Game Theory - Hello Neighbor's SATANIC Plot!

Episode Date: January 18, 2024

Join Game Theory Host MatPat as he discovers the TRUTH about the neighbor from Hello Neighbor!

Hadley ho, neighborinos! Welcome to Game Theory! And wouldn't you know it, it's the holiday season. A time of love and togetherness. A time for family and brotherhood. A time when we're called to serve as a neighbor to one another in this great big brotherhood of man. And when I say act like a neighbor to one another, I mean breaking into each other's houses to unlock one another's murder basement. Screw you, Wilson! The 90s are over! Neighbors don't dole out sage advice while hidden behind chin-high fences anymore, Buccaroo! Nowadays, if you're moving into a new house, at least one of those homes in your neighborhood is hiding a meat hook with your name on it. Case in point, Hello Neighbor. An indie horror game set for release next summer, but whose alpha builds have already caught the internet by Storm. In a 2016 that was light on big releases, the indie scene stepped up in a big way, with everything from welcome to the game to layers of fear.

Sister location to Sarah is missing. Unique, thought-provoking, and most importantly, scarily fun games. But across all of them, Hello Neighbor is the one leaving people with the most questions, myself included. If you're unfamiliar with the game, let me quickly recap. You play as a new addition to the community, just moving in. But shortly after you move, you start to notice some strange behavior from her jazzercise-prone neighbor. Screams coming from the house, erratic behavior, paranoid looks. Peering in through his windows reveals a heavily guarded door leading into his basement.

But seriously, what is down there that he doesn't want the world to see? That is the mystery you're looking to solve in the game. the game. Break in, find the tools necessary to undo his security measures, and unearth your neighbor's dark secret before it's too late. But you know what? Why go through all the weight and all the hassle? Today we put the clues together to solve this mystery half a year before the game's release. So the first major question people playing this gamer left with is, is this guy actually a bad guy? Jury acts kind of creepy and is really serious about his privacy, using everything from bear traps to a security shark.

Beware his jaws of justice. Security Shark! But we don't actually see him commit any crime. And the game seems intent on misleading us. In fact, in the latest update, one of the opening cutscenes show what appears to be someone running away from him, but slow down the footage and look closer, and you see that his supposed victim is actually just one of the many mannequins he has positioned throughout his house. Notice the shiny brown head, white body, and lack of arms. So, are we just paranoid?

Jumping to conclusions, premature. Is this guy actually going to be revealed as dangerous in the final game? Or is this all just one big misunderstanding? Well, the answer to that is He is 100% Dangerous. Our first clue comes from an early Reddit AMA with the developers dynamic pixels. During it, they received a question from a concerned redditor. Someone who felt uncomfortable playing a game where they were going to be the criminal breaking and entering into an innocent person's home. Dynamic pixels response is telling. Quote, what if the neighbor is a psycho? and is holding someone prisoner. Who knows?

Semi-colon open parenthesis. Smells like a hint. A pretty specific hint at that. At what the game designers have actually been planning for the final plot of this game all along. That someone is being held prisoner in this house. As if the words weren't enough, the winky face seals the deal. Why? Well, it's simple emoji etiquette.

A winky face at the end of a sentence is coy, flirty, implying more than just the words say. For instance, if I were to text you, Why don't you come over tonight? Winky face. That winky face implies you ain't just coming over for overwatch and chill. And in Hello Neighbor's case, the wink on the part of the developers means we're pretending like we're not giving it all away, but you know better.

Coy, knowing, it'll be our little secrets. But if you don't believe interpreting emoji like modern-day hieroglyphics is a valid piece of evidence, well then just look at this. It's a detail every play-through of this game is overlooked thus far, including my own over on GT Live. But it begs the question, why would a mailbox in front of a house, have not an address, but two numbers, separated by a colon. Of course the first thing we all think of is time, but that doesn't make any sort of sense here. Why put a military-style time reading on a mailbox? There's also no way that this was an accident. It's too specific of a detail for dynamic pixels to include in there. So let me tell you I looked. I looked a lot. I was getting scientific coding sequences, NASA coordinates, all kinds of stuff that seems to have no possible connection to a game about trolling your creepy neighbor. So where else do you have two numbers separated by a call?

Colen, ratios, citations, Bible verses, Bible verses, chapter number, colon verse number. After striking out so many times, that seemed like the most likely. So I dug through the entire Bible to find every instance of chapter 14 verse 14. What I came up with was the following list. A lot of the quotes were purely random, false leads, non sequiturs, things without context. Unless of course we're supposed to leave Joshua and the neighbor is secretly Caleb, son of Jeff and A. the Kennesite, I'm gonna say a tentative no to that one. But one quote in particular stood out from Kings 2 chapter 14 verse 14 Specifically related to someone breaking into a palace where quote he took away all the gold and silver all the items found in the treasuries of the royal palace and some hostages

So it seems to me that we have printed on the mailbox in front of the neighbor's house a Bible verse Specifically telling the story of someone breaking into a palace and stealing not just the valuables but also rescuing some hostages in the process. Now granted, we're still very early in the game development process, but I like our odds. So our neighbor has been keeping people in his basement against their will, and it's our job to robin hood the heck out of things and steal everything back, freeing the hostages and then making our escape. And the evidence in Alpha 2 already points to this.

If you successfully make it to the basement, we get soft confirmation with a mattress on the ground and a crib, as though someone is being kept there against their will. In fact, whoever's down there may seem like they're trying to escape. For all the hoopla made around getting into the basement in the big Alpha 2 release last week, those who actually bothered to research the game knew what it looked like back from trailer number 2, where we actually get a thorough look at the basement, running through long stretches of corridors to escape from the neighbor as he approaches. But what's most interesting here is what happens as you head your way down into the basement.

You actually hear a child coughing, a baby whining, a female crying, Shadow is moving frantically along the floor, and finally someone shouting something that sounds a lot like run. At the end of the trailer, we're presented with a door labeled hide here. That happens to be locked. We as the player have to resort to hiding under the bed, and right before the neighbor catches us, we hear a female scream. That scream leads the neighbor to unlock and check the hiding room. Seems to me like the mother and her children tried to escape,

fell for hiding in the obviously a trap hiding room with the big arrows attached to it, and got busted by the neighbor, who has a guy. key to that door. He captures the family that was already as prisoners, but we as the player escape because he didn't know we also happened to be down there. So already we can see how huge chunks of this story start to fit together. But that leaves us with a big, big question. Who or what is this guy? Who is the neighbor? Well, the simple and really creepy answer is that he works for the circus. The guy is a clown. Literally a clown. I know, I know it sounds stupid and like the biggest leap in line that I could possibly ever make, but the evidence is there. On the game's website there's a bunch of promotional material ranging from trailers, pre-made animated gifs, or gifs, if you prefer, and of course, art assets. And hidden among the promotional pictures showing locations and imagery we're already really familiar with at this point.

There's hidden one real oddball in the group. No, it's not the one where the neighbors dressed like the devil showing us that crack is whack like some sort of middle-aged copper-tone sun tan girl. But that one, uh, is admittedly pretty weird too. Nope, it's not that one, it's this one, where our favorite curly chin is covered in white cake makeup summoning us down into the basement. Weird, right? And this is like the only picture where anything remotely like this occurs. So I would have written this off as just an early game design decision that eventually got scrapped if it wasn't for the pervasive use of carnival-style imagery throughout this game. During the Alpha-1 mini-game teaching you how to hide, you're in a queue with a height limit,

just like you would find while waiting for an amusement park ride. The second floor of his house has a shooting game. just like those rigged Carney games that are legitimately impossible to win. Unless of course you're Stephanie who wins on her first throw. The mysterious third floor train seems like a monorail system you could find in a theme park. Even the music reinforces a fun house vibe. Fun house, not fun house. It was present in the trailer for the game released on the website and I thought maybe this carousal style music was just temporary, but nope.

There it is again in Alpha 2. Hominously playing a happy go lucky tune while you descend into that creepy candlelit basement and a mother and her child cry. Apparently we just live in a day and age where all horror games revolve around the developers' childhood traumas of stranger danger. As men in furry suits or clown attire steal them away into the secret hideouts. Speaking of animatronics, he's even got one of those too. On the second floor, one of his defensive mechanisms is security shark. Prepare to be finished. Security shark! But glitch around a bit and look under the water level, and you see it's not a real shark, but a robotic one.

Kind of like something you would see again at a Universal Studio-style attraction. Or, I guess, a haunted pizzeria. Freddy, Foxy, Bonnie Chica, and introducing Sharky! So we have a creepy clown carnival worker kidnapping mothers and their children and keeping them in his basement. But let's take a moment to look through a bit more of the concept art and get even more ideas about what's going on in this game. This picture, for instance. See anything that's a, um, a bit off? Right there hanging on the right balcony's clothesline as a female skin suit.

Or perhaps more accurately, a blow-up doll? Man, I hate it when the neighbors leave their sex toys on the clothesline to dry. Really leaves us with some awkward conversations for the kids. Now, I'm not sure that this tells us a whole lot other than he's a man with personal needs, okay? So leave him alone! And in these mock-ups of the gameplay area, we see where our player eventually gets buried in the event he gets caught by the neighbor one too many times, in your very own backyard.

But there's one other essential detail in these pictures we haven't covered yet. As we see in this image from their sight, There's a mysterious shadowy figure in the background behind all of this. Well, could this be the player, I hear you saying, and well that's a good guess, look closely at the hands. You'll notice the outline of gloves extending from the wrists. That's an important detail because at no point in the imagery around this game, both in gameplay and in the promotional materials, is the player's character ever shown to be wearing gloves, which leads us to perhaps the biggest twist of all.

He has a partner. But then, who is it? Well, we don't have much information about the other characters, appearing in this game, but I did take it upon myself to take the neighbor's model and scale it to the relative size he would be if he were that far away from the camera in this picture. And I discovered that the neighbor is actually slightly shorter than this shadowy figure. Why does that matter? Two reasons actually. First, it confirms that that's not the player character. Anytime the neighbor catches us in-game, he's always looking at eye level or slightly downward. We are shorter than the neighbor. So the heights just don't add up. But that leads us to point number two. We only ever get to see one. one other person in the game, this man in the pictures. And look at their relative heights.

The neighbor is slightly shorter than his male counterpart. They also clearly have a long history together as this portrait was taken years prior. Notice that the neighbor has more hair in this picture as well as a beard. So it would seem we have two kidnappers working out of a carnival or circus, and stashing victims, both living and dead, in the basement. According to Kings 1414, it's going to be our job to get in there and rescue them and stop these two murderers. So it seems clear enough, but something kept nagging me as I wrote this theory. Why? What is the motive?

Are we just supposed to believe that they're doing it for the funzies? Hey, they're just too wild and crazy guys. No, it's too simple, too easy, and quite honestly, too boring for a game who has developed its plot like this. And that's when I saw it last week as I was exploring these images. Look closely at the image with the shadowy figure. Closer. Closer! Do you see it?

The book. In this concept image, when the shadowy figure lurks near the neighbor, the neighbor is reading Faust. Faust! Fast recap for those of you who don't know. Faust is a German legend about a brilliant scholar, named Faust appropriately, who in the search for ultimate knowledge and power strikes a deal where he sells his soul to the devil. Yes, the devil. That is who's who's been helping the neighbor from the beginning,

and that is the motive to these murders. Need more proof? Well, I could start with the candles filling the basement, certainly reminiscent of satanic channeling circles, but maybe that's not enough for you. Maybe you need more. Well, look here. In the latest alpha build of the game, you can find a house on a darkened street. Inside, you'll find a frozen version of the neighbor, suspended in mid-air along with his bed. Is it just a glitch?

Developer error? Exorcist reference? It doesn't matter. What's important here is that, for the first time ever, it gave us access to a full 360-degree view of the neighbor's character model. And look at the bottom of the next-of-the-nebors character model. the shoes. There's a sticker. Some might say a seal that reads 6666. The sign of the beast. The number most associated with Satan. The neighbor is literally being outfitted by the devil. And that got me rethinking this whole theory. Maybe Kings 1414 isn't the passage that I was looking for.

Maybe there was something else. So I scrolled back through my notes and found this, Isaiah 1414. I will ascend above the heights of the clouds. I will be like the most high. Who's talking here? The answer is a few lines back at Isaiah 1412. Quote, how art thou fallen from heaven, O day star, son of the morning? The day star son of the morning is another way of referring to the morning star which is another name for Lucifer, aka the devil. Isaiah 1414 is the last thing the devil said before he was struck down into hell forever. It's a cry of pride that he will rise above everything and claim ultimate knowledge and power over the

the universe. The same thing Faust bargains for in his story. So that is the real message the mailbox is trying to deliver, that this will be a story of an unholy alliance between man and ultimate evil to claim power over everything. Or at the very least, of one man's quest to ascend to the level of God. And that's when all the pieces fit together. The strange candles, the victims, the neighbors access to all kinds of security devices, the glowing doors that seem like portals to other realms. Not only is the neighbor not working alone, he's working with the devil himself, and performing horrific acts on his unsuspecting victims to fulfill his end of a terrifying contract, which makes the idea of entering the house all the creepier, and getting caught all the more horrifying. So, with that in mind guys, just remember that's just a theory. A game theory. Thanks for watching.