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I Cannot Drown: The shrine in the snow.

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lost

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most masculine emperor

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This is where I post from.. if you even care.

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This was so fun to draw!!

i'm gonna give a hug to whoever guess every map

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i just love light effects on water...

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it has been a while since i posted. i love painting mountains :)

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Hakuga (AnxEyeTea) findings

So there's some more or less interesting stuff in the files.

Oddheader's most recent video about video games tied to cults oOOOooOOOoo showed up in my recommended, and Hakuga was the only game I didn't recognize. The original itch.io page claims that the game was created by the uploader's friend, who took his own life in 2017, and the parents of that friend gave his computer to the uploader, which contained the game in an unfinished state, so the uploader made it playable. Since it was made in Unity, you can extract the game's assets with AssetStudio. The first thing you'll notice upon extracting them is that the game contains actual photos of dead people. Most of them depict the victims of Unit 731, and are completely uncensored. The ones that are related to the unit are used in the "Museum of Shame" area in the game.

There are also some development screenshots ("Offline.png", "hokugescrin.png" and "hkgunity.png"). Note how in the second one the top and bottom are cropped, and in the third one parts of the top are obfuscated.

At some point, I found a file that was dated 2021, which would be 4 years after the creator allegedly passed away. And this graphic has multiple variations.

It wouldn't make any sense for the creator's friend to have put it there, since he said he wanted the game to stay the way the creator left it.

So then I looked at the audio files in the hopes that I could find the source for some of them, at least the ones that weren't taken from SDR2/Persona 5.

I reverse searched this one, and it actually led me to a result:

A soundcloud trap beat. Even though the track is now titled "20", the url still has the original title, which lines up with the filename.

Having looked at the game's files for as long as I did, there were some glaring similarities between them and the cover art. One featured the japanese Shin Godzilla logo that was also used in-game multiple times, another cover was present as-is in the files, another used the same anime girl in the same 3D program and another one had that exact same picture of Renamon uncropped, which was used as a texture. Overall, they had almost the exact same art style as the game.

After this was discovered and shared with the Oddheader discord, a "fixed" version of Hakuga with no other info was uploaded on AnxEyeTea's itch.io, being 57mb smaller than the first version.

The Soundcloud account's last activity was on March 10th, 2021. There's no way this account doesn't belong to the original creator of the game, especially when you consider there was no trace of this game on the internet prior to Halloween 2022. That, and the account has its location set to Japan even though a lot of the comments it wrote were either in English or French. What's noticeable is that 1. The syntax of these comments is typical for a native French speaker 2. There are spaces before exclaimation and question marks 3. The first person "I" is always lowercase And before that, I had already tried to compare the writing styles of the game's creator and his "friend", which were exactly the same. Some of the game's graphics were also titled "sans titre", "téléchargement" and "copie" which would indicate that the creator's first language is French.

This story of "My friend took his life 6 years ago and his parents gave me his stuff so I learned how to use Unity and made this game playable" reeked of bullshit from the start. My first thought was that the creator made up the story of him taking his own life in order to either be shielded from criticism or to make the game seem more interesting by getting people to believe he died.

And finally, by looking up "hakuga reddit" in order to find something else, I found this post. An AMA by the creator, Alex.V/"Akiba Tomoke", hidden in plain sight.

There's a chance this is fake and was made by a data miner or something (considering the "I" is actually uppercase this time), but this account uses the Akiba name that was only used in-game, and its profile picture is a slightly altered version of an image in the assets that I couldn't find a source for:

So there you have it. The backstory was fake, there's no real link to a cult, it was just another edgy ARG.

EDIT: But wait, there's more. Somebody other than the OP replied to the AMA post, claiming to be the uploader.

These were up for about an hour until he deleted one of them and deactivated his account. At the same moment, this was posted to the itch.io page:

Somewhere in that timeframe, the Soundcloud account also got deleted. Strangely enough, the Twitter account from 2018 (which doesn't mention the friend AT ALL despite being created a year after his alleged passing) is still up. An hour after the intial text appeared on itch.io, some sections of it were rewritten multiple times (these are in chronological order, click for better quality):

You can see that after the third revision the archive.org link was removed, and right after that the itch.io download for the game was removed. After the last revision, the seperate page for Hakuga was completely deleted from AnxEyeTea's itch.io.

It should be mentioned that as soon as the "fixed" version of Hakuga was uploaded to the itch.io account, a review popped up on the old archived version, which got edited multiple times. Make of that what you will.

Certain aspects of the now deleted Soundcloud account actually led to the creator's professional design work, some of which still included assets and references to Hakuga. Nowadays he works on music videos, his last one was released in May of this year. I won't link to it here since I assume he doesn't want to be associated with Hakuga under this identity.

The Conclusion

A statement has been made on the itch.io page.

TL;DR: The creator of the game is still alive and well, nobody died. The premise of someone distributing his dead friend's unfinished Unity project was solely made up for the release of the game. Hakuga was a failed (collaborative?) ARG that utilized suicide, war, depression and drug symbolism as well as images of real dead people that were, in his words, intended to denounce and not forget what happened (specifically in relation to Unit 731). The usage of Japanese text is purely stylistic and mostly nonsensical.

Thanks to everyone on Discord and Reddit who contributed to debunking this.

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I was never the same after playing this hack

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the penguin is going through stuff man

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THE WITCH LOST HER MAP ‼️‼️‼️