Dream Daddy Secret Ending
Jan. 2nd, 2022 08:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingIt turns out that Joseph, the wholesome and secretly gay Christian Youth Minister dad, is not the leader of a cult, nor does he murder your player-character. This is what happens:
After inviting you out onto his yacht to seduce you, Joseph drugs you and takes you down into the tunnels under your suburban neighborhood. He explains that there are so many single parents in the neighborhood because he has been murdering their partners and sacrificing them to some sort of eldritch Lovecraftian horrorterror, which then continues to feed off their sadness and despair. He is, of course, intending to kill you. You escape, but it turns out to be a House of Leaves / Doki Doki Literature Club! situation in which you haven’t escaped at all.
Thankfully, Joseph’s alcoholic wife Mary decides that she’s had enough of her husband murdering people, and she stabs him right before he stabs you. Joseph has four creepy children who are all perfect clones of him, and Mary has brought them with her. After injuring Joseph, Mary leaves him in the tunnels to be eaten by the creepy children.
Mary saves your character, who is then contacted by another single dad who I’m going to call Paranormal Investigator Barret Wallace. (His actual name is Saul.) He is the only character in this game who looks like an actual adult, he’s hot, and he warmly encourages you to get in touch with him if you need to talk.
I love Mary so much, by the way. Whoever wrote her did an outstanding job, and I salute them.
It’s an excellent horror story. I’ll be honest and admit that the dating sim elements of this game didn’t resonate with me, but the secret ending makes the entire endeavor worthwhile.
I remember that the Game Grumps team had to deal with a strong fandom backlash after people went through the Dream Daddy game files on Steam and found this ending when the game was released in 2017. Purity discourse on Tumblr was starting to get heated, and this was right around the time when Undertale fans were getting death threats because the game has jump scares that aren’t properly warned for (it has no such thing, by the way). Arin Hanson eventually had to get on Twitter to apologize for leaving the secret ending in the Dream Daddy files as an Easter egg, and his statement is reproduced in the Switch version of the game.
I also remember that there were a few student artists who were bullied off of social media for creating fan art of gender-swapped Dream Daddy characters. These artists were young queer women who enjoyed the game but were more into girls, and they were accused of being homophobic, transphobic, catering to a straight male gaze, etc etc etc. After being contacted by the parents of a teenage artist who attempted to commit suicide, Arin Hanson had to get on Twitter again to ask fans of Dream Daddy to stop stalking and harassing each other. People make jokes about how “Tumblr is a hellsite to you, but I’m just reblogging my pictures,” but let me tell you. Tumblr was a giant looneybin back in 2017.
After inviting you out onto his yacht to seduce you, Joseph drugs you and takes you down into the tunnels under your suburban neighborhood. He explains that there are so many single parents in the neighborhood because he has been murdering their partners and sacrificing them to some sort of eldritch Lovecraftian horrorterror, which then continues to feed off their sadness and despair. He is, of course, intending to kill you. You escape, but it turns out to be a House of Leaves / Doki Doki Literature Club! situation in which you haven’t escaped at all.
Thankfully, Joseph’s alcoholic wife Mary decides that she’s had enough of her husband murdering people, and she stabs him right before he stabs you. Joseph has four creepy children who are all perfect clones of him, and Mary has brought them with her. After injuring Joseph, Mary leaves him in the tunnels to be eaten by the creepy children.
Mary saves your character, who is then contacted by another single dad who I’m going to call Paranormal Investigator Barret Wallace. (His actual name is Saul.) He is the only character in this game who looks like an actual adult, he’s hot, and he warmly encourages you to get in touch with him if you need to talk.
I love Mary so much, by the way. Whoever wrote her did an outstanding job, and I salute them.
It’s an excellent horror story. I’ll be honest and admit that the dating sim elements of this game didn’t resonate with me, but the secret ending makes the entire endeavor worthwhile.
I remember that the Game Grumps team had to deal with a strong fandom backlash after people went through the Dream Daddy game files on Steam and found this ending when the game was released in 2017. Purity discourse on Tumblr was starting to get heated, and this was right around the time when Undertale fans were getting death threats because the game has jump scares that aren’t properly warned for (it has no such thing, by the way). Arin Hanson eventually had to get on Twitter to apologize for leaving the secret ending in the Dream Daddy files as an Easter egg, and his statement is reproduced in the Switch version of the game.
I also remember that there were a few student artists who were bullied off of social media for creating fan art of gender-swapped Dream Daddy characters. These artists were young queer women who enjoyed the game but were more into girls, and they were accused of being homophobic, transphobic, catering to a straight male gaze, etc etc etc. After being contacted by the parents of a teenage artist who attempted to commit suicide, Arin Hanson had to get on Twitter again to ask fans of Dream Daddy to stop stalking and harassing each other. People make jokes about how “Tumblr is a hellsite to you, but I’m just reblogging my pictures,” but let me tell you. Tumblr was a giant looneybin back in 2017.
