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The Mystery of Nier: Automata's Secret Church was a Wild Ride

On July 25, at 12:44 AM PDT, Reddit user “sadfutago” posted a video of him entering a never-before-seen door in the Copied City area of 2017's NieR:Automata. The gaming side of the web promptly exploded in what became a week-long hunt to discover the secret of what lay beyond the door—or if it was all just a giant hoax.

But while the video post mentioned above is what set the internet on fire, sadfutago's first post on the subject (and first Reddit post overall) came about a month-and-a-half before on the tiny (currently 293 member) r/NieRFanart subreddit.

The post was largely ignored. However, the next day on the larger (currently 20,099 member) r/NieRAutomataGame subreddit, he posted a similar comment and got a few, somewhat confused responses.

Four days later came a follow-up—this time with some blurry pictures taken off of a TV screen.

Then came a similar post on the big r/nier subreddit (currently 180,090 members) a few minutes later.

It was received with more than a bit of skepticism. Then four days later, sadfutago posted his first video of how he got to the aforementioned church. It showed a door no one had ever seen before.

The video was met with utter shock throughout the subreddit. Many questioned how no one else had found this and were eager to try and recreate it for themselves. However, no one was able to—and questions to sadfutago went unanswered. Then, on July 25, after more than a month of silence, came the video that set the Nier fandom ablaze.

It wasn't just a door but a whole new area—with ladders, items, and moving set pieces. Speculation went wild. Was this an Easter Egg left behind by the developers? Was this cut content that was only on certain copies of the game? Was this a mod—despite the fact that no tools existed among modders to make such drastic changes to the core game? Was this actually an ARG set up by the creators of NieR:Automata to promote the upcoming Nintendo Switch release of the game? No one knew. The next day, another video appeared—this time showing off the church from the original screenshots.

This video fanned the flames even higher. Not only was the church filled with callbacks to the original Nier game, entering the church triggered an in-game cutscene with some voiced lines following after as well. It looked so official, there was only one thing to do: ask NieR:Automata's creators if it was real. But their replies were enigmatic at best.

But sadfutago wasn't done. His next clip revealed that going into the church with a different character allowed for a different outcome: a new boss battle.

Over the next few hours, sadfutago posted text updates on his progress against the boss across several subreddits with hundreds of commenters cheering him on.

Then came the video of him beating the boss.

As cool as the fight was, it wasn't what got everyone's attention. Rather it was the fact that interacting with the bird bath made questions in another language appear. While sadfutago seemed to think it was Korean, fans were quick to notice that not only was it actually Japanese, but also that the questions being asked were the same as the ones the player would encounter shortly before the final boss battle of the first Nier game. It was then that things went full creepypasta with a series of picture posts followed by a Twitch url.

Redditors flocked to the Twitch stream to get the truth, once and for all.

In the end, everything was revealed to be a mod created by three people: DevolasRevenge, Woeful_Wolf and RaiderB. In secret, the three had worked together to develop the modification tools and then build the entire Church sequence. They will be releasing the tools used to create the mod, as well as the mod itself, over the coming days. So, while this didn't turn out to be cut content or an ARG to promote a new game, it most certainly heralds the start of a new era of NieR:Automata modding—modding on a level all but indistinguishable from an official Square Enix-made release.

Source: sadfutago on Reddit