Game Theory - The Most DISTURBING Game Since Petscop! (LaceyGames)

Episode Date: August 14, 2024

Join Game Theory Host Tom as he breaks down the dark story behind LaceyGames. Credits: Writers: Tom Robinson and Brett Turley Editors: Dan "Cybert" Seibert, Koen Verhagen, JayskiBean, Koen Verhagen, Shannon (Bomb0i) and Warak Sound Designer: Yosi Berman

Lacey Games is one of the most disturbing franchises we've ever covered. This is normally where I put in a joke or a lighthearted comment, but today is not the day for that. What initially appears as a bright and colourful set of flash games for young girls quickly reveals a dark story of trauma, along with the very sad and very real issues that can cause it. This theory is not for the faint of heart. But if you are willing to keep going, there's a fascinating story waiting for you. You have been warned. Hello internet.

the game theory, the show that really misses good old-fashioned flash games. Nothing can scratch that nostalgic itch quite like going back through new grounds and finding that game you used to play almost 20 years ago. But clearly I'm not the only one feeling nostalgic for this era of gaming, because recently a new YouTube series has popped up from the YouTuber Ghost Tundra about an old Flash series that no one has heard of. Lacey Games. The reason no one has heard of it? Well, because it never really existed. Yeah, this is a Petscop situation, where we follow the let's plays of user as they document an old series of flash games from their childhood. Except these aren't real games.

Despite what you may have seen YouTube is playing online, the only true versions that exist are on Ghost Tundra's channel as part of this series. Why are we talking about a YouTube series here on Game Theory rather than Film Theory? Maybe if Lee wasn't so busy stealing my stuff, then I wouldn't have to steal this from him. Oh, what's that? I couldn't hear you over all these great video game movies. This series is also about games. whether they're real or not.

So it does feel like it fits here on Game Theory. Though, as you can probably guess, not all is as it seems. Initially, it's just a series of simulator games that would belong on any Flash website, things like dress-up sims, cooking sims, pet grooming sims, and makeup sims. But when the video's uploaded digs around the Lacey Games site, they discover some disturbing secrets hidden within these seemingly innocent games. Creepy characters hiding in darkness, cryptic messages flashing between frames,

and disturbing visuals of Lacey taking. her own life. What the heck is going on with this game designed for kids? Is this some weird demonic spirit possessing the game or a video game character come to life? No. In fact, the weirdest part of all of this is this is exactly how the developer intended these games to be. They made these games as a warning. So, let's turn our clocks back to 2009 theorists, because we are going to piece together all the hidden clues to figure out what the heck is happening inside Lacey Games and whether there is anything we can do to save both Lacey and its developer. The series begins with the game Lacey's Wardrobe, which starts as a wholesome dress-up sim where

the player prepares Lacey for her cute date, trying on different combinations of tops and shoes. Honestly, I'm kind of digging these looks. They're the perfect level of 2000s adorable, though it doesn't take long for these things to take an unsettling turn. As the player completes outfits for Lacey, a figure stalking her in the distance gets closer and closer and closer. He leaves threatening voicemails, sends her gory presence, and ultimately gets hold of her. Now, normally at this point, you'd expect that the character is trapped in a basement somewhere

and that you have to escape or something. But not Lacey. The results here are much darker. Here, she is dismembered and then eaten. Yeah, I told you the series was dark. And if that was too much for you, it's only going to get worse from here. So, this is your final warning. After this point, we are going to be getting into some very real and very real, very

disturbing stuff. I urge you to proceed with caution. There is no shame in backing out now. But if you have chosen to stay, let's move on to the next installment, Lacey's Diner. This is a game about Lacey running a restaurant. Normally, everything is fine. You just put the ingredients into a bowl and serve your creations to your customers. But the video's poster informs us that there's a secret ending. And in it, Lacey's business begins to fail. She does not handle this career failure well and ends up creating the most advertiser unfriendly recipes you could imagine using ingredients like cockroaches, broken glass, cigarette butts. Not exactly what you'd expect from a kid's game. However, during this segment, it becomes clear

that the business failing isn't actually the root of this psychological break. It comes from her past trauma. We get several flash frames of disturbing poetry, with one of the less graphic lines reading, When he looked down, he saw my little bruised cheeks smiling back at him, the exact size of his sweaty palms. The rest of the lines aren't strictly safe for YouTube, but that first line gives us all we really need to know. Lacey was being abused. Each unsavory ingredient Lacey puts into her final meal ties into what she went through, the cockroaches that lined her ceiling, the broken glass she was hurt with, and a bag of drugs that she was forced to take. All of this is telling us about Lacey's backstory. She was traumatized by those experiences, and now every wrong ingredient, every small

setback, every mistake, they bring all of that trauma back to the surface, causing the games to literally fall apart at the seams and reveal the broken little girl that lies beneath. This then continues in the third installment, Lacey's Pet Shop. As usual, it starts out like a classic kids game where Lacey grooms pets, washing them, cutting their hair, but the requests get more and more extreme, asking her to stretch out their neck or cut off their limbs. After she causes too many atrocities, it devolves even for the further into a nightmarish point and click adventure game. And it's here where we learn the truth about Lacey's abuse. As you go through this new section, text appears in the bottom right corner

that says, Uncle, have you seen Puddles anywhere? I can't find her. And she goes on to say, Stop laughing. Later on, we discover that Puddles was Lacey's dog, but only as she mourns for the death of her sweet little angel. It seems pretty clear that her uncle was laughing because he knew exactly where Puddles was. He was the one who killed Puddles. She follows this up later with another poem. Quote, for years he was barking up the wrong tree, worried about his sins becoming too visible on my skin. For this poem to immediately follow the lamenting of her dog, the one her uncle killed, suggests that wasn't all that he was responsible for. He was also responsible for her horrid living conditions, her pain, and her suffering. He was Lacey's abuser. It is at this point, however,

that we begin to see something shift. While she mourns her dog, she defiantly states, You can hurt me all you like, but weren't allowed to take it away from me. I will let you rot. Her dog being killed was the final straw, causing something to snap inside Lacey. And when she enters the next room, she tells us this. And when he turned his back, I was the dog that bit his neck. Then, suddenly, she wakes up back in the world of sunshine and rainbows. It was all just a nightmare, except there's a corpse peering out from under her bed. Lacey finally took revenge on the man who caused her so much pain, killing him in a burst of rage, leaving his corpse to rot beneath her. However, at the end of this video, there's one final detail that changes everything we've seen

so far. At the beginning and end of the video, we hear audio recordings from a character called Grace Assock. She is one of the founders of Laceygames.com. But during her final recording, we hear her say this. I only then realize the other co-founder, Rocio, was hiding a lot of things for me. Now, if you've not been going through this series frame by frame like I have, that likely doesn't mean anything to you. But we saw this name appear during Lacey's diner. In the disturbing ingredients section,

once you place the drugs into the mixing bowl, the game cuts to an image of a drug fact sheet, and on it is Roseo's name. In the next video titled The Disturbing Rabbit Hole of Laceygames.com, we hear an interview between Grace and a new character, Charlie, the person who has been uploading these let's plays. Grace informs us that while she was in charge of managing the website, Rosio was the game's designer and was responsible for inserting all the concerning content.

Her inserting her own name like this on something so realistic and horrifying can only really mean one thing. The poem of abuse, these ingredients, these aren't from Lacey's backstory. They're from Rosios. In Pet Shop, we see more confirmation of this, with the video cutting to real footage from Roseo's perspective, and it follows the events we saw, Lacey describing about killing her uncle. Despite the sunshine and rainbows, the darkness didn't go away.

Quotes, it's been days, but I just can't leave. He's still under the bed. He'll look at me. Rosio was lying in bed for days after she killed him, with his corpse just lying underneath her. She was too paralyzed by his influence, even after his death, to allow herself to leave. This inaction matches a scene earlier in Pet Shop,

where Lacey crawls into a cage, knowing it's bad for her, but feeling comfort in its familiarity. All Rosio knew was abuse. It's why it took the death of puddles to break free from it, and took her a while to build the confidence to leave that part of her life behind. It's here that the live-action Rosio dreams of her future in cartoony thought bubbles. It's here when Rosio sits in bed with her uncle dead beneath her that the idea of Lacey was born. A happy girl with dreams and aspirations. One who could do things she was never allowed to do,

like, go shopping or buy CDs of her favorite songs. This is why Ghost Country used mixed mediums in this scene, setting up a juxtaposition between the grim, unlit reality of Rosio and the bright future of Lacey. But if Roseo went on to create Lacey games to play out her dreams to be the perfect, bright and happy character unburdened by her past trauma, how, and more importantly, why did they turn into the disturbing messes that we've been seeing? Charlie even makes the comment that the website isn't the same as she remembers, which tells me that these games may not have always been like this, that they likely started off as good and wholesome to reflect the ideal world Rosio wanted to live in,

only for something to bring her crashing back down to reality. And thanks to that final video, we know exactly what that something was. We're told by Grace during the rabbit hole video that the site was getting hate mail from parents who thought that one of the characters, Lacey's tomboy skater friend Jay, was a bad influence on their daughters. Ah, good to see angry hate comments were still a thing back in 2009, and just as ridiculous as ever. Though, Rosio did what I'm sure many YouTubers wished they could do, she replied with a snarky comment. Careful what you wish for. She did then comply with their requests, but in a more malicious way than they'd expected.

In this video, we are shown two games, Jay's skating game and Lacey's makeup parlor. Jay's skater game is a classic flash skater game where you jump from building to building on a skateboard, though it ends with Jay whizzing off a building and falling into a pit of spikes. Jay wasn't just being removed. She was being killed off. I don't think is what the parents had in mind, nor were they expecting what happened next. In Lacey's makeup parlour, Lacey does the makeup for several women with their eyes shut,

but their faces start to sag, eyes open with uneasy stares. One client even has a maggot crawl across her face. Then Jay's mutilated body suddenly appears, revealing that Lacey isn't your average beautician, but a mortuary cosmetologist, applying lipstick to her friend's corpse while having a mental breakdown as she processes the death. From the website, it is clear that a huge part of Lacey Games identity was the friendship between Lacey, and Jay. With Lacey being a manifestation of Roseo's hopes and dreams, it stands to reason that strong friendships were a core desire of Rosios as well. Killing off her perfect friend was

heartbreaking. But what was worse was that whenever there was conflict on the site, her friend Grace played the victim and placed all of the blame on Roseo, saying horrible things about her and eventually abandoning the project altogether. Once again, this perfect world Rosio had dreamed up wasn't coming true. And so she took a different approach. In the audio recordings from Grace at the start of the Pet Shop episode, we see an About Us page that reveal that Rosio and Grace started this site together as, quote, a safe space for kids to play. I mean, sure, if you call a website full of death, abuse and cannibal jump scares as a safe space, then mission accomplished. Joking aside, I actually think that despite the changes Rosio made, she believes the statement to be completely accurate.

When Lacey finds a mirror in Petschop, we see this character appear. The mirror shows this as a reflection of Lacey, the real Lacey, Rosio, and she's breaking the fourth wall, speaking directly to the children playing her game. She goes on to say, I made lots of games for you, but with none of those lies. This isn't the first time lies has been mentioned in the series either. During Lacey's Diner, one of the many flash frames reveals a poem like you'd expect, although this one isn't about her uncle. Instead, it reads,

They used to teach kids such perverse, little bizarre lies that they passed as truth. That is a bit of a mysterious statement. However, within the context of Lacey's Diner, it makes perfect sense. To get this poem, Charlie had to go down the hidden bad route, which leads to Lacey's business failing. The themes of this bad ending are all about the weight of failure. and the inability to handle the pressure required to succeed. Contrast this with the good ending, or any traditional children's media for that matter.

They don't have realistic depictions of failure. Is your dream to run a successful diner? Well, your dreams are achievable with a few easy clicks of a mouse. Charlie even notes that to unlock this hidden ending, you have to run down a timer that's longer than anyone would need for this simple task. The threat of failure is more of a vague illusion to make a child's inevitable victory all the more sweeter. This is what Rosio meant about Lacey Games being a safe space. The lies Rosio is taking issue with here are the sugar-coated messages children are told.

Morals that say life is easy if you follow your dreams, that good people prevail and that everything will be okay in the end. These are the lies she was taught growing up. But reality proved it all to be false. And so she wouldn't sugarcoat things. She would tell it like it is in order to protect other little girls from going through what she did. Jay's skating games about how recklessness can spin out of control and lead to fatality. Pet Shop is about the fragile morality of pets and how it's selfish to treat them as accessories.

Make-up parlor is about the expectation for women to look attractive no matter what their struggles. And wardrobe is about how dangerous men will prey on girls no matter what they wear. In Rosio's mind, she was keeping the kids safe. It's just that her methods for safety aren't the same as yours or mine. They're twisted to extremes by her own tragic experiences, causing everyone around. around her to run away in fear. To the point that when Charlie mentions Rosio's been missing since 2010 and that they need to find her, Grace responds with, oh yeah, and that bombshell about Rosio disappearing, that's

basically where the series ends, at least for now. After her dream career and relationships were dashed and she distorted her sight with real but horrific lessons, Rosio just disappears. Is she dead? Was she kidnapped? We never really get an answer. Unless, of course, you are paying very close attention. In the final frames of the rabbit hole video, we are given one last poem to decipher.

And it goes like this. She stepped into the empty room at the edge of the universe and calmly walked towards the single button on the wall, which, as she had been told by the gods above, could delete the existence of anyone she disliked. She thought long and hard of all the ugliest soul she had ever known. She made her decision, and her finger met the button without any ceremony. But looking down at her feet, it was all red with blood. She stood in shock. The blood tainted her very being.

She thought deletion would be clean and instant without realizing that death is the only deletion that exists and that there is no death without painful, unrelenting grief. And grief stared at her through mirrors forever. From the eyes of all she had ever thought to delete, it was a world catastrophe. Now, initially, the reading for this seems pretty darn obvious. She wanted to delete the person she disliked the most. In nearly every Lacey game, Lacey dies, usually by her own hands. And in one case, we see Lacey being choked by an illustration of Roseo.

Lacey was Roseo's optimism. A fun-loving girl with lots of friends, a part of her filled with the lies told to children. This visual of choking occurs during a section about Rosio killing off J. Which was the result of this illusion shattering. In that moment, Rosio killed her own creation and what it represented. Lacey was the soul she disliked the most. But at the end of the day, Lacey was still a part of herself. And so when she looked down after hitting delete, she saw herself covered in blood.

She realized that metaphorically deleting Lacey wasn't enough. It needed to be literal. Death is the only true deletion, which meant ending not just Lacey's life, but her own, too. However, while that would be a suitably sad ending for a series like this, something didn't feel right to me. If Rosio had died in 2010, I feel like her body would have been found, right? And with the site being as popular and as controversial as it was, that would have been a big story. Or at least being easy to find with a quick Google search. For her to still be missing and her disappearance to be considered a mystery, feels like the answer can't be that straightforward.

Maybe that's just the FNAF Brain Rock talking. But as I went frame by frame through each video, there was a detail that stood out to me. In the video, Lacey's diner, we see this final frame. It depicts a real person wrapped in some kind of cord or wire with the caption, I'm in heaven. This is Rosio and while the use of heaven might make you think of peace and the afterlife, like someone might believe they find if they unalive themselves, the fact she's able to write this seems to imply that she's somehow still present to tell us this,

that her heaven isn't the heaven we might explore. The wires tying her up are also an interesting choice. They actually repeat several times throughout the series. In Pet Shop, we see these wires tethering her to the ceiling. The images are obviously super distorted, but the way those cables are hanging from the ceiling and are clearly coiled, they remind me of computer or internet cables from my old media company days. Then, in Rabbit Hole, we see several flashes of Rosio tangled in those same wires. Except this time, there's a circuit board thrown into the mix.

Is this telling us that Rosio somehow connect? herself to the computer, that her afterlife is inside Lacey Games? I know, it sounds far-fetched. Why would this game grounded in gritty, disturbing realism suddenly take a supernatural turn? Believe me, I get it, but hear me out. Right at the end of Pet Shop, Grace mentions that Rosio is likely dead. But when she does, we suddenly see a face appear in the screen with the word, Hello.

This feels like Rosio showing us she isn't dead, but alive, and able to respond to things said about her. We see the same thing play out in the rabbit hole video. In it, there's a moment where the screen cuts to a bunch of eyeballs looking around. Then the video of Charlie and Grace pops back up, only this time it's inverted. Like it's from the reverse point of view, like someone within the computer looking out. As Grace speaks and drops her not very friend-like opinions about Rosio, the screen once again begins to glitch out. It's reacting to what she's saying. Blood appears on the video window and the same face appears.

Rosio is watching everything from inside the games. That's why no one has been able to find her for 14 years. She stuck somewhere no one can reach her. Deleting herself didn't mean ending her life, just ending her existence in the physical world. And now she is inside her own creation. But hope is not lost for Rosio. When Lacey first enters the digital nightmare space in Pet Shop, she is confronted by Skellercat. Skellicat's whole thing is that she's a rude gatekeeper, saying,

I've been hurt, so I will hurt others. This is exactly how Rosio has operated throughout the series. She was hurt by angry parents, by her friend Grace, and so she went on to hurt other people. However, Skelet Cat isn't a lost cause. Lacey's able to brighten her mood by returning her skin, which allows the player to proceed. She undoes the hurt that Skellicat has been through. So, how do we metaphorically return Rosio's skin? How do we help make up for the hurt she suffered?

That, I believe, will come down to Grace and Charlie. Charlie is a fan of the site and can make up for all those old criticisms by showing appreciation for Rocio's work. She's sharing it online with theorists like us and we always appreciate games like this. Charlie even says that Jay, the controversial member of the group, is her favorite character. As for Grace, Rocio is clearly listening out for her words specifically. All Grace needs to do is look inward and show this digital Rocio the kindness she should have offered her back when they were partners. Those small actions are all it's going to take to save Rosio. At the very

least, I think we can all take away an important lesson from Rosio's story. Behind all the content we consume, be it games, social media, or YouTube, there's a person on the other side of that screen. Someone who just wanted to bring some joy to people in a world full of hate. You have no idea what they've been through, what they're going through. Your words have more impact than you realize. Let's encourage that optimism and creative passion instead of encouraging people to destroy it. But hey, that's just a theory. A game theory! Thanks for watching.