Have you played The Stanley Parable?

For those who don’t know, The Stanley Parable is a genre-defining walking simulator. You play as Stanley, a character in a story. That sounds straightforward, but it’s actually not – you have a number of opportunities to ignore the story and go off on your own. The narrator, throughout, will comment – often incredulously – on your journey through the game’s many, many endings.

All of which takes place in an empty, operational, copy-pasted, office environment.

Back in high school, I showed my Creative Writing teacher a short film inspired by The Stanley Parable, called Jack. Jack is inspired by the Stanley Parable, but not at all a rehash or a reboot (even though it shares a voice actor for the narrator, Kevan Brighting.) It simply plays with the themes of the original game but reapplies them to the space of a television studio, with a character who doesn’t realize that’s where he is. It’s not that he’s an actor in a created world like The Truman Show, though that was also cited by Vesio productions as an influence. Rather, it’s Jack the character who becomes self aware, realizing his place as a tool of the narrator. My Creative Writing teacher loved it, and to be frank, that will always be one of my finest achievements – introducing this man, who is an award-winning actor and one of the reasons I am the writer I am today, to the things I loved, the film Jack included.

So what does this all have to do with “LOST!” by RM?

If “LOST!” was not inspired by The Stanley Parable, at least in part, I would be thoroughly shocked.

I don’t just mean the office environment they end up in. I mean the story, the themes of the video all harken back to this game from 2013. I don’t think The Stanley Parable was the only influence, just how it wasn’t the only influence on Jack. But there is a distinct parallel between all three in their story beats that can’t be ignored, as well as enough differences between Jack and “LOST!” that I think they may have a common ancestor, so to speak, but only distantly so.

RM’s “LOST!” is very much about being trapped in the music industry, and however voluntarily that may be, it’s not without its sacrifices and has a huge impact on your identity. At the beginning of the video (after the awesome claymation intro, which I don’t say lightly as claymation gives me the heebie-jeebies in the least fun way) RM is performing his song in a physical maze, while alternate versions of him appear. Then he starts seeing his face on other people in the studio, including one of the announcers. He looks up and realizes he’s in an office elevator with other people who look nothing like him, all with the same outfit and nametag – “RM”.

This is where we get into full Stanley Parable territory.

“LOST!” aesthetically pulls a lot from the The Stanley Parable. The Stanley Parable is defined largely by its long, empty hallways and beige/yellow carpets. Both are present in “LOST!” albeit with some variation. The game has a crisp and unsettling texture, as per its Half Life 2 mod origins. “LOST” dials that up to 1000. Mazes are present in The Stanley Parable, as the empty hallways twist and turn in weird directions – sometimes impossibly. “LOST!” uses mazes as a motif.

But perhaps, what’s most important to this analysis is the fact that both RM and Stanley have been in the same room with themselves.

With Stanley, there’s a specific easter egg you can get where you can see Stanley – yourself – through panes of glass, walking towards another one of the game’s many endings. Since that path is, in fact, accessible, the implication is that this is you, the player, have done that path before, even when you haven’t.

RM’s video takes a more layered approach to this. In the surface world – the world of the television studio – he sees his own face on several people in the studio, including the female host. There’s also a costumer with a clothing rack that has multiples of his exact suit, with the nametag. RM – the singer playing himself – doesn’t really use his real voice in the surface world, instead mouthing alongside the sampled audio. We don’t see RM speak for himself until he meets his duplicates in the underground office world.

However, in the underground office world, RM’s duplicates are NOT duplicates. Sure, we still see duplicates of RM on the various isometric sets. However, how real those versions of him are dubious since they aren’t really interacted with. However, there are 4 other actors playing RM, two presenting male and two presenting female, all with different personalities and energies. They even mouth the words to his song at various intervals. For all intents and purposes they are him, just a different version of him.

It’s safe to say that the duplicates represent aspects of RM’s personality that he sees in himself. The goofball, the scaredy cat, the stoic powerhouse, and the femme – all are parts that listeners and hardocre ARMYs have seen in him. However, over the years, people who are not RM – more specifically, industry executives and western news outlets – have tried to control the narrative about who BTS are, and who RM is.

Before BTS’s hiatus a few years ago, RM’s personhood had been commodified, but since the band members decided to figure themselves out separately, RM has reclaimed what was taken from him. He has risen to prominence as an artist with his own voice, as have all of his bandmates. But in “LOST!” RM explores aspects of his own personhood that – it appears – he hasn’t been able to fully realize.

At the end of the video, RM is onstage with the two hosts. As they try to promote him in their standard and impersonal way, he actively looks around the room, almost like he’s panicking, before looking right at the camera. The scene then cuts to the underground office, where the other 4 duplicates are looking up, hearing the show end and the exit to the surface world close before looking at the camera. They haven’t gone anywhere, they’re still there.

The reason “LOST!” fits the bill for analog horror is that it takes the three criteria and complicates them. There is an in-universe camera of the show, but there is also the isometric view of the space and numerous high resolution shots that don’t match the Retraux aesthetic.