Amanda the Adventurer (Scary Dora)
Screenshot from Markiplier's video "Amanda the Adventurer" on YouTube.
Recently, I watched Markiplier play Amanda the Adventurer, a Dora the Explorer-esque horror game created by MANGLEDmaw Games. It is a “found-footage” game involves a series of VHS tapes and puzzles to solve..
*Warning there are spoilers about the game in this article. If you do not want any spoilers, I suggest you watch your favorite YouTube gamers play it before reading any further.
The story of Amanda the Adventurer is that in the early 2000s, a man named Sam Colton is inspired by his adopted daughter, Rebecca, to create a television series where Rebecca plays the main character, Amanda. She goes on adventures throughout the neighborhood, and kids in the fictional town of Kensdale, Ohio, where the game takes place, fall in love with the show.
Eventually, a bigger company, Hameln Entertainment, buys out the show and turns it into an animated series where Rebecca voices Amanda. This is when things start to go wrong. One of the VHS tapes the player can find is a video about Rebecca reading a series of phrases while a Hameln employee encourages her. These phrases are “Bye yell,” “Pie man,” and “Baa lamb,” which are all phrases that sound a lot like the names of demons Biel, Paimon, and Balam, who does not have a Wikipedia page of his own, but I found his description on this page.
Sam does not like that Hameln is having Rebecca read these phrases and asks for it to stop. Of course, it is too late, as Rebecca already summoned the demons and hears one of them speaking to her through her headphones. She becomes upset and the video ends with the Hameln employee saying to take five.
In the game, we play as Riley, the niece or nephew (the gender neutral term is “nibling” but that word just sounds wrong to me) of Kate, the Kensdale librarian who is dead by the beginning of the gameplay. Kate did research on the disappearance of the Kensdale children who watched Amanda the Adventurer, but the gameplay seems to suggest that she didn’t quite figure out what was happening. Or maybe she did and that’s why she died. Once again, it’s not totally clear, but I think that’s what makes this game so cool.
Throughout the VHS tapes, Amanda and her companion Wolly the sheep go on different adventures together, but these are not typical adventures a child would go on. Amanda becomes more aggressive and unhinged as the tapes go on, and Wolly is always trying to calm her down and keep her in check. The player is able to click on different objects within the tapes and even type out answers to some of Amanda’s questions. She and Wolly seem to be alive within the tapes and able to respond in real time to the player.
Aunt Kate thought that maybe Hameln Entertainment did some sort of energy transfer, known as dynakinesis, with Rebecca into the VHS tapes so that her soul would be alive inside of Amanda. Why would they do this? Well, you probably could have guessed that the game does not make this clear, but we all know how big companies can get greedy and take advantage of child actors. At one point in the timeline, Sam disappears and Hameln blames him for “abandoning the show and Rebecca,” but I’m pretty sure it was Hameln that made him disappear in the first place.
Once Sam was out of the way, it was easier to take advantage of Rebecca, who is seen signing a contract in one of the VHS tapes. She was very young and did not know that the contract she signed wasn’t legally binding, and who knows what the contract said? They could have outlined in the terms and conditions what would happen to Rebecca if she continued to stay on the show, but there was no lawyer present, so nobody was the wiser about the situation.
Eventually, more children were lured by Amanda (now Rebecca’s soul/energy trapped in a television show) and became trapped in the show as well. They do not appear as human characters, but rather as different entities with eyes that can’t speak, like trees and pieces of meat. This truly did stump me. Why would Hameln want children’s energy to transfer into the show to become these entities for any other reason than test subjects? Why would they even need test subjects when Rebecca’s energy transfer worked? I think something happened so that Hameln wanted to get revenge on the people of Kensdale.
I think when Rebecca started to act up and change the events of the show, parents started to worry about their children watching it. We even see this in another VHS tape where a concerned father is talking about how the show has changed. Since nobody would have suspected an energy transfer into the show, they probably just blamed Hameln for writing poor scripts and boycotted the show, and possibly the company since they made numerous toys.
To make matters worse, the disappearance of Sam was all over the news, so Hameln Entertainment was getting more bad publicity not only within Kensdale, but likely outside of the town as well. Their crisis communication was decent in that it covered up any misdoings on their part and scapegoated Sam, but that didn’t solve the fact that parents still didn’t want their children watching the show. Hameln decided to strike back.
They used Rebecca to lure children away from their homes, likely to get them into the studio where Hameln Entertainment was working on Amanda the Adventurer. This is when those children’s souls were transferred into the show. It broke their parents’ hearts.
In MatPat’s Game Theory video, he talks about how Hameln Entertainment is like the Pied Piper, who helps the people of Hamelin get rid of the rats infesting the town. However, the town does not pay him for his services, so he lures their children away to their deaths (depending on which version you read, this does not happen in the kid-friendly version). MatPat theorized that Hameln used Rebecca to summon the demons to gain their knowledge/power, but I think their main objective was to get back at Kensdale for giving them a bad name. Gaining demonic powers was just a bonus.
Hameln Entertainment also a mouse as part of their logo and their slogan reading “Follow us to fun!” that popped up at the end of each Amanda episode, both of which are direct references to the Pied Piper. I think Hameln eventually lost control of Amanda/Rebecca, which is indicated by the disappearance of the logo at the end of each episode as the game progresses. Amanda’s only way of having control is withing the VHS tapes, so she is able to make changes to the tapes. I think this was a neat aspect of the game; it shows that the inspiration came from somewhere.
Amanda the Adventurer is also a direct connection to Dora the Explorer, so I did a little research on Dora and whether there were any similarities between the real-life origin story of Dora and the in-game origin story of Amanda the Adventurer.
Unfortunately (or I guess fortunately), I could not find anything. Dora was created by people already working for the bigger television company, Nickelodeon, so the only real connections were the similarities in name, the setting of the early 2000s, and the manner of both shows, where the person watching the show answers questions to help Dora and Amanda along the way. The difference is that Amanda/Rebecca can actually hear what the player says and respond to it. Amanda is a truly interactive television show, while Dora is more focused on learning.
Needless to say, I really like this game and wish I knew about it sooner. The different references within the game make my English major brain light up. Plus, I got to remember my time as a child watching Dora the Exploerer and be glad I wasn’t put in a trance and had my soul transferred into the show or onto any VHS tapes kids could check out from the library.
Oh and, by the way, MatPat also calls out Gen-Z for not knowing what a VHS tape is, which connects to my last post. As a Gen Z-er, I would like to say that I absolutely do know what a VHS tape and a VCR is. Yes, I am one of the older Gen Z-ers, but seriously, stop doubting us. We don’t have to know about old technology to succeed in life, it just so happens that some of us do.