As the eerie cult ending continues to play out, Mary arrives and insists she’s going to get you out of the dungeon. She frees you from your restraints and the two of you begin running down a long hallway. Here is where things get really odd. A piece of dialogue previously mentioned that you were in a “dream, daddy” and it’s time for you to wake up. This happens just before Mary shows up to rescue you. While it isn’t clear how much of the game is suggested to be a dream, the hallway scene certainly seems to be otherworldly. During this scene, your character runs with Mary down the hall but claims the hall seems to be getting smaller and smaller. By the time you two reach the end, your character and Mary both feel dehydrated and exhausted and have no clear recollection of how long you were journeying down the hall. “I’ve been walking for what I think must be days,” your character says in the code revealed by the data miners. “It could be weeks… months…” All the while, your character drifts in and out of sleep that is plagued by nightmares of Joseph’s children.
But they aren’t the only ones in your nightmares. A new dad is present as well but the game doesn’t give you any information about who this is or why he has appeared here. This is when your character comes face to face with the reality that the world around him is fake and believed to be a construct at the hands of Joseph. After waking up in your house, your daughter Amanda happily skips into the room and asks if you want breakfast. When you question Amanda by asking what her birthday is, her eyes turn black and the world around you fades away. You lose consciousness and awaken yet again in the dungeon with Joseph peering at you. He comments that you “almost got away” before mentioning that Mary is “rocking the tag team with you.” This is the first indication you receive that the hallway scene was not just a dream. Mary must have actually attempted to help you escape although it isn’t clear how the plans went so awry.
At this point, you attempt to stab Joseph with the knife Robert gave you on your second date. Joseph swats the knife out of your hands and then begins choking you before Mary appears yet again. This time, she has taken the knife and stabs Joseph in the chest. Joseph isn’t really affected by the wound, which causes Mary to back away. At this time, Joseph’s kids, or vessels, claim to be “so hungry.” Their pleas to be fed causes all three of Joseph’s children to corner you before you and Mary somehow make another escape.
You wake up to see your daughter standing before you but she has a very different version of events. Amanda claims the yacht you were on sank and that rescue crews pulled you out of the water a few days ago. She also says nobody has seen Joseph since then but proof emerged that he was embezzling money from the church. At this point, Mary enters the room along with the mysterious dad you saw earlier and explains that Joseph ran away when the feds showed up. As for the strange dad, he is a detective by the name of Saul Graves and he knows that Mary’s story isn’t true.
The detective, who has been following you the entire game, says he won’t be able to forget what you both saw “down there” but it’s his job to get to the bottom of it. Turns out he lost his wife under “mysterious circumstances” and it’s believed Joseph had something to do with it. This father is actually believed to be an eighth datable dad that could possibly come to the game later via DLC or he was a part of the cult storyline that was scrapped from the game all together.
The part of the mystery that still has the community divided, however, is just how much of the game was a dream, how much of it was rooted in reality, and how much of it was a strange combination of the two. While some players believed the dungeon scene was a horrible nightmare and that the detective could have been referencing what happened “down there” in the ocean where your character was rescued, it seems a bit far fetched given the detective’s story of his wife’s mysterious disappearance. Also, his comment that you and Mary have your stories straight is another odd one if we’re to believe the detective was referring to the ocean when he mentions “down there.” Instead, this seems to suggest that the detective wants to keep what you both saw a secret and make sure nobody else in the town becomes suspicious about what happened.
The idea of the entire Dream Daddy game being some sort of a dream sequence, however, is also not likely. There is nothing to suggest the other relationships in the game aren’t really happening and Robert’s warnings about Joseph also don’t seem to fit very well in that theory. For now, the truth behind Maple Bay may continue to lie far, far beneath it.
