Players who have been parachuting into free-to-play battle royale Apex Legends (Apelegs? Have we committed one way or the other on Apelegs yet?) have stumbled on something cute – a small plushie version of Nessie, hanging out in the water near Cascades.

Nessie may be hiding more secrets though, the devs have teased, leading to a fully fledged manhunt for the elusive cryptids.

There are many of these toys, which also made an appearance in the Titanfall games, scattered through the training level. However, it seems like the first person to (publicly) find a Nessy in the live battleground, King’s Canyon, was YouTuber Somewhat Awesome Games, who shows off its location in this video (from which I also took the header image for this post):



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Later, a Reddit user called KFranssens10 asked “What does ‘A Nessy Appears’ mean in the kill feed??” Sure enough, players have been noticing the message in between the stream of who killed whom, apparently since the game launched.

The culprit that causes the message appears to be shooting the toys. Who would do such a thing, I don’t know, but people have been spurred on in further plushie violence by cryptic (no pun intended) posts by the developers. Community manager Jay Frechette wrote “Let’s just say someone is on to something…” and associate producer Josh Medina followed up with: “How long till someone figures it out? Imma say I have faith in the community and say they get it in a week.”

So far, a spinoff subreddit called “nessysecrets” has documented a second Nessy, which appears in Skulltown after the first one is destroyed. Speculation based on an alleged datamine has it that there will be ten in total, which will need to be picked off one by one in order for…something to happen. What that something is is anyone’s guess.

It’s early days, but then again, the game only came out a week ago. If this is part of a tease for new content, it’ll probably pay off when the first season begins in March. How long it’ll take for the Nessies to be sold as adorable merchandise à la Overwatch’s pachimari is another question.