Game Theory - The END of Mascot Horror

Episode Date: September 11, 2025

Join Game Theory Host Tom as he goes over games that are starting to use darker and twisted themes within their storytelling, instead of the classic mascot horror that we’re used to seeing. In today’s episode, he looks at WHY it’s happening, WHERE it’s going, and WHAT it means for the channel going forward.

This may be the most important episode of Game Theory I've ever done. Over the last year or so, I've been noticing an evolution happening within the indie horror space. So today, I wanted to look at why it's happening, where it's going, and what it means for all of these channels going forward. Hello, Internet! Welcome to Game Theory, the channel that stares into the Abyss and asks, Hey, Abyss, you're good. But today, loyal theorists, I have one simple question for you. Why has indie horror gotten so dark? That might seem like a funny question coming from me. The guy who literally talks about dead kids and serial killers at least twice a month,

but to me, it feels like over the last year or so, there's been a definitive shift in the indie horror scene. While we're still getting our generic walking simulators with creepy childhood mascots or the 157th version of Ban Ban, we've also seen an influx of horror games that are darker, more twisted and quite frankly traumatic. I started noticing this last year, when I made a video on one of the most requested franchises from our entire subreddit, Lacey Games.

When diving into that series, it became apparent that while this was 1,000% a piece of art worth shining a light on, it was also going to need some massive content warnings. After many internal conversations are theorist and many nights tweaking the script, we ended up with a video that I am really proud of. But after that moment, I started noticing more of these dark indie horror games with actually scary real-world themes being requested. Games like Amory, bad parenting, mouthwashing. It's not just indie horror either. Analog horror here on YouTube has begun to see the same evolution. Things like the inside-out analog horror go to some really dark places. And then, a couple of

weeks ago, I dove back into the Giggle Land ARG. The first time around, it felt like more of your typical indie horror affair. But this time, it involved one of the characters literally wearing someone else's skin. So, afterwards, I took a short break. and began to ask myself why. Why does indie horror seem to be getting bleaker and bleaker? How did we get here? And where is it going? So, today, I wanted to pull out a little bit and look at the meta of the indie horror

scene, to shine a light on why games have been getting so dark, what it means for the future of the genre, and inevitably, this channel. Oh, and it's probably worth mentioning, we will be talking about some potentially triggering topics in this video. I will remind you again before we actually talk about the specifics, but just so you know, this is your warning. If you don't want to hear about any of these subjects, I totally get it, but please turn back now. For as long as there have been stories, there have been horror stories. Ever since cavemen were gathering around fires, there have been tales of monsters and myths that played on our collective fears. Demons, ghosts,

scorned gods, alluring monsters, and curses have always been part of humanity's subconscious. They represent the unknown, danger, inequality and more. If there has been an anxiety humanity has felt, there has been a monster that's personified that anxiety. In a way, this process makes overcoming our fears easier. Dragons can be slayed, ghosts can be warded away. Even when horror stories end in tragedy, the process of verbalising our fears can teach us how to avoid danger in the first place, or it can help us to process the unavoidable.

Because of that, horror has always been an ever-adapting genre and a way to reflect widespread societal emotions that the storyteller and their audience are faced with. When it comes to what is considered modern horror, many historians cite Mary Shelley, writer of Frankenstein as the modern Prometheus of horror. If you got that joke, congratulations! I hope your high school English teacher is proud of you. Now, to be clear, the lines I'm drawing out today aren't quite as black and white as the title cards might make them out to be. Technically, there were plenty of printed horror stories prior to Frankenstein, like Carl Friedrich Callertz the Necromancer, or Horace Walpoles, the Castle of Otranto. And the same will be true of all the eras I'm talking about. What I'm mainly focusing on is the turning point of these eras, the time where we began to see an abundance of these types of stories, and when they began drying up. Frankenstein, for example, quickly became the poster child of the genre because of how it dealt with the apprehensions towards rapidly advancing technology.

With scientific advancements, particularly electricity, mankind began playing in the sandbox previously reserved for the gods. So Frankenstein asked if we were equipped to handle the unintended consequence of our ambitions. The next big movement in horror came at the dawn of filmmaking. In the 1920s and 30s, German Expressionism brought about films like Nosferatu and the cabinet of Dr. Caligari. These sharp and twisted horror pieces reflected Germany. emotional response to the First World War and the rise of fascism bubbling up within the populace.

Likewise, the 40s and 50s produced surrealist films across the globe that evoked the mangled battlefields of World War II. Body horror was popularized during this era, employing a graphic, visceral shock to access that historic, traumatic experience of the war. Atrocities committed across Europe and the severe nuclear devastation in Japan inspired some of the more gruesome and unearthly visuals. And yes, Godzilla. In the 1960s and 70s, supernatural and religious horror reigns supreme, with films like The Exorcist. Set in Washington, D.C., and released during the apex of Nixon's Watergate scandal, which I learned about recently on GT Live, the film was intended as a direct response to the Vietnam War. In addition to the obvious display of protest in the film,

there are more subtle suggestions of the period's history influencing the film. The Exorcist ultimately ends in an exhausting, uneasy draw. between good and evil. Although Reagan lives, Father Marin is forced to jump out a window to his death by the demon that once possessed Reagan. This unsettling conclusion mirrored the general uneasiness felt by the American people when the United States troops pulled out of the Vietnam War. During the 80s and 90s, due to the birth of the 24-hour news cycle, America was forced to become more aware of the horrors that were around them, namely child abduction. A few high-profile cases from that time, like the Greeley case of Janelle Matthews, spurred on what became known

as the Stranger Danger Panic. The idea of a serial killer hiding among you, ready to pick off any unsuspecting children who were breaking the rules or by themselves, which, if it wasn't obvious, is the premise of most 80s and 90s slasher flicks, like Halloween, Friday the 13th, and Scream. Now, before you guys start telling me that this is an episode that should have been on film theory or before Lee comes breaking down that door accusing me of stealing his stuff, this is about the time where horror games really started to appear on the scene. And they largely followed the same sort of patterns we've been seeing up to this point. You had your traditional spooky characters like Dracula, Frankenstein and

werewolves in Sega's Monster Bash or Castlevania. You also had movie tie-ins for movie franchises like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Friday the 13th and Halloween. Once again, sticking to the horror that reflected the reality of the day. And this symbiotic relationship between video games and movies carried on into the late 90s and 2000s. With Y2K drawing near and anxieties about mankind's reliance on technology, horror shifted from slashes to the apocalyptic. With the fear of crumbling infrastructure came the threat of mindless anarchy,

aka zombies. And so we got a bunch of zombie-focused media with games like the Resident Evil series and the arcade shooter House of the Dead. And movies like 28 Days Later, The Walking Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and Sean of the Dead. Turns out the key to a successful piece of zombie pop culture is just adding of The Dead at the end of its title. This era also introduced us to the world of Silent Hill, which was a huge game, but it fits more into the psychological horror genre that we'll talk about later. Like I said earlier, not every era is perfectly black and white. Silent Hill was just ahead of its time.

It wasn't until the 2010s that video games and movies really began to diverge. During this time, there was a shift in how people looked not only at the world, but at themselves. Mental health awareness for things like depression and anxiety began to climb, and there was a huge increase in young people going to therapy. Movies in general began to reflect this with stories like Funny Story and the perks of being a wallflower, which centre very explicitly on taking one's own life during a period where, sadly, the rates of said action had skyrocketed. Horror movies did the same thing with Black Swan and Nightcrawler. Psychological horror movies that showed how an ordinary person could devolve into darkness, and the sinister nature of modern-day media culture and consumerist ethics.

Initially, gaming followed suit with smaller scales, survival and psychological horror games like Outlast, Penumbra and Amnesia finding success. The thing is, though, these games had a problem. While yes, they were psychological, they were also dark, gritty, and oftentimes quite graphic. This didn't really mesh with the new kid on the block that was beginning to pick up Steam as a major player in the media landscape and more specifically the video game landscape YouTube. YouTube was becoming the place to watch gaming content from creators like PewDiePie, Markiplier and some guy called Matt Pat. I'm messing, of course, although I actually haven't seen him

in a while. He's probably enjoying retirement on a beach somewhere. Anyway, YouTube was just switching up their algorithm to favor watchtime over views. And so Longa Let's Plays were beginning to blow up. People would tune in from all over the world to see what games were being played, which was big for the industry, but these violent and grotesque-looking games weren't sitting right with YouTube's other big priority. Advertisers. YouTube was, and still is, an ad-based platform and so they needed to appease the advertisers to keep them spending money on the platform to pay creators. The thing was, these advertisers weren't all that keen on all the blood and violence. They didn't like it in the videos or plastered all over.

the thumbnails of the site, which opened the door for one indie horror game in particular to slide on in and change the YouTube gaming landscape forever. Come on, you all know it! Say it with me now! Five Knights at Freddy's! Thap paved the way for what we now know as mascot horror. This was one of the first times we really saw a second factor come into the creation of horror content. It was no longer about just reflecting society, it was also about fitting in, with with the medium in which it was being shown. FNAF did still follow a lot of the tropes of psychological horror,

revealing the evil in the mundane, destroying our sense of safety and familiarity by perverting the innocence of childhood nostalgia. However, unlike the games that came before, these mascot games were perfectly optimized for YouTube. Instead of violent gore and gritty realness, we now have a bunch of bright, colorful, and simply shaped characters that work great in thumbnails.

Even on small scale, can tell that this is Golden Freddy, you know that this is Huggy Woggy, and you can see that this is Amanda. They're so recognizable at a glance that anyone scrolling YouTube will know what they're looking at, which not only allows you to play the YouTube game well, but it also plays the advertiser game well. Because at a glance, these characters aren't really all that scary. Their horror is implied based on the incredibly cryptic clues that we have to put together by playing the game, Which means advertisers didn't strictly know this was horror at first. It looked like family friendly content like Chuck E. Cheese or Disney.

And even when it became clear that this was horror, because it was getting the views and didn't look like horror, the ad dollars continued rolling in and blew mascot horror into the stratosphere. This led to a decade of gaming full of these kid-friendly mascot horror games. We saw the rise of franchises like Bendy in the Ink Machine, Dokey Dokey Literature Club, Poppy Playtime, Andy's Apple Farm, Cooking Companions, A Man of the Adventure, Indigo Park, Piggy, That's Not My Neighbor, don't fret, and so many more that it would be impossible to name them all. But sadly, even from the get-go, we began to see the cracks forming in this genre. From broken messes like Hello Neighbor, to the internet meme that is Garden of Bam-Ban.

And those are just the well-known ones. There are hundreds of indie horror games available that just leaned into the same old tropes, the same gameplay and they felt like they were just thrown together in the hopes of having some of FNAF's success. This is where we enter the now, the 2020s. It was time for indie horror to evolve once again, but this time something was different. And it's here what I'm going to put in your final warning. We are about to cover a number of games with some dark subject matters that might be

triggering or traumatic for people. There is no shame in stopping the video here. I totally get it. Please look after yourself and your own mental well-being. If you do want to stay, let's take a look at a recent example that we got so many requests for, mouthwashing. At the heart of its story, we're still exploring the awfulness of the corporate capitalist machine that doesn't give a flying fart about the individual, just like we've seen in a number of

mascot horror games. But the way they showed that this company doesn't care is where things get really dark. Yes, they do the classic things of leaving the crew stranded without enough supplies. But then we get to Anya and Jim. Jimmy's storyline. A storyline about SA and as a result, a pregnancy, ending with Anya choosing to end her own life rather than stay trapped with Jimmy and carry his child. And the captain, Curly, he does nothing to stop any of it. However, unlike with previous indie horror games like FNAF, this deeply dark and twisted storyline isn't implied or hidden in secret notes or

newspaper clippings. It is front and center to the story. Play the game normally, and it is impossible to miss. Bad parenting is another game we've got dozens of requests for. Playing as a boy called Ron, you're introduced to his neglectful parents and messed up childhood, along with a sinister figure named Mr. Redface who causes his family to suffer. Through each step of the game,

it slowly revealed that Ron is a victim of child neglect at the hands of his alcoholic father, who turns out to be Mr. Redface, named for his drunken violence. Eventually, Ron's... dad kills him and shoves his body into a closet. Now, again, on the surface, you may not think a dead child in an indie horror game is all that much for me to make a scene over.

We talk about dead kids way too much on this channel as it is. But again, the difference is in its overtness. In FNAF, we never truly see the dead kids or the murders. We're only told about them. And because the scope is so large and the franchise is so weird and sci-fi with its goofy animatronics and soul metal, We don't really feel attached, but here it's once again the A plot of the game. There's no avoiding it.

And because it focuses on one kid and we see his father do the evil deed firsthand, it forces us to witness it and feel the evil and uncomfortableness. We've even started seeing this evolution bleed out into the more traditional kid-friendly mascot horror games. Poppy Chapter 4 showed us a much darker, more gruesome side with decaying bodies on spikes. And then there's Giggle Land with its wearing of people's skin. Now, these themes do reflect modern societal fears. With the 2022 repeal of Roe v. Wade, a legal ruling that eliminated the federal right to abortion

based on the right to privacy, it's easy to see why we're seeing stories like mouthwashing. The topic of child endangerment is one that was especially difficult to mitigate during the global lockdown in 2020. Children no longer had access to mandated reporters, teachers, doctors, other family members who are likely to notice that something is amiss and reported to the proper. authorities. Even the ideas of cultism and religion in things like Giggleland are part of the same societal fears, from the people who grew up in these environments, now trying to deconstruct them and figure out what happened. That all matches with what we've been talking about.

Horror media is an ever-shap-shifting beast, evolving and morphing to reflect the real-life horrors happening all around us at any given time. But you see the difference from the previous evolutions, right? Rather than this evolution being solely driven by shifts in societal fears, the main driving force is actually the additional element. YouTube causing the rise of mascot horror has led to an oversaturation of the market. The storylines and jump scares just aren't cutting it anymore. Horror fans have become increasingly desensitized to those classic tropes that used to scare the pants off of them. A simple jump scare on a long spooky hallway?

That isn't enough to get your adrenaline pumping once you've played through the same scenarios countless times before. And so, a new element has been added to the equation. Rather than the platform affecting the change, we're seeing a rebellion against the cookie-cutter, low-quality, kid-friendly horror. Moving on to new, more intense horror games to renew your sense of terror. But it hasn't gone backwards to match the previously gruesome and gory psychological horrors of the early 2010s, those situations still felt too vast or fictionalised to really hit home. And so, we are seeing storylines reflecting much heavier topics, the truly unpleasant parts of the human experience in order to hit like a Freddy Jump Scare did a decade ago.

So, that is the history of horror and how we've ended up here. But why does all of this matter? Why have I even brought this up? Well, because, as I've said a few times now, more and more of these types of games are popping up. And more and more, we're seeing requests for us to cover them. When we don't cover one of these games, we get a lot of people wondering why we haven't. and so I wanted to set the record straight because the real answer is complicated and nuanced. One of my goals as the host of this channel and one of our goals at Theorist in general is to make sure we're telling stories we find interesting and helping to bring some educational value along the way.

Stories about these heavier subjects can absolutely fit into this mold. They're insightful and it's important to make sure we're all educated so we can help those around us. But they can sometimes be difficult to discuss in a way that feels. feels respectful and nuanced for everyone watching. Lacey Games is a good example of this. It tells the story in a fascinating way. The ARG puzzle solving and use of symbolism and interpretation allowed us to shine some light on media literacy and build an interesting episode.

The dark and traumatic story elements of course were a part of that. But there was more to the story than just that. There was the drama of the in-world developers and their friends. There was the sci-fi. She's in the computer part. There was even a light at the end of the tunnel, a positive message that things could be okay in the end. But mouthwashing, while it is a fantastic game and it's incredibly thought-provoking, the reason it was thought-provoking is because it was all laid out in front of you.

It's the A-plot rather than a secret story. Therefore, to keep everyone on the same page, we would have to talk about it right at the start of the episode. There's no lead-in, no way to soften the blow, and no easy way to give you guys an out if you need one. Plus, if we tried to skirt around the subject, it would feel odd because it is the focus of the story. So, any law discussions I could have about it would always come back to that plotline. And to ignore it would be to dismiss the core point of that story. And to top it off, the ending is just as dark. There is no light at the end of the tunnel.

That's the point and what makes the story so powerful. But it can also make the entire video I make just as upsetting. And as a creator, that clashes with the responsibility I have, to you guys. We're surrounded by real stories of violent crime from every facet of media, whether it's Twitter, true crime podcasts, news stories, wherever. And it's important to listen to victim's stories and hold space for their trauma. But it's also important to be mindful of how much additional content I am adding to that topic. Sometimes the real world is a dark enough place on its own. It doesn't need me to jump into every dark, disturbing game that crosses the

YouTube homepage. when there are so many people who have sadly experienced this kind of stuff firsthand. For a lot of people, this show is their safe space, away from all of that awful stuff that they're seeing or experiencing. And I want to respect you guys and take that seriously. I recognize that there are a lot of people that haven't dealt with or are currently dealing with trawler. And so, if I talk about every one of these games as they come out, it means constantly

reminding them of that past hurts. making this less of a safe space for them. At the end of the day, we're an Edgatainment Channel built on exploring the physics of Mario, and a lot of our community are younger people. So, talking about real, hardcore trauma isn't what people have come to expect from us. That doesn't mean we will never talk about these stories. As I said, they are important, but when we do, we will always give a warning like we did with Lacey Games. And we likely won't cover them all that often.

I mean, just look at the gap between Petscope and Lacey Games. And the reason I'm not cutting these out altogether is because I also recognize there's a flip side to this coin. Some people want to see stories like this because it shows that they aren't alone in their experiences. And for developers, making these games can be a means of self-theraping, helping themselves to process their experience to come out the other side. If that is you, please don't stop making these games.

If making a game like this is helpful for you, make it. And if you really want to see us cover one of these darker topics, let us know in the community tab. On the subreddit, all I ask is that you bear in mind the things we've talked about today. While you may enjoy this type of content, or maybe it helps you process, there may be people in this community who don't want to be subjected to that. I'll keep doing my part two, checking the suggestions and keep weighing up the stories we want to tell and how often we want to tell them, to make sure that we represent everyone in this

community. The good news is this discussion, this process we're talking about. it's not something that's going to be forever. Like all eras of horror, this two shall pass. Eventually, we will see mascot horror die off. I don't know exactly when that will be, but it just will. We're already seeing it reach critical mass, so it's only a matter of time until the balloon finally bursts.

And when that happens, we may also see the end of this more darker style of media. Because if the traumatic narratives are there to be the antithesis to mascot horror, Well, then without mascot horror, you suddenly have no need for these darker, shock-inducing stories. And at that point, we may even see video games moving back into alignment with movies. Right now, the growing fear in society is AI. And unlike the rising fear of the reliance on technology we saw in the 90s, this is about the fear that technology will take over and replace us. We're seeing it already with movies like Companion or Megan.

And surprisingly, in indie horror games, like FNAV. I can also see this direction working with the added element of YouTube and social media, because, much like mascot horror, visually, it's not overtly gruesome or violent. It's clean and crisp and allows you to still use some of the tricks for advertisers and platforms like YouTube that we've seen work for mascot horror. But as time goes on, I also think we'll see another shift, one that will almost be like a resurgence of what we saw in the 20s and 30s. Host of film theory Lee told me about a friend's kid he spoke to recently and how they'd had a nightmare because their friend on the schoolyard had told them that World War III was going to happen and they didn't want to die.

That is a very real fear being felt by the younger generation due to the political climate across the globe right now. And so, when they grow up and start making games and movies, I can also see us returning to that state of mind. Using more traditional style monsters with special powers and high intellect to represent the people and governments, we're perceiving as plunging the world into chaos. Just like we saw in old movies like Nosferatu. Oh, but would you look at that? Maybe this change will happen sooner than I thought. It is evolving, just backwards.

But hey, that's just a theory. A game theory! Thanks for watching.