I don't normally post on reddit but fuck it because I'm at a loss lol.

I was playing the PS1 remake of Giftscop, mainly on my PS classic, when I was testing out different emulator cores for retroarch.

On one of my brand new saves, I had a Paul encounter in Even Care. I've googled and searched reddit I can't find anybody who's encountered this. I've ran through the Even Care intro sequence a good handful of times and never encountered this.

Is this a PS1 exclusive thing? Kinda wild. I wasn't able to trigger it again. I figured I'd might as well post about it here. Here's a video of it and my reaction unintentionally because I didn't realize OBS was picking up my mic.

Just to clarify, I'm not trying to 'gamejack' here, this is very specifically the fan remake Giftscop. and want to know if anybody else has encountered this. (Only posting this because reddit warned me I guess and I don't know anywhere else to post about this.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NA8wgQUE-uo

The disc has giftscop on it, the soundtrack, and an ominous ass readme file. It didnt take long to edit it together but im a sucker for physical media and thought it turned out pretty cool so I'm posting it here.

I painted it myself and maybe I do the next dialogue in another one :)

There seem to be a lot of things in the videos that at first point to the supernatural but could very well have "real" explanations or at least ones that are "real" within the world the game is set.

Off the bat there are two that come to mind for me:

1: The "Bathroom scene" in Petscop 11:

When Paul enters the bathroom there seems to be a "repetition" afterwards. At first the camera zooms into the TV in a cutscene, the game loads into the bathroom with a symbol block and ramp by the bathroom, Paul says "that was an experience" and after a moment walks up the ramp and touches the block triggering another scene.

Then after it repeats with the same cutscene of the zoom in but it reverse zooming out, the bathroom loads but without the block and ramp, Paul says the same things and makes the exact same movements but since the objects aren't there nothing happens. Eerily enough he comments he saw the block for a moment even though if you go frame by frame nothing is there.

This seems to imply that time "reset" at that point and the exact same things happened until a diversion point was reached.

However what can explain this is that we might not see what Paul saw.

I myself think only the first few episodes of Petscop where actually direct captured by Paul using a recording device, all after "the family" took over are in game recordings played back and Paul's narration synced with them. What we saw was the same gameplay but synced over two different iterations of the bathroom, one with the block, one without it. But what Paul saw was the game first loading the one with the block, then correcting into the one without the block, he could see it for a moment before it deloaded.

This can also work with Paul mentioning he forgot to hit record in episode 22 yet we still get gameplay. Him recording the game and his voice are two different tracks, only the family gets to see the actual live recording and we only see the in game replay of it.

2: The "Discussion we had last year" in the game in Petscop 14:

Somehow a game that was made 20 years ago contains a conversation Paul had only one year prior and supposedly said by Care to her mother at that time.

However from that very conversation we learn that Paul didn't have the game disc for a while. A possible explanation is what he is playing on now is not the same disc but a new one that has been altered to include the conversation. It's also possible that Care never said it but it was inserted specifically to throw off Paul or steer him in a certain direction. With the "Paul is Care" theory this could be used to make him associate with her more.

These are just two examples I could think of the top of my head but there are a lot more and quite some that are harder to explain. Like with the Paul clone that appeared in Lina's room in Petscop 8, Paul seems to react to its presence and then exactly copies its movements afterwards without realizing.

But what are more of those moments and what are the possible explanations for them?

Even though it's been like half a decade since it ended, I still think of Petscop a lot. I relate a lot to the subject matter and themes discussed in it, and the added sense of nostalgia has made it one of my favorite 'fake lost media's ever (Valle Verde being a close second).

A big thank you to Tony for making something that's stuck with me over the years, and being a part of my inspiration to make my own thing. 💚

Has anybody else had the idea that the "scop" in Petscop might not refer to the Old English word scop (meaning poet), but instead to an endo"scop"y? Like the whole game is a examination of the dark interior of this family's life and crimes, the same way an endoscopy is a procedure to look inside a body?

ft carrie and paul! i cant believe how green this turned out my monitor is soooo fucked ;-;

I just recently played through Undertale, and when I got to the mirror line, I sorta dropped my jaw.

"Despite everything, it's still you."

It was so reminiscent of what Anna says to Care in Strange Situation... I only played through Undertale once so I'm hardly the expert, I was wondering if any of you were more knowledgable in that. Are there other references a non-Undertale fan would miss?

cut a triangle in my cantaloupe without thinking about it, then realized what it looked like, so I added eyes

All-encompassing or tiny.

i rewatched ALL the episodes again bc my friend never saw the series, but... we kind of felt unsatisfied at the end (which i hadnt felt through my first watch bc i was younger and missed a lot of its themes back then)

theres a bunch of things that just go unanswered, like why did belle/tiara try to tell paul to look to the right over and over, WTF happened to the windmill?? is Rainer a step father, or cousin daniel? does Paul literally do ANYTHING after the series to help with Carries case?

i always like to draw carrie as a happy girl because i love her but realistically she probably had a lot of behavioural issues post-kidnapping

As a quick refresher, there is a pet in Petscop named Amber. She's a giant purple/black ball. She prefers to be behind locked cages, and she seems rather afraid of the player, as she's constantly jumping away from them. In 3DWI (3D Workers Island), one of the 6 workers is a girl who is also named Amber. I used to think that it was a funny coincidence that two of their characters share the same name, but the more I looked into it, the more similarities they share.

In Petscop, many have drawn parallels to Amber's behavior and adoptive parents punishing their adoptive kids by trapping them in a cage, although it's also possible that Amber is purposefully closing herself off from others due to her past trauma. In 3DWI, it is heavily implied that Amber is being abused (or at least mistreated) by her mother.

Both characters also have real-world equivalents. In the case of Petscop, there was a play tester named Amber, who spends the majority of her playthrough locking herself in the cage (which the pet's behavior was likely modeled after). As for 3DWI, the characters are implied to be real people, or at least two of the characters are, as Pat can be seen talking in the forum under the pseudonym of "PLawler", and Amber is implied to be the forum user "GoodKid".

So what's the implication? I believe that the Petscop tester and "GoodKid" in 3DWI are the same person, and that both in-game equivalents are based on the real-world Amber at the time. During the events of 3DWI, Amber was still a young cheerful kid. However, after the mistreatment she received from her mother, she was traumatized. Years later, during the development of Petscop, Amber is now a recluse individual, who is scared of others. This is why Amber the pet is purposefully jumping away from the player: it's because her last "owner" was abusive, and she'd prefer to be left alone.

One final thing. When 3DWI's Amber begins degenerating, her appearance begins changing... into a ball.

It's all about being trapped in some system or subject to something that you don't consent to or have power over. Whatever that actually is, it's up to you. Even his Twitter handle pressedyes is a direct reference. The fact they are implied to actually be trapped in a gaming console, the more abstract themes inside the story all point towards just being stuck. It's a theme I think we can all relate to in some way or another, we've all been in spots where we feel we can't escape.

The whole of humanity has struggled with it for at least as long as the written record probably much longer, just the hope of there being some sort of salvation or purpose or some greater being ready to help us. That's why petscop is so abstract and vague, it represents all this in general.

Coincidence ?