Video Game / The Well Speaks To Me

The Well Speaks To Me is the first in a series of RPG Maker horror games by Michaela Thisten. The games all take place in, and center around, the Forest, a strange forest with several villages inside where people are known to disappear mysteriously.

The first game follows Alice, a girl living alone in a cabin in the forest, as she carries out her daily chores. Her family was apparently killed in a horrible accident, leaving her to fend for herself, and she hopes to escape one day. Something is going to happen in six days. Sometimes, she sees a strange figure in the window. And for some reason, the well speaks to her...

The second game, They Watch From The Walls, follows a girl named Carrie at the Halloween festival. She runs into a scarecrow calling himself Mr. Pumpkin who invites her to his haunted house attraction for free. She accepts the offer, thinking it will be some harmless fun. But soon after she enters, the door locks, and it becomes apparent that this is no ordinary house- the danger is very real, and she will have to play Mr. Pumpkin's twisted game to escape his clutches.

Like Veins Beneath The Town, the third game, follows recurring character Dr. Jesse Thornheart, an investigator known as a Chastiser, as he ventures into Ishinakku Village to investigate the kidnappings of 21 women by a monster known as the Suturer. Unfortunately, the townspeople are unwelcoming towards outsiders, so he is mostly on his own as he descends into the dark mines.

A Hollow Harvest follows Jesse again as he goes to Vondovlin Village on a request from the Crowane family of farmers to investigate several disappearances from the village. To discover the truth, he investigates the house and the history of its deceased former owner, Johnathon Crowane. Over the course of several days, Jesse uncovers the secrets of Johnathon and the truth of the monsters prowling the village, while trying to keep the family safe.

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This series contains examples of:

General

• Creator Cameo: Micheala Thisten appears as an NPC at least once per game. In the first game, she shows up in the Easter Egg to give out the secret code, in the second game as an NPC in the Halloween festival, in the third game as an NPC in Ishinakku Village, and in the fourth game as an NPC in Vondovlin Village.
• Easter Egg: Each game has a secret code that can be found by looking everywhere, and the secret code in the first game will lead to the one in the second and so on.
• Episodic Game: The games are essentially one big story split up into smaller, 1-hour games, each one exploring a different mysterious incident in the Forest.
• Don't Go in the Woods: The Forest, the main setting of the series, is a sinister Eldritch Location haunted by demons who abduct people and do all sorts of horrible things to them.
• Ominous Mundanity: The spooky, eldritch, demon-infested forest that serves as the setting is just called The Forest.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: No matter what Jesse Thornheart does, he can never win against the demons.
• Sequel Hook: Each game sets up the next one in the ending.

The Well Speaks To Me

• Ambiguously Human: Although Alice appears human originally, several of the faces she makes simply don't look human. Possibly a clue about how she isn't the real Alice.
• Better to Die than Be Killed: In the final day, the skinwalker seems to be aware that Jesse is coming to investigate the house and kills Alice before he arrives, leaving Jesse with no clue about what happened.
• Big Bad: Alice herself is revealed as the one who killed Alice's family and stranded her in the forest.
• Big "SHUT UP!": Alice exclaims "SHUT UP!!! SHUT UP!!!" when she's frustrated with her victims' "voices".
• Blaming the Victim: In the Big Bad's mind, all the people she killed deserved death.
  Alice: [to her victims' "voices"] I HATE EVERY ONE OF YOU!!! YOU DESERVED IT!!!!! YOU DESERVED ALL OF IT!!!!!
• Dead All Along: It's implied Alice was killed alongside her family, and the one in the game is a skinwalker taking over her.
• Downer Ending: Alice, having lost what little sanity she had left, throws herself down the well she used to dispose of her victims and dies, with Jesse left to speculate what may have happened.
• Easy Impersonation: Averted with the skinwalker taking over Alice, who doesn't act like Alice at all, especially as days pass.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: The first game is rather different from subsequent ones. Instead of exploring an environment and working towards a specific goal, you are confined to a small space where you spend six days doing chores and seeing your protagonist react to everything. In addition, the story is told in a very surreal presentation, which can make it hard to understand, while later games have more straightforward plots.
• Foregone Conclusion: Alice will go insane by the end- you are outright told this in the first sentence of the description on the game page.
• Foreshadowing: There's a book about skinwalkers in the house, while Alice has a craving for human meat and is prone to make unsettling faces. All this seems to indicate that Alice died long ago, her body being taken over by a skinwalker.
• Kill and Replace: Alice was victim of this.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: Alice has them, signifying that there's something wrong with her.
• Surreal Horror: The first game is more like this than the rest. It starts innocently enough- you play as a girl who lives in the forest and does her chores. But as the game goes on, the forest area becomes distorted as the girl loses her sanity.

They Watch Through The Walls

• Big Bad: Mr. Pumpkin lures Carrie into his haunted house, trapping her inside, so he can play sadistic games with her and sell her and the other kids.
• Doom as Test Prize: Mr. Pumpkin invites children, most recently the protagonist Carrie, to brave his Haunted House "attraction", promising a surprise to anyone who makes it to the end. It turns out that the "prize" is being stuffed in a cage and sold to pedophiles.
• Easter Egg: In addition to the secret code for the next game, one of the rooms has a box that, if unlocked with the code from the previous game, has a note about the experiment that Jesse Thornheart escaped from.
• Haunted House: Mr. Pumpkin owns one that he claims to be a fun, fake haunted house attraction, and invites children to brave it. Unfortunately for them, the scares are very real and Mr. Pumpkin is a demon.
• Multiple Endings: Two, depending on which door you enter in the final room.
  • Bad Ending: If you enter the door on the right, which only requires a key you are automatically given, Carrie will fall into a trap set by Mr. Pumpkin, who reveals himself to be a child trafficker planning on selling her and the other kids off- the story ends with them crying while Doctor Thornheart is attacked by the angry townspeople for failing to save their children.
  • Good Ending: To get it, you need to find the three Pumpkin Keys hidden in the second section of the game. The ending plays out like the bad end, until Doctor Thornheart stabs Mr. Pumpkin in the back and saves the kids. Mr. Pumpkin spitefully kills himself to avoid giving any information on his employers, and Doctor Thornheart is seen musing on what connections this case has to the well incident from the previous game.

Like Veins Beneath The Town

• Abandoned Mine: The bulk of the game is spent in the Abandoned Railway Project, a series of caverns dug in a project to create a railway under Ishinakku Village that was abandoned. The workers left many things there like notes, but the only living being still in the mines is the monstrous Suturer, who is dragging women of the village into the mines so he can kill them and turn them into dolls.
• All for Nothing: Jesse agrees to hunt down The Suturer in exchange for Mr. Maigata giving him information on The Forest once he is done, to which Mr. Maigata agrees. Unfortunately, by the time Jesse returns having accomplished his task, he discovers that Mr. Maigata has mysteriously and abruptly died, with Jesse suspecting he was murdered by the demon-worshipping townsfolk for helping Jesse, leaving him with no way to obtain the info he wants.
• Big Bad: The Suturer is the monster kidnapping girls and dragging them underneath Ishinakku Village to turn them into dolls.
• Bittersweet Ending: Jesse manages to defeat the Suturer, preventing him from killing any more women, but Mr. Maigata was murdered while Jesse was away, preventing Jesse from getting the information on the Forest that Maigata promised as payment for saving Laura Maigata. In addition, Laura was already killed by the Suturer, and Jesse has to flee the town as the villagers hate him for violating their contract with the demons. On top of that, Jesse has violent flashbacks to his past as an unwilling test subject of some horrible experiment.
• Creepy Souvenir: The Suturer tears off body parts from his victims and uses them to make a doll-amalgamation-thing, in addition to sewing some body parts onto himself. Whenever they rot, he drags in more women to replace them.
• Dug Too Deep: The Ishinakku Railway miners dug into a cavern to make a railway, and were instructed to dig several levels beyond what was apparently needed (the reason being to get at a jewel mine). In the process, the miners ran into the demons who resided down there- though it is unclear if they died or bolted before anything happened to them.
• Easter Egg: The usual box locked by a secret code in Ishinakku Village unlocks a story about someone who saw a lighthouse in their dreams, but cannot find, even though the locals insist the lighthouse is there.
• Have a Nice Death: Whenever Jesse dies, a short cutscene plays showing his final thoughts as he succumbs to whatever killed him (or, if he dies to the Suturer, the latter taunts him as he dies).
• Human Sacrifice: This is what the Suturer’s murders of the village women amount to; he sacrifices their bodies to the Forest in the hopes of receiving demonic power in return.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Mr Maigata is the only villager who's against worshipping the demons and is actually helpful to Jesse. He gets killed for his trouble.
• Red Herring: Notes in the Ishinakku Railway from the mine workers reveal that what seemed to be a simple mining project to create an underground railroad is far more. The workers have to dig very deep and hear strange noises, and the higher-ups refuse to tell them exactly why they are doing this. This all hints at the mayor having some sort of dirty business with the demons. In truth, there was a jewel mine deep inside and the mayor wanted the jewels, so the cover-up was completely unrelated to the demon threat.
• Title Drop: Jesse says the game title when seeing the underground women mutilated by the upside-down trees and the roots sucking their blood as if the roots were veins themselves.
• Underground Level: The primary area of the game is the Ishinakku Railway underneath the village, a gigantic series of caverns with dangers like cave-ins, giant chasms, and deep water.

A Hollow Harvest

• Big Bad: The Skinwalker is the monster causing the disappearances in Vondovlin Village and threatening the Crowane family.
• Call-Back: An NPC in the third day brings up the events of the first three games when talking about the corpse that was found in the village.
• Foreshadowing: On the second day, Jesse will note that the house looks bigger from downstairs than the hallway makes it look. It turns out there is an entire secret room hidden behind the left wall and only accessible by a bookcase downstairs.

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