Thank you for agreeing to help me, give me games because I need to theorize. I would like some Five
Nights at Freddy's. *cough*
I did not ask for this. I would like a Poppy
Playtime. *cough*
I did not ask for this.
I would like a Minecraft. *cough*
You are useless. But I will give you one final chance. You must feed me. Feed me, FEED ME.
Hello Internet! Welcome to Game Theory, the show that lives on
brain food. And brain food. In case you don't follow our stuff over on GTLive,
recently I've been working my way through a game that on the surface seems incredibly simple.
A giant floating tomato asks you to feed him food, and that's exactly what you do.
I want strawberry
Okay. I want a donut.
Good, solid way to finish. He did save desert.
Okay I am full for now. Visit me when I will be hungry again. See you later. Welcome to my game.
The end. Yeah. Nailed it.
Simple, like I said. Sure, bit by bit things get more complicated as the lights go out and
food items get hidden in bags. But overall, there didn't seem to be much there. Oh, how wrong I was.
Oh, my God.
Little did I suspect that by playing this game, I was starting down an impossible
path. One made up of two games that conspire against you. Two games with multiple endings
and nearly infinite routes between them to explore. Each one full of unforgiving
challenges required to unlock a treasure trove of secrets and waiting at the end,
a secret program downloaded onto your computer with every install of the game and a single
warning, you've got one shot, one chance. Attempts to open this thing early and it's
going to be locked forever. It was a journey that would drive me to my breaking point.
I'm going to break this game over my knee and I will squeeze out all of her juices to make
the lemonade. And then I'll shove it down Mr. TomatoS throat and it'll just shove down his
throat and he'll have to suck it down. Even when he doesn't want the lemonade, he might
want chocolate sauce. But no, he's not getting chocolate sauce. He's getting Ms. LemonS lemonade.
Today starts my villain Arc.
Welcome to my game, buddy.
Oh, no, I am not your buddy, sir. So suck down that cream theorist's and hide your chocolate
soup. We got to deal with some rotten fruit. The first time you pick up Mr. TomatoS,
you will lose. And when that happens, you suddenly get this.
So you feed him his balanced breakfast of brains,
eyeballs and severed hands until he rewards you with death. And a hidden message in wingdings.
You can do it. Okay. Oh, hey! So I'm assuming this is the, like, “you lose” image.
I'm inside. Inside what exactly? The game? the computer? This is the first indication
that this game isn't all that it seems. There is a lore here. But to unlock it, we just need to
get good. So we reopen the game, and nothing. You're met with a wall of flashing wingdings.
Oh, oh, we got some wingdings. Oh, hello.
I mean, I'd love to translate that right now but I can’t.
Well, that's exactly what I did, which gives us this message. I'm already inside your system. Do
not worry about her safety. Everything will be fine. I have everything under control.
Okay, so this sapient tomato’s in my computer, it’s apparently going all Doki Doki up in here.
But then who's this “Her”? He's literally the only character in this game. And why
does he need to be fed body parts? And most importantly of all, what's chocolate soup?
I want some chocolate soup. Chocolate soup.
Fun fact, it's an old European dish from the 17th century that's often served in cafes.
Chocolate soup aside though, clearly there is more here that we need to answer.
So I dove back into the game aaand… nothing. The game wouldn't open. And when I went to
download the game again, I saw this: Only one completion allowed. It was then that I should
have taken the hint that only pain awaited me down this path. But no, I just had to get
to the bottom of this mystery. So I had to reset the game and start over from scratch.
All my points, all my items, all my secrets gone. But I didn't let it deter me. I was going to solve
this game. But at what cost? At what cost? My next playthrough, I managed to buy a knife
and stab or noshing little nightshade. And the results were underwhelming, to say the least.
However, trying to start the game again, I was in for yet another surprise.
Clearly time for another restart. Beating the game normally gives you a boss battle
against Mr. Tomato where you feed him poison until he glitches away.
Nothing too exciting. But if you manage to beat the game without making a mistake,
that's when things really start to get interesting. Mr. TomatoS doesn't
transform into some demonic being devouring severed limbs. Instead,
he stays calm. He's even a little bit helpful. In fact, he offers up some,
quote, weird text I found in the code just don't go back into the game after he says goodbye.
When you open his new file, you get a long series of numbers. Now, I'll admit,
I tried a lot of different ciphers to decode this message, but nothing seemed to be working until
I realized that there was one number that was repeated over and over again within the sequence.
The number 20. These aren't part of the code. These are spaces,
speces separating out groups of numbers that can then be deciphered into actual words.
It's simple and it's genius. So I deleted every 20, replaced it with a space, and then decoded
the rest to get this letter, which starts to pull the mystery of these games into focus.
Hello. I hope someone finds this message. I will change each letter of this message with
a number so he cannot read it. So if anyone's really reading this, I want you to know that
everything is not what it seems. Never trust him. He is much trickier and much smarter than
you think. If you do everything he wants, he can get incredible power and he knows about it. The
more particles of code he absorbs into himself, the more powerful he gets. With that power,
he can do anything inside the game. You've already begun to notice the changes in his
behavior. Try to access the console and erase all progress. Writing where the console is located
will be very dangerous because with his power I am afraid he will be able to translate even this
text. Try to find the console before he finds it. That is all. Good luck. The password is…
And then there's a randomly generated password. Immediately we can start to figure out what's
going on here. We're not feeding him actual body parts, but instead we're feeding him
parts of the game's code. By feeding him the game code, we're making him more powerful,
which is why it's only after we've lost that he can boot us out of the game permanently.
But still, don't really have a good reason why he wants this. Is he an A.I. gone rogue?
Is he just a demon trapped inside of a video game? It’s not clear. Luckily or unluckily,
that wasn't the only place that we could search for clues. Enter Ms. LemonS.
Hello there and welcome to my class.
This second game also takes the simple approach:
an educational game with basic puzzles like geometry and math. But unlike Mr. TomatoS,
she's not kicking you out of the game when you lose. If you build up her irritation level to ten,
she'll cut off your hand and gouge out your eye. No problem. You just restart the game again.
That's right. Despite a full reset, the game still remembers what you
lost. So what are you supposed to do? And I was shocked by what I discovered.
These games aren't just connected by the lore. They are literally connected by their
programming. They share the same system, my computer system, and can speak to each other.
And it seems like losing to Mr. TomatoS is what helps you to win in Ms. LemonS.
Nope. No you do not MatPat. No brain for you. But if body parts can transfer across games,
maybe items can too, including that handy dandy trusty rusty knife.
As you can see it didn't work out quite as
well as before. And not only does this cause her to lock you out of the game,
but she also has enough control over the system to lock you out of Mr. TomatoS as well.
And while yeah, LemonS seems to be in control. Thanks to yet another knife ending,
we learned that there's another being in control of even her. You See, by activating the game's
hard mode and then stabbing her, LemonS is suddenly replaced by a different entity.
A new personality takes over and she switches realities so we appear in the one where she
wasn't stabbed. Gotta admit. Better use of the multiverse than the MCU. So not only are we
dealing with the multiverse, notice what LemonS said before she was replaced. She definitely
won't let me die. And that's a bummer. The entity in control is some sort of a female,
and both LemonS and TomatoS seem to be held here against their will.
We see this sentiment mirrored in the opening splash screens of both games where the different
colored letters spell out “and suffering”. Even the game's itch.io page has the words
“Why am I in agony” partially crossed out. Why are these digital creatures in so much
pain? All we've known up to this point is that Mr. Tomatos is just eating code.
But take a look again at what this controlling personality says. The life of this person is
actually very important to me. She calls Ms. LemonS a person Ms. LemonS. And Mr. TomatoS aren't
corrupted A.I. or demons. They're people. They are souls trapped inside of a video game, constantly
in pain and longing for death. This battle between the humans inside of the fruit and the
female entity that's controlling things from the background appears throughout multiple endings.
If you managed to make it to the end of Ms. LemonS, your game isn't done. In fact,
the hardest challenge of all awaits. Ms. LemonS gets possessed by the other entity
and launches into a boss battle that would make Sans blush; same mechanics, same banger music.
*banger music*
If you manage to survive this entire six minute battle,
letting her rage meter on the side run to empty, you get yourself this.
So this entity sometimes takes over and LemonS has to get her back under control.
Interesting. And even more telling, if you defeat Mr. TomatoS using the poison
and then hop back into Ms. LemonS, you won't find the lemon that you're used to.
By killing TomatoS we somehow allowed the person inside Ms. LemonS to absorb
the other entity. Honestly, at this point, we just have more questions than answers.
Except there's one final place to look. You see, when you download these games,
there's one other small program that gets dropped into the folder:
Project Uroboros. It’s not concerning at all right? mystery program's coming along with
the game that I just downloaded off of a small indie site. Totally safe. Not a Trojan horse at
all. Now Uroboros (both spellings are correct) is usually depicted as a snake eating its own tail.
It's the symbol of a cycle repeating or getting lost in yourself. And given that these games are
all about repeating the same gameplay loop to get different endings, yeah. I'd say it's
a fairly appropriate symbol. Except here, there's a catch. When you open the program,
the computer immediately tells you that this contains classified information and that we have
to be registered users in order to access it. It says that we have one shot to unlock
this program, otherwise we're shut out of it forever. So where's the code? Could it be in
these two games? Yeah. To get inside of Project Uroboros you need one very specific ending.
By beating Ms. LemonS with an irritation level of zero, you get the true ending of that game.
She changes your personal ID granting access to this mysterious computer program. And once
you're in, nothing. At least not really. You're presented with a lot of broken links
and blocked out tabs. Now, this is clearly meant to be a research archive of some kind,
but how then do we recover the data lost in those files? Well, each time you get an ending
in either TomatoS or LemonS, a new file named DataRecoveryModule gets put into the main folder.
Data recovery, you say? Sounds exactly like what we need. In fact, each of those
data recovery modules is numbered. For instance, stabbing Mr. TomatoS gets the ending number five,
the failure ending with TomatoS is ending six and so on. And by getting each ending, we open up a
new chunk of the website and it's here, finally, where the complete story starts to come together.
It turns out that the man responsible for all this was a scientist named Eugene. One day he
met Sebastian, a high class waiter that regularly gets drunk at the local bar. While Eugene doesn't
seem interested at first. Sebastian insists on calling Eugene his friend or buddy, if you will.
[TomatoS]: Welcome to my game, buddy.
Now, you can start to see where this thing might be headed.
Sebastian is also in love with a schoolteacher named Luise, who doesn't seem to be all that
interested in him. Sadly, this is when Eugene decides to enter his villain arc. Like so many
indie horror game scientists before him. He grabs both Sebastian and Luise to become part
of an experiment, turning his friends into Mr. TomatoS and Ms. LemonS respectively.
From experiment logs you unlock on the site, we learn that in order to hold these new forms,
Eugene created something called the vessel. Not an A.I. but rather a living entity that Sebastian and
Luise could essentially use as their home inside the computer. The vessel could transform to meet
the needs of the consciousnesses inside of it, which is why it was a kitchen for the waiter
Sebastian and a classroom for the teacher Louise. However In each case, the vessel has different
levels of control. With Mr. TomatoS, it's only 30%. So he's able to retain all memories of his
death in past life, which is why he escaped into the world wide web and wants us to help
him get stronger. Maybe it's to get revenge on the man who did this to him with Ms. LemonS,
the vessel has 70% control. The question is why? Why did Eugene do all this? Well,
as most villains in these franchises tend to, he has himself a sympathetic back story. Eugene
wasn't alone in this world. He had a wife, one who unfortunately got sick and died. Her name
was Marine, and Eugene was desperately trying to make a cure for her that didn't work. This
is why he created Project Uroboros, the symbol of life, death and rebirth. It was meant to save her.
In the experiment logs, we find both Mr. TomatoS and Ms. LemonS’s entries under experiment one and
two. But even if you unlock everything across both games, there's still a mysterious third
entry that remains locked. I suspect that this is Marine's entry. After learning everything that he
could from the vessel. I suspect that Eugene may have mastered the experiment and tried
to transfer Marine’s dead consciousness into this new digital world, a world that he made
to keep her alive forever. Just do me a favor there, Eugene. Don't go building robot bodies
and then trying to plug her personality into that. No one will believe me when I try to tell
him that that's what you did. Honestly, though, I suspect the games developers, OXTORD Games,
may come out with one final fruit based game with a new character who doesn't remember who she is,
and it will be up to us to remind her of her identity. But that's not going to be the only
thing we're going to have to fight off. See, there's one final ending and it's
locked behind a section called Decapsulation. To access it,
you need two codes. One's achieved by beating Ms. LemonS on suffering mode. Basically the equivalent
of hard mode. Probably something I should’ve pieced together before my first playthrough.
She doesn't actually know what the code’s for other than it's likely dangerous and
was purposely hidden by the one who created it. The second half of the is a little harder
to get to because it's entirely random. When entering into the game, there's a chance that
you see this, a broken form of Mr. TomatoS. The experiment entry for this version informs
us that this is the original Mr. TomatoS, the real Sebastian, all the other versions that
we've seen of him are just parts of him that have broken away and evolved into their own versions,
each believing themselves to be the original. This dying version of Mr. TomatoS gives us the second
part of the code in the hopes that it'll save him. So using this combined code, we begin the
decapsulation process and we’re met by a pair of eyes inside a black void. This is
Uroborus the name that Eugene gave to his creation, the one he claims isn't an A.I.,
but rather has its own DNA. The one that he refers to as The Vessel. This thing is sentient. It talks
to us exactly as Eugene describes it, using text rather than speech. And it informs us that while
Ms. LemonS and Mr. TomatoS used him as a vessel in order to live, it forced him into an endless
coma. But now the tables have turned. By releasing him, he's now in full control, forcing them into
the endless coma. Which I suspect is what we saw happen with Lilith; the gray, creepy lemon that
we met in the absorbed ending. What it wants? It doesn't say. However, from Eugene's logs,
we can see that it was able to grow on its own. Adapt, evolve. My gut is that by encapsulating it
within the system, Eugene was able to control it, to use it for his experiments. However,
now that it's free, it can continue to grow and evolve, becoming more powerful and more dangerous.
As I've said, I suspect that there's a third game on the horizon, one that'll seem like a
simple game with a third fruity character. But as the game goes on, I think we'll see
Uroboros come in and take control, trying to absorb and destroy this third entity,
the one that is Marine. I mean, it's because of her that Uroboros exists in the first place,
forced to become a slave, a simple host for these human entities that are trying to live forever.
However, I think there's hope. Mr. TomatoS has many forms, as we all know, and as data entries
tell us, that he's not just eating any old code, but specifically he's eating code from the vessel,
from Uroboros himself. If and when this third game comes out, I suspect we're
going to have to jump between the games to get Mr. TomatoS to eat more and more of Uroboros,
eating it from the inside out. And Ms. LemonS, While she only has
the one body. Her personalities have an aversion to dying, so I don't think she's going to be going
down too easily, potentially changing realities in order to bring down Uroboros once and for all.
Maybe then all of them will be able to pass on into the afterlife, no longer in agony.
How do you like them apples? But hey, that's just a theory. A GAME THEORY! Thanks for watching.