Solution 2022

Always

0. The first thing to solve is the title of the whole riddle. Always is a reference to the common saying in the online riddle community that goes "it's always morse". This alludes to how common morse code is in riddles. The title implies that this weekly will be a themed riddle centered around morse.

1. You are presented with an 8x8 grid containing album art. You are also given the hint of "duration" and three different thresholds. The level is asking you to look up the lengths of the albums and then separate them into three different categories. You can use google lens or tineye to find the albums with no title on the cover.

Doing this gives you ternary code, however it is not base 3. The 8x8 grid is not important and you're meant to read it as a continuous line. An avid riddlemaster and a music enthusiast can notice that the different groups seem to contain short, average and long length albums. The short/long binarility is a simple indication of morse code.

Morse is actually a ternary system if spaces aren't provided. Short is dot, average is dash, long is space. The full ternary string is 1211120012000200020120021021201002111200120001202010212001201020.

Plugging this into the enigmatics brute tool gives you the answer: toussaintlouverture.

The album names: https://i.imgur.com/aKLAxgZ.jpg

2. The page title name "Forest of Giant Trees" is a subtle attack of the titans reference, however the only important thing is "trees". Marselo is also just for scenery. Understanding that this is a themed puzzle you can google "morse trees". This gives you a way to get morse code by moving left for a dot and right for a dash.

The symbols on the page image are your guide for moving left and right. The arrow leads the path. You are meant to read the symbols as if you were actually walking along the path and marking every turn you made.

The source has a hint saying "sinistEr/dexTer". This is latin for lEft/righT. Since the morse tree or huffman coding for intellectuals isn't entirely standard, I had to state which direction is dot or dash.

Decoding all symbols give you the answer: paranoidpeasant

Alternatively and canonically you can use the website quipqiup.com to extract the answer.

3. Here you have a 26x50 grid containing what seems to be ciphertext. Most of the letters are actually there to distract you. Using the hint "lines" and the fact that there are 26 rows in the grid you can safely assume that the 26 letters of the english alphabet are in play somehow.

Read each line individually by focusing on the letter that corresponds to the specific row a1z26 style. On the first line you have aaa a, which is actually meant to be read as dash dot. Once again it is morse code in play.

Doing that for each line gives you the answer: dotdotslashapostatereturns. However that itself is not the answer, it's actually just apostatereturns.

4. Okay this is kino. The title is Nino which means ni no, the two japanese characters that are presented on the page. At first it might seem like it's simple morse, but using standard morse won't work.

There's a subtle hint saying "lang=jp" in the source code that only the best html5-heads can decipher. The japanese characters are not there arbitrarily, instead it's an indication to use japanese morse code "wabun code".

Dcode has a wabun code decoder. Ni is dash, no is dot, which you can determine by their shapes. The answer is: amakishiyokitare.

5. This level has 5 lines of letters. The page title "form" simply means that the answer will be acquired through visual form in the way of shapes. Actual cryptographical decoding won't be in play here.

By now you should have realised that the theme here is morse, so just turn each line of letters into morse. The page source tells to ignore spaces.

--.--.--.--.---.--.....--.....--.-----.....--.---.
--.-.---.--..--.--.---.--.---.--.-----.-------.-.-
--..----.--.-.-.--.---.--.....--.-----.....----.--
--.-.---.--.--..--.---.--.------.-----.-------.-.-
--.--.--.--.---.--.....--.------....--.....--.---.

Focusing on the dots you can see that the answer is: kinoplex.

6. On the final level you are greeted by Asuka and Rei and also some spaceless morse strings. The page title moon and sun is another reference that leads you to think about binary systems.

You're not actually meant to decode spaceless morse here, so hold back on dm'ing Yoon. With some analysis you can see that each line length is divisible by 8, so just treat dot as 0 and dash as 1 to get valid binary to ascii. Decoding gives you: thegarnettoucan, which leads you to the final answer page which is "itisalwaysmorseexceptwhenitisnot".