Game Theory - I SOLVED The Lore of Giggleland... and It's Not Even Out Yet!

Episode Date: April 16, 2025

Join Game Theory Host Tom as he SOLVES Giggleland, an indie horror game that hasn't even released yet!

Can I solve Giggle Land before it even releases? No, I haven't gone insane, Poppy did that to me years ago, this game isn't even out yet. All that exists is a Steam page and a single creepy YouTube trailer. But if you really pay attention, hidden inside them is a rabbit hole that tells us everything we need to know about this theme park. Hello internet, welcome to Game Theory, the show that can't stop smiling. And what makes me smile is after a long day of theorising, I like to kick back, open a pack of M&Ms and watch some other YouTube videos so that I can just relax and switch off.

But as the old adage goes, there's no rest for the wicked. While I was just minding my own business, YouTube showed me an ad for a new indie horror game, Giggle Land. Now, despite my sorted food watching experience being rudely interrupted, I have to admit I was intrigued. And so I watched the full video. And it ticked all the usual boxes. Abandoned theme park, creepy mascots, the works. But the game wasn't actually out yet. So I took a mental note to talk about it once it released,

and then I saw the description. It was all in binary. Binary that translates to a Discord server link. Clearly, there was more to this thing than met the eye. And now there was a server full of theorists who also wanted to solve what I very quickly realized was an ARG. One of the hardest ARGs I've ever seen, in fact. But thanks to the community's hard work and dedication,

as well as a little bit of elbow grease from us here at Team Theorists, I believe we've not only solved the puzzles for this ARG, but the story of the game before it even releases. As always, links for the server and the master dock this community has made will be in the description. But without further ado, let's explore the mysteries of Giggle Land. You'll laugh, you'll cry, and you'll never stop smiling. Once you join the Discord server, the first thing you're told to do is to visit the website,

which hasn't been linked. So, we're off to a great start. Thankfully, Discord user Facemelter 9,000 somehow managed to find it. Giggle. Dot land. And like that, we're off to the races. Although, it's not exactly what you'd expect from an indie horror website. It's more like the back end of a website.

Though, by clicking on admin, you do find the actual website for the theme park. And immediately, things feel off. There's a picture of two characters named End. Elliot and Ella, except according to the Assets folder, their names are actually Tolly and Rory. Elliot and Ella are different characters, that Cat and Dog from the trailer. There's also a page full of cartoon cats, loads of glitchy texts that can't be translated, and reviews reminding you to be happy. I did notice a pentagram and upside-down cross in a few places, so we might be dealing with some classic demon mascots here,

but there's just not a lot to go off of. So I went back to the giggle.land page to see whether there was more law to find within those links. And boy was there! When you go to star.html, you get this. When infants are left to cry it out, their cries go through a predictable sequence of behaviours. A baby left to cry it out will eventually stop crying. But it won't be because distress has been eliminated. But rather, the baby learns that there is no longer any hope.

Jeez, that's depressing! What's worse is that isn't just a depressing line written for an indie horror game. This is actual parenting advice from the book, Texas, Texas Child Care Fall 2010. The book references the work of Eric Erickson and his theory, his psychology theory, on the stages of a child psychological development. This quote specifically focuses on the first stage, trust versus mistrust. Basically, how a baby learns to trust that their caregiver will meet their basic needs.

And how consistently they will be met. If they are met, the child develops a sense of trust, which Erickson believed was the basis for personal identity. But if their needs aren't met, then a child becomes fearful of the world around them. Way to make parents sleep training their kids feel bad, my dude. But it is interesting that we're being pointed to this psychologist whose key work was about how letting children cry out is bad. And we've also got a website full of quotes about not feeling pain and being unable to stop smiling. Seems like Eric Erickson might be a fundamental part of the Giggle Land ethos.

As if the park was developed to help rebuild that trust. Make them feel happy all the time. It sounds lovely on paper, but this is an indie horror game, so no corporation is a good corporation. And they definitely aren't doing things above board. Back on giggle.com, there's a PDF called Report November 23rd, 1990. It's a missing person's report for an eight-year-old girl named Laura. While watching TV, Laura was told by her mother it was time for bed,

and she turns off the TV. This starts a fight where Laura insists on watching to the end of the episode to see what happened. Laura's mom does end up giving in, but once the TV comes back on, the show has already ended. Laura went to bed devastated, and the next morning, Laura was gone with all her clothes, stuffed animals, and drawing pad. Laura's mom speculated that it was her ex-husband. They were divorced and he had a bad habit of hurting Laura. All signs seemed to be pointing to him. But with what we know about Giggleland's desire to make sad children happy,

I have a feeling they were the ones who abducted Laura. Why else would there be a missing child report on a website about a theme park when it was a home of induction? Besides just filling out my indie horror bingo card. If they are following the works of Eric Erickson, they likely believe that what they're doing is a net good. And so kidnapping kids, forcing them to be at Giggle Land, it's worthwhile because they will get a better future. Needless to say, I had a lot of questions. Fortunately, there was a contact page with an email address for someone named Josh. So immediately I sent them an email and got an instant reply.

Surprise, surprise, it was just an out-of-office auto reply. Why put an email somewhere if you're not going to respond to it? Because this is an ARG and nothing is quite as it seems. Looking at Josh's sign-off, there was a link. www.kidiar Workshop.com. This website is for the company Kids Media Workshop. And their goal is to make cartoons with characters like Elliot and Ella that help teach children about the powers of kindness and friendship

to stand up to bullies and quote, other negative forces. One of the episodes is actually available to watch. If you head to the Steam page, one of the developers' names is, uh, let's say unconventional. And while I suppose it's plausible

that a child could be named a bunch of random letters and symbols, in reality, this is actually part of a YouTube URL that takes you to episode three of Elliot and Ella. In it, Elliot is getting bullied. But he and Ella decide to, quote, remove the weeds from the garden. There's a bunch of glitches, the bullies look at them with horror, and before you know it,

the bullies have been buried in the dirt. Yay? I mean, standing up to your bullies is good and right, but burying your classmate was definitely frowned upon where I grew up. That being said, I think we found our monster mascots. However, the kids and their parents don't really seem to mind this. In fact, they love it. And that's because the show isn't just for kids, it's by kids.

In the Parents Zone, KMW says it's providing support for parents. who have children with trauma. The staff are trained psychologists who provide respite care, separating the kids from their parents, learning about their issues, and then creating similar stories for Elliot and Ella to play out to help them. On the About page, we're also told that the children were encouraged to write, draw, animate, and voice act for the show to help them express themselves.

Or as I like to call it, free child labour. That, along with teaching kids to remove, quote, negative forces like the bullies, separating them from their parents, willing or otherwise, and insisting everyone should be happy, yeah, I think we may be dealing with some kind of cult. One that is using the psychology from Eric Erickson to brainwash kids to build up trust and convince them to leave their sad homes like Laura and remove those who don't conform. Plus, there's this message from the KMW founder and, well, just listen.

We live to believe and create something you cannot take away from us. Now, will you listen and take our words as we speak? We are here to lead you. Like, come on, Terry. Sound less like a cult leader. This cult is absolutely trying to convert the world in their way of life and removing those who don't agree with it. And actually, if the kids are writing these episodes, does that mean that they saw what happens if you don't conform? Did they see the murder mascots like we saw in that episode?

Just something to think about. Terry also has this weird habit of capitalizing certain letters, which, of course, I wrote down and put into all the ciphers I had, giving me nothing. I know, I was disappointed too. This had to mean something. You don't just randomly capitalised letters like that in an ARG. But it felt like we were missing something. Like there was a key to unlock their true meaning. And that is when Discord user Aurora and her team discovered something huge.

After some intense searching through the website, they found that there was a secret audio file inside the missing persons report PDF. I've never seen anything like this before. What a crazy way to hide clues! Good job Giggle Land and good job Aurora and team for finding it. Now, let's open up this audio file. And it's password protected. It never ends, does it?

So, once again, it was time to go over everything we had to see if there was something I'd missed. And indeed, there was. On Giggle.com. There was a bug report, which seemed like any standard game bug report. But what I'd failed to notice the first time was this one line that's highlighted. Finally! a code I recognize, base 64, which gives us the name Sarah. We've not met a Sarah yet, but who am I to question it?

Sadly though, Sarah is not the password, at least not on its own. I do however remember this ARG mentioning base 64 once before in the description of the secret Elliot and Ella episode. Below the binary code, it says base 64 plus PDF. We've used base 64 for Sarah, so now we need to unlock the second half with a PDF. And the only PDF we've encountered on this website so far is the missing report about Laura. The question is, what part of the PDF do we use? Discord user TAMUS suggested using the highlighted number at the top of the report, 513-76-98000.

And wouldn't you know it, it worked. Happy birthday to our dear! I wanted to celebrate your special day with you. It's a shame your mother took you away. Before the... Maybe when you're older, we can find each other. We'll give you a gift you'll never. Never forget.

We love you. Even through the distortion, it's clear. Elliot is saying Sarah, the name we needed to open the file. Is Sarah another missing kid like Laura? Laura's mother took her away from the show she was watching before she could see the ending. Maybe before she could be brainwashed to make her happy all the time. Although, KMW made it seem like that was happening at the physical giggle land. So, did Sarah's mom take her away from the psychologists before they could fix her?

Theorizing aside, remember, this is an action. the piece of the puzzle we were looking for. We were looking for a key to solve this jumble of letters, and that key is now right in front of us. As I tend to do with all random audio I get in an ARG, I put it into a spectrogram and doing so reveals a six by six grid with a selection of boxes blacked out. What was that random mess of letters we found earlier? Six lines of six letters. Laying the text over the grid and selecting the letters that were in the blacked out boxes, you get a single word. crying. They're really leading into this Eric Erickson quote, aren't they? And they continue to do so because if you take the word crying and put it at the end of the Kids Media Workshop URL,

you find this box. It congratulates us for finding the key and suddenly a picture of Eric Erickson comes out of it because why not? So the weird doesn't stop there. There's another link on the KMW homepage labelled the Captain's Sales and when you click it, it asks you to download a file full of images. These images are particularly, peculiar because they are simply coloured dots, but each file is named a different number. People tried combining all of them, combining just the reds or the blues, but whatever they did, it didn't reveal anything. We all knew these colours were important because Discord user Joan found a hidden page on the KMW site that gave us the hint red blue plus green. We just couldn't

figure out how. In fact, we were struggling so much that Giggle Land themselves entered the chat. Yep, they took pity on us and gave us another call. clue, Eric Erickson had some great books. Well, we've already been talking about one of his books, childhood and society, the book about the stages of child development. And this is where it gets real interesting theorists. If you take a digital copy of the book, specifically the second edition, you can overlay the coloured dots on the corresponding page the image is named after. And the dots will then highlight certain letters. Noting down what letters are revealed by each colour, and then using the red-blue plus green clue from earlier,

we get a really long combination of letters and numbers. Again, I tried my usual ciphers. Again, nothing worked, and so again, Giggleland had to speak up. They said to use a KDF or key derivation function. This is basically an algorithm designed to generate secure passwords from a single key value, turning a simple password into a much tougher string of characters, exactly like we have here. All we need to do is reverse it, and for that, we need a key.

A key we've actually been given already. Back on the page with the Erickson box, we were told we found the key. And to get there, we had to use the word crying. Discord user Truehead was actually the first to figure this out. And once they decrypted it, we got a new YouTube video. All we can see is a very dark room with TV audio playing episode 3. However, that's not what's interesting here. What's interesting is the video's transcript.

It does not match the audio we're here. Instead, it says this. She speaks to herself. Alone, she begins to stand. Reaching her hand, she begs for some light. Answers, that is all she wants. Her travels are only just tumbles. She who speaks, 06.

Hey, you and me both, poem, I'd like some answers too. Like, who the heck are you talking about? Wait a minute, the letters at the start of each sentence. S-A-R-A-H. Sarah. Ooh, now we're getting somewhere. This video is called Second-E-R-A-H. is called Second Hijack, and in the description it says,

Where did you take her, Debbie? I speculated earlier that Sarah's mum maybe took her away from Gigoland before they could do any of the weird psychological experiments on her, based on what Elliot said in the audio recording. If Debbie is Sarah's mum, then it would appear like I was on the right track. Although, we have seen a Debbie show up once before. She is one of the children on the parent zone saying how happy she is. If this site is up to date, then she can't be the mother.

just another child. But if the site hasn't been updated in a long time, then there is a chance Debbie has grown up, had a kid, and then taken them away from the horrors they experienced as a child. My mind was racing, theorizing about the possibilities. Only for that to be interrupted by Sin of the Soul from this subreddit are weird, who came across a Tumblr account about a girl stuck in her house. The name of the account was Sarah is speaking 06. She Who Speaks. This is Sarah's and it is a treasure trove of law. She is a girl graduating high school and much like the transcript of the poem said, she is talking to herself, looking for answers and is stuck inside her house with her mom constantly keeping an eye on her.

This is everything we've been looking for. For example, another post tells us that one day her mum leaves the bedroom door unlocks and Sarah begins to snoop around, finding her mum's sketches of, get this, Elliot and Ella. I'm getting a real good feeling about her mum being good. Debbie from the parent zone. Those kids were encouraged to draw to express themselves to make the show. And sure enough, as time went on, we got that confirmation. People began messaging Sarah directly on Tumblr and someone asked if they knew someone

called Debbie. To which Sarah responded, I have a mom named Debbie. And when Sarah asked about her mom's drawings, it was revealed that her mom was raised in a commune with her uncle who helped teach kids how to draw and express themselves. Check, check. And check. Debbie is Sarah's mum, and she is the same one from the website. The little girl raised in a commune that was helping to make the show. And as you'd expect, things aren't quite right with this little commune.

They aren't allowed to leave. And Debbie mentions there weren't many adults, lots of children. What did we see earlier in the ARG? Laura, a child being abducted in 1990. And if you look real close at the KMW logo, you can see that it was actually established that same year, 1990. Children are being taken and put into the commune because, as Eric Erickson taught, their childhood years are the most formative and if raised. Right, they and the world will have a brighter future.

I knew the founder sounded super cult leadery. However, Debbie did escape and actually, I believe she did so. because of the very psychology that KMW were using. We talked earlier about Eric Erickson's theory on psychological development and how in the first year children learned trust versus mistrust. Well, clearly, KMW didn't read any more of the book because there are actually eight stages in this theory that all apply to different ages.

Now, thanks to Sarah, we can actually figure out how old Debbie was while in the commune and what stages she went through. Sarah's account ends in 06, implying that she was born in 2006. She's also graduating high school, making her 17 or 18, which would then match up with the year 2024. The same year the KMW website was last updated. So 2006 feels like a good birth year.

In one post, Sarah makes a comment wondering what life would be like in the commune. So clearly, she didn't grow up there. But we've also had messages like, where did you take her? So the commune know of Sarah's existence, meaning Debbie either left when she was pregnant or when Sarah was so young that she now doesn't remember. We also know Debbie was part of the commune when she was 11, based on that parent's own comment. And it seems like KMW became public in 1993, according to their website.

We don't know for sure if that comment has been there since the beginning, but if it was, that would mean Debbie was 11 in 1993, and so would have been 24 in 2006 when she gave birth and left. Debbie was part of the Gigoland commune for over a decade, and therefore she'd have got through Eric Erickson stage 5 and 6. Stage 5 is identity versus role confusion. This happens between the ages of 12 and 18 years old. When a child begins asking questions like, who am I? Where am I going in life?

Erickson says that to help them find identity, you need to allow a child to explore in order that they can form their own sense of self. If instead they are forced to conform to set ideologies, the child faces an identity crisis, leading them to long for a different way of life. exactly like what happened to Debbie, forced to never leave, to conform to the commune's way of life, and eventually it caused her to run away to figure out who she was. But not until she got to stage six. Intimacy versus isolation.

This stage develops between the ages of 19 and 40. At this age, we as people are seeking close relationships that are based on trust, emotional openness, and mutual support. If the individual finds these relationships, their mental health will be significantly improved and they'll be happy. But if they don't, it can lead to isolation, psychological distress, depression and anxiety. Due to her crisis from stage 5, Debbie began to become isolated. She could only see the commune and the people in it for what they really were. Manipulative, closed off, only looking to advance their mission of saving kids and removing those who caused pain.

Even when she found a romantic partner to conceive Sarah, it wasn't real. She was just trying to gain the intimacy that she craved. See, the psychology they were using to get these kids to trust them and make them happy was the very thing that pushed her away. Now, she has a skate. But as Eric Erickson said, the damage was already done. She has isolated herself and her daughter out of paranoia that someone is going to take her away, which ironically is leading Sarah to follow in her footsteps.

Sarah is 18 and so is also in the identity versus role confusion stage. And just like her mom before her, she is beautiful. being isolated, forced to conform to her mum's way of life. Now we are beginning to see her rebel. She's starting to snoop around, desperate to find the truth, and it's driving her towards Giggle Land more and more. When Elliot said, maybe when you're older, we can find each other, we'll give you a gift you'll never forget.

That was foreshadowing the events that I believe we're going to see unfold in the actual game. Oh yeah, remember there's a game attached to this thing? Recently, Sarah began answering more questions on her Tumblr. those answers she mentioned having a blue bunny toy with an accessory and that she likes wearing beanies, which matches up suspiciously well with the two characters I mentioned right at the beginning of this episode. Tolly and Rory, who based on the screenshots on the Steam page, appear to be the lead characters in this game. On the website, we're told that the real Giggle Land is being turned into a game, the game we're about to play, making this an in-universe game. So either this

is going to be a retelling of Sarah's story with Tully represent. presenting Sarah, or worse, Sarah is going to head to Giggle Land and end up being trapped in the commune. Forced to help create this game, using her experience and Tolly to tell us what happened. Just like the kids cartoons did all those years ago. The only problem is, we won't get a happy ending. Because that would mean Sarah is still stuck in the commune in order to make the game and tell us the story. Maybe we'll get to find out what happens to her, but I have a feeling it's not going to be good. Regardless, I think it's clear that Sarah is going to escape her mum's confinement and head to Giggle Land to find out what she's been keeping from her, only to discover the horrors her mom was trying to protect her from.

A cult that kidnaps kids in order to help them be happy, while using them to help brainwash other children with their weird world views. They see anyone that gets in their way or anyone that causes pain as a weed that they can remove from this world, maybe with a little help from some murdery mascots. Although we've not actually seen much of these mascots during the ARG. In fact, there are a couple of mysteries left unsolved. But Sarah's Tumblr account is updating every single day. Like, as I'm finishing writing this episode, she found an old Elliot and Ella VHS, which not only had her mum's name in the credits, but also her dad's Simon, the other kid from the parent zone.

Seems like he's still part of the commune. Maybe he's the one communicating with Debbie. Maybe he's going to be the one that tricks Sarah. into staying before the game takes place. I guess we'll just have to wait and see for more ARG updates or for the game to release. But in the meantime, remember, that's just a theory. A game theory! Thanks for watching.