The worst has yet to come.
Don't let the name of the game fool you, this game is anything but 'happy,' and be prepared to find many, many moments of nightmare fuel awaiting you.Potential spoilers will be unmarked. You have been warned.
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General
- Just the sheer concept of the game. You play as a child experiencing ungodly nightmares and you have to make him 'happy' again.
- And that's just about what we do know. Due to the lack of dialogue and reliance on visuals, everything we don't know is often ambiguous. What is going on? What is exactly going on? What even led up to all of this?
- The ending screen for the demo shows him falling down from a bright light alongside a horde of smiley faces and toys...and straight into the mouth of a ginormous smiley face with teeth. Needless to say, the image can invoke very lovecraftian vibes if you don't know the premise (which is pretty mysterious anyhow).
- The Launch Trailer
. At first, it seems that Happy Game really is a happy game. You get to see families and children reacting happily and laughing at a cute boy and his misadventures in a mystical land, nothing out of the ordinar- wait, why are the families laughing at the boy suffering and seeing hellish creatures? - The Demon. The game's mysterious Big Bad, all we know about this thing is that it just visits a random kid one night and plagues him with terrible nightmares. The thing always keeps a constant smile on, and whatever it is, it makes it clear very quickly that it's here to make the boy suffer.
- The Demon is always watching you, one way or another. This is made apparent whenever the Child's memories are shown, with the events unfolding allowing it to influence your nightmares. This is also made more or less apparent in the nightmares as well, usually transforming into things ranging from the sun or air, certain creatures you encounter, or even pictures and drawings.
The First Nightmare
- The first nightmare forces the Child to walk through a massive, pitch black room, all in the sheer vain of getting back his soccer ball. Literally nothing illuminates the room outside of spotlights, which often illuminate some Eldritch Abomination. The only thing the Child can do is walk forward and hope for the best.
- All the monsters in the first nightmare are demented Living Toys, presumably ones out of the Child's memories. If the Child happens to complete each puzzle they're in, the toys will become ghastly red beings with glowing eyes, all the while having red lights illuminate and violently flash the whole world. Be thankful this doesn't hurt you. Most of the time...
- The very first puzzle encountered involves doing random things to three toys: pulling a teddy bear out of a box, pulling apart a clown doll, and playing with a nesting doll, respectively. Each one gains a Nightmare Face before disappearing in a blinding light. And this is just the first puzzle.
- A little bit before the toys disappear, an image flashes to show the Child getting impaled brutally on a spike while the Demon watches.
- The second puzzle involves putting together three toys using four hanging devices, culminating in a strange musical number of sorts. The Child starts cheering on the toys, remaining oblivious to the room and toys turning red. One of the now jellyfish-looking devices pull out a cymbal and clang it loudly, sending the Child back to his senses. A moment passes, and the device starts clanging violently to the music while the Child screams in pain from the sound before everything turns red. The next moment, the Child is suddenly surrounded by the desecrated pieces of the performing toys.
- One particular puzzle involves getting the soccer ball out of a huge creature called the Panda. It already looks horrific enough with its ungainly limbs and empty smile, but then you start pulling one of its limbs. This results in its upper jaw pulling upward from the lower jaw, revealing the sinew holding the smile in place. If it can't go any further, it will breathe in pain while a white skeleton creature pops out of its mouth. Then the creature pulls its eye out, in turn pulling itself apart to reveal a blood-red voodoo doll. Once that is pulled, a copy of the Child is pulled apart in the same fashion while screaming horribly, only for the ball to appear in front of you like nothing happened.
- The final puzzle has multiple broken toys the Child has to put back together. Most of the toys are pretty playful during your advances, but a few stand out in contrast:
- Once the Child puts a head back on a stuffed bunny, you will have to take its head off, revealing a new head each time. It starts off with a cyclopean creature that looks like its laughing madly, and, if you take your time, you witness each head progressively turn into grotesque forms of the bunny's head, and much later some sort of fleshy shadow monstrosity.
- If the Child starts pulling the hands of a doll alongside a dog toy, the doll immediately ruptures its head, revealing a shadowy creature with long arms and fingers. It does at least give you a toy piece you need, but it's still pretty unsettling with the creaking noises it makes.
- Squeezing a rubber duck will cause it to squirt a jet of blood into a puddle in front of it. Keep doing it, and a black hook gradually rises from it. Pull it, and said hook reveals a clownish head underneath. Pull it again, and said head grows into a massive growth, just before it then spits out a toy piece you need. Not helping is the squeal it makes when it does so - essentially a distorted version of the duck's squeal.
- The last scene in the nightmare depicts the Child on a bridge in a hellish landscape filled with spikes, a stark contrast to the rest of this nightmare. Said spikes also have the bodies of children stuck to them, and as the Child walks forward one child falls on a spike right next to him.
The Second Nightmare
- The second nightmare, in stark contrast to the first one, is much more bright and colorful, and the inhabitants here seem to look much more cheery and cartoonish...which just makes it all the more uncanny when you witness horrible things go down, often to terrifying effect. In broad daylight, no less.
- The giant bunnies, good lord. The first bunnies you meet are pretty unnatural already, but they are definitely more acceptable than these guys. They resemble giant, obese furballs with sharp eyes and small smiles, and if one's attacking it'll open its mouth wide while shrieking and revealing More Teeth than the Osmond Family in a flash. Not to mention their ravenous appetite, as they will gladly eat any creature close to them, especially poor children.
- Unlike most of the other puzzles, puzzles involving these bunnies appear to actually kill the Child if he messes up somehow, and the only surefire way of escaping them is by distracting them with the bloated bodies of smaller rabbits, and even then this only delays the inevitable of them catching up until the Child reaches the burrow.
- Special mention goes to how you first meet them. The Child ends up chasing a Small Bunny who has his toy bunny to a flying bell, whereon it pulls its clapper and jumps into the hole it opened. If you decide to ring it for the first time, a giant bunny suddenly pokes its head out and notices the Child, who's too amazed by it to notice it holding his toy now. Then it screeches at him while spitting out the head of the small bunny before pursuing him. If it manages to catch up to him, it will pick him up and slowly lower him into its mouth, just before a white light flashes and sends him back to the bed.
- Optionally, you can also send the boy to inspect the hole. This involves him putting his arm in the hole to inspect, only to gasp at something in the hole and quickly pull it back. It's implied that whatever he saw was the giant bunnies already there, and they're just waiting for the Child to open the hole.
- While they don't really do anything to really hurt the Child, the small bunnies are pretty mischievous in some of their activities. The first bunny you meet proceeds to lure the Child to a very-dangerous hole in a suspicious manner, killing itself presumably for the sheer sake of it. Then there's a more blatant manner of them laughing at him madly while he fails at certain tasks, such as while he dies or if he fails to cut them.
- Speaking of the latter, a later puzzle involves cutting a bunny in two. Only instead of the expected decapitation, it splits into two infused bunnies with blood in-between.
- The bunnies are also single-mindedly invested in eating carrots, regardless of how big or cute they are. Unfortunately, feeding them means they will become too fat to run from enemies, seemingly blind to their own deaths.
- You eventually witness one particularly grueling moment where one small bunny takes things up to eleven and swallows a giant carrot, becoming so fat that you can't even get the carrot back out of it. This leaves it vulnerable to a bloodthirsty giant bunny, which proceeds to slowly and brutally bite larger chunks out of it and eat it until there's nothing left.
- After two stages, you reach a world filled with Hearts, a happy community of creatures with hearts for heads, playing with toys and doing harmless activities. Everything's just seems too good to be true, and it's proven right when you notice several guillotines around the path, each one gaining red drawings of smiley faces and having creepy crows perch on top. Then you begin to start taking away the Hearts' activities to activate certain guillotines, and you get to witness these Hearts have their heads explode into a gory mess, and the surrounding Hearts pause to laugh at their misfortune before continuing on like nothing happened.
- Things only get worse when you summon the third giant bunny, only instead of looking like obese furballs with masks, this one looks like a fat bunny plush with a chubby face. Instantly, it distorts its face into a giant mouth with an arm. Then time slows down as the Child runs away from it. Not long after, everything falls into chaos as the surviving Hearts explode around you and the guillotines start mutilating the rabbit slowly but surely pursuing the Child.
- The whole time, the thing just doesn't give up its pursuit. Bisect it in two? It just hauls itself at the same pace as before. Cut its head in two? Its arm gives chase instead. It takes cutting that in two to stop its pursuit, and even then it still tries to grasp at the Child in futility.
- Twice before you escape it fully, you get a lovely view of the interior of the bunny, revealing that it's filled with nothing but the heads of the children eerily similar to the Child.
- Think you finally left the level for good? Well instead you go straight back into it, allowing you to see the full extant of the carnage that ensued. Everything is just dead and silent, save for the crows from earlier eating the resulting corpses while the sun shows a happy face, and the Child's reaction the whole time is sheer discomfort. You do leave afterwards, but only after you find a smiley face head floating where the burrow should be.
- The fourth level you land in is fairly surreal, essentially being a calm, yellowish landscape filled to the brim with smiley heads, and all the beings here either have smiley heads or wear them. It doesn't help that the Child suddenly can't get the aforementioned smiley head off his own head, subtly implying that the world itself requires him to wear it to even be here.
- As the Child goes, a set of gloved hands suddenly pop out of the ground and start reaching for him. They thankfully don't attack him, but the Child still has to keep going to avoid getting caught by them.
- The first puzzle involves giving creatures called Foodies utensils to help feed their larger counterpart cake. Outside the hidden arm in the lake and the cake looking like the Child's head (later turning out to be just a cover for it), things go well as the Foodies finish their goal in instructed format. Then you wake them up again, and they start destroying each others' heads with the utensils, almost as if the cake is still there. They do end up turning into angels that lighten the mood a bit, but the event still comes off as unsettling.
- The introduction to the Rippers. Once the Child moves ashore from a lake, a copy of him suddenly drops from the sky and walks off beyond a restriction sign. The Child tries to catch up with them, but a headless body is flung into his direction, much to his shock. He continues following the copy while numerous other bodies are flung away. Things go awry very quickly when the copy is picked up and decapitated by a Ripper, a frowning smiley head creature, and unfortunately the Child himself has to do the same thing to even progress. Not only does he survive the process, but he is left alone as a disembodied, moving head.
- Right as the Child finds his bunny toy again, the gloved hands pull it away right in front of him. Then we're treated to an unsettling reveal of the thing slowly rearing a part of its body in full view, revealing an utterly agonizing smiley head with the arms poking out of its orifices.
- Before the thing even takes the Child down the crevasse, it reveals its sadistic tendencies by luring him closer to it in a tempting manner, and while it attacks him it dangles the toy right in front of the Child while just out of reach. We're then treated to the poor kid screaming in pure horror as the thing pulls him into the hole, very slowly mind you.
- Things only get worse when the creature pulls him into a void as two bloodier versions of it appear and fight over him. They ultimately drop him, and as he falls down the screen pans out to reveal an utterly horrible shot of creatures from before mutilated and littering the abyss while the Demon looks on.
- Unlike the rest of the levels, which generally had a cheerful ambiance and music, this one sounds suspenseful and very foreboding, and all the ambiance is nothing but the sound of the creatures around you skittering and squelching in pain.
- All three of the following puzzles involve getting yellow hearts to defeat the smiley face monsters, and none of the methods used are pleasant to watch:
- One puzzle involves using matches to illuminate a head filled with "cockroaches," revealing an eerie-looking bunny in the darkness. It gets better when you're forced to impale roaches onto the bunny's stick, scaring the Child into dropping the match while they scream in agony. You continue doing this until the sheer weight of the roaches tips the bunny into the match, burning its flesh and leaving only a charred skeleton holding onto one of the hearts.
- Another puzzle involves putting tiny versions of the small bunnies into a machine, home to a smiley face creature that takes absolute glee in mutilating the bunnies thrown in. You can turn the tables by pulling it out and throwing a bunny in the machine to take its place, making it behave almost identically to the creature as it starts mutilating it instead. A moment passes before the machine breaks apart to reveal the creature as a bloody mass, which must be broken up to get the heart inside it.
- A particularly gruesome puzzle making bubbles out of a puddle of smiley liquid. Pulling it in a strong enough way causes all of it to form one giant smiley face, and five prongs can be formed on its sides. It looks relatively off-putting to say the least, but it gets worse when you pull these prongs away, revealing that five heads of different creatures are stitched to it. Pull these away, and they rip away the bubble to reveal what can only be described as a slimy, very sickly, unhygienic brain with a face. Everything about it looks incredibly disgusting, ranging from its eyes constantly twitching and always following your cursor, its organs being exposed and rotting, or its voice being labored and coarse. It doesn't help that once you start making its heart beat faster it starts to shake so violently it looks as if it's about to explode.
The Third Nightmare
- Compared to the first two, the third nightmare looks much closer to the Child's world, being a bleak, often empty place comparable to an unclaimed patch of wilderness. The beings here aren't any better, being grotesque versions of real wildlife and, unlike the other creatures encountered, are much more supernatural in behavior.
- The Ghost in the first puzzle. You can't actually see it at first, but it sure as hell makes itself known by smacking the Child's dog and flailing it at him. The only way you can is by moving a rain cloud over it, revealing it to be a shadowy, ungainly humanoid.
- Freeing the dog from it requires shocking it with lightning and pulling a cage over it. However, this ends up temporarily transporting the Child to some kind of dark plane, revealing several things about the ghost. One, the ghost's actual form is a creature wearing a costume with a happy mask (and it's pissed). Two, there are apparently other ghosts just surrounding you the whole time (and they're all just as pissed). Three, the ghost can transform into an even larger ghost without much trouble.
- Despite trapping the ghost in a cage and saving the dog, it seems to not actually retaliate at all, just doing nothing and allowing the Child to pass by. The only thing it does do is turn to look at the Child when he passes by and disappear, and we never hear from it again in any capacity.
- The Elks. They barely resemble elk outside of their antlers and the noises they make, instead resembling ghoulish little cyclopses with pajamas. They're also neither friendly or subtle, as a group of them drives off the Child so they can beat his dog.
- Then there's the whole scene of them eating children. The Child, thanks to the head of an Elk he's wearing, is forced to join a group of these things gather around a stone circle to eat a kid the Demon summoned (which isn't helped by the fact that the kid looks like the Child). We don't see the process happen, but we do see the aftermath.
- If you complete the puzzle involving the rocks, the largest rock starts forming a glowing smiley face. For a split second afterwards, you can actually see the indentations on it form a smiley face as well.
- The ending of the game. After everything is over, the boy finally wakes up and it seems like he's ready to happily face the day. Or is he? The seemingly idyllic scene suddenly cuts to what looks like a grown version of the boy lying unconscious with a smile on a blanket in a dark room by a box of toys. On closer inspection it seems the man is melting! And then suddenly some kind of… ghostly creature bursts out of his chest screaming! The screen goes black and we see the boy again trying to break through the screen! It seems the nightmares are far from over…
