Valle Verde (or Green Valley) is an Analog Horror series on YouTube created by Alluvium that details a lost PlayStation game.
The creator of the series, having found himself lost in the Ecological Park in La Plata, stumbles upon a statuette marking a recently disturbed dig site with a red string poking out of the ground. A week later, having returned with a shovel, he digs it up to find a metal lunchbox with red and blue string attached to it. Inside was a strange VHS tape covered in styrofoam.
Having assumed the tape was depicting a normal game he had never seen before from a brief watch, it was left on his VCR until his friend started a conversation over it. Apparently it was a completely unknown game, using an experimental peripheral called the THBrain. He offered to help digitize it so it can be posted on YouTube and the creator, admitting that he doesn't have the best knowledge on how to do so, accepts the offer.
The series can be found on Alluvium's channel here
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This series contains examples of:
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: The game's experimental A.I. is buggy and prone to failure to the point that when the player in the tape is given an auto-generated task from a corrupted Ito, the game flat-out warns them that taking the task can destabilize the system. As it turns out, this is because Nott is scared of the game's makers and whatever "ceremony" sealed the souls of children in there.
- Amazing Technicolor Population: Morfelius Oraculum is a green-skinned human. And that may be the least strange thing about him.
- Angelic Abomination: Eating the Forbidden Fruit locks the player out of the chapel gate, summoning a huge rainbow-colored pyramid thing in front of it. Trying to move past prompts the angel to hit the player with a Flaming Sword, killing them instantly. Fortunately, it leaves after the player shows it the "Divine Mercy" picture, allowing them to go on unimpeded.
- Art Shift: Halfway through Part 2, the player visits the library and starts playing another game called Tharsis. The art style is Animesque but much more realistic than Valle Verde's Animal Crossing vibe.
- Bad "Bad Acting": The characters in Tharsis have very wooden voice acting (being read by computer generated voices, with the lines themselves seemingly being machine translated), to the point that it becomes obvious even to someone who doesn't speak Japanese.
- Body Horror: Dr. Neetow is graphically incinerated alive by the mechanical god; a grisly scene where his eyes melt off and his body is thoroughly charred away to a black husk. The worst part of it all is that he's still alive afterwards.
- Creator Provincialism: The author of the series is from Argentina, just like Matias. There's plenty of music from country present, specially when inside Matias' house.
- Also in Matias' room, there's a notebook full of sketches. These are drawings made by Benjamín Solari Parravicini, also known as "The Argentine Nostradamus". He claimed that he would communicate with otherwordly beings and at night would draw them while in a trance.
- Color-Coded for Your Convenience: The text boxes are colored differently depending on who is writing them. Blue is the original game's text, red is whatever is added by the A.I. itself, and green means that a person who is trapped within the game is currently speaking through the text boxes. Morfelius Oraculum uses unique white text boxes with pink and lime-green text, in a wildly different font from other text boxes, highlighting his strange nature even by Valle Verde's standards.
- Driven to Suicide: In front of Kazuya's house are a pair of shoes, implying that they had taken their own life while trapped inside the game.
- Expy: Foxxo, the town's mayor, is one of Tom Nook. When he's first introduced, he actually gives the player money, but shortly afterward the force corrupting the game immediately forces him to put the player in debt instead, in a sort of nod to how Tom Nook actually is vs. how many Animal Crossing fans perceive him.
- The main character bears some resemblance to Ness.
- Game Within a Game: Valle Verde's library somehow contains thousands of songs, books, movies, and video games. The player boots up Tharsis, a riff on Resident Evil 1 with designs straight from Ghost in the Shell. It's totally fictional, but the music, menus, and FMV cutscenes look and sound authentic. A later episode also introduces "Under Pressure", which is instead a reconstruction of a real game that was cancelled.
- Hijacked by Jesus: Somewhat literally. Jesus himself shows up in the game, seemingly protecting Matias, the child who is currently trapped in it. He appears in the form of a portrait that comes to life when viewed.
- Horrifying the Horror: Nottt, the sentient AI, probably would have been the main antagonist in any other "haunted video game" web series. Whatever's haunting this game, however, terrifies even him, to the point that he uninstalled all of his language libraries except Spanish just so he couldn't understand the screams of its victims anymore.
- Kid Hero: The main character of the game is a ten-year-old boy. Judging by his mugshot, it's likely that Matias was pretty young when he started playing.
- Laser-Guided Karma: Dr. Neetow is introduced hosting a boxing minigame against a robot invention of his that bugs out and forces the player to lose when the robot doesn't spawn in the arena, with snide dialogue suggesting he has a bit of an ego. That very same robot is sacrificed to a mechanical god later on in the same video, and when said robot sacrifice is judged to be insufficient, Dr. Neetow is chained up and burnt alive when that same ego drives him to complain about it, as punishment. Emphasis on "alive."
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: It's actually currently unclear whether there really is a demon possessing the game or if the game's AI is simply utilizing Matias' Christian upbringing to manifest the horrors within the game. The AI, named Nottt, is definitely sentient, but in episode 2 he says that he has observed definite Ritual Magic in the outside world, making it even more ambiguous as to it being him, dark magic, or a combination of both.
- In Robert Saetern's Memorandum, it's made clear that the THBrain is a translation device and VR headset, but something happened with it that caused several people, including a very religious man, to be absorbed into the software...but before then, there was an investor who seemed weirdly obsessed with the idea of using it to create an artificial afterlife, and the device seemed to be collecting data after the death of the subject...
- Mind Screwdriver: Robert Saetern's Memorandum clarifies what the THBrain is and the circumstances of how the game ended up in an anomalous state.
- Monkey Morality Pose: The second time he arrives to the field with the ruler portal, there are three chess pieces moving around the checkerboard-themed grass. They seem to represent a donkey covering his ears, a dragon covering his mouth and a monkey covering her eyes.
- Nightmare Face: Normally, when the main character is damaged by something, he sits down with his eyes turned into dizzy spirals. However, when he is hit by the flaming sword of the Angelic Abomination he instead falls to the ground, convulsing, while his face shows a more realistic scream of agony.
- Not So Invincible After All: In the fourth video, before the player can fully explore the junkyard, two eerie-looking guards waste no time striking the PC down to prevent them from progressing. Later, when a car game's malfunction spawns them into that same junkyard, they take advantage of the circumstances to turn both guards into roadkill and finally explore the rest of the area unimpeded.
- Religious Horror: A devil is implied to be possessing the game in the VHS, and many references to Christianity are present within the game. It's ambiguous which references were already in the game and which references were sneakily added by the game's A.I.
- Rule of Symbolism: The series is packed with religious references.
- Seven Deadly Sins: In the first episode, the agents document a "spontaneous level generation" anomaly that maps to each of the Deadly Sins. In order:
- Gluttony is represented by a landscape made of cake and mounds of sugar, with ambience including the sound of drinks being poured and someone chewing very loudly.
- Envy is a blue landscape littered with giant statues of the player, each with a single eye constantly staring at the camera. The sky has eyes too.
- Greed is a yellow room filled with mountains of gold coins and copies of famous paintings. To progress, the player has to "steal" one of the gold piles to clear a path, but wisely leaves it behind.
- Lust is represented by a flesh-covered room littered with what can only be described as pube bushes. The room pulses with a heartbeat and a baby can be heard cooing in the background. A few drips of blood drop from the sky and searching for their source leads to a Rain of Blood and a dozens of red screaming faces erupting from the floor. A giant disembodied hand holding a pair of forceps chases the player out.
- Sloth is a more normal forest littered with loudspeakers playing a song that, when translated from Spanish, has the singer chastising someone for being a Lazy Bum and sleeping on the job. As the player moves forward, the song slows down and the screen darkens, until snapping back to normal just before they leave.
- Wrath is blood-red and populated by black silhouettes cowering from a single one-eyed giant that appears to be yelling at the closest figure. The ambience is Ominous Latin Chanting under Robert Oppenheimer's famous "Destroyer of Worlds" speech.
- Pride is a dark, glitchy area populated with tarnished gold statues all staring at themselves in mirrors. Moving past them leads to a pristine green meadow and a ring of angel statues. Past that are a large set of gates which lead to Heaven as represented by the town chapel. This being Pride, you can walk right through.
- Shout-Out: One of the NPCs hanging out in the "junkyard" is Mr. Millipede. Alluvium confirms in a youtube comment that this footage was taken before his tragic fentanyl overdose in 2021.
- Time Crash: Episode 4 consists in large part of an undersea exploration game where parts of many other games are bleeding into it, from Lemmings to Crash Bandicoot boxes to LEGO minifigures. Enough exploration eventually reveals that all of this is under the ocean of the "junkyard" area.
- Wham Shot: Within the first five minutes, even. During the scene where Foxxo introduces the player to 5 different NPCs, they turn out to be shadows on the ground that quickly glitch out as soon as their portraits pop in.
- You Have Failed Me: When the robot made by Dr. Neetow, based on Matias, is apparently not a good enough offering to the mechanical god, he's chained into a metal structure where he's burned until his muscles are charred. The next morning he's still chained in the center of the town, wheezing weakly.
- It's also implied that the three women working in the café were killed at some point after the player helped Matias escape, as during the ceremony, their corpses are seen in a dumpster and Foxxo mentions that they were unable to maintain their labor.