Game Theory - Please Come Home... (Andy's Apple Farm)

Episode Date: April 23, 2023

Welcome back to the special corner of Game Theory reserved for the cute games that have a deadly darkness hiding just under the surface. Today, we are talking about Andy's Apple Farm. I played this on GTLive on YouTube and knew I had to make a theory. There is some creepy stuff hiding in this game. Get your flashlights ready Loyal Theorists, this is about to get DARK!

Hello and welcome to the beta test of game theory. As a beta tester, your goal is to find bugs and glitches and overanalyze them. I'm fully aware the game is not finished yet. However, you'll be essential for ensuring that this thing rolls out for the enjoyment of the whole family. Thank you, beta tester. Hello, internet. Welcome to Game Theory. The show that takes a look at the indie horror tree to find what franchise is ripe for the picking. Case in point today? Andy's Apple Farm.

It's got old school 80s style graphics, charming character designs, and a lore that's hidden in one of the coolest and most unique ways yet. It requires you to lose. By purposely failing, playing things out of order, and ultimately trying to break the game, you unlock new clues that draw you deeper and deeper into this horror show. You know what they say? A mystery a day keeps the FNAF episodes away, and Andy is a bushel full of questions. So let's take a trip on over to the Apple Farm to see if we could solve one of my favorite horror mysteries of 2021. When you first boot up the game, you're given a choice between high graphics and low graphics.

As tempting as it might be, let me tell you right now, pick the low quality graphics. Trust me on this one. Oh my gosh, he walks so slow. I think the graphics are too high fidelity for us, Matt. We're experiencing extreme slowdown because the graphics are too high quality. Once you've selected your option, it's revealed to us that we're playing as a beta tester for Eastwood games. Hello, uh, this is Eastwood. Thomas Eastwood. Welcome to the beta test of Andy's Apple Farm.

As a beta tester, your goal is to find bugs and glitches and report them to make. to me. Glitches, you say? In an indie horror game, who could have foreseen it? In-game, we take on the role of Andy the Apple, a cute little guy who had the keys to his house stolen by his four friends. Before they'll give him back, though, the friends challenge him to four separate mini-games. Klaus the Clock wants you to play I-Spy. Melody the Moon wants you to play Friday Night Funkin. Felix the Fish needs you to catch three fish, which seems like a weird thing for a fish to ask you to do. And Margaret, the unrecognizable animal, wants you to sort fruit. Yeah, probably the biggest mystery of this game is what she's supposed to be.

Margaret the Mutt, the dog. What can I say? She was giving me some strong bulldog vibes. After doing some digging though, apparently she's supposed to be a mole? Nope, not buying it. Anyway, that's not really the mystery we're interested in, because even before you start these mini-games, things begin to fall apart. We see both Andy and Felix's faces and audio distort text get stuck behind the background assets, and once you play the mini-games, some cryptic text appears

on screen. She's not gone. She's still here. She wants you to free us. Please, free us. And then the game crashes. Boy, Thomas, you are not kidding when you said that there'd be glitches. I am earning every bit of that minimum wage that you're paying me. If you power through all the issues and play all the mini games and collect all the bonus stickers, you're told your keys are in the barn where you meet the final character Peter the Pumpkin. Play with him a final round of tag and get this. What is going on? Okay, yeah, whatever evil monstrosities is in the bar and sure. One final jump scare and boom, you're at the end. That's it. 20 minutes gameplay, five very basic mini games. That's the whole thing. Provided you don't care about

the lore. And what sort of Pleb doesn't care about the lore? No, confused Matt Pat needs to know what's going on in this thing. And once you start digging into it, secrets are everywhere. So what on earth is this story and what's going on with that monster with the eyes? That, my friends, is what we aim to solve. Sounds great. Let's play. The first major hint we get is during Felix's fishing mini-game. Normally you play this one first and nothing really happens. Your eyes just sort of glitch out a bit. You know some spookies happening when your eyes start melting.

A minute or two later, the game will start to have real problems and crash. Ultimately giving you this message right before it does. Quote, He drowned that day. At the bottom of the lake, she didn't save him. It's not her fault. Doesn't make a lot of sense on its own, but wait, if you play this same mini game after one or two of the others,

suddenly you get yourself a new ending. This time you get some new pixels appearing in the bottom left of the screen. Those aren't just any pixels, friends. That's a body. The body of a dead child. Hold on here. Glitches, hidden lore, and dead children? Did we just get a bingo?

Did we just get a bingo? We know that this is a child's body thanks to a police report that we receive when hooking the body and bringing it towards the surface. A search is underway for a child who fell off a rowboat and never resurfaced Thursday evening. The victim, a 10-year-old male, and his sister fell off a rowboat late at night. The girl returned home safely, however, the young boy. has not been found as of yet. Our 10-year-old didn't just fall out of the boat, he drowned, leaving us to pick up his body from the bottom of the lake.

Now, this is normally where I just move on to the next big puzzle, but Andy's Apple Farm is different. There's even more hidden in this first mini-game. We've already mentioned that the order in which you play the games can reveal different secrets, but the secrets you unlock are also dependent on how you play those mini-games. In the case of this first fishing mini-game, if instead of lifting the body, you drag the body across the seafloor, the game freaks out and gives you this code.

Using a substitution cipher, we see that it says, but it wasn't her fault. We weren't alone that night. I don't blame her, which is followed by a visual of a girl in a boat with a silhouetted figure appearing behind her. In fact, we can actually see this girl in the aftermath of this tragedy. Since this is an 8-bit-style game,

if we smash our bodies against every surface we encounter, chances are we're going to find a gap in the collision detection. And sure enough, that's exactly what happens. At the bottom left of the picnic area and the overworld as a gap which leads to a girl crying in the boat after the incident. She gives us lines like, I didn't mean to. What are mom and dad going to think?

I'm sorry, Lewis. Followed by a reversed message in hexadecimal over an image of a boy, which translates to Lewis. So clearly, Lewis is our 10-year-old victim, but the scary part is that it appears this girl, his sister was the one that pushed him into the lake. Why else would she be saying, I didn't mean to? It also seems like the shadowy figure was the one that drove her to do it.

Now, that alone is a pretty horrifying story, story, but we're just getting started. The next part of the story unfolds during Margaret the Moles minigame. By taking your cursor out of bounds during this mini game, we get a binary code that translates to the name Cameron and a family Christmas photo dated 1981. Notice the hair and sweater colors here? The two children match Lewis and his sister's sprites. If you continue the minigame but keep tapping the space bar near the end, Margaret's face distorts and we're suddenly shown a new scene featuring two characters who, based on the body and hair color, appear to be the mother

Cameron and their father Thomas from the Christmas photo. In discussing the boat incident, Thomas appears to be quite upset, convinced that his daughter's to blame. But the mother defends her and tells Thomas to get out. Now, if Margaret's is the first mini game you play, then once you've beaten it, you head on over and get this new cryptic message, the time was supposed to be happy, but she could feel her skin peeling off. Which is creepy and gross, and I don't like it, mostly because it doesn't connect

into anything that we've talked about yet. But don't worry, it will. Something else, though, is bugging me more. Why does the name Thomas feel so familiar? Oh wait, at the start of the game. He's the creator, Thomas Eastwood. By playing Melody's music minigames second or third, we're teleported to a forest covered in snow

where we find a car and hear this audio. Hey, Cam, like... A struggling indie game developer on their final hope. Why does that sound so familiar? Anyway, he initially tries to talk to someone named Cam, which is probably short for Cameron, the name that we talked about earlier. But this failure has caused him to look into new technology

that makes his games more lifelike. We've all done this. rodeo a couple times. Sounds like someone is going to be shoving some dead souls into his video game. But again, that's not all. Coming back and playing Melody's mini game a second time, you'll find a prompt where you can listen through the window of a house. Inside is Cameron, consoling her daughter who's upset that both her dad and Lewis aren't around for Christmas. It's important to note that the mother addresses the daughter as Isabella, which would explain the stocking in the background with the letter I on it. There's also a stocking for K, most likely for Cameron, and a third one with

the letter A. Hmm. Well, no time to figure that one out because after the scene plays, the houses burned to the ground while screaming as heard inside. Implying that both Isabella and Cameron died inside of a house fire. That also explains the quote that we talked about earlier about skin peeling off during a happy time. Burning to death at Christmas. I've heard of chestnuts roasting over an open fire, but this is getting pretty extreme. Anyway, the final game is I Spy with Klaus the Clock. If you push your cursor out of bounds in this one, you get a scene depicting Thomas sitting across from his friend Arthur.

Our first and only name in the game beginning with the letter A. Hmm. We actually learned that after being kicked out, Thomas asked Arthur to keep an eye on his family, but also seems to have suspicions that Arthur's now having an affair. I suppose they're ex-friends now. Or should I say axe friends? Considering the next cutscene we can unlock is where we see Thomas using an axe to hack his friend to pieces. Thomas then looks down at his bloody hands and screams, what have I done?

All right, so we have a tragic boat accident, a deadly house, fire a murderous game developer and a mysterious shadow that seems to be pulling the strings. But how does it all fit together? Well for that we need to play our final game attack against Peter the pumpkin. If you let Peter win the initial game, we see what is in my estimation the scariest image coming out of Andy's Apple Farm. A dark figure looming in a room with text appearing below the image. I can see it. It's been following me. I think it's watching me but it doesn't have eyes. Hey that shadow looks kind of familiar, doesn't it? Wonder if it likes boating. If instead you win the first game you get a different message. I just wanted

to see my family again. I knew what I was doing was risky. I didn't want it to turn out this way. Free us, save us, help us. The next game is nearly impossible to win, but it can be done. Doing it gives you a cipher that translates to, Thomas don't ask for help. Nobody can save you now. We then get the garage scene with a dark entity and Thomas falling to pieces. It's worth noting that as he turns to pieces, they turn red and we see the eyes of Andy the Apple appear. We can then walk across the screen to finally find Andy's missing key, with text appearing that says, I should have known what I got myself into. It's my fault. You on the other side, you can help me, save me, save us.

So, there you have it. Pretty much the full slate of secrets coming from Andy's Apple Farm. Now, let's start putting them together because clearly there's still a number of other clues and loose threads that we have to tie up. First, the house fire. Who started it? Thomas accuses Arthur of doing it during the act scene, but I don't think that's true. Instead, I think it's Thomas who started the fire. Andy the Apple appears to be Thomas trapped inside the game.

Klaus the clock, meanwhile, is the stand-in for Arrower. Before the cut scene in the woods where we see Thomas kill Arthur, we actually see Thomas's car at the burned house for Klaus's arrival Implying that Thomas was there to start the fire and then Arthur arrived after the fact But all of this raises the question then why would Thomas accuse Arthur of killing his family if he did it himself? Well the reason lies in another area of the game that we've yet to explore and that's the game's loading screen Even when you boot up the game for the first time there's already a second save file that's loaded up and hey, they've got themselves eight badges not just the four that were limited to unlocking. So hopefully there's some answers in this other save file. Is this real? Did my PC really die?

Nope, past Matt Pat, it did not. And if you're a lore hunting expert like me, you too will have probably noticed not just the creepy face hidden there in the blue, but also the QR code on the screen, which means that this just became an ARG. Bingo! Definitely bingo this time! What's strange though is that this QR code just takes you back to the game's Itchio page, which you would have been to anyway to download this thing in the first place, which, means there's more to this page than it first seems. Browsing the page line by line, I noticed this little exclamation point here was hyperlinked.

So I clicked it and found a YouTube page by someone called Logan Eastwood, the great nephew of Thomas Eastwood. This guy only has three videos, mainly just playing this old game that he found at his great uncle's house. But it's the latest video that's the most interesting. Titled Andy's Apple Farm Secret,

this video shows us a brand new cutscene from the game. One where Thomas looks at an axe and argues with a voice inside his head saying, I don't want to kill him. I don't want to kill anybody. And the voice responding, when did I give you a choice? I suppose you could say Thomas here is a wait for it. Reluctant follower. Get it? It's a fnaf thing, you know, glitch trap possessing Vanney and all that?

Look, it's not like I'm seeking this stuff out. It just comes to me, okay? Anyway, all of it seems to be tied back to this dark entity. In the boat, in Thomas's house, at the end of the game, it keeps possessing people and causing them to kill others. But why? What is the goal? Well, I think that it's getting. stronger. Think about it this way. We see the entity for the first time in the boat with Isabella, but at that point in the story, it has no facial features. Moving forward in the timeline, though, we see this entity again in Thomas' bedroom, and it still has no eyes. They explicitly tell us it has no eyes,

but now it has a mouth. By the end of the game, once everyone else has died, we see it has many eyes and a massive form, capable of killing Thomas. It's been getting stronger with each death. But Thomas wasn't completely destroyed. We saw him transform into Andy the Apple. He even addresses us directly, asking the player to save us, plural. He's not the only one trapped inside this thing. Klaus is Arthur, Margaret is Cameron, Melody unlocks the events leading to Isabella's Christmas Eve scene, and Felix is fishing for Lewis's dead body.

These characters, these dead characters, have had their spirits put into the game. Why? Well, we know Thomas was messing with technology to make his characters more lifelike, and when his son died, Thomas was desperate to be with his son and bring the family back together again. And so, the entity saw this as an opportunity. Thomas essentially made a deal with the devil to keep his family together as we see him say I should have known what I got myself into I just wanted to see my family again I knew what I was doing was risky and like the devil often does

He fulfills the promises but there's a catch his family does indeed get to be together again But not in the real world instead stuck inside a video game Except there is a wrinkle here Isabella didn't die in the house fire Unlike every other character she doesn't get a death date screen in the barn She is weirdly unaccounted for. And if you play Melody's mini-game before all the other characters, we see the message, she's not gone, she's still here, she wants you to free us, please, free us.

And to put the final nail in the coffin by checking out M36's YouTube page, we can find Melody's test sprite video, who we've already established as Isabella's in-game counterpart. In this video, we receive coordinates, which, when decoded from hexadecimal, translates to, She saw what you did, Thomas, which means Isabella not only survived the fire,

witnessing her mom die in the life, die in the process, but she also likely saw Thomas kill Arthur in the woods. So Isabella isn't dead, but she's also melody in the game? How? Well, I think she's definitely gonna die at some point, just not in the story of this game. You see, M36 has come out and said that they're working on a follow-up, and we've even gotten some screenshots from it, showing us two girls standing together, one in a blue shirt and the other, a brunette wearing pink, exactly like the sprite of Isabella. Her story is not done, and I think that this other girl is only gonna play a part in it.

On November 14th, M36 posted the code to their Discord, which had the latter half of a YouTube URL. Following it took us to an unlisted video called Don't Be Afraid Sam, where a girl with a blue shirt is seen with a copy of Andy's Apple Farm. She touches it and is told, Don't be afraid, Sam. You'll be with her again soon. I believe our next installment is going to continue Isabella's story after she escapes the house fire. She's going to confide in her friend Sam, and she's going to realize that her family is stuck inside of the game. But the entity is going to get her before she can do anything to free them. Sam is also going to get caught up in this thing, told that she can be with her friend very soon,

which in turn is going to get her killed, and she too will enter the game. In fact, I predict she's going to be one of the only unused characters that we see in M36's first sprite test video, the B, known as Bailey. So, there you have it. My predictions for Andy Apple Farm's next chapter is what I would be saying if I didn't have one final prediction bombshell to drop on you. When exploring that final barn on the top floor where you find images of Cameron, Arthur, and Thomas, There's also one for Lewis, but it doesn't have a death date. Instead, it just has a missing date.

His body is never found. I think, just like with his sister, this is a clue that Lewis is also going to be back, but in this case, it's not going to be the real Lewis. If I were to guess, it's going to be the entity using Lewis's body, a body that, unlike Isabella and Thomas, it won't have to fight against for control. It's going to be a doppelganger. The entity will be piloting it, and it'll be looking to kill. And that, my friends, is the uplifting story of Andy's Apple Farm, a family that murders itself during Christmas while under the control of a demonic force, hoping to be reunited in some sort of video game afterlife. How do you like them apples? But hey, it's all just a theory. A game theory. Thanks for watching.