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What is the true story of Since its release, fans have been speculating about what the true lore of this cryptic game actually is. But, by putting all the clues together from the animals to the ending, and by diving into all of the symbolism, the dark truth is revealed. Hello internet. Welcome to Game Theory, the show that's flocked to this new game as soon as it found out it existed. Re: Animal. Why? Because this game is made by the same studio behind the first two Little Nightmares games, Tarsier. And when this game released a few weeks ago, people were not disappointed by this thriller co-op game. It's essentially the spiritual successor everyone wanted, rather than what Little Nightmares 3
ended up being. But, just like the Little Nightmares games, there is danger, suspense, and of course, lore. With barely any lines of dialogue and a lot of clues hidden from plain sight, the game's story is a mystery from beginning to end. Who are these kids? What happened to them? And why, oh why am I being chased by a giant demon pelican? DLC is said to reveal more of the story, but the first chapter isn't releasing until July. But, fear not, friends, because the game we currently have actually gives us everything we need to figure out the true story behind Re: Animal and the dark secret these children are hiding. So, put on your creepy collectible masks, theorists, as we travel through the hellish nightmare
of Re: Animal. The game starts out looking up from a well with four silhouettes looking in. As the fifth appears, the screen turns red and it cuts to one of our playable characters in a boat. He's wearing a bag on his head with a rope tied around his neck. As he moves through the vast space of water, the boy stops and finds a body in the water. He pulls the body in, and as she comes to, she attacks the boy, trying to strangle him. They break up the fight and talk. I thought you were dead. Where are the others? I don't know. Sounds like we have our objective for the game. And so, we do just that, slowly finding our friends Hood, Bandage, and Bucket. Bet you could guess where they got those names from. I mean,
our main characters are literally called The Boy and The Girl, so maybe those in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. As we go about finding them, we explore more and more of this weird and mysterious world. We witness suits of human flesh come to life. A man who wears said skin suit and can apparently teleport through dead bodies. Okay, but as we escape from this horrifying man, we fall off a cliff and suddenly we're looking inside the well once again with a dead lamb at the bottom that begins to contort and the screen once again goes red. Turns out this appears to be a vision from the girl. She regains consciousness and so our journey continues. Now across a flooded city full of sea mines, a demon pelican, and
a giant pig. After finding our friend amongst all of this, we sit at a bus stop and have another conversation. Do you know why we're here? No idea. Suddenly, the girl begins convulsing. The screen turns red and we once again see the lamb at the bottom of the well, which grows into a fully grown sheep. But, no time to worry about that because the school bus is here. Maybe the next part will be more friendly. It won't. We arrive at a large building. Always hated that place. According to the website, these guys are orphans. So, what we're looking at is the orphanage where they met. Here we find a bunch of candles and statues
lying around, some strange dust children, and a giant human spider because spiders weren't creepy enough already. Of course, we defeat it, gang climb into a military truck, and we have another conversation. You know where this is going, right? Girl gags, screen goes red. Oh, look, here's the sheep except it's got humanoid limbs now and it's quite big and it's trying to climb out of the well. More strange creatures await us on the other side like this giant horse skeleton and a giant whale missing an eye. We solve the puzzles, reap the rewards of our actions. The girl has yet another vision. But, this time as the screen turns red, the girl becomes unable to stand. We see the sheep climbing out of the well and as it
does, a sheep climbs out of the girl's mouth. Head up, out then in, I guess. Well, for her at least. The sheep violently chases down the children through the trenches and war torn buildings picking them off one by one, growing larger each time it does. Finally, it eats the girl. But, this isn't the end. Oh, no. Once we're inside, we see four orphans cut their hands onto an object. The girl hears her friends call to her as they enter a shed. The girl finds a circle of rabbits drawn on the floor with a dead rabbit to the side. Then, the shed door is shut, and she is knocked unconscious. We then see the four orphans dragging the girl in a body bag towards the well.
Sheep standing on their hind legs approach the children and cry out as everything turns red. The four look down the well like they did at the start of the game. Now, with the girl at the bottom. Suddenly, she is lifted up and is reanimated before cutting to credits. The game ends on an image of the well as water rises up to the surface, bringing the girl's body with it. Okay, so, what the actual heck is going on? We've got sheep with human arms eating children, a world covered in water, and the worst case of orphan bullying I've ever seen. It's very Tarsier, which means it clearly means something. You just have to stop and think about it for a moment to figure it out. One thing we see all
over this game is rabbits. The girl wears a rabbit mask. There are images of rabbits running in circles. There are rabbit altars, and a literal dead rabbit at the end. Now, that might seem like nothing. The game is literally called Re: Animal. There's going to be some animals in it. So, for it to be showing up this much, it has to mean something important, especially given Tarsier's focus on nightmares in previous games, as well as the Steam page for Re: Animal talking about how the design of the characters in the world are based on or symbolic of these children's troubled pasts. So, what does the rabbit mean symbolically? Well, of course, you have classic examples of fertility or it
being a symbol of good luck. But, as I dug through the many, many websites talking about the different meanings, one of them caught my eye. The idea that rabbits or hares are actually a symbol of bad luck. This comes from historic folklore. So, of course, I was drawn into it. You guys know how much I love to talk about that stuff. Tarsier are a Swedish company, and in Nordic folklore an all white hair was thought to be a transformed witch. So, seeing one meant you had an evil sorceress in your midst. Weirdly, Celtic folklore is actually very similar, just with one slight change. Instead of just bad luck, they believed a hair brought death. And if one crossed your path, you were doomed.
This was considered to be even worse if you were in the midst of a war. The Celtic leader Boudica, before going into battle with the Roman Empire, released a hare which walked directly towards the Roman army. An omen that said this path leads to death. And during this game, what is it we witness? A war. There are trenches, soldiers' helmets, and tanks. They even used Queen Elizabeth's address to the evacuees during World War II, back when she was just Princess Elizabeth. To you living in new surroundings, this, along with the kids' accents, not only places our game somewhere in the UK, but ties us into the Celtic understanding of this symbol. This is a world at war. These kids are children of
war. Children who were evacuated from major cities to protect them. So, to see rabbits everywhere in the setting, we're being shown that things are pretty bad. Which brings us to one of our lead characters, the girl. She is wearing a rabbit mask. She cuddles the dead rabbit during the ending. And if you find her coffin during the game, we see the spirit of a rabbit running out of it. The girl is, symbolically, the rabbit of this world. She is the bad omen plaguing this place, at least in the eyes of her friends. They believe it's because of her that this war is happening and why they are suffering. So, they did what
they felt they needed to. They wrapped her up and threw her in a well to die. But, throughout the game we keep checking in on this well, and within it we don't see a girl, we see a lamb. It jolts and twitches to life, much like she does at the end of the game. Clearly, these two things are once again linked. The game is a cycle, and this lamb is another representation of her. In multiple cultures like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, lambs are a symbol of sacrifice. Historically, they were used as a way to atone for sins or to avoid certain death. Man, my media studies class is really coming in clutch today. This is how the girl is seen by the other orphans. She was the necessary sacrifice that was needed to be made to
stop the war. By sacrificing her, the bad omen, it would stop everything and they could go back to their old lives. And if you think I'm just being convoluted for the sake of it, why would this girl be symbolized by two things? We literally see the narrative play out in the movie theater. If you stop and watch the whole thing rather than just carrying on to the next area like most people, we see a circle of five rabbits running around. The food begins to rot and then there's one dead rabbit with four rabbits running around the dead one, followed by a lamb being killed. That's what this game is. These children are looking for a way out of their hardship. The rotting food and see
sacrificing the girl, the white hair, the bad omen, as the only way to end the curse of war. But why would they think that? I mean, I don't know if you guys can tell, but I've had a mystery voice and throat issue that's been plaguing me for six months now. We're still looking into it. I'll be fine. We'll figure it out. But my initial instinct wasn't to turn Santi into a living sacrifice. And these are just kids, too. Near the end of the game, we see them cutting themselves, which reads like a blood pact. But the object they bleed into tells us it's a little more than that. It seems to be some kind of sacrificial stone. A stone with a hole carved out of it that you would fill with water or
blood when making sacrifices. You see it in all kinds of religions across the Americas and Europe. Meaning, this isn't just a blood pact to kill their friend. It's a blood oath for a religious sacrifice. This is not something that kids do on their own. They need to be told or influenced in some way to head down this path of destruction. And that is exactly what's going on. In the orphanage, I mentioned how there seemed to be a lot of candles and sheep statues. It goes beyond just normal levels of enjoyment and is bordering on what I would consider cult level behavior. At the end of the game, once the orphans complete the ritual, they
end up surrounded by bipedal sheep, a mindless flock just doing whatever they're told, which is also very symbolic of those who are members of a cult. They're literally sheeple who need to wake up. This is 100% a cult and the orphanage is where the indoctrination happened because hidden in one of the secret rooms there are candles surrounding a specific item, one that looks a lot like the sacrificial stone that the four use in their blood ritual. This is where the pact took place, in the orphanage before the events of the game. They were being brought into the cult and after learning their teachings, believed that they needed to do something about the bad omen in order to
end the war. So, the orphans throw the girl into the well and the last thing she sees is them looking down at her. However, there's more to this folklore than just seeing the white hair. As I've mentioned, it was considered a bad omen if you saw one. However, they believed the best course of action was to avoid it because if you managed to harm, or worse, kill this white hair, they believed it would bring a much more severe curse upon you and your land, exactly like what befell the orphans. I mentioned this earlier, but hidden throughout the game, you can find coffins of all characters, not just the girl and the boy, but all the characters. And when you open them, you see the shadow of the character showing
us what happened to them after this sacrifice. Hood is shot, the boy is hanged, Bandage is dealt a deadly blow, and Bucket is beaten and pushed off a ledge. They killed the white rabbit and so brought upon themselves a worse fate than just the war. If this cult that had indoctrinated them knew about the rabbit omen, which led the kids to do what they did in the first place, the cult would also know the consequences of those actions. The kids may have been mindless sheep just thinking they were doing the right thing, but now they had doomed them all. So, maybe in an attempt to save themselves, the cult killed the kids who killed the rabbit. Maybe then their world would be spared. But all the
kids are alive. We're playing as them, so how could this be their death? Well, think about it. This world is full of nightmares, what look like exaggerated versions of the horrors these children witnessed. And there's a time loop happening where at the end of the game we see the waters rise out of the well, bringing the dead girl [clears throat] with it. Only for the boy to then be floating on an ocean and find her floating in the water. And for her to be alive again, just like the boy and all of his friends. I thought you were dead. What we're seeing isn't the aftermath of their actions in the real world. It's the curse that they brought on themselves for killing the white rabbit.
This is their hell. Look, look, I know, I know. Everyone hates the whole they were dead the whole time, it was all a dream stick. Believe me, I do. It's why I really try to avoid using that as my big twist on this channel. Because it can just be so unsatisfying. But in this case, it just works so well. If this is the afterlife, that's why we're seeing strange creatures chasing us, why the kids return to places from their memories like the orphanage, and why there's a bunch of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey shenanigans going on. Outside of the time loop element, we see World War II trenches in the middle of a city. But then also modern cars on the side of the road and modern washing
machines, things that were not around at the same time. But it's because, as the Steam page tells us, these are fragments of the children's troubled past, representations of things and places they despise. Hence they keep asking questions like where are they and if they can get out. I wish you could go back. Yeah, me too, baby. This is their torture, being forced to relive what they did. Plus, I mean, every advertisement for the game talks about going through hell, so they weren't exactly being subtle about this. I'm sure we could look at each of the monsters we face and unpack what they all represent to each child, but I'm running out of time here. So if enough of you hit that subscribe button, we'll
be sure to cover it in a future video. I've already done some of the research, and let me tell you it is fascinating. I'm sure you'll want to see it. Even the sheep is part of their eternal curse. Yes, it's a metaphor for the girl being the sacrificial lamb, but then it becomes this massive monster and goes on a rampage. Why? Because they aren't alone in the afterlife. The girl, the one they killed, is also in the afterlife with them. Notice how anytime one of the children talks to the girl, she convulsed and the lamb in the well changes. It starts as dead, but eerily comes back to life, then rapidly grows. With more conversations between the group, the girl has more aggressive
reactions, and the lamb mutates, eventually climbing out of the well and subsequently out of the girl. And every time this happens, a red mist covers the screen, almost like she's literally seeing red. These conversations are bringing back the memories of what they did to her, and that makes her angry, causing the sacrificial lamb to grow and mutate into a monster that kills them off one by one horrifically, only to restart the cycle and force them to go through that suffering again and again. When the boy rescues the girl from the water, the moment she wakes up, she attacks him. Her first instinct is anger and revenge. When we find Hood, they say, You came back. I knew you would.
Hoody knew that revenge was coming their way for the actions they committed. Bucket is confused why the girl they killed would help them. And in that moment, the girl has her visions of anger. That's the answer to Bucket's question. This afterlife, this curse, is her revenge against them. She wants them to feel the anguish that she did. But, in the end, the sheep consumes the girl as well. Her anger and hatred become out of control, and now she is consumed by it. And as the girl is inside the sheep beast, she is exploring the cause of that anger, the root issue, the moment she was lured into the shed, killed, and the cycle begins anew. She, too, is forced to relive the betrayal over and over again, to give them what
they deserve. Until she realizes they already got what they deserve. By finding the children's coffins, not only does the girl witness how each of the orphans died and suffered for what they did to her in their previous lives. It also unlocks the secret ending of Re-Animal. In it, we see the girl at the bottom of the well after the sacrifice. But instead of her becoming possessed by rage, humanoid creatures move close to her. Each of them wearing white masks similar to the girl's rabbit mask. Maybe they were other children who suffered the same fate. As they come to her body, they put their hands on her and her body goes down into the water. In the regular ending, the girl is re-animated through
rage and rises to the top of the well. But in this ending, when she saw what became of her killers, knowing the curse of the white hair got them, the anger dissipates. She is given peace and she goes down into the water allowing the cycle to end. But hey, that's just a theory. A game theory. Thanks for watching. World premiere on Game Theory. Is Silk Song too difficult?
