Game Theory - This SECRET Clue Solves Amanda The Adventurer 2!

Episode Date: July 17, 2024

Join Game Theory Host Tom as he solves Amanda The Adventurer 2 from a single clue found in the demo! Credits: Writers: Tom Robinson and Eddie “NostalGamer” Robinson Editors: Dan "Cybert" Seibert, Koen Verhagen, Pedro Freitas, Jerika (NekoOnigiri) and Shannon (Bomb0i) Sound Designer: Yosi Berman

Look at this hand from Amanda the Adventurer 2's demo. Count the number of fingers. One, two, three, four, five. That might seem pretty unsurprising, but throughout the game, we are constantly shown that Amanda doesn't have five fingers. She has four. That single detail was enough to send me down a rabbit hole and revealed there was more lore in this small demo than meets the eye.

Hello, internet. Welcome to Game Theory, the show that'll point and click on everything to find the law. You should get your clicker fingers ready too, because the... The internet's favourite, albeit horrifying version of Dora the Explorer, is back to once again vacantly stare into my soul. Who would you go see? If you're unaware, this is Amanda the Adventurer, and she is the main character for a game that was initially made as part of a game jam that blew up a couple of years ago.

Since then, it was turned into a full game where we tried to figure out what happened to some local missing kids in our aunt's attic using VHS dates from an old kids TV show, Amanda the Adventurer. However, it becomes immediately clear that something is off with this It discusses a lot of strange subjects like rotting flesh, playing with knives, and if you don't answer how Amanda wants you to, she begins to freak out and turns into a monster that'll come and kill you. Kids TV certainly has changed since I was a kid. I'll just stick to Thomas the Tank Engine thanks. But as you progress, you have a chance to unlock secret tapes and by doing so, you begin to learn the truth about why this show is the way it is. Amanda was a real person, played by a girl named Rebecca. Her dad, Sam Colton, created Amanda.

the adventurer and sold it to a company called Hamlin Entertainment. They were the ones who made it such a hit, but they also are the ones who made things go awry. They wanted to create an interactive show and to do it, they tricked Rebecca into summoning a demon entity. I feel like there was an easier way to do this, but indie horror got it indie horror, I guess. Regardless, one of these demons did manifest, and now it inhabits her body. It even kept the cute pig tails. But Rebecca wasn't completely lost. No. Her mind was transferred into the show. We see evidence of neurosurgical experts in the show's credit, and whenever we bring up something from Rebecca's real life, Amanda gets mad, and suddenly the demon is knocking on our door trying to hunt us down.

And the hunt has begun again, because now we have a demo for the upcoming sequel where we are continuing our investigation at a local library. After picking up a couple of books with funny names. By puberty, pu-a, poo-po-burty? I don't know. I don't get the pun on that one. What word is Matt trying to say? Pooh birdie. Pooh birdie. Can you say puberty? You can find the code for the cabinet scrawled inside them and that gives you access to the first of two tapes this demo has to offer.

They operate as expected. Click on things and type in the answers. Get them wrong and Amanda gets mad and begins to manipulate the tapes. It once again feels very simple, but if we've learned anything from this franchise, it's that nothing is ever quite as it seems. There are secrets hiding throughout these tapes. Some of them are blinking your miss-it moments and others are hiding in plain sight. So, grab your library cards theorists because we've got to hit the books to figure out what's going on in Amanda the adventurer too.

When you boot up the game, we are met with our classic CRT with Amanda's logo on the screen. Though, if you wait long enough, you'll start to see those blinking your miss-it moments I mentioned. The screen will begin to glitch out and occasionally reveal some new messages. Words like, let me out plastered over the screen with a hand pressed up against the screen in the top right. According to the game's Steam page, this would appear to be Amanda, who is, quote, doing everything to find a way to free herself. Although, notice the amount of fingers. This hand has five fingers. Throughout the demo, we are being shown Amanda's hand over and over again to count coins.

Attention is being drawn to it, and it very distinctly only has four fingers, which is appropriately creepy for a demon child, but it means it doesn't match our hand on the TV. This cannot be Amanda speaking to us, at least not literally. Instead, it's most likely meant to be showing us the real Amanda, Rebecca, the human child whose mind was forced to live at her days inside the VHS tape. We've seen Rebecca occasionally tried to break through in the past. Amanda is typically bright and cheery, but when we ask her about her dad Sam, it leads to glitches and resets of the tape. The real Rebecca is coming to the surface. This is just another instance of that. She is trying to reach out to us directly for help.

This message is from her. And while her trying to escape isn't anything groundbreaking, Knowing she's the author of these messages is important because it's not the only message we get from this screen If you keep waiting something else will appear on the CRT a secret code and if you've been a fan of Amanda for a while You'll probably recognize it as the code used in the steam demo for the first Amanda the adventurer in this demo The Code appeared on the fridge behind Amanda and it translated to pause turn on the oven now So by using those same symbols we're able to decipher this new message and it reads as follows He tried to find me.

Actually, we only knew it said he tried to find me. We didn't have a symbol for the letter F. But I think we can all agree it makes sense given the context. Regardless, who is the he she's talking about? The demon? It was hard to say, but fortunately, there is another code that helps us narrow it down. On the Amanda 2 Steam page, before the demo was released, there were four drawings. These are clearly made by Rebecca, as they're all drawn from her perspective as Amanda.

The entity is a meaning. She's trapped inside the TV with bars over the screen. She even references us as a new friend watching her tapes. All things that Amanda slash Rebecca has experienced. These are her drawings, but that's not all. If you mess with the exposure, you can find those same symbols hidden in each one. Putting them together, gives you the phrase, it will find you. These messages initially seemed to be about the same thing.

He tried to find me. It'll find you too. The Steam page for Amanda 2 also hints that the demon is after us And throughout the demo, we can hear it crawling around the ceiling. So it would make sense that that's what she's referring to. But two things stood out to me. One, she said he tried to find me. We know the demon did find Amanda.

She is possessed after all. So that seems to not line up. But the second thing is her use of pronouns. In the first message, she uses he, while the second uses it. Which tells me that she's actually talking about two separate entities here. Why else would she change how to use? she refers to them. The it is almost certainly the demon entity. We've already established. It's chasing us in this new demo. And it's not really a guy, gal, or non-binary pal. It's a thing, a demon,

a monster, an it. But then, who is she talking about when she says he? Well, the only male character we are fully aware of so far is Sam, Rebecca's adopted father and the creator of Amanda the adventurer. It would make sense that if his daughter suddenly disappeared or he felt like his daughter was suddenly possessed by a demon, that he would go looking for the real Rebecca. It's just good fatherly behaviour, which is a nice change from our usual indie horror fathers. But Sam is also missing. And in our last theory, we concluded that Sam was actually a guinea pig for the mind transfer experiments that Hamlin Entertainment was doing, testing it on him before they tried it out on Rebecca. This was all because we got this VHS take showing

Rebecca on her own signing a document before being taken away to a room by members of Hamlin Entertainment. We presumed this meant Sam had already gone missing, but I'm not so sure that's the case anymore. We don't know for sure when Sam went missing. The news report doesn't give us a date. Instead, it just talks about future events being cancelled and to give Rebecca some privacy. That would make you think that Rebecca was still around prior to Sam's disappearance. But then we got this moment from the new demo. Amanda sells one of her stuffed toys, specifically a rooster. This franchise loves its symbolism, with lots of elements like the lonely kitten trapped in a cage from the first game representing Rebecca trapped in the TV by Hamlin Entertainment. During the

What is family taped from the first game, we also encounter a rooster, and she asks us what it's called. If instead of rooster, we type in Sam, Amanda begins to freak out. What did you say? The rooster is a representation of Sam, but her giving him up like this for money feels like a reflection of that moment we saw with Rebecca signing the papers. Maybe she was given promises of money or travel, things that Sam wasn't able to give her, and so she was encouraged to cut him out of the picture. Or maybe it was to be emancipated so she could make her own decisions. or so Hamlin could do whatever they wanted because Sam couldn't stop them. Either way, she's removing Sam for some kind of reward

and is then led to a guarded room and likely experimented on, turning her into the monster we know today. And if that happened, Sam would be trying to find her, sticking his nose where Hamlin doesn't want it, so they would just decide to dispose of him. But there is one part of our original Sam theory that this game seems to be bringing up. One that has been hotly debated since the original release of the game. Is Sam actually Woolly?

There are a lot of interpretations out there right now, and it's fair, we actually don't have a lot to work with. But the main reason I ask this now is because of this moment in the demo, where Amanda asks us who we'd like to go see. If you can visit anyone in the world, who would you go see? If you go ahead and write Sam, she'll respond like she did in the family tape from the first game. Wait, that's... However, if you instead say, Wully, you get a very different response. Yeah, if you could find him. Those are two completely opposite responses.

Surely that means they can't be the same character. And that's true. If Amanda doesn't know they're the same character. And I say that because outside of this moment, the parallels between Sam and Wully are only getting stronger. On the penultimate tape from the first game, we saw Amanda trying to do surgery on Wully, killing him in the process on the operating table,

showing that whoever Wally is, he was operated on and turned into another case. character just like Rebecca was and just like we suspect Sam to be. In this new demo, Willie is noticeably absent. He's even missing from the logo. And when we ask Amanda about him, she just teases us about whether we can find him. Woolly is missing. And we aren't supposed to be able to locate him, which is awfully similar to what we know about Sam. He went missing at the hands of Hamlin and no one has been able to find him yet. During the second tape in Amanda 2, which is basically just a teaser for the full game, we get this moment. There's a legend that there

There is a special toy hidden deep in these woods. Last time we went to the woods was in the very first demo for the game and if you remember, in that demo we were given a Google Map view of a circle marked in those woods. We were then given a typing prompt and the correct answer was Woolley. Woolly is what was buried in the woods. Only in that original demo, the forest he's buried in was a real forest, not an animated show forest and there's only one other place we've seen a real forest show up in this series. During the news report about Sam's disappearance, we see police officers interviewing people next to the woods. Sam went missing and is likely buried deep in those woods,

just like woolly. This is why we get this moment in the final tape from the latest demo. She's looking at a dead woolly buried in a hole in the woods. But I also suspect based on the glitches, it's a moment where we can tell her what she's really seeing. And if we type in Sam, she'll start to make the connection. Up until now, she's not been aware of who Woolley really is. He's just a buzzkill that doesn't let her do all the twisted things she wants to do. But whenever we bring up Sam, the mask begins to fall and the real Rebecca begins to shine through, trying to remember who she really is.

When she comes across Woollie in that hole, something is going to click, connecting the real life burial site of her dad to the burial site of Woollie. And that is going to once again bring the real Rebecca to the surface. And the more we can make that happen, the better chance we are going to. going to have of freeing her. However, while we're trying to help Amanda, it appears like we're going to be facing some opposition going forward. No, I don't mean the demonic Amanda that's in the ceiling. I'm talking about something way worse, an opossum. No, this isn't a joke. In the main demo tape while Amanda is trying to get enough coins to visit her three places, she is attacked by an

opossum who steals her coins away. This is clearly meant to be referencing Swiper from Dora the Explorer, a fox that would try to swipe whatever important item they had on them. Sadly, we don't get to sit here and yell at our screen, Swiper, no swiping! Instead, we just have to click on the opossum as he runs away, which makes sense, but, you know, I'd have been up for a new game mechanic, I'm just saying. This might just seem like a cute little reference at first,

but they show up again in the second tape to attack Amanda in the bathroom. And Amanda says something interesting. That line, who even are you, set off my theory alarms. It makes sense for her to wonder how a pest got into her house, but wondering who they are? The only reason she'd say that is to help. clue us in that they're supposed to be someone important. Plus, the types of animal characters we see in this game do seem to matter. Willie being a sheep shows that he's just falling in line,

doing what he's told by Amanda and Hamlin. So, I started looking into opossums to see if there was anything I could learn that might help us figure out who this is. The first thing I remembered from my biology classes was the opossums diet, and I promise I'm going somewhere with this. While they are omnivores, meaning they basically eat anything, they're known as opportunistic omnivores. Rather than hunting things, they will take whatever they happen to come across. And one thing that is known to include is Carrian, otherwise known as rotting flesh. Something we are very familiar with in this series. Amanda's physical body is rotting away somewhere. And now, suddenly there's a creature known for consuming rotten flesh clawing at Amanda. That can't be a coincidence. And it likely means whoever or whatever

the opossum is, it's more likely connected to Amanda's physical body than it is her new TV persona. However, they are also known for eating non-rotting creatures too. Most notably, despite a lot of bad press, they are considered very useful for humans, as they also eat other pests like rodents. And when I think of rodents, I immediately think back to what we learned in our last theory. The name Hamlin comes from the story of the Pied Piper, where the Piper lures all the rats out of Hamlin town. When the town won't pay, he then leads all the children out of the town as well. Last time we saw that Hamlin was drawing all the children away from their homes.

They were the rats, and we believe they ended up in the show like Rebecca did, just as background objects with ice. Hamlin was consuming them for their own personal game, just like an opossum consumes rats. The opossum is Hamlin, either a person from Hamlin or just something put in place by Hamlin to keep Amanda on track. In the initial tape, Amanda wants us to go to the Isle of Dead Dolls. The Isle of Dead Dolls is an island located near Mexico City, and the legend goes that a man came across a dead girl in the canal. The next day, a doll floated down that same canal, so he fished it out and hung it up in the trees to ward off evil spirits. That's why Amanda asks us, Do you think that really works?

She's trying to ward off evil spirits, the demon that is controlling her. But Hamlin doesn't want her to fend off the demon that they've tried so hard to summon, nor do they want Amanda escaping her TV prison. So, the opossum shows up and steals the coins from her hand to stop her progressing. But the connection goes even deeper when you start to look at the spiritual meaning behind the opossum. I've mentioned how the opossum is this game's version of Dora's Swiper, and we did a whole theory over on our sister channel about how Swiper is actually an evil fox spirit living inside a computer game. And given we're dealing with demons inside of a video game,

it felt kind of important to check out those spiritual elements too. Unlike the fox, the opossum is far less common in folktales. I could only find a handful from North and South America, and they also seem to paint the opossum as a trickster, much like their foxy counterparts. However, they are sometimes shown to be different, mainly that they are foolish and vain. There's one Native American legend called Why O'Possum's Tale is Bear. And in it, we learn the opossum is jealous of the raccoon's striped tail and wanted one of its own.

It asked the raccoon how it got them and was told to wrap its tail in bark where it wanted the rings and then to light it on fire. Yeah, I think you can probably see where this is going. It did just that and in doing so, it set its whole tail on fire. And the burns were so bad that the fur never grew back, leaving its bare tail. To me, this ref. reflects exactly what we've seen from Hamlin Entertainment. They were messing with forces they didn't understand. Demonology. All in the attempt to make the perfect viral kids show, but their hubris caused their downfall. Much like the opossum, their plan backfired. They summoned a demon,

but they couldn't control it. Now it's out in the world. And the child they put into the TV is now rebelling too, talking about horrible subjects and ruining the reputation of the show. Everything went up in smoke. It might even be more literal than that too. The opossum might be more actually be one of the members of Hamlin we've seen, like The Businessman or One of the Doctors, trapped inside the show thanks to their own hubris. Now, it's going to be out to us to fend off the Hamlin Opossum from Amanda and help her to realize the truth in order to help her escape this prison. And that, my friends, is what I predict the story of Amanda the adventurer too is going to be. The only question I have left is, who was the raccoon? In the folk tale, it was a raccoon that

led the opossum to burning its own tail. Did Hamlin think it was just too big to fail? Or was there someone else pulling the strings. Another person or show they were trying to learn from who tricked them into summoning these demons, only for Hamlin to fall victim to their schemes. I guess we're just going to have to wait and see you when the full game releases later this year. In the meantime theorists, remember, it's all just a theory. A game theory! Thanks for watching.