Nier: automata mystery

the hidden church in nier: automata

Scrolling through Twitter, Daniel Griffiths’ interest was piqued when he saw a post describing a mysterious phenomenon being shared in the Nier: Automata community: A2 opening a hidden door in The Copied City and strolling into a secret, never-before-seen area. Curious, he decided to pursue more knowledge, and landed in the Nier modding Discord server.

Like him, many other Nier: Automata players who caught wind of the phenomenon sat upright - metaphorically and perhaps literally - and flocked to both Reddit and Discord to check out what exactly was up with the secret area. It was dubbed the “church mystery” or “sadfutago’s posts”, among other monikers.

In a time when information is at the very tips of our fingers, where even a badly worded, vague Google Search can lead to the results we want, a mystery has an irresistible allure. It’s hard to accurately capture the phenomenon around a mystery afterthe-fact, after the dust has settled and an answer plopped in our laps. So consider this an oral history, in a very loose manner, more than a full recreation of what went down.

june 18: the beginnings

by jenny zheng

On June 18, a mysterious user named “sadfutago” posted a video to the Nier Reddit, showing the path to the hidden door notably with a shaky hand, as well as repeated (mis) use of the dash button. You can see the comments left by other Reddit users, ranging from advice (“You’ll go faster if you press dash once and then run”) to suspicion about this almost entirely clean account posting never-before-seen footage, to asking for more images.

“That’s what we wanted,” Devolas said, in regards to users asking for more proof. I connected with the people known as Devolas, RaiderB, Woeful over Discord in August, almost a month after the hunt for the church took off like a firework and, subsequently, exploded brilliantly. They are the talented trio behind the church mystery, the mod - yes, a mod! - that sparked endless speculation. It started, they tell me, as a way to troll the modding server, but blew up into a phenomenon far beyond what the trio expected.

The inside of the church as seen in the June 18 video (pictured left)

In a follow-up to the June 18 post, sadfutago posted more of the church on July 25, and this time it wasn’t shaky handheld footage. It showed A2 traveling through never-before-seen hallways with structure sticking out of the sides. But the church mystery videos Devolas posted under the moniker sadfutago didn’t immediately blow up. “The Reddit posts barely had over 10 upvotes initially, and the first video we posted just got 100 upvotes and died for a month,” Devolas said.

That all changed when Lance McDonald, a well-known PS4 modding personality on Twitter and YouTube, tweeted out the July 25 video. McDonald claimed that “It’s not yet possible to mod Nier Automata in this way”, lending credence to the theory that it was indeed an actual secret area in the game.

This was the “oh, sh-t” moment for Woeful. “When Lance McDonald found the whole thing and made his post on Twitter,” Woeful said. “The amount of views/likes/retweets it started getting made me so giddy and absolutely inspired all of us, I think, to continue working and trying to make it bigger and better.”

“After Lance’s tweet, the videos on Reddit and all the posts started to blow up and it began to trend,” Devolas added. Following the viral circulation of the church mystery, Nier: Automata producer Yosuke Saito and creator Yoko Taro posted some seemingly-cryptic tweets. Saito commented “Eternal Mystery”, while Taro wryly gave no insight when asked about the church mystery, and instead followed up with, “I love sausage and beer.”

Nier: Automata creator Yoko Taro playing along with the mystery (pictured right)

july 25-29: the ending

Everybody had a theory, but there were three main camps: 1) sadfutago was telling the truth and this secret church door was actually in some super specific version of the game; 2) sadfutgao was lying and was secretly Square Enix PR, concocting an elaborate marketing campaign for some future Nier release; 3) sadfutago was lying, and the church mystery was actually a mod created with tools the widespread modding community hadn’t seen yet.

Near the end, the prevailing attitude on Reddit was that the church mystery was likely “official content” of some sort, but regardless of the outcome, most people had enjoyed the ride. It was around then that Devolas decided to end things with a since-deleted Twitch livestream, revealing that the church mystery had been a mod all along.

The mod was surprisingly challenging to make. “On a technical side, literally everything is hard and iffy with the game engine,” Woeful explained. “The things we found the Platinum devs did were bizarre and sometimes finding something as small as a sound effect could take an entire day. Anyone on the server or who has touched the engine can testify to it never playing along and always being wack. Luckily most of the big parts of the map tools I had finished months (and some years) prior, so we focused more on the scripting and getting things looking nice.”

A lot of the way the church saga mystery unfolded wasn’t intentional, but that’s what made it all the better. Whether it was fate or luck, the church mystery played out eerily to the “true ending” of Nier: Automata, where players can choose to work together. You, as the player, can choose to see all your save files sacrificed, but in exchange find out that even after the credits, the story doesn’t end. The church mystery similarily felt like a joint effort in exploration. From a poorly sung rendition of “Weight of The World”, created by the Nier: Automata modding Discord to cheer sadfutago on in their fight against bloby, to the coming together to trade theories, all of it felt incredibly, harmoniously in line with Nier: Automata’s own spirit.