Game Theory - I Analyzed Hello Neighbor Frame By Frame

Episode Date: February 27, 2024

Join Game Theory Host MatPat as he FINALLY Analyzes Hello Neighbor Frame By Frame! *Credits:* Writers: Matthew Patrick, and Tom Robinson Editors: Dan "Cybert" Seibert, Alex "Sedge" Sedgwick, JayskiBean, Danial "BanditRants" Keristoufi, Koen Verhagen and Shannon (Bomb0i) Sound Designer: Yosi Berman

For this video, I'm working with a charity who are dedicated to finding out if Matt Pat ever responded to the Hello Neighbor Twitter account. For just £3,000 per month, you can help support the Matention Patension Foundation to give Hello Neighbor and every other indie game Twitter account the resources that they need to help get the attention of Matt Pat. The begging has to stop. Okay, I'm ready. I'm finally ready. I'll analyze Hello Neighbor frame by frame. Oh, Internet. Welcome to Game Theory, the show that's always late to the meme. And now, you didn't read that title wrong, my friends. Today's the day that I finally answer the developer's call.

Today, I'm putting one of the most iconic Matt Pat memes to bed. Today, I'm gonna be analyzing the test pilot for the Hello Neighbor TV show, frame by frame. Now, if you have literally no idea what I'm talking about here, let me just bring you up to speed. Hello Neighbor? Probably a game that needs no introduction, right? It was an indie horror game that blew up a couple years ago, all about a kid trying to break into their neighbor's house, to discover the secrets that are hidden inside his basement. At the time, the devs really hyped up the enemy AI.

The neighbor getting to know your routes through his house, getting smarter as you played. It was an idea everyone got really excited about. And the story they were teasing was also really cool, with images indicating that this mysterious neighbor had sold his soul to the devil. And so they released a pre-alpha, and then an alpha, and then another alpha, and then there were like three or four separate betas, and each time the game was just vastly different and significantly worse.

Come on. Not going. The ball is stuck. It's stuck. Why does our copy of the game literally not do anything that it should be doing? Until the full game finally released and it just wasn't good. It was glitchy, the puzzles didn't make sense, and the story was incoherent. It was this really big letdown for me for a game that, honestly, I thought, had a lot of promise.

Now, I'd done a handful of theories on those alpha builds and those really helped the game blow up in its early days. But after being so disappointed over and over again with the various releases, it just kind of, stopped covering the whole thing. Fast forward two years and suddenly there's a new TV pilot for an animated show based on the series, and I'm getting tagged by the Hello Neighbor staff on Twitter to not just watch the thing, but to analyze it frame by frame. And normally that sort of thing be fine, no big deal. I get asked all the time on Twitter to analyze things.

But what made this one different is that they did it over and over and over again, not just once or twice, but three times back to back to back, basically saying the same thing over and over again. They were practically begging me to do a theory on this thing. The internet would eventually notice this long string of tweets, they were screen grabbed, and then they became immortalized as a meme. As for me, yeah, I never wound up doing it. I never did watch that TV pilot. Nor did I analyze it frame by frame like they were asking me to. Until today. That's right.

I'm finally going back to analyze this thing frame by frame four years later, which, you know, is fitting. I was always late to the meme anyway. But what's our theory looking to do today? What am I trying to prove? The deep lore of Hello Neighbor? Yeah, I suppose there's going to be a little bit of that in here. But the real question that I want to answer today is whether or not I enjoyed it. Was time to build right?

Would I have actually enjoyed analyzing their TV pilot frame by frame? In total, there are 8,748 frames of this thing, so we better get to cracking. The pilot's only five minutes long, but it gives us a pretty solid foundation of what the plot of this show would be. It follows a group of kids who are all suspicious to the neighbor, so they decide to investigate his home to see what they can find. Of course, it doesn't quite go according to plan. The neighbor tries to catch him, but using his own house against him, they're able to escape. The kids watch as he puts a body into his trunk and drives off. Curious, the kids follow him and discover that it wasn't a body after all, but rather a doll, that he then promptly buries.

The neighbor yells at the sky for a bit, realizes that the kids are watching him and then chases him away. They once again escape racing home before the neighbor does. They watch him from the window until of course the neighbor turns and stares back, cut to black. It's short, it's sweet, it captures a lot of the feeling of the original game. It's got secret passages, a mysterious but angry neighbor, and of course a mystery about what the heck is going on with his sky. So if we want to find out of the sky. figure that out, we gotta do what the meme suggests and go through it frame by frame. Here we go. Okay, so right here at the start frame five.

I'm telling you, we are doing this. It's gonna be a long video. Here we see the return of hello neighbors favorite creature the crow. I never really spoke about crows in my initial theories, but they are everywhere in this franchise. From the concept art to pretty much every installment of the game and now they're here too. Usually these guys are just set dressing, but I would suspect that the connection here is actually deeper than that. Edgar Allan Poe famously used a raven in his poem, the Raven, to be a stand-in for a bad o omens, a reminder of all the bad things that happened in the main character's life.

In this case, the death of Lenore, a stand-in for Poe's dead wife Virginia. And all of this is very fitting when you consider that Mr. Peterson also loses his wife in a car accident during the events of Hello Neighbor Hide and Seek, which takes place before Act 1 of the first game. Also, I know Ravens and Crows are technically different, but in a lot of old mythology where these sorts of ideas originate, the two were often used interchangeably. Greek myth, for example, claims that it's crows that are bad omens, giving the god Apollo bad news. While in Norse and Celtic mythology, it's a raven that's a sign of war and death. So, starting off the opening shot with crows and ominous dark clouds, not the best sign for whatever's going to happen.

And if the crows weren't enough, the lightning that strikes the banner at Frame 39 is just icing on the cake. Very spooky indeed. My name is Nikki Roth. My neighbor, Mr. Peterson, is acting very suspicious after his children, Aaron and Maya, gone missing. All right, there's lots to unpack with this one. First, the neighbor has a name? I've been referring to him as the neighbor for all these years, but apparently he's had a name the entire time.

According to the Hello Neighbor books, his full name is Theodore Masters Peterson. And you heard me right, The Books. Like every other indie franchise these days, Hello Neighbor broke off into its own series of not just one, not just two, but seven books. Fortunately for me, your new game theory host Tom was insane enough to go and read the entire book series himself. Thanks for saving me on that one there, Tom. If you think I'm insane, just wait till you hear what's in these books.

But it is pretty weird that touch an important piece of information, like your main character's name just isn't in the games. Agreed. Okay, now here we are. We're 360 frames in, and we're already being shown when in the Hello Neighbor timeline the show takes place. You might not recognize him, but this guy here, Nikki Roth? He's our protagonist from the first game.

He's missing the baseball cap and the large jaw, but he still does have that iconic chin swirl. In Act 1 of Hello Neighbor, Nikki's kidnapped and locked in the basement, only escaping years later and not returning to town until he's an adult. If he's out here spine on Mr. Peterson as a kid, that means that this show has to happen before the events of Act 1 in the first game, which, you know, is great, because again, outside of the books,

we get very little information about this part of the game, or really any part of the game, for that matter. So, who knows? Maybe this will be able to answer some of our burning questions about this franchise. One last thing, by the way, less of a lore thing and more just because I'm analyzing this frame-by-frame and reacting to it the way that I normally would. I've got to point out that my script here is really not happy with the grammar of that opening line. My neighbor, Mr. Peterson, is acting very suspicious after his children, Aaron and Maya, gone missing. It should be went missing, not gone missing. Feels like maybe the opening was originally longer and then they had to cut it down, which led to weird grammar and hacky sentences.

Anyway, it's a minor thing. It did feel weird to me as just an opening line for this franchise, but hey, let's get back to the lore. 4.30 p.m., Hall of Records. Interesting, so the series seems to not take place in the same world as the games. The original alphas of Hello Neighbor used Russian for any text assets. And later releases used a made-up language that jumbled up and swapped around letters, but this, it's just in English. That or they just changed their minds. The books are designed to be direct tie-ins to the games, and they do take place in Missouri, with all images inside the books using regular English for all the signs of newspapers.

But then Hello Neighbor 2 came out after the books and yet uses the same mixed-up language as before. Anyway, it is very inconsistent how they use text in this franchise, so just make up your mind, guys. You see, this is why we can't have nice things. 3.47 a.m. soldering in basement. Frame 890. This one stood out to me as odd. For the first time, we can actually see into the basement without going inside. The basement in both the games and the books are specifically called out, having no windows. Quote from the book Bad Blood. The basement is pretty dreary, windowless,

with nothing more than a hanging bulb here and there. And in the games, we literally see fake windows with drawings of the outside world pressed up against the stone, something that the books tell us were made by Mr. Peterson's son Aaron. We can see the hanging light bulb that was mentioned, but the fact that Nikki can see inside the basement does ruin a lot of the mystique that both the games and books tried to build up about this mysterious room in the house. However, while it's certainly weird for the story, it does help us theorists, because it's full of interesting details. Namely, that it's full of amusement park attractions. We've got a bumper car, a carousel horse, a ticket booth, and a bunch of schematics on the wall for things like a ferris wheel.

This ties in with what we saw during the very first teasers for this game, where we see Mr. Peterson wearing a clown outfit. Back in the day when I was actively covering the series, I was always confused about that detail because it didn't tie into anything else that we were being shown, other than maybe a possible connection to Pennywise the evil clown from IT. But now it starts to make sense when you look behind him and see that on a mannequin is a red nose and red wig, the outfit for a clown. He is actually a part of this circuit.

circus themed amusement park. My gut would be the Golden Apple Amusement Park that we saw just a few frames earlier and lo and behold my gut was right. Because the books tell us exactly this. Tom, take it away. So yeah, Mr. Peterson is the head engineer in charge of designing all the rides for the park. This scene with the Carousel, ticket booth and Ferrisville does actually happen in the books, but it's during a class trip to the Golden Apple factory where they're being shown all the designs and plans for the park. That might not seem like an important distinction to make, but what it shows me is that this series is handling things differently than the books. While the books are designed to be a direct link to the stories of the game, this series isn't a direct continuation or standard retelling.

Instead, it seems to be a reimagining, taking inspiration from the books and combining certain elements for clearer storytelling, but altering it just enough that we get new law. Wow. We've skipped ahead a bit, but this is where things get really interesting. As you can see, across the room we see the phrase cursed written all over the walls. Curst, along with the word omen, are regularly seen throughout the books,

graffitied over both the Golden Apple Amusement Park rides before it opens, and on the Peterson's house years later, Typically, these phrases are written by a group called the Forest Protectors, a cult of elite members from the town that dress in bird costumes and perform rituals to bring themselves good luck and the rest of the town bad luck. Yes, this is an established part of the lore, and I'm shocked that you wouldn't have figured that out by playing the games. Anyway, during the events of both grave mistakes and puzzle master, Mr. Peterson's son Aaron and his daughter Maya, start to investigate the Forest Protectors. And so the Forest Protectors begin to sabotage Mr. Peterson's amusement park rides,

graffitting them with these words to try and warn him to stay away. Of course, they don't listen, which leads to one of Mr. Peterson's rides malfunctioning and killing a young girl. This would seem to imply that the Force Protectors are at play here, but not so sure. Remember, this series seems to be paralleling the books, but it's not one for one. This looks to be Aaron's bedroom, notice the small baseball cap over on the side. So it feels very strange for the Force Protectors to be inside of the Peterson household, especially given how protective we know the neighbor is. Heaven?

Have we reached Heaven? Nirvana! Oh, wait. So what then is this all about? Well, I think all this wall art is down to the neighbor himself. A couple shots later we see Maritzah backing up against a wall with dozens of newspaper clippings and characters circled in red. This is taken straight from the first book, and it's not just any character that's circled, it's Aaron. Mr. Peterson is looking back across everything that went wrong with the park and noticing Aaron at every turn,

writing the word omen next to him. In his paranoia, he believes Aaron is the bad omen. Aaron was around the ride that failed. Mr. Peterson's past rides at other parks also malfunctioned, killing even more people. And surprise, surprise, Aaron was there too. But the final nail in the coffin here, Aaron was also the, the one who pushed Mr. Peterson's daughter, Maya, off the roof, leading to her death. I suspect that that is why he wrote all over Aaron's walls as a reminder of why he was

locking Aaron in the basement, meaning Aaron is likely still in the basement of this story as well. But speaking of that conspiracy board, while I said it's lifted straight from the first book, there are noticeable differences. Some of them are small, like the calendars lining up with March of 1993 and September of 1994, which is 18 months apart. That right there is the same amount of time Mr. Peterson was given to complete his park attractions in the books. But there are other details here that have themselves a much deeper meaning. We see articles about crows, the university president committing tax fraud,

and a celebrity called Casey Clark who fell from Grace. I looked into that character specifically, but she isn't anywhere else in this franchise at all. No books, no games, not even in the animated series, at least from what I could tell, which means that it's not the character that's important, but rather what they did. This board isn't just noting down a bunch of paranoid ramblings of Mr. Peterson like we see in the first book.

Instead, it seems to be more in line with his investigations during the second book trilogy. Which, confusingly enough, takes place before the first book trilogy. It's kind of like Star Wars if it didn't have cool laser swords and magical powers, and instead had a lot of bear traps and boxes. Just so many damn cardboard boxes. It seems to me that Mr. Peterson is trying to uncover the mystery surrounding the forest protectors, and how they create bad luck for the town while keeping all the good luck for themselves. He's looking into the bad luck that follows people in the town like the celebrity and the university president,

as well as researching into crows, which we've established are a symbol of bad luck, which makes Mr. Peterson a lot less evil and a lot more like a misunderstood, sympathetic villain. He literally tells the kids later in the pilot, You kids, you have no idea what you've done. This must be what he's referring to. They're messing with his investigation. I suspect that Mr. Peterson feels like he's been cursed by these forest protectors,

and he's trying to expose them. But he's worried that all these detective kids getting in his way, they're going to not only ruin his life, but also ruin the town as a result. Frame 4,703. That, uh, that walking animation is really something. His body's always turned to the left, and we can't see his legs. Makes it look like they've used a forward walking animation, but just key-framed it sideways.

And that's weird because they've shown front-facing versions of him before. So it's not like a Sonic the Hedgehog or Mickey Mouse situation where they always have to face one side or the other because of that iconic shape. Hopefully they were able to iron that out in the full series. Other than that, yeah, nothing really to add. It just made me laugh. These are the little details that you notice

when you're asked to do things frame by frame. No, not this time. Not this time. You're not gonna do this to me a deal. Not again. And just like that, we're into our final scene. And I gotta say, the neighbor is far less scary as soon as he make him speak. Part of what was terrifying about him in the games, and even in the first trilogy of books for that matter is that he almost never speaks.

In the second and third book especially, he just towers over Nicky without saying a word, just staring. That makes him creepy and mysterious. But as soon as he starts talking in full sentences like this, kind of ruins the mystique, makes him a lot less threatening. I get that he's human, and they're turning. trying to make it more sympathetic, but I don't know, it just kind of takes the wind out of the sails there. Anyway, we're back at the Golden Apple Amusement Park, which really is the linchpin of the series.

So much happens here in the book series, and we're clearly seeing some of that take place here. The crows begin to circle, and in the second trilogy of books, crows only begin to circle during storms. Now, the crows themselves aren't strictly involved in anything nefarious. In the books, and in reality, birds actually use the Earth's natural magnetic field to help navigate their way, namely during seasonal migrations. Messing with that field, though, can cause an effect known as electrosmog, which causes birds to break away from their traditional flight paths. Now, really big storms do have the ability to affect electromagnetic fields in the world,

but never really enough to affect bird migrations. Here in Ravensbrook, though, they're known for having incredibly powerful storm systems compared to the rest of the country, which in turn causes the crow's flight patterns to shift drastically, leading them to then circle. However, this also acts as a sign of a storm coming, and when a storm comes, that means the forest protectors have begun their ritual to curse the town, and thereby bring themselves good luck. That's why we see Mr. Peterson here yelling at the sky, you're not gonna do this to me again.

It's not the crows that he's speaking to, but rather the forest protectors who are bringing a curse upon him and the rest of the townspeople, which he blames for the death of his wife, his daughter Maya, and the failure of his ride designs. Later in the scene, we see him reveal an object with a gemstone in the middle, which is another direct reference to the forest protectors

and the ritual. It does look slightly different in the books, but clearly it's meant to be the same thing. Quote, it's not quite round, but not a cube either. It has lots of sides, each one catching the early dawn light creeping past the clouds. From here it looks to be about the size of my palm, a tarnished, brassy thing. And just look at the pictures. Clearly there are some obvious

comparisons here. Now, this device in the book is super important because it's part weather detector. This allows the forest protectors to know when a storm's coming so they can perform their good luck ritual. But it also seems to be the thing that actually brings good luck to anyone who's holding it. Wonder if that's maybe why it changed its shape. There are these real-world gemstones called star sapphires. They look like normal sapphires, but with a star-shaped pattern in the middle. Back in the day, they were thought to ward off witchcraft, hexes and Now in the book, Mr. Peterson managed to make one of these and suddenly the investigation into his past ride malfunctions and all the deaths that they cause, they all get dropped in an instant.

So again, this seems to be what he's referring to here when he talks about the force protectors, not doing this to me again, because he now has the device that will be able to change his fate. But one thing you'll notice throughout my analysis here is the repeated phrase, in the books, in the books, right? All of this stuff is explained in the books. So I just wanted to see if there was anything I could take away from this scene that didn't rely on book knowledge. And the thing that stood out to me was the burying of the doll in the middle of the amusement Park. This doll was Maya's doll that we see her carrying around in the game Hide and Seek, which came out in 2018. Now, this doll has shown up in later games of the franchise, like in an underground shrine during the VR game, Search and Rescue,

but Mr. Peterson's never buried this doll specifically in any of the other games or stories as far as I can tell. So why change that? Well, I would imagine that they're expanding on the crow lore, which kind of sounds like a joke, but I'm being completely serious here. I mentioned at the start of this episode how crows were a sign of bad luck and death. Part of the reason for this was because crows would circle battlefields after a war, looking to feast upon the dead that lay across the land. However, there is another potential meaning if you see crow circling, a more spiritual meaning.

One interpretation of crows circling like we see is that there's a spiritual transition between our world and the spirit world taking place. This can be as simple as someone communicating from beyond the grave, but it can also be a symbol of rebirth. And you see, this is where the doll comes into play. These dolls have a spiritual element to them, and we see that in real world with puppets. Now, puppets are meant to serve as a bridge between huge,

Humans and the Spirit Realm, allowing the user to remove the effects of curses, hexes, omens, and even bad luck. And hey, would you look at that? There's that whole luck thing again. The VR game Search and Rescue actually uses dolls in a similar way. In the final level of the game, Aaron is able to use a doll of another character to switch between his own and their's. The dolls have a spiritual connection to them. And when you combine that with the crow's circling, makes me think that Mr. Peterson burying Maya's doll and using the good luck device from the book

is all part of some kind of ritual of his own. Either trying to bring him and his family good luck, like we see in the books, or maybe it's something darker than that. Maybe he's trying to reach out to the spirit realm and bring his daughter back to life. We saw in the original alpha that he is more than happy to make a deal with the devil, who's to say that he wouldn't try something so extreme that stands against both God and nature. And that, my friends, basically brings us to the end of this pilot episode, so it's time for me to finally answer the question that I've been wondering for the last four years.

Did Matt Pat truly enjoy analyzing this frame by frame? And I gotta say, yeah, it was okay. But honestly, I would have enjoyed it way more if the lore of the books was actually in the pilot itself. I mean, really think about how this episode's gone. If we go back through this video and remove any and all references to the books and the book lore, even the ones that came out before this pilot, what would I have actually been able to predict? I guess I would have found some cool details about crows, Maya's doll. Maybe I'd been able to figure out some connection to bad luck, maybe.

But the idea of a weather-detecting good luck device, the entire concept of the forest protectors? Yeah, there is no chance. That never appears in any sort of game media. The old days of Hello Neighbor were fun because all the answers were in the actual game itself. Anyone could just pick up the game and understand it. And for those who were truly dedicated fans that wanted to go a level deeper, all the clues were in the game, minus a few small details that might have been left on a Twitter page or some website.

But nowadays, all these indie horror franchises, they're basically asking us to do homework. Because to understand anything in this pilot, or honestly, the recent games, you have to have read the 1,400 pages spread across their seven books. Now, to be fair, this is, This isn't just Hello Neighbors problem. We've been seeing it more and more across all sorts of media. Fnaf, great example of that.

It used to be that the games were completely solvable just from the games alone. Sure, you might be able to find some extra cool information on Scott's website or a cryptic line from a single book, but the game was all you really needed, and it then left you with some dangling threads to theorize about in future games. But by ruin, still have no idea who Gregory really is, why he's there. Oh, and now there's this random robot down in the basement pretending to be him? If you only play the games, there's no way that you would know that this thing is the mimic, the big villain from three of the books, or that Gregory was patient 46 and definitely evil. We're also seeing it with franchises like Marvel, who are now so

focused on overarching narratives that the individual stories are becoming less contained. And if you do hope to understand everything about the main antagonist, sorry, you got to binge eight hours worth of television shows multiple times over. This naturally leads to more frustration and more burnout in the fan base. Now, any theory that gets made stops being a theory and becomes more of a recap of the last few books that nobody bothered to read, which just isn't interesting for me as a theorist, or for people watching these videos. When these tweets initially came out,

part of the reason I didn't respond was for exactly this reason. I had my hands full with the FNAF books and didn't have time to catch up on all the extra outside media that was being made for this particular franchise. But look, I don't want this to be a complete downer of an ending because besides the box stacking and glitchy gameplay, I think this franchise is fun. It's goofy, it's dumb, but it's fun.

The story in the books is actually a good story. We just need it within the actual game. and show because there's a lot of potential for the future of this franchise in the theorizing department. From what I can tell, there are more Hello Neighbor games on the horizon. I mean, Hello Neighbor Diaries literally released a couple months ago in December. Tom told me that the seventh book ends on this massive cliffhanger and seems to be part of a trilogy that never finished, and I know that there's the whole of season one, as well as potentially season two and three coming for this show that we analyze the pilot for today. There just needs to be a bit more of a balance here. Give your games and your shows a little more lore. Mix in a couple more clues and make your books a little less important important in that equation. Because at the end of the day, those mysteries are the things that keep us theorists coming back for more.

And those are things that allow us to hook into a story and care about the characters as opposed to walking away from a five-minute pilot going, what did I just watch? And if you can manage to find that balance, who knows? Maybe the rest of the industry will take notice, and you'll manage to get Tom and Lee coming back to make their own theories about your franchise. But as for me in this pilot, as I ride off into the sunset, I think we can finally call this meme officially dead and buried. But hey, that's just a theory. A game theory. Thanks for watching.