Well hidly-ho neighborinos!
Welcome to GAME THEORY.
And wouldn't you know it, it's the holiday season.
A time of love and togetherness.
A time for family and brotherhood.
A time when we're called to serve as a neighbor
to one another in this great big
brotherhood of man.
And when I say acting as a neighbor to one another I mean breaking
into each other's houses to unlock
one another's murder basements.
Screw you, Wilson! The 90's are over.
Neighbors don't dole out sage advice
whilst hiding behind chin-high fences anymore,
buckaroo. Nowadays if you're moving into a new house,
at least one of those homes in your neighborhood
is hiding a meat hook with your
name on it. Case in point:
Hello Neighbor. An indie
horror game set for release next summer,
but whose alpha builds have already caught
the internet by storm.
In a 2016 that was light on big releases,
the indie scene stepped up in a big
way, with everything from Welcome to the Game
to Layers of Fear, Sister Location to
Sarah is Missing.
Unique, thought-provoking, and most
importantly scarily fun
games. If you missed any of the playthroughs
check them out by clicking the GIF of me freaking out in the corner.
You can also click the JIF of me
freaking out in the corner, but I'll leave that
choice up to you. And, uh, watching those animations
play back, if you can't tell, I'm a
bit of a wuss when it comes to these sorts of
things, so expect all sorts of
girlish screams in your future.
(Oh, fart nuggets!) But across
all of them, Hello Neighbor is the one leaving
people with the most questions,
myself included. If you're unfamiliar with the game,
let me quickly recap: you play as a new
addition to community, just moving in.
But shortly after you move, you start to notice
some strange behavior from your
jazzercise-prone neighbor.
Screams coming from the house,
erratic behavior, paranoid looks.
Peering in through his windows reveals a heavily-guarded
door leading into his basement. But seriously,
what is down there that he doesn't
want the world to see? That is the
mystery you're looking to solve in the game.
Break in, find the tools necessary to
undo his security measures, and
unearth your neighbor's dark secret
before it's too late. But you know what,
Why go through all the wait and all the hassle?
Today we put the clues together to solve this
mystery half a year before the game's
release. Partly because I like the challenge
of doing it, but also partly because if i wait too long
to do a theory on it they release a Ditto
the same day I release a video using
Ditto's absence as a critical piece of
my argument, and then the comments section blows up
about it, and you know, it's a purely hypothetical
situation but it's something
I'm trying to avoid moving forward, all right?
Let's get neighborly.
So the first major question people are left
with is, is this guy
actually a bad guy?
Sure, he acts kinda creepy and is REALLY
serious about his privacy, using
everything from bear traps to a security
shark. (Beware
his jaws of justice.
Security shark!)
But we don't actually see him commit any crime.
And the game seems intent on misleading us,
in fact in the latest update one of the
opening cut scenes show what appears to be
someone running away from him, but
slow down the footage and look closer,
and you see that his supposed "victim"
is just one of the many mannequins he has
positioned throughout his house. Notice the
shiny brown head, white body, and
lack of arms. So, are we just
paranoid? Jumping to conclusions
prematurely? Is this guy actually
going to be revealed as
dangerous in the final game, or is this
all just one big misunderstanding?
Well, the answer to that is he is
100%
dangerous. Our first clue
comes from an early Reddit IAmA with the developers
Dynamic Pixels.
During it, they received a question from a concerned Redditor. Someone who felt
uncomfortable playing a game where they were going
to be the criminal breaking and entering into an
innocent person's home. Dynamic Pixels'
response is TELLING.
"What if the neighbor is a
psycho! And is holding someone prisoner.
Who knows? ;)"
Smells like a hint.
A pretty specific hint at that.
At what the game designers have actually been planning
for the final plot of this game all along.
That someone is being held prisoner
in this house. As if the words
weren't enough, the winky face seals the deal.
Why? Well, it's simple
Emoji etiquette. A winky face
at the end of a sentence is coy, flirty. Implying more than just the words said.
For instance, if I were to text you,
"Why don't you come over tonight ;)"
That winky face implies you ain't just coming over for
Overwatch and chill. And in Hello Neighbor's case,
the wink on the part of the developers means,
"We're pretending like we're not giving it all away,
but you know better." Coy,
knowing, "it'll be our little secret".
But if you don't believe interpreting
emoji like modern day hieroglyphics
is a valid piece of evidence, well then just look
at this: it's a detail every
playthrough of this game has overlooked thus far.
Including my own over on GTLive. But it
begs the question, why would a
mailbox in front of a house have
not an address, but two numbers
separated by a colon?
Of course, the first thing we all think of is time
but that doesn't make any sort of sense
here. Why put a military-style time
reading on a mailbox? There's also
no way that this was an accident. It's too
specific of a detail for Dynamic Pixels
to include in there. So let me tell you
I looked. I looked a LOT.
I was getting scientific coding
sequences, NASA coordinates, all
kinds of stuff that seems to have no possible connection
to a game about trolling your creepy
neighbor. So where else do you
have two numbers separated by a colon?
Ratios, citations,
Bible verses...
Bible verses. Chapter number,
colon, verse number.
After striking out so many times that seemed
like the most likely. So I dug through
the entire Bible to find
every instance of Chapter 14
Verse 14. What I came up with
was the following list. A lot of the quotes
were purely random. False leads,
non-sequiturs, things without context.
Unless of course we're supposed to leave Joshua
and the neighbor is secretly Caleb, son
of Jephunneh the Kenezite. I'm gonna
say a tentative no to that one.
But one quote in particular stood out.
From Kings 2, Chapter 14
Verse 14. Specifically
related to someone breaking into
a palace, where
"He took away all the gold and silver,
all the items found in the treasuries of the royal
palace, and some hostages."
So it seems to me that we have
printed on the mailbox in
front of the neighbors house a Bible verse
specifically telling the story of someone breaking
into a palace and stealing not just
the valuables, but also
rescuing some hostages in the process.
Now, granted we're still VERY early
in the game development process, but
I like our odds. So the neighbor has been keeping
people in his basement against their will, and it's
our job to Robin Hood the heck out of
things and steal everything back.
Freeing the hostages, and then making our
escape. And the evidence in Alpha 2
already points to this. If you successfully
make it to the basement we get soft
confirmation, with a mattress on the ground
and a crib, as if someone
is being kept there against their will.
In fact, whoever's down there may seem like they're trying to
escape. For all the hooplah made around
getting into the basement in the big Alpha 2
release last week, those who actually bothered
to research the game knew what it looked like
back from Trailer #2, where we
actually get a thorough look at the basement.
Running through long stretches of corridor
to escape the neighbor as he approaches.
But what's most interesting here is what happens
as you head your way down into the
basement. You actually hear a child
coughing, a baby whining,
a female crying, shadows moving
frantically along the floor, and finally
someone shouting something that sounds
a lot like "RUN." At the end of the trailer,
we're presented with a door labelled "Hide here"
that happens to be locked.
We as the player have to resort to hiding under the
bed, and right before the neighbor catches
us, we hear a female scream.
That scream leads the neighbor to
unlock and check the hiding room.
Seems to me like the mother and her children tried
to escape, fell for hiding in the obviously-
a-trap hiding room, with the big arrows
attached to it, and got busted
by the neighbor, who has a key to that door. He captures the family that was already his
prisoners, but we as the player
escape because he didn't know WE
also happen to be down there.
So already we can see how huge chunks of this
story start to fit together. But that
leaves us with a big, big question:
Who, or what,
is this guy? Who
is the neighbor? Well, the simple
and really creepy answer is that
he works for the circus. The guy
is a clown. Literally a clown.
I know, I know, it sounds stupid, and like
the biggest leap in logic that I could
possibly ever make but the evidence is
there. On the game's website there's a bunch
of promotional material ranging from
trailers, pre-made animated GIFs
or JIFS if you prefer, and of
course, our assets. And hidden among
the promotional pictures showing locations and
imagery we're already really familiar with
at this point, there's hidden one
real oddball in the group. No, it's not
the one where the neighbor's dressed like the devil
showing us that crack is whack like some sort of
middle-aged Coppertone suntan girl,
but that one is admittedly pretty
weird too. Nope, it's not that one,
it's this one, where our favorite curly chin
is covered in white cake makeup,
summoning us down into the basement.
Weird, right? And this is like the
only picture where anything remotely
like this occurs. So I would've written this
off as just an early game design decision
that eventually gone scrapped if it wasn't for the pervasive use of carnival style imagery throughout
this game during the Alpha1 minigame teaching you how to hide, you're in a queue
with a height limit just like you would find while waiting for an amusement park
ride. The second floor of his house has a shooting gallery just like those rigged
carny games that are legitimately impossible to win, unless of course
you're Stephanie who wins on her first throw.
The mysterious third-floor train seems like a monorail system you could find in
a theme park, even the music reinforces a funhouse vibe. Funhouse, not Funhaus. it
was present in the trailer for the game released on the website and I thought
maybe this carousel style music was just temporary, but nope there it is again in
Alpha 2, ominously playing a happy-go-lucky tune while you descend
into that creepy candlelit basement and a mother and her child cry. Apparently we
just live in a day and age where all horror games revolve around the
developer's childhood traumas of stranger danger as men in furry suits or clown
attire steal them away into the secret hideouts. Speaking of animatronics, he's
even got one of those too, on the second floor one of his defensive mechanisms is
security shark. (Prepare to be fin-ished.
Security shark!) But glitch around a bit and look under the water level and you
see it's not a real shark, but a robotic one. Kind of like something you would see
again at a universal studio style attraction, or I guess a haunted pizzeria.
Freddy, Foxy, Bonnie, Chica, and introducing Sharkey! So we have a creepy clown
carnival worker kidnapping mothers and their children and keeping them in his
basement. So let's take a moment to look through a bit more of the concept art
and get even more ideas about what's going on in this game. This picture, for
instance. See anything that's say, um, a bit off? Right there, hanging on the right
balcony's clothesline is a female skin suit, or perhaps more accurately a
blow-up doll? Man I hate it when the neighbors leave their sex toys on the
clothesline to dry! Really leaves us with some awkward conversations for the kids.
Now, I'm not sure that this tells us a whole lot other than he's a man with
personal needs okay, so leave him alone! And in these mock-ups of the gameplay
area we see where our player eventually gets buried in the event he gets caught
by the neighbor one too many times- in your very own backyard. But there's one
other essential detail in these pictures we haven't covered yet. As we see in this
image from their site, there's a mysterious shadowy figure in the
background behind all of this. "Well, could this be the player?" I hear you saying, and
while that's a good guess, look closely at the hands. You'll notice the outline of
gloves extending wrists. That's an important detail
because at no point in the imagery around this game, both in gameplay and in
the promotional materials, is the player's character ever shown to be
wearing gloves. Which leads us to perhaps the biggest twist of all- he has a
partner. But then who is it? Well, we don't have much information about the other
characters appearing in this game, but I did take it upon myself to take the
neighbors model and scale it to the relative size he would be if you were
that far away from the camera in this picture, and I discovered that the
neighbour is actually slightly shorter than the shadowy figure. Why does that
matter? Two reasons, actually. First it confirms that that's not the
player character. Anytime the neighbor catches us in game he's always looking
at eye level or slightly downward. We are shorter than the neighbor. So the
heights just don't add up. But that leads us to point number two. We only ever get
to see one other person in the game: this man in the pictures. And look at their
relative heights. The neighbor is slightly shorter than his male
counterpart. They also clearly have a long history together as this portrait
was taken years prior. Notice that the neighbor has more hair in this picture
as well as a beard. So it would seem we have two kidnappers working out of a
carnival or circus and stashing victims both living and dead in the basement.
According to Kings 14:14, it's gonna be our job to get in there and rescue them
and stop these two murderers. So it seems clear enough, but something kept nagging
me as I wrote this theory. Why? What is the motive? Are we just supposed to
believe that they're doing it for the funsies? Hey, they're just two wild and
crazy guys! No, it's too simple, too easy, and quite honestly too boring for a game
who has developed its plot like this. And that's when I saw it last week as I was
exploring these images. Look closely at the image with the shadowy figure. Closer.
Closer. Do you see it? The book. In this concept image, when the shadowy figure
lurks near the neighbor, the neighbor is reading Faust. Faust! Fast recap for those
of you who don't know, Faust is a German legend about a brilliant scholar, named
Faust appropriately, who in the search for ultimate knowledge and power strikes
a deal where he sells his soul to the devil.
Yes! The devil. That is who the shadowy figure is, that's who's been helping the
neighbor from the beginning, and that is the motive to these murders. Need more
proof? Well, I could start with the candles filling the basement-
certainly reminiscent of satanic channeling circles- but maybe that's not
enough for you. Maybe you need more. Well, look here. In the latest alpha build of
the game you can find a house on a darkened street. Inside you'll find a
frozen version of the neighbor, suspended in midair
along with his bed is it just a glitch? Developer error? Exorcist reference? It
doesn't matter. What's important here is that for the first time ever it gave us
access to a full 360-degree view of the neighbor's character model. And look at
the bottom of his shoes. There's a sticker. Some might say a seal that reads
6 6 6, the sign of the beast, the number most associated with Satan. The neighbor
is literally being outfitted by the devil. And that got me rethinking this
whole theory. Maybe Kings 14:14 isn't the passage that I was looking for. Maybe
there was something else. So I scrolled back through my notes and
found this. Isaiah 14:14 "I will ascend above the heights of the
clouds. I will be like the most High." Who's talking here? The answer is a few
lines back at Isaiah 14:12 "How art thou fallen from heaven, o day-star, son of
the morning!" The day-star son of the morning is another way of referring to
the morning star, which is another name for Lucifer, AKA the devil. Isaiah 14:14
is the last thing the devil said before he was struck down into hell forever.
It's a cry of pride, that he will rise above everything and claim ultimate
knowledge and power over the universe- the same thing Faust bargains for in his
story. So that is the real message the mailbox is trying to deliver, that this
will be a story of an unholy alliance between man and ultimate evil to claim
power over everything. Or at the very least of one man's quest to ascend to
the level of God. And that's what all the pieces fit together. The strange candles
the victims, the neighbor's access to all kinds of security devices, the glowing
doors that seem like portal other realms. Not only is the neighbor
not working alone, he's working with the devil himself and performing horrific
acts on his unsuspecting victims to fulfill his end of a terrifying contract.
Which makes the idea of entering the house all the creepier and getting
caught all the more horrifying. Before I wrap things up here, if you're interested in
more Hello Neighbor theorizing push on that creepily swinging door with a no
trespassing sign to subscribe to the Game Theorists because you can bet this
is a game I'm gonna be revisiting again as more details come out. I can see these
theories becoming just as fun as FNAF so if you're a fan of that series click on
this and if you're not a fan of that series, well, it's not FNAF, it's actually
completely different. it's a murderer dressed as a clown instead of a murderer
dressed as an animatronic. So either way subscribe and I know I mentioned it
before but if you are interested in watching my first playthrough of hello
neighbor where the neighbor severely glitches out and gives me free rein of
the house then click that welcome mat right there we do a bit of freaking out
we do a bit of theorizing all in all it's a good time with a good game and
hey it gives us more time to hang out together I love doing the live streams
the GT live community is one of the most positive on YouTube everyone is super
supportive of each other so if you want to join that community click right there
check out hello neighbor and make sure that you subscribe but now if you'll
excuse me I need to go because Christmas is right around the corner and I've got
to write a bunch more theories if I hope to get ahead enough so I can take a
holiday so with that in mind guys just remember that's just a theory a game
theory thanks for watching