Game Theory - You Were Meant To Lose (FNAF VR Help Wanted)

Episode Date: May 7, 2023

FNAF is back with its first official VR game "Five Nights at Freddy's VR: Help Wanted". You know what that means Theorists - the story is not over yet! Well, mostly. I think this is the start of a whole new chapter of FNAF lore. The old story had its ending, William Afton trapped in limbo forever. The new story has a new villain, YOU... sort of. What do I mean? Get ready Theorists, FNAF is just getting started!

It's back. The show that clearly doesn't understand the meaning of the word final. It's back. Call it whatever you like. Fnaf 7, Fnaf, VR, Help Wanted, Matt Pat Insanity Simulator. But after a year of detoxing, Five Nights at Freddy's is back, with a new official game in the series, and it, more so than any other installment, feels like an inflection point.

A game that is simultaneously looking back to pay tribute to where these games began, as well as a game that's looking forward to lay the groundwork, work for where this franchise is headed. This isn't just some quick VR cash grab for the series. This is a pivotal game in the canon that closes the book on the old lore and also launches us into FNAF the next generation. It seems to answer some old mysteries from the previous games all while opening up the themes and tone for what's to come. And there is a lot to unpack here. This is without question the mediest game in the FNAF library, which is impressive because it's still a VR title. So let's not waste any time and

get started with the basics. Now in case you don't have a VR headset, I've actually played through the entire game on GT Live, so you can check out all the highlights. No! No! Oh! Are you kidding me? Do we do it? And low lights of my play-through over there. Hello, boys and girls! I'm here to give you your happiest day ever! Come with me, wayward souls! We've got vengeance to strike! But let me quickly take you through what you need to know for today's theory. In five nights at Freddy's Help Wanted, we're playing as a beta tester for a new Freddy game, as we're told in the opening cinematic, we know that Fasbear Entertainment has developed something of a bad reputation over the last few decades.

While it's true that some stories associated with our name were loosely based on actual events, the majority of them were total fabrications from the mind of a complete lunatic. Lawsuits pending. And yes, that picture is really Scott Coffin, canonically inserting himself into this game. That is a discussion for another episode, my friends, because it throws all sorts of weird monkey wrenches into the lore, but we'll get to that later. So according to the intro, Scott's games gave Fasbear Entertainment a bad name. And the point of this Freddie Fasbear virtual experience then is to poke fun of their past, clear their name, and ultimately rebuild the brand. Seems simple enough, right? Play through some

loving recreations of past games as well as some new mini games and that's it. Job complete. A new generation of Faz fans fall in love with all these new characters and add to Scott Coffin's growing pile of money. Don't forget the merch perfect for Playing through the game, it is legitimately impressive. Pretty much everyone here is recreated in a stunning 3D environment. Bonnie, Baby, Fun Time Freddy, the puppet. Heck, even Easter egg appearances by Mini Rinas and Lolbit. Characters that most of you watching this probably haven't even heard of before

because you have much better things to do with your brain space than I do. Practically everyone is here in this game, except for one important omission. Golden Freddy. I mean, Allora isn't around either, but you know, I said, But that seems weird, right? I mean, this is a game that drops you into perfect recreations of the first three installments of the series. You don't just forget about one of the most important characters to the lore of these games. Well, that's because it isn't some careless oversight. Golden Freddy isn't here for a reason. It's our first clue that this game isn't just a joke and is a canonical entry.

Specifically, it tells us where it falls in line with everything else that we've played through. Golden Freddy isn't here because she's busy hanging out in any H.E. double Chica arms with William Afton. Think back to the end of Ultimate Custom Night and our previous theories. By tracking the voice lines used throughout the game over screens, we were able to piece together that we're playing as William Afton in that game. Child Killer extraordinaire, and that the whole game was him trapped in hack to atone for his sins. And the thing that was keeping him there was the one he should not have killed a girl named Cassidy.

The spirit who had an axe to grind, possessing the Golden Freddy suit. The reason Golden Freddy isn't in Phenapie, is because the spirit is down there tormenting Willie A forever from here until the end of the series. That's why the ultimate ending of Custom Night was Golden Freddy twitching off into the darkness. Cassidy never gives up her soul. No matter what old man consequences said. Further cementing that help wanted is now at the end of the Fnaf timeline is this miserable little creature right here, the scrap baby plush. Because why wouldn't you want to cuddle with something that rips in half and eats children alive? Let me remind everyone who doesn't have an encyclopedic index of

all 60 plus animatronics that have graced the screen in this franchise, that Scrap Baby is the homeless hobo version of the old baby after escaping sister location and who has voted out of the Enard tribe sometime between Fnaf 5 and 6. Her only on-screen appearance is in Fnaf 6, so the fact that a reference to her exists in this game at all means that it must come after her expulsion from Ennard, sometime definitely after Fnaf 5, but again with Golden Freddy missing, it seems to secure it after everything's burned down and closed. So we have ourselves a company that's trying to rebuild its reputation after a series of tragic events. Seems pretty simple, right?

Of course not! This is a FNAF game! You know that the story is never going to be that obvious. Hidden throughout the game are cassette tapes that, when collected, unleash a new monster into the hallways of this pizzeria. What the game's files refer to as glitch trap. A yellow bunny with purple eyes. Hmm! Yellow bunny with purple eyes, you say? I think I might know where this is headed.

As you collect more and more. more tapes, this glitch rabbit comes closer and closer, becoming more and more fully formed. Beat all the minigames and you unlock the final challenge pizza party. A nightmarish fever dream that mashes together every location that you just played through. Waiting for you at the end of this horrific maze is the single scariest moment from the entire franchise. And I can't emphasize that enough. It is literally chilling. What you learn is that you, a seven-year-old, have been lured to the back room of Freddy's. And what awaits you is, is your pizza party, complete with your favorite flavor of cake, all your best animatronic friends,

and then GlitchTrap calls you to follow him. The music fades, and suddenly you're on stage. You're holding Freddy's microphone. You are, Freddy. You've been stuffed. You are now a missing child, watching as your killer dances gleefully to the song that you're being forced to stand up on stage and sing. This isn't just a spoopy jump scare of some goofy character. This is real horror.

So it definitely seems like this new character, Petto hair over here is William Afton. I mean, sure, the suit isn't as bulky as a Springlock suit, but he's got all the other qualifications down. Yellow Bunny Fersona, check, association with the color purple, check, enjoys children's pizza parties just a wee bit too much. Big old check again. Said again, to call this character William

would be missing a huge chunk of this game's story. This isn't William. Like I said, he's trapped. in eternal torment with Cassidy listening to Barney the Hippo over here tell his life story. Dry bread was always fresh on Tuesday. They made sourdough bread on Monday and threw it out Wednesday. What was they saying? No, to understand who, or better put what, this thing actually is, we need to examine the tapes that summoned glitch trap here in the first place. Scattered throughout the various minigames are 16 glitching cassettes left behind by a former game dev,

tape girl, which, when put together, tell the story of a failing game company, a bit of malicious code, and some very stabby, stabby office supplies. We're also introduced to the story of another beta tester, who was in our position before us named Jeremy, making this the third time that the name Jeremy has appeared in these games, with the first being FNAF 2's Night Guard, and then again on the gravestones in Fnaf 6. Coincidence? I think not.

The first tape immediately makes it clear we're not picking these up in chronological order. There are more. They may not be in order. Which leaves us the task of shuffling them into some modicum of sense in order to put the story together of what really happened while this game, the game we're supposedly playing now in its final form, was in development. Going through the tapes, I've done the shuffling for you, and I think I've come up with the most cohesive narrative based on the evidence and what tape girl actually says. She begins by telling us that the game's then playtester Jeremy has been complaining to his manager Dale about nightmares. Except he's not explaining them like their nightmares, he's talking about them like their nightmares. He wasn't talking about it like someone telling a friend about his dreams though. He was pale. He doesn't even jump anymore

He just stands there like he's talking to someone. Pale doesn't react to scares Talking to themselves sounds to me like he's going crazy either that or he's just a fnaf YouTuber hashtag relatable am I right? The game he's working on is this one Freddy Fasbear's virtual experience which includes some code that was inherited from Fasbear Entertainment scanned off some old hard drives to save him time and money It was just junk, circuit boards and things like that. It seemed to take hold by itself. But then, he started appearing. At least that's what Jeremy said.

Manager Dale doesn't seem to take Jeremy's warning seriously, however. And instead, he starts documenting all of Jeremy's behavior in preparation to fire him. You can always tell when a company is getting ready to fire someone. The thing about it is that I don't think they were going to fire him because of anything he was doing wrong. They just knew he'd seen something. This confirms for us one major detail that the scariest thing in the FNAF universe is crunch time. Working long hours until you're driven crazy and then fired at the end? Man, it's just like the real-life games industry.

It's uncanny, these games just get more and more realistic. So Jeremy is going crazy and no one is listening. Flash forward to tape 6, where Tape Girl talks about coming in early one morning to see the supply room lit and Jeremy in the darkened testing room. It's a short tape, but it's an important one, because it sets us up for tape number 9. when we learned that what she saw looked like a Halloween mask laying on the ground and a bunch of ink both on Jeremy and scattered around the floor.

But that's not ink, and that's no mask. The ink is Jeremy's blood, and the mask is actually Jeremy's face, which he presumably sliced off his own body using the aptly named guillotine paper cutter. We know this to be true thanks to tape number four, where we hear tape girls say that the cutter comes from the supply room and that Jeremy expressly knew where it was. I didn't even know we had one in the supply room. I was always afraid of losing a finger.

That seemed so silly now. Jeremy used to do design work. I guess that's how he knew it was there. And for as extreme as the sounds, we know that he sliced off his face due to all these seemingly minute details about how his face was obscured that morning. I went back and peered in the window.

I couldn't see his face. He had the visor covering his head. Anyone else getting some bizarre bite of 87 vibes from this story? No? Is it just me? Huh? actually dies from his injuries. After Jeremy's death, things start getting even weirder, which is a relative statement considering that this is the FNAF franchise we're talking about. TAPE over hears a conversation about a lawsuit in the aftermath of Jeremy's death,

which makes perfect sense given that he died a horrific death on the job. In response, the company starts taking some serious steps to cover their tracks, namely to sell off the game and destroy evidence that could incriminate them. In the meantime, Tape Girl takes over Jeremy's role as playtester, and all we can hope is that she's She really cleaned that VR headset before she put that thing back on. She has three days to play test the game. Across her audio logs, we learned that in that time, she sees glitch trap for the first time and comes to learn that he's attached itself to her audio logs.

She tries to delete them, but can't. So instead of deleting them, she fragments and disperses them into the 16 small pieces we've been collecting throughout our play-through. Warning us that they shouldn't be reunited at any cost. Hides all traces of these logs that I've created. I fear that finding them and reassembling them will also reassemble the very thing I've tried so desperately to destroy. Whoops! Probably shouldn't have hidden that info on tape 15 of 16. After that though, she seems to backtrack on her story, saying that in fact the entity in the game can be killed, and that to do so we should reassemble the tapes. Odd, but okay, we've got them all anyway, so might as well see what we can do.

Glitch trap attacks us once we have 16 tapes, and if we don't, respond in time we trade places with him. For a brief second we see through his eyes back down at the console that we were just operating. Our consciousness has truly melded with his, just like the voiceover warned about at the top of the game. Asbear Entertainment is not responsible for accidental digital consciousness transference. So that's a bad ending. But if we do manage to properly follow tape girls instructions as he's trying to mind meld with us, well he still seems like he escapes. Or at the very least, he definitely

doesn't die. This should have been like some Mr. Smith in the Matrix moment where all his code disintegrates or something. But instead, we're trapped on one side of a door in the game. A bloody hand-printed door with scratch marks clearly showing people stuck in here desperately trying to escape. And we see glitch trap practically skipping off into the darkness. This doesn't seem like the ending we should be getting for putting all the pieces of the tape together and following all the tape maker's instructions. That would basically mean that FNAF VR has three losing scenarios here. Getting so, stuffed at the end of the pizza party, transferring consciousness on the home screen, and getting locked behind the door if you choose to follow tape girls' instructions. That can't be right. Can it? Well, maybe it is. Maybe that's the point of the game.

Maybe we are destined to lose no matter what we do here. I mean, think about it. The canon ending of sister location was a bad ending, with Michael getting scooped. The canon ending of FNAF 4 was a bad ending, with the crying child getting bitten. In FNAF 6, you and literally everyone else burned to death. I mean, it's considered a victory, but you're still dead. Now let's look closer at the text of the audio logs. There is something clearly wrong in them. The tapes start out just fine. They follow her story in a pretty logical way and we know she's a real person in the real world because she's observing things from outside the game's testing room. Things like Jeremy complaining to management and the stuff that's present in the supply room. But then, upon closer inspection, you start noticing some strange anomalies.

For instance, we have two tapes that both start with her in. introducing who she is. A hi or hello followed by, you don't know me, or can you hear me? Which is our first hint that something's a bit off. The same person is making these tapes the whole time for the same audience. So why introduce herself to us twice in both tape 1 and tape 15? Why would one end with her saying, Now I fear that those logs are being used as a Trojan horse. If you're unable to abandon development, hide all traces of these logs that I've created.

Basically telling us to hide the logs, but then also say this. There are more. They may not be in order. Basically inviting us to put them all together. Weirder still is the fact that the last file suddenly does this major about face relative to all the previous logs, where suddenly she says out of nowhere, oh yeah, there is a way to kill glitch trap. This is odd on a lot of different levels. The first and most obvious being, if these instructions really do work and she's so sure about it, why didn't she follow them?

If this method was actually effective and she knew it was effective, GlitchTrap wouldn't be in the game anymore, because she would have followed her own advice and wiped him out. How would she even know that this system works? The answer is, it clearly doesn't. Or at least, it doesn't do what she says it's gonna do. That's because she's not trying to get you to kill off the entity in the code, she's trying to get you to release it.

While we don't have every piece of the puzzle in this story, here's what I think actually happened with all these audio tapes. The tape maker starts out. out genuinely making these logs to document the weird stuff that's happening in the game studio. The stuff with Jeremy really happens. She really sees glitch trap in the game, but on her last day of playtesting, she tries to delete the files and fails. Instead of killing glitch trap, she undergoes a digital consciousness transfer, just like we do in one of the three bad endings, trapping her in the game and releasing glitch trap, presumably into her own body, or just releasing him into the real world. Both of which are possibilities that the game explicitly warns us about in the opening sequence. Fasbear Entertainment is not responsible for accidental digital consciousness transference,

real-world manifestations of digital characters. That, my friends, is why you always have to read the disclaimer. From inside the game, she's now stuck. With her only hope for escape being to go through the same process she just went through from the other side. She creates a new log, starting over by saying, Hello? Can you hear me? Which in reality is saying, hello, can you hear me? in here since she's now making the log from inside the game.

She tries to create a new story that encourages a future developer to piece the logs back together and then seeds one final log out there to tease the idea that a future developer can solve the problem by killing off GlitchTrap using her log assembly method. It's smartly constructed because she's counting on future developers having the same curiosity and determination she did. She even mentions this in one of her earlier logs, tape 3, that when Jeremy had told the developers that something was wrong, But as a death team, we all just saw it as a challenge to find what the problem was and fix it. We do exactly the same thing, finding what's wrong and following the instructions on how to fix it,

only to find ourselves on the wrong side of the door covered in handprints, where presumably lots of other people have been there before us. Glitch trap, or whoever is in the body of GlitchTrap at this point, perhaps Cape Girl herself, disappears into the darkness and takes over our body on the outside. And now it's our turn to wait for the next beta tester to come in, follow the tapes and hand over their consciousness to us. Now, that last bit there is speculation based on the oddities and the audio logs and the fact that following her instructions results in seemingly yet another bad ending.

But even if all of that about consciousness switching and her being trapped in the game and us taking her place trapped in the game isn't the case, the point is, Williams back, just not in a way that any of us expected. What seems undeniable in help-wanted story is the fact that his consciousness was preserved in the circuit boards that got scanned to make this game. And now he's here as glitch trap, tricking players into letting him escape. It's no longer the same guy. He's now an AI replicating the behaviors of William and snatching the body of whatever completionist is determined enough to play through all the elements of the game.

In a funny way, it's exactly like the story we've been piecing together for PetSkop. It's odd actually. Maybe they really are one and the same. Both made by Scott coffin. The biggest lingering question now in my mind though, how many Williams are out there? Is this just one instance of an AI looking to escape and now we're the new host body? Or is it somehow able to replicate itself? Copying and pasting its code into any mind out there that's playing its little game? Could we be entering a new part of the FNAF franchise with multiple William Aftons? All in completely different bodies.

For as cool as that would be, and honestly I think this game could open up that world. I don't think that's gonna be the case. I think that's why there's such an emphasis in this game on you being a beta tester. It's one instance of corrupted code and you happen to be playing it. And now you're infected by it. In the next generation of FNAF, you, or at least your body with William Afton's code in your head, is the new killer. And so on and so forth until we finally get to FNAF in space. But hey, that's just a theory.

A game theory. And we should probably talk about Jeremy. It's weird that his name is used three times. There is no possible, way that that's meant to be a coincidence. There's also this random appearance of Shadow Freddy which I found in my play-through, which again, seems like an odd little detail that's important to account for in the Pizza Party minigame. And the fact that Glitchtrap has three toes, just like the footprints that are outside of Fnaf 6's house window, there is a lot

more here in this game, but I honestly just need more time to think it all through. Rest assured though, I'll be back. I always come back. But hey, that's just a A theory. A game theory. Thanks for watching.