used that I had not seen in many other worlds outside of some horror experiences. A few of the worlds are adventure based, and gave me some nostalgia about the days I grew up playing point-and-click quest games. A bulk of them are extremely artistic, and in a few cases the intensity of the art provided a challenge. Sometimes I thought about the world too abstractly, and in others, I hadn’t thought deeply enough. 

The worlds associated with CUBES are of various qualities, by 2023-2024 standards. It is impossible to look at the worlds through 2019-2020 eyes, but I can imagine that some of them might have been artistically and technically impressive for that time. For modern times, some of them are still remarkably quite good, even if a little finicky because of the SDK change. 

Unfortunately, this does mean that while there are a bunch of awesome concepts and brilliant executions, some of them are less so. A couple of the worlds are very rough and it’s hard to imagine what they would have looked like with earlier SDKs in effect. Their mechanisms have not translated well to later versions, or they were designed to evoke a certain nostalgia for a subject or game and not necessarily provide a cohesive polished experience. It could also be that six years ago world making tools were not widely understood and there were less extremely talented creators.

Design and Technique

Many of the codes can be found through careful searching, even with VRChat using modern versions of Unity. PK made some wise decisions regarding the futureproofing of CUBES in that even if some worlds do not work or are unavailable, the overall solvability of it is not changed. This is also true about the mechanisms of codes being hidden across the various external worlds; the creators did their individual best to also futureproof the way codes could be obscured and discovered while trying to not create features that might break the SDK functions. 

There is a little bit of back-and-forthing between CUBES and the worlds that the rooms are associated with. In some cases you may find hints as to where to look for the codes within the worlds, but in others the reference only identifies the place to visit, not the place to look. It is possible to do a lot of exploration beforehand now that the world hunt itself is no longer a factor. Some of the rooms will provide a hint so that a brute force approach isn’t necessary to find what you’re looking for.

Going through CUBES brought back a feeling of nostalgia for me; back to the days where I would sit down with a new game, and answers were never explicitly provided by sources–only hints were allowed except through massive strategy guides and hint line phone numbers. PK and a few others on the CUBES Discord did their best to only give me enough information to work things out on my own, only narrowing the scope of the hint when I felt like I was really, truly out of ideas. Despite being four years past the prime of CUBES, I still had that feeling of adventure and searching for clues to solve the riddles.

In some cases puzzles were so abstract that I did not at all understand what I was doing, and I admit that I consulted the particular world creator’s assistance because of some misinterpretation. When I did this there were still no easy answers and even though that was frustrating, I appreciated it not being given away. It made me feel like I was working up to something, accomplishing it.

Even though The Silver Stronghold exists and a basic map is out there in the wild, I still created my own. I documented solutions on pen and paper, scribbled notes, used spreadsheets and modeled with CAD software. It felt satisfying to plan out my own fastest, most efficient route to get from the start to the end while still getting all of the secrets needed for the conclusion. I documented unique locations, and used hints from the CIA to get the codes I was missing. Sometimes I enlisted friends to help find them, which made it more fun.

From the bizarre start to finish, I’m a little sad that the six weeks I have spent working on CUBES is coming to an end. The amount of effort put into locating all of the secrets; creating a navigation system; feeling the tension of the environmental dangers; having that first-time fear of being precise with the code entry; knowing that each successive room traveled creates a bigger and bigger chance of making an error and a very appropriate conclusion makes this one of the best VRChat experiences I have had to date. I haven’t had that old school adventure feeling in a very long time, and CUBES made that happen for me.

As for the end, I really don’t want to spoil anything in case you are able and want to go through it on your own. CUBES does have an actual ending, which in my view makes it a full fledged game in VRChat.

Modern Problems Require Modern Solutions

PK did a great job with the world, adding in a lot of visual and auditory variety along with appropriate redundancy to ensure the world would still work way beyond its intended lifespan. It is a little bit unfortunate that as of SDK 3.0, there are some issues visiting CUBES. Some people who participated in the initial hunt find they can no longer join, and the people that helped me find some of the codes are also unable to visit themselves. If you are able to get it to load for you, it’s absolutely worth your time, especially if you’re looking for a large-scale VRChat scavenger hunt or are into ARGs.

There are some caveats about the way the world works with VRChat having updated from SDK 2.0 to 3.0:

• Be consistent with the way you operate doors and ladders.
• Be deliberate/intentional with entering disarm codes.
• There are some worlds that were updated and no longer contain codes or mechanisms to reveal them. It is not game-breaking and CUBES can still be finished without them.
• If you’re having trouble visiting CUBES, try disabling IPv6. 
• There are at least two rooms where any code that is typed in does not work. It is also not game-breaking and you can finish CUBES without them.
• Some codes you encounter in different worlds may be approached from different directions, so if one doesn’t work, try reversing it.
• Don’t give up! Some of the codes are just hard to find and require a little more thought.

ABOUT PK and CUBES:

CUBES was developed and designed by the user PK. Their personal Discord is one called Break, a virtual and digital music project established in September of 2021. Some of their works can be seen in worlds such as God is a DJ, Silent Dawn, Halcyon, MUNCH, and We Move at Night.