#apartment analysis

First off! The titular Lyle! Going to try to keep this section limited to what we can learn about Lyle through his apartment rather than just thoughts about Lyle himself, as he is possibly the single most-discussed character in the whole game. And we can infer a lot!

Jeanne’s dialogue confirms that apartment 21 is actually Lyle’s apartment, seeing as she does consider him her neighbor. It’s not a situation where Lyle moved into someone else’s abandoned apartment after the apocalypse started.

The D&D M&W stuff makes it clear that Lyle’s a fan of tabletop games! Do you suppose he’s part of an ongoing group, or is he looking for people to play with? It can be so hard to find a local playgroup! I like to think he and Edwin had a group going, maybe with a few other astronomers involved.

Considering we get the crossword book from him but also that it’s completely unstarted, I assume that it’s one of those things that’s he’s been meaning to get around to but never quite found the time (been there, buddy).

We can find anxiety meds in Lyle’s bathroom! Which is a minor if interesting detail. Lyle really does get more and more relatable.

Funnily enough, one thing that we don’t see in his apartment that we should be in there is the zoom lens that Edwin’s loan log says Lyle is currently borrowing! But considering his partly mechanical form, it’s possible that the zoom lens is simply part of his body now.

Lyle’s dark room! I’d wager Mr. Henderson wouldn’t exactly approve if it’s existence if he were to ever find out. This strikes me as something that breaks some kind of agreement found in you average renter’s agreement.

Notably you can only ever access the dark room if you kill Lyle to get the key! He doesn’t grant you entry under any circumstance, and it’s not exactly hard to see why considering what his ‘special project’ is.

On that note, Lyle will never attack you! It is impossible to get him to be the one to instigate a fight, you have to attack him out of the blue.

The photos of Sam make it clear that Lyle’s affection for Sam isn’t a new development by any means.

More concerningly, though, is the key you can find between two of the bookshelves. It’s SAM’S apartment key, which the more eagle-eyed and elephant-memoried of you out there will recall is the spare that’s missing from the plant outside Sam’s apartment! It’s dubious as to whether or not Lyle has ever used the key.

As far as I’m aware, the key has no actual purpose other than to serve as an ominous reminder of Lyle’s obsession.

What the fuck is Lokjaw’s deal. Seriously. Lyle. Why do you have a man in your unlocked closet? I can excuse the hamburger man you have locked in your bedroom (we’ll get to him), but this is just ridiculous.

My thought on why Lokjaw hasn’t just left the (completely unlocked) closet is because their mental state has deteriorated to the point where they cannot operate a door. Maybe they don’t even recognize that a door is a thing that leads to another place anymore.

But that’s assuming Lokjaw was ever human to begin with! I’ve seen theories that they were Lyle’s dog (credit to @crankyteapot once more), which would explain the mutant’s posture, strange lower jaw, and why they’re in Lyle’s closet in the first place!

But considering that there’s no dog bowl, no collar, and no reaction from Lyle if you kill Lokjaw? I’d wager that if they are a dog, they’re not Lyle’s dog, but rather just some random already-mutated dog he came across! It went sniffing around the closet and Lyle just shut the door behind it. This making it a problem for future Lyle.

Lokjaw does drop raw pork if you kill it, which is… hmm. Something.

I… don’t think there’s any pleasant explanation as to why it drops raw pork actually.

Something about Lokjaw, whether human or canine, makes me think they had a very nervous disposition. There’s something so defensive about their posture, and their facial expression seems so scared! Unfortunately for us, this translates to the mindset of ‘kill the thing that is scaring me’.

Unfortunately, the reason for Tumorhead’s presence in apartment 21 isn’t any clearer than Lokjaw’s! If anything it’s stranger because he’s in what appears to be Lyle’s bedroom, and he’s even locked in there by those strange fleshy growths.

On thing IS clear: the hamburger found around the room is pretty clearly implied to be meat that’s fallen off of a Tumorhead himself, judging by what happens in battle. Sam is the bravest man alive for taking this meat and cooking it.

@crankyteapot pointed out a few visual similarities between Tumorhead’s clothing and the Onlookers, and I could see there being a connection!

I really love the idea that Tumorhead, having looked outside but while still human, stumbled drunk into Lyle’s apartment and collapsed into his bed (with Lyle being too timid to correct them). The poor guy nursing a splitting headache that manifested very viscerally as his metamorphosis completed in his sleep.

Located in Lyle’s bathroom, we finally have an easy-to-explain mutant presence! The broken-down door makes it pretty clear that this guy forced his way in from F1 through Lyle’s shortcut.

Since this guy is pretty clearly implied to be from F1, I wonder if he has any association with that one gigantic eye in the unnumbered rooms? On one hand there’s some surface level similarities, but on the other hand Eyecluster’s eyes are functionally distinct: they’ve been modified into acid-launchers and it’s unclear if he can still see out of any of them!

My favorite detail is how Eyecluster’s posture seems off balance from the sheer volume of eyes he has, it’s a neat touch that conveys just how ungainly their newly added parts are! And I adore how the Visitor’s effects clearly don’t care about what an organ USED TO do. Your eyeballs spit acid now. Your hair can eat things. Your tongue is easier to get around on than your legs.

This is nothing but pure headcanon, but I like to think that on the morning Eyecluster beheld the Visitor, he woke up wearing contact lenses that he’d left on overnight by mistake. The unpleasant sensation in his eyes ended up heavily influencing the results of his transformation.

It’s what you all came here for, it’s LYLE BATHTUB THEORY TIME!!

So. Lyle’s bathtub. It’s weirdly long, right? And that’s not just sprite perspective weirdness! The comically long bathtub has actual inspection dialogue that reads ‘huh this thing is long as hell, weird huh?’ and it also points out that the whole room looks stretched. Sure enough, the less conspicuous but still very conspicuous counter across from it is also weirdly long!

But why? I’ll tell you why. I think Leigh stretched Lyle’s bathtub. it’s not what’s INSIDE the bathroom, but rather OUTSIDE!

The other side of the south bathroom wall is the hallway where Leigh chases you. You know, the hallway that she supernaturally lengthened so she could have more fun chasing Sam. Not only that, but this chase is required in order to access Lyle’s apartment in the first place, you cannot access Lyle’s bathroom without having done the Leigh chase!

So Leigh’s space-warping chase tunnel seems to have had some lasting effects on the adjoining rooms! Which makes sense. Sure, Leigh has some kinda of vague elongating powers, but you can’t tell me she knows how they work or how to use them in a way that doesn’t have some lingering effects.

It seems that the freezing temperature within the apartment is coming from the bodies of the residents themselves as opposed to a malfunctioning air conditioning unit, or something else along those lines.

Supporting this idea is the fact that most of their bodies seem to be actively growing ice, and nearly all of them have an ice breath attack that can freeze.

It's a neat Spin! They aren't merely in a cold area, they are the reason the area is cold in the first place! And judging by just how uncomfortably freezing they all look, these guys all seem to be victims to one of those 'constant agony' types of mutations. Imagine if your body was partially made of ice, but said body is also constantly telling you that this new state is impossibly, unbearably cold. You shiver, but it is mostly a reflex and offers you no semblance of warmth. Warmth is a thing that your body can no longer create. Chilling stuff.

I assume they're all a family unit, or at least very close! Mostly because of the layout of the apartment itself. I, personally, would not have a double wide bed with someone I only consider a roomie.

Assuming the family idea is correct, I like to think Pompom is the matriarch! Balaclava strikes me as the owner of all the video game consoles and games we find around the apartment.

My thought regarding the Tuques is that they are, or rather, used to be cats! This explains why there's more than one. The poor things started climbing into loose piles of winter gear once the apartment grew too chilly for comfort and eventually began fusing with them.

On that note. I like to think that, in the same way that Baby Teeth’s condition is spread via biting, this mutation is airborne. Specially, in the frosted over breath of those afflicted. Because damn wouldn’t that be so cool?

The apartment sure does have a LOT of winter gear, right? Though it could be argued that some of the clothes are grown from the resident's bodies, most of them do appear to be normal clothes functioning, well, normally (minus whatever's going on with Trapper Hat). That, plus the hockey gear and trophy in the closet make it clear that somebody who lives here is a hockey player! This goes a long way to explaining the quantity of the gear, since you need to dress warm to attend a hockey game.

But it's still odd, right? That somebody in the apartment would be a hockey player, but all of them look so extremely uncomfortable in their frozen states. Well, it might be a fairly obvious leap, but I believe that the Enforcer found in the sewers is the hockey player in question!

I know that it's fairly logical that the Enforcer is tied to apartment 34.

Like. Duh.

But seriously, his style of mutation matches that of the other frozen residents FLAWLESSLY, not to mention how glaringly out of place he is in the waterways! He also seems to be the only enemy in the entire game capable of inflicting the frozen status, apart from the apartment 34 residents.

But, unlike them, he is notably not visibly miserable.

My guess is that the Enforcer returned home after looking outside, and while everyone is holed up and shutting themselves in, he gradually spread his mutated status to the other members of his family. Each victim lowering the temperature of the apartment further and further and exacerbating the process.

To start things off, I believe that the mutated residents of apartment 16 were part of a gardening club that just happened to meet the morning all this started happening! A collection of people from different walks of life who shared a passion for botany, meeting up to show off their favorite (and in a few cases, quite exotic) plants!

A trickier matter to explain is the how of their mutations! A fairly large the elephant in the room is that there are NO WINDOWS on F1, and thus no easy way for anyone in apartment 16 to have looked outside! The easier answer is simply that they looked outside before F1 became an endless labyrinth with no windows, and in fact they would have had to in order to make sure their plants are getting adequate light.

Personally, however, I like to think that everyone got exposed in the early morning hours JUST as the Visitor’s effects began, while its influence was at its weakest. Delaying the onset of the changes until everyone had moved their plants into the apartment for their meetup.

With the basics out of the way: I think it’s a clean 50/50 on whether or not any individual we’re looking at in here is a human mutant fused with a plant, or a plant mutant puppeting human remains.

The Skull Flower and Ribcage Bloom are two examples where the plant is definitely the witness to the Visitor as opposed to a human!

One of the Skull Flower’s attacks is spitting hard seeds at you, which is likely how it creates more Skull Flowers! The bullet-like projectile acts as a means of getting the seed into the skin, where it then germinates.

It would also explain WHY all the plants are so hostile: you and your party are potential fertilizer.

Plants being affected by the Visitor despite their lack of eyes is really cool, and there is precedent for it with Sam’s houseplant (assuming you move it into the light)!

My understanding of this process is that the Visitor's changes are brought on by perceiving it, and thus being perceived by it, right? Well! Plants don't have traditional eyes, but they can tell whether they're in light or not! Is that not, in its own way, a form of perception? An awareness of a thing, even if a plant knows nothing more than that there is a thing?

I suppose that’s all the Visitor’s influence needs.

Moss Freak is another likely pure-plant mutant! Despite being human shaped and possessing bones, the lack of flesh and the fact that it’s face is merely an approximation of what a human face should look like makes me think this is more mimicry of human features than an actual resemblance.

Moss using a sketal frame as a mimic also ties into its battle strategy! You approach the smiling, waving plant man, and BAM: two more reveal themselves from within! It’s not just an ambush… it’s an ambush!

Root Creep is a bit of a gray area. Is it a human twisted into the shape of a plant, or a plant growing through a human body? I could see it being argued either way.

I think I lean slightly more towards Root Creep being a plant using a human body as a sort of ‘pot’. Mostly due to how the roots are just bursting out of this poor (hopefully dead) guy’s head.

I’d also like to take this opportunity to comment on just how gnarly Root Creep’s eyeball stamens are.

Grass Creep, Seed Creep, and Great Flower are where we get into what are more overly human-turned-plants!

They possess very human shapes and features, invoking the imagery of a human body being stretched and warped and folded into plant-like biology to match the greenery they’re not fused with.

Just look at Great Flower! That is a human head stretched into the shape of a corpse flower. Marvelously fucked up. This is the sort of thing the Visitor does to humans all the time, and the screaming face makes it clear that even if there’s no human consciousness anymore, a human was definitely used as a part in the creation of this monstrosity.

I like to think that Grass Creep was a crotchety older gardener. Suffered from joint problems only made worse by their transformation, resulting in their uniquely rooted state. They were very glad to find that their body no longer hurt to move, even if it stopped moving altogether.

Seed Freak gives the vibe of (at lest two) siblings fused together! Maybe they weren’t even in the gardening club, they just live elsewhere in the apparent. Happened to be passing by and figured they’d offer help with carrying one gardener’s heavy potted cactus into the building. Only to find that they started merging with it when they go to set it down.

Lastly and not leastly, we have Crimson Bloom!

They seem to have made a lair for themself in the bathroom, with lots of of skulls decorating the interior as well as the entrance. Fashionable!

Equally fashionable are the swarms of flies clogging the air around them. It makes sense: a rafflesia (the plant Crimson Bloom seems to have fused with) stinks like rotten mean with the explicit purpose of attracting carrion flies. To eat? No! The flies are the rafflesia’s helpful pollinators! While they’d be irritating to the average human, I’m sure Crimson Bloom is having the time of their life surrounded by their swarming friends!

Both Great Flower (corpse flower) and Crimson Blossom (rafflesia) are fused with exceptionally uncommon plants, so my assumption is that they were both the heads of this gardening society. Founders and organizers, now fused with their prides and joys.

For that matter, they’re still doing their best to make sure their precious plants are cared for. There’s no windows in apartment 16, remember. And plants do, historically, need sunlight to live. But without sunlight, other sources of nutrients will have to do… hence all the skulls.

Apartment 16 sure has a lot of skulls, huh?? Like, it’s a LOT of skulls! A frankly unreasonable number of skulls. Wow. One has to wonder how.

I do have a theory on that: the ambient noise!

Apartment 16 sounds like a busy swamp, with all sorts of noisy insects (and frogs??) creating a jungle-like atmosphere.

Consider where you find apartment 16. In the middle of a literally endless maze of rooms. So if you're lost and being chased by, hypothetically, a massive mass of rats that stalks the outer halls? Yeah, you're gonna try and get out of there.

I think it’s fairly likely that people think that apartment 16 leads outside, and all of those skulls are the remains of people who ducked inside hoping to escape the Rat King or to find a way out of the maze.