Due to the nature of the Lacey Games as a whole, making it impossible to discuss without spoiling anything, all spoilers will be unmarked. You Have Been Warned.
The Lacey Games are a series of Flash games that chronicles Lacey, a seemingly innocent girl. And you're going to help her out on her little adventures!
In Lacey's Wardrobe, Lacey has a busy day. She'll go picnicking in the morning, go shopping at afternoon, then go on a date with a cute guy at night. The only problem is that she doesn't know what to wear, so you'll be helping her dressing up.
In Lacey's Diner, Lacey has recently opened up a new restaurant, and once again, it's up to you to help her cook food and serve it to the customers.
In Lacey's Petshop, Lacey runs a famous pet shop and must customize each pet for her clients!
Despite all of this, the Lacey Games are, in truth, a series of Surreal and Psychological Horror videos by ghosttundra
using the vehicle of obscure Flash game showcases/let's plays.
See also Lacey's Wardrobe for the fangame version of the first episode.
Lacey's Tropes!
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General
- Animesque: The titular heroine is drawn in a manner resembling the kind of manga-style designs a teen might doodle.
- Author Avatar: It's heavily implied that Lacey is actually a stand-in for Rocio Yani, one of the co-founders of Lacey's Games, as she looks nearly identical to Lacey.
- Corrupted Character Copy: Lacey is one of Sue, a Korean flash game mascot from various 2000s flash games, who had several jobs depending on the game.
- Disguised Horror Story: All of the videos start out fairly innocent, but the cheerful facade quickly fades away.
- I'm a Humanitarian:
- The stalker in Lacey's Wardrobe notes that he ate Lacey's remains "so that they could be together forever".
- In the bad ending route of Lacey's Diner, it's implied that Lacey murdered her Creepy Uncle and put him in the dish she later serves to the customers.
- Kill the Cutie: All of the videos end with Lacey getting killed or killing herself.
- Mood Dissonance: Often, even after the happy flash game facade falls, elements from it still remain, upping the horror through juxtaposition:
- On the second dress-up segment in Lacey's Wardrobe, even after the Stalker calls and peers through the window, selecting clothes for Lacey still produces the sparkly sound effect.
- In Lacey's Diner, the food Lacey makes on the third day on the bad ending route is presented in the same manner as the food she cooks in the normal route: with fanfare, a pink background, and sparkles.
- Mood Whiplash: One moment, all is normal with Lacey, before you get hit with some absolutely batshit crazy horror.
- New Jobs As The Plot Demands: In the videos so far, Lacey has been a pet shop owner, a cook, a waitress (at the same diner), and (according to one image in Petshop) a musician.
- Nightmare Face:
- The Stalker in Lacey's Wardrobe.
- Lacey herself, and her customers, on the third day of the bad ending route in Lacey's Diner.
- Lacey's reflection turns into a Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl with one of these in Lacey's Petshop.
- The Ophelia: Lacey. She's quite pretty, and in Lacey's Diner she goes completely insane. In Lacey's Petshop, during the Nightmare Sequence, we learn why she became this and get to see her strange inner monologues.
- Stylistic Suck: Lacey's games don't have the highest production values, with frequently Off-Model art, compressed audio, and mispellings in the text. All of this is to help convey the feel of a mid-2000s era Flash game.
- Sympathetic Murderer: Lacey. She killed her uncle who molested her.
- They Killed Kenny Again: Lacey dies in each video under different circumstances, and nothing that happened in one video has come up in another.
Lacey's Wardrobe
- Addressing the Player: In-Universe, Lacey pleads with the player to not click the "ready" button and send her out with her stalker, who will kill her.
- Ax-Crazy: The Stalker, who "loves" Lacey so much that he wants to butcher and eat her alive so he'll be together forever with her. It's also implied that she's not his first victim either, judging from the "gift" he sent her.
- The Bad Guy Wins: The video ends with the stalker killing and eating Lacey.
- Big Bad: The stalker trailing Lacey throughout the game, who eventually kills her.
- But Thou Must!: There doesn't seem to be any other option except to make Lacey go out to be killed by her Stalker.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: Lacey ends up getting butchered into pieces and eaten alive by the stalker, screaming and crying in agony the whole time.
- Downer Ending: The stalker eventually ends up killing and eating Lacey.
- Eaten Alive: Lacey's brutal death was being eaten alive by her stalker, hearing her painful screams and cries.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: This is the only video with clear non distorted voice acting as well as the only video that makes no mention of Lacey’s Creepy Uncle and portrays Lacey as a relatively normal girl with none of the mental issues she showcased in future episodes, in addition Lacey in this video actually seemed to be aware that she was in a game, begging the player not to make her go outside implying she is a form of sentient AI, this was dropped in future episodes. The antagonist of this video, the Stalker, also has yet to appear again in the series, unlike Lacey's uncle who's a prevalent character in the videos.
- On top of that, this video is the only one where we see no one In-Universe react to the content with (totally justified) shock and horror. Most following videos include the recurring character of charchar887 who plays and investigates the games in complete shock of what they're seeing. In Wardrobe, there are no obviously "real" characters featured at all unless the silent player and/or video uploader are counted. Strikingly, the description of Wardrobe is only a few words long and refers to the game as though it is as innocent as it first seems.
Wardrobe video description: cute little game i found after many years. i remember playing this as a child lol :) - Fat Bastard: The stalker is very obese from what we see of his face, and outright eats Lacey.
- Karma Houdini: The video ends before the stalker can get any comeuppance.
- The Peeping Tom: After his call on the second dress-up segment, the Stalker can be seen watching Lacey get dressed from her bedroom window.
- Stalker with a Crush: The antagonist is a stalker who calls Lacey twice to make creepy remarks towards her on the phone, leaves a gift of what is implied to be human flesh, and kills and eats her.
- Stupidity Is the Only Option: The only way to beat the in-universe game is to send Lacey out on her "date" with the extremely creepy stalker who has made it abundantly clear he has bad intentions in mind for her, like leaving her threatening phone calls and a "gift" of human flesh.
- You Bastard!: The game directly calls out the player once they force Lacey to meet with her stalker.what have you done
Lacey's Diner
- Art Shift: The first two days play out in the typical Animesque doodle art-style. The third day in the bad ending route abruptly switches to a disturbing photo-realistic look where everything is dark and distorted to signify the Sanity Slippage Lacey is going through.
- Asshole Victim: Lacey's uncle is implied to have molested her. In return, she kills him and serves him to her customers.
- Big Creepy-Crawlies: When the cockroaches are added to Lacey's "dish" during the bad ending a screen featuring a large cockroach on a wall appears.
- Body Horror: In the bad ending route on the third day, in conjunction with the Art Shift, Lacey's design becomes odd and disfigured, and her face splits open every time she speaks. Her customers don't fare much better, becoming photo-realistic but with exaggerated and twisted facial features or alternatively, missing a face entirely.
- Cigarette of Anxiety: Lacey smokes one after her restaurant is closed down.
- Creepy Uncle: It is heavily implied that Lacey's uncle molested her, and she ends up killing him and serves him as food after she snaps.
- Deconstructed Trope: Many old Flash restaurant games have the customers leave if you take too long. For Lacey, this leads to her restaurant failing and her going insane.
- Disproportionate Retribution: On the third day in the bad ending route, Lacey gets back at her customers for their impatience by putting ingredients such as broken glass, cockroaches, cigarette butts, meth, and human flesh in the food she gives them.
- The Dog Bites Back: After undergoing Sanity Slippage, Lacey kills her Creepy Uncle. She also sees serving the "food" to her customers as this.
- Downer Ending: The bad ending has Lacey undergo Sanity Slippage because the customers got impatient and left, so she gets revenge by feeding them gross and unsanitary "food". When her diner gets shut down afterwards, she kills herself.
- Driven to Suicide: The video ends with Lacey killing herself after deliberately getting the diner shut down.
- Going Postal: When Lacey can't keep up with her customers' demands in the face of a failing business, she ends up poisoning them with the next day's special.
- Lethal Chef: Played for Horror in the bad ending route, where Lacey, in her Sanity Slippage and anger towards her customers, serves food made of cigarette butts, dead roaches, porn magazines, meth, used condoms, broken glass, and human flesh.
- Multiple Endings: The In-Universe game has two. If the player makes the food on-time and serves it to the customers, they get a A Winner Is You screen saying Lacey's Diner became the best diner ever. Failing leads to a disturbing alternate ending where Lacey undergoes Sanity Slippage, culminating in her serving disgusting and dangerous "food" as revenge and getting her diner shut down, after which she is Driven to Suicide.
- Rape as Backstory: It's heavily implied that Lacey's Uncle molested her, causing many of her underlying psychological issues.
- Revenge Is a Dish Best Served: Played for Horror. After Lacey snaps in the bad ending, she makes the day's special...something containing things like broken glass, cigarettes, and cockroaches and feeds it to the customers. It's unclear if they survive this.
- Sanity Slippage: In the bad ending route, when Lacey fails to serve food to her customers on time and they walk out, she freaks out and goes into a depressive mood with suicidal thoughts. Failing again the next day causes her to really snap and rant about the impatience of the customers; the next day, she has completely lost it and feeds them deliberately disgusting, inedible "food" which gets her diner shut down, leading to her killing herself.
- Throw the Dog a Bone: The normal route's ending, though barebones, actually lets Lacey be happy for once: her diner does well, she's proud of herself and hopeful for the future, and she earns enough to maintain herself and possibly improve her lot in life.
- Uncertain Doom: Whether any of the customers survived eating the inedible and outright dangerous food Lacey served them is unclear. Given her Sanity Slippage and unreliable POV it's also unknown whether any of them actually ate the clearly dubious food or if they saw through it and reported her without further incident.
- Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: At the end of the second day on the bad ending route, Lacey gets mad at her customers for their impatience and decides to get back at them by putting disgusting and even dangerous ingredients in the food she makes them. It's also implied that she murdered and cooked her uncle. Despite that, her implied Dark and Troubled Past, bleak circumstances and clear Sanity Slippage keep her sympathetic.
Lacey's Petshop
- All Just a Dream: The end of the video reveals that the sequence with Lacey exploring the house was just a nightmare.
- Bad People Abuse Animals: The orders at Lacey's Petshop quickly go from cleaning the animals to dressing up the animals to mutilating the animals. It's also implied that Lacey's uncle killed her dog.
- Bittersweet Ending: Lacey actually survives for her once due to the events of the game being All Just a Dream… but what her uncle did to her still traumatised her... and there’s something rotting under her bed.
- Body Horror:
- Lacey painfully stretches a hamster's neck for an order.
- In her Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl form, Lacey's face appears distorted and unnatural, as though it's melting.
- There's also her uncle's decayed corpse under her bed.
- Forced into Evil: Lacey's inability to say 'no' leads her to mutilating animals.
- Hope Is Scary: Lacey describes this feeling when not wanting to leave a cage she put herself in (on a more metaphorical level, reliving the abuse her uncle put her through) because the suffering is familiar and thus appealing to her.This pain just hurts so comfortably
- Kick the Dog: One of the first things we see about the Lacey's Games website is a drawing done by a 9-year-old girl named Jenny being shown on the front page, being relentlessly mocked by someone who owns the site (implied to be Rocio), claiming it's trash and that Lacey hates it. It is so pointlessly cruel that it reflects why the Lacey Flash games are so depressing.
- Kindhearted Cat Lover: Lacey is revealed to be this as she returns a skeletal cat's skin, and we see her thoughts of wanting a cat.
- Medium Blending: In a first for the series, Petshop includes live-action segments, including the interview with Grace Asop at the beginning and Lacey's monologue in the mirror.
- The Mirror Shows Your True Self: Lacey's reflection turns into a Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl.
- Mood Whiplash: Twice. The first is when Lacey, during her tragic inner monologue, finds a key and refers to the aforementioned monologue as an "edgy moment". The second is when it's revealed Lacey's exploration of the hellish mansion was just a nightmare, and we're returned to the standard cute Lacey.
- Or Was It a Dream?: The end of the video reveals that the sequence with Lacey exploring the house was just a nightmare. However, the...thing under her bed is still there.
- Pig Man: A whole family of them, eating what appears to be flowers in the dining room. They don't do anything to interact with Lacey, and they disappear moments later.
- Self-Immolation: Lacey does this to escape her nightmare.
- Shout-Out: The audio that plays when something crawls out from under Lacey's bed is an excerpt taken from the 1981 short horror film, Beneath The Skin."But it never was real. It was just a bizarre story that somehow happened to my life. But it never was real... but I had this dream that was so real. I dreamed that it was me, and not her, that he killed two years ago. And that's another story."
- Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl: Lacey sees her reflection as one of these in the mirror.
- Surprisingly Happy Ending: Lacey wakes up, alive and well… Downplayed as there's something rotting under her.
- They Killed Kenny Again: Averted for the first time in the series, Lacey actually survives to the end of the episode on account of everything that had happened being All Just a Dream.
the disturbing rabbithole of laceygames.com
- Disproportionate Retribution: Rocio's response to Moral Guardians complaining about Jay? Kill her off in a very gruesome way. On a website for children.
- Kitschy Local Commercial: The video opens with an ad for Lacey's website featuring some very awkward singing.
- Medium Blending: Continuing the trend from Lacey's Petshop, we see Grace and the player talking to each other frequently throughout the video.
- Moral Guardians: Several emailed Rocio disapproving of Jay's tomboyish personality. Rocio responded accordingly.
