Game Theory - A Fragmented Memory (FNAF Help Wanted 2)

Episode Date: January 17, 2024

Join Game Theory Host MatPat as he solves the newest Five Nights At Freddy's game, FNAF Help Wanted 2! *Credits:* Writers: Matthew Patrick and Tom Robinson Editors: Dan "Cybert" Seibert, Koen Verhagen, Pedro Freitas, Warak and Shannon (Bomb0i) Sound Designer: Yosi Berman

Come get your cat candy here, candy, candy. Now I will tell you a story, really. A-end in an end. There once was a boy covered in. There he saw a rabbit. He followed the rabbit. As it's, they went above the... Oh, internet?

Welcome to Game Theory, the show that encourages you to be mask off. Ladies and gentlemen, it is time to conclude the year of FNAF. With tales from the Pizzaplex books releasing every two months, the ruined DLC release back in July, and the FNAF movie happened in October, 2023 really did feel like the classic days of FNAF all over again, where there was a new release happening every few months. And to end the year of FNAF on an insanely high note, Steelwall decided to pull one final trick out of the Scott Cawthin Playbook.

They released a second game within six months of ruin, the completely unexpected, but very exciting sequel to FNAF VR, help wanted. And let me tell you, they couldn't have released a more perfect game at a more perfect time. Because at a moment of peak frustration with the fan base, When Foxy Stans and Bonnie Bros had all collectively thrown up their hands in desperation, this game swooped in to deliver the answers that they so desperately needed. If the narrative of FNAF is kind of like a cracked piece of pavement constantly on the verge of crumbling into dust,

this game was the cement filling in the crevices, patching up all the holes in the narrative, just enough, give the whole thing a solid foundation again, at least for another couple of months. And I really do mean that. Not since FNAF 6 has there been a Freddy's game so determined to tie up loose ends and deliver answers to the lingering questions that have been piling up in the background. Basically, help want to two single-handedly put a close on one major story arc, while also opening the door to another, a next generation.

It's an ending and a beginning, all in one, depicting a cycle of violence that shows that you're never truly out of the woods when you're in the world of FNAF. In short, it's probably the single most important game release in the last six years for this franchise. So today, we're going to solve this game together to see what it's trying to tell us and where it's pointing the series moving forward.

So grab your FAS wrenches and get ready to step into magic, theorists. Today, finally, we're going to see what lies behind the mask. As the game opens, we're welcomed in as a new employee of the Pizzeria. Pazbear Entertainment is offering a new on-the-job training position for a future pizza professional. And after that short intro, we're immediately thrust into a Pizzeria hubworld full of training mini-games. All while Helpy cheers us forward from his little projector in the corner. But very quickly, one question starts to rear its ugly head. Who are we?

Who are we playing as? Throughout the various mini missions that we're presented with, one line that we hear repeated over and over again is, What Makes You So Special? Three separate characters all bring it up. Moon, Baby, even Mystic Hippo. What makes you so special? What makes you so special? What makes you so special?

Considering everyone keeps asking us, we should probably have ourselves an answer ready for them, right? Well, we get a solid idea of who we might be thanks to plenty of explicit clues that are sprinkled throughout the game. First and foremost, we know. that we're a FAS technician. Midway through the game, you unlock a FAS wrench that allows you to access a secret back area of the Pizzeria. In that back room, there's a glowing tower that should look familiar to anyone who played through the Ruin DLC earlier this year. An inhibitor. Back in that game, these devices stopped you from being able to remove your AR-enabled Vanny mask.

But that's silly, why would that matter here? It's not like we're wearing a mask. Or are we? Sure enough, deactivating the tower allows you to reach up and remove the AR mask that's been stuck to your face since you first booted up the game. Suddenly, you see that this entire time you've been inside of a derelict pizzeria, worn down, decayed. And this isn't just any ruined pizzeria. It's the Fnaf 6 location, complete with a recharge station and a Freddie spaghetti hole front and center. Not only, is this just a fantastic midgame twist that completely recontextualizes everything that you

thought you knew about this game world, but it also helps confirm who we are and why we're down here. You see, us having a bany mask? It's weird, right? Like, who are we? Why would we have something like this in our possession. Well, it has to do with our job. In ruin, Helpy tells us that these AR masks were worn to help technicians navigate through the destroyed Pizzaplex. Now, when I first saw that in the game, I was convinced that it was a trick just to get us to wear the mask and teach us the mechanics of this new game. But here we are in Help Want a 2 in a destroyed Pizzaplex wearing a Vanny mask. And right there on the wall is a poster telling staff members to make sure they remove the mask at the end of the day. It proves

that what Helpe was saying, at least in this moment, wasn't a trick. The mask is in fact a real tool that's used by FASBair technicians for as strange of a concept as that is. So we're a technician for the restaurant, sure. But that's not the only thing we know. Our next clue comes in the form of the Fas wrench. Midway through the game, you unlock this tool, which allows you access to the back area of the pizzeria. Upon unlocking it, the mystic Hippo Karni Booth says that the key is familiar to us.

Look, Mr. Gumbull! He's familiar to you. So we know that we're someone who's used this tool in the past. Immediately that should bring to mind one person, Cassie's dad. Earlier this year in the security breach, Ruin DLC, we were introduced to a young girl named Cassie, who goes on a mission to rescue her friend Gregory from the destroyed remains of the derelict pizzaplex. Along the way, she too obtains a fazz wrench and says this. A fazz wrench, it's just like my dad's.

It's a pretty explicit connection there, and that's not all. In the fazzarblast arcade games and help want it too, we repeatedly hear the carney say this. Now, you look like you dead kids. We're a prize, with a little one. So we're a fazz tech, who also happens to be a parent. Cassie's dad is literally the only character we know who truly fits the bill. But so what? What's the big deal if we're playing as Cassie's dad? It's not all that interesting. And you heard what Moon said. What makes you so special? We're special in some way.

Let me just make this perfectly clear. All dads are special, okay? They have very important roles in their kids lives. That's something that makes him very special. At least in my book. But obviously we're talking about FNAF. The joys of parental responsibility? Not what these characters are referring to. In a theory that I posted a couple months ago, I proposed that Cassie's dad wasn't just any technician. Instead, he was none other than the Bonnie Bro from Fnaf 4. You know, the kid that wears the Bonnie mask who helps Michael torture his crying brother to death, we know from Ruins item descriptions that Cassie's dad's favorite character was Bonnie. In that game, we were also able to collect both an old-school Foxy and Bonnie mask, which was an odd detail when you consider that there were no other

OG animatronic masks present like Freddy or Chica. That seemed to be referencing the masks that both Michael Afton and Bonnie Bro were wearing on that fateful day in 1983. Those details, coupled with a few other things, led us to the whole Bonnie bro conclusion. But now that the full game's out, it certainly seems definitive that our theory was right. You see, towards the end of Help Wanted 2, we're given the chance to light fires next to the gravestones of some very familiar missing children. Light them in a specific order, and you unlock a secret chest. A chest that contains none other than that old Bonnie mask. When you collect it, we see the text, this looks familiar.

It also unlocks an achievement called Lost Luggage. This right here, this was our mask. It was one that we thought was lost a time. One worn during that horrific accident of 1983. Speaking of that date, in order to find the game's secret ending, we have to unlock six creepy voodoo-dow plushies, each one hidden behind very explicit in-game actions. In one, you go to sister locations private room and type in a very specific date. I bet you can guess what it is, one nine eight three. And that year just keeps coming up. Multiple mini-games take place during Fall Fest, which in the previous VR games DLC was specifically called out as being in That is why we're considered special because we were part of that fateful day.

Because by killing the crying child, we sent William on a murderous rampage. It's a memory that we, as Bonnie Bro, have tried to repress. And that's not just me speculating. We know that Bonnie Bro has been actively trying to avoid these memories based on Mystic Hippo asking us this. Do you remember? It's also why when we collect one of the first secret voodoo plushies, we get a trophy in game whose description reads, retrieve a memory. Basically by playing this game and getting these secret objects, we're forcing ourselves to confront. front memories that we've buried deep in our psyche.

We're come to terms with the trauma of our past. We're accepting it as something that happened that cannot be changed, only atoned for. Which then brings us to the game's endings. If you play through the game normally, just by completing the various mini-games' helpie tasks you with, you eventually unlock the six members of the FAS Force. The FNAF Universe version of the Transformers,

because let's face it, at this point, FNAF has literally parodied every IP known to mankind. Once you complete the collection, the lights flicker, and suddenly a charging station appears, which opens up to reveal the hand of our dear friend GlitchTrap. Another flash? Suddenly the nightmare staff bots appear, attacking you. GlitchTrap has won. He's tricked us. He's used Cassie's dad's love of collectibles against him. Much like the tapes and help wanted one, these action figures contained parts of him, his memories, his essence. By gathering them all together, we've once again

made Glitch Trap whole. With Princess Quest being the cannon ending and security breach, it means that Glitch Trap lost his hold over Vanessa. He needed himself a new helper, so he lured us in. The last human employee remaining and got us to put the pieces back together to reawaken him. The cycle once again repeats. That's why we see him reaching out of the charging station, just like during the burn trap ending. He has enough strength to reawaken, to take control. And it's only then that the staff bots show up to kill us. But things aren't quite done yet.

After our death, we change perspective into the eyes of a staff bot. And not just any staff bot, specifically we're looking through the eyes of the one who tells Cassie to take a mask at the beginning of security breach ruin. Take a mask. Take a mask. It would seem like we've been absorbed into the system. Our consciousness is now part of this MapBot. We're trapped inside of it, forced to execute its commands. In the ultimate of ironies, the mask that we were using to try and stop GlitchTrap

becomes the mask that we now give our daughter as MapBot. This is then what results in her getting that occipital implant. This is how Helpy gets into her mind. And this is eventually how the mimic gets free. To me, the way that you get this ending, it's highly symbolic by not accepting our past, By ignoring and repressing the scars of our past actions, by not unlocking all those memory plushies, we've passed our mistakes forward.

And in the process, we managed to doom our own daughter. Bonnie Bro didn't just ruin the life of one child, he wound up ruining two. Our actions have, in short, single-handedly prompted the events of ruin. But hold on, I just kind of glossed over a big detail there. We're attacked by a bunch of corrupted staff bots, and then suddenly we're in Mapbot? Ow! It's kind of a big leap there, you know?

Well, at first, I thought that we were just scanned into the system. the mimic AI scanned our brains while we were wearing the vanny mask and boom, we're now stuck as part of the AI program running the whole Pizzaplex. But looking closer at the details, I think there's actually another explanation here. When you look at the map bot through the vanny mask and ruin, it looks different from all the other staff bots that you encounter in the game. It looks more organic. You can actually see what appears to be a brain stuffed inside of its head. Compare that to how every other staff bot looks under that same AR lens, and it's completely different. Why would that be though?

Well, it would appear as though our brain, or at the very least our organic matter, was stuffed inside of these robotic suits. It's part of what's powering this particular bot. But again, I ask, why? This seems to be such a random detail. Until you remember what a computer brain would be learning from studying Afton's behavior. Afton stuffs his victims into animatronic suits. That's what he did during the missing children's incident. It's what we see Glitztrap doing at the end of Help Wanted One, and apparently, it's what he did to Bonnie Bro.

He stuffed him into MapBot here. For a while, there's been a lot of confusion about the true nature of glitch trap. Is it a virus? Is it Afton in the mimic AI? Was burn trap the mimic? It's largely been left unclear. But now, I actually think this ending is trying to give us an answer. In the books, they make it explicitly clear that there are at least two mimics threatening the Pizaplex. First, there's a physical mimic that's buried down in the basement, that physically walks around and is able to kill people.

Then there's the second version, a more general AI program that's eventually able to get installed to run the entirety of the Pizeplex, and is able to control and corrupt all the animatronics that work there. Is this confusing? Yeah. Is it frustrating? Most definitely. But I also now see what they were going for with the storyline. Remember how an AI works?

You train it by feeding it situational data. And the data that goes in directly influences how it's going to behave moving forward. There's even an example of this with the endo daycare minigame in Help Want a 2. You're teaching an AI program how to behave. Good data going in gives you good behavior. Bad data going in gives you chaotic behavior.

In the books, we see the basement AI being trained up with a simple code. off all the arms and legs of things that look humanoid. And it does this over and over again, in epilogue after epilogue to each and every one of our teenage protagonists. The data that the basement AI was trained up on was simple and it was non-specific. But like a good program, it did exactly what it was told. Ripped off all those limbs.

Now compare that to the PizzaPlex AI. This was trained using a lot more data. It was told to copy the behavior of actual humans. And so it learned coded languages. It learned a wider series of gestures and behaviors. It learned how to play games and hang up close. It was far more sophisticated. So by having two different versions of the mimic in the books, what we're really seeing are different ways that an AI can be trained up and how the behavior spins off of that. So how's that all applied to the games? Well, in ruin, there's a key moment on the catwalks of Monte Gator Golf that show two entities working together, but also acting separately, as they're able to argue against each other. Help he says, I took care of the situation, to which the mimic responds.

They're cut from the same cloth. They both started as the mimic program, but they've evolved. in different ways. And based on all of that, I suspect that the mimic Cassie runs from at the end of Ruin is a parallel for the book's basement AI A simpler, older system that uses Gregory's voice to talk to us throughout Ruin. This one just exists and executes two simple goals. Kill things and escape from the basement. But then there's the Pizaplex AI. I suspect that this is the more sophisticated system. This is the one that's been trained up on Afton's data specifically. It's the one that embodies itself as Glitz Trap and it's also the one that speaks to us in the form of Helpy. And we know this to be true because of what we see throughout Help Wanted 2. In this one game, the AI is drawing from pretty much every past animatronic, including characters like Scrap Baby and Lefty, which are odd pulls considering their characters

that were never put on display for the public. These were characters that only existed for the fake pizzeria made to entrap Afton in Fnaf 6. So the fact that the system here knows about them means that they had to have come from Afton's mind. It's also why in the Helpy Hospital minigames, we see a kid's drawing of a burning pizza restaurant with Helpy running away. That's how Afton was able to escape and live on. His consciousness was contained within the Helpy AI, which was able to survive the Fnaf 6 fire.

And remind me again, who's the one that encourages us to play these mini-games throughout HelpWont 2? The mini-games that lead to the collection of the FAS-Force toys, which ultimately give us the bad ending? Oh yeah, it's Helpy. And not just any Helpy either. Helpy spelled with an I. That spelling detail actually matters.

You see, the name of the physical animatronic Helpy, it spelled H-E-L-L-P-Y. But in Ruin, that digital neural implant helpie is spelled HELPI. And when you know it, in the game files for Help 1-1-2, the Helpie on the projector screen is once again spelled with an eye. This is GlitchTrap, the Mimic Program trained up on Afton's data. He's yet again trying to put the pieces back together. And by completing his tasks and unlocking the FAS Force, you help him to succeed.

He's now back in full control of the Pizzaplex, ready for ruin, ready to create a new servant in Cassie to finish what Vanessa started. But if I've learned anything from Steel Wool, it's that you can't always trust the first ending you see. Remember that creepy plushy that we unlocked earlier? Well, there are six of them in total. Each one unlocked via a seemingly random series of actions. Put a code into the Wackamol game backwards. Make a weird soda mixture only during a complete electrical shutdown of the factory.

Shoot a random rocket chip during various Fasherblast minigames until you get to FNAF 2, at which point you pop balloon recreations of the animatronics to unlock a final boss battle against a cut out a spring trap. Like I said, these get bizarre and they get convoluted in a hurry. But the main thing you need to know about them is that by collecting them, you unlock a glitched coin that allows you to play the fourth and final version of Princess Quest's arcade cabinet. At first, it plays just like your normal Princess Quest minigames. You swing your sword, you kill the glitchy bunnies, you collect the keys, simple. At least until it's not.

You open a door and you suddenly find yourself standing next to someone playing an arcade cabinet. Next thing you know, the princess is standing there in the room with you. Are you kidding me? Oh, this is nuts. The real world and the digital world are leaking. into each other. Reach into the screen, grab your sword, and suddenly you are the princess. Who's the princess now? B-Beeh! Glowing sword in hand, we fight our way through the glitching bunnies until we meet the old Red King. We give him our Vanny mask, and in return, he gives us the

glitch trap plushy from Help Wanted One. And this is where things go really off the rails. Out of nowhere, the sister location elevator appears. Hop in, and suddenly it takes us inside of a giant claw machine, with a giant Vanny staring in at us. We offer up the glitch trap plushy revealing the true glitch trap. She crushes him and then fades into darkness. Doing so unlocks a trophy named consequences. The description reads, system threats found, repair complete. So, what was all that? Well, actually it seems pretty explicit. Glitch trap was the system threat. By crushing him, he's been deleted and the wider AI system's been repaired. We won. Except, is that possible? Didn't I just say that the other ending

showed us the start of ruin? For that game to exist, which we know it does, Glitch Trap has to survive here. So is this secret ending not canon then? Just a cool reveal with no substance? No, actually, I don't believe so. For the first time ever in this franchise's history, I Matt Pat believe that both endings are canon, let me explain. I do think that we're destroying Glitch Trap and the Vanney ending, but I'm not exactly sure it's a system-wide removal.

Instead, I suspect that this ending is specifically about Vanessa herself. We've known since the original Help Wanted that Vanessa, GlitchTrap, and Princess Quest have all been inextricably connected. For those of you don't remember, the Princess Quest minigame originated back in the two days, version of Help Wanted, where they needed a game to replace the original mechanic of piecing together the missing 16 tapes from Tape Girl. Here, we watch as Vanessa, the princess falls victim to Glitchtrap. In Security Breed, she beat Princess Quest 3, which shows Glitchtrap being defeated, and Vanessa walking out of the Pizabeth's freed, leaving the Vanny Mask behind. So the fact that we're now playing Princess Quest again tells me that we're not fighting to remove Glitchtrap from the Pizs system,

instead we're yet again fighting specifically to free Vanessa. These games have always been about Vanessa and Glitchtrap. I wouldn't expect four to deviate from that pattern. Even my old buddy Candy Cadets trying to tell us that this game is about finishing Vanessa's story. Throughout Help One and Two, you collect coins that can then be traded to Candy Cadet for pieces of a story. His second one tells about a young woman that's been lured in by a friendly voice, only for it to have been a witch that tries to eat her. Now let me tell you a story about a young woman who, when she was little,

was led into a dark forest by a witch and almost eaten. She manages to escape, but she's permanently scarred in the process. When she's older, she returns and is met by a young boy who offers to help. When she had grown, she sought revenge on the witch and entered the forest again willingly. She was greeted at the mouth of the forest by a young boy who offered to help guide her through the darkness. She welcomed the help and followed the young boy over the river through the jacked trees and tore a small house. She followed the boy into the house. The oven door closed.

The witch would finally have her meal. here, this is Vanessa's story, cut and dry. She was lured in by what she thought was a friendly voice, tape girl, telling her to gather the tapes to stop GlitchTrap, only for Glitch Trap to then take control. She does escape, but is permanently scarred by this. She has the Glitch Trap virus inside of her. It's not in full control, but it's definitely there, which is what we hear about in the emails from FNAF AR and the retro CDs from Security Breach. I compartmentalized him. He's locked away. She had compartmentalized him. He wasn't in full control, at least not yet. She then comes back to tried to kill GlitchTrap herself but runs into a young boy.

Which seems like he's gonna help her, only to lure her deeper under GlitchTrap's control. By the time she transfers to the Pizzaplex, Vanessa's tone has changed in her therapy tapes. I'm needed somewhere else now, thank you. We see the same thing in the FNAF AR emails. She's no longer in control. Glitch Trap has completely taken over,

and it's all thanks to the only little boy that we know of, Gregory. Thanks to his retro CDs, we know that he was meeting a person in a bunny costume. You're talking to someone or something? It's hard to tell. What are those things? They almost look like rabbit ears. Gregory is a villain. At the very least, he was at some point in the story.

That is clear as day. Between this Candy Cadet story, Gigi and the fact that he was clearly working with Vanny before the events of security breach, he is not on our side. He was the one that helped Glitch Trap to take full control Vanessa, right up until the end of security breach. Even cut lines of dialogue from Help Wanted 2 seem to support our conclusion here. These voice lines come directly from Vanessa, and they tell us the following. Quote, you need to listen to me carefully. Don't help it escape.

It's using you to finish where she left off. Only a small piece of his code remains. Vanessa is back to being more in control, but she knows that a small part of him remains, the glitch trap plushy that started it all back in Help Wanted. We also get lines like, The Memories are freed. Use the token.

Bring him to me. Referencing the memory plushies that we're collecting, the glitched Princess Quest token, and then being told to bring the plushy to her so that she can crush it herself once and for all. Destoring glitch trap inside of her mind allows that other persona Vanny to finally fade into darkness.

Vanessa is truly free. And we know this to be true because after this ending, when you go back to the main hub screen, Helpy's gone. Replaced by a boy claiming that the Fasbear pizza tastes like real cheese. Delicious for him, but even tastier is the fact that Helpy's been purged. Glit's trap is gone. At least, he's gone from this version of the program.

And you see, this is what I meant about endings and beginnings. This to me feels like a very specific end, the end of Vanessa's story. And with it, the end of this current era of FNAF, from Help Wanted One to Help Wanted 2. Let's call it the Vanessa arc. longer a part of this story. Her battle's over. We saved her completely. But in closing out her story, the cycle also repeats. Yet again, we have ourselves an innocent girl, this time named

Cassie, being lured in by a seemingly friendly voice, Gregory. But in reality, it's all a trap. Thanks to that occipital implant, she now has help be as a part of her mind, just like Vanessa did with Glitchtrap. And now she's wearing the mask more and more frequently, again like Mani. In short, it's been passed on. Cassie is just Vanessa 2.0. Gone is the era of Vanessa and Glitchtrap. Long live Cassie and the men. At this point, the only question is, what's it truly gonna take to break this cycle once and for all? But hey, that's just a theory. A game theory. Thanks for watching!