A teaser clip for Lore-Fi, featuring Taylor resting in front of her computer

“Hello. My name is Gregory Daniels. I’m twelve years old. I live at 3251 Spring Lake Drive, and I’ve been kidnapped!”

Not exactly what you’d expect to hear when loading up a lofi beats YouTube channel. Then again, MatPat’s newest alternate reality game LoreFi isn’t only focused on creating a playlist of over eight hours of chill beats that can provide a low-stress soundtrack for your life. It also plans on using that lofi beats channel to deliver a slow burn mystery set to play out over the span of months.

Taylor’s room, as featured in the LoreFi livestream

Meet Taylor: Lore Through Environmental Storytelling
Gregory Daniels may be missing, but we don’t find out much about him through the initial launch of LoreFi. Instead, we’re introduced to Taylor, a teenaged girl chilling out to music in her apartment.

Her interests are laid bare in the objects she’s collected over the years: VHS tapes and a trophy from her time in ballet…a gaming console and toys to show she’s a gamer…a “sweet drawing” her friends found at school…and a binder full of CD mix-tapes she burned after downloading the files off the GrapeVyne, a tongue-in-cheek reference to the peer-to-peer downloading client LimeWire, which was a major source of pirated music back in the mid-2000s.

This particular element of gameplay is reminiscent of the indie game Unpacking, which tasks players with unpacking boxes as the main character moves in to a series of new places. It’s a story that packs a surprisingly powerful emotional punch as you experience the highs and lows of a character, as told through the objects they take with them in life.

And while those stories unfold best over time, LoreFi is already showing some hints of that emotional roller-coaster. Because while Taylor’s dad sends her a message “Hey kiddo, how are you” on the computer, she’s crudely erased him from a family photo with red pen, and added a drawing of an ominous figure opening the door in the same color. “Call Dad” has also been removed from her to do list.

Taylor nods at a shadowy figure in the doorway, just off camera

The stream also has a number of custom animations that add further depth to the story: every now and then, Taylor’s computer enters screensaver mode, scrolling through a series of art pieces likely drawn by her, before she clicks the mouse to return to GrapeVyne. Later on in the night, her door creaks open and the shadow of a figure enters the frame, causing Taylor to take off her headphones and give a silent nod of assent, a slightly less ominous version of the encounter pinned to her corkboard.

The stream is filled with subtler moments, as well. Every now and then, Taylor receives messages from friends and classmates. And at one pivotal point near the beginning of the stream, her computer gets infected with a virus.

The spectrogram image of a Duck-branded virus

A Duck Conundrum Through the GrapeVyne
When I was in undergrad in the mid-2000s, I worked as IT support in my college dorm. Before the school year would begin, one of our training exercises was to install LimeWire on a clean computer, and go through the process of removing all the spyware and more nefarious malware from the computer, to confirm we’d learned how to debug computers without resorting to a full reformatting.

That is to say: Taylor downloaded something rather nasty from the GrapeVine, and she doesn’t even know it. We’re starting to see the signs, though. As soon as the song she was listening to before downloading the virus finished playing, a peculiar audio played that, when run through a spectrogram analyzer, generated the face of a duck – a likely sign her computer had been infected. The duck’s appearance may have been the earliest sign that something was wrong, but it wasn’t the last – as the night progressed, her computer’s webcam turned on of its own volition, signaling the beginnings of Taylor’s troubles.

The Game Theory channel was also hacked by the virus, in the lead-up to LoreFi’s launch

MatPat’s teasers for LoreFi imply an even more prominent role for our duck-shaped virus: in a recent Minecraft theory video, the same antivirus notification that confronted Taylor during a bout of music piracy hit the Theorists: a series of popup notifications appear, before a series of three computerized texts take over the video:

Blue: Interesting…
Green: Most aren’t able to catch me infecting their systems
Red: Impressive.
Green: Perhaps you can entertain me a little more.
Blue: Find me….
Red: before I find you.

The screen is then taken over by a distorted image of the duck in multi-colored tones, before those colors merge into a white version of the logo, along with the date: “July 13th”. This is when the first episode of LoreFi: Taylor’s Story dropped, and when MatPat revealed more information on how the ARG will operate moving forward.

The LoreFi Update Schedule
Shortly after LoreFi launched, MatPat made a guest appearance on the Game Theory channel, and explained more of the narrative and structure of LoreFi. Echoing what he teased at VidCon, MatPat described the ARG as “what happens if Lofi Girl meets a murder mystery”. However, he also elaborates on how the game will work:

On one level, you can just study and relax and sleep to the music you’re listening to…and there’s going to be new music releasing every week on our LoreFi Spotify channel.

But you know what? If you want to go a level deeper, hidden within some of that music and the videos that exist here on YouTube there are clues pointing at the story of a missing kid. A missing kid named Gregory…

There’s going to be new secrets waiting to be discovered every week over on Spotify, and a new animation dropping roughly once a month, month and a half on YouTube. All as we help a new character Taylor solve the deadly game she accidentally finds herself trapped in.

So, structurally: there will be new music joining the game’s already impressive 250 track playlist Lofi beats to theorize to (complete) every week hiding what are likely to be puzzle-centric clues tied to LoreFi, with monthly updates to the YouTube animations that might provide more environmental updates to the story. It’s unclear whether the roughly 90 minute summary stream is distinct from the 24/7 stream, but the summary stream does at least appear to be relatively comprehensive, at least from an animations perspective.

A Morse code message at the end of Ryder Jacob’s song “Tuned Out”

Much of the existing progress has been focused on untangling the environmental storytelling from the summary stream, although fans have already cracked a handful of more overt puzzles. For instance, fans quickly noted that the song Tuned Out concludes with a section of Morse code, spelling out the message “tag you’re it”.

On the YouTube front, I ended up getting Rickrolled* by one particular Easter egg hidden in a stack of books, with loose pieces of paper spelling out TINY and MYSCRTS. Assuming that was hinting at a TinyURL shortener I gave tinyurl.com/MYSCRTS a try, leading to exactly what you’d expect. I wish I could tell you that was my first time getting Rickrolled while playing an ARG, but that would be a lie. I have also been encouraged to drink my Ovaltine on at least one occasion.

The introduction of Synthwave Boy’s lofi beats channel, from Lofi Girl’s perspective

Playing to Lofi Music’s High Definition Strengths
LoreFi is not the first lofi channel to play around with injecting a bit of lore into its streams. Last year, the original Lofi Girl YouTube channel teased the launch of a new character by having Lofi Girl walk away from her computer. Shortly before she disappeared, one particular apartment in the distance with a glowing blue light started blinking out a message in Morse code, driving to a website with a countdown from inside that room.

Over the course of the next few days, the camera in Lofi Girl’s now empty room slowly zoomed into the blue apartment. Once fans had a clear enough view of the room, Synthwave Boy came into the space with his dog, expanding the Lofi Cinematic Universe. There’s even a music video that goes deep into Lofi Lore. It’s a great rabbit hole to fall down, including the recent release of the highly addictive alternate history stream, medieval lofi radio – beats to scribe manuscripts to.

Expecting fans of an alternate reality game to give a 24/7 stream their full attention is too much to ask, even for a large fanbase. However, the medium works exceptionally well at serving as a platform for gradual change, and for scheduled events to tell fans when to pay attention to the game.

Luckily, LoreFi has set its gameplay-based expectations upfront: updates to the song list may come on a weekly basis giving players a concrete task to tackle, but animations will remain relatively unchanged within the loop for about a month at a time, setting a gradual pace for LoreFi to unfold. And if the first batch of information is any indication, this game will be just as focused on piecing together events through environmental storytelling as it is on more traditional puzzles.

MatPat’s Quest Jacket “volumes”, another recent example of MatPat’s experiments in the space

LoreFi: MatPat’s Most Narrative ARG Experiment Yet
While this is MatPat’s first major game after retiring as the face of Theorist Media (hosting the Game Theory, Food Theory, and Style Theory channels), he’s run a number of alternate reality games in the past – from the Theorist Gateway puzzle trail to his series of Quest Jackets. However, the core of many of his prior projects were focused on the puzzle solving side of ARGs, rather than the narrative side. So, it’s refreshing to see environmental storytelling play such a large part of LoreFi – especially since lore has been such a strong component of what MatPat has uplifted over the years with his video essays, theories, and reviews.

If you’re interested in following along, the Official Game Theorists Discord has been tackling the ARG, and have started organizing their findings and theories in a Google Doc. The r/LoreFi and r/GameTheorists subreddits have also started diving into the story, to see what they have uncovered. The YouTuber Datchia has also started making a number of videos theorizing around LoreFi.

* Note: while it is entirely possible the Rickroll was an Easter egg by the LoreFi team, it is equally likely that TinyURL wasn’t the intended solution, and the URL was either coincidentally set to “Never Gonna Give You Up”, or done so as a lighthearted gamejack by a fan who came up with the same theory.