Game Theory - The DEVIL is in the Details! (Hello Neighbor)

Episode Date: January 24, 2024

Join Game Theory Host MatPat as he dives back into everyone's favorite franchise... Hello Neighbor.

Thank you, Ephraim. Hello. Neighbor. Well, hello. Hey, bird. It's so nice to have you here where you belong. I never knew. Satan.

Welcome to Game Theory. The show that's secretly a long meta story about my week after week march toward boldness. as I slowly tear all my hair out trying to make sense of the symbolic nonsense developers throw at me. In this week's edition of Matt Pat's journey to premature Chrome Domeness, Hello Neighbor, because, well, the game was supposed to be released tomorrow, and it was really my last chance to try and predict the plot after two more alphas and a beta had been released. I even had a theory mostly hammered out, and then, of course, the unthinkable, a delay. If it had been Scott Cawth and it would have been released like three days earlier, but no, a delay until December.

But then something even more unthinkable. Beta 3 goes public and the developer announces all sorts of information about the final game. In just five minutes of them talking, we get so much information. One of the basements? One of the bosses. Fear rooms. The fact that this is only... 40% of the full games.

So I took the remnants of my shattered script, then went back to the drawing board with all this new information, only to come to some very interesting conclusions. So put your globes on ice and hold onto your umbrellas, because if you don't, it'll probably glitch out and force you to restart the game from the beginning, because it's time to invade a sad, lonely man's privacy in the quest for the truth. You can't handle the truth! In the one and a half videos that I've done covering Hello Neighbor,

I talked about how all the clues in the game up through Alpha II's release pointed at the neighbor having sold his soul to the devil. Bible passages, golden calf imagery, devil costumes, the number 666, but over the past several iterations of the game, the edge on the neighbor has been softened by quite a bit. The ending of Alpha 3 showed us the neighbor alone and crying in a room. Apparently even the Antichrist over here has a softer side. But Beta 3 seems to suggest more and more that the neighbor now regrets whatever deal he made with the devil so long ago.

For proof, look no further than the first minute of the game. We hear a scream, A neighbor runs over to the basement, and when he slams the door shut, he looks panicked. Like, he's trying to keep something in and over. It's not about keeping us out. It's about keeping whatever is down there stuck down there. I mean, heck, even props a chair against the door on your side. That's not gonna keep you out. You literally remove it within seconds of pressing start. That chair is meant to prop the door shut against whatever entity is lurking down there. And then for more proof when you do finally make it down there, what do you find? The neighbor or some mental projection of him hiding behind a locked cage with dozens of

of security cameras pointed at the door. It's an eerie image that clearly shows us the neighbor's paranoia. But that begs the question, what else is down there? What is he so scared of? What doesn't he want to escape the basement? Well, we actually see it. The Dark Shadow. In my previous theory on the game,

I called out the dark shadowy figure lurking behind the neighbor in some of the promotional illustrations for the game. Hypothesizing, based on the Faust book, also seen in those images, that it was the devil. Satan himself standing behind the neighbor. And since that theory came out, the role of the shadow has only gotten more important in the game. For one, the shadow is always present in the so-called fear rooms. These nightmarish dreamscapes forcing you to confront and overcome some type of trauma,

a pantry where glowing eyes watch you, a gym where everyone crowds around you, a grocery store where you're being hunted by other shoppers. It's important to note that these are childhood nightmares, and the visual design reinforces that idea as everything about these fear is huge and misshapen, towering shelves in the supermarket, oversized items in the closet, an enormous twisting classroom. It's almost as if you're experiencing the world from a whole new perspective. The perspective of a child, and watching you the whole time, not Half Life's G-Man this time, but the Shadow Man, observing from the rafters in the grocery store, looking through the window at the basketball game,

staring down from an overhanging beam in the school, and peeking into the pantry, watching you struggle, and watching you struggle, and watching But why? What's actually going on here? Well it's my belief that these fear rooms are recreations of the past experiences of the neighbor's childhood Being bullied in school getting lost in the supermarket getting locked in a pantry These are all things that happened to our neighbor and we know this for two reasons first the mannequins To solve the major puzzle of Beta 3 we have to bring four mannequins to the recreation of a birthday party happening in the center of the neighbor's house Now clearly the mannequins are for people from the neighbor's history as he tries to recreate this old birthday party. It's kind of like Fnaf 3's happiest day mini-game. It's also worth noting that one of the mannequins is sad and rejected positioned like he's hiding in a corner. Again like Fnaf 3's happiest day mini game. Go figure. Childhood birthday parties, huh?

Wrecking more childhoods than game theory. Who do? Where dreams go to die, Satan is ever present and the impetus for so many indie horror games. Anyway more on that in a second. For now all of that evidence seems to a that to the neighbor, mannequins are used for recreating moments from his past. It's also heavily hinted at through one of the biggest puzzles in Alpha 3. Hidden in the yard next to the neighbor's house is a gramophone sticking out of the ground. It's odd, but I mean, have you seen this game? Odd is like its middle name. Hello, odd neighbor.

Using a megaseed, and I'm gonna need you to put them way up inside your butthole. You can grow a tree that produces a golden apple. Drop the apple into the gramophone, and suddenly we're in a flashback experiencing the world briefly through the eyes of the neighbor. in a moment that symbolically feels like he, as a child, broke a gramophone and lived to regret it. That's the framing device for all these flashbacks. And who's there to comfort our poor, crying Antichrist, none other than the Shadow Man? So who, or better yet, what, is the Shadow?

Well, my original theory was that it was Lucifer, Satan himself. And while it might have seemed far-fetched at the time, the latest builds only strength in that theory. For one, the number four is everywhere. Yes! The number four! The most evil number. In the grocery store fear room, you see signs everywhere that have four eggs on it, with the fourth one being broken and falling out of it a golden apple. Back at the neighbor's house, there's a large platform balanced on a support.

On that platform, four boxes. And if you happen to look inside the boxes by hacking the game, inside the fourth box, another golden apple. There are four fear rooms throughout the game, four beds in the house, four mannequins at the party with the fourth one being scared, and next to that gramophone buried in the ground, is a sign that looks like an adult holding on to four children with the fourth child tilted like it's being dropped or better yet like it's falling But what does any of this have to do with Satan? Well in Christian texts of all the heavenly hosts

Cherubim and seraphim lining the skies there are only four Count them four named angels of all of God's messengers Gabriel Michael Raphael and Lucifer Lucifer the shining one the morning star is the one that decided he would be greater than God and fell from heaven to become the devil. Just like we see in the sign next to the Gramophone, one large God figure overseeing four smaller figures with the fourth one falling. Now all of you attentive theorists may have noticed that most of these foursomes came with a golden apple. The box on the platform has a golden apple in it. The Gramophone accepts a golden apple. The broken egg in the grocery store has a golden apple hatching out of it.

Heck, there's even a stack of golden apples that are unreachable on a shelf in the grocery store, mini-game, a grocery store that has a picture of a golden apple on its sign and was called the golden apple in earlier releases when they were still using English. Golden apples are in paintings alone, in paintings hanging from a tree. Even in the basement, there's a small patch of trees that we know from Alpha 3 are the same type of trees that will produce golden apples. This symbol is literally everywhere in the game. And of course it comes back again to the Bible or the Torah. Either one will do this time because we're going all the way back to Genesis, not the council. Though I will say the biblical book of Super Nintendo would have made for some great reading and put the council wars in a whole new light. No, the book of the Bible that tells the first story of human sin in the form of Eve eating a fruit from the tree of knowledge after being tempted by a serpent. A serpent that in Christian belief is commonly thought to be an early incarnation of the dear old devil. So what does this all mean? We have a lot of things going on. Very strong evidence of the devil being the main antagonist of this game. Very strong evidence of the devil being the main antagonist of this game. Very strong evidence. for the neighbor making a Faustian bargain with him, being tempted by some golden apple the devil was offering, then coming to regret it, but then there are all these other lingering threads that try as I might I can't quite knit together into the perfect theory sweater, for lack of a better analogy. I'll just run through them quickly for you so we can all piece this story together. First, the birthday party. That isn't a biblical reference, but clearly it's a pivotal clue to the story of this game and again reiterates the theme of three good things and one different thing. It seems to indicate that the neighbor was awesome. from the rest of the kids or the rest of his family. So is this the moment that changed him to accepting help from the devil? I don't know. Number two, sure the golden apple is knowledge and the devil's trickery and all that, but is that all it is in this game? That it just represents the temptation of the neighbor?

It seems like it should have something to do with the apple of knowledge of learning something. And what about the bandage on his right ring finger? Was the neighbor married at some point? In countries like Russia, where the game is set, it's customary to wear wedding bands on the right hand. Early builds of the game also had a car crash sound hidden behind the end door. Could the neighbor have lost his wife and made the deal with the devil to get her back? Is that why he's crying at the end of Alpha 2? Number 3, what about your character? In your house, you have a picture of a kid on the steps and someone standing there like the neighbor.

Seems to suggest that there's some sort of family relationship between the two of you. It's also worth mentioning that on the wall of your house is a picture of your old bedroom, which becomes a pivotal clue to unlocking parts of the neighbor's house later in the game. Then, when you beat the basement, you're back in a recreation. of that room with the neighbor looking in on you, screaming. Couple that with the idea that we're told by the developers that you're moving back into your childhood home, so, is the neighbor your father?

I gotta say, him peering in on you in your childhood room makes it feel like he's an overbearing parent, and his overprotectiveness might have been the reason you moved out in the first place, so maybe you were the kid that was rejected from that birthday party. The fallen child was you all along. Number four, since the supermarket and the school are locations for fear rooms, are probably also looking at a factory, church, and hospital-themed one down the road, since there are models for all of those buildings on the outskirts of the game map.

Any final plot of this game will probably involve those locations too, or some sort of childhood traumas happening in each of those locations. And finally, perhaps the biggest question of all. What is real and what is it? I mean, clearly, the fear rooms in the basement are symbolic, but what about the house itself? The Russian translation for the railway reads, Subway of the Subconscious.

It seems to strongly indicate that stuff in the game isn't real. And a special, huge thanks to Lena underscore Chestnut for the tip there on the Game Theorist subreddit. Well done, I am no scholar of the Russian language. All of this also harkens back to the earliest alphas of the game, where the door the neighbor was protecting had a heavenly glow. So, is this some kind of purgatory, some kind of atonement for sins of the past? There's clearly a lot here, but it's all just a bunch of loose threads with just conjecture to go off of. I presented you with the things that feel the most of the most.

the most solid from an evidentiary standpoint. And honestly, that's what it feels like right now. We have big chunks of the puzzle put together on this one, but we're missing the one or two puzzle pieces that make it form one complete picture. So for today's episode, I just wanted to present you with all the major details at play here. I just need some more time to think about it. And I'm sure you guys do too. Anyway, I'll keep tossing it around in my mind.

Also, I just gotta call this out because I think it's a fun cultural reference. The boss of Beta 3 is a giant reference to Baba Yaga, a character from Russian folklore. That's not for me to talk about, though. Gumba! Put it on this! To-do list. Good, it's not Japanese culture. Do something different, ya wee-a-boo. He can cover that one, whether he likes it or not. And I'll be back when I finally have this thing solved and that big revelation hits. Because until then, it's all just a theory. A game theory. Thanks for watching.