Harold is a virus

Howdy y’all! Laura Cough, Internet Lizard’s Firstborn Daughter here, and welcome to your weekly-ish Automaton Lunch post, where I bring you random and obscure fun facts about Luke Vincent’s titles, from the Willful to Walk!

Today’s topic of discussion is Luke Vincent’s A Game By Its Cover Jam title, Order of the Third Hand. It’s a surreal 3D walking simulator about a guy investigating a cult that’s stationed in the underground subway. You might not have played this game before, but it’s available on Luke’s Itch page right here. This article will contain some spoilers, but because this is not much of an important game to many, I figured I’d leave out the warning from the title. If you really care enough about it, go play the game before reading this, it’s free to play.

Now, before we proceed, I do need to say that this one’s a Godot Mono game, which is a fancy and technical way of saying I can’t properly decompile the game to a working state. I can, however, access the in-game models, textures, and scenes, allowing us to bascially take the camera, anywhere we want, to try to find secrets and new discoveries in this game!

Here’s a fun start – in the opening subway area of the game…

…There’s actually a set of phantom collision objects hiding in front of the tracks! The player can’t normally access these though, because they’re typically inaccessible due to the other, larger collision plane that exists here. Speaking of the subway tracks, the tunnel they’re situated in actually extends far beyond what the player can normally see!

We can actually see a very similar situation in this area with the bars that keep the player from exiting the subway.

It’s possible that this area was once intended to be used for something greater, but whatever concept was supposed to go here was scrapped in the interest of time? It’s fun to speculate.
And on the topic of this area, did you know that it actually holds a secret? This Bonobo Man here stands behind the bars waiting for the player to walk forward, only for him to very quickly run out of sight! Waiting there long enough may eventually prompt him to return, but I haven’t seen this before in normal gameplay.

Now, this is a very short game, and in fact, these few things were about the only interesting features I could find regarding the map itself. That doesn’t mean that this game is out of quirks, though.
You likely already knew that the title menu shows a version of the first level in the background – but as it would turn out, this version of the first level is identical to the one seen in gameplay. This would be completely normal, if it weren’t for the fact that there was a copy of the first level scene with the name “1_1(title_menu)”. What’s stranger is that this 1-1 level copy makes absolutely no changes to the normal level, and is literally just an instance of the level scene!

Another strange internal quirk comes with the game’s music. The game features four tracks in its OST, and all of them have an extremely simple naming convention, simply being the date they were produced…

That is, except for one.

Anyone who knows the Automaton Lung Soundtrack knows which theme AL_011 is – March Prequel. And sure enough, this track is a remix of that very song.
(Side tangent: I’m going to be incredibly honest, when I heard this track play when going through the game for the first time, my face lit up like a Christmas tree.)

The game also contains this random 512×512 completely black texture… Sure.

Also found in the game’s files are the two cartridges that Luke used as inspiration when creating the game. Their placement here isn’t much of a surprise – keeping them in the same working directory as the game was likely a convenient way to keep them on hand.

That’s all I could find in here. Again, this game is pretty short, so there’s not a whole lot of interesting or unique content to be found in here. I hope you can enjoy what I put together for now, though. Join me next week as we do a deep dive into Automaton Lung’s hidden debug content.
Cough Out!