What is the Princess Quest Tree? It’s a mural of a tree found in Princess Quest, a hidden minigame that first appeared in the mobile port of Help Wanted. With Security Breach, we got Princess Quest II and Princess Quest III. Help Wanted 2 gave us Princess Quest IV. The tree guards the final area in many Princess Quest games. The tree can be seen growing over the wall of a castle. Half of the tree has leaves, and half of the tree doesn’t.
In the most recent game, we can see the tree in full detail. The Puppet mask and tentacles decorate the columns supporting the tree.
The Puppet mask was possibly always there, if difficult to make out.
Like most things in this series, we can’t talk about the tree without coming to conclusions about the rest of the lore. Catastrophic (but exciting?) conclusions. Even before Help Wanted 2, I knew that this Tree belonged to one character: The Puppet.
But the way I came to this conclusion was so weird I avoided publishing it. But here we are, so I’m just going to lay my horrible lore map out for you to look over, and you can do with it as you will.
The key question here is: What is the Puppet’s relationship to Cassidy?
I believe our answer is in Princess Quest. Princess Quest is Cassidy’s story, told from the beginning. When Scott discussed his rejected movie scripts, the one that I craved the most was “The Cassidy Script”.
Now, the movie we got was great. Just like Scott said, the Mike script was probably the best choice. But the theorist in me wanted a Cassidy lorefest disaster at whatever cost. Happily, with Help Wanted, Security Breach, Ruin, and Help Wanted 2 I think we are finally getting more information than we ever have about Cassidy. Cassidy has always been a mysterious character. Who is she? Why is she so important?
I’ll get this out of the way first. I think Cassie is Cassidy. The names are close, of course. In Ruin when the game sings Happy Birthday to Cassie, it dumps her in the Princess Quest Room. But there’s more to it than that. I don’t think she’s just Cassidy.
With all the information we have been given across the new games, I can only come to one conclusion. Cassidy is the Puppet. Do not kill me for this. Let’s look at the second room of Princess Quest first.
This room is the same as the Give Gifts Give Life minigame. By lighting the lanterns, the Princess is giving from her own light.
The fifth body, Golden Freddy, is represented by a dark hole in the floor. We’ll get to Golden Freddy in a second.
Okay, so maybe the Princess represents the Puppet. But does that mean she’s Cassidy?
An early version of the game called the Princess Sprite “Cassidy”.
I don’t think this is as far-fetched as it appears to be on the surface. In fact, I think in Pizza Simulator, Scott already told us as much.
The Puppet is in Golden Freddy. She just is. I have some guesses, but I don’t know exactly how this happened. But that seems to be what Scott’s saying here. There is a great deal of overlap with these characters. Lefty has one yellow eye and one dark eye, shakes, and is generally menacing. He seems to be our Golden Freddy for this game. And the Puppet is in him.
The Princess has a shadowy copy.
So does Golden Freddy.
Shadow Freddy is a recolor of FNAF2’s Golden Freddy. He is even missing the same ear.
Nightmare is a copy of Nightmare Fredbear. Another exact recolor of Golden Freddy. In the files, he too is called Shadow Freddy.
But Nightmare is confirmed to have at least one more form.
Nightmare is also Nightmarionne, a twisted version of the Puppet. When we find him in Security Breach, he is in a Gold Box. And he is behind a door with this image.
Again, I think, pointing to these characters together. The Puppet. Golden Freddy. Cassidy. Nightmare. Make of all that what you will.
Let’s talk about what I promised from the start. The Princess Quest Tree. We already discussed the second room in Princess Quest. If we go back to the first room, this is the Princess’s origins. Where she gets her start. It gives us information about Cassidy before the Give Gifts Give Life minigame. It’s a simple room, with a box and a table with three chairs. There is actually a secret Easter Egg for this room, discovered by u/fortnitedude43590 from Reddit. Rarely, a tree can appear.
I said I knew this was the Puppet’s tree. And also that the way I got there was weird. Both things are true. But I’m just going to go over my theory for this and bear with me.
There is an important tree in the Books. And no, I don’t mean The Storyteller, although that is an important tree too. The tree I’m talking about is from much earlier. We learn about it in the Frights. It is a tree that is losing its leaves.
The tree I’m talking about is Oliver, from Coming Home. Susie’s story also starts with a tree.
Throughout the story, Oliver is losing his leaves.
There are several odd things about Susie in this story. What I think is that this story is deceptive. It is a story that pretends it is about Susie, but it is secretly about Charlotte/Cassidy. In the games Susie has blonde, curly hair. But the Susie from this story has brown hair and brown eyes.
Susie’s sister is named Samantha, which is the female version of Sam or Sammy. Sammy is Charlie’s brother from The Silver Eyes trilogy.
Not only that, another important character is Jeanie: whose name and role are close to Aunt Jen. This is Charlie’s Aunt in The Silver Eyes trilogy.
Patricia is depressed, has trouble sleeping, and quilts for a living. Henry’s depression in the books leads to a sad end, he talks in the game about how he can’t rest, and books on quilting are among Henry’s possessions.
I told you this was an unconventional way of reaching the conclusion that tree is definitely the Puppet’s tree. But it’s how I came to that conclusion regardless.
Whether you interpret it that way or not is up to you, but since we’re already here, Coming Home talks in detail about that tree and what it means.
The tree’s fallen leaves are cyclical. A loop. The leaves fall, they grow again. They also have to do with light and dark, the summer and the winter. Susie does not know she is dead, but she sees her own family’s sadness and grief in Oliver.
Susie can only visit her family during the day time. At night, she must go back to Freddy’s with Chica. In the light, she’s with her family even if they can’t see her. In the dark, she’s at the Pizzeria.
But the sun has a greater cycle than day and night. Summer and winter are light and dark on a grander scale. And as Oliver loses his leaves, Susie loses her ability to visit her sister. Samantha is able to find Susie’s doll, Gretchen, and the sisters say goodbye as the last leaf falls. In this strange, last moment, the sisters are finally able to see each other.
The themes of light and dark are important in Princess Quest.
There is another new character, introduced in Security Breach, that connects the themes of Light and Dark. A character that is a blend of the Puppet who watches after the children, and sports Fredbear’s cheery golds.
When the Lights are on, Sun is a friendly caretaker for children. But when the Lights are off, he turns into the more sinister Moon.
A Nightmare version, you might say.
Which brings us to one final question. One final character whose identity has hung over the series. A character who Moon and the Nightmare staff bots seem to work for. Vanny. Why does Cassie spend all of Ruin wearing the Vanny mask? Is Vanessa Vanny, or is there a weirder explanation? Vanny and Vanessa both have different voice actors and mannerisms, but they look the same under the mask.
My current guess is that Vanny is Vanessa. But when Vanessa wears the Vanny mask, she is possessed by the Puppet, who is under William’s control.
This is the mask from Help Wanted. Cassie wears it through most of Ruin. It also appears in the Security Breach Trailer. William says, “When I first found you, you were nothing. You were small, pathetic. But now, you are more. Are you ready?”
I think this moment from the trailer has lead to a lot of speculation about Vanessa being brainwashed, and is the reason many people were surprised when she was revealed in the movie as an Afton working for him willingly. This doesn’t sound like something William would say to his daughter. But I don’t think William is talking to Vanessa here. I think the character William is talking to is Cassidy. He is talking about when he found her outside of the restaurant and killed her. When she became the Puppet, he saw her as “more”. He asks her if she’s ready to work for him.
Vanny has voice clips which include a little girl’s laughter. She also skips, swings Gregory playfully, and in her idling motions, practices ballet.
The minireenas are small versions of the Puppet, in the same way that the Bidibabs are small versions of Baby.
I think that the Vanny’s mask is the Puppet’s mask, remade as William’s favorite character (a Rabbit).
But once the Puppet regains control at the end of Help Wanted 2, she is immediately able to turn the tables on her captor and “repair threats to the system”.
What waits beyond the tree, and the puppet mask columns of Princess Quest IV? It’s this ending, of course. Moon under Vanny’s direction, obtaining Glitchtrap and getting rid of him.
I think this is the end of Glitchtrap, but not William, for complicated reasons that deserve another article. But that’s generally where I’m at with Cassidy, Golden Freddy, The Puppet, The Princess, Vanny, and the Help Wanted 2 ending. …And the Princess Quest Tree, of course.