Game Theory - 7 Years of Bendy Lore

Episode Date: September 28, 2026

Bendy and the Cage may be taking its sweet time getting here, but we’ve got PLENTY of ink to spill while we wait! Join us as we revisit EVERY Bendy Theory we’ve ever made, from our earliest predictions to the theories that aged… questionably.

This is every Bendy theory we've ever done. I have been excitedly waiting for Bendy and the Cage's release for over two years. It was supposed to come out in 2024. Then it got delayed to 2025, then 2026, and then the Steam page got updated, changing it from 2026 to just coming soon. So who knows when we'll get to see these tantalizing tunes again? But because I've missed them so much, and I wanted to prepare myself for when this thing finally does drop, I decided to dust off the old game theory videos of law,

go all the way back to Bendy's beginning. Some of them have aged pretty well, and others, yeah, not so much. But that's all part of the fun of theorizing. So, join me in this adventure through the epic highs and lows of Bendy theorizing thus far, and maybe it'll hold us over just a little longer until the game finally releases.

Matt, take it away. Hello, internet. Welcome to Game Theory. You've heard of the talkies. Well, this show pioneered the Talkie Too Muchies. And today we're flashing back to a simpler time, A time before video games and YouTube, before Marvel and Star Wars, a time before, dare I say it, fidget spinners. That's right, loyal theorists. Today we're flashing back to the years between 1920 and 1940, a truly simpler time,

in which the US just so happened to be thrown into an economic crisis during the Great Depression, and Hitler rose to power overseas, thus sparking the beginnings of World War II. But hey, look on the bright side, at least there was no such thing as FNAF. In such dark times, the world was a desperate need of entertainment. They needed a reason to laugh. And thus, animation exploded onto the scene. I mean, sure, animation had been around since 1900. And if you really want to get technical, could date back as far as the invention of the Thoma Trope from 1825, but it was this era, the 1920s to the 1940s when history entered what's known as the Golden Age of Animation.

And it's this world where we find ourselves in for today's theory. The world of Bendy and the Ink Machine. Now, if you haven't been watching a lot of let's plays lately, this one might've slipped past ya. It's a small indie title told in five parts, because at this point, it's always five parts. With the first two currently available and a third one on the way shortly, there isn't a whole lot to do in every chapter. But what it lacks in gameplay,

Bendy makes up for in style and story, putting you into the throwback world of the earliest days of animation. In the game, you play as Henry, a retired cartoonist invited to come back to his old studio after 30 years. The invite comes from a man named Joey Drew, your former boss at the company Joey Drew Studios. Inside, you find that everything is abandoned. And by putting the bits of lore together collected from audio logs sprinkled throughout the game,

you learn that Joey was experimenting with ways of bringing his cartoon creations to life. And apparently, his experiments were a success. The company's signature character, a little devil named Bendy, is now alive and very, very dangerous. You also learned that some employees, like Sammy Lawrence, Joey Drew's music department director, worship these living cartoons as gods, forming what seems to be a good old-fashioned But the believers must honor their savior. I must have him notice me. For our Lord is calling to us, my little sheep.

The time of sacrifice is at hand. Besides Bendy, there's also Boris the Wolf walking around and Bendy's girlfriend Alice Angel, who looks like she'll be playing a bigger part in chapter 3. And honestly, that's about it for now. Now many of you have been asking me on Twitter, at Mat Pat G.T. As well as during G.T. Live to do a theory about this game, to try and predict what's going on. But after doing the research, I think I can do you one better.

Instead of just trying to put together a rough plot summary, I think I can reveal the true identity of the main character of the game. Joey Drew, the mastermind animator, obsessed with bringing his creations to life. Because here's the thing. I believe he's inspired by a real person, and that the events happening in the world of Bendy actually mirror events that occurred at one of the top animation studios during this golden age of animation. Joey Drew in-game is playing the role of perhaps the single most important pioneer of animated entertainment,

a man whose name has sadly been almost completely forgotten by history, a man by the name of Max Fleischer. Now, seeing Bendy and Boris, you probably immediately think of Walt Disney and the old Mickey Mouse cartoons. I mean, we're all trained to think that Walt Disney was the pioneer of this style of animation, that he's the guy who made cartoons into what they are today, but that's because he purposely planted those thoughts into your head. And that's not an exaggeration. If you read about Walt Disney, you start to learn that he was a master of marketing himself.

Taking credit for things that weren't his idea to begin with and using the media to sell his story to listeners who didn't know any better. No, if you're looking for the true masterminds responsible for helping to shape the early world of animation, it was Max Fleischer, with his brother Dave Fleischer working from their animation studio in New York. Way back in 1914, when Walt was still only a 10th, teenager, Max Fleischer invented rotoscoping, a technique that allowed an artist to trace over live-action footage to create more realistic-looking animated movements. This was a huge advancement, allowing cartoons to be drawn faster and with a higher quality of movement. It also gave rise to the

first of the major Fleischer-Brother series known as Out of the Inkwell, in which live-action footage of Max was combined with his animated characters as they literally came to life off the page to interact with and explore the real world. But the Fleischer's didn't see. stop there. Ask anyone what the first cartoon to feature synchronized sound and music was, and they'll usually say Steamboat Willie, Mickey Mouse's monumental debut from back in 1928. But it was Max, not Walt Disney, who was the first to combine sound and animation in his series of shorts called song cartoons back in 1924, four years earlier than Steamboat Willie. These were those famous follow-the-bouncing ball sing-alongs that you've probably seen or heard of. Well, you have Max Fleischer to thank for those. But according to rumors, when Steamboat Willie launched, Walt Disney, despite being four years late to the party, actively tried to discourage reporters from mentioning these past sound videos in their articles, thus allowing Disney to claim all the credit for being the first to use these techniques. And thus began the animation feud with the Disney's on the West Coast in Hollywoodland,

going up against Max and his brother back east in New York, an animation feud that would last in the industry for the next two decades. At their prime, the Fleischer Studio would be a premier producer of animated cartoons for theaters, with Walt Disney Productions being their chief competition. And yet, as I'm sure you can guess, it was the Disney's who came out on top. Their marketing smarts and location in California amongst the growing movie industry ultimately buried Fleischer's business and erased his name from the annals of animation history. But what's any of this have to do with an incomplete indie game hits? Well, first, think about what you just heard. Even with animation in its infancy, Max Fleischer's work without of the inkwell was literally bringing animated characters into the real world. Just like Joey Drew in his ink machine, a man who literally wrote a book on bringing images to life,

as we see in Chapter 1's The Illusion of Living. It's also clear that Joey Drew's animation studio has fallen to ruin by the time your character visits it, a detail that reflects Max Fleischer's eventual bankruptcy, ultimately losing his business to Walt Disney, the man who stole the credit from him. At this point, I don't get what Joey's plan is for this company. The animation sure aren't being finished on time anymore. Think about it. If this game was truly meant to pair,

parallel Walt Disney animation, then why would it happen in an abandoned studio? And why would the characters be out for revenge? I mean, Disney won everything. Disney runs the world. Max Fleischer was the one who was left with a crumbling business and a name lost to obscurity. So if there's anyone out there who would have a chip on their shoulder and be out for revenge, like you see Joey Drew and Bendy and the ink machine, well, it would be him. But we're not even to the good stuff yet. One look at Bendy's design and I'm sure you immediately think of Mickey Mouse. Right, small, mischievous character with big white gloves? Well,

Max Fleischer had his version of the character too. Bimbo, a tubby black and white cartoon dog complete with big white hands. One of the five main recurring characters that his studio would produce during their run. A character whose personality is a much more direct parallel to Bendy than Mickey's is. Mickey in his early cartoons tends to be the good guy, the one who's having to fight back against bullies. But Bimbo is actively a troublemaker. So much so that one of his most infamous appearances,

1930s, Swing You Sinners, is entirely about undead spirits punishing him for his misdeeds. Chicken, you used to steal. He's constantly chasing women and pulling pranks. Bimbo's behavior just seems to be the stronger match for what you'd expect from a little devil like Bendy. And the parallels aren't just with Bimbo. There's also a direct relation between Max's real-life characters and Bendy's girlfriend,

Alice Angel. Now, admittedly, we don't know too much about Alice. She was just introduced in Chapter 2 through one poster and one audio log. But what we do know is that she appears to be a female devil creature like Bendy, who somehow became an angel, like a Looney Tunes-esque Lucifer, who happens to sing. We also know that she's drawn to be beautiful. Not only does she just physically look pretty, but she's also wearing a tight black falter top dress, something that back during this era of animation would have been seen as sexy and scandalous.

We also know via the audio logs that Sammy Lawrence expects her to surpass Bendy's popularity. People really seem to enjoy my Alice Angel voice. Sammy says she may be as popular as Bend Me someday. Long story short, this ain't your mama's mini mouse, but it is your mama's Betty Boop, one of the Fleischer Studios' most famous creations. Betty Boop matches exactly with Alice. She's a singer who was introduced into the cartoons to be Bimbo's love interest, surpassed him to become way more popular, and was considered to be an attractive, sexy character back in the day.

So much so, in fact, that her design had to be toned down in 1934 when the government started cracking down on the sexual content in films. Oh yeah, and she also happens to wear black halter top dresses. Well, eventually red, but you know, this is black and white cartoon. And if you're wondering how a human woman would become the love interest of a cartoon dog, well, get this. Bette Bop actually started as a dog, a French poodle in fact. It's kind of disturbing, really. Her long dog ears became her long poop earrings. It's kind of gross. Anyway, she's also the matching species of her love interest, just like the ink machine's two little devils. But it's stylistically where we see these two worlds collide the moment. During Fleischer's War against Disney, two styles of animation developed. Disney's West Coast style was much more family friendly, with characters behaving much more realistically, and in settings that happen to be brighter and cheerier.

The New York style, Max's work, is much grittier, twisted, aimed at more mature audiences with character bodies contorting like rubber bands. It was a looser animation style that felt like improv, where characters aren't so tightly bound to the rules of reality. It was a lot like the YouTube animations that you see from channels like Gonzo SSM, psychic pebbles, Pebbles, Ony NG, and of course, Ego Raptor.

The settings were grungier, taking place in cities, sewers, inside buildings rather than outdoors. And the topics dealt with were racier. Just like Betty Boop, a character made to be a sex symbol that has literally persisted across generations. In short, these were scarier cartoons with darker, sometimes even hellish imagery. And this is the aesthetic that seems to embody the game. Joey's animation studio is a tight, confined space filled with industrial pipes and dripping ink. dark and shadowy. It's literally a hell on earth. And yet for all the jump scares, what's creepiest in the game right now is the cult.

The big reveal that ends chapter 2 is that Sammy is trying to sacrifice you to their ink god Bendy. He's clearly in a cult worshipping these living, breathing cartoon characters. But in this case, truth is actually stranger than fiction. Because there's an unexplained recurring theme of cult activity throughout the Fleischer Studio roster. In Betty Boop is My Palm Red, we see Bimbo and Cocoa the Clown worship a shadowy witch figure. A shadow, mind you, that never gets referenced or explained, it's not a joke in any way. They're just there, bowing to it, and presumably it gives Bimbo his fortune-telling powers. Then there's Bedi Boop Red Hot Mama where a fireplace suddenly, for literally no reason, transforms into the literal mouth of hell.

Also, let me just say how creepy it is that every Betty Boop cartoon requires a scene that shows her with some sort of strong backlight, so you can see her legs through the dress. I mean, come on guys, find a magazine or something. And here we all thought that anime was creepy. But perhaps the single most disturbing, bizarre, inexplicable example of this is in the cartoon Bimbo's Initiation, where our lovable dog Bimbo gets locked in the sewer by Mickey Mouse, Max clearly showing his grudge against Disney there, when all of a sudden he's confronted with a bunch of cultists.

No joke, actual cultists asking him, Want to be a member? Want to be a member? No. When Bimbo refuses, he's suddenly tortured with all sorts of horrific punishment. including a knife cutting through a spinning room to stab him repeatedly. Want to be a member? Want to be a member? No.

Over and over again, he's asked to join until he's finally had enough punishment and says yes, at which point it's revealed that the cult is made up entirely of Betty Boob's. What the? What? What? So are you saying Betty Boob created a bunch of clones? That there's a cult that worships herself? Or maybe you're saying that when a stranger asks you to join a cult, you should absolutely say yes, because there's gonna be a hot girl in it for ya.

Regardless, it's weird and it's creepy, and I have no idea how people back in the early 30s found it funny, but I think this scene gives us a really strong indication of what's going on in Pendi and the Ink Machine. So in the words of Good Mythical Morning, let's talk about that. Between the gritty setting, the failing company, the desire to bring cartoons to life,

the mischievous white-gloved mascots and matching female partners, a boss with a chip on his shoulder, and the recurring cult imagery, there is little to no doubt that Max Fleischer is, in fact, the real-life Joey Drew. So then what? What's all this mean for the game? What's the point of doing this? Well, if this theory proves true, first, we'll see Alice take center stage as the game goes on. Like Betty Boop, we'll hear about how our popularity skyrocketed, surpassing Bendy. And you can expect, Bendy probably won't be too happy about that,

creating some infighting between the characters, with you stuck in the middle. I'd also hazard to guess that we haven't seen the last of that cult. Just like we saw in Bimbo's initiation, how intense would it be to learn that these characters are using the ink machine to replicate themselves? Building a cult consisting of hundreds of horrifying Bendy and Alice clones. And lastly, just like Sammy is an ink monster, it wouldn't surprise me to see Joey Drew as the real identity behind the first Bendy, fused together with his creation by the cursed ink machine,

literally consumed with his desire to bring cartoons to life, just like Max Fleischer desired to bring his cartoons to life. and was eventually consumed by his desire to get revenge on Disney. Segway to Bendy Chapter 3. Everyone's favorite ink demon is back, and he's brought with him more fetch quests than you can shake a plunger at. And while sucking inky Botox out of blobs and chasing Looney Tunes rejects around with an ink spewing Tommy Gun was awesome and all,

Chapter 3 delivered on what I'd been really waiting for with this game. Story! We got a better idea of why these characters want to escape the ink. Do you know what it's like? Living in the dark puddles? It's abusing and screaming well of voices. Clarity on the hatred-fueled relationship between Bendy and Alice. See those grinning demons?

Let's remove them. Shall we hate it when I do that? And through one incredible Easter egg, we got a strong hint that Henry was the original creator of Bendy the cartoon character. On the plus side, I've got a new character. I think people are going to love. We're finally getting enough meat. on this theory bone to start gnawn like a hungry Boris.

And let me tell you, there are still plenty of mysteries hidden in these sepia toned hallways. But as I went through the game's three chapters again to brainstorm for this theory, there was one moment that I had completely forgotten about. One screen, so short and so random, that it had gotten lost in the shuffle. And yet something that is so important that the meatley decided to put it as one of the first big unexplained moments in the game. So I decided to look deeper into it. Try to decipher what it meant.

And once I did, it started to occur to me that that screen is the linchpin of the entire Bendy story. The place where it all begins, as well as the place where today's theory begins. Way, way back in Chapter 1, ex-animator Henry receives the letter beckoning him to return to his old workplace, Joey Drew Studios. And he does what any good horror protagonist would do, blindly stumble into an abandoned building with absolutely nothing to protect himself. Once inside, Henry activates the mysterious ink machine and unleashes the horrible ink monsters that plague the rest of his journey, down memory lane. The first chapter ends with Henry getting chased by Bendy, falling down a shoot, and passing out in a room full of coffins and pentagrams. Family-friendly entertainment with merchandise available at your nearest hot topic,

ladies and gentlemen. But as Henry loses consciousness, we see three screens. The ink machine, Bendy attacking, and a third shot of a wheelchair. Now, the first two are pretty self-explanatory, but it's that third one that feels completely random and out of place, the wheelchair. Clearly, it's important to the story of this game because of the way it's placed there, but because we've yet to see any other obvious hints towards it and the length of time between chapter releases, I think most of us had either written it off completely or forgotten about it. But when I started to dig deeper, I came to realize that the clues as to what this had to do with

the game's story had been hiding in plain sight the whole time. Take a look at Bendy. I mean, take a real good look at Bendy. While I was searching through character entries, researching for this theory on the Bendy Wiki, some of the monster's imagery started to jump out at me. The more I look, the more I started to realize, Bendy Limp's. If you really want proof, look at his chasing animation when you remove the lighting effects from the game.

He's got a really strong limp, and it's not just me making this up, or cheaply made animations. Look at his character model on the wiki. One leg is perfectly normal, but the other leg is twisted inward. Most of us have overlooked this detail because we're usually running away from Bendy in low light. But when you actually stop and look at him,

This element of his design is unmistakable. That wheelchair and that flashback was his. In those three flashes, we're being told a complete story. The ink machine arrives and is used on someone who couldn't walk. Someone who is bound to a wheelchair. Thanks to the ink, that person now walks. And happens to be the personification of the murderous ink demon Bendy. But hey, there's no denying.

They walk. So that begs the question. Who is in that wheelchair? Who is Bendy? Well, I think all us players have been suspecting that it's Joey Drew, and this revelation gives a bunch of evidence to that hypothesis. Not only does Bendy have an inky human hand, but throughout the chapters,

we've seen how every other major character from the audiologs has been transformed into an ink monster. In chapter two, we saw composer Sammy Lawrence longed to escape the inky prison of his body. Then in chapter three, we got confirmation that Susie Campbell, original voice actress for Alice Angel, actually becomes Alice when touched by the ink demon. Even the projectionist Norman Polk becomes, comes uncreatively enough, the projectionist monster.

So really, of the recurring audio log characters were only left with the option of two. Either Janitor Wally Franks, who's appeared in all three chapters, or the mastermind behind the whole operation, Joey Drew himself. Either one could potentially be Bendy's true identity. And of the two, chapter three all but confirms that Bendy equals Joey. At the beginning of the chapter, if you take the demon path, one of the major differences that you get access to a tape recording made by Joey. In it, he says,

Why, with enough belief, you can even cheat death itself. Now, that is a beautiful and positively silly thought. Sure, his fixation on beating death could just be a god complex, but it could also be the fact that he himself is dying, that whatever disease has put him in this wheelchair is slowly eating away at his life, and that through the ink machine he'll be able to beat his impending death. And I'm not just looking for connections where they don't, exist, the Chapter 3 trailer reinforces the idea that Bendy the cartoon character is also cheating death.

The trailer begins with an incredible short cartoon between Boris and Bendy in a cemetery. But intermixed in these antics is this skeleton who keeps harassing Bendy for no apparent reason. It comes out of nowhere, seemingly at random. So in a game where there are so few characters already and a lot of it is highly symbolic, why is this thing there? Because the skeleton is symbolic of death. Bendy is being threatened by a symbol of death. Notice what leg the skeleton grabs.

It's the same one causing the Bendy monster's limb. At the end of the cartoon, Bendy is scared off by the skeleton. He is literally physically trying to escape from death. But most importantly of all, who wrote and directed this little cartoon? Joey Drew himself. This cartoon, Tombstone Picnic, is him telling his story, living with the fear of impending death, constantly being dragged down by his diseased leg,

The ink machine could do what belief couldn't. Becoming one with Bendy saved his life. Which leaves us one final question then, who is Wally Franks? Well, I guess there's technically two questions. Who is Wally Franks and why aren't you subscribed to this channel yet? Before I go to answer that first question, I challenge you speed demons to hit the sub button and then let me know either Alice or Bendy in the comments before this old-timey screen countdown runs out.

Three, two, one. One, incredible work there, guys. Thank you so much for subscribing, or if you're already subscribed to the channel, thank you so much for putting up with that kind of obnoxious break. I know that these things can be frustrating, but it is, statistically speaking, the single best way for driving new subscribers to a channel at this point, and I'm really eager to get the fierce community to 90 million subscribers before the end of the year.

Wait, did I say 90 million? I meant 9 million, sorry, that was a typo. Though 90 million would be okay, too, but no, let's set our sights at 9 million for now, okay? Anyway, thank you guys so much. Digression over. Now, on to the identity of Wally Franks. At this point, we know the fates of pretty much every other character. So what happened to Wally, the janitor? The guy whose own motto in this game is,

I'm out, yeah, I'm out of it. Well, I would bet you that we find out in chapter 4 that Wally is Boris, specifically the perfect Boris that Alice Angel is so eager to get her hands on. And no, it's not only because of process of elimination, though, sure, that helps out in a game with a limited number of characters. No, there's tons of evidence to suggest this. Even though his official title is Janitor, details him throughout the game reveal that he's much more like the studio's mechanic.

Look here at the ink machine blueprints on the wall. Even though they're four Joey Drew, underneath you can see written, Attention Wallie Franks. In other words, Wally is the one responsible for handling the installation of this machine. Additionally, in his audio logs, he laments the breaking pipes as though he's the one who's forced

to fix them. Can I tell you what? If one more at this pipe burst, I'm out of here. And in chapter one, we learned that. Joey had each one was donate something from our workstation. We put them on these little pedestals in the break room. The six items donated are a gear, a bendy doll, Joey Drew's book, an ink jar, a record, and a wrench.

Of those, only the gear and wrench make any sort of sense to associate with Wally, and both of those are mechanically oriented. It's not like there's a plunger or a broom or some other stereotypical janitorial item in the mix. The reason why all of this mechanical stuff matters is what we see Boris do in chapter 3. When the door into the factory to get stuck, Boris knows how to crawl into the vents and open the jam door. There's no gameplay here, so it's a weird thing to just include in the story elements of the game, unless it's meant to tell us something. The act of crawling into the walls and opening a jam door is something a mechanic working at the studio would be able to do, but that's not all. In a teaser available on Game Jolt, the Meatley included an image of Boris holding a wrench,

again, pointing to a possible connection with the mechanic of the building, i.e. the one who installed the ink machine in the first place and dedicated their wrench to the sacrifice altar, aka Wally Franks. But the final nail in the coffin comes from the Meatley himself, who posted on Twitter shortly after the release of Chapter 2, quote, Why would Wally leave his keys in the trash for 30 years? It's almost as if he never got a chance to go back for them, end quote.

to the fact that Wally Franks met with an untimely end. And in this game, we've never actually seen anyone die. They've only become infected with the ink, transforming into ink monsters or ink characters. So unless a new monster is introduced in Chapter 4, which is pretty late in the game's story to be introducing new characters, that leaves us with only one option. Wally Franks is Boris.

The one human character whose fate has been left unaccounted for becomes the one cartoon character who we don't know the origins of. So, there you have it, theorists. My predictions as to the major reveals of both Chapter 4 and Chapter 5. Didn't even need to wait three months. In my estimation, Chapter 4 will center around the Boris Wally reveal as we try to rescue our hapless dog from the clutches of the evil Alice. And then Chapter 5 will bring us into the finale,

where we confront Bendie and his machine one final time, only to learn that it was Joey Drew all along, A victim of his own attempt to cure the life-threatening illness that afflicted him. Which honestly would wrap up the story if there weren't one big question mark hanging over all of this. Who is Henry in these events? Was he just an animator? Just the creator of the characters who would go on to be abused by Joey and his schemes? Or does Henry have some more sinister motives?

Alice says that she knows why he's here at the end of Chapter 3, but do we know why he's there? as the player? His motivations are still really unclear. Recently, Chapter 4, the penultimate episode of this five-part series came out, and hoo-hoo-hoo, boy! What a difference a few months make! Out went the exhausting series of fetch quests from Chapter 3, and in came, stealth, mini-games, actual gameplay, a barbecue! What the heck is this? And not just one, but two boss battles. In fact, the game had a sing double everywhere, double Alice, that is. After proving herself to be a little

devilish in chapter three. Ah! Jesus! Holy bull! Chapter 4 ends with Alice Angel, finally getting her comeuppance at the hands of Alice Angel. What? Excuse me?

Excuse me what? Great question, me from the past. That's exactly what I aim to answer today. Now, obviously, the reveal of a second Alice Angel accompanied by a mecha Boris was a huge twist that no one saw coming. But it was also the clue that we needed to figure this whole thing out. Because for all the time that we online have spent theorizing about Bendy, we've also been ignoring the other title character here,

the ink machine, specifically how that ink machine works. And between the twist ending of Chapter 4, some hidden files in the game, and most importantly of all, changes to the first three chapters now that they've been remastered, will finally be able to piece together what's really going on in this game, and the surprise reveals that'll bring Chapter 5 to a close.

Let's start at the end. The shocking reveal of Alice Croft and Mechrist, of Boris. Watch everyone on YouTube play through this chapter and we're all shook by this moment. What? What? Boi-deal Alice Angel, hold on. But in retrospect, we shouldn't have been. Two Alice Angels shouldn't have been so surprising.

We've literally been walking through halls of dismembered Boris's, uh, boor-eye, uh, for months now. I mean, the first big reveal way back in Chapter 1 is the Dead Boris. A big moment of Chapter 3 is dedicated to escort missioning of Boris through a swamp of Dead Borai. And yet all of a sudden, we're like, Whoa, there are two Alice's? How was that possible? What this clearly confirms for us is that the ink machine is able to produce the same character multiple times. And as Alice mentions in Chapter 3, not only is the machine producing multiples of the same character, but it also does it at varying levels of quality.

So now let's take a closer look at our two Alice's to see what we can learn. Chapter 3's Alice clearly has something wrong with her. Her face is half melted off, she talks with some kind of weird echo-y voice, and oh yeah, the hunt homicidal range. This Alice refers to herself as Susie, meaning that she, at one point, was Susie Campbell, Alice Angel's original voice actress. Spoiler alert, Susie, they don't. Unless, of course, your dream was getting run through the chest by a kill-a-kill-style scissor blade. Now let's look at our new Alice. If you look in the game files, Chapter 4's Angel is referred to as Allison Angel. This name is likely a reference to

Allison Pendle, the voice actress who took over for Susie Campbell. This honestly goes a long way to confirm our last Bendy theory, that Joey Drew was using the ink machine to transform employees into the characters. Now he wants to meet again tomorrow, so he has an opportunity for me. I'll hear him now. But not only that, the fact that the jealous, rage-fueled Susie became the twisted form of Alice seems to imply that good-hearted people have the potential to become perfect versions of the characters they most relate to, while those with impure souls become impure souls become

imperfect copies. It's almost like the ink machine is passing judgment on those who touch the ink. Susie's biggest fear was being unremarkable and forgotten, so the machine, like some sort of dripping, sepia-toned sorting hat, transformed her into something truly monstrous, a perversion of the very character that she loved. And that's not all that we learned from Susie. We also learn that a person can go through the machine multiple times and get different results. Wiggling, pus, shapeless slug. The standard time... Well, it made me an angel!

Riggling, shapeless slug? It sounds like her first time through she was selected to be a searcher, like the ink people and ink enemies that we encounter throughout the game. Because Susie initially became one of these ink creatures, it's likely that these kinds of creatures are the ink machine standard output for its basic employees. Much rarer, however, is the machine-turning employees to the biggest stars of the Joey Drew universe, Bendy, Boris, and Alice. They could have pulled me back.

Do you know what is life? Living in the dark clouds? It's abusing, screaming well voices. In short, the ink machine is all about a cycle of reincarnation, and it's using humans as ink. All these instances of He Will Set Us Free written on the walls are the searchers literally searching for an escape, an escape from this endless cycle of death and rebirth,

And someone, or something, keeps putting them back through this cycle. Bendy. And that's exactly what we see the ink demon doing, gathering ink monsters like we see him do the projectionist in Chapter 4, and sending them back into the ink supply to be spat out again. Why? Because everyone, as well as Bendy himself, I would suspect, believes that a pure-hearted, perfect Bendy output

will be the one who'll be able to end this cycle and finally set all of these trapped people free. This idea of kind-hearted employees transforming into perfect versions of character, is further supported by Meccaboris. Like Alice and Angel, Cy Boris isn't given a name in the main gameplay of the chapter, but if you dig around in the game files again, you'll find that this character is actually named Tom, a reference to Thomas Connor,

the disgruntled ink machine maintenance employee. Whoever thought that this kind of screen, and I know something about pressure, I don't, or he's some kind of idiot. And if you're saying to yourself, who? Come on, you guys remember Tom, right? You know, Tom, Tom, the con man, the Tomster. But in all seriousness, you really had no reason to take notice of this guy.

Before Chapter 4, Thomas Connor was one of those side characters who had no real purpose in the story. He had one out-of-nowhere audio log from Chapter 3 that didn't reveal any new information. This, in turn, led me to conclude in my last Bendy theory that Wally Franks was going to be revealed as Boris in Chapter 4 because... ...through other major character from the audio logs has been transformed into an ink monster. So unless a new monster is introduced in Chapter 4, which is... Pretty late in the game story to be introducing new characters, that leaves us with only one option. Wally Franks is Boris. Well, wouldn't you know it, but with the release of Chapter 4 came a bunch of updates to chapters

1 through 3. The new remastered editions, which, if you're a theorist like me, reads instead as the retcon editions. It's moments like this that are the most telling for me as I hunt for clues, because as creators go through the process of telling their story, they tend to have a better sense of where they're headed and how they actually want to tell them. that story as they get closer to the finish line. And so they go back and tweak a few things and add a few things to better telegraph where they're headed. And true to form, Thomas Conner

suddenly became a much more prominent character with an audio log and ink output schedule being added into Chapter 1 and a joint conversation with the janitor Wally Franks added into Chapter 3, which begs the question of why. My last theory concluded that Wally Franks had to be Boris. He's one of the most prominent characters in the game. He has a connection with the ink machine as evidenced by the blueprints, and the Meeley has made it clear on Twitter that despite saying time and time again that he was, he never actually made it. Wally never got out of Joey Drew Studios. We also know, based on the items you collect in Chapter 1 for the summoning ritual of the ink

machine, that he's now the only character left at this point. Joey Drew has his book, Sammy is the record, Thomas Connor is now established with the wrench, Alice is the stuffed toy based on her chapter taking place in the toy workshop. Our character Henry is the artist, so he's represented by the record. the ink, which leaves the last item as the ink machine's gear. That's Wally Franks. He's an essential character to this story, appearing in every chapter, and yet the creator of the game decided to retcon Thomas into a bigger role so that he could become Boris, despite the fact that all the signs were pointing to Wally Franks becoming Boris. This tells me one thing, that the Meatly has

other plans for Wally, and has had other plans for Wally the entire time. It tells me that Wally Franks is going to be revealed to be the Bendy Monster. I know, I know, it seems like it should be Joey Drew. There is tons of evidence for that, but it's starting to feel like that's more and more of a misdirect by the meat leave. I mean, think about what we've learned about Joey Drew up to this point. He's selfish, he steals, and he's a liar. When I agree to start this whole thing with him, I thought there'd be a little more give and take.

Instead, I give, and he takes, he's not the type of person to test the ink machine on himself, which is why he gives people like Susie a special opportunity, using the ink to turn her into Alice as a test case. But our evidence isn't just a psychological analysis of the character. The limping, twisted-footed Bendy that I talked about in the last theory that I thought connected with this shot of a wheelchair from Chapter 1, it appears to be gone in the newest chapter, and in the remasters, as confirmed by these animated models

released by the game's official team. And if that wasn't enough, if nothing else, we know that Joey Drew sent that note from the beginning of the game. Unless he sent it right before he tried, transformed himself, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense that a Bendy monster looking like that would have the best penmanship. Now look at another change that happened in the remasters. It used to be that Bendy was summoned by Pentegrams on the ground. But if you play through again, you'll notice that they're just random shapes in a circle.

Pentagrams come with evil satanic connotations. This change tells me that Bendy is no longer meant to be purely a villain. But if he's Wally Franks, a man who was against his will thrown into the ink and transformed, this suddenly makes sense. We also know, based on that Twitter post I mentioned earlier, that Wally doesn't escape from Joey Drew Studios, so he has to be someone in the game, and we have yet to meet him with just one chapter left. There's only so many people he could possibly be. Now look at his audio log from Chapter 4.

These guys down in the warehouse get to play games all day while I'm stuck clean up after him. I tell you, if these guys don't stop realizing who the real genius is, I'm out of here. This reveals to us that he's disgruntled and vengeful to his fellow employees, a trait which, we know from Susie as Twisted Alice, would turn him into an imperfect ink creature, like the imperfect ink demon Bendy. The clip also reinforces the idea that Wally cleans up the messes of everyone else. And what do we see Bendy do with the projectionist in Chapter 4?

Cleans up his mess by dragging his body away. In fact, if I'm right in saying that Bendy is constantly throwing people back into the ink machine in the hopes of producing a perfect Bendy, well, that's what he's doing in the context of this entire plot. He's trying to clean up after the mess Joey Drew created. But regardless of whether evil Bendy is Joey Drew or Wally Franks, one thing I can promise you is that,

just like there's an evil Alice Angel and a good one, there is a perfect Bendy to balance out the ink demon. And dear viewers, I'm here to tell you that perfect Bendy is you. That's right. You, Henry the protagonist, are going to be the prophesized Bendy that saves Joey Drew Studios and all its employees from their cycle of rebirth.

Here's how I say the whole thing playing out. First, we know that Joey and Henry started this business together, and we know that Henry created one of the characters. Based on the fact that his desk has what appears to be an early version of Bendy with a no over top, it seems pretty clear that he created Bendy, but got rejected by Joey. Eventually, Henry leaves the company. However, we know that Joey Drew steals characters. So he stole and tweaked the design of Bendy, leading to huge amounts of success and even its own theme park,

which begs the question then, what would lead to so? Suzy to say this. Apparently times were tougher than I thought. For a moment with the check. Why would Joey, despite all this success, be poor? Well, it's because of Henry. We know that Henry did something to the studio or to these characters based on this line in Chapter 3.

I know! I'm thinking Henry sued the company for stealing his character. Or, perhaps based on the poison ink that he's represented by in that opening ritual, is the one who created and sent the ink machine in the first place, all in the name of sabotaging the man who stole his character. It was his OC, do not steal, but then someone did. Joey Drew stole his OC, and we online know that that's unforgivable. So Joey invited him back 30 years later to see the ruins of their business, forcing Henry to face what he did.

Joey approaches Henry, forces him into the ink, and everything seems lost. But then, since the ink machine clearly judges people, Henry's pure love of these characters will be the thing that ultimately allows him to emerge as perfect bendy, overcome Joey Drew, destroy the ink machine, and set everyone else. Else free. The end. Well, at least until five chapters at Bendy's two. So, five chapters, three theories, and one year, eight months, and 16 days later, it's finally over. The saga of our little devil, darling Bendy reached its sepia-tinted conclusion, and, uh, well, it was controversial, to say the least. Slow stealth sections, Bendy going on full beast mode, and no

appearance of the plunger, which has some of the complaints that I saw circulating online, but it was the ending that left most people in the Inky Dark. After fighting off Royd-Rage Bendy, suddenly were taken to a kitchen with Joey Drew washing some dishes before sending us back to the studio with the same exact words that kick this whole thing off in the first place. Come visit the old workshop. There's something I need to show you. Alright Joey, I'm here. Let's see if we can find what you wanted me to see. Are you kidding me?

Every time this game launches a new chapter, I need to play through the whole thing again since it's so unstable I lose my Save data. I'm telling you, if I haven't found what you wanted me to see the other five times that I've gone through these chapters, this ain't it, chief. Also, did it bother anyone else to hear Joey say, I need to show you? There's something I need to show you. But then the closed captions say, want to show you. You're rankling my OCD here, game. Anyway, I don't think it's an understatement to say that this was far from the ending the series had been leading us towards. Understandably causing frustration to gamers who'd spent the better part of the last two years theorizing about this game's mystery. So today we're gonna dive down to the inky depths and add some color to a finale that most people found a bit sketchy. Let's begin. First things first, it's important to establish that the events in the game never really happened. At least, not literally, like we played through them. Yep, it's one of those. Where everything is symbolic, like a dream theory, coma theory, or in this case, a story theory.

You see, the game tries to leave it open to interpretation, revealing in the end game letter that Repair Man Thomas Connor is a bit miffed that someone stole his adventure. the ink machine, only to show us a few seconds later after the credits that it's in Joey Drew's house. So could it all have been real? Yeah, it could have, but it's not very likely. That's why the entrance to Joey Drew Studios is attached to the kitchen, and why there's this dramatic visual ship when we're entering the real world. The game designers are trying to tell us through aesthetics that the studio isn't reality. This hallway with the six posters is very reminiscent of the opening hall.

Yeah, it is. And this room is really interesting. very reminiscent of chapter one. It is. So this is my desk. I'm going to waste it so much time in this chair. Making it even clear is the fact that in the gameplay, Allison Pendle is transformed into the perfect Alice Angel

and Thomas Connor as cyboros. But in real life, two are married and living happily together with their time at Joey Drew Studios a faint memory in the distant past. There is very obviously a set of real world events and a separate studio world. But making this distinction perfectly clear to us is this final

post credits moment. A little girl asking for yet another story from Uncle Joey. Tell me another one, Uncle Joey. It doesn't get any more direct than that. Another story, i.e. We were just told a story by Uncle Joey. So the five chapters of Bendy are just that, a five-part story.

But just because this was a story all along doesn't mean that it's not rooted in fact. Quite the contrary, it's Joey's version of the rise and fall of his studio. The small details in his story are inspired by things in the world around him. For instance, the Little Miracle Safe Stations throughout the game, we're actually just inspired by this TV and radio repair company that we see a flyer for posted on his bulletin board.

And if you look really closely in the background during this post-ending bonus scene, on the back shelf there, you'll see a bunch of items that should look pretty darn familiar. A record, a plushy, a wrench, ink, a book, and a gear. All the items that we had to collect in Chapter 1 of the game to activate the ink machine, except now their visual style is more realistic. Real items that he's translated into the fictional animated story world that he's created. As for the bigger plot points in the game, well, that's just Joey's life. Joey clearly created a studio with the help of Henry, who, as we guessed, was indeed the creator of Bendy. Once Henry left the business to spend time with his wife, the studio eventually died. In part, due to changing entertainment trends, people simply growing out of the old silent black and white cartoons.

But when the tickets stopped selling, when the next big thing came along, Only the monsters remain. But also because of a series of bad business decisions by Joey, most notably Bendyland. We know this from all the overdue bills on Joey Drew's bulletin board, as well as blueprints of the failed theme park. It's possible that Joey tried to keep up. Evolve the Bendy character, revive him for an older audience

as we see darker, more mature, more gun-happy versions of the characters on the animating table in his house, but clearly nothing has worked, leaving Joey a poor, broken old man, which leads us to Monster Bendy. Why did I say that Monster Bendy has revealed to be Joey Drew? Well, it's because Bendy in the studio is a symbol of his regrets. Listen to his final dialogue in the kitchen. I thought I knew who I was, but the success starved me.

In the end, we followed two different roads of our own making. You, a lovely family. Me, a crooked and buyer. And my road burned. I let our creations become my life. The truth is, you are always so good at pushing, old friend. Pushing me to do the right thing. You should have pushed a little harder.

It's all a series of regrets. Regret that he didn't start a family, that he let himself become consumed by work and greed, that he lost a friend in Henry. Look at the letters on his bulletin board. Joey is reaching out to employees of the story. studio decades after they work together. They've moved on with their lives. They've found love, other jobs, families, but Joey hasn't. He's trapped by the ghosts of his past. All wrapped up in

and represented by Bendy. No longer just a cute cartoonish devil, but now a twisted, shambling monster who roams the remains of his failed studio. The sharp-toothed embodiment of his own regrets. That's why Bendy sometimes helps you out throughout the game. Henry and Joey had this complicated relationship. That's also why you have to show Bendy the end to finish him off. To show him, and by proxy Joey, that that era of his life is over. It's all a shadow of the past. Only the monsters remain. Shadows of the past. In a lot of ways, Joey Drew rightfully sees himself as the villain of his own story, all represented by Monster Bendy. It's incredibly sad. But then, what about Henry reentering the studio? The mysterious writing on the walls. What does

Does Joey want to show us? Well, from a literal standpoint, the writing that was on the walls was done by Henry. If you replay the game, you're given the ability to use a lens of truth in all the previous chapters. Each time the cycle repeats, you see on the walls that Henry makes a tally, and that he's able to call out certain events that happen every time he goes through the loop, where he's attacked by Sammy with the word ouch, where jump scares happen with the word peekaboo, etc. But confirming that it's Henry writing these messages are two in particular. His dream my effort, which reflects Henry's frustrations of working with and ultimately carrying the business of Joey Drew,

as well as this one right next to a Joey Drew audio log, that's the Joey I Know. It's admittedly kind of odd that Henry complements his own drawings here in the prison cell, and he might just want to check his grammar on this little bit of graffiti, dream too big and you'll fail? More like grammar fail. Am I right? Up top. Okay, don't have to high-five me, it's okay. But it's definitely Henry leaving these messages. It's also why we have flashes of hallucinations throughout the previous chapters. There are events from past iterations of the loop peeking through.

But then, why is everything a cycle? What does Joey want Henry to see? Well, it's a story Joey has told himself, and probably those around him dozens of times. He's relived these moments, this twisted history of his failed business countless times. That's the thing about regret. It doesn't go away. It exists in a constant loop of what-ifs and alternate choices. Except, as Henry himself points out, reliving the past does not change it.

Joey being a prisoner of his own history is just a spiral of sadness, and no amount of reliving these events is going to change them. That's why everything in these loops is so predictable, every single cycle. Like Henry writes, there never was any choice. Making it worse is that, as Joey gets older, those he once worked with start passing away. Going through the game again, we see on the coffins the names of some of the key side characters. Susie Campbell, Grant Cohen, Bertram Piedmont, Lacey Benton, all dead and in their coffins. Sure, in the events of the cartoon studio, they may have been sacrificed to the ink machine,

but I suspect what's really going on is that in real life, they're actually dead, passed away from old age or the like, which just makes Joey's situation worse. His past is crumbling away. The only people he ever had any connection with are fading away with time. Joey's alone, and he's dying alone. The only choice available for Joey is to end it, to put a close on Bendy and move on with his life. And it looks like that's finally what he's trying to do, sending out letters to his former employees to reconnect with him,

to make sure that they no longer see him as the villain, that they weren't victims of the ink. Not literally like we see in the studio, but figuratively, as he fears his work destroyed and corrupted everyone around him. And they appear to be fine. They've forgiven him, which just leaves one, Henry, his oldest and most, important friend, his co-founder, the one who represents everything that Joey's life could have and would have been, the perfect bendy to Joey's twisted monster of regrets. When he invites Henry to the studio one last time, it's him bearing his soul to us, the ugliness, the regret. It's Joey asking Henry for forgiveness, yes, but it's also Joey asking Henry for permission

to forgive himself. And if that post-credit scene is any indication, the permission is given. The cycle is broken. Henry forgives Joey and brings over his daughter to hear some stories from the old studio. Joey has a family at last. Tell me another one, Uncle Joey. Before we get to things that got me to question some of my earlier conclusions about the game, let me first call out something that seemed to confirm one of the Bendy community's biggest fan theories, including a theory of our own.

Hidden inside the game's files, there does appear to be confirmation that, at least at some point during the development process, Bendy was planned to be revealed as Joey Drew. Inspired by Dreamfisher's Reddit post covering their theory on a one-eyed Bendy, I did something I hadn't really done for any of the previous episodes. I dug specifically into the game's assets, giving closer inspection to the 6,000 or so files used across the completed games five chapters. Now, I have very, very limited experience with making games,

having only done a few rudimentary ones back in college. But one thing I do know is that it pays to be organized. For instance, in Bendy, you're dealing with 1,440 separate audio assets. So without any sort of clear labeling system, you're gonna be searching for a long time. Or else you're suddenly gonna give Alice Angel some random ink splat sound effect instead of a voice.

Luckily, Bendy's developers, the Meadley and Mike Mood, have done an excellent job of keeping all their files clearly labeled. All character voices are marked with DIA for dialogue, followed by the chapter it's specifically being used in. But that's not all. Another titling convention they seem to use for chapter was alternating titles in all caps based on the scene that it was in. Let me give you an example. As you go into the Sammy Lawrence battle early on in Chapter 5, all the audio clips for that section are in caps. Like someone shouting for attention on Twitter. The trade of and vendor. I trusted you. I gave you everything and you left me to God.

At the end of that Sammy fight, we enter a short cutscene with Alice and Boris, at which point all the file names go to lowercase. Ah, that was close. You're lucky we were in the neighborhood. Once the battle resumes with a new onslaught of searchers, we're back to uppercase. Watch out! Here they come! To back to your puddles! Each segment of the battle is grouped based on its casing.

Here's why this matters. In the files, the final boss fight against Bendie has has Henry's one line. But he's never seen the end. The end. But there appears to be another unused line during that same segment, also listed all in caps.

Joey? You notice the shock in Henry's voice as though he's surprised to see Joey. This then leads directly to a series of beast bendy audio files, all in lowercase, before going into Joey's final speech in the game's ending audio, which ends in caps. Joey underscore end.

Henry, so soon. I didn't expect you for another hour yet. So the naming pattern still fits, but also listen to the resonance. In designing the game, the team did an amazing job reflecting audio reverb to reflect the room scale that they're in. Large and full of echoes in the giant ink machine chamber. Set us free. A lot less open in the lower ceilings of Alice and Boris's hideout. Why are you here? And now compare the audio of the end with Joey's opening line in the kitchen.

The end. Henry, so soon. The real world audio with Joey Drew is much deader. There's no echo, no reverb, just like me when I record in the closet. But Henry's line of shock, Joey, the end. Has that echo in there. An echo that appears for every single bit of dialogue that's said within the empty sparse hallways of Joey Drew Studios. In short, the titling conventions and resonance tell us that Henry expresses his shock at seeing Joey sometime between the

the start of the final Bendy fight and going to Joey's apartment, thereby giving further evidence that Bendy is Joey, or at least was almost revealed to be Joey in unused audio files. So that was one of the first things to show up upon my closer inspection of the game, but here's where things go from moderately interesting to completely upending everything we thought we knew. Dreamfishers post got me to specifically focus on the 2D textures used throughout the game, the stuff that wraps around 3D objects or environments to give them their detail. And in those files, you can find some pretty wacky stuff. Like this is Joey Drew as we knew him, and this is Joey Drew's face flattened by a steamroller.

Look at that tongue just down there in the corner. And where are his eyes? You ask? Most effective jump scare this franchise is produced. In the actual game, you can't even see these things. Serious talk here though, Joey. You might want to look into getting some clear eyes. For dry red eyes.

Clear eyes. Ass. But it's the very eyes. obviously titled texture pack named Props 04 underscore S-H-D-H-D-H-Matt Hifen-Ur-MAT-H-U-N-UrS-H-Eau that hides more secrets than I think any of us could have ever suspected. On this sheet, you have all the things that you'd expect to see around Joey Drew's little apartment here. Some paintings, a base texture, the electrical outlets, evidence that Henry may actually be dead, a rug, you know, all the usual stuff. Now, I know what you're thinking.

Those are truly enormous electrical plugs. I know, I was shocked too, but I really think that you're fixated on the wrong detail here. Because like I said, hidden amongst that texture file is a series of newspaper headlines, one of which outright reads, Local Artist pushed himself too hard, Found Dead at Desk. That's, um, an oddly specific newspaper headline to include in a game about a cartoon studio, right? What makes that headline even more suspicious, though, is when it's put in context with Joey's endgame speech.

The truth is, You are always so good at pushing, old friend. Pushing me to do the right thing. You should have pushed a little harder. Again, we see this recurring theme of pushing and pushing harder. Coincidence? I definitely don't think so. I mean, if this newspaper headline were truly meant to be taken seriously

and was referencing some event in the game's timeline, it would be directly referencing Henry, our artist, who specifically references his desk twice in the game. Your smile will desk. How blessed it's so much time in this chair. A character who, we also know, based on his first and only audio log in the game, complains firsthand about just how hard he works. I haven't seen Linda Ruk, just keep drawing in right? And here's the thing.

We know this headline was specifically put in there by the game devs, considering that we can see with some of the other newspaper textures that they've been clearly doctored. For instance, here, blank, a year in review. It was doctored to remove the year. aren't just random assets that were thrown in for set dressing. They were selected. They were curated. They were corrected. It's also worth noting where in the game this headline exists, back near the ink machine in Joey Drew's apartment. You would never see this newspaper unless you hacked into the game in order to get over there.

Which, let me tell you, is no small feat, but it is definitely there on a shelf in that back room. Joey collected the paper and keeps it next to his precious machine. But how could Henry be dead? We are obviously playing him walking around the studio. I hear you asking and trust me, it's something that I kept asking myself as I wrote this thing too. Honestly, I don't know if this is anything more than just a suspicious Easter egg thrown in there for hackers. But if it is real, I, of course, have a theory as to what's going on. And let me be completely honest with you, with a lot of the theories that I do on this channel, they're all just for fun. I don't necessarily believe every single one that we do, but in this case, I think I'm on to something.

First, let's look at Joey's audio logs. In my final Bendy theory, I chose to focus on the thematic meaning of the ending, how it was a story of regrets, apologies, and closure in the real world. But in doing that, I largely wrote off events that were happening in the studio as just part of this story that Joey was telling. But what if there was a bit more truth to all this studio action than I originally expected? Consider this, throughout chapter 5, Joey's audio logs give us a timeline of the development and usage of the ink machine. Whatever that great thing was I saw wandering around your office, you better keep it locked up tight. I realize it was the first attempt, but imagine if the press caught sight of it.

If you claim that your failures are because these things are soulless, then damn it, we'll get them a soul. So the detail of the grin confirms for us that Bendy was indeed the first created and he's without a soul. Joey then, in his quest for a soul, moves on to former voice actress of Alice Angel, Susie Campbell. I know how much this part means to you, Susie. I too really believe my characters are more than just drawings. They're alive, Susie. I'll be straight. I'm putting together a small project. A little ceremony.

I want you to bring Alice to life. Once again, what do you say? She says yes. So he uses the ink machine ritual to turn her into Alice Angel. And again and again, for a lot of the other employees. This is why the walls of the studio are covered with the phrase, The Creator lied to us. It's not because of salvation or anything like that, but it's because Joey lied. He lied like we see him due to Susie to get their souls sacrificed into his ink machine.

Now look at this. Notice that there are two mutually exclusive sets of characters that we see over the course of the game. One set has coffins hidden inside the studio, and the other set have letters on Joey True's bulletin board. With the coffins, we have Susie Campbell, Bertram Piedmont, Grant Cohen, Norman Polk and Lacey Benton. With letters on the bulletin board, we have Wally Franks, Allison Pendle, and Thomas Connor. The ones with coffins are actually in those coffins. Those are the victims in real life.

They are soulless, they are dead, empty husks of bodies, sacrificed to the machine. All the others, in the words of Wally Franks, we're outta there and are now living happy lives far away from Joey and his machine. Seems like a lot to assume, but I have proof. Look at this. It's an incredibly small but super important detail. In chapter 4 we fight and defeat Bertram Piedmont. Look what happens at the end of his

battle. His head remains intact but the doors shut on him. Now look at what happens when Susie's form of Alice Angel dies. She just lays there dead. But what about Frank and Boris just moments before? The game makes sure that we see that he melts away into the ink. That is the difference here. One set of characters is out of just ink and melt away as soon as they're defeated, the other set have actual human souls in them and don't fade away. You have two chances to see Norman the projectionist die. Once in chapter three and again in chapter four to the hands of Bendy. In both cases, Norman's body persists. He lies on the ground if you take him out or he's dragged away by Bendy if he's the one who does the deed. Those creatures, the one with souls actually infused into them, are all the ones associated

with coffins. So what does any of this have to do with Henry and a newspaper headline about an artist dying? It tells us that Henry got tricked, that Joey successfully sacrificed him to the ink machine. I mean, think about it. He got a letter from Joey Drew inviting him back to the studio in much the same way that Joey reached out to all of his former employees. Those letters on Joey's bulletin board, what I originally interpreted as Joey reaching out trying to make amends to his former employees, is actually, just evidence that he tried to lure everyone back to the office to sacrifice him to the machine, and that some people, like Allison, Tom

and Wally, just lucked out. They lived far enough away to take a meeting with their former boss, said, thanks, but no thanks. But that other people, like Susie, Bertram, and now Henry said yes to the invite, and became victims. What about that final scene between Henry and Joey? It's actually

told out of sequence. That's actually the first scene of our little timeline. It shows that Henry went to meet Joey, and now listen to what Joey says. The truth is, you are always so good at pushing, old friend. Pushing me to do the right thing. You should have pushed a little harder. That's him admitting that he's still bad.

I mean, translating that line, it's basically, you pushed me to be better, but you didn't push enough. Need more proof? Remember at the end of the Tombstone Picnic cartoon where Bendy sees a human shadow? Well, look a bit closer at that scene, notice that in the final frames we see Bendy smile. It's not a reaction of fear or mischief. It's him smiling at his creator, Henry. And that's not all. On a second play-through, we have the ability to use the lens of truth which reveals hidden messages written on the walls throughout the studio.

We established during the last Bendy theory that those messages were left by Henry, as evidenced by lines like, that's the Joey I knew, and his dream, my effort. But it's the invisible line of Joey lied to us that shows that that even Henry at this point in the game recognizes that he was betrayed by his former business partner. Remember those weird flashbacks at the end of chapter 1? Well, they happen when Henry steps

into the sacrifice circle. And what do we see? Joey's wheelchair from a ground-up perspective. That is us on the ground looking up at Joey's wheelchair. We also see the ink machine and bendy. We are flashing back to the moment when Henry first got sacrificed,

knocked onto the ground, looking up at Joey's wheelchair. But the clincher here is in the lead-up to the final battle against Bendy. We see Boris, Allison, and Henry come to the ink machine one final time. But before they can enter it, they have to cross an inky river. And it's here that Allison and Boris have to get left behind, saying this. I don't see any way around. We're not like you, Henry.

If we go in there, while a drop of water in the ocean is rarely seen again. Again, Allison and Boris here are supposed to be Allison Pendle and Thomas. Conner, but Joey hasn't been able to get a hold of their souls. We see as much because they wrote a note to him on the bulletin board. As such, they're only ink creatures. Good ones, to be sure, but still, they're just ink. That's why they can't cross the river while Henry can. In the end, Henry accepts Joey's invite. 30 years after he left the studio, Joey leads Henry to the machine, does the ritual, and sends Henry's soul into a character, leaving behind the empty husk of Henry's body to be disposed of. Not, in a coffin like the others, but left at a desk. An artist slumped over his work, reported dead from pushing too hard. And why would Joey do this? Well, maybe, unlike his other victims, Henry has a family,

a family who'd be curious if he one day went missing. Meanwhile, Henry's soul is left wandering the film reels, an animated purgatory over and over again, alongside the characters that he helped create that were turned into monsters by the man who betrayed them all. It couldn't be further in tone from the initial, ending that I proposed for this game, but I gotta say, in my mind, it ties up a whole lot more loose ends. So I have a confession to make. I've underestimated the Bendy series. I honestly think most of us have.

So what do I mean by that? Well, from a storytelling standpoint, these games are a lot more sophisticated than you might first believe. Take for instance my last episode on the game, where we covered the design detail of characters who melt away being creatures who are made entirely of ink versus those whose bodies persist after being killed, those are the ones that are infused with real human souls. I mean, it's an extremely subtle detail in the game design and at no point does the game actually spell it out for you, but it's essential for understanding basically the entire plot of this game, everything from how the ink machine works to the meaning of the ending. But for another great example, let's look at Sammy Lawrence, everyone's favorite music director slash cultist slash a part-time hot topic social media manager. He has this dramatic death at the end of chapter 2, so when he reappears at the top of chapter 5, all of us were like, uh, what happened? Cue the montage. Oh, okay. No! No, why! Are you kidding me?

Sammy Lawrence? Wait, really? Sammy! It's Sammy! I thought he died! Oh! Wait to finally fight you! So, that's not Sammy, because Sammy died in chapter 2, right? Gamers across YouTube were shooketh by this revelation, but if we were really paying attention, and I mean, really paying attention to the details, we would have known that Sammy had actually been reborn one other time between those two chapters. Across Bendy's five chapters, there's actually only two sorts of candle assets that are used. One, that are candles inside of cans of bacon soup, and the other ones are tall white candles. Now, the bacon soup candles are used practically everywhere. But these white ones only tend to be used in places that are associated with music.

Remember Sammy Lawrence is the music director or places where Sammy physically is. In chapter 2, for instance, they're around all the little prayer altars and sacrificial bowls that Sammy has set up for the ink demon. Again in chapter 5, there were Sammy and the lost ones have set up their little memorial wall. But they're concentrated in one other random place throughout the game, specifically chapter 4's caves. At the top of chapter 4, there's an ink pool that we have to unlock that contains a respawning swollen searcher. You are supposed to rip off his little ink wart on his shoulder and then we move on. We use it to create a gear, fix the little hangy dangly bits and you move on to the rest of the game. It's a very simple puzzle. The pieces are right next to each other. It's not that complicated. But if we look closer at that moment we'll actually notice more of Sammy's ritual candles set up around that inky pool with Sammy's iconic mask hidden on the ground just behind it. Sammy was here too trying to summon something. The ink demon? We can't really know for sure. Maybe he was successful, which is why his mask is the only thing left there. Now, I didn't find this out myself. It was actually put together by Tumblr user Dreamfisher, who, along with another Tumblr user Adobe Out Design, are the two most prolific bendy theorists on the internet, as far as I know, at least. Their work has gotten me to start taking a closer look at this game again, which is perfect since there's actually a new game coming out later this year. More on that in a minute, but first, I wanted to talk a little bit about game design. It's interesting, actually. As I've gone back through this game, I've really questioned why I missed some of the

details the first time through. And the reason is that the game design has a lot of noise. And I don't mean noise like, wow, I'm at a party and it's so loud and I need to shout in order for anyone to hear anything that I'm saying. I mean that there's just a lot of details in this world that feel extraneous, whether or not they actually are. Let's take a look at it from a numbers perspective. Noisy data is basically a set of numbers with a large amount of additional meaningless information mixed in. So, maybe with the numbers. Perfect. So like here, right? You look at these data points and you can tell pretty quickly just by looking at it that it's supposed to be in the shape of a line Right? This is what's known as clean data. But now

Open this up here. I haven't used one of these since like science fair in high school But now if you look at this data it's a lot less clear what the shape is meant to be What's important in this data set? What isn't? Is there supposed to be a shape to define these data points at all? Probably not quite honestly all of this data is very noisy. Wow the work The world of statistics is so exciting! So now let's translate it to something that is legitimately exciting, video games. And compare it to everyone's favorite franchise on this channel, Five Nights at Freddy's. Oh, it invades even episodes that aren't about it!

But there's a good reason in this case, Five Nights at Freddy's is actually a great example of this concept. Fnaf isn't a noisy game series. The first game is so stripped down, in fact, that the meaningful data points just stand out right for you. Golden Freddy, phone guy calls, weird newspapers on the wall. That's it. That's all you really need to solve the plot of this thing. In Fnaf 2, yeah, there's a lot more going on. More rooms, more animatronics, more gameplay. But stuff like the Mandatory Death mini-games, force the meaningful data points directly into your face. You know that their importance, even if you don't quite understand what they mean. It's up to you to figure out the line that connects those pieces.

But in general, you know what data points you're working with. So now let's translate it over to Ben. Now, I love Bendy as a game. I love its aesthetics, I love its characters, but it's a noisy game world. From a design standpoint alone, the walls are covered in lots of different messages. The messages themselves repeat multiple times across the five different chapters. They all tend to have the same handwriting, so it's unclear whether they're supposed to be tracked to different writers or the same writer. There's mysterious footprints all over the floors, doors open and shut seemingly at random, and there's just a lot of stuff everywhere. It's a messy, ruined world.

and that's okay, that's part of the atmosphere, but it just makes it unclear what's intentional world building and what's just there to fill out the space. As a result, when I was crafting theories on Bendy, I tried to stay away from a lot of that messy data and just focus on the things that are clearly important in any game that you play, quite honestly. The audio logs, character designs, dialogue, and things like the ending, or end chapter images. But even those a lot of times in Bendy would get changed when a new chapter release, or when new updates would come out. And it does seem like as the game's gone on,

more and more of it has gotten intentional, which is always a good thing. Anyway, the reason I bring all this up is because this game needs more theorists working on it. There's still a lot to unpack here. There's a lot of stuff to sift through. Which is especially important, because there's gonna be a new game, Bendy,

and the Dark Revival. Already, there has been a lot of talk about this game playing into this new idea of choice based on this one line in the teaser. But one thing always remains, the choices you make. And aside from that one line, that's really all we have to go off of. You could say that what's really going on here is Bendy and the shots in the dark. Terrible joke. Anyway, all that being said, I actually think that we've been given more clues about this new game than we realize.

So what is this new game about and what is actually being revived here? That, my friends, is the question for today. First, it's important to note that according to one, of the game's creators, Mike Mood on Twitter, Bendy and the Dark Revival is NOT a sequel. There's a tweet right there, looking at the evidence square in your face. And yes, internet, I know that I put Bendy to in the title of this video,

but guess what? Sometimes you gotta introduce people to a new game based on, you know, traditional titling conventions. I'm trying to prevent another kingdom hearts here, friends. We're not gonna have ourselves Bendy's ink drop distance, okay? But Mike, in that same tweet, also makes it very clear that this new game isn't a prequel either. So if it's not a sequel and it's not a prequel, well, that only leaves us with two other possibilities.

Either it's an alternate universe that's using the same characters in a new way, or it's a side story. And based on the evidence that we have leading up to this new game's reveal, I actually think it's going to be a bit of both. Let me explain here. As we all know at this point, once you beat Bendy the first time through, you get yourself a chance to play through the game again, only this time you're using your lens of truth to see all the secret messages that are sprinkled, across the walls and floors of Joey Drew Studios, across the entire game, not just in the last chapter. And from the opening hallway, already things start getting weird. It becomes immediately clear that you're stuck in some sort of loop, as evidenced by the tally marks that you see along the right-hand wall.

Add up those tally marks, though, and you get yourself 414. So apparently we've already gone through Joey Drew Studios 414 times. It seems like it's an arbitrary number, right? No, it's not. The teaser for the new game was officially uploaded onto the Joey Drew Studios YouTube channel on April 14th. 414. That's not all. In the lead up to this big reveal of the new game, that same channel's been uploading audio logs from various moments throughout the studio's history.

From those logs, you can actually construct a timeline of events. Bendy's premiere back in 1929, the studio growing in 1931, Alice Angels premiere in 1932, the first appearance of the butcher gang in 1935. Troubles with Bendyland in 1940 and the ink machine going in and really taking over the studio in In 1943. But then there's this one final audio recording. One that combines all the audio of everything that came before, but then introduces us to a whole new voice. Such knowledge.

The listed date of that recording? April 14th, questionable year. 414 again. So very clearly the game's developers are are setting up a connection between the time loop that Henry finds himself trapped in and this new character who's researching the ink machine and the people who were connected to it to uncover the secrets behind the studio. This also isn't the first time that we're hearing about whoever this mysterious observer is. Before chapter 5 was released, a series of three audio recordings were uploaded onto that channel. Each one labeled question mark, question mark, question mark.

Remember, at this point in the story, Henry has just met perfect Alice and Angel and Cy Boris, and was being held their prisoner, which is where chapter 5 begins. These audio recordings were made by Henry during that imprisonment phase. If anyone finds this, my name is far below Joey Drew Studios. And while most of what he says across the other clips isn't particularly interesting, no offense, Henry, I know he had nothing better to do, you were stuck in an underground prison in an imaginary ink world, maybe. Who knows? He does make one odd comment that bears repeating here.

There's crazy things happening down here. Monsters. Demons and angels are clearly references to Bendy and Alice. So what is this other thing? This thing that's listening to him? How is he being watched? It seems very clear that his fears in this audio recording are actually setting up and connected to this new, observing character. So who is this person? Well, in the aftermath of the teaser's release, some people online have speculated that it might be Bendy himself.

learning to talk or something like that, but I would disagree with that conclusion. You see, on the official Bendy Twitter account for the last two months, they've been tweeting out a letter a day leading up to this reveal. If you put those letters together like a grand old game of wheel of fortune, we get ourselves this message. Benevolent demon, someone has reawakened the dark. The fact that this phrase is being directed at Bendy and references someone else doing this reawakening indicates that Bendy probably isn't the one. one in question here. Taking it another step further, the phrase benevolent demon seems to be coming from Sammy Lawrence. He's the only one who not only sees Bendy as a force for good, but also speaks in this sort of biblical heightened language. For our Lord is calling to us, my little sheep. The time of sacrifice is at hand. However, think back to the first game. Over the course of Henry's story, we see Sammy go from being a devotee of Bendy. But the believers must honor their savior.

to being completely disillusioned with Bendy. The straight up and dinda. Which, can you blame the guy? I mean, he just keeps getting killed at the hands of the god that he was just making sacrifices to. So the fact that he's back to calling Bendy a benevolent demon seems to indicate that this actually might be a Sammy from an earlier part of the timeline.

Or, should I say, an earlier part of the story loop. A time before he gets fed up with Lord Bendy ignoring his sacrifices of candles, and bowls of soup. Also notice in this phrase that he's using the word reawakened the dark, which would imply that the dark has been awake before. If the dark is in fact ink, then the ink machine is probably coming to life again after years of being turned off. Lastly, let's talk about this final shot of the teaser, the one that bludgeoned me to death at the top of this episode. The jump scare here definitely goes quickly, but if you slow it down and you brighten it up a little bit, the figure actually takes the shape of the piper, one of the three members of the butcher gang. You'll notice the ear, the hairline, that elongated face right there. Now, the Butcher Gang, to me, might be one of the most interesting unsolved mysteries from the original game. I mean, they're treated just like a normal enemy spawn, but stop and actually look at these guys. These creatures have clearly been twisted and tortured, their bodies mutilated and dismembered, and then reassembled together. Every other character in this game is either like an ink blob or some version of an existing,

cartoon character. But these three have been remixed in mutilated ways with body parts that have been removed and added and heads and ears swapped positions mouths sewn shut. And again, while this might just be noisy data, just some really cool, creepy designs for these characters, I don't think that's the case. There is clearly a backstory to these three particular characters and that's proven by looking at the design of the Fisher. You see that? He says right on BEL, liar. A sign that is written in and branded in that he's a liar. That's not a fashion accessory that you're walking around with their friends. Clearly this isn't just an imperfection of the ink process. They're being punished for something that they did when they were human. And let's be clear, even though they do spawn a bunch of times throughout the game, they were human at one point. Or at least a subset of them were. Well, yes, many of them do melt back into the ink when they're beaten. Many of them don't. And, and they're,

evidenced by Alice Angel's little morgue here in chapter 3. These guys are dead, but their bodies have remained intact, which means that at one point in time they did in fact possess a human soul. The other interesting thing about the butcher gang being the big climax of this teaser trailer is that they're on the side of Bendy. Think back to chapter 3 one more time. One of the tasks that Alice Angel gives us is defending her against an attacking onslaught of butcher gang members. That battle of of Allegiances is further supported by that chapter's ending. Remember, this was the one and only part of the original game that had an actual decision point involved. You could either go the demon route or the angel route. It literally changed nothing about how the chapter played out except for the final image

that you were shown at the end of the chapter. With the demon route, showing you a particularly interesting one. It showed you Bendy leading the charge of an army of searchers and butcher gang members. They're aligned. They are on the same team. And so now let's look back at this new game's teaser one more time and how it mentions choice. It specifically says that we can walk with angels or cower before demons.

Cower before demons or walk with angels. Ladies and gentlemen, we are picking sides. So putting all of this evidence together, here is my prediction for this new game. Whoever this observer is, he's reactivating the ink machine, probably the one that's currently laying dormant in Joey Drew's house. In doing so, it has the potential to change the course of Henry's story. This isn't a prequel or a sequel, it's yet another iteration of that gameplay loop. The 414 iteration of that loop, except this time things might change based on our decisions,

based on who we decide to align with, the path of the demon or the path of the angel. And that in turn will dictate how this whole loop plays out. And along the way, hopefully, we learn just a little bit more about these butcher gang members. Who knows? Maybe we'll learn who that Tommy gun belonged to, and perhaps, in the end, will finally be able to escape the ink reels once and for all. Today, we're diving back into the inky depths with Joey Drew Studios and their newest game, Bendy and the Dark Revival.

If you're unfamiliar with the franchise, honestly, I can't really blame you. It's been five long years since the world was last buzz about Bendy. Oh, sure, there was a mobile game, a short prequel title called Boris and the Dark Survival, and of course, the requisite handful of spin-off books released in the Intervie. But nothing really captured everyone's attention. It looked like the franchise was drowning in its own inky grave, which is why the trailer dropped for an official sequel releasing in just a few weeks caught everyone off guard.

And that wasn't enough. They then decided to catch everyone off guard again by releasing a game that was really long, really solid, and most importantly of all, really stable, which, let's be honest, considering the quality of game releases these days, is already putting it in contention for Game of the Year. It is a low bar. Of course, you know why I'm interested in this thing. The theories.

Sure, I can go around all day inhaling full cans of bacon soup like an overzealous Kirby, but if there's no meat on the bone for us to chew on like a cartoonish wolf, well, then this one's going to get relegated to my ever-growing list of Matt Pat Personal Time games. Lucky for us, though, Bendy be bringing the lore. And what they call a cycle breaker, once upon it, everything begins again. A lot of lore. From what I gather, it exists in parallel with the outside world, but completely removed from the march of time.

Lot, it just keeps coming. Lour! That I think is a complete lie. A lie that I plan on exposing today. Open your eyes and look around you. None of this makes sense. Let me quickly catch you up with what you need to know. The original game, Bendy and the Ink Machine, was all about a talented animator named Henry Stein.

Former partner to the unscrupulous businessman Joey Drew. Over the course of that first game, we learned that Joey Drew has used human souls to fuel the titular ink machine, All in an attempt to create living ink creatures. But eventually, the animation studio goes bankrupt. Joey retires in disgrace, a bitter old man, and is ultimately forced to sell off the rights to his most famous characters to a new company, Archgate Films, run by Joey's old friend, Nathan Arch. And that's where this new game picks up.

In Bendy and the Dark Revival, we play as Audrey, a young animator for Archgate who gets brought into the ink world by the clearly evil janitor Wilson. You're working late tonight. A pretty girl like you. Shouldn't be wandering around all by yourself. Mind if I step in. Seriously, this man is a walking, talking, HR violation.

They couldn't have made him any more dastardly if they had given him a black cape and a curly mustache. Anyway, the rest of the game is then spent with Audrey trying to find her way back home, all while avoiding both Wilson's army and the demonic ink demon himself, a monstrous, bloodthirsty form of Bendy that kills on contact. Or, at least that would have been what the game was all about, had it not been for the surprise cameo of a familiar face, in Chapter 3.

Who are you? Don't you know me? Take a good luck. Aren't you? Joey Drew and the flesh. At a couple of points throughout the game, we encounter an inky version of Joey Drew himself, or at least an embodiment of his memories, who sits us down to take us through a literal slideshow of the game's lore.

Where are we? Very old place, full of memory. There's a little story you need to hear. Once upon a time, Audrey, there was a bitter old man. All right, well, it doesn't get much more sure. straightforward than that, as part of the presentation he tells us that the Henry we played as in the first game wasn't Henry at all. But rather an inky recreation that Joey made after the real Henry left the studio. Why would he do such a weird thing?

Well, he wanted to torture Henry. Get his stress out, kind of like a sepia-toned voodoo doll. In his anger, Joey used an evil machine to create another world, a world made of paper, David, where he'd torment his own version of Henry forevermore. He felt betrayed by Henry. So, as a totally healthy way of dealing with his anger and jealousy, he created this inky prison in order to punish anyone who ever crossed him, the world that we've been playing through in both of these games,

simply known as the cycle. Eventually, Allison Pendle, the second voice of Alice Angel from the first game, comes into Joey's life and makes him realize that he can be a good person. She didn't visit often, but when she did, she saw something good in Joey, no one else could, including himself. Through their friendship, he began to see the world with better eyes. So, out of kindness, he creates a version of Alice Angel in the cycle to help Henry survive. Meanwhile, in the real world, Joey is also busy creating Audrey out of the ink to become his perfect daughter.

That's right. The character that we've been playing as for the entire game is none other than Audrey Drew, a human made out of living ink. Joey finally did what he set out to do, creating the perfect life from just a pencil and a dream. Just a pencil and a dream. It's enough. You have to have hard. It's a nice story, and certainly a wholesome character arc for our dear old Joey Drew, but call me suspicious whenever a game literally sits me down and spells out the lore for me.

I mean, the original game was practically built around theories. What we have done is left it up to the community. So if you play the game and your name is Mad Pat and you like to theorize, there's a chance you're going to figure things out and actually be able to understand what we were talking about. And also, let's just take a minute to look at who. Who's info dumping this lore on us? The living embodiment of Joey Drew's memories. Oh sure, he might seem all nice and folksy,

but remember, this is a guy who has never been trustworthy. On company records, Bendy is listed as his creation, despite the fact that Henry created him. He also lied to his employees when the company was about to go out of business. The idea that the company is in some form of financial difficulty is untrue. And a slander's lie against him. Even his close friend Nathan Arch said in the book,

The Illusion of Living, quote, Joey is so good at storytelling that even when he tells you it's not real, you can forget a moment later. I mean, this is a guy who is so jealous and bitter that he literally creates an endless torture chamber for his former business partner. And we're expected to trust his version of events, events that make him seem like some sort of benevolent family man? No, I don't think so. So, I started to dig around in Joey's story. Let me tell you, there's evidence hidden all around the cycle proving that Joey's version of events is a lie. A lie that throws into question everything that we know about the main character, Audrey.

The true story of Bendy in the Dark Revival is one that Joey doesn't want you to know about. So grab yourself a pencil, a dream, and probably something to write on, too. Just try not to get any corrupted ink on the carpets, all right? Just got them all washed. Let's start by disproving what Joey Drew tells us. Starting with the timeline of events. Joey claims that Allison Pendle walked into his life and changed everything, giving him a new lease on life and in turn prompting him to help Henry within the cycle.

Except, we know that that can't be true. The dates don't line up. Allison joined Joey Drew Studio sometime in the 1930s. That means that the cycle would have been created prior to that date. Why is that a problem? Well, it's because we have evidence that shows Henry begins his cycle in 1963. This is thanks to a letter that we get right at the start of Bendy and the Ink Machine, inviting Henry back to the studio 30 years after he left the company,

which thanks to the employee handbook, we know, was 1930. There's also a calendar in Joey's apartment at the end of Chapter 5 in Bendy in the Ink Machine that shows the exact date to be August 30th, Now, there's speculation out there about whether Joey's apartment and old Joey here in the ending of that game are meant to be part of Henry Cycle, aka part of the fake world that was made by Joey, but even if it is fake, why would you include a calendar from some random date in the future? Just doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Speaking of the things that don't add up, what about Allison Angel? Joey is pretty vague about her creation, but he leads us to believe that she was created purely from ink,

inspired by Allison Pendle, but not made from Allison Pendle. Except here's the thing. Joey and Allison break off their role. relationship in 1946. He fires her after she sides with her future husband and gent engineer Thomas. Joey does keep in touch with Allison, as we see from the letter in his apartment, but he burnt that bridge. She is no longer an angel to him, or even really a friend. So why would he then make an angel to help Henry in the 1960s that was just inspired by her? It doesn't make sense based on the timeline. I suspect that Allison Angel's creation was meant to punish her as well. That instead of her being just an ink creation, he took the original Allison Penning.

and used her soul to create Alison Angel. Now he's able to torture her for all eternity, just like he did with Henry. Joey is no hero. He never was a hero. He didn't have a change of heart, it's all about public image, just like we saw in one of the tapes from the first game.

I believe there's something special in all of us. With true inner strength, you can conquer even your biggest challenges. Okay, let's stop right there. I can only do so many takes in this trash a day. Of course, a living version of his memories is going to paint him as the good guy. He never sees himself as wrong. But in reality, Joey is just putting a new spin on the chain of events in order to come out looking like the good guy to his daughter.

His daughter, the one part of Joey's story that I haven't addressed yet. Who or what is Audrey? According to Joey, she's also a child of the ink. Perfect, practically human, made to fill the void in Joey's life. Now, I think part of what Joey's saying here is true. She is an ink person. It's hard to deny that based on her bendy finger at the end of the game and the fact that she respawns out of the ink. But what I don't believe is that she's made purely out of ink.

On the contrary, I think that she was made using human souls, just like every other ink character in the series. And better yet, I know exactly who was used to make her. It's all thanks to 10 secret memories hidden throughout the game. One of the main collectibles that you can find on your adventure are memories. 10 items that were told are special, but don't really seem to be. A baseball, hat, a duck, a hot dog, some crayons, stuff like that. Audrey never says anything about him, and their descriptions tend to be super generic. A rubber duck.

It still has soap on it. Wow, we are really lighten the lore on fire with that one, guys. Or so I thought. You see, these items are the key to solving the mystery of who Audrey really is. So hold on to your hats, because the first memory I want to talk about is, well, the hat. One of the memories is listed as a min's fashionable hat. So that makes it clear that the hat didn't belong to Audrey, but rather someone she spent a lot of time with. Now, this type of hat is called a boater hat with a flat top, thin, circular rim, and ribbon around the middle.

Boater hats were seen throughout the late 19th century and early 20th century, even being part of the FBI's unofficial uniform back in the day. But we mostly see these hats being worn amongst the upper classes in the summers after World War I. There was also a bit of a revival forum back in the late 1930s. Notice a problem with that? Well, as we've established, Audrey was created sometime in the 1960s. Styles had changed, and the boder hat wasn't really fashionable anymore, especially not out and about for daily use like the memory's description states.

It's more likely the memory of this hat belonged to someone who was around in the 1930s. So, are there any other memories that could help us narrow down the search for who this hat could belong to? Yes. One memory that really caught my attention was this one. The cracked mug. Quote, a cracked mug lovingly repurposed into a plaything. It may be sad, but it still has life in it yet. This broken mug was turned into a toy, which feels like a weird gift to give your kid, but whatever.

Here you go, Audrey. Love you so much. Take this sharp piece of porcelain and have at it. But this isn't the only time in the game that we see a cracked mug. When we're shown to our room in Chapter 5, creepy janitor Wilson has left a very specific book on our pillow. It's a story called The Mug and the Maiden, and it stands out because it is long. I mean, like, long, long. Some of the lore drops in this game are long, but here we're talking multi-page long.

And if you manage to read the whole thing, do you want to guess who the hero of the story is? A cracked mug. This is a story not connected to us, but Wilson. This is his storybook. This is his childhood toy. And that's not the only connection to Wilson either. Another memory we get is a set of crayons, most notably colored crayons. Quote, arrays of colors can spark a world all your own.

There are only a handful of times. that we see color in this game, and all of them come from Wilson. Wilson is the one with a colored drawing of ship the Hoy Dudley and a Sepia world. During Wilson's boss fight, we see colored ink coming from him and the other enemies when we hit him. And finally, there's the towers that helped to subdue Demon Bendy, towers covered, with colorful rainbow sparkles, just like the crayon's description. Right now, all signs seem to be pointing to these memories being connected to our antagonist, Wilson in some way. Could he potentially be our soul donor?

No, that would be impossible. When Audrey was created, Wilson was still alive, so it physically can't be him. But then who? Well, for an answer, looked no further than this memory. A carton of milk for growing up strong and healthy, had some chocolate for a snack enjoyed by both young and old. The use of the word old here suddenly opened my eyes to new possibilities. Just because Audrey was a child, it didn't mean that the soul that she was born from had to be. What if instead it was coming from a grown-up, a parent?

Someone who would have shared memories with their child. They would have seen a man wearing a boater hat. They would have given their child a toy based on their favorite book, crayons, for their child to play with. Audrey wasn't made with Wilson's soul, but rather the soul of one of Wilson's parents. And when you look into it, it becomes very clear which one it is. It's revealed in the game's final minutes that Nathan Arch, owner of Archgate Pictures and the Bendy IP, is Wilson's father. As of 9 o'clock this morning, Bendy and all his little cartoon friends now belong to me. This acquisition, according to an article on the Joey Drew Studio Archives, took place in

1972, only a year before the events of the Dark Revival. So the timeline for Nathan being the sole donor doesn't add up. He was still alive at the time. But you know who wasn't? Wilson's mother. In the spinoff title, Boris and the Dark Survival, we get this clip from Joey Drew to Nathan Arch. Hope this reaches you in South America.

You and Tessa enjoy your vacation. Tessa Arch. Wife to Nathan and mother to Wilson. She looked after Wilson. She would have seen her husband Nathan wearing that boat her hat out and about in the 1930s or earlier. She would have given her son a cracked, mug and a set of crayons. These are her memories. And the one that puts it all together is this. The final memory that you collect. A simple hot dog.

Seems like nothing much, right? Wrong. In that same area of Wilson's lab, you can find an audio recording from Nathan that says this. I think we'll pick up a hot dog for Tessa. He brought a hot dog home for Tessa. That was a memory that they shared. A memory that Audrey now shares. In short, when Wilson's trying to kill you at the end of the game, what he's really doing, unintentionally, is trying to kill his own mother. Talk about your awkward edipus complex, right? In the In the end, Joey Drew turned to Nathan, his close friend during the financial collapse of his company. It's been quite a struggle to put this into words. Nathan Bio is coming up a little short. If you couldn't lend us the amount I mentioned in my last letter, it wouldn't be a big help to me. But inevitably, this never came to pass. Nathan didn't help.

Joey Drew Studios fell into bankruptcy, and Nathan picked the company's bones dry. Betrayed once again by someone that he thought was his friend, Joey, in true Joey fashion, did like he did with Henry and Allison before. He threw Tessa Arch into the machine. He turned her into ink. He would tear the Arch family apart in order to create a family of his own. He used Tessa's soul to create Audrey. And then he created a cover story to hide all of his misdeeds. A story that framed him as the good guy.

Except now, we know the truth. Once a shyster, always a shyster. Whether you're made of ink or flesh. And see, guys, this is why you can't have friends in the entertainment business. We've got a brand new game that is full of secrets to find. Aptly called Secrets of the Machine. By doing certain tasks in a specific order, you can unlock teasers for new games, discover hidden Easter eggs, and even get jump scared by the Dancing Devil himself.

No joke, I actually had this game paused while I was on a call with our writers discussing what this theory would be, and suddenly, on that poor screen, I get jump scared by Bendy and nearly fly off my chair. But besides the poor screen jump scares, what's been cool about this particular game is that it's being updated every single day by the developers. With slight changes and alterations, adding more hints as to what the law of this game truly is. It's been a week since the game's release at the time of writing, and I'm still having to go back and change things because new secrets are being added, which is great for teasing fans, but not so great if you're trying to figure out the story. But despite the developers working against me in real time, I think I figured out what's really going on. The story we're being told isn't just to tease new games. It's a story of loss, regret, and an evil corporation that has taken things too far in the name of innovation.

And for once, we're not talking about Joey Drew. So dive into The Ink with me, friends, as we uncover the secrets of the machine. As I've mentioned, this game is very much about exploration. You walk into an isolated house within a black void and through an inky portal. And once there, you can unlock a bunch of things just by experimenting. One thing you're able to do is get cans out of this vending machine. And so, naturally, most players pick them up and started throwing them all over the place to see what they could break. Which is good, because that's actually what the devs want you to do.

Dang it, we've become predictable. It is quite fun, though. You can throw cans into this pipe, at Bendy cutouts, at posters on the wall, literally anything you can see. Try throwing a can at it, because chances of it. are, you'll unlock something. But the important one for us today is over here on the right, where you can find two windows and a locked door. By playing the games as the developers intended and throwing your can of beans at the lit window, the lights go out and the door unlocks, taking us to a room with a family portrait front and center. There's a pencil attached to the

painting, and by using it, we can measure our height on the wall and see that the person we are playing as is six years old. Ah yes, a time full of innocence and wonder. But don't worry, just like all Bendy games, our life is about to get a whole lot worse. hear a car honk, and suddenly blood splatters onto the parents of the family portrait. There's only one interpretation here. We lost our parents in a car accident. That'd be traumatic for anyone, let alone a six-year-old. So, of course, this sends our character down a very dark path. As we walk into a middle school, we see a teacher talking to the school psychologist about us. We're pursuing art, however, our drawings have become twisted since the accident. Instead of cute birds and butterflies,

we've now taken to drawing monsters that are scaring the other students. It's also during this conversation, we learn of our character's name, Riley. That's not a name we've heard before in this franchise, but, you know, it's nice to put a name to a POV, I guess. As time goes on, we see one of Riley's drawings that scared the other kids at school, an angry looking car with blood pooling underneath it, the car that killed her parents. At least that's how Riley sees it. Her trauma is definitely outworking itself through her art. Though this character is unusual, not because it's disturbing, but because we've seen it before. This is Gasket, and if that name isn't familiar to you, I'm honestly not surprised.

He was one of the villains you went up against in the mobile game, Bendy Nightmare Run. That's right, Bendy had a mobile game. And I say had, because the game is no longer available to download anywhere, due to a whole host of reasons, including rising costs and lawsuits.

So, Gaskets' inclusion here felt like a really weird callback, especially when according to the game's description, this is a game made of, quote, lost cartoons recently discovered in the dark vaults of Joey Drew Studios. But Riley doesn't work for Joey Drew. Or at least, she didn't. Because after she draws this horrifying car, we get a letter through the door from the one and only Joey Drew, offering Riley a job. We continue to draw more of the same angry car while at the studio, only for Riley to get fired from the studio because of these disturbances,

which explains why her infamous car was pulled from the dark vault of lost cartoons. Joey Drew hid her work some way, would never see the light of day because it was considered too scary. And that's coming from a company whose mascot is a literal devil. If you take a look at the rest of the characters from Nightmare Run, they all seem to fit that description. They're all much angrier, more violent characters than the cheeky devil that made the studio famous. Regardless, as we turn around, there is one final door to walk through. And above it reads, one word, gent. The corporation that made the ink machine in the first place, and was seen taking it away in their van at the end of the dark revival.

That is where the main story of secrets of the machine ends. A tragic story of trauma that causes nothing but misfortune for this new movie. character Riley. However, that isn't where the story ends for us theorists. There is much more going on in this story than meets the eye. If you take a step back and look at some of the seemingly random details this game has to offer us, we can start to figure out the bigger picture. What's going on with this ending? Why have we been introduced to a new character? And how does it tie into the wider bendy story? Well, for starters, it's important to establish that these events aren't just flying by in quick succession because the game's artistic. This kind of world manipulation, along with the

sepia tone colour scheme and inky tunnel is the kind of thing we'd expect from one place in particular, the cycle. The cycle is the inky world created by the ink machine, a world that can be bent and moulded to the creator's will. We first experienced the cycle at the very end of Chapter 5 of the original Bendy and the Ink Machine. Our lead character Henry beat the ink demon and woke up in Jerry Drew's apartment. After some pleasantries, we walk through a door and end up right back at the start of Chapter 1. Everyone. And I mean, everyone, was confused by this ending. Even to this day, we still don't really have a full grasp of how the cycle works or how people end up there. What we do know is that it's called the cycle because existence here is quite literally a cycle,

a continuous loop that forces people to relive the same thing over and over again. And any time the ink demon is defeated by playing the old movie reel called The End, the world resets and everything begins again. But how does that relate to our new character, Riley? Well, by completing the story, we also end up starting from the beginning. If we get killed by Gaskett immediately after completing the main story, we're right back at the beginning. Get jump scared by Bendy and you guessed it, we're right back at the beginning. This game takes place inside the cycle.

Riley is in the cycle. And we can see that reflected in the archway that appears at the beginning of each playthrough. This archway contains a word or phrase, but it changes each time the cycle resets, showing us a different side of Riley's personality. Some of them are things like remember or discover, which makes sense. We're going to the house to discover secrets and remember. Remember the horrible things that have happened in Riley's past. But then we also get words that seem to contradict that sentiment.

One of the words that can appear is conceal, a word that literally means not to be seen. How can we both discover and also conceal? Well, when Henry resets, he doesn't remember it's a cycle. He has to go through and figure out what's going on, hence remember and discover. However, in future playthrus, using the seeing tool, you can find messages presumably from past Henry's warning this current Henry about what's to come. He was able to learn about what this place was, and he's trying to stop his future self from suffering the same fate. And if Riley is also continuing to go through the cycle, uncovering more and more secrets, revealing more and more about horrible past like the death of her parents, the rejection of teachers,

and her firing from Joey Drew Studios, I don't think she'd want her future self to remember any of this. She'd want to keep it hidden, to conceal it. And who could blame her? I thought Henry's loop sucked, but yikes. We also end up getting words like real life and illusion. Obviously, real is spelled like film real, because, I mean, who doesn't love a good pun? But if you take out the pun and focus on it being real life as in, it is real, then we end up with two more phrases that are opposites.

It would align with what Henry expressed when he's in the cycle, trying to figure out whether the whole thing is real or fake. Riley is going through that exact same experience. The world around her is weird and mysterious, constantly shifting with characters and objects appearing and disappearing. It'd be natural for her to assume it's all an illusion. But as with Henry, this is all very, very real. Then there's this final word, regret.

What exactly does Riley regret? The death of her parents wasn't exactly her fault. Does she regret the drawings that caused her to lose her job? Maybe. Although, I actually think the word is more closely connected to the ending of Riley's story. She ends up walking through a gent door, presumably meaning that after her firing from Joey Drew Studios, she ended up at Gent.

She sees a black container and upon interacting with it, the cycle resets. But while that's where our game loop ends, that last detail tells us a heck of a lot about what happened to Riley after at this final moment. Since Bendy and the Dark Revival, it's been clear that Gent were more than just the creators of the Ink Machine. They had some ulterior motives. While Joey Drew Studios was going bankrupt, the Gent Corporation is what kept them afloat.

And here, the Mona Lisa gaze into Mona's eyes in perfect health, with no undiagnosed problems and her optic nerve in excellent condition. Anyone here got eyes like Mona? Mine are brownish. Not enough people know about their eye. health. That's why OCT scans are included in every standard eye exam at Specsavers locations. Should have gone to Specsavers. Book an eye exam today. Eye exams provided by independent optometrists. Contact your local Specsavers for details.

Where some see heroes and others see egos. Bloomberg sees the era of billionaire athletes. A fad to some, the future of money to others. We see Crypto's trillion-dollar swings. the end of jobs or the end of human struggle. We see the endless funds fueling the AI hype. While others follow the noise, we follow the money. Learn more at Bloomberg.com. Know how the studio is still going at all. Though the obvious answer here is a gents privately pouring in some funds.

And truth be told, they really creep me out, especially that Mr. Gray. He doesn't seem to be motivated by money. Then he sure as heck ain't telling us what he's really after. Later on in the story, we hear this audio log, and it makes Gentletia motives crystal clear. So when I saw this here out in the newspaper that reads, Gent Corporation looking for research subjects pays $3.50 a week, I figured it'd be good for me. Easy money, right?

With my record, you can't afford to be picky. But it turns out something really wrong is going on in this place. I mean, I've seen dead people before. But here, death is like a way of life. A clockwork march, they wheel out the bodies and they disappear down the chute. Forgotten men from the street paid to die, $3.50 a week. And then, once you finally do walk into the Gent building during Bendy and the Dark Revival, you'll find a number of those bodies under tarps with black ink staining the sheets.

Gent were advertising jobs to people in order to use them as research subjects. People who were desperate and needed money. People that were criminals, homeless, or just couldn't keep a job. People like Riley. In secrets of the machine, by shooting some cans into an overhanging pipe, you can access the theatre. And if you throw another can at the screen, you begin to see a video that doesn't really fit anything we've seen before. It uses real footage of eyes, tentacles, dripping ink, along with the words reject, submit, and of course, Gent. This appears to be showing us exactly what these experiments were. Gent, experimenting with what the special ink from the ink machine

does to a person. Will it submit to its magical, sentient will? Or will their bodies reject? leading to another failed experiment and another dead body. We see a similar thing happen elsewhere in the franchise and now we get to do my favorite thing ever. Talk about the books. Woo! Party Poppers! Woo! Originally, the authors said that the books were actually full-blown canon to the games,

but now the Meatley, the series creator, has come out with this tweet. Quote, in regards to Bendy books and content outside of the games, I've always viewed them as fun extras for people who want more from the universe. The super talented authors and artists who work on them are given freedom to make things their own. To me, the games decide the canon. The books kind of live in this nebulous space between canon and not canon. That doesn't mean that information we get from the books is wasted, however. Books like this are often a place for the writers and developers to experiment,

to test out ideas and plant seeds in the minds of the audience to see what sticks and what doesn't. The stuff that does work might then have a chance to work its way into the games. And so I wanted to bring this stuff up because I think that might be. what we're starting to see here. Do you guys remember the insane cultish ink man from the first game Sammy Lawrence? Well, in the book Dreams Come to Life, we learn a bit more about his backstory as the director of the music department for Jerry Drew Studios. He ends up accidentally consuming some of the ink machine's magical ink when a pipe bursts. He immediately becomes addicted to drinking the stuff and it slowly drives him insane, eventually leading to him becoming the black inky,

demon-worshipping version we see in the very first game. Just like the ink machine can turn human souls and drawings into living versions of characters, the ink from the ink machine has the ability to physically change people into inky monsters. That is what Jent seems to be experimenting with, and Riley was one of those experiments. Remember, these are her memories we're cycling through, so seeing that video of an experiment happening to someone, it feels like it's her replaying the moment back to herself. She's only remembering quick flashes of the horrible thing she's experienced as her mind tries to forget and conceal them. Plus, if you go into the game's Steam page, you'll see this in the description.

Quote, subject number 131-389-145. Property of the Gent Corporation. No unauthorized viewing or interaction. Danger. Unstable. This confirms that the story we're experiencing is from a Gent experiment. You don't just give a video file a subject number for no reason. Riley is subject 131-389-145.

When she walked into Gent at the end of that story, it's not because she works for Gent. But instead, she's a young adult down on her luck that needed money to stay afloafloat. after losing her dream job. And Gent were happy to provide that. So long as she was willing to be part of a little experiment. That container we interact with at the end is ink from the ink machine. She's asked to consume it as part of the experiment to see if it would change her. And now they're observing and recording what happens.

That's why the archway signs keep changing to words like conceal and regret. She doesn't want to keep reliving these memories and regrets the decisions she made to get there. But there's nothing she can do. She's stuck repeating it over and over and over again. completely helpless while Gent just stand there and watch. Or at least, I thought she was completely helpless. But there's one detail that caught my attention. The name of the building.

It's called the drawing board, which on the surface just sounds like a reference to Riley's artistic roots. But in reality, I think it has a double meaning. The phrase back to the drawing board means that you've attempted something, but it was unsuccessful. So you're going back to the start in order to try again. Riley is constantly going back to where it all began. the car accident, the firings, the submission to Jen's experiment. However, this name tells us that she is refusing to sit there resigned to her fate. She's literally going back to the drawing board each time she resets to see if some other change will affect the outcome.

We were warned that this game was considered unstable, which also implies that Jen aren't the ones controlling what's happening inside the game, despite being enabled as the developers. They aren't the ones changing the arrangement of items inside the house. It's Riley trying desperately to change her fate to find a way to find a way to, to break out of her cycle. Ultimately, I think she'll end up succeeding. At least partially anyway. When you enter the main room of the drawing board, you're greeted with a banner that once again can have a couple of messages. But the most common one I've encountered is this.

Escape your Cage. Obviously, this feels like a message for Riley, encouraging her to keep going and to try again to break free. But the word choice is interesting. While Cage reflects a place where an animal or a test subject would be trapped, just like Riley is, it's also the name of the next big installment of the Bendy franchise. The cage was teased late last year, but other than a short teaser and a couple of screenshots, we know nothing about this game, which I guess seems to be the marketing approach for most Bendy games these days. The only thing we do know is that this game takes place during Bendy and the Dark Revival between when Audrey visits Henry and the Gent Corporation building and Henry and the rest of the gang arriving during the final battle to help her.

The only other detail we have are these lost ones that are trying to attack us. Lost ones have been enemies for us in basically every installment of the Bendy franchise. Although they have personalities, they appear to be living in a constant state of suffering, slowly driving them insane and in turn, becoming hostile to anyone who they come across, exactly like what happens to Sammy when he becomes addicted and transformed by the ink in the books. This is the fate of those who are part of Jent's experiments, or the ones who submitted to the ink, that is. But these lost ones we see in the cage teasers are different. Unlike normal lost ones that are completely made up of goopy black, These ones have skeletons showing and weird apparatus around their skulls.

It looks like something straight out of the Saw franchise, but if the lost ones are experiments created by Gent, then this apparatus does look like something you might use as part of an experiment. Also, the place Henry is escaping from in the cage is known as the pit, which is found inside the gent building. So seeing more gent experiments in that particular area isn't all that surprising. But the most noticeable detail is that amongst the usual black ink is also some kind of red liquid mixed. The only time we've seen any colours in this world other than the black and sepia yellow is from Wilson in Bendy in the Dark Revival. He was trying to bring his new character Shipahoy Dudley to life and to do so he was using multi-coloured ink.

The final creation was still a mostly black and yellow monster but with streams of rainbow coloured ink leaking out of him. But that's not what we're seeing here. It's just red. There are no other colours mixed in and it's worked into their bodies rather than leaking out of them like blood. That tells me these aren't connected to Wilson, but someone else. Someone that specifically uses red ink. Someone like Riley. When she draws gasket, she uses red ink to draw blood underneath it.

She's been told that her designs are too creepy and I don't know about you, but these new lost ones are way creepier than what we've seen previously. She has to be connected to this in some way. I'm not entirely sure how, but we do see a bunch of coffins building up outside the drawing board. In both the games and the books, for the ink to take, The person needs to be living. They need to submit to the ink and not reject it. But as we heard from that audio log,

a lot of the experiments from Jen don't work out and they just end up with a bunch of dead bodies. But here, death is like a way of life. A clockwork march. Given that these new lost ones have skeletons showing, they look more like the dead race to life than a living being corrupt by ink. It's almost as if those rejected bodies

are what ends up in those coffins. And from there, Riley is able to take these failed experiments and give them new life, her red ink and twisted imagination. It may even have something to do with the Bendy summoning circle that is slowly being drawn on the floor of the hidden room in the back. Is she using it as part of her creation process? Or is it to summon Bendy to help her escape this cycle?

Sammy Lawrence drew the same circle to try and summon the ink demon in the original Bendy. And he's also due to return in this upcoming game. So I wouldn't be surprised if these two are connected. Working together as a force to stop Henry as he tries to defeat Bendy and help Audrey. I mean, Henry was the partner of Jerry Drew after all. the man who fired Riley and led her down a path towards Gent, the experiments, and being stuck in the cycle in the first place. Riley doesn't want to escape. She wants revenge.

But hey, that's just a theory. A game theory! Thanks for watching. World premiere on game theory. This is the complete law of Amanda the Adventurer.