Hello Internet!
Welcome to Game Theory, the show that thinks that you are just the most.
And I am just the most excited because after three long months,
we finally have ourselves an update to Welcome Home; the retro website
that's brimming with beautiful artwork and sinister secwe...
secwets.
The retro website that's brimming with beautiful artwork and sinister secrets.
When we covered this project back in May,
I was blown away by how impressive this was.
From the fantastic character designs to the deeply unsettled world building,
Clown, the project's creator, has crafted something that's really special here.
A clever story about an old seventies TV edutainment show starring puppets
that was mysteriously taken off the air.
huh, I’m beginning to notice a trend with all these online horror projects lately.
Nah, it's probably nothing.
The show itself revolved around a cast of quirky puppets, the joyful Julie,
the clumsy Poppy, the rambunctious Sally, the reliable Eddie, the friendly Howdy,
the grumpy Frank, the streetwise Barnaby and of course, the lead, Wally Darling.
Basically what you get
when you throw Mister Rogers, Bob Ross and Elmo into a blender.
The show itself, as we can learn through the website, would basically flow
like your typical kids
program, Wally would take the audience around the neighborhood and learn
different life lessons alongside his friends.
It would eventually disappear from the airwaves,
with the only remains being gathered up and put back together on this
very site by a group known as the Welcome Home Restoration Project.
But of course, like most things
that you find on the Internet, not everything is as it first appears.
In my last video, I went through the website
and uncovered its many secrets, from messages hiding inside of Wally’s
drawings to hidden images that revealed Welcome Home
to Be a cult, with several images
showing Wally in a position of power as the cult leader all built to worship
some Cthulhu like entity, the home itself, Wally's Sentient House.
In that video, I concluded that
Wally was trying to reawaken home, sending the restoration project
all these letters and drawings in the hopes that they would gather people
into the fandom for their eventual indoctrination.
And before the update, that's exactly what it looked like
with the Restoration Project Preparing a Welcome Home exhibition
that was set for the near future.
But soon after my theory came out, the website went dark, disappeared
completely.
That was until July, when the Welcome Home website sprung back to life
with a massive update.
And I do mean massive.
We got more than just some cute new pictures and hidden codes this time.
We've got audio files from the show, talk show interviews, merchandise and
oh yeah, giant eyes watching our every move.
Those eyes belong to Wally and now he's watching us more closely than ever.
But the joke's on you, Wally.
I've already dug through every corner of this thing,
and I know exactly how you plan to gather more followers.
I also know that one of your
precious flock, one of your puppet friends there, is waiting in the wings
to betray you.
So join us.
Loyal theorists, join us. Join us.
Join us JOIN US.
As we pull back the curtain and reveal the difference between Puppet and master.
Let's just start with the big cliffhanger
from the previous theory, the upcoming exhibition for Welcome Home.
This event was a chance to share the history of the show
with the world, but from the website's newsletter,
it definitely seemed like something a lot more sinister.
It read as follows, quote, “Together we will get it out.
We will get everything out.
You will see as we do, neighbor.” I’m just going to go and leave
that invitation on read.
Thank you very much.
As I already mentioned, I suspected that this event
was meant to gather people together to make them part of Wally's cult.
So imagine
my surprise when on the updated website I saw that there was a brand new page
dedicated to that very exhibition and nothing really happened.
Here I was expecting images of destroyed displays, news articles
of a disaster, maybe a message written on a wall in blood.
That’s not too much for a guy to ask, right?
But instead
all I saw were vinyl records, an activity worksheet, a mock up Wally puppet.
I was wrong.
The most exciting thing on there was the merch.
Merch that was almost as exciting as our new merch over on Theorywear.com,
which includes a color changing t shirt activated by your body heat,
Game Theory leggings with sleek green piping and a phone pocket.
And of course, the villainous Ourple jacket.
And if you want items that are really hot, well then check out the heat
map collection.
Because we're nerds and we decided that thermal
imaging patterns would be really awesome to put on our clothes.
They're available right now
via the link down in the description or on screen right now.
So go ahead, click them and grab them before they sell out.
I promise you, you won't be indoctrinated into a cult if you touch them.
I promise.
No, something had to be off on this website.
The main thing on the page was a short interview
with the mysterious museum curator, simply known as the Question Answerer.
As they said on the exhibition page, quote, “I still have so many questions
to answer here in the world of Welcome Home.” You and me both there QA,
you and me both.
Which means that it's time to do what you always do when you're stuck
and need answers in an ARG, click anything and everything on the screen.
And sure enough, my gut and brute force was right.
There was actually something hidden here on the page.
If you click the word ‘answer’ from the Question Answerer quote
I just read, you're taken to a page with a single image of a notebook.
On this notebook
we see someone has been trying over and over again to find a password.
But a password for what? Well, to find out.
All you have to do is click the image, revealing a red safe with keys
that represent the various characters from the series.
Clicking again takes us to a blank guest area that requests a password.
According to the notebook, the code is going to be five letters
and go figure
those worksheets from the exhibition also have five questions, with each answer
being one of the residents of Home lining up with the keys on the safe.
Who's the funniest neighbor?
Has to be the residential jokester, Barnaby.
Who shines brighter than any star?
Sally Starlet. Who’s the biggest chicken?
Our knock of Big Bird Poppy.
Which neighbor speaks to flowers?
According to the character profiles, it's Julie.
And who's your best friend?
Well, that one there has to be our main character, Wally.
And if we take the first letter from each answer B, S, P, J and W and type
all that in, we're rewarded with the staff only page.
And before I show it to you, let me just say that
there is so much going on here.
It is going to burst your theorist brain.
The page isn't like anything we've seen before.
There's a bunch of text, but it's all it's strange angles.
The title has been copied so many times it's almost illegible.
There's even some redacted text thrown in here for good measure.
There's also a new group of photos that don't seem nearly as upbeat
as the main site.
And there we have it, my bloody walls.
I can finally rest easy.
But really the image that grabbed my eye here was this one: An image
of art supplies with a couple of no touching signs sticking out of the box.
Hey, you don't tell me what I do or do not do sign!
But in all seriousness, look at the note that's sitting on top of the pile of latex
gloves: “Put on gloves before handling any art.
Call me if we run out!!!” Those signs there aren't for visitors, they’re
for the staff. And it's important.
I mean, you're not just writing four exclamation points there for no reason.
In a later image, we find an email warning staff
about a strange substance that's growing on the artwork.
Quote, “If a substance begins to grow on anything delivered, please
place it back in the box it was shipped in and return it to us at your leisure.
If you or anyone in your team experiences nausea, dizziness or fatigue,
please don't be alarmed.” Yeah,
because when I touch something that suddenly makes me sick,
my first response is clearly going to be, This is totally fine.
We can actually see the substance on the first image with the glove box.
One of the gloves has actually been used and is covered with a paint like goop,
which matches what we see in the art pieces from the About Us page.
The artwork is being delivered like this and whatever's on it is not good for you.
It seems connected to this line of secret text from the website's original
FAQ page, quote, “When I unwrapped the first letter, I felt it.
I heard it. Open. Open. Open. I want it out.
I'm going to get it out.” It's not just making people sick, it's
literally giving Wally an entry point.
It seems that once you touch the paint,
he can speak to you, indoctrinate you, brainwash you.
In fact, it now appears to be happening to someone on the staff only page.
Here's the quote.
“I had a dream when I began working on the Playfellow exhibition.
Wally Darling
was sitting at the foot of my bed with a rotary phone in front of him,
ringing away.
It looked just like the little toy phone we were restoring for the exhibit.
It kept ringing.
Wally stared at me like he was waiting for me to pick up the phone.
Just staring, unblinking.
The phone ringing and ringing.
I couldn't move.
I couldn't figure out how to move and pick up the phone.
He kept waiting. I couldn't pick up the phone.
I keep getting phone calls, now.
Or at least, I assume that's what's happening.
I keep hearing it ringing.
All day, sometimes.
I check my phone and there's no new messages.”
The writer is being driven mad by the same substance.
Hearing the call, the call of Wally and his cult of Home.
Just like you should be hearing the call, my call of hitting that subscribe button.
Just click the button to answer the phone in the next 5 seconds
to make that ringing stop, please, please make the ringing stop.
Thanks. You're just the most.
Now let’s figure out what's going on with this note.
The note goes on to talk about how they tore up the workspace
to find the ringing and that they poured over every recovery of the Welcome Home
Restoration Project has given me access to including their website.
Given that they're speaking
about the organization in the third person and they seem to be the one responsible
for all the mess that we see backstage of the exhibit.
It leads me to believe that this is the person put in charge
of the whole thing, the Question Answerer a professional exhibitor and museum
curator who believes in our happy home just as much as we do.
I actually saw their name pop up in the old website
when I was doing my previous theory,
but we didn't get much detail about them, so I kind of left them alone.
But now they seem to be playing a much more important role in the story,
especially as it was their quote that led us to the staff page in the first place.
The QA has been the one handling the artifacts.
They've been getting everything
set up, and in so doing, they have fallen victim to Wally's trap.
What they've also done is
tell us where we need to look next to keep our quest going.
The Question Answerer keeps referring to a telephone that Wally’s holding,
one that they can hear, but they dismiss the toy phone in the exhibit, quote, “All
that was there were the toys for the exhibit,
and obviously those couldn't be ringing.” But I'm never quite so quick to dismiss
any evidence that feels so overtly obvious.
The telephone is prominently displayed at the exhibition as official merchandise
for the Welcome Home show, and given there's now
a merchandise page on the website, it felt like the best place to go next.
The merchandise
page is full of holiday cards, vinyl records, cereals and coloring books.
But the biggest and most important thing
they present to us right at the top of the page is the rotary phone.
In fact, you can actually interact with this toy on the website.
Pressing the buttons allows you to hear responses from the colorful cast
of Welcome Home, just as you'd expect from a similar phone toy.
Except something isn't quite adding up.
Despite the restoration project bringing the phone back to its original
working condition, there seem to be some discrepancies between what we see
and what the packaging tells us we should be seeing.
The box tells us that there should be 16 built in conversations in this thing.
But that's spread across ten buttons,
two of which seem to be missing and with one that's actively glitching.
The remaining seven only have one response and they don't even remotely match
what's said on the box.
Which means that whatever phone they have, it is not the phone that we see
on the box.
Additionally, the Wally button doesn't have a play function.
The website says his button has a glitch and has been taken offline.
But as with most things involving Wally, things aren't exactly as they seem.
If you click on the button anyway, you can definitely hear Wally's dialog.
But while all the others are responding
awkwardly to a prank phone call, Wally's is...
Well, Wally's is a bit different.
It isn't an innocent prerecorded conversation for a toy phone.
This is targeted and it's creepy.
While all the others are responding to a prank call.
Wally knows that we're there, and he speaks directly to us.
Not about the show. To us, about us.
He's planning something, something big.
And he needs his followers to keep up appearances until the time's right.
This toy allows
Wally to speak to his new followers directly, a shepherd to his flock,
informing them of the work that's still to come.
And while what he has in store is still unknown,
he's still finding ways of keeping us busy.
Before this update,
one of the ways Wally communicated to us was through drawings in a guest book.
By opening those up in a separate tab, we'd find hidden messages
like, “I can hear you, neighbor.”
It was unsettling, to be sure, but now he's back at it again.
Only this time he's doing it across the entire website.
When you visit certain pages, you'll watch as Wally begins to draw
something on the page before your very eyes.
Clicking on each of these newly formed drawings takes you to an audio file, each
one directly from Wally.
Once you find all the audio files, you can actually start to see a pattern.
The pages the files are from all have single word titles like ‘soon’, ‘i’
and ‘neighbor’.
At first this might seem random,
but if you try to rearrange them, you can form the sentence.
I will help you understand, neighbor, I will find a way soon.
Which is super cool on its own,
but it doesn't even stop there, because when you play the audio
clips in the same order, they create one side
of a conversation.
This conversation feels like it's someone he's already converted, someone
who's waiting to hear from him again, who desires to be a part of home.
So who is he talking to?
Well, it matches quite nicely
with the note left behind by the Question Answerer on the staff only page.
And suddenly it becomes clear why he’s desperate
for the Question Answerer’s attention.
Wally might be able to draw over the website,
but to spread to more people, to become more powerful,
Wally needs to be able to see.
The Welcome Home Restoration Project tried to stop Wally
in his influence by shutting down the guest book in this latest update.
But underneath that news
update is another post not dated that says, quote, “So many guest signatures...
So many of them are trying to communicate. What are you telling me for?
Do you think I can answer? What are you trying to do to me?
I'm closing that guest book, I'm not playing this game anymore.
The ringing is enough.” It's a reluctant follower.
It's the Question Answerer.
These eyes everywhere across the site will allow Wally to see into the real world
and will help him interact with people on the other side.
And the bad news is, it's working.
As we see all over the behind the scenes photos on the staff only page.
One of the notes tells us about using a black light
on all artwork and for staff to take photos of what they find.
Doing this reveals the drawings of eyes, spirals, telephones, phrases
like the phone is ringing, all things that we've fairly well covered at this point.
But how can we be sure that this is Wally's doing and not someone else?
Well, on the emails
requesting the five letter password that we found earlier,
the email response is simply the worksheet.
The email is to the Question Answerer and the person it was sent
to is from part of the WHRP but their name’s redacted.
The Question Answerer prints out these pages
after receiving the emails, but under the blacklight written
underneath everything we find the identity of the sender.
Wally Darling.
Wally is signing in invisible ink.
He's sending us down rabbit holes.
He's providing letters, emails and now passwords to a safe
so that the WHRP can have more conversations with him.
The puppet has become the master.
However, while it might be easy to jump on the whole Wally is evil bandwagon.
I believe that he may actually be just as much of a puppet as anyone else
in this thing.
In the last theory, I mentioned that there were two signatures
from Wally in the guest book: One that look normal, “You're looking for me.
Silly.
Silly.” And another that felt a bit more chaotic, “You won't write back.”
This led me to believe
that there may be two versions of Wally wandering around one good and one evil.
This update seems to be pointing us in a similar direction.
In the email that was sent by WHRP
that talks about the substance causing nausea, dizziness and fatigue.
We find a note written in invisible ink that says, I am so sorry.
Wally's apologizing?
But isn't this exactly what he wants?
To brainwash others to see as he does?
It doesn't make a lot of sense unless there are two versions of Wally.
On the original website, there was a secret page
that showed Wally hiding in shadows, followed by the text, “I can't see you.
Do you see me?”
In one of the audio clips we found this time, he says:
Wally, being able to see or not see is one of the big recurring phrases
across the website.
So how come he suddenly breaks mid-conversation
and then all of a sudden is struggling to speak
and says that he can't see anything?
Maybe it's not that there are two Wally's, but rather one Wally
with two different sides inside of him.
Eyes have
always been used to represent Wally, but they've often been accompanied by spirals.
We see them throughout the black light images,
but there was also a spiral beneath home on the old website.
Well, if we look at that spiral now, it's
grown, it's bigger, and now there's an eye inside of that spiral.
The So Below page now reveals a spiral that when clicked gives us
a recording of home talking in noise,
those noises can actually be translated from Morse code to say: “hello”.
Spirals are the signature of home,
eyes are the signature for Wally and now they're becoming one and the same.
They're mixing with each other.
Home is controlling Wally.
On page six of the guestbook we see Wally's written his name.
But if you open the image in a new tab,
the image is called ‘our name’; ‘our’ as in plural ownership.
Two beings inhabiting one body, Wally and home, which explains
why Wally contradicts himself mid-sentence.
It's his good half, his real half fighting back,
trapped inside his own body, unable to see, barely able to communicate.
But with what time he has, he's
begging us to stay quiet, to not fall for Home’s tricks.
And he's not the only one that feels trapped here either.
There appears to be someone else onto Wally’s schemes,
someone who's working from the inside undercover,
trying to track down the cults behavior and bring the whole operation down.
And that, my friends, is going to have to wait till next time.
I know. I'm sorry.
This is such a huge update.
I haven't even gotten a chance to talk about the bugs crawling
across the site or the weird videos of rotten fruit that you can find.
Yeah, this thing starts getting real weird from this point forward,
so make sure you hit that subscribe button so you don't miss the follow up theory
when it comes out in about a week or two, I would say.
One last reminder to check out the latest Theorywear which is just the most.
And as always in the meantime, remember, it's just a theory.
A GAME THEORY!
Thanks for watching.
And hey, if you want to check out our first video on Welcome Home.
Rub up on that video you see on screen left.
Or if you prefer another spooky game with a lot of deep lore.
On the right, you'll find the beginning of our series on Petscop, the creepiest
PlayStation game you'll never play.