Game Theory - They're COMING For You! (Mr.TomaoS and Mrs. LemonS)

Episode Date: December 6, 2023

Join Game Theory Host MatPat as he explains the secrets hiding in these seemingly innocent food games... *Credits:* Writers: Matthew Patrick and Tom Robinson Editors: Dan "Cybert" Seibert, Alex "Sedge" Sedgwick, AbsolutePixel, Brandon_n_motion, Pedro Freitas, KL Allen and Shannon (Bomb0i) Sound Designer: Yosi Berman

Thank you for agreeing to help me. Give me games because I need to theorize. I would like some five nights at Freddy's. I did not ask for this. I would like a Poppy Playtime. I did not ask for this. I would like a Minecraft. You are useless, but I will give you one final chance. You must feed me. Me feed me Oh internet welcome to game theory the show that lives on brain food and brain food Recently I've been working my way through a game that on the surface seems incredibly simple a giant floating tomato asks you to feed him food and that's exactly what you do

I want strawberry I want a donut Good solid way to finish Okay, he did save diverts I am full for now Visit me when I will be hungry again. See you later. Welcome to my game. The end.

Yeah! Nailed it. Simple. Like I said. Sure, but by bit, things get more complicated as the lights go out and food items get hidden in bags, but overall, there didn't seem to be much there. Oh, how wrong I was. Oh my God! Little did I suspect that by playing this game, I was starting down an impossible path. One made up of two games that conspire against you.

Two games with multiple endings and nearly infinite routes between them to explore. Each one full of unforgiving challenges required to unlock a treasure trove of secrets. And waiting at the end, a secret program. Downloaded onto your computer with every install of the game and a single warning. You've got one shot, one chance. Attempt to open this thing early, and it's gonna be locked forever. It was a journey that would drive me to my breaking point. I'm gonna break this game of

over my knee and I will squeeze out all of her juices to make the lemonade and then I'll shove it down Mr. Tomato's throat and it'll just shove it down his throat and he'll have to suck it down even when he doesn't want the lemonade he might want chocolate sauce but no he's not getting chocolate sauce he's getting miss lemons lemonade today starts my villain arc welcome to my game buddy oh no I am not your buddy sir so suck down that cream theorists and hide your chocolate soup we got to deal with some rotten fruit the first time you pick up Mr. Tomatoes, you will lose. And when that happens, suddenly get this. You're just used it, it's okay. I'll give you a last chance. So you feed him his balanced breakfast of brains, eyeballs, and severed hands until he rewards you with death. And a hidden message in wingdings. You can do it.

Okay. Oh, hey go. Hey. So I'm assuming this is the like you lose image. I'm inside. Inside what? Exactly the game? The computer?

This is the first indication that this game isn't all that it seems. There is a lore here. But to unlock it, we just need to get good. So we reopen the game and nothing. You're met with a wall of flashing wingdings. Oh, we got some wingdings. Oh, hello. I mean, I'd love to translate that right now, but I can't.

Well, that's exactly what I did, which gives us this message. I'm already inside your system. Do not worry about her safety. Everything will be fine. I have everything under control. Okay, so this sapient tomatoes in my computer. He's apparently going all do-doke. dokey up in here. But then who's this her? He's literally the only character in this game and why does he need to be fed body parts and most importantly of all? What's chocolate soup? I want some chocolate soup.

Fun fact, it's an old European dish from the 17th century that's often served in cafes. Chocolate soup aside though, clearly there is more here that we need to answer. So I dove back into the game and Nothing. The game wouldn't open and when I went to download the game again I saw this. I saw this. Only one completion allowed. It was then that I should have taken the hint that only pain awaited me down this path, but no! I just had to get to the bottom of this mystery, so I had to reset the game and start over from scratch. All my points, all my items, all my secrets, gone. But I didn't let it deter me.

I was going to solve this game. But at what cost? At what cost? My next play-through, I managed to buy a knife and stab our gnaishing little nightshade, and the results were, underwhelming, to say the least. Oh, I didn't think. that everything would turn out that way. You are either much smarter than I thought,

or you are just a monster like me. Congratulations, you finished the game. However, trying to start the game again, I was in for yet another surprise. Oh, oh, oh, he's got! Clearly, time for another restart. Beating the game normally gives you a boss battle against Mr. Tomato where you feed him poison

until he glitches away. Nothing too exciting. But if you manage to beat the game without making a mistake, that's when things really start to get interesting. Mr. Tomato doesn't transform into some demonic being devouring severed limbs instead he stays calm he's even a little bit helpful in fact he offers up some quote weird text I found in the code just a don't go back into the game after he says goodbye did you forget what I told you don't come back when you open his new file you get a long series of numbers now I'll admit I tried a lot of different ciphers to decode this message but nothing seemed to be working until I realized that there was one number that was repeated over and over again within the sequence the number 20 these aren't part of the code these are spaces, spaces separating out groups and numbers that can then be deciphered into actual words.

It's simple and it's genius. So, I deleted every 20, replaced it with a space, and then decoded the rest to get this letter, which starts to pull the mystery of these games into focus. Hello, I hope someone finds this message. I will change each letter of this message with a number so he cannot read it. So if anyone is really reading this, I want you to know that everything is not what it seems. Never trust him. He is much trickier and much smarter than you think.

If you do everything he wants, he can get incredible power and he knows about it. The more particles of code he absorbs into himself, the more powerful he gets. With that power, he can do anything inside the game. You've already begun to notice the changes in his behavior. Try to access the console and erase all progress. Writing where the console is located will be very dangerous. Because with his power, I am afraid he will be able to translate even this text. Try to find the console before he finds it.

That is all. Good luck. The password is... And then there's a randomly generated password. Immediately we can start to figure out what's going on here. We're not feeding him actual body parts, but instead we're feeding him parts of the game's code. By feeding him the game code, we're making him more powerful, which is why it's only after we've lost that he can boot us out of the game permanently. But still, don't really have a good reason why he wants this.

Is he an AI gone rogue? Is he just a demon trapped inside of a video game? It's not clear. Luckily, or unluckily. That wasn't the only place that we could search for clues. Enter Ms. Lemons. Hello there, and welcome to my class. This second game also takes the simple approach,

an educational game with basic puzzles like geometry and math. But unlike Mr. Tomatoes, she's not kicking you out of the game when you lose. If you build up her irritation level to 10, she'll cut off your hand and gouge out your eye. No problem, you just restart the game again. Our eye is gouged out. But we reset it. That's right. Despite a full reset, the game still remembers what you lost. So, what are you supposed to do?

What happens if I'm going to Mr. Tomato at this point, without an eye? Just out of curiosity. Oh, that would be wild. It's not like things can get worse for me at this point, you know? And I was shocked by what I discovered. Ah! ... decided to help me. I'm very hungry.

These games aren't just connected by the lore. They are literally connected by their programming. They share the same system. My computer system and can speak to each other. And it seems like losing to Mr. Tomatoes is what helps you to win in Ms. Lemmons. Oh, oh, buddy, oh buddy, oh buddy. What? No!

So what do we do with it, though? We can't do anything with it. Get your eye back. Do I get a brain now, too? Nope. No, you do not, Matt, Pat. No brain for you. But if body parts can transfer across games, maybe items can too, including that handy-dandy, trusty-rusty knife.

How about 20 plus 27 equals knife to the face? You tried But you can't kill me with some random piece of metal that you found And you disgust me I will make sure that you won't hurt anyone else Get lost As you can see it didn't work out quite as well as before And not only does this cause her to lock you out of the game

But she also has enough control over the system To lock you out of Mr. Tomatoes as well Wow Wow, she'd be mad So that relationship is going nowhere That ship has sailed. Yeah, sorry. What's this one going to do?

Oh no, boot up error, access block, private message. I won't let you in here either. So she's got control. It seems like she's stronger than tomato. And well, yeah, Lemon seems to be in control. Thanks to yet another knife ending, we learned that there's another being in control of even her. You see, by activating the game's hard mode and then stabbing her,

Lemons is suddenly replaced by a different entity. This is incredible. I'm so proud of your. But all your efforts were in vain, because she definitely won't let me die like that. And that's a bummer. Well, she's right. I just can't let this happen. But life of this person is actually very important to me.

In this world, there are so many timelines, so many possibilities. A new personality takes over and she switches realities so we appear in the one where she wasn't stabbed. Got to admit better use of the multiverse than the MCU. So not only are we dealing with the multiverse, notice what Lemon said before she was replaced. She definitely won't let me die, and that's a bummer. The entity in control is some sort of a female, and both Lemon and Tomatoes seem to be held here against their wills. We see the sentiment mirrored in the opening splash screens of both games,

where the different colored letters spell out and suffering. Even the game's Itchio page has the words, Why am I in agony partially crossed out? Why are these digital creatures in so much pain? All we've known up to this point is that Mr. Tomatoes is just eaten, But take a look again at what this controlling personality says. The life of this person is actually very important to me. She calls Ms. Lemons a person.

Ms. Lemons and Mr. Tomatoes aren't corrupted AI or demons, they're people. They are souls trapped inside of a video game, constantly in pain and longing for death. This battle between the humans inside of the fruit and the female entity that's controlling things from the background appears throughout multiple endings. If you manage to make to the end of Ms. Lemons, your game isn't done. In fact, the hardest challenge of all awaits. Ms. Lemons gets possessed by the other entity and launches into a boss battle that would make Sands blush. Same mechanics. Same banger music. If you manage to survive this entire six-minute battle, letting her rage meter on the side run to empty, you get yourself this.

My apologies, thanks for buying enough time. She likes to go over the line sometimes. So, this entity sometimes takes over and Lemons has to get her back under control. Interesting. And even more telling, if you defeat Mr. Tomato, you'll using the poison and then hop back into Ms. Lemons, you won't find the lemon that you're used to. You really killed him just because that's awesome. That's very awesome. Thanks to you, I was able to finally absorb her.

Her despair was so beautiful, so incredible, I'm finally free. By killing Tomato, we somehow allowed the person inside Ms. Lemons to absorb the other entity. Honestly, at this point, we just have more questions than answers. Except, there's one final place to look. You see, when you download these games, there's one other small program that gets dropped into the folder. Project Ouroboros. It's not concerning it all, right? Mystery programs coming along with the game that I just downloaded off of a small indie site.

Totally safe. Not a Trojan horse at all. Now, Ouroboros is usually depicted as a snake eating its own tail. It's the symbol of a cycle repeating, or getting lost in yourself. And given that these games are all about repeating the same gameplay loop to get different endings, yeah, I'd say it's a fairly appropriate symbol. Except here, there's a catch. When you open the program, the computer immediately tells you that this contains classified information

and that we have to be registered users in order to access it. It says that we have one shot to unlock this program. Otherwise, we're shut out of it forever. So, where's the code? Could it be in these two games? Yeah. To get inside of Project Orboros, you need one very specific ending. By beating Ms. Lemons with an irritation level of zero, you get the true ending of that game.

She changes your personal ID, granting access. to this mysterious computer program. And once you're in, nothing. At least not really. You're presented with a lot of broken links and blocked out tabs. Now, this is clearly meant to be a research archive

of some kind, but how then do we recover the data lost in those files? Well, each time you get an ending in either tomatoes or lemons, a new file named data recovery module gets put into the main folder. Data recovery, you say? Sounds exactly like what we need.

In fact, each of those data recovery modules is numbered. For instance, stabbing Mr. Tomatoes gets you ending number five. The failure ending with tomatoes is ending six and so on. And by getting each ending, we open up a new chunk of the website. And it's here, finally, where the complete story starts to come together. It turns out that the man responsible for all this was a scientist named Eugene. One day, he met Sebastian, a high-class waiter that regularly gets drunk at the local bar. While Eugene doesn't seem interested at first, Sebastian insists on calling Eugene his friend, or buddy, if you will. Welcome to my game, buddy. Now you can start to see where this thing might be headed.

Sebastian is also in love with a school teacher named Louise, who doesn't seem to be all that interested in him. Sadly, this is when Eugene decides to enter his villain arc, like so many indie horror game scientists before him. He grabs both Sebastian and Louise to become part of an experiment, turning his friends into Mr. Tomatoes and Ms. Lemons, respectively. From experiment logs you unlock on the site, we learned that in order to house these new forms,

Eugene created something called the vessel. Not nai, but rather a living entity that Sebastian, and Louise could essentially use as their home inside the computer. The vessel could transform to meet the needs of the consciousnesses inside of it, which is why it was a kitchen for the waiter Sebastian and a classroom for the teacher Louise. However, in each case, the vessel has different levels of control. With Mr. Tomatoes, it's only 30%. So he's able to retain all memories of his death and past life,

which is why he escaped into the World Wide Web and wants us to help him get stronger. Maybe it's to get revenge on the man who did this to him. With Ms. Lemons, the vessel has 70% control. The question is why. Why did Eugene do all this? Well, as most villains in these franchises tend to, he has himself a sympathetic backstory. Eugene wasn't alone in this world, he had a wife,

one who unfortunately got sick and died. Her name was Marine, and Eugene was desperately trying to make a cure for her that didn't work. This is why he created Project Ouroboros, the symbol of life, death, and rebirth. It was meant to save her. In the experiment logs, we find both Mr. Tomatoes and Ms. Lemons's entries under Experiment 1 and 2.

But even if you unlock everything across both games, there's still a mysterious third entry that remains locked. I suspect that this is Marines' entry. After learning everything that he could from the vessel, I suspect that Eugene may have mastered the experiment and tried to transfer Marines' dead consciousness into this new digital world, a world that he made to keep her alive forever.

Just do me a favor there, Eugene. Don't go build in robot bodies and then trying to plug her personality into that. No one will believe me when I tried to tell him that that's what you did. Honestly, though, I suspect the game's developers, arcs toward games, may come out with one final fruit-based, game with a new character who doesn't remember who she is and it'll be up to us to remind her of her identity.

But that's not gonna be the only thing we're gonna have to fight off. See, there's one final ending and it's locked behind a section called Decapsilization. To access it, you need two codes. One's achieved by beating Ms. Lemons on suffering mode, basically the equivalent of hard mode. Probably some I should have pieced together before my first play-through. I probably shouldn't have bought the thing that said suffering, huh? Did I just turn, like accidentally turn on hard mode? I did, didn't I? She doesn't actually know what the codes for other than then it's likely dangerous and was purposely hidden by the one who created it. The second half of the code's a little harder to get to because it's entirely random. When entering into the game, there's a chance that you see this, a broken form of Mr. Tomatoes.

The experiment entry for this version informs us that this is the original Mr. Tomatoes, the real Sebastian. All the other versions that we've seen of him are just parts of him that have broken away and evolved into their own versions, each believing themselves to be the original. This dying version of Mr. Tomatoes gives us the second part of the code in the hopes that it'll save him. So using this combined code, we begin the decapsilization process and were met by a pair of eyes inside a black void. This is Ouroboros, the name that Eugene gave to his creation. The one he claims isn't an AI, but rather has its own DNA. The one that he refers to as the vessel. This thing is sentient. It talks to us exactly as Eugene describes it, using text rather than speech. And it

informs us that while Ms. Lemons and Mr. Tomatoes used him as a vessel in order to live, it forced him into an endless coma. But now, the tables have turned. By releasing him, he's now in full control, forcing them into the endless coma, which I suspect is what we saw happen with Lilith, the gray, creepy lemon that we met in the absorbed ending. When it wants, it doesn't say.

However, from Eugene's logs, we can see that it was able to grow on its own, adapt, evolve. My gut is that by encapsulating it within the system, Eugene was able to control it, to use it for his experiments. However, now that it's free, it can continue to grow and evolve, becoming more powerful and more dangerous. As I've said, I suspect that there's a third game on the horizon.

One that'll seem like a simple game with a third fruity character, but as the game goes on, I think we'll see Oroboros come in and take control, trying to absorb and destroy this third entity, the one that is marine. I mean, it's because of her that Ouroboros exists in the first place, forced to become a slave, a simple host for these human entities that are trying to live forever. However, I think there's hope. Mr. Tomatoes has many forms, as we all know,

And his data entries tell us that he's not just eating any old code, but specifically he's eating code from the vessel, from Ouroboros himself. If and when this third game comes out, suspect we're going to have to jump between the games to get Mr. Tomatoes to eat more and more of Oroboros, eating it from the inside out. And Ms. Lemons, well, she only has the one body, her personalities have an aversion to dying, so I don't think she's going down too easily,

potentially changing realities in order to bring down Ouroboros once and for all. Maybe then, all of them will be able to pass on into the afterlife, no longer in agony. How do you like them apples? But hey, that's just a theory. A game theory. Thanks for watching.