Project Lunky and The Void Files (We Are So Back?!?)
Hello, theorists!! It has been a minute since we last had a proper big analysis post, hasn't it? Over a year now, in fact! There have been a couple tidbits we have missed in the past couple 3 Scary Games videos (due to real life time constraints!), but it seems those have all been little teasers all leading to this. Years of waiting (and years of effort on Lixian and the crew's parts!!) and speculating have seemed to come with the biggest thing this story has seen since the initial Lunky takeover and the 60's era of 3 Scary Games.
A horror roguelite set in the Plier Corporation. Hidden secrets. Access to The Void Files and the connections and plot points it maps - some that even seem to call back to speculations we've made on this very blog.
(Additionally, this is going to serve as a debriefing of the story thus far as we cover the game, basically going through and stitching up the timeline for those who are confused or who weren't there before. Our prior organization for our posts in retrospect are extremely dated and might have left some folks in the dark. This post hopes to clear up that stuff and tie it all up with all the new stuff we've gotten, along with our analysis on the way. Any underlined words you see will be links to either past explanations of videos or the videos themselves for context!)
Let's jump in again!
We begin the game with a string of streetlamps that we follow through a dark void. If this looks familiar, it's because we have seen this in another Lixian game - his adaptation of DAMIEN.
This serves as the sort of "inbetween" place in the story dimension, as it was in places like where Damien fell down into the lake in the original as well as his dreams. It also seems to be a nod to us of who's speaking to us now - though it seems pretty clear through the red text and the voice acting by Pamela Horton that this is Celine.
She calls us the Conduit, and tells us to pick up the Warp Crystal on the ground. But before she can say what she wants us to do with it, we are suddenly thrust into The Void, where we see the flashing neon sign of the Plier Corporation - though it seems to be called "M Labs" now, the change of which has been addressed in 3 Scary Games 107. It's unclear whether this change was for narrative purposes or meta logo changes as the game went through development. (According to Lixian, this game took quite a lot of time and went through a lot of changes, which would make sense!)
Going into the lab to see what's on the slab, we find Lixian, who is surprised to see us and tells us to get out. The scratches on his face are the same as the ones we see here AND the way that he talks to us here is very remeniscent of this teaser here, which makes this game the thing that it was teasing and confirms that this has happened after Lixian was sent into the void by the Spider Mark (which we'll touch on later).
We are met with a bombardment of Lunkies split in half and over the intercom, we hear a voice, and it seems pretty clear through the red text and the voice acting by Pamela Horton that this is Ce- hey, wait a minute, this isn't Celine! She remarks that she doesn't know who we think we are even though Celine remarked to us "it's you" in the beginning of the game, her tone is colder, and in future notes, we see her name is "Dr. Cline" - which is eerily close, but no cigar.
So what's going on here? Well, here's my theory.
We know because of the way the Warfstache Clicker game was set up (explained here), Darkiplier already exists. That would make the Celine we hear at the beginning some form of Darkiplier (which would make sense as to how they know about the crystal, too). And if we are going off of the logic that "this story isn't canon to WKM, but WKM is canon to this story" as seen by looping the end of Damien and the existence of Warfstache, there has been one other unresolved instance regarding Celine in the 3rd chapter of WKM. Remember this?
This has never really been resolved and it seems like Lixian might be using this for his story.
That's right - I think that because of the eldritch associations and the similar named, Dr. Cline is the Entity inside Celine's body. The fact that she's called "the Director", someone who famously leads Actors, feels like more truth to that fact.
And she doesn't seem too pleased with us coming in like this.
Fortunately, we're able to escape with help from the crystal, and we run into Warfstache, who helps us get locked and loaded for our trip down into the corporation.
From here is where the roguelike truly begins, and the gameplay takes up most of our attention. But let's go through the elements of the game that stuck out to us as we progress and what we can glean from them!
Starting with The Hall!
The shop area where you interact with Warfstache has some interesting details within it. First off, we've seen this big door before from the Warfstache Clicker game, as well as Warfcoin!
Additionally, the pictures on the wall - they're all stills from DAMIEN.
And one thing of note that Warfstache says in a dialogue about them is "These paintings... are they memories, or something else?" I wonder what this means.
The portal that opens up also has some color similarities to the one we've seen before here and here.
Lastly, one thing I find interesting is how Warfstache has been stuck in here, and how the exit door just won't open, just like in the Clicker game. There are a lot of parallels between these two that are quite odd, and suggest that Warfstache is trapped. "One day, we'll get out of here," he says. Keep that in mind.
Now, let's get into the Labs themselves. Along with the strange nature of the building being in the middle of the void, is interesting to note the anomalies as not just a game mechanic, but as a facet of the world, ESPECIALLY Liminal, which changes the entire environment. Time and space shift in this place, it seems, just like the story dimension.
Scattered across the facilities, we find notes, chalkboards, and dead folks, which paint a picture of what has happened - they have been trying to clone Lunky as a more perfect and it seems docile specimen, with Cline frustrated in Lunky's tendencies in repeating the word "hole" and the short temper and mangled form of the Split Lunkies. They seem to be using DNA from the original while adding...something else scratched out. It's also clear that Lixian is not wanted on these premises, which further establishes the need to replace him with a "perfect editor" for good. However, Lunky unfortunately escaped, controlling all the clones with him, and seemed to spread some kind of virus. We also see cryopods, which call back to the Longeyed teaser.
Getting through to the Liminal door offers us one more letter, however, which gives us some insights and some questions.
Cline talks about a mysterious "he" who came back "just in time" to trap Lunky in another dimension with a locked door (the one we open up to fight in the boss level), and threw Damien's axe in there too (bittersweetly, which is interesting). Who is this mysterious person? It couldn't be Lixian, could it? Certainly not Damien? Could it be the Eldritchplier we've heard tell about? And what does she mean by the "ideal subject"? Let's keep searching and find out.
Getting into the First Ending, we of course get into the final boss battle with Reborn Lunky, which not only parallels the original "he escaped" video with the circle of flames and the way Lunky attacks, but this seems to be reminiscent of when Lunky was resurrected in #69 (nice).
After that, we finally do the thing and find Darkiplier's axe thrown in by that mysterious "he" (yes, I know it says Damien's axe, but Celine's the one who cleaved Actor in half with that thing)!! ...only to have Lunky attack us, reunite briefly with Lixian who said that "it worked" before getting yeeted off a cliff into the darkness.
Despite our apparent demise, it seems like we set out to what Lixian told us to do! We found the axe and helped him out! Now he can battle Lunky and set things right!
But why do things still feel... unresolved?
Well, let's get into that Secret Ending, shall we?
We don't just get a third Cline page and a bundle of teeth for our troubles, oh no! Not only do we get the clues that finally, officially gives us the password to open up The Void Files website we talked about prior (and you can see how to get in in this post), we also get a little Warfstache dialogue after we do the first ending.
After a little dry wit commentating on where his Sidekick might be, he hears the Exit door that he previously couldn't open... open.
And when Warfstache sees who it is, he responds (with a slower and lower pitched sound bite), "...You."
Excuse me?
Who on earth would give Wilford such an uncharacteristic reaction like this? Lixian? Darkiplier? Or maybe...
An interesting detail we noticed that of all the DAMIEN stills to put over the exit door of the Hall, the one that's there is the picture of Celine's body floating in the water.
Could it be Dr. Cline, if we're going off of our above speculation? And if so, why?
And somehow, we're not even done with the lore drops!!
Because after a year of waiting, The Void Files is finally open for business!
We are greeted with an unlisted Youtube video by a figure in shadow (who we can assume from the events he describes, files on the site, and the voice is Lixian) who seems to be broadcasting from the time in between the beginning and the end of the game, saying that after he got chased by the Lunkies, he found himself in a room. He's seen and found a lot of Files, and he's passing the savings directly to us!!
The following files are very interesting, and confirm a lot of the timeline we previously saw in the 3SG videos, which you can see here. (Only 30 images per Tumblr post, apparently, so big thanks to @/rivtictics for posting those - or you could just look at the void files website yourself).
Lixian found Damien's axe and felt himself become more dangerous and powerful because of it (which we erroneously chalked up to being some kind of demonic possession prior) after he killed Lunky, came across strange creatures that he defeated with the axe - all but one, who dragged him off into the void and found him face to face with the Plier Corporation.
Strangely, he keeps mentioning a "he" in bold, saying that he "lied" to him and asserted that he had to capture Lunky, that it was "us or him". This "he" created the Labs to clone Lunky, starting with the creatures we had seen Lunky defeat - ones like the spider Mark, which we now see in the files! Given that one of the stats regards "Hunting Utility", it definitely seems like the events of #69 (figures the funny number 3 Scary Games is so lore heavy) were an early visualization of what was to come - these monsters, being tested by the EldritchPlier to find and trap Lixian so they could swap him out with the perfect Lunky.
But who is this "he" we keep hearing about? Who is the Eldritchplier?
Well, we also get a couple of redacted team bios, and along with Dr. Cline's, we get... an M, you say. In red, you say. ...and the Void Files password has "snakes" in it??
Were we actually right in a way about Actor making Lunky years ago????
Ok, ok, let's calm down, this is a LOT and while it certainly threads things up from the story thus far, it certainly still leaves a lot of questions.
Why is the axe so special? Why is Warfstache trapped, and what happened with who he saw? If this is the Actor and the Entity behind all this (at least in this non canon universe thing Lixian has made), what is their gain? What does Lixian know about the events of WKM, and why was he lied to? Where is Darkiplier in all of this, and why is the crystal so important?? Additionally, given all the parallels to this and the Warfstache game, is this some kind of time loop or curse or just another product of how things in the Markiplier universe echo through other parts of it?
Well, it seems like we're going to get answers to these questions if this keeps up, as Lixian tells us to "keep our eyes peeled" and that he'll "stay in touch". The Void Files video is called Video 1, so there seems to be more coming.
Additionally, since he is trapped in this room after he gets chased by the Lunkies, this is before the end of the game where we see him very much not in the room in the void. It seems like we have the beginning and end of everything, but the middle still needs to be filled in.
Honestly critiquing, it's strange to go about it in this roundabout way (why not just include everything in the game with the void files leading up to it, for clarity's sake?) but considering the way this series has already been formatted and the busy schedule Lixian has had with work, I can understand it. Lixian and his team seem to be strongest at visuals and game dev as opposed to the story of the whole thing. Though we have gone through and picked apart every crumb of story we can from these little snippets, even we know that it isnt the strongest, which is totally ok! I am interested to see how this route continues for whatever shape the story goes into - as long as no new elements are added, this feels like a good foundation for the beginning of this ARG direction and I hope it's a springboard for Lixian to improve even more. Project Lunky as a game in and of itself is a very enjoyable experience, and a massive step up that's really awesome to see. What a beast of a game!!!
Oh, and one more thing - there is one detail we haven't seemed to have cracked yet, and I'm not sure if it's even plot relevant, but I wanted to share here in case any of you guys with better monitors can figure it out. In the vending machines, on the back of the blue wrapper containers, is a QR code. No clue why it's there, but we couldn't seem to be able to scan it on our end. Is this anything? Let us know if you're able to find out on a playthrough.
...is that everything? Did we make it? Phew... I haven't written something this long for this blog in a WHILE, haha. (thank goodness for spring break!)
What an wild ride these past few days have been. I wanna give a massive thank you to everyone who's still been following us and keeping up with all this stuff even when we haven't, and those who have just jumped on this crazy bandwagon of ours and are spreading their thoughts, art, and love! I started this blog with a few online friends when I was a teen and internet noob, and it's wild to see how much things have changed since then. This whole update has felt like a blast from the past and a reminder of how much I and the creators I like have grown as artists, and I think that's really neat.
We'll see you whereever this journey takes us next, theorists. Verum invenire!
