Game Theory - DON'T Trust Your Neighbor (Welcome Home)

Episode Date: September 18, 2023

Join Game Theory Host MatPat as he continues to break down the hidden LORE of Welcome Home! Credits: Writers: Matthew Patrick, Eddie “NostalGamer” Robinson and Tom Robinson Editors: Dan "Cybert" Seibert, Tyler Mascola, Koen Verhagen, Alex "Sedge" Sedgwick, and Shannon (Bomb0i) Sound Designer: Yosi Berman

When I was a boy and I would hear about something scary, somebody getting badly hurt or something like that. My mother would try to find out who was helping the person who got hurt. Always look for the people who are helping, she'd tell us. You'll always find somebody who's trying to help. Oh, internet, welcome home. To game theory. The show that leaves no hidden link unclipped. Today we continue our investigation into Welcome Home,

the website that's one part fan wiki, All Parts, ARG. Last time we began doing a deep dive into the website's July update, where, to a series of hidden links, secret, safe codes, and invisible link, we discovered that the main character Wally was covering his artwork in a strange paint-like substance, one that allows him to speak to, control, and convert new followers into a cult. But things are never quite that simple. Wally is not just a physical puppet, he's a figurative one as well.

He appears to be nothing more than a pawn in a larger scheme, having his strings pulled by the real threat, Home, the living house at the center of the neighborhood. Last time we left things on a bit of a cliffhanger, there were still several parts of the update that I had yet to cover. Twisted videos of rotten vegetables, muffled conversations with the neighbors, and one character who's secretly looking to betray them all.

Today's revelations, I believe, will not only give us an answer about Home's ultimate goal, but also tease what we can expect from this franchise moving forward into the next major update. So take my hand, theorists, as we have one more stroll around the block in the sinister neighborhood we call home. One thing I didn't expect when logging back into the Welcome Home website post update was the sheer amount of bugs across the site.

And no, I'm not talking about broken links or buttons that don't work, I'm talking literal bugs crawling around the website. These colorful little critters appear on nearly every page. And at first I thought it was just a little extra design flare, adding some movement to an otherwise static page. But then I noticed this particular part of the most recent newsletter, Quote, Please excuse those pesky bugs, dear neighbor.

What is a beautiful home without a pest or two? We will do our best to keep things neat, tidy, and organized. I mean, they might as well have just said, Do Not Touch in giant red letters. So, of course, I'm gonna touch it. When you do, you're met with something completely new to the series. A video. A video that opens another side of the story

that Wally, Home, and the Restoration Project do not want people to hear. So, let's take a look for ourselves, shall we? We don't get a lot visually from the videos themselves. They appear to be our neighborhood characters interacting with each other. The conversations seem to be very trivial on the surface. Sally wants Poppy to bake a cake, Howdy is talking about his family back home with Barnaby,

and Eddie and Julie play make-believe games. Nothing's really happening, but we know better. Looking at the details here, you start to notice that the conversations are happening off in the background, meaning that whatever perspective we're seeing this from, it's not the character that we hear. So, whose perspective are we in? And why are we watching? Well, you don't have to wait long to get your answer. At the end of each and every video, one of the characters addresses Wally, and as they say his name, the audio distorts and the visuals cut out.

out. I'm sure we can come up with a wonderful joke between the three of us. Isn't that wrong? Next time, don't give any any hints, hey? I didn't see you there. What can I get you for you today, Walsh? In fact, in some clips, we actually see Wally's hand in the shot. We are watching from Wally's perspective.

He is the lens that we're seeing the world through. Except, he's not interacting. He's just sitting there, quietly, completely still, observing. He's going from place to place keeping a close eye on all his neighbors, spying on his neighbors, if you will. If we're right and Wally is supposed to be some kind of a cult, leader than this makes a lot of sense. As the shepherd for his flock, he needs to make sure that everyone's under control. No one's stepping out of line. By the looks of it, something rotten seems to be happening under the surface of this idyllic kids TV series. In one of the hidden videos, Sally Starlet makes a snide comment to Poppy about someone using gelatin molds for all their baking. There's no one else in the neighborhood I would trust with this. And not just because you're the only one here who can make something that doesn't come out of a gelatin mold. And we learned that this is a dig at the local bookworm Frank Franklin, based on a similar conversation in a different video. I suppose gelatin can't always be relied upon, too. Still, I think it holds perfectly sliced

fruit beautifully. People are gossiping. They're making comments about others when they're not present. And they don't just stop at gossiping either. Barnaby mentions having tomatoes thrown at him by another neighbor in a different bit of audio. As long as they're not throwing tomatoes at me, it sounds like a walk in the park. I tell you, we got a neighbor who's got an arm like a professional baseball player. It's not easy. This again feels like a call out to Frank Frank Franklin, who has himself. vegetable patch in the back garden. In fact, there's a lot of weirdness around Frank in general, which we'll come back to in a minute. In general, though, people in this neighborhood are feeling a lot of tension, and most of it's revolving around the resident jokester and Wally's best friend,

Barnaby, who seems to clash with almost everyone he speaks to. While Frank is teaching Wally about flowers, Barnaby comes in to create a big disruption. Hey, hey, not a daisy goes by where you don't get impatient, but hey, I'm just pauling your leg. You'll just get out of here. Go find an audience for Your silly gag somewhere else. Barnaby also chases down Eddie the mailman because he wants his delivery, even though Eddie says it's against the rules. I have to put it in your mailbox. It's policy.

And Barnaby just straight up bullies Julie after she tries to tell a joke. What did the number three say to the number two after beating him in a game of checkers? Oh no, here he comes. I won! That was just doggone terrible. But then there's the final video. It is wildly different from everything else we've seen so far. Unlike the other bugs that appear on the normal pages of the website,

this bug is found on a hidden page, the W-O-X-Y-V-E page from the Welcome Home pre-update. In case you don't remember, this was one in a series of hidden pages that you could discover by finding misplaced letters and the text sprinkled across the website. This particular page shows scripts from the original Welcome Home TV show, but now there's been a bug added,

a real bug hiding under the pages. Click it, and we find a video of Barnaby talking, just like all the other videos. But this time he's not talking to another character, instead he's talking to home, telling him all the things that he did that day. In his talk, Barnaby calls back to all the other clips, like annoying Frank,

bullying Julie, chasing down Eddie. Yeah, he's a real shower push. No wonder Julie can't tell a good joke. She's got a sense of humor, only Frank could love. Just like in all the other videos, Barnaby calls over to Wally, but this time, the video doesn't immediately end. Go on, get down.

Hello, buddy, bow. Hey, you stop baiting. Everything all right? Did you hear that? Just before the video glitches out, we hear a number of banging and creaking sounds all coming from home. It's home talking back. And if we look at the transcript, we actually get a translation to tell us how home is feeling.

Sounds of banging can be heard. Sort of like laughter. Opens and closes its door judgmentally. We're being helped along to understand how home feels. And given the judgmental lines are focused around what Barnaby sees is fun, I'm not convinced that home is happy. And most disturbingly of all, in those final moments, the bangs and creaks are left unaccounted for.

There's no transcript. No translation. Why? Because the truth is purposely being hidden from us. I believe that this right here is the moment that Wally is taken over by home. Until now, Wally has simply been a faithful servant to home, doing as it says, be in its eyes and ears. But after hearing how the neighborhood's been miserable, Home decided it needed to take matters into its own hands,

taken full control of Wally like the puppet that he is. But there was still something that felt odd to me. So far, Wally slash Home is the only one that we've seen communicating to us through the glitches in the website. But this suddenly blows the roof off their whole charade, revealing the truth that they don't want us to know, that they are one of the same. So why would they choose to show it to us on the website?

Well, what if I told you it's not them? There's someone else uploading these videos to the site. There's someone else working from the inside to take Wally down. Consider this. The way these videos have been seated out to us, the audience is completely different to how Wally's been speaking to us through this website so far. Wally draws on the website to get our attention,

but these videos are being revealed by literal bugs crawling across the site. So if Wally draws because he's an artist, then is there a character that's associated with bugs? The answer there is a resounding yes. One of the character's descriptions reads as follows, quote, The Resident Book Worm with an expertise on butterflies,

a description that belongs to none other than Frank Frankly. This guy loves butterflies. He even wears a butterfly-shaped bow tie to prove it. But he isn't limited to just one type of insect either. Eddie calls on him for help when an insect gets into his post office. I'm afraid I only deal with bugs, Mr. Deere. Your bug? A critter, I guess, your name of whatever it is.

It's upheaving my whole post office. The most damning of all is that on the merchandise page, there's a letter from Frank to Wally talking about an insect that he saw and a picture explaining the legs of the bug, a bright and colorful insect that looks exactly like the insects that we've been clicking on throughout the video. If there's an insect, Frank is involved, which means that these videos are coming from him. It is Frank trying to talk to us. And it's clear that he knows the truth about what's going on when you take a closer look at the videos taken place in his garden.

Frank is the only one with a vegetable patch, as seen from the neighborhood page. But the garden isn't quite right. There's a rotting tomato just lying there. And Frank acknowledges it in one of the clips. They just won't leave my tomatoes alone, and who am I to shoe with him away? But it's just left there for us to stare at. This sign of decay. Just like Wally, Frank here is painting us a picture.

He's telling us that life since joining the cult isn't all it's cracked up to be. There's a sign of decay inside. There's something corrupt in the middle of this otherwise, pristine looking place. In fact, in multiple clips, he's suspicious of the true nature of basically everyone around him. I doubt you're any sort of beagle. I've never seen any blue dog before in my life. Frank knows the neighborhood, Barnaby, Howdy, and Home are not what they seem on the surface. In fact, he's afraid of them. In that same video clip of the vegetable garden, we see a lineup of these colorful things. If there are any professional gardeners out there that want to

tell me exactly what they are and what their name is, I'd appreciate it because I wasn't able to find it, but to me, they seem very humanoid. We see eight standing up in a line and then one opposite them upside down with its head buried. Nine people in total. And then, remind me again how many neighbors there are? Poppy, Barnaby, Julie, Frank, Howdy, Eddie, Sally, Wally, and home. Nine. These are our neighbors. But then, who's this one with his head buried and why? My mind immediately went to the phrase burying your head in the sand, you know, refusing to think about unpleasant or negative things. If this is Frank's garden, it's likely that this has been put together by Frank. So maybe Frank knows the truth and is denying it? No, if he was denying it, he wouldn't be

reaching out to us through the website. It would make more sense for this one to be Wally, denying that there's anything wrong in the neighborhood to begin with. Or maybe it is symbolic of Frank, hiding from the neighborhood because he knows the truth. He's now trying to tell us without being seen by everyone else because he's worried what the neighbors will do to him if he gets caught. Sadly, though, it might be too late.

On the staff-only page, there's a framed photo that has a note from the question answerer, the curator that's putting together this entire welcome home exhibit. It says, quote, this art was not part of the shipment. Please stop using the work printer to prank me. But underneath the actual photo, written in Invisible Ink, are the words, Who Are You, with an eye and a spiral? Last episode, we discussed how the eye represents Wally and the spiral represents home,

the two working together. And the Invisible Inc is one of the ways that they communicate with the outside world. For it to grab both Wally and QA's attention, it's got to be an important detail, right? And while the image itself is quite dark, I felt like I recognized it from somewhere. Then it hit me. The QA says that it's not part of the shipment or original assets. And there's one place where Welcome Home assets exist that aren't being considered canon by the family. base, clown's portfolio page. Sure enough, when I took a look, there was a high-res

version of this exact image and it shows our new helper Frank frankly. The image is a weird one. He's surrounded by his own body parts, arms, hands, eyes, and in the center of the photo we see Frank holding mysterious red square. But these hands aren't like his usual ones. The number of fingers don't actually match up. Yep, it's like the good old days of fnaf my friends were counting fingers and toes before anyone becomes a robot. Anyway, like the other puppets, he typically has three fingers and a thumb, but this image shows him with four regular fingers, with a thumb hidden behind the card that he's holding. These are human hands. I did think it was odd that Wally wrote

under the photo, Who Are You? I mean, it's clearly Frank's face. Wally knows who this is. He's one of the neighbors. But paired with the image of Frank having human hands, this question sounds slightly different. It's not who are you? It's who are you really? And going back through the information that we have on Frank, suddenly him being the odd one out becomes abundantly clear. The description pages tell us how each character came into the neighborhood. All of the them except for Frank. Frank's description actually reads, quote, Frank does not have any known information regarding his origins prior to moving into home when compared to the others. How he got into the neighborhood is just as much of a mystery to the WHRP as it is to us. He's hiding his identity

to take things down from the inside. In the photo, Frank has all these extra body parts around him. I suspect that all these spare parts are things he uses to disguise himself in order to break Wally and Holmes' little cult open from the inside. When talking to Wally about the flowers and Barnaby interrupts, Frank puts emphasis on a very specific word. Don't actually have any blue pigmentation. They have to grow in soil that is basic as well, so the pine straw should be left for the other beds. You're telling me that these flowers are liars, Frankie?

I'm not telling you that these flowers are liars, Barnaby. Frank isn't trying to tell Barnaby about these lying flowers. He's trying to tell someone else. It could be Wally. We know he's the perspective that we're seeing here. Maybe he's trying to reason with his good side. Or maybe this is his way of breaking the fourth wall, talking directly to us. When Frank is saying these flowers,

aren't as they seem, we're being shown the people standing together and the one representing Frank having his head buried in the sand. And what color is Frank's representation? Blue. He's telling us that he isn't what he appears to be. He's not a puppet from this neighborhood. He's a spy on the inside. This same photo of Frank with the human hands on clown's Tumblr account has the hashtag scopophobia. Scopophobia is an extreme or irrational fear of being looked at or seen. Frank is afraid that he's gonna be seen for what he truly is, but wants us to know the truth about this neighborhood so he buries his head in the the sand and hides messages through his trusty bugs. I have no doubt and the future updates we'll learn more about Frank and how exactly he became part of the neighborhood. I just hope that he's able to stay under the radar for long enough to tell us the truth. But hey, that's just a theory. A game theory. Thanks for watching.