oh no it's happening again except I hate to break it to you Matt retired like months ago so you're just going to have to settle for me instead hello Internet welcome to Game Theory the show that's tuned in to the Sweet Sound of lore and recently the demo for a new indie horror game caught my ear don't fret an indie horror game with a musical theme as you can imagine I was very excited to play this although it isn't just about music it was created by musicians musicians you may know from right here on YouTube
the project was spearheaded by rocket music a nerdcore music group who you might remember from their Garden of bamb band song that we covered back in our Stinger Flynn Theory the game also features collaborations with other nerdcore musicians like Oreo longest solo ever and even friend of the channel and fellow Brits stupendium but you know I'm something of a musician myself a guitarist to be specific I totally insert a clip of me doing a sick riff here but uh I'm in the middle of moving so maybe if enough of you subscribe we'll post something on
Instagram or something regardless that means that running around the world as a little guitar man sounds right up my alley right now we only have a demo for the game however this demo was originally designed to be a chapter 1 and so there's a lot of little details Mysteries and of course law that have been mixed together into a beautiful Symphony we play as fret a student at the prestigious musical school called harmonic Heights unfortunately things are not going well at old ha because in classic indie horror fashion there's been a mysterious uptick in the
number of missing students after our presumably dad comes banging on our door demanding to take us away to some event we wake up inside a guitar case within harmonic Heights and it's up to us to figure out what's happened to all the missing kids why we're a guitar now and whether we can stop it so get your instruments tuned up loyal theorists as we explore the sick beats sorry the story beats of don't fret when we wake up in this school and start the game we quickly learn that this place is on lockdown and so
naturally our main goal is to find a way to escape while avoiding the game's big monster a woman with a tape for a head called tape head I see you guys took the Silent Hill approach to naming your villains after exploring a bunch of cool areas and coming fa to cassette with tapeh head in a classic indie horror style Chase sequence the game comes to a close but the real story has only just begun throughout the game we can find entries from fet's Journal scattered around harmonic Heights now where did I put that thing uh
Sheep music no cheeseburger no fet's afraid of those Santi can you hold this thanks buddy almost got it huh what's a dragon doing in here wait you're not from dope fret you're from the sponsor of today's video Dragon City and if you think this little guy is cute just wait because with Dragon City there's 1,000 different dragons for you to collect hatch and evolve into epic weapons of Destruction and unlike certain high schools we all know where the monsters tend to to be less than friendly these dragons will actually fight alongside you unlocking new skills
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down to the description or scan the QR code on screen to download Dragon City today plus if you use my link Dragon City is offering you theorists a special bundle with 15,000 food 30,000 gold and the very rare black metal dragon no dragon Master is going to be able to stop you now not even fantasy lawkeeper Lee so thanks to Dragon City for sponsoring today's video but now I really have got to find what I did with that aha finally the journal now let me tell you the real story of don't fret from this journal
we learn about a character called Rachel mcfaden Rachel was in the great above fret and she was assigned to be his buddy when he first enrolled in harmonic Heights she was also a violin Prodigy so much so that according to Fred she was one of the stars of harmonic heits she was going to make it out of here and then one day sadly Rachel would suffer the same fate as many of the other students as she too is now missing but fret does have some leads about what might have happened to her Rachel hasn't been
in class all week heard in h room she got in a fight with Miss hole and refuses to practice at all for the recital next week last time I saw her she was talking to the janitor maybe he knows something and if you go to the janitor's office we find a note that seems to outline how that conversation went down you're a monster you let her know too much and now she's missing because of you it all started with a simple kindness and escalated into Rachel's disappearance it all depends on Fret great not like there
isn't enough on my plate as it is so the janitor lets some information slipped to Rachel but what well before she disappeared Rachel was apparently pretty freaked out about some weird creatures that she saw roing around the school at night Rachel pull me aside after practice today and really scared me last night she snuck out after hours and swear she saw something in the hallway it had to be the Night Cleaning crew right Rachel must have thought pretty similarly here leading to her speaking to the janitor who clearly didn't hide the truth and that caused
her to disappear we also find notes from other students that talk about these same strange creatures and what they are that they hide in vent and that they're afraid of the light if it wasn't clear those notes are kind of our instructions because eventually we get to see these things for ourselves they're these small humanoid creatures wearing what looks like school uniforms but with their faces covered in paper sheets music sheets if you explore the school a bit more you can find one of these costumes hidden in one of the students abandoned lockers seems fitting
for the monsters in a music school almost as if they're fulfilling a role where both the the teachers and students are monsters but then during our first encounter with one of these guys the radio that's been playing in the background suddenly begins telling us the story of one of these missing children from the school a 12-year-old boy has been abducted from his suburb home in the middle of the night playing this message along with the first true visual of this creature it's almost as if they're connected by more than just their dress code apparently the
local media has been referring to these missing kids as the missing innocent got to love local media and their obvious yet dramatic G conventions however if you check every inch of this school you can find several posters depicting characters from the game like fret tapeh head and of course these new childlike creatures which we can now see unamed the missing I'll take what happened to the missing children for 200 Alex these creatures the missing are the missing innocent the missing children from the school that's why they're storing their uniforms in lockers they're just following old
habits dressed in the same clothes they wore every day to the what's interesting is that the radio DJ specifically says that they were abducted from their suburban homes and what did we see at the start of this game our dad trying desperately to take us somewhere from our Suburban home were we about to be turned into another one of the missing probably although clearly something intervened turning us into a more complex style of monster like tapehead instead of the generic missing sadly we don't have answers on the specifics for that right now this is just
a demo after all but what I do have an answer for for is why why are all these kids being turned into the missing and more importantly who is responsible one of the few things we are reminded of time and time again throughout this game is the recital that Rachel was apparently not practicing for prior to her disappearance this recital seems to be a pretty big deal at harmonic Heights a welcome pack we find early on in the game mentions that harmonic Heights puts on two recitals annually and this is where the students are showcased
to some of the top talents in the world which makes sense I suppose for a music school I wasn't part of a music school growing up but our summer concerts were a massive deal regardless kick although these definitely aren't the grade school recital that all of your friends and family can and are forced to sit through this event seems to be a bit different at the end of the demo we find this letter written to a Dr Sharon Reed the founder of harmonic Heights and it details some strange requirements Dr Reed on behalf of the
foundation we celebrate this Mutual partnership again as part of the agreement we will be putting on a recital twice per year with a strict privacy policy it is of the utmost importance that you leave us to conduct this event behind closed doors your involvement in this matter is unnecessary and unwanted we shall be in touch soon sincerely X um excuse me sir we still call it Twitter thank you so this Foundation are the ones running the recitals not the school itself which is an IM immediate red flag but we got to keep hunting for that
law and the only way to do that is to speak with them directly hidden around the school are phone numbers that you can call using the in-game pay phone to dispense some extra law and one of them is found where you'd most expect to find graffiti in a school the bathroom stools inside we find a boy covered in blood and cassette tape I wonder who could possibly be responsible for that but that's not what's important here alongside messages about practicing and warnings about the upcoming recital we get another one of these phone numbers 555 7110
calling it transfers us to what appears to be a receptionist at the foundation and she's not exactly thrilled that we've called her hello Miss Stone of the foundation how can I help wait I don't recognize this number who is this where did you get this number listen to me you little brat we're tracking you right now you shouldn't have called In from from wait harmonic Heights we'll be there in just a moment so clearly the foundation on not the good guys here they want to conduct these recital full of the greatest young musical prospects outside
of the public eye but why what kind of indie horror plot are they scheming this is where our old Power the stipendium comes in Stoops voices a character called the conductor basically a musical version of one of those Zar machines that would read your fortune these conductor machines are a new addition to the harmonic Heights and the school assumes that the kids are going to love these new things and let me tell you we certainly do because instead of of reading our Fortune the conductor tells us that he's going to help us escape from this
nightmare school though his methods are unusual the only escape from this treachery comes in the form of talent canisters locate them in the school and bring them to me do you understand no as a matter of fact I don't understand what on Earth is a talent canister well thankfully as the game progresses it does become clearer what the heck the conductor is going on about we get to see what one of these Talent canisters look like thanks to yet another poster that we find on the halls in the school and it has the caption Talent
you got it do schools actually think these kinds of posters work like a kid is just walking down the hway feeling sorry for themselves sees this poster and goes wait you really think so thanks poster also this is a school for the most talented Musical prodigies you don't think they already know by the fact they are there that they have talent immediately I'm tipped off to know that there's something weird about these canisters and that becomes even more clear when we get to see the canisters IRL going back to everyone's favorite School location the bathroom
stalls in the one where we found the phone number you can see a broken Talent canister above this tape covered body it almost looks like this child was captured by tapeh head and that this Talent canister is part of the capture process maybe it's even part of what turns them into the missing and that is when it all started to click into place you see the name tapeh head has a second meaning yes she literally has a tape for AE but there's actually a real tool in the real world also called a tape head it's
the part of a cassette player that allows you to record and play back audio from the tape throughout the chase sequence we see words written on the wall that say she can hear you she is listening for the best talent in the musical school and as we saw with the kid in the bathroom capturing them and likely recording their talent harvesting it into these canisters I mean what else would a talent canister contain other than well Talent when the conductor said they're after your talent Fred and will do whatever it takes to seize it he
was being literal everything the recitals the kidnappings this whole freaking school is orchestrated pun very much intended by the foundation to extract the essence of these kids' musical talents that's why the foundation wants these recital done in secret they're being used to perform some sort of extraction ceremony that captures the raw essence of talent heck it's likely that the recital was the the event Fred's dad was so eager to drag us off to in the game's opening cutscene and the reason they're doing all of this it's a Tale As Old As Time money near the
start of the game we see a television at for something called conduct Tech fast track your child's success and leave your morals behind with conduct pushing the boundaries of medical ethics off a bridge since 1951 the foundation isn't just stealing Talent from Musical prodigies they are then offering that talent to the highest bidder wealthy people who can just buy their child's way to the top without having to put in any work or without having to listen to month of bad practicing before they get good hm this is starting to seem like a bit of a
metaphor for the real world music industry I'm sure you're all familiar with nepotism and how those with wealthy or famous parents can gain careers without really having to do anything themselves and often that comes at the cost of new Young and unknown artists many of the top record labels won't give them a second look because they're more interested in the money that can be provided by these nepo babies or the top record labels will find and use these unknown talents to make the label richer and help bring success to those other people only for them
to be discarded once their usefulness runs out now in the world of generative AI it's becoming even more of a problem music labels can create Mega hit Sensations overnight with very little time money or effort wannabe musicians can create a Smash Hit without any musical skill or training but the AI they're using it doesn't just make music out of thin air it has to be trained and it does so by listening to the music that was created and owned by others particularly independent creators creators like rocket music stipendium Jake Neutron Oreo longest solo ever toasty
marshmallow their talent is being stolen by these AI algorithms and then sold to anyone who can afford it without the need to spend years practicing training or building an audience the good news though is that this game is a message of hope that shows what happens when we take an active role in the story obviously by taking an active role in this game taking control of fret we are going to be defeating the foundation and help saving all of these talented kids but by doing so we're also supporting talented independent creators like rocket music rather
than those that wish to exploit them major record labels would never have picked up musicians making music about Indie video games but you guys the fans showed up for these once unknown artists and as a result they've been able to forge careers for themselves these guys are selling albums packing out concerts venues and now releasing video games I wouldn't be surprised if at the end of this game once we beat the foundation and save everyone we end up exposing the foundation for everything they've been doing and then watch fret Rachel and all the other students
go on to make a name for themselves independently just like rocket music did but I guess we'll just have to wait and see for when the full game drops next year in the meantime remember keep supporting Independent Artists and also remember that's just a theory a game theory thanks for watching and one final thank you to Dragon City for sponsoring this video remember to use the link in the description or the QR code on screen to get 15,000 food 30,000 gold and the very rare black metal dragon fight on theorists
