Just Monika! (repeated, way too many times)
(glitch)
So, last time we began covering the creepy, hidden mystery of--
(another glitch)
[Steph as Monika, voice edited] *Read texts on screen*
(G̶̥͇̦̯̃̓͘̕a̷̭͛͘m̴̧͈͙͈̞̅̏̓̔̄͒̈̾̔̾̍̚e̴̲̬̯͉͔̗͖͍̠̞̳͔̣̳͗͂ ̵͉̞͔̪͈̲͍̎̌͐̈́̏̊̿̀͑͗͘͘͝͠T̸̨̛͔̺̭̲͖̫̲̫̭̭̠̞́̍̉ͅh̵̡͎͙̗̾͊̅̑̓͘ȩ̵̛̮̯̖̙̘̥̫̖̭̣̏̄̀̒́̂̾̌͌̔͝o̶͖̮̳͔̜̰͌͋́̋r̵̡̛͉̪̙̗̲̥͓͚̲͍͇͖̗̩̀̈́̎̄̐̂̐̈́̚y̵̢̬̔̓̈́ ̷̧̢̭̟͔̱̻̣̞̱̱̞̆̅̆͗͛̐̈́̚͝ͅg̷̬͉̖̬̓͋͂̄̈͆̉̒̌̐̒̍̔̇̊l̴̨̡̟͚̻̣͔̪̦̏͋̅̋̈́͒͋̎͛͛̒ȋ̶̟̊́͒̾̔͛̓̍͋͑͘͝͝ţ̶̹͕͚̦͉̻͕̜̙̆͑̈́͆͝͠ͅc̸̢͚̮̹̱̠̜̣̠̝̜̪̤̗̒̒̑̓̓͗̂̃̋̈́͗̈̚͝h̷͖̿̍̅̃̓̂̚͝y̷̱̙̞̼͖͕̗̱̺͐̈̀̐̀̏̌́͒̑͝ ̵̨̹͙͓̮̌̐̃͠i̴̡̬͖̼̞͊̂͋ń̴̨̝̼̰̳̙̫̙͕̭͍̲̔͑̇͗́͋̕t̴͓̥̐̿̂̀͘ṟ̵̼̻̺̰̺̭̣̝̫͚̀ǫ̷̧͇̱̹͙͕̹̲̔ͅ)
Hello internet!
Welcome to G̷̙͉̝̻̑̃̉͑̅͌̏͛͟͢͜͡ȃ̸͈̩̬̫̰̳͑̒̕͜͢͠m̲̦̦̗͖̩͑͂̑͛̾͟͞ē̵̙̠̱͔̲̇̔͆̀͗͡ Ţ̢̥͙̬͓̫̜̈̅̍̂͠h̡̼̬͇̹̋͑͌̎̈́͂̏̊͑͜͡ͅe̛̟͍̦̞̯̺̰͒̾̀̏̚͘ơ̸̺̥̟̙͍̘͈̞͍͑̃̉͑̾̚r̨͙̟̻͔̰̊̆̽́́̆͊̆͜͝͡y̛̲̖̪̤͔͆̉͋͂̆͌͝͡͞!
And, uh, my apologies for any technical difficulties we may be having during this series!
So in part one of this theory, we start to unearth a horror game hidden underneath the cute facade that is Doki Doki Literature Club.
We found a letter hidden in plain sight- alluding to human experients and cults,
all topics that appear in Yuri's book; The Portrait of Markov.
A book that just so happens to have a mysterious eye on the cover.
This will let me concoct a theory that the four girls from the club are actually characters from another game-
A horror game, in fact, being produced by Team Salvato.
And that, this is the reason that Monika turned sentient in Doki Doki.
Her AI isn't meant to be contained in a mere visual novel game.
But today is where things really start to go off the rails as we dive deeper into the Portrait of Markov mystery,
and cover the game within this game, that's itself hiding a third game.
Oh yeah, and by the way,
if you thought Monika was bad, well then you should start getting really scared of Yuri.
As you'll know if you finished the game the character files in the game's directory play a huge role in the plot.
Monika manipulates and deletes them one by one in her quest to make you love her.
And ultimately you have to delete Monika's file in order to reach the game's true ending.
But there's more in these files than just character information-
each of them is a puzzle in and of themselves left in the game to be solved by the fans.
And two fans of DDLC in particular stepped up to the challenge.
Reddit users Mithost and warchamp7 dug deep into these files and uncovered their secrets-
posting their findings to the /r/visualnovels subreddit.
And the lore bits they uncovered broke the Portrait of Markov mystery wide open.
So the character files on your computer start as .chr files,
which isn't a real file format that programs can recognize.
But that doesn't mean you can't open 'em.
If you use a text editor like notepad you can absolutely see what's inside and that's
exactly what they did, with the text inside each file giving them clues as to
what they should be doing next.
Yuri's - [clears throat] - Yuri's - something about this visual novel makes me go through puberty...
Yuri's file was the easiest to crack. It started as a bunch of random letters and numbers
but that pile of letter vomit was actually text encoded in Base64.
It's an encoding technique that converts binary data into text, specifically ASCII text,
the same stuff that Bob built his army using a few years ago on YouTube.
That may sound like it's really hard to decode,
but all you have to do is copy it and paste it into a base64 decoder like this one right here.
When you decrypt Yuri's file, you'll see that it's actually a short story;
a creepypasta which the game's director Dan Salvato confirmed that he
wrote over two years ago and just stuck in the game as an easter egg.
It's a spooky story to be sure, but it seems to be just that. An easter egg, a red herring.
It is nothing compared to everything else hidden in these other character files.
Natsuki's file came next, which when opened in a text editor gave
the clue that this should be opened as a PNG file.
Changing the extension resulted in this...
Odd discolored image.
But for anyone's who's had some experience playing around with Photoshop,
this color scheme may remind you of what happens when you
invert the colors on a picture. It produces those signature blues and greys.
So reversing that inversion, the picture suddenly starts to look like a real picture.
And not just any sort of picture; a face!
Rotate the image and wrap that texture around a 3D cone,
then look at the cone from above and it turns into
an image of a mysterious blond woman with whited out eyes.
This woman doesn't resemble any of the other characters in the game or anyone talked about by 'em
so perhaps then she's a character from the other game being developed by Team Salvato.
Maybe it's Elyssa, the girl suffering the strange illness that we heard mentioned in the letter
found in the last episode.
Monika's character file, when converted into a PNG turns out to be an image of the ring with a square of
black and white static in the middle.
But that's not just *any* static, it's a QR code! -
- was what I initially thought, but nope it's actually way more complicated than that
and huge compliments to the guys on Reddit for solving this one.
It's actually binary, computer language.
It's a bunch of ones and zeros where one number (0) is represented by the color black and
the other number (1) is represented by the color white.
So what Mithost did was to take those black and white pixels and convert them,
line by line, into strings of binary,
then convert that binary sequence into alphanumeric text using an online converter,
which resulted in yet another pile of letters and numbers,
but these should be starting to look a bit more familiar, right?
It's more base64 code which when converted reveals a note that really starts to bring all this together.
[Steph (as Monika) reads text on screen]
[MatPat] Wow, that is a lot to unpack so let's get to it.
First, it seems pretty clear that this was written by Monika,
as evident by the "You've been watching me for a while now" and
"You already know my name" lines. It also seems to be written after Doki-Doki's true ending,
where she destroys the game. Notice how she comments that there's
something you as a player can't stop, something that's killed everyone else,
which is why she destroyed the game in the first place. but now come the bizarre
But now comes the bizarre part.
She says that she's experienced some sort of deja vu,
and that this isn't her only story, supporting the idea that she's coming from somewhere else.
Perhaps, once again, a different game. and it's not just her either it's all four of them
And it's not just her either; it's all four of them.
Quote: "everyone else has had the same kind of experience."
What's most exciting, though, is her suggesting that
perhaps we, as the player, can, quote: "go back and tell them what's going to happen."
"If they know ahead of time, they should be able to avoid it."
Meaning that we're gonna be tasked with trying to jog their memories
or that in this new game there'll be some sort of Easter egg calling back to
the events of Doki-Doki. Quote: "If they remember their time with me in other worlds..."
Other worlds, like other games that these characters have been used in.
That maybe we can do something in these other games to warn the girls and
prevent Doki-Doki from ever happening in the first place.
And the conclusion is pretty much the most blatant: Team Salvato has another game coming in 2018
and in this game Monika isn't the villain;
she's the hero. Of everything in Monika's letter though,
One reference in particular really stands out: blaming this deja vu on what she calls the Third Eye.
And it's not just Monika either; this Third Eye is hidden throughout your time with the Literature Club.
During Act 2, you're always given two regular poems.
Once the game starts to break, the first poem that Natsuki gives you is
a string of random letters and numbers, which at this point we're old pros at decoding!
Using base64, the text reveals a creepy hidden poem titled "Open Your Third Eye",
which describes the narrator taking pleasure in stabbing someone to death.
The second poem that Yuri gives you seems at first glance to be a huge block of random words,
but hidden in plain sight at the end of it is another ominous passage
that describes a compulsive stabbing and concludes with the line:
[Quote]
That's three characters now who have brought up this Third Eye,
the same eye that happens to be described on the cover of the Portrait of Markov.
And remember what Yuri said about the plot of the book last episode?
"All the people trapped [in the human experiments at the religious camp] have this trait-
-that turns them into killing machines that lust for blood."
That trait is undeniably the Third Eye.
All of this points to Team Salvato's new game being about human experimentation;
researching a psychic phenomenon that invokes uncontrollable bloodlust
in the people exposed to it.
Which brings us to the last piece of the puzzle:
Sayori's character file, which is by far the trickiest to decipher. In order to unlock its secrets,
you need to convert it into an OGG audio file which sounds like
a lot of random noise at first, but when you open that audio in a visualizer program,
and then apply a spectrograph to that visualisation you reveal a QR code,
that when scanned, takes you to the website "projectlibitina.com".
Oh that is a ton of work just to reach a page of plain text,
but the information contained within that text is eye-opening;
Third Eye-opening, that is!
The page is an examination report dated January 5th 2004,
which describes horrifying experiments being performed on a three-year-old psychic girl
with the first name Libitina. Her last name is left blank.
Another blank name appears at the bottom of the page,
another subject who was terminated earlier.
Based on the context of the redacted poem we covered last episode,
it's my guess that this girl is Elyssa
even the number of letters in Elyssa match the number of redacted letters in the name.
That's far from the only parallel to the Portrait of Markov that we see here though,
a note to the head doctor at the bottom of the page reads
[Quote]
Yuri says that the book is set in a religious camp that was turned into a human experiment prison,
which lines up pretty well with this mysterious doctor's reported devotion to a God of some kind,
and the redacted poem's allusion to joining this mysterious family.
Judging from the various notes on this webpage, the tests performed on the three-year-old were
all about activating Libitina's Third Eye;
that lust for blood which proves successful,
but then, based on the failed test results, Libitina is then unable to suppress.
But not only are we getting more and more clues as to the next game Team Salvato is working on,
we're actually seeing exactly how our favourite club-mates are gonna fit into the story,
because I am confident three-year-old Libitina grows up to be
one of the four girls we see in Doki-Doki Literature Club,
and what's more, I can prove exactly which one it is.
Libitina is a three-year-old and her height and weight are both average for her age
so there's not much to go on there,
but if we look a bit further down the page, we see a list of noted behaviors that
the researchers say should be ignored in future examinations.
[Quote]
There's one character who we see display almost all of these traits during Doki-Doki Literature Club,
particularly in that second Act: Yuri.
Once the game bugs out, Yuri's dialogue becomes the most erratic.
We repeatedly see her eyes twitching when she talks to us, she screams a fair bit,
laughs erratically at a few points, and that bit about self-harm?
Oh, I don't think I need to explain that one.
But these aren't the only clues that we have to go on.
There are two more things that absolutely confirm that Yuri is Libitina.
The first is her age. Libitina was born January 5th, 2001,
which would make her 17 years old in 2018, the year that Project Libitina is set to release.
As the only member of the Literature Club in senior year, Yuri is the only one of the girls
in the right age range to be Libitina,
but there's also one more piece of crucial evidence that absolutely clinches this theory,
and the evidence isn't found in the game itself, or even in its data, or a random hidden webpage,
but rather in the Doki-Doki Literature Club merchandise store.
Yeah, this guy is hiding clues in more places than Scott Cawthon!
Team Salvato might not be offering much in terms of merch items,
but the few items that are present reveal some very interesting details, so let's look at the posters.
Four of them are simply CGs of each girl taken straight from the game, nothing too exciting there.
Another four are creepy original artwork featuring iconic quotes from the characters.
Between all of these there's this running motif of the girls being tied up in a red string.
Even Monica has a bow wrapped around her.
But Yuri doesn't seem to possess these strings.
In fact, all of the red strings seem to be emerging from her -
from her heart, from this flower, whatever this is -
ensnaring all the other girls.
An allusion to Libitina's psychic influence over everyone else.
But if that doesn't convince you, there are two more posters for sale, featuring original artwork.
One of these is a surprisingly cute picture of Monika handing you the song she sings you at
the end of the game. It's cute, very cute.
The last poster, called Yuri Unhinged, is a bit different,
and when I say a bit different,
I mean completely different from anything else in the game or on the site.
It shows the quiet bookworm Yuri sitting in the classroom at sunset,
toying with a knife.
For someone "unhinged," her posture is seen as oddly relaxed, even confident.
In fact, it's the most confident we've ever seen her, like she's in full control of the situation
and behind her you see all sorts of ominous text scrawled on the blackboard.
To her right, we see a poster, a poster with a big ol' "Illuminati Confirmed" eye in the middle
and the words "help me" scribbled along the top.
This is the Third Eye - Yuri's Third Eye - and this is the only artwork where we see it depicted
Illuminati confirmed, Yuri as Libitina confirmed!
Doki-Doki Literature Club isn't just a free game made to promote Team Salvato's upcoming horror title,
it's a part of Project Libitina.
Monika is the upcoming game's protagonist,
while Yuri is the monster at the center of the story, Libitina herself.
This is why Yuri was so attached to the Portrait of Markov stories,
it is her story,
and the disconnect from being put in the wrong game is the reason that Monika becomes self-aware.
But hey, that's -
[cut off] [slash of blade]
[softly] ...Game Theory...
[slash of blade]
[quickening beat]
[outro music with steady beat]