Game Theory - The Scariest Game That Doesn't Exist! (Evertale)

Episode Date: May 14, 2023

A while ago, I made a video about how mobile game ads LIE to us. Well, I think I've found a game that takes that to the EXTREME! Welcome to Evertale. If you've never heard of it, it is a mobile game that is infamous for its completely fabricated ads. These ads tell you NOTHING about the game you are downloading. In fact, they seem to be telling some other kind of dark and twisted story. So of course, I had to find out all of those secrets for myself. Let's go!

Welcome to Game Theory, the show that always delivers on what it promises, cringy humor with passable fan theories. Set the bar low, my friends, and you'll never disappoint. Speaking of setting a low bar, today we're talking about Evertail, a mobile game that saw our creepy lore videos and exposés on misleading mobile ads and said, yes, please, to both of those things. Not only are the Evertale ads we're talking about today misleading, there are also hundreds of them.

372, in fact, as far as I could tell, ripping off everything from Pokemon to Mori to Final Fantasy and Earthbound. And yep, I watched each and every single one. Don't say I never do anything for you. Anyway, in case you weren't already aware, Evertail is a mobile monster catching game that released back in 2019. It looks like this, it plays like this, and you should never download it.

Never. Not once ever, because its ads look like this. Psychological horror at its finest, meant purely to capture your attention. Maybe get you to download the game and the hopes that at some point it's going to go off the rails dokey dokey, dokey, or club style, spoiler alert, it does not. No horror element, no creepy lore, just disappointment. This is clearly false advertising to trick unsuspecting creepypasta lovers into downloading their cash grab game. And that is not okay.

If you want a scary Pokemon game, you could support an indie developer and give Beasts of Burden a shot. Or if you want something that scratches the scary RPG itch, check out the tragically ignored Omori, which is outright ripped off here in these ads. But please, please do not download Evertail. Do not support this kind of blatant theft and lying all to hype up their gacha-style Genshin Impact wannabe. I mean, Lily's garden may have made up lore for a glorified towel matching game. But at least when I download the game, I get to see Lily and the gameplay that's being shown. So again, do not download Evertail. These horror ads are a shameless ploy used by an aging game trying to get new users hooked.

And you know what? It worked on me. I got hooked. Hooked on watching the ads, that is. Because the ads are good. They're creepy. They're compelling. They're mysterious. Watching them, I started to get curious. Was there an actual story inside?

of these things? Because if you watch enough of them, some characters tend to repeat. A few of them even get consistent names. All the while, white text warns us of the consequences of our actions and tells us that it's time to move on. I mean, are these just a bunch of creepy images randomly thrown together in an attempt to get clicks? Or is there an actual attempt at a hidden narrative here put in by the game's marketers? I needed to find out. So, the team and I decided to watch all three hours and 22 minutes worth of fake ads in order to piece together the story that's hiding within. That is longer than the Lord of the Rings' return of the king here, people. And let me tell you, contrary to what I thought,

there is a story here. And it is way better than what you get in the game itself. In fact, way better than what you get in most games these days. For those of you who haven't seen any of these advertisements, first off, congratulations, your life is better off as a result. But to catch you up, each one is around 30 seconds long, and most include at least one of six color-coded monster trainers, also known in the ads as breeders.

We have blue, pink, orange, gray, the blonde, and the ginger. It's a bit odd that of all the colors, red is missing, but maybe that one was too close to Pokemon's source material. This young group of breeders all know each other. One ad even refers to him as a team. Many of the ads are pretty formulaic. Breeder walks around for a bit, finds themselves a dead body, or watches a monster die, and then gets jump-scater killed. Now, obviously, since these are mobile game ads, there's going to be a lot of repeats to the format as they reuse key elements to try and AB test which versions are going to get the most clicks. Different assets are used sometimes, characters tend to get swapped out, and occasionally the dialogue changes entirely.

However, and this is where it gets interesting, the characters themselves stay consistent between the ads, pertaining both their unique characteristics as well as their names. Pink is Kana, blue is Heroto, gray is Kazuto, and Ginger is Lizette. In fact, we learned that Heroto Blue is romantically involved with Kana Pink. Orange, meanwhile, is a bit of a loner due to having lost a loved one as we see an ad number 337. And now you start to see why things get a little bit weird. Naming characters, giving them backstories in a 30-second ad, it's not just something that you do for the laws.

If this was just a bunch of random ads that were creepy for creepy's sake, you wouldn't maintain consistency like this. You wouldn't have specificity like this. You would just keep things as generically colored sprites. But by giving them names and backstories that are consistent and carry over, suddenly the decisions that are happening inside this world feel purposeful. They tell me that there might be more lore hidden within and that we gotta keep looking.

Over the course of the ads, we watched the team go on many different adventures, like hanging out in summoning circles, camping in the woods to roast their pet monsters over the fire, and hanging from meat hooks. But it's not all fun and games in the life of a breeder, my friends. There are more mundane things, too, like going to the grocery store,

only to then find a girl standing over a dead body telling you to hold the bloody knife. Blue says yes, and suddenly the girl is trying to frame him for MADDA. Speaking of Murder Girl, in another trailer, number 8, She says that it was her monster that did the old stabby stab, and then it's up to you to bring it to justice in the room next door. Also, Murder Girl? Yeah, she might just be the missing red breeder that I talked about before.

Now, while all of that might seem random, throughout the ads, one theme consistently comes up. Capturing monsters and then killing those monsters. It's the classic argument against Pokemon. Oh, they're just enslaving animals and then getting them to fight each other. Except here, the violence and the horror have been cranked up to the max. In many of the ads, we see glitchy text that reads, you will be judged by the monsters you've caught.

In another, that by catching monsters, we ourselves are becoming a monster. And they don't mean that in the figurative way either. In multiple ads, we see a monster tied up outside of a hut desperately trying to escape. The professor explains to us that the woman inside became so obsessed with breeding that she became a monster herself. Sure enough, the ad ends with long, shadowy arms reaching out of the house to consume the trapped creature. It's actually pretty darn similar to what we know about the Pokemon world, where, based on various Pokedex entries, we know that people and Pokemon are basically made of the same stuff.

They can turn into one another. And again, the Evertail ads seem to take this very literally. It adds like No. 353, when the cursor scrolls over a monster, the human breeder that they're made of appears underneath. So it seems like humans are indeed transforming or evolving into the very monsters that they catch, and then feeding off of each other once they've turned into monsters. And they're not just transforming into monsters either. They're giving birth to those monsters. Remember, these aren't trainers, they're referred to in the ads as breeders.

And that word seems very important to the lore of this thing. In ad number 299, we watched the player impregnate a woman using monster DNA. The resulting baby is a human snake hybrid that gets chained up and then reappears throughout the next dozen ads or so. Her snake-like appearance actually resembles what we see in a much earlier ad. Number 72, where we stumble into a church full of cultists worshipping a cyclops angel snake. As you might expect, the monsters aren't taking kindly to any of this. It seems like some of them are rising up to take revenge. In a couple of the ads, we see that monsters have realized that the capture balls that work on them can also work on humans.

And as a result, they've decided to turn the tables by catching humans for themselves and then forcing them to battle. That is why so many of the ads feature landscapes covered in bodies and pools of blood. The monsters are forcing humans to kill each other, just like we do with Pokemon. Now, that is a lot of ideas already. Breeding monsters, becoming monsters, worshiping monster gods, monsters capturing and battling humans. And this is all without me even mentioning the mysterious virus floating around in the air that causes characters to vomit or cough up blood.

Do you want my honest opinion? I think that the marketing team for this game just took every scary trope and threw it against a wall to see what would stick. But I also think that, intentionally or not, they did create a lore here that makes sense. You see, there's still one major thread that I haven't talked about, and it brings all of these disparate ideas together. Across the ads, death is overwhelmingly common for the character.

In fact, most ads end in someone dying at least once. For example, blue and pink are forced to battle one another to the death, they're hit by cars, helicopters crash into them, they're trapped and eaten by cultists, and of course, grabbed by mysterious shadow hands. But you see, it's what happens after they die that's interesting. Sometimes these deaths result in them entering an astral plane of some kind. Other times, it ends with them standing over their own dead body. In ad number 94, we watched the professor get trampled by an elephant monster, only to end up in a different location.

blood underneath him as though he died, but still able to walk around without a problem. Death doesn't seem to exist in this world, and there's a good reason for that. It's because these kids, all of them, are trapped in a simulation. We see this most explicitly in ad number 42, where one of the game's characters approaches what seems to be the boundary of the world, only to find themselves reflected in a mirror. Suddenly the mirror breaks and a giant monster peeks through. And this isn't just any monster either.

This is the same one whose DNA was used to create our imprisoned, snake girl from earlier. It seems like our player characters might be humans trapped inside of a game that was designed to torture and kill them over and over. Don't believe me? Well, we see it explicitly happen. In ad number 354, we literally see Orange get dragged into his television monitor. Doesn't get more explicit than that, but the clues were there the whole time. In a blink and you'll miss it moment right at the start of ad number 28, we can see a name for the blonde breeder, Chiba Kure, which translates to earthbound spirit. It's a human. In another, ad we see Kana, Pink, walk into a convenience store. Only for the demon inside to proclaim, I will eat you alive because a human soul is a supreme feast. The breeders in the Evertail simulation are not simulations. They are real people trapped inside of the game. And once you look at the ads this way, suddenly everything about them starts to fit together. You know those glitches that we keep seeing? Those aren't just cheap, creepy ways to transition between scenes. They're intentionally here for the lore. We're trapped in a glitching simulation. In later ads,

the glitches actually become much more obvious, with objects physically missing from the reality of that world, instead replaced by distorted pixels. The scenes are literally missing things that we've seen appear in hundreds of other ads. Their simulated reality appears to be falling apart. So where does the story end? How do they escape? Do they escape? Looking across the ads, there seem to be two options. The first is to give up and be absorbed into the game's code and become part of the simulation. In ad number 322, we see the lines, Living is Hard, You can be happy if you die, flash up within the glitchy screen. Later, in number 363, we meet this bizarre blob creature that's known as the sage of a thousand eyes.

It tells Orange, the void will eventually consume the world. Do you just sit and wait for it to disappear? Or become a part of me and gain eternal life? Now, this sage appears to be related to yet another character that we meet in ad number 140, Sato. In this ad, the gray breeder, Kazuto, is hit by a car. The world turns black and he finds himself floating over his own dead body. Everything glitches and then a green ghost-like creature begins to approach him, creeping closer and closer. Translating the Japanese, it roughly says,

Welcome to the singularity. There's no time or space here. I'm the one who controls the universe from behind. That's right, call me Sato. The singularity is a term for the hypothetical point in time where technological growth becomes radically faster and uncontrollable. It's normally used in reference to artificial intelligence gaining sentience, and I believe that's what we're seeing here. Sato and the Sage of a Thousand Eyes represent, one means of escape for our characters to be absorbed by this ever-growing AI blob.

But there does appear to be a second route here. In one very specific ad, we see Blue trapped in a red hellscape. Translating his text, his dialogue reads as follows. I can't go back. My memory is returning to me. It seems the time has come to face the consequences of our actions. The idea of memories returning does happen in a few other places, and when it does, it always tends to be accompanied by the failure of a program called

denial.exe. The best example of this comes in Add 40, where a breeder begins to remember and suddenly denial EXE crashes, restarts only to see the message, denial has defeated you again. Keep pretending you're in control. It's this denial program that's keeping them trapped in the simulation. It's only once they remember their past misdeeds and accept them that they'll be able to break the simulations hold and escape. But what did they do? What's the thing that they're in such denial about?

Well, it all goes back to that imprisoned monster snake woman. We know that the breeders were conducting experiments. on monsters. In fact, we know that they were mixing human DNA with monster DNA to get these terrifying results. I think these experiments went too far and had unintended consequences. In ad number 336, we see Orange descending down a long elevator into an underground lab. There, he's attacked by a mysterious, fleshy creature. It happens so quickly that you can't quite make out exactly what it is, but if we watch ad number 30, suddenly everything clicks. Here, we're back in the same lab, and our breeder gets attacked by a fleshy zombie.

Something about the genetic experiments with monsters went wrong to create these horrific humanoid creatures. And that, in turn, gives Wade one final set of trailers that I've yet to talk about. Ones that look a whole lot different from everything we've covered so far, ones that look like this. These ads are unlike anything we've seen before. The child crying has his mouth filled with words for help. People no longer look like people, but rather monsters. This, I believe, is the real world, the world that was created by our quote-unquote heroic breeders. is what Blue was talking about in that other ad,

the actions that they have to face the consequences for. They were literally creating and breeding monsters, but then they played God a bit too much. They pushed things a bit too far, and suddenly they wound up breaking the fabric of humanity. The world, the real world, is now filled with twisted, horrific monsters. So there you really have it. The story for a game that doesn't exist.

The hidden lore within the messed up world of Evertail's ads. A world where breeders played God a bit too much. much, started to experiment too broadly with monster DNA and created twisted humanoid zombies out for blood. A world where there are successful creations like the snake girl are imprisoned in a basement somewhere, hidden from the rest of society, but worshipped by many. A world where breeders are pulled into a simulation made to punish them repeatedly until they're finally able to stop their denial and accept the consequences of their actions. I tell you what. When I first started researching for this episode, I didn't know what to expect. And I certainly didn't expect it to be anything

coherence, but it turns out that this is the perfect kind of story for a channel like ours. If only someone had bothered to make, you know, an actual game like this, rather than leaving it confined in the realm of ads. So, dear Zigaza Games, stop making deceiving ads to sell a boring cookie cutter gotcha game. And instead, focus on making the game in lore that you've been promoting. It's good. It's messy, and clearly you threw a lot out there to see what would stick.

But you get what us theorists are after. It's dark, it's scary. It feels like a puzzle that we can solve. And it has this great moral message about the hubris of At the end of the day, you would have a creative product that gets people excited, that gets them to talk, something that spawns a franchise that you can be proud of. Ah, who am I kidding? Where would the micro-transactions go? But hey, that's just a theory.

A game theory. Thanks for watching.