#puppet game

So uhhh... I started this post when watching another playthrough of the game in early August.... I uuummm... couldn't finish it cause the person playing didn't get Pearl's glasses and therefore would get the less than perfect ending and I really didn't want to watch it.

So I finished everything past this today/when posting. Not as detailed as it could've been if I'd been watching gameplay, but hopefully it still works... It ended up being a lot longer than I'd initially thought, so sorry for the long read.

So, a lot of people knew of the game through the demo that had released like, what? 3 years ago now? We didn't know the story or anything really, just that Gordon was fighting these muppet rejects (affectionate). We don't know much except that the puppets have been alone for a good while and are just a liiiittle too happy to see a human again.

By the demo's end we the audience assume more than we know. With the puppets' lines we assume a lot from the puppets attacking people, to them being left due to not being liked (having weaponry literally used on them as "props" for the show). We're all under this assumption that the puppets did something to cause them being alone... And then the full game releases.

As I said above it starts with some talk show about a woman discussing her depression and it switches to other channels, a guy eating a giant sub, some reality tv show about a guy talking about his ex, and a news story about an accident that had happened and hearing about it raining later in the night. It's a massive juxtaposition compared to what people were expecting, and just as the audience/player is reeling from all this info we're hit with the gameplay, with Gordon and his work file.

Just as you're given a moment to breathe, you read his file and see he's considered a "problem" employee who has to do well in this current task or he'll be fired. The entire game discusses how unhappy people are and how the world just isn't a happy place. But then as you're questioning what type of game you started up, you go inside the hotel and see the front desk has a chalkboard sign that says "ring me", and Gordon does. From there we meet Ricky the Sock and hear his little speech about the neighborhood being back on air.

From here the puppets are trying to be friendly (though a bit rough with it) and Gordon is trying to do his job. They're at odds with each other....kind of. We learn more about the story of the world here, about the war that caused things to go all gloomy, about how the studio was closed... All the while the puppets are still trying to make friends with Gordon and he's helping them as he can though begrudgingly (Pearl's glasses, the film convo with Goblette, helping Ray with the draining system, giving the dogs food, and playing the Piano with Arnold).

As we learn more about the characters and world we see that it's a pretty fractured place. We also find out that the puppets saw some of it. We don't know what they saw, but given how some of them became "unfriendly" we can only assume it was terrible. And I don't just mean that as a gloss over, I mean it was clearly awful given some of the unfriendly ones literally removed their eyes. So yeah, all of the puppets were abandoned by the humans and left to their own devices, got traumatised by seeing what was on tv instead of their own show, and tried putting it back on the air when they figured out how.

These puppets were left, abandoned, for so long by humans. They were left alone and eventually saw what people were doing and watching instead of interacting with them. They saw the worst of the worst but still chose (for those that didn't break) to try to help people by showing something nice on the tv. They wanted, truly wanted, to help people in the one way they knew they could. But just as they'd managed to find a way in, not a great way, but a way, Gordon comes in to turn the antenna off and end their efforts. We also see as the game plays out how Gordon doesn't really want to do it either, but his hands are tied.

His resolve is slowly but surely broken down as the game progresses, but because it's his job, his livelihood, he has to. He helps the puppets out where he can, both due to puzzles and cause it's only right to help them since he's already doing so much negative stuff to them (after all you can play without helping any of the ones I listed earlier). And by the end of the game he's helped them a lot, and suddenly Ricky hits him with one more question.

To help them get the show on the air correctly. And... he does. Gordon does what he can to get them on public access and eventually they get multiple companies offering to sign them up for a season or so. His ending monologue is literally about seeing the light in the dark again, coming out of a long depression and getting back into a nice swing of things.