Darkspore, the gloomier sequel to Maxis’ 2008 Spore, seems to have gotten its own alternate reality game. HelpEDNA.com surfaced on the web recently and is helping unearth the universe of Darkspore. Slated for a 2011 release, Darkspore is dubbed “a fast-paced, sci-fi Action-RPG in which you battle across alien worlds” and is loosley based on Spore, the previous title in the series.

Help EDNA appears to center around Earth’s first contact with a mysterious alien race that is seeking help against the Darkspore and Exponential DNA, a substance used by the Darkspore to devastate the galaxy. The whole adventure of Help EDNA is traversed through a text-based interface controlled by an artificial intelligence. Players must guess at commands in order to unravel the mystery behind this tantalizing bit of the Darkspore universe.

The site is frequently changing and initially helped figure out the time and location of Maxis’ Comic-Con panel. Other puzzles have included figuring out the chemical compositions of adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine (the bases of DNA). One puzzle even required analyzing 12,000 digits of pi in order to unmask a message detailing how all these puzzles have simply been a test of intelligence.

Does that mean the real information is yet to come?