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What actually happens in the story of This Twisted Games has baffled players since its release, with its abstract narrative and absurd visuals. But if we do as the surgeon did and put the pieces together, the answer becomes clear. And the real villain in all of this isn't even one of the characters in the game. Hello Internet. Welcome to Game Theory, the show that dives deep into a game to find the hidden story at its heart. And I couldn't help but delve incredibly deep into the story of the latest indie horror title that has taken the internet by storm, Ender Copia. It's a point-and-click adventure created by independent animator Andy Land, in the style of 90s classics like Pajama Sam and Putt-Putt, but with a
darker, more surreal twist, of course. The game stars Mello, a 9-year-old boy with amnesia trapped in the house of the monstrous Henry. On the computer in Mello's room, we found key clues about his past. An image of him falling out of a truck, Henry taking him home, and Mello with his head crushed, unable to draw straight. The implication is clear. Mello was separated from his family by accident. Henry took him in and hit him on the head so many times that it caused him to lose his memory. Mello now wants to escape, and we, the player, are his guardian angel, helping him navigate the world. But apart from that, the story remains shrouded in mystery. Even when the credits appear after the three endings, the
game leaves many questions unanswered. The first question is, " What on earth did I just play?" But there are also more sensible questions like, "What's really going on under Henry's house? Who is this guy, the surgeon, and what's going on with him? And have we been misinterpreting Mello all this time?" Alright, loyal theorists, if you switch your scroll wheel for a tap and follow me, I'll guide you through this crazy maze of illogical plots. By analyzing the key themes and symbolism throughout the game, we can uncover the true story behind this fantastic game. Mello begins in Henry's house, which holds many secrets. Like the fact that on the wall there is a strange cyborg man called The Surgeon. A perfectly normal way to start a
game. He sings a song about being in love with two women and then uniting them into one person to be his girlfriend. So, someone has clearly been reading too much Frankenstein. Combining two or more things into one, like joining a body from different parts. Although I suppose it's more of a reference to Universal's 1931 Frankenstein movie and its sequel, Bride of Frankenstein. Unlike the original book, which doesn't have a girlfriend. But regardless, the reference is clear. The surgeon himself is also an assembled character, combining two classic figures: Frankenstein's monster and Dr. Frankenstein. He's a doctor who resurrects a bride like Frankenstein, but the bride is for him and is also made of spare parts like
the monster. The doctor in the movie is also named Henry Frankenstein, and our captor is named Henry. He also has the characteristic hump of Igor-type characters, who often assume the role of Dr. Frankenstein's laboratory assistant. Henry is also a reference to Clungo from Banjo-Kazooie, a lizard creature with large fangs who is also an Igor-type character. Once again, two Frankenstein characters stitched together. My favorite example of this " everything is Frankenstein" motif comes from the first screen of the game. In Mello's room, you can find a reference to Freddy Fish on the wall. Freddy Fish is a point-and-click game series developed by Humongous Entertainment. But when you click on this fish, it makes a honking sound.
This is a reference to another popular franchise from Humongous Entertainment, Putt-Putt. It's a Frankenstein-type reference of two different things combined into one. One of the main messages of Frankenstein is the irony that the monster, Adam, although he looked and was treated like a monster, was in fact Frankenstein who was the real monster. He played God and refused to take responsibility. In this story, our surgeon is literally both. He looks like a monster, and he is, combining his two loves in the bride for his own twisted game. But that also gives us a new way of seeing the world we are experiencing. When we encounter terrifying and disturbing characters and visuals, we must ask ourselves: Is this
really a monster? Or is it something that simply needs to be better understood? And this isn't the only perspective we get from our old, beloved monster surgeon. We escaped Henry's house by killing a clock and giving the password " Cheshire" to a parasite, following him down a toilet into a world of misery, murder, and office work. A not-so-subtle reference to the twisted and distorted world of Alice in Wonderland. A hint of what else we can expect from now on. However, upon landing, Mello loses his hands, eyes, and mouth, which he must now find in the three new lands available to us. Misery Town hosts a carnival that should be pure
fun, but in reality it's quite the opposite. We are required to learn about the brutal deaths of clowns in order to win a game of whack-a-mole. And this carnival version of the game Operation forces us to cut open a living man to extract a prize from his entrails. And this is where our surgeon friend gives us another perspective. Replace the planks, replace the sails, replace the crew, replace the nails. This beast that nothing could kill, but what if the captain is sick? This song is about the classic thought experiment of the Ship of Theseus. The idea is, if you replaced a single plank on a ship, would it still be the same ship? If so, what would happen if you replaced every plank over time? Would it still be the same ship? Our surgeon friend's answer
is yes. But then he asks, what would happen if you replaced the captain? To answer this question, let's look at the story of Misery Town. The town depends financially on the carnival. So the locals visit it often. This made them get tired of the same act over and over again. Therefore, the clowns, boards, and nails of the carnival were often replaced. But it's still the same carnival. The carnival leader is a tyrannical trapeze artist whom Mello defeats, freeing the inhabitants and the artists. With the trapeze artist gone, people leave the carnival. This means that it's not the same ship once it has a new captain. The next area is the office. Now, The Office is a comedy about a paper company with a useless boss
where nobody works. My mistake. The office at Endocopia is a corporation that used to be a paper company and now has a useless boss and nobody does any work. See? Completely different. Everyone who works here is unhappy, so Mello has to make them happy. He gives the workers a red ball, a vacation voucher, and also a stress ball, which is a reference to the cursor icon in Sam&Max Hit the Road. And then, he can meet the boss. It seems he's not doing a very good job running this place. This boss is known as the AI. It is a combination of brain cells and memories of the company's founder and a supercomputer intended to help manage the business. That makes it our
Frankenstein motif for this area. And he has replaced the founder and changed the company, like having a new captain on the ship of Theseus. But we are also presented with the third main theme of the game: the copies. The AI shows us some AI-generated art that he created. You're disgusting. And he admits that, although his copy of the Mona Lisa is not perfect, soon his method will be perfect and will make art and life indistinguishable. AI art is an example of a copy that degrades over time, and AI is a distorted copy of its creator. That's fitting for a company that used things like printers, photocopiers, and balaclavas, isn't it? And all these things come together in
our final area, Timesville. It's based on Animal Crossing. The cute animal villagers talk like the characters in Animal Crossing, the passage of time is an important mechanic, and there's an aquarium to fill, but it's anything but a peaceful game. The town's history revolves around death. See Arthur the bear die, enter a haunted tomb, find the security guard brutally murdered when he only wanted to play Space Cadet Pinball and Minesweeper. Here we find references to horror movies like The Shining, The Silence of the Lambs, The Ring and the scariest thing of all: having to be on Slack while working from home. The town is stalked by a serial killer who uses the corpses of cute villagers in grotesque ways
to put on puppet shows. The villagers are sewn and manipulated like puppets to make it appear as if they are alive. Corpses sewn together, need I say more? The honorable surgeon colleague also returns to exhume bodies. And he tells Mello that he uses those spare parts for his patients. We also have a monstrous version of our friend Cathur. And at the police station, there's a poster looking for villagers with anomalies, tying all our motives together. Frankenstein sewing different things, the ship of Theseus, and copies of copies degrading. And at this point, it became clear to me that the real story and the issue behind Indecopia is replacement. To replace one thing with another similar thing that retains aspects of its identity. Visiting each
location for the first time restores Mello's body parts. He finds his hands lying around, a skeleton gives him back his eyes, and the supercomputer that speaks with biblical references gives him a new mouth, like an Am in reverse of "I have no mouth and I must scream." But if part of Mello has been replaced, is it still the same Mello? The game would tell us that yes, it is. A new mouth doesn't change that. However, she is not the same person she was before developing amnesia. We know this because when we meet a character who has known Mello since before his amnesia, he tells us that Mello used to play with him, but now they don't play together anymore. Mello's name used to be Roger. Henry killed him with a
blow to the head, the Surgeon resurrected him, he forgot his past and took the name Mello. So the parts of his body are the planks of Theseus' ship, but his mind is the captain. The character who tells us all this is, in reality, another Roger. This is a copy of Mello's work made by the Surgeon, and it's not exactly an accurate copy. It's another situation like the Ship of Theseus. But there is actually a second part to the thought experiment of Theseus' ship that almost no one talks about. Let's say you have the Ship of Theseus and you replace the wooden planks one by one until they are all replaced. But during that time, it continues sailing like the ship of Theseus. So we took all those removed planks and built a new ship
with all the pieces in their original places. Which of the two should be called the Ship of Theseus? In the real world, an insurance company would say that it's the one that keeps sailing. This new ship, even though it's made of old parts, needs to be called something else. The fact that the larger Roger retains the name, but that Mello keeps Roger's original body, fits perfectly with this hypothesis. This is quite metaphysical, and you might start thinking about yourself and your life in a slightly different way. But the story is far from over. There is much more that this game wants to teach us. You see, in Henry's house, Mello finds a drawing and a passage from a sacred text about a sleeping god. Her head is
framed against the sun like a halo, and, interestingly, the drawing shows that she has many limbs, four arms and at least three legs, which resemble the bride's two joined bodies and her multiple limbs. It turns out that the world of this game exists inside the body of this god. Henry's house is the gorge and the worlds below are its entrails. This raises many questions, especially about how and why this relates to our themes of being replaced. But they are not answered until the end of the game. There are two normal endings in Endercopia. In one, Mello follows the parasite out of the sleeping god into the wasteland. The parasite moves into an abandoned house
and says he had to leave because the sleeping god is a sinking ship, a sinking ship of Theseus, where a surgeon has been repairing and replacing body parts. That's right, the Surgeon is creating a Frankenstein with his own god. Therefore, in this ending, the task is never complete. Mello walks until he finds his home and his family waiting for him inside. They are negligent, abusive, and punish Mello for having disappeared. In his room, he finds his sister and tells her the story of Endercopia. The end. With this information, we can deduce the meaning of the game's title. Endercopia sounds a lot like endoscopy, a camera that a doctor inserts through the patient's throat to examine their insides. Believe me, I know
this procedure all too well because of my rare voice problems. Mello has been going down the throat of the sleeping god to explore and heal it by restarting its organs. It's a recurring joke that Mello can't read, that's why he calls it Endercopia instead of Endoscopia. But endoscopy is not the only procedure referred to here. There is a throat procedure called an esophagogram, an alternative examination to endoscopy. It consists of coating the throat with barium sulfate and observing it using an x-ray. Barium sulfate is usually administered to the patient by having them swallow a marshmallow. The characters call Mello "marshmallow" throughout the game. And although it's presented as a joke about misunderstandings, it 's actually the same joke about Mello not
knowing how to read. He is the one who calls himself Mello, not Mallow. The surgeon says at one point that he doesn't know why Mello chose that name, but explains the meaning of endoscopy by saying that it comes from the Latin "to look inside". Except it's not Latin, it's Greek. The surgeon misremembers the word and Mello misreads it. It's as if the truth degrades over time, like a broken telephone game or a photocopy of a photocopy, which is appropriate because the suffix "copy" refers to copies. And now, Mello is recounting the events of this story to his sister. It's something we all need to keep in mind. Stories are often clouded by the narrator's perception of reality. And the more a story is told, the more it becomes
distorted and turns into a copy of a copy. Perhaps it ends up being a "Frankenstein" of other stories. I mean, mythology is literally that, with different authors combining characters to create a more cohesive story, but it 's not faithful to the original intention. So, when we hear someone recount an event, it's important to consider their biases and how they may have perceived the event differently from the original intention. There are always two sides to every story and all that. Who would have thought that a little marshmallow that can't read would be so profound? But we're not finished yet. In the next ending, the parasite does not rise to the surface. So Mallow goes alone and has to fight Henry. Henry
accidentally strikes the uvula of the sleeping god. This causes me to vomit bile and almost every character you've ever met. Mallow's friends take him to the abandoned house and together they turn it into a home. Mallow invites everyone to roast marshmallows over the campfire. Since Mallow is a marshmallow, this symbolizes that he shares it with his friends to heal them, rather than healing that strange giant god. He will not sacrifice them or use parts of them for his own benefit, nor for the chance that a great being might fix everything. Instead, he gives a part of himself to everyone. This is actually a philosophy known as secular humanism. The idea that we are the ones in control. Trusting in our own
resilience strengthens confidence and makes us realize that we are both the problem and the solution. He encourages us to take charge of our lives and focus more on those around us and how to help each other, instead of looking for a divine being to solve our problems. This is the happy ending, and it gives you a warm feeling both in the story and on a deeper level, but it's not the most satisfying. Sure, we have two interesting interpretations and philosophies, but neither Mallow nor we, the players, know the truth about the game's story. And let's be honest, that's why we're all here. But fear not, for that information comes from the third ending.
Melo encounters the Surgeon in the heart of the Sleeping God, and we discover that he planned to revive him so that this world does not fall apart. He has been physically repairing the body, replacing parts piece by piece. But his final step is to make the bride rise to power in order to control her mind, so that she becomes his new captain. The game ends with the Surgeon reading a book, the bride ascending, and Melo and the Surgeon being crushed to death. And I don't know how to feel about it . Certainly, this is not a happy ending. So I delved a little deeper, and theorists, this is where things get weird. There are secret minigames you can play to unlock short story fragments. That sounds familiar. We see a dead woman on a
hospital stretcher. The surgeon approaches the bride, and an angel speaks to him, telling him to come in. Then, a body sits down in the hospital room. So it seems that resurrection in this world is much more spiritual than scientific. The surgeon says the spiritual realm is beyond his understanding, so he doesn't know why it works, but he does know he needs spiritual help. In the surgeon's book we find the seal of the demon Sitri, from the Ars Goetia, a section of a book that contains the names, ranks and seals of 72 demons. This symbol is covered in drops of blood, a common technique used to summon such demons. To resurrect his beloved, the bride's surgeon needs to summon Sitri, the demon of love and desire. So, it wasn't an angel who
brought her back, it was a demon. We can find the bride under the floor of Henry's house. She feels incredible pain. Held up as if tied to a stake in a distorted crucifixion. If you click on her, she writhes in pain and screams. And after four clicks, the game closes with a binary error code that says: "Oh sir, we love how you suffer." When the bride ascends, she is symbolically ascending from hell to earth, unlike Jesus' ascension from earth to heaven. And the god he becomes after this ascension is a being who created a world of flesh and suffering. This is a distortion, a degraded copy of the Christian story of the death and resurrection of Jesus. The sacred text we found earlier says: " If dust breathes, will it not dream?
" We are that dream. Dust is another way of saying dead in the Bible. For example, Genesis 3:19 says: " By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return." The sleeping god has returned to earth. He has literally been buried underground. And now it is dust. He is dead. But this sacred text tells us that dust breathes, and that if it breathes, it can apparently dream. That we are that dream is a connection with Alice in Wonderland, which ends with Alice waking up and it all being a dream. Don't worry, this won't be a "it was all a dream" theory, and the reason is that we know the people in the body
were swallowed by the sleeping God. He didn't literally create them in a dream. He took things that were already there and created this world for those people. So, this is a demonic flesh god who does not create things, he only assembles them and is resurrected with rituals that are the reverse of those of Christ. All of this is a reference to the Gnostic belief in the Demiurge. Gnosticism was a controversial, well, actually heretical, branch of Christianity that believed that the God mentioned in the Old Testament was actually evil. He did not create the universe. He simply molded our bodies from what already existed: dust.
He is the God of the material world, which is why we suffer in sin. He has trapped our souls in our bodies. Our souls were actually created by the true God, the good God of the New Testament that Jesus preached about. Some Gnostics even believed that the serpent in the Garden of Eden was actually Jesus freeing humans from the direct control of the demiurge. This is mentioned in Endocopia via the Genesis 01 computer. This gives Melo the instruction to literally ascend the corporate hierarchy like a snake to confront and dismantle the authority at its top. So, the serpent is dismantling the supreme authority of Genesis. That authority in Endocopia is the AI that runs the
office. who refers to himself using the phrase "I am," which is a quote from the God of the Old Testament. I am who I am. So, Melo is the serpent that confronts the God of the Old Testament. Ipso facto, Melo is Jesus. And that's a Latin phrase, Surgeon. Not only did he come back to life, but he was also able to do things that a surgeon, someone who is just playing God, could not. He is able to reassemble his own body and remain Melo, unlike the Surgeon, who has been replaced with robotic parts and is losing his memory and understanding. Melo finds a mannequin which he brings to life by copying a drawing of his face onto it. His name is Scribbly and he's adorable. The Surgeon is only able to make a simple copy of a person,
Big Roger, who is not very well assembled. The surgeon says that in another life he could be Melo's father, but not in this one, because Jesus' father is not the demiurge, he is the spiritual God. But in other branches of Christianity, the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament are one and the same. More directly, in the good ending, Melo shares marshmallows with his friends, something symbolic of Jesus sharing bread at the Last Supper, which he referred to as his body. Jesus had 12 disciples at that Last Supper, one of whom was his traitor, Judas. However, I only count 11 at Melo's marshmallow party. So, who is number 12? Who is the one who betrays him? The only other person who can interact with him, the one who can
decide whether he gets his happy ending or is crushed by the god: us. Mello refers to us as his guardian angel, but remember, this game has been a history of distorted copies and corruption. The only other time we saw an angel in this game, it was actually the opposite, a demon. And throughout the story, we took Mello to the heart of the demiurge only for him to die, allowing the ritual to be completed. A ritual that was prepared by the surgeon, someone whose memory is failing him. He no longer knows who Mello's guardian angel is, or even what his notes say. But in those notes, we found Sitri's seal, covered in blood. This is their ritual.
He invoked Sitri, he invoked us to bring Mello here, back to the room where it all began, and bring this evil false god back to life. We were the villains the whole time. We used the replacement themes to manipulate Mello into doing our bidding and steal his happy ending. But, well, that's just a theory. A game theory. Thanks for watching. World premiere on Game Theory. Is Silksong too difficult? Yeah.
