Game Theory - You Give Them Life (Hello Puppets Scary VR Game)

Episode Date: April 30, 2023

As a fan of scary indie games, I like to investigate new ones that pop up. So today we are not talking even more FNAF, but making the switch from animatronics to puppets with the game Hello Puppets! This VR game has a lot hiding beneath the surface. Today, I want to discuss the bit twist involving your best puppet friend in the game, Scout. You see, Scout may just be the most dangerous thing for the player in the game. How? Well Theorists, sit back and enjoy the puppet show.

Well, hello, old Bean. I have good news for you. Today you get your very own handyman puppet. Choose whichever you like. Hmm, such a hard choice. How about... no. What? I am NOT going to choose a puppet. But don't you like puppets? They're fun and full of joy. You are a creepy puppet. Your puppeteer over there is wearing a black hood over his head. Clearly you've taken a his body and are just trying to trick me to fall for the same thing. Hate to break it to you, but it ain't my first time at this rodeo. But some say the bond between a puppet and his puppeteer is magical.

Oh, come on, man! You're even emphasizing the words that are tipping me off to your plan. You see what you're doing here? The bond is magical. Wow! Really can't imagine what's happening here. Listen, uh, Mortimer? That's what you said your name was? Listen, Morty, if you want to really trick someone, just talk like a normal person and puppet supernatural creature, your little self-congratulatory in-jokes that you think are so clever. We all get it, man. We all know what you're doing. So I'll put you down as a no. Also, hide Gimpy back there. He ain't doing you any favors. Welcome to Game Theory. The show that's now legally obligated to cover any indie horror title about friendly children's entertainment cursed with eternal life. Today we're looking at the relatively unknown VR game. Hello Puppets. As it becomes the next in a long line to try to steal FNESN. Like many a title I look into, this game too is steeped with ambiguity and hints at a deeper story behind what we see at the surface.

So let me give you the spoiler warning up front. We're trying to solve the ambiguous ending to this game, which means that we'll be exploring all of the game secrets right up through the last moments. So let's start at the beginning for anyone who hasn't played the game. Hello Puppets puts the player in the shoes of an unnamed college reporter investigating an old warehouse where homeless people have been reported to go missing. The warehouse was once a television workshop for the kids program Mortimer's Handi Man, a puppet show ripping off the Muppets. In fact, posters on the wall describe it as being better than the Muppets, so shots fired there. Of course, the Muppets have been around for decades and didn't ever start kidnapping and possessing humans, or at least they did a better job of covering it up. Either way, it's none of my business.

Mortimer's Handeman started in 1985, since apparently all horrific murderous children's content originated from the mid-1980s, and it had an abrupt ending when a mysterious fire burned down the studio, killing seven and badly injuring many more. What's even more mysterious than the fire, though, is that someone decided to clip the article about the fire out of the newspaper, walk into the burned building, and hang it at the end of a random hallway, for reasons.

At the end of that hall, the former star of this old show, Mortimer greets you from the arm of an unknown and a relatively bored-looking host. Morty asks you to select a puppet and you choose one named scout. Once the selection is made, Mortimer begins a ritual meant to bind you and scout. A ritual that will turn you into scouts, Um, turn you into scouts.

I know that there's a word for this. It's an inanimate object that you control with your own body in order to make it seem like a living creature. Uh, p... Anyway, the ritual doesn't actually work. Instead of becoming a mindless husk for your puppet, you retain all of your basic functions, much to the frustration of your new arm companion. No, no... A zombie zonked!

I'm supposed to control you completely! It's at this point that I have to reveal the secrets of the story. I don't have time to explain everything to you, but basically you're in a decommission soundstage filled with murder as sentient puppets and now they want to drain your life force in order to sustain themselves so they can bring their canceled show back to life and take over the world. But hey, that's just an in-game explanation of what's really going on. So with all that being said, what am I covering today? Well, stay tuned. We're about to get to that. As the story continues, we learn that Scout has failed her exam to become a full free-roaming puppet twice in the past. You've had two films will be your last. After realizing that she's failed yet again, a disillusioned scout convinces you to to help her to escape. Conveniently, even though your ritual technically failed and you're not a zombie puppeteer,

you eventually learn that you and Scout are able to swap brains, where you can enter her consciousness and take over her puppet body, and she can do the same to you. After a long series of fighting henchmen, solving puzzles through your combined human puppet brain abilities, you finally make a dramatic dash for the exit. But in the process of opening the final door, Scouts arm gets caught in some gears, and it gets torn off. Over the next minute, Scout professes her friendship for you, before suddenly, and inexplicably dying, leaving you to presumably escape onward into freedom. It's kind of sweet, but also logically, a really weird moment. She lost her arm, sure, but she's still a puppet. It's not like she's bleeding out or beyond repair or anything.

Everything around you in the game is some kind of torn apart and sewn back together version of an animal or a puppet, so immediately there's something here that doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but we'll come back to that. Right after she dies, you can remove scout from your hand. The whole world gets washed out with a bright white light and you find yourself sitting in a theater with a bunch of stuffed bears watching the credits. And from there, that's pretty much it. If you let the game keep running, you just start back where you originally began in the first hallway of the game as though nothing ever happened. So what happened? Did your character just escape? Did the puppets die? Most importantly of all, though, did we end up starting that talk show? Shake if you want the talk show.

A talk show. I like that. We'll call it like, talk to the hand. Things are suspect right from the beginning of the game. During the ritual sequence, your character seems to teleport to avoid with a rickety bridge. You're supposed to be absorbed at this point by Mortimer, but instead a door opens up with Scout's face peering back at you. With little choice, you run towards the open door and find yourself back in the real world holding Scout. After this, you're the only host who has any sort of agency ever in this process.

Over the course of the hundred or so times that were led to believe the puppets have performed this ritual in the past, It seems to have worked totally fine with everyone else that they've chosen as a victim, so why did it not work for you? Was it something you did? Why are you spared the mind meld that everyone else underwent? We see during the game's Tea Party scene that Anthony Pearson, a paranormal investigator whose recordings are littered around the studio, has been fully integrated as a host for the puppets. In fact, he's Mortimer's puppeteer from the very beginning of the game. He's a lifelong paranormal investigator with an Illuminati tattoo.

He would certainly have been more prepared for an incoming puppet curse than, you know, you, college journalist, but somehow the ritual worked perfectly on him. That idea makes me scratch my little theorist head and ask, what if it wasn't you? What if this whole thing wasn't an accident? What if the entire time you were meant to not be fully under scouts controlled? Mortimer was performing the same ritual we know that he's performed many, many times in the past. If the meat locker scene in this game is any indication,

it may have been dozens to hundreds of times before this one moment. So this isn't the kind of glitch caused by an inexperienced. or unfamiliarity, so what if instead we conclude that Scout couldn't take control of us because that wasn't her goal in the first place? What if we entertain the idea that you're working with Scout, your fight through the warehouse, and even your escape was all intentional? Let's look at the evidence. Both Mortimer, the leader of the handyman, and Scout, your own personal puppet, seem to want you to escape from the get-go. Scout is obvious, right? She literally just tells you that if you can't escape, you both die. Mortimer, though, is a little more subtle in his... pushing, but not entirely.

And why is Mortimer helping us? That makes no sense. Aside from leaving bits of his security badge around for you to find, Mortimer explicitly gives you an opportunity to escape when you first meet him. Not even a tough opportunity either. He just wants you to pour tea with milk and sugar for each of the puppets. If you're British, you'd argue that you should have put the milk in first, but other than that, Mortimer isn't exactly quibbling over the details. When you succeed, Mortimer starts talking about letting you go. and Scout, I propose a competition, a kind of compromise where possibly neither one of you dies. And it's only Riley's protests that make it seem like you need to escape. As she starts yelling about how you and Scout are her property, Mortimer slams his puppet hand on the table in order to flip out the control panel for the room.

For as ominous as Mortimer is, he also never poses any direct sort of threat to you. Other puppets send henchmen to stop the player, or set up puzzles that are impossible to pass, but more He just keeps things moving along. So what is the goal here? Why help you out? Well, again, Scout has already explicitly told us this. Basically, you're in a decommission soundstage filled with murderous sentient puppets from a canceled children's TV show who were brought to life by an evil voodoo spell, and now they want to drain your life force in order to sustain themselves so they can bring their canceled show back to life and take over the world.

The big points in this plan are, one, the puppets aren't just using you as a free ride, they're also draining your life force, and two, the bigger plan is to restart their TV show and take over the world. Now, I'll admit they may have underpants gnomed this situation a little bit. I don't get it. You see? Phase 1, collect underpants. Phase 2? Phase 3, profit.

But it still paints a picture of what they hope to achieve. There are some hints throughout the game that they've already started recording whatever this new show is. But there's a bigger issue with making content than just the making of it. They need to broadcast it. At which point, presumably it just takes over the world! I guess no one told them that cable isn't a thing anymore and that they're going to have to contend with 8,000 different streaming services. But whatever, welcome to modern times. The point is that the logistics of getting a TV show on the airwaves,

even if those airwaves are just YouTube internet waves, are a tough ask for a puppet who we established in the game as not being able to read. That's right, one of these puppets is even supposed to be a brilliant scientist, but they're totally illiterate, as you find out when you have to read everything for them in the game. So immediately we know that they need a real intact human being, and not a zombie, to get to the final stages of their master plan. They're gonna need people, or at the very least a little basic reading comprehension, to actually air their show.

Which means that they're not gonna just want passive human hosts. They want that brain swapping ability that we see between you and scout. Your connection between puppet and human isn't an accident there. It's a necessity for them to get what they want. From there, with that realization under our belt that this whole thing is intentional, we can finally speculate about a much bigger theory in this game. What happens in that ambiguous ending? Let's revisit what we see. Your character removes Scout from their hand, everything goes white,

but you're not back to your normal life at that point. The credits roll in a bizarre theater attended by Teddy Bears, not a police station where you'd presumably be reporting the meat locker full of dead people down at the knockoff Muppet Studio. In fact, you seem to be inside the building still. At least the design and architecture look the same, but why? Why would we still be in the building? More bizarrely, after the credits roll, the only thing that happens is that the game is that the game starts over, only this time you can't select the same puppet again. That means that we've continued in the continuity of the last play-through.

And either you're playing again as the same person, an option that doesn't really make a whole lot of sense, or you're now the next victim who's stumbled into the warehouse and the whole process is repeating itself. Well, I think that's the intention. What is it trying to tell us? Where did our original character go? Why would we still be in the theater rather than running down the street, screaming about the bloody bloody puppet murder that we just avoided. Well, it's because we're not in our character's body anymore. We have no reason to scream bloody murder. We are now Scout. Remember how that brain swap ability works? When we're in Scout's brain, we retain our own consciousness. We just see what she sees and take on her abilities and vice versa. A brain swap in the other direction would mean that she is now in our brain. Scout would retain her own consciousness, but just operate our body directly. She could see what we see and take on our abilities. Like the most important ability of all,

just being a person and blending into human society, which, you know, might be a little bit helpful if you happen to be a sentient puppet who's trying to help your evil puppet friends launch a TV show in their attempts to take over the world. Scout dying by losing an arm doesn't make a whole lot of sense either. I was willing to go with it because the writing of that scene was touching, but under the cold light of logic, it's much harder to tell what actually is happening here.

Scout stops talking and is no longer sewn on to but almost immediately following that our whole view fades to white. Under normal video game conventions, this fade to white would be us passing out, dying? If it's just us escaping, then why not have us actually walk through a door? Why not show us the outside world? Well, it's because we're not escaping. The more logical answer here is that this white out moment is the final brain swap. Scout leaves her body.

Sure, which is why it's lifeless and the stitches come out. But she didn't just die. She brain swapped in the final brain swap. into our body. Instead of taking us on as a passive host but still operating as a puppet, now she can operate as a fully fleshed person. The puppets have managed to remove the middleman in their quest for world domination by directly possessing humans rather than just using their life force and getting someone's hand shoved where the sun don't shine. When the game starts up again after the credits roll, the process repeats. With a puppet failing to take over your body,

then coercing you into a false sense of security and camaraderie, before making the ultimate brain hop and adding you to the crew of the world's deadliest kids TV show. At least as far as we know, those Muppets are looking mighty shifty over there. But hey, that's just a theory. A game theory. Thanks for watching.