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Julie is a murderer. In the latest Welcome Home update, there's a detail that reveals Julie's dark past, the reason she came to the neighborhood, and that no matter how hard she tries, she can't escape the truth. Hello, internet. Welcome to Game Theory, the show that feels at home anywhere in independent horror. But, as promised, I am once again settling in the Welcome Home neighborhood. Last time we did our typical ARG, reviewing the recent update, solving the puzzles and deciphering the secret videos and letters we found. We discovered that these characters we all know and love are also real people. I know, what a revelation for a
puppet show. But what I mean by that is that what we are shown as characters are actually the actors who operate our friendly neighborhood characters. We are shown a symbolic story of how the actors in this program are so absorbed in their work that they are becoming their characters. And the home, which is symbolic of the program itself, is what keeps them there, controlling them and forcing them to avoid contact with the real world. There was so much ground to cover, so much so that there was still a thread left that we never got around to pulling. We had spent a lot of time exploring the clues in Joyful Julie's house, which was now shrouded in darkness. She
was isolating herself from the world after she failed to make the black flower bloom and had a breakdown. This house led us to the latest letters and clues, but we had not yet explored Frank's house, which was now suddenly available to us . In the previous update, he had unearthed Julie's plant and was hiding it, which resulted in a meltdown. He too is now in darkness like Julie. Now, I had started to investigate this before the last episode, but when I did, I realized two things. One, it didn't really relate to anything we had talked about in the previous episode, but two, there was much more to the little things it
revealed than it initially seemed. I wanted to take my time with this and really figure out what it meant. And now, I think I know a lot more about the dark secrets of this program and how some of our neighbors are hiding from their past. So, clean your shoes on the welcome mat, loyal theorists, as we step into the dark secrets hidden inside Frank's house. Unlike Julie's house, Frank's is much more interactive. You can move between the living room, the kitchen, and the study, observing the furniture and anything else you can find. Like a gun in the closet. Children's programs were crazy back then, huh?
Obviously, something is happening. And if you go to Frank's studio, you'll find his diary. Inside there is a key you can take. And after exploring the entire ground floor, you can go upstairs, enter Frank's room and see him sleeping in bed. If you approach it and click on it, you will disappear. And your cursor is now a gray hand. Look at yourself in the mirror in Frank's room and now you will see Frank's reflection. As if we now had control of Frank. At this point, the house becomes very different. And instead of a real house with a normal design, it becomes a kind of nightmare house. Upon leaving Frank's room there is a door, but it is in grayscale. You can go downstairs and move around the room, which has no
furniture, but pictures of furniture stuck to the wall. There are a few rooms to explore here, like one with plants covering everything, or Frank's back garden with a hand-drawn sky above it. This, along with the pictures of furniture on the wall, reminds us of what we learned last time. These are not real furniture pieces or a real garden; it's a TV set. However, there is one room that is the exception. After leaving, you can return to the house and find yourself in a white room. The furniture here looks real. And more importantly, it doesn't look like the rest of the house. This looks like Frank's real room, his puppeteer's room. And there are some surprising interactions here. In the room, there is a
family portrait that is covered in black. The URL name for this image is called family portrait. As we said last time, Frank is starting to forget details of the outside world as he becomes more absorbed in his work. The family portrait crossed out in black represents that forgetting of his family, things from the outside. But the strangest thing is that when you click on certain elements, a red screen appears. There is a cracking sound, and suddenly the object has blood underneath it. I admit the room needed a bit more color, but that's not what I meant. I was thinking more of a nice millennial green or something like that. Just kidding, I hate that trend too. Anyway, I think it's time for us to go. Clicking on the
wardrobe takes you back to the back room with three doors. The central door is just a picture, but I noticed it was peeling in the top right corner. When you peel it off, it reveals a tunnel you can enter, sending you back to the main page. So, that's the basic tour of Frank's house. The strange and creepy stuff confirms a lot of what we talked about last time, but there are much darker secrets when you look closely. For example, who are we in this scenario? You might think we're just exploring Frank's room, but seeing the pendulum clock, it's clear we're someone else. The clock shows a shadow projected upon it, a shadow that is undeniably Wally Darling. Wally is the one who walks
through this house, and it gets darker when he thinks about what happens when he enters Frank's room. Frank was sleeping in bed, but when you click on him, he disappears. And the hand cursor changes from Wally's hand, which we've used throughout the website, to Frank's hand. Looking in the mirror, we can see that we now have control of Frank. In Wally's phone call at the beginning of the update, he told us: Find our weak point. Open my insides. And repair the line. He talked about how he takes control of the neighbors, and now we see a live demonstration. Wally has entered Frank's house and taken control of him. But remember, this world represents what happens in the real world through the world of
puppets. So Wally isn't physically going inside to control this human. It's about using fear and isolation to metaphorically enter them and take control. We only see it through the puppets, where Wally literally enters and moves Frank. At this point, we have explored all available rooms. However, some rooms may appear differently after multiple entries. Some are just details like different windows when going down stairs, but these variations tell another story. A much darker story about the neighbors. There is a possibility that the backyard will appear red with the shed sunken into the ground.
Looking back at the house, the upper window has black roots growing out of it. In the latest update, Frank was becoming paranoid about the black flower he had dug up and hidden in the shed, now thinking it might have moved. This variant of the shed shows us that Frank might actually have discovered something. The flower is still alive. When crawling through the tunnel to escape, there is another incredibly rare variant that can occur here. As you crawl through the tunnel, a red light appears at the end and your arrow cursor turns into a shovel. As you approach the red light, a silhouette will appear looking into the tunnel. At this point, I wanted to turn around and just pretend I didn't see anything, but when I
tried, a message appeared on the screen that said, "Bury me." And then, the face of this silhouette appears right in front of you as a short scream sounds. I love that. Yes, not scary at all. What a pleasant, welcoming, and safe franchise this is. But who the hell was he? I wanted to suspect it was a neighbor. However, when you clarify the image you can see that it has a nose, one that does not match any of the neighbors we have met so far. However, it reminded me of something else: the black flower. There is a distinctive feature of this flower, the red spiral at the top, which looks very much like the face of the startled person and their red spiral eyes.
In addition to that, there's the cursor turning into a shovel when you see the red light. This flower was unearthed by Frank when Julie couldn't make it blue. It is also worth noting that in Julie's house, where Frank's gift used to be, if you enhance the image, it reveals its own tunnel, just like Frank's. This tunnel could be connected to Frank's, linking both Julie and Frank to the burial of the flower and, therefore, to this figure. This figure is the black flower, or at least I think so, the real-world counterpart of the flower in this story. The story within the universe could be about a strange black flower that doesn't bloom, but as we've already discussed at length, what we see isn't the real story. It's just the lens through which
the story is told. This character is what the flower is supposed to represent. Julie, or whoever manipulates Julie, did something she feared others would discover, and Frank helped cover it up. And I think I know exactly what that something is, and it's all thanks to another one of the concept images from Welcome Home. Welcome Home creator Clown posted a lot of concept art of the characters and world of Welcome Home on his Tumblr before the project came to fruition. We've used some of these images in the past, like these of Wally, which alerted us to the idea that this could be a cult. Note the cross-shaped cufflinks and Baphomet's "as above, so below" pose, a phrase that later appeared within the ARG. Now, to
be clear, I know that Clown has previously stated that these images are not canon in Welcome Home. However, as time has passed, these images have begun to play a role in the wider story. This image we used of Frank in the past appeared in the Playfellow exhibition within the universe, for example. So, with that in mind, take a closer look at this picture of Julie. In it, we see her sitting in a field of flowers, and right behind her is a black figure with disheveled hair and a shovel dripping something. For me, there are too many connections here to ignore between this unknown silhouette and the character who causes the scares we 've been talking about. But those features, the
hunched body, the frizzy hair, and the blood dripping from the shovel, it's hard to deny that he looks like someone who has been murdered. If we add the warning when trying to escape the red light that says "Bury me" and the fact that Frank's objects have blood underneath when clicked, it becomes clear that the incident Julie is hiding is a murder. Julie killed someone and covered it up with Frank's help. But the craziest thing is that I can not only tell you that this happened, but when it happened and why it's only now becoming a problem. I said earlier that the odds of this encounter in the red tunnel were extremely rare, and I mean it. When reviewing the source code of this page, there is a one
in 1,965 chance of the red tunnel appearing. It's a very low probability, but the number is also strangely specific. I understand wanting to make the number very high, but if you wanted a low probability, wouldn't you have put 1 in 1,000 or perhaps 1 in 2,000? You know, a round number. Why choose that specific number? Because 1,965 is not just a probability value, it's a year. 1965 is the year the murder occurred, and that is why that probability value is assigned to the corpse . At first, I wondered if this murder could have occurred during the early stages of production of the television show Welcome Home. Julie killed a member of the team and tried to cover it up, which is why the show mysteriously went off the air
a few years later and why we see all this happening now within the show's storyline. Someone had discovered the truth. But the dates just didn't add up for me. We know that the first episode of Welcome Home aired in October 1969, four years after the 1965 date. Now, Lee will tell you that it takes a long time to develop a show to the point of airing it, but four years is excessive, especially in the 1960s. Although, if you're tired of all your shows taking so long to come out, you can always check out Theoryverse. We create new programs all the damn time. In fact, we've just started launching our next batch of programs and I've had a lot of fun preparing some of them. Like our board game show, are you already bored?
Our unique D&D game, TPK. If you understand that reference, then you know you're in for a wild ride. Speaking of travel, there's Santi's new interview show, The Ride, which, despite involving Santi, I really loved being a part of. It was fun sitting down with a friend and talking about life, religion, parenthood, you know, the typical lighthearted chat. Plus, we have more episodes of Amy Plays Inside a Theory and Exclusive Theories. Oh, and we currently have a limited-time offer where you get 1 month free on our annual armchair theory plan. Scan the QR code on screen for more details. But the point is that programs shouldn't take 4 years to develop. A great example of this is Joan Ganz Cooney, creator of Sesame Street.
They produced a study in 1966 examining the potential uses of television in preschool education, and two years later, Cooney and Lloyd Morrisett created the Children's Television Workshop, which debuted its first program, Sesame Street, on November 10, 1969. From conception to broadcast, it took Joan three years, a full year less than the four years we've been talking about. But, in addition to that, we know that Julie was only hired as talent by Playfellow Workshop, which means that the company name had already been created, which in the case of Sesame Street happened only a year before the first episode aired. This means that the 1965 incident was something that happened before Welcome Home began, even before Julie was
hired. This sheds a completely new light on Julie's character. Thanks to the letters from last time, we know that the real Julie left home quite abruptly to pursue a new opportunity, just like her character Julie Joyful on the show. Even when the Joyful ask Julie to return home, she seems strangely reluctant. Julie, when are you finally going to join our band? That sounds awful. Oh no, Frank's sounds are waking up. Yes, hang up the phone. Frank, hang up. This is why Julie has been trying to hide from her mistake, from her murder. In the secret video " Regard" about how she met Frank, although the details seem to be confusing for her.
He fell into my tunnel from above. She also had a large basket of fruit. I think he came to say hello. Was he angry? I don't think he was. I think he said to me, "Are you new here? I'm new too. My name is Frank." I think he knew I was scared. He told me a really corny joke and I laughed. When I first saw it, I assumed it was Julie forgetting things or becoming paranoid. But there's something that happens at the end that, with all this new information about Julie hiding from her past, now makes sense. At the end of the video, we hear Wally say: Did all that really happen, Julie? Wally is questioning Julie's story about meeting Frank for the first time, because they didn't meet during the production of the show.
Julie's incident with this shovel character happened 4 years before Welcome Home aired, before she was even asked to join the show. But based on the symbolism and the secret videos, and again, the blood on his belongings in his house, Frank is an accomplice in Julie's murder. He hid the black flower, a symbol that he helped conceal the corpse. Frank was there in 1965 with Julie, but they covered up that fact to prevent their dark secret from coming to light. But Wally makes it clear that they can't. The way he says, "Did all that really happen, Julie?" It doesn't sound like an innocent question like the ones he usually asks. It sounds more accusatory. Is that really how you met Frank?
Because he knows the truth. And this dark secret is how Wally and Home are taking control. This is Julie's weak point. And in the real-world story, it shows us that someone who runs the television program knows about Julie's past. They know what she did and use it to their advantage to keep her on the show and prevent her from leaving, preventing her, like the other actors, from having a life outside the show, isolating them from the world. Julie is now between a rock and a hard place. She is trapped in Home's neighborhood. She is always being watched, but she cannot return home either, because she cannot risk the truth coming out. To the point that she is now digging a hole in her house
looking for a new way out of this nightmare, only to discover that what she is trying to escape from is down there with her. The only question I have left is, who is Wally? If all puppets are stand-ins for puppeteers and Home represents the show itself, then who does Wally specifically represent? The original creator that we actually theorize is Barnaby. And unlike any other character who joined the neighborhood, including Barnaby, Wally has simply always been there. Who in the show's production would have so much knowledge, so much power, so much obsession as to want to control their fellow cast members, only to realize their mistake years later and reveal the truth to us? I'm not sure yet, but I'm sure we'll find out soon in future
updates. Meanwhile, theorists, remember that it's all just a theory-a game theory! Thanks for watching. World premiere on Game Theory. We were wrong about Welcome Home.
