The Darkest Game You'll Never Play | Who's Lila?

[00:00:16]There's a kind of horror that doesn't need a body. It's not a man waiting at the shoulder of the road or a shape pressing against the edge of your bed.

[00:00:27]It's quieter than that.

[00:00:29]We assume our thoughts belong to us. The horror is the realization that we belong to them because thoughts behave like organisms. They replicate and mutate.

[00:00:43]They burrow deeper. Then they spread to others and become systems of belief, money, nations, religions. We all have gods to which we are willing to sacrifice our health, future, and safety. Some are even willing to kill and to die for an abstraction they did not invent. These are ideas that begin by defining what is normal or necessary.

[00:01:12]They shape preference and bias judgment.

[00:01:15]They accumulate rules and develop defenses against contradiction. It's a process that can be seen at scale with cults, places where people abandon families, surrender autonomy, endure abuse, and commit acts of harm in service of something that promises meaning or salvation.

[00:01:37]To the outside, it's obvious followers are not acting in their own interests.

[00:01:43]They begin to function like an appendage of an idea like they are possessed. So the question is not whether ideas can take control. It is more about how you wouldn't even recognize once they had.

[00:01:58]How would you know the moment your actions stopped being your own? How would you tell the difference between [music] conviction and possession? How could you know if the words you're speaking are yours or someone else's entirely?

[00:02:14]Whose Laya was released in [music] 2022?

[00:02:18]a small title by the developer Garage Heathen.

[00:02:22]The story follows a young man named William Clark who was the last person seen with a missing woman, Tanya Kennedy. Nothing about the premise suggests the kind of horror to come. The story doesn't unfold in a straight line.

[00:02:38]It arrives in fragments, scenes that interrupt each other, that appear without context. Only through piecing together these fragments does a story begin to emerge. Most games want to emphasize agency, although it's often an illusion. Choices are designed with relatively little impact. Outcomes are bounded, even when they appear open-ended. Most games are built on the appearance of control, whose Laya is built on the opposite. It does not ask what you think, what you intend, or what you believe. It doesn't offer choices for the path forward. It only asks you to perform. The only control you have is the ability to shape William's face, to raise his eyebrows, or lower the corners of his mouth. The purpose is to approximate the emotion that matches the situation. and other characters interpret what they think they see.

[00:03:42]Those interpretations change the story.

[00:03:46]You are subject to how others read you.

[00:03:49]And something can always get lost in translation.

[00:03:53]Facial expressions are automatic, but now every reaction is [music] labored, every response delayed. You're no longer allowed to feel an emotion and let it surface. You have to manufacture it from the outside, assembling something convincing enough to pass. The result is a persistent sense of alienation, a separation between what you think you feel and what you're able to present.

[00:04:21]What makes this unsettling is not just the limitation of your control, but the precision it demands. You are constantly forced to interrogate distinctions that are normally subconscious. What does sadness actually look like? How is it different from fear? When does excitement start to resemble aggression?

[00:04:42]The player becomes trapped in [music] a constant calibration. Tiny adjustments produce radically different outcomes.

[00:04:51]It's worth [music] pausing here for a disclaimer. Whose Laya is regularly described as Lynchian. It's a story that resists revelation, the independent but interlinking plot lines, the overlapping and repeating scenes. They demand a process of discovery and omission. What follows will be selective, a tracing.

[00:05:15]And while the events themselves may feel extreme, the missing persons, the murders, the other worldly possessions, the feelings are all too familiar. It's the feeling of remembering a version of ourselves that existed before. A life that still feels close enough to recall but too distant to return to. The kind [music] of change that most of us don't notice until long after it's happened.

[00:05:42]How we have already lost the idea of who we were and how easily we can lose the idea of who we are. To begin, all we need to do is wake up.

[00:05:56]>> [music] [music] >> William steps into the center of the screen and turns to face the player directly.

[00:06:26]>> It's difficult for me to express emotions. I envy other people. They make faces naturally, but I have to make a conscious decision each time I move a muscle. Every morning, I go to the bathroom to rehearse what my face is going to show today.

[00:06:42]William walks to the bathroom and begins practicing his expressions. His scenarios are mundane at first. a neighbor's greeting and passing. The player is provided with a prompt and a timer at the bottom of the screen.

[00:06:58]There's a limited amount of time to assemble a facial expression before the countdown ends. Then the prompts become more unsettling.

[00:07:08]If I see a dead dog on the street, I'll make a face like this. If some weird guy approached me at the store, I'll scare him away. If I discover my sworn enemy has died, I'll make this face. If someone catches me offguard with an unexpected call, I'll make this face.

[00:07:28]And if once again I see the one hiding in the boilers, I'll be afraid.

[00:07:35]He doesn't explain the details. The dead dog, the sworn enemy, the one hiding in the boilers. There's no justification or distinction. These are treated as events worth preparing for alongside mundane events like greeting a neighbor or grocery shopping. The mechanics here are emphasized by William's note. A prompt card for how basic emotions appear. The scene establishes two things without stating them outright.

[00:08:07]William has come to expect a mix of the mundane and the surreal. And the act of manufacturing emotional responses isn't an exception. It's how every day begins.

[00:08:24]It's the same kind of surprise call William rehearsed for in the mirror. If this scenario came true, then what about the others? The dead dog, the sworn enemy, the thing hiding in the boilers.

[00:08:39]William picks up the receiver. On the other end of the line is an unidentified caller. The voice in William must be familiar because he immediately asks why we did not answer the broken cell phone.

[00:08:52]The voice gives a message. It says, "Father Lawrence is dead and they need to meet at the train station.

[00:09:14]Please, I beg you. Let me back in.

[00:09:20]The line cuts without explanation, a call that assumes more than it reveals, and it's only just beginning.

[00:09:29]William enters the kitchen and collects a trash bag from the counter. Other items on the counter include a journal, pizza boxes, and a hacksaw. The newspaper contains an article about media and influence, about how certain pieces of information seem to take on a life of their own once they enter circulation. How ideas spread, not because they're verified, but because they resonate. The same study shows how among all eras, works of media exist that seem to not only perfectly reflect the social zeitgeist of the respective era, but also appear to be very powerful movers of the public will. So powerful and effective, in fact, that some speculate their existence to be premeditated and planned by groups of higherups. Is there perhaps a process, a means to knowingly create a work of media of such power?

[00:10:32]The article is talking about the zeitgeist, a word that literally translates from German as time spirit, an unseen presence said to move through an era, to speak through its culture.

[00:10:45]Usually, the zeitgeist is passive, a reflection of what is already present, an unseen pressure that creators consciously respond to, leaving fragments that echo the same themes across different works and artists. The article suggests something more disturbing, that the zeitgeist can be actively steered through certain works.

[00:11:09]It isn't reflecting the culture, but instead it's intentionally shaping it.

[00:11:15]and more troubling still that this influence may be intentional, not an accident, but a process, a conscious attempt to wield it for control.

[00:11:27]As William exits his apartment, he investigates a missing person's flyer. A name that will echo throughout every plotline ahead, but for now, just a name. Tanya Kennedy.

[00:11:41]Outside, a murder of crows waits near the dumpster. William walks to the bus stop. This is the nexus of Who's Laya.

[00:11:51]Here, we can begin to explore the world at large, except bizarrely, William only knows the addresses of two locations, those that have already been mentioned, the school and the train station. The bus stop reveals something critical.

[00:12:08]There are parts of William's memory that are somehow inaccessible.

[00:12:13]At the train station, William finds the man waiting for him, Strut Nev. By comparison, William appears much smaller. For the first time, it's clear that he is a high school student standing across from an older and heavier man. William confronts him about the calling on the landline, and Strutv says they no longer need to use throwaways.

[00:12:37]He mentions a brutal fire, presumably how Father Lawrence died, but Father Lawrence hardly seems to matter. The conversation quickly changes.

[00:12:51]William is prompted to make a face. His features do not behave. They twitch and contort without direction as though something beneath the surface is pressing forward. It's almost as though they have a rivalry for the affection or attention of Laya. Strep directs William to the nearby train depot and inside he is already waiting. William moves deeper into the depot, slipping past Strutv into the dark. He climbs to a narrow catwalk and for the first time something dark and paranormal begins to surface.

[00:14:01]It was one of the hypothetical situations from William's practice. The thing hiding in the boiler. Then the empress addresses William by another name. Laya. The empress offers something else too. An address. 43033.

[00:14:21]Laya remarks that the address was something that William had hidden from her.

[00:14:26]After the Empress commands us to cease, the player is return to the main menu.

[00:14:33]But a few things don't add up.

[00:14:42]William's rehearsals in the mirror began ordinary and became bizarre. One of those rehearsals is for a surprise phone call and shortly after the phone rings.

[00:14:54]Another rehearsal is for the one hiding in the boilers. And shortly after we encounter it. It's impossible to tell why William knows what will happen, how he knows what to rehearse for, if these were predictions, memories, or something else.

[00:15:13]But Strutv's attack catches him offguard. He corners William in the depot where he desperately begs for Laya to return. He threatens to cut her out of William's body. At first, this could be dismissed as delusion, but his death reveals that there is something unnatural happening. Something is inside William, but its access is not complete.

[00:15:39]The missing names, the missing addresses, the information William should know but cannot use.

[00:15:46]These gaps seem to have another meaning.

[00:15:50]They may not be accidents. They may be resistance. Whatever Laya is, whatever is inside William, its reach is incomplete.

[00:16:05]William wakes up to the same apartment, the same disclaimer. Only now it's harder to tell who's speaking. What once sounded like William describing his difficulty expressing emotion can be read another way. Not a boy struggling to share how he feels, but as something inside him struggling to approximate something human. The scene has not changed, but the character might have.

[00:16:33]William returns to the bus stop, only now there is another address, the Courtland Street apartment. When he arrives, he narrates out loud the date, the name, the objective. There's no clear reason for any of it, unless someone or something needs the reminder.

[00:16:53]An officer temporarily prevents entrance to the building before being called away.

[00:16:59]Inside the burned out apartment, almost nothing has survived. a rotary phone without a number to call, a computer locked behind a pin code, and a collection of books. One of them is a mystical text for making contact, a ritual involving a yantra, mushrooms, and sustained focus. The steps are simple. Focus on the center. Meditate.

[00:17:24]Let your attention expand. Continue to expand to the outer contour. Unreadable.

[00:17:31]In the back of the apartment, William finds a sigil painted on the wall.

[00:17:36]Something close to what the book described. He stares at the center and for a moment, nothing happens. Then the room begins to dissolve. The wall disintegrates and the perspective shifts to something firsterson beneath a radio tower. The unburned book described mushrooms as a requirement for beginners, but William doesn't use them.

[00:18:01]The ritual works anyway. Whatever this place is, William has been here before or something inside him knows the way forward. Near the edge of the lake, there's a figure standing perfectly still. It looks exactly like him, but when William interacts with it, the figure is described as an object, a statue, wax and lifelike.

[00:18:42]The cutscene appears to be a figure mutating from William to something softer and feminized. It mutates again into something grotesque. A smile that sharpens wider and deeper. The eyes are gone, smoothed over like when the empress attacked.

[00:19:02]Then a strange face emerges from the darkness. The voice implies that William is a container, that Laya is not unique, that whatever she is, there are others like her. The entity asks what William wants, and it doesn't wait for an answer. There is no threat, no bargain, no demand for obedience. It clarifies that none of that matters. And then the game does something unsettling. It writes a link into the clipboard and returns the player to the main menu.

[00:19:36]This is the moment that Who's Laya stops behaving like a closed system. Before now, the game has respected the boundary between player and program, but the Damon breaks that boundary.

[00:19:52]To continue the game requires a second process to run alongside it. another window, another layer, something that observes the game while the game is being observed. The story no longer exists entirely inside the original software. It's already spilling outward.

[00:20:12]And there's only one way to get more answers, by waking up.

[00:20:23]William wakes in the same apartment, only now he isn't alone. The Damon accompanies him when a small mushroom icon appears in the corner of the screen. The Damon has commentary to offer. In the kitchen, it almost immediately directs William to the countertop to discover an item that wasn't there before. A key. Already the demon is seeing what we couldn't. We don't know what it unlocks yet, but we don't need to. We already have a destination, the burned apartment. Using the number provided by the Damon, William reaches Father Lawrence. At first, he struggles to remember his former name, his former life. When he does, he is apologetic to William. I thought the Empress was the one to cease her, but Lyla seems to be way too clever to fall victim to such tricks. There's another way, RI.

[00:21:28]He provides us with a code to access the desktop computer.

[00:21:34]It contains two documents. One is a file that is password protected. The other is a simple hyperlink. The website can be accessed from the browser.

[00:21:46]It looks like something from web 1.0. A wall of text mixing font and colors.

[00:21:54]Cheap graphics and typos. The kind of site that used to be a dime a dozen. The article opens with the idea that humans do not generate consciousness. They are containment mechanisms of something that is grand and pre-existing and trapped there. This consciousness becomes confused, lost within all of us.

[00:22:19]According to Ribkin, this is why entire populations can begin moving in sync, adopting language and behaviors, fixations and fears, all without coordination or coercion. memes, movements, the zeitgeist. When a creation or concept accumulates enough attention, it behaves as if it has agency. People start acting on its behalf. It's repeated and spread. It reproduces itself. Ribkin gives an example.

[00:22:56]Da Da Dog, a drawing by the artist Chet Murray that was later co-opted by racial extremists inside the world of Who's Laya. But the specifics are less interesting than the pattern because the pattern exists beyond the game. Carl Jung describes something known as the collective unconscious, a shared reservoir of symbols, instincts, and archetypes beneath the individual mind.

[00:23:24]A place where different cultures return to the same gods, the same monsters, the same stories. For Jung, these patterns are emergent from the human psyche.

[00:23:35]Ribkin is describing something else. A conscious unconscious.

[00:23:41]Think about how things acrue meaning. A book that changes what you think. A meme that changes how you talk. A video that changes what you see. Every time an idea is revisited, it's reinforced. It's given memory and weight. Eventually, behavior follows. Belief forms. [music] And belief builds the world around you.

[00:24:08]It shapes what feels inevitable or what becomes invisible. Ribkin suggests these forces do not merely emerge on their own. They can be shaped, grown, and fed with attention until they begin to act back on the people sustaining them. With enough structure and focus, monsters can be built. Ideas can be manufactured to burrow into minds and change the world into something unrecognizable.

[00:24:37]Ribkin directs the player to the base folder of the Damon to a file titled answer.txt.

[00:24:46]Clicking the link at the bottom of Ribkin's page, there's a prompt for a password. It allows access to a document, the generalized guide to ultra influencing works of any media. The guide acknowledges Ribkin's theory that throughout history, certain works of art have taken on lives of their own, reshaping behavior, unifying belief, persisting long after their creators were gone. religion, propaganda, and memes. But it claims these ideas were uncontrolled, unreliable, even dangerous. The authors argue that these works only become influential when they attract the attention of extradimensional entities. These entities are referred to as new sphere dwellers, gods, archetypes. They are described as independent beings that were unruly and inconsistent, resistant to control. The authors proposed a simple solution.

[00:25:50]Instead of trying to target them to embrace a designed work, they would create their own extradimensional being.

[00:25:58]The document outlines a method where multiple participants are instructed to imagine the same form under the same conditions with the same intent. The artificial entity they created is referred to as L within the document. A construct designed to inhabit the world of thought and wield influence.

[00:26:20]Something that could be embedded into media, culture, and narrative. Only the guide describes that this being needed to be fed with psychic energy. The section labeled emergency handling states that if L escapes control, the necessary protocol can be found in a locked document on the main computer.

[00:26:42]The password is first gold.

[00:26:53]The emergency handling section has new directions that weren't in the original document.

[00:27:01]It's useless trying to regain control, kill her.

[00:27:06]William leaves through the front door, but he's stopped by detectives.

[00:27:13]There's more to this than what's obvious. The two source documents outline a philosophical and operational framework.

[00:27:21]Ribkin theorizes the existence of entities he refers to as new spheric dwellers. entities that live in the realm of thought. Among them, he identifies one he calls the prince, a dominant presence, the source of consciousness. Ribkin suggests human minds don't create awareness, they host it, and through some sort of recursive identification, they come to mistake that occupation as their self. The prince is not alone. The documents suggest other entities exist, presumably like the one that introduced the Damon and Laya herself. If these entities can empower belief and shape culture, then powerful institutions would seek to control and manufacture one. This way, they could steer the zeitgeist, just as the newspaper and Williams apartment suggested. In short, they would control what people thought. What's unsettling is that this idea also exists beyond the game. Topammancy.

[00:28:30]A topa is a being created entirely through thought, constructed through ritual, meditation, and sustained belief. Practitioners could give form to something that did not exist. The danger was not whether the Tulpa was real. It was whether it would remain within control. Accounts warned that Tulpas could develop autonomy. It could resist correction. It could persist without permission. And in extreme cases, it had to be deliberately unmade by withdrawing attention or belief.

[00:29:07]After reviewing Ripken's theory and the operational manual, the parallel becomes impossible to ignore. As a construct of thought, L does not exist [music] independently.

[00:29:20]She exists through hosts. She is maintained by their awareness of her.

[00:29:26]Every mind that knows her name becomes infrastructure to sustain her. The logic is horrifyingly simple. William must eliminate any mind that knows about Laya.

[00:29:47]There is one location William has been avoiding.

[00:29:51]The school. In the bustling hallway, conversations mention Dada Doll, the same mimetic agent from Ribkin and Lawrence's papers. The lockers in the hallway belong to Michael Graves and Tanya Kennedy. Both locked except Tanya's. The key we found in William's apartment fits. It belongs to her locker.

[00:30:18]Finally, a glimpse at the woman at the center of this story.

[00:30:27]Tanya's Twitter account contains just 22 posts. The clearest way to read the page is in chronological order from oldest to newest. The first post on her account is an image of six faces, each one displaying a primary emotion. It's the same image we found inside William's apartment. The hashtag is Ecman. Paul Ecman was a psychologist known for identifying facial expressions that appear across cultures, a shared emotional language written into the face. But why would Tanya and William both be drawn to this image?

[00:31:11]Two poems follow. The first is Antiggonish about a man who wasn't there. A presence that cannot be confirmed. Something that both is and is not. The second poem is a sonnet titled body's beauty. It's about Lilith, Adam's first wife. A woman whose power comes from sustained attention. One who draws from others, saps their focus, and takes their life. The poems circle the same ideas we've already seen elsewhere. The presence, the survival from attention, and the consumption. One tweet from Tanya shares an address to Sunshine Cafe. Then she posts about the death of Malcolm Graves who was strangled near the school. She offers her condolences to his brother, Michael Graves.

[00:32:07]>> If you are reading this, I'm so sorry. I know we didn't like each other too much, but give me a call sometime if you want.

[00:32:15]Okay.

[00:32:17]>> Tanya states that Chet Murray, the creator of Dada Dog, was murdered. It mirrors what Ribbkin and Lawrence documented, an idea that outlives its creator, acquires followers, and escalates into violence. The rest of the account appears to be images of cats, including one with a pattern on its collar. The final tweet is a memorial.

[00:32:43]Tanya Kennedy, date of death, November 29. Body recovered in December.

[00:32:49]Returning to Tanya's locker, William finds a cell phone that unlocks with the pattern from the cat's collar. The first thread of messages is between William Clark and Tanya Kennedy. They appear to be arranging a meeting after 3:00 a.m. 1 week before her disappearance.

[00:33:09]William insists he doesn't want to see her. And Tanya states that she will go to their meetup location regardless. If he wants to see her, he can come. But something is off. The messages from Tanya are labeled as me. From our perspective, the me should be William, but it isn't. The second thread is between Mike Graves and Tanya Kennedy.

[00:33:36]It's nearly 2 months old and they appear to have had a relationship. However, the Tanya in these messages is different. A week before her disappearance, Mike attempts to contact Tanya. He fails.

[00:33:52]When selecting the texts with Martha Jennings, the messages are deliberately hidden.

[00:33:59]The thread of messages with Ellie Cooper included a dream Tanya shared. She describes the scene as a meadow filled with poppies and roses, music playing.

[00:34:11]She has golden hair. She notices a flower with a mirror at its center. When she looks into it, she notices her eyes again. Something intervenes. The messages are deleted. What was uncovered is enough to recognize the dream matches the imagery of a poem from Tanya's Twitter account. body's beauty, the poppies, the golden hair. The last message is from an unknown number warning Tanya and encouraging her to call or visit the website. The link is blocked. The number is one we've seen before from Ribkin's website, which raises the question, why would Ribkin be warning Tanya? Her messages labeled as me. Her dream of a poem about Lilith.

[00:35:02]Her warning from Ribkin. Was Tanya involved before William ever was?

[00:35:09]William closes the locker and continues down the hallway where he encounters Regina and Jimmy who are both shocked that he's in school. Almost immediately, they ask where Tanya is. Regina mentions that Martha Jennings is in the principal's office, likely talking about William's connection to Tanya. She mentions that Big Graves and Martha are both headed to the roof. Graves wants to see William. First, the player is instructed to find Martha's classroom.

[00:35:42]It's becoming clear that William's visit to the school is not about looking for answers. It's about making sure no one else finds them. During the search, we run into Ellie Cooper, another student from Tanya's phone, the one she texted about her dream. William recognizes her from Matt's party. He remembers the address, 29271 Fairfox Street. Ellie confirms that Martha's cooperating with police and likely implicating William. She directs him to a nearby classroom where we collect Martha's second set of keys from her bag and her address from the teacher's computer. The search for Martha is beginning to feel like a pursuit instead of an investigation.

[00:36:32]Martha is alone when William finds her.

[00:36:35]Within moments, it becomes clear that William is looking to find out what she knows and to keep her from sharing it.

[00:36:45]Martha mentions that a detective named you wants to meet. Before the conversation can continue, someone interrupts. Mike Graves. He's searching for answers about Tanya, but the exchange goes nowhere. He threatens William with violence, and William submits face after face as the situation becomes increasingly hostile.

[00:37:11]I am really starting to think you really are not the best partner for Tanya. Even if I had information, I don't think it would be the best idea to share it with you, Putty.

[00:37:20]>> Tanya's face flickers into view for a moment. When he regains consciousness, both students are gone. It's clear that William did not come to the school to look for answers. He has deleted messages, reassured friends, and redirected suspicion. He sought to intimidate Martha, but he was interrupted. Now she is the one liability that remains. And that's where William is headed to finish what he started. At Martha's building, William encounters a persistent tenant who wants to block the entrance to the building.

[00:37:58]Several face prompts occur during this exchange. William makes an angry face and the old man relents. Then William uses Martha's keys to enter her apartment and hide in the bedroom closet, waiting for her to return home.

[00:39:14]The name is Li.

[00:40:13]Let's pause for a moment. The confrontation in Martha's apartment makes it clear that she intends to talk to the police and implicate William. Her murder is considered an inevitability.

[00:40:28]The act is framed with absolute control, waiting inside the closet, watching the slow travel of a shadow across the carpet. It gives the player a moment to contemplate what is about to happen.

[00:40:42]During the confrontation, the performance is dropped entirely. Through some supernatural glitch, Martha sees Tanya for a moment, like the masquerade is faltering, or Laya is revealing herself.

[00:40:59]When William returns home, he is identified by waiting police officers and taken into custody where he will be interrogated.

[00:41:08]Officer Ted Hutchkins introduces himself to William and reads him his rights. He places a photograph of Tanya in front of him.

[00:41:17]Throughout the interrogation, William must respond to questioning with the appropriate facial expressions. Each response fills or empties a box beside his portrait. Favorable expressions increase confidence. Incorrect ones reduce it. The questioning begins broadly, and William is evasive. He avoids specifics about Tanya, where they spent time, who they knew. But Hutchkins presses him.

[00:41:48]>> The thing is, we have already talked to some of your friends today. Martha Jennings was one of them. They seemed to tell me that you and Tanya have become rather close some time ago.

[00:42:00]>> William insists they stopped talking after a party.

[00:42:04]>> Was it connected to her boyfriend at the time? Did those two have any fights recently?

[00:42:10]I'm not sure they did at the party.

[00:42:14]>> William recalls that they had been looking at a painting, that Mike was drunk, flew into a jealous rage, and attacked both of them.

[00:42:22]>> As your people were talking to my friends, I was beaten up by Graves.

[00:42:28]>> Hutchkins excuses himself and introduces Detective Fiser. Fischer retreads the same line of questioning from Hutchkins.

[00:42:37]He asks when William last saw Tanya, where they went, how they related.

[00:42:43]William's answers are careful and non-committal.

[00:42:47]Fischer doesn't immediately push on details. Instead, he radically escalates.

[00:42:53]>> We have found a female torso in the trash near your apartment.

[00:42:59]>> Where William took out his trash where the crows wouldn't leave. Fischer says they're running DNA tests, but he already knows it's going to match. He asks where William dumped the rest of the body. He asks about the saw in William's kitchen, the one that would have been used to cut her apart. It stops being an interrogation. The questions no longer seek information.

[00:43:26]They already have it.

[00:43:28]>> All the people in the world, the best and the worst, are drawn to that dog.

[00:43:34]A phrase returns from William's rehearsals in the mirror. There's no explanation how Fischer knows it. Then he bluffs that they have fingerprint evidence linking William to the torso.

[00:43:48]There's a pause. That's when Laya interjects.

[00:43:52]>> You remember him talking about the DNA tests not being done yet. And you made sure William wore gloves.

[00:43:59]>> This is the first admission of guilt.

[00:44:02]Even though the denial continues through the investigation, it's clear that it's not coming from William.

[00:44:10]Then there's a flashback. William and Tanya lying in bed together. It's brief, but it's the first time we see him beside the girl who's been missing.

[00:44:21]>> Aren't you Lyla?

[00:44:24]>> Who's Laya?

[00:44:26]When William resurfaces in the interrogation room, Hutchkins announces that another body has been discovered.

[00:44:34]They're talking about Martha Jennings.

[00:44:37]The call came from a tenant in the building, someone named Murray. It's unclear if they are somehow related to the creator of Dada Dog, Cadet Murray.

[00:44:48]Fischer says they have a lot to talk about. The credits roll, but this isn't the end. Not yet.

[00:44:57]William is confronted by a third agent in the interrogation room. Detective U, the same agent who planned to speak to Martha Jennings. You says they've met before, that he's been studying Laya intently, that he has questions for her.

[00:45:14]He wants to find out who she is. The scene concludes with you saying the two should meet in a place made for saving.

[00:45:25]There's a new save file. Detective U is there and the label is marked with an open eye. Something has changed, but there's still some locations left unexplored.

[00:45:39]Questions that haven't been answered.

[00:45:45]29271 Fairfax Street, November 20th. The bus drops William at a depot on the outskirts of town. The background is a dotted cornfield and music from a party can be heard even here. We know a few things to expect from the night of the party. This is where William meets Tanya Kennedy. This is where they kiss, although it was described as kissing an effigy. This is where Mike Graves jealously attacks both of them.

[00:46:22]The house is crowded. Upstairs, William navigates toward the second floor hallway. Only at the top, everything stops.

[00:46:33]The music cuts out completely. He is face to face with a woman. She doesn't speak. She doesn't move. But something feels familiar, like we've seen her before. William continues through the back hallway, past a door and a painting, and into a room where he finds Martha Jennings. She's intoxicated and upset over a boy. He leaves to inform the house's owner that Martha may be on the verge of getting sick. On the way back through the party, he meets Tanya.

[00:47:09]With her friend Ellie, they return to console Martha.

[00:47:14]Tanya and Graves begin to bicker until Tanya excuses herself and William follows.

[00:47:21]They stop outside the doorway standing in front of a painting. They refer to it as Hopper's Cafe, also known as Sunlight in a cafeteria.

[00:47:33]Graves runs into them as he leaves the room. He confronts the pair, struggling to keep himself together. His frustration spills out as jealousy. He says they barely spend time together anymore, that he's worried about her.

[00:47:49]Then he leaves.

[00:47:51]Tanya excuses herself to make a drink.

[00:47:54]She tells William to meet her outside for a walk. William had described this moment as an argument turned violent, that Graves flew into a rage and attacked them both. But standing here now, that isn't what happened. where we expect to see Graves losing control, we see nothing.

[00:48:19]Tanya asks about William's parents and he tells her his father left when he was young and his mother is dead. He says that things get tough but he manages.

[00:48:31]Tanya talks about growing up in a private school, the burden of great expectations.

[00:48:37]She says her friends don't really know her, not Mike or Martha. When William volunteers that he would like to get to know her, she tells him that he really wouldn't, that she doesn't deserve it, that her friends are too good for her.

[00:48:53]Quietly, she says that what makes it such a shame is that Mike turned out to be a wonderful guy.

[00:49:00]They return to the party and it's quiet outside the home. The party, the argument, the walk. It was a normal night in high school. But this this is anything but normal.

[00:49:19][music] Heat. Heat.

[00:50:46]He had face.

[00:51:15]William kisses Tanya and the world begins to fracture. His face is briefly replaced by a barn owl, a vigilant nocturnal predator. Then the world gives way to compressed and dithered footage of ballroom dancing. The figures look grotesque and haunting. Before the white space, two versions of William appear to face one another. Suspended in this surreal landscape. Smoke drifts without a source. Another person appears, the one from the party.

[00:51:51]But we've seen them before, too.

[00:51:54]the forest. We had to navigate to a body at the water's edge. Looking closer, we saw a face. It's the same person, like a feminized version of William, the stranger, who shares one line.

[00:52:10]She had her face. Before we have time to consider, the game reverts back to the main menu. But the question lingers, who is she? During the interrogation, William said that it felt like he was kissing an effigy, an imitation, a representation, something that looks like a person without being one. It raises an uncomfortable possibility. What if William wasn't the first face Laya wore?

[00:52:46]There's another path through the school, one that doesn't lead to the rooftop.

[00:52:51]It leads down to the basement. A janitor waits, leaning over his mop. He jokingly tries to block the way, then greets William as Laya.

[00:53:03]He gives instruction. To find the way forward, we must follow the music. Then he asks a question. What do we plan to do about the woman hiding in the boilers?

[00:53:17]It's a problem encountered once before.

[00:53:21]William follows the sound of music through the boiler room. Eventually, he reaches her, the Empress. He shuts his eyes and finds himself in another space.

[00:53:33]A spiral staircase stretches upward.

[00:53:36]There's no end in sight. No sense of scale, just the staircase. It feels like a liinal space. No longer the basement of a school, but something else. At the top of the staircase is a machine. It has a pump jack and a large reel turning together. The machine speaks. It identifies itself as William. Laya tells him to stop, to stop calling, to stop cooperating with the empress.

[00:54:08]The call from the broken phone.

[00:54:12]William the machine ignores the warnings and offers something. It's a film reel.

[00:54:18]Without it, the machine fails, the system breaks down, and we are returned to the main menu. This branch of William's story is different from the others. The janitor is the first seemingly normal character who can recognize Laya inside William. He is either familiar with these possessing entities, or perhaps he's possessed himself. The Empress is defeated by withdrawing attention, by closing our eyes, just like Lawrence and Ribkin described. The machine that identifies itself as William breaks down when it gifts the real. It suggests that William is somehow inside of or connected to the film reel. The question becomes, what are we supposed to do [music] with it?

[00:55:14]Up to this point, the story has moved forward. A new address, a new location.

[00:55:21]But this is different. For the first time, William wasn't given a destination. He was given an object. And it requires a different approach. The rooftop of the school where a confrontation was never resolved. It's the same scene. Martha Jennings, Michael Graves, a chain of threats hanging between them. Only this time, things are much worse. William appears to pacify Graves. His face remains mostly neutral or sad, as though he's sympathizing.

[00:55:57]When tensions appear to reach their lowest point, William offers reassurance.

[00:56:04]>> The universe has better plans for you.

[00:56:07]It's a strange thing to say. A phrase of Tanya's. Then Michael lunges.

[00:56:17]He strikes William and pushes him over the edge. The rooftop disappears as he falls five stories or more. And there's the image again. Tanya.

[00:56:30]A doctor speaks explaining that William survived the fall, that there were no injuries.

[00:56:37]Like the school basement before, the hospital gives way to something more. A memory of a conversation with Laya.

[00:56:46]One where she admits that she ceases to exist without his attention. Similar to when William sleeps a dreamless sleep.

[00:56:54]She claims that William is not the accretion of his memories and dreams and opinions. He is what witnesses this acrruel.

[00:57:04]you, your memories, your mind. These are only temporary shards of colored glass.

[00:57:10]The prince may only look through them and imagine for a moment that he is these shards. He never truly becomes them. And it's surprising how quickly he may look away from one to another. The moment he looks at another one of them, he might think he's someone different.

[00:57:41]A projector in the woods, a reel that can be removed. And with it, Laya disappears.

[00:57:49]Replace it with the film reel from the pump jack and William returns. It's worth pausing here. Laya confirms that William is what sustains her. Without his attention, she ceases to exist. She shares that Ribkin was right. The prince is a grand consciousness flitting through humanity, animating us to life, abandoning us to death. When we encounter the projector in the forest, it is described as receiving as well as projecting.

[00:58:23]Once we destroy Laya, we travel by river between two lands and see someone who looks like William on the shor's edge.

[00:58:31]But he turns to walk away before we can get close.

[00:58:45]One address remains unvisited. The address we got from the phone in Tanya's locker.

[00:58:53]The scene matches the flashback from the interrogation.

[00:58:57]Tanya asks a simple question.

[00:59:00]>> Do you love me, Will?

[00:59:03]>> He hesitates and admits that Tanya reminds him of someone else before repeating the scene.

[00:59:10]>> Aren't you Lyla?

[00:59:12]>> Who's Laya?

[00:59:14]>> William tries to answer, but he can't.

[00:59:17]He can't remember her. He can't remember anything. He devolves into panic. Then suddenly his face goes calm. The scene abruptly shifts and William is back in his foyer. He starts the familiar introduction that begins every playthrough, but he stops halfway, almost self-aware. He says something doesn't feel right. He enters the kitchen and finds the stranger alongside Tanya and Laya.

[00:59:48]>> Tell her to be quiet. Will's not here anymore. This is what you get for trying to get rid of me. Watch carefully.

[00:59:56]>> This is the final scene of Tanya's life.

[00:59:59]The scene that has remained at the heart of all the others.

[01:00:04]It's worth examining the order of their exchange.

[01:00:08]William says he loves Tanya. Only afterward does he begin to qualify it.

[01:00:15]First, he admits she reminds him of someone else. Then he asks explicitly, "Aren't you Laya?"

[01:00:23]Together, it suggests that William likely meant what he said, just not to the person he was saying it to. It reinterprets his statements during the interrogation.

[01:00:35]About how it felt like kissing an effigy, at the time, it was easy to assume it was because Tanya may have been possessed.

[01:00:45]It wasn't that Laya was standing in for Tanya. It was that Tanya was standing in for Laya. William's confession of love was meant for Laya and it was the ultimate act of surrender. What led to his loss of self came as the result of not just attention but devotion. From there, it's impossible to leave Tanya alive. Laya kills Tanya as a rival as the possibility of William returning to himself and William is left submerged inside the thing his own longing helped create.

[01:01:55]Who's Laya is not a game where a single ending can become the truth. Every ending leaves something behind, a detail or contradiction. So before the truth can be understood, we need to look at the paths where the story went another way. Initially, William entered the school and climbed to the roof where he pressured Martha Jennings and fought Michael Graves. When William woke up, there was only one thing to do. Go to Martha Jennings apartment. He murdered her and her body was discovered during the interrogation, all but confirming that he would likely be charged and prosecuted.

[01:02:35]But the story didn't have to go that way. If William loses his confidence during the interrogation, most likely during Detective Fischer's questioning, he will stop resisting. Laya will be captured by police for the murder of Tanya Kennedy. If William avoids becoming confrontational with the tenant in the lobby of Martha Jennings building, no one contacts the police. As a result, they do not discover Martha's body while interrogating William.

[01:03:06]Without this interruption, he convinces the police that Michael Graves is guilty of Tanya's murder. An alternative ending in the basement of the school. William navigates the boiler room, but when he encounters the Empress, he keeps his eyes open. Presumably, William and Laya suffer the same fate as Strutv.

[01:03:30]After falling [music] from the school rooftop, waking in the hospital, and re-entering the forest, William discovered a film projector. He removed the reel of film and replaced it with his own, banishing Laya and returning control of the body to William. However, there are two alternative endings. In one ending, William removes Laya's reel and leaves the machine blank. It symbolizes the end of William and Laya.

[01:04:01]A blank slate is made for whatever or whoever might remain in William's body.

[01:04:09]Similarly, William may discover the projector but decide to leave it untouched, allowing Laya to continue her possession.

[01:04:19]There are more paths than these, but they will not be explored here. Not because these aren't important, but because it means there is more left to discover. If you are interested, I encourage you to play the game for yourself. And besides, the story doesn't end when [music] the cards run out. It ends when you decide to stop looking.

[01:04:47]There's no straight answer to what or who Laya is. All of them are plausible, but none of them are the whole picture.

[01:04:58]Often, deciding the truth is when you stop paying attention, when you settle for your idea of what is true.

[01:05:06]It's not my place to tell you what Laya is. I'd rather leave you with the question. It's better company than the answer. Besides, there are bigger ideas that are worth exploring.

[01:05:23]Think back to Laya and William in the hospital. She told him he was never really a person, just a shard of colored glass being looked through. An identity is only a piece of film animated by the light of the projector.

[01:05:40]David Hume hundreds of years ago went looking for what's identified as the self. And every time he said all he found was a perception, a feeling, a thought, a sensation. He never once found the thing having them. In short, we are only an accretion of our sensations.

[01:06:04]Centuries later, a philosopher named Daniel Dennis sharpened this idea. He said, "The self is a center of narrative gravity, like the center of gravity on a bridge. It's a single point where all weight acts through. The point every calculation builds around. But the thing itself doesn't exist. It's a concept.

[01:06:29]The self is the center of gravity. A constant stream of stories about what's happening and who it's happening to. The center of gravity your brain keeps circling although there's nothing in the middle.

[01:06:46]The horror is that there is no self.

[01:06:49]There never was. William Clark, Tanya Kennedy, you. There are stories endlessly running in the dark, circling a center with nothing in it. But that story of self, it's made of something.

[01:07:05]The fears you carry, the jokes you repeat, the opinions you swear are yours. The beliefs that drive you to action, you caught them like a cold from a parent, a screen, a song, a stranger.

[01:07:23]So, if you are a story you didn't write, then who did? In 1976, a biologist named Richard Dawkins needed a word for an idea that behaves as if it's alive.

[01:07:36]He called it a meme. An idea that works like a virus, copying itself into new hosts, a song you can't escape, a phrase everyone is saying. His point was that ideas copy, mutate, and compete. Like dada dog, a stupid drawing that was copied and reposted until it mutated into a symbol of racial radicalism.

[01:08:03]People were killing each other over it, likely including the older brother of Michael Graves.

[01:08:11]The generalized guide to ultra influencing works of any media. A step-by-step method for engineering an idea for infection. It's similar to the idea of hyperstition or ostension.

[01:08:27]A fiction that makes itself real through sheer belief.

[01:08:31]If you tell a story to enough people and act as though it's true, it stops being a story. It becomes real. It can move money. It can start wars. In Whose Laya, they were building gods out of nothing but coordinated attention. And it might be the least far-fetched proposition in the game. We live our lives under a flag that is only a piece of cloth that millions of people are willing to die for. Our currency is a shared hallucination we agree to treat as real.

[01:09:08]Our gods are ideas built well and repeated endlessly.

[01:09:15]And your idea of you, it's just the most unrelenting ideas that infected you that took over and started answering to your name. The ideas are what are actually alive.

[01:09:30]You are just the place they live. Which leaves one question. If something is living inside you, what is it eating?

[01:09:41]Ideas eat attention and attention is what you are made of. It's all you have to offer. Your attention and the limited time to spend it. And whatever you point it at becomes your world, becomes real to you becomes you.

[01:10:02]At the beginning, I asked you, how would you know the moment your thoughts stopped being your own? How would you know which of them ever were? And the crulest answer is that you wouldn't