- "On the plus side, I got a new character I think people are going to love."
- Henry Stein
"It's a cycle, Audrey. An ink-stained nightmare forever stuck on repeat. With just a pencil and a dream... and with a little help from the Gent Corporation, it came into being." |
The Cycle is a nightmarish alternate reality styled after the world of early 1900s animation and the primary setting of every game within the Bendy series. Described as a realm that acts as a "story", the Cycle operates as a series of forever repeating events that was originally created by Joey Drew using the Ink Machine.
History[]
During the waning years of Joey Drew Studios, Joey began to blame everyone around him for the mistakes that had led to his company's downfall, including the failure of the Ink Machine to literally bring his characters to life. Still resentful over the resignation of his friend and business partner Henry Stein in the early years of the company, Joey began to hallucinate Henry being by his side as he attempted in anyway possible to keep Bendy and himself relevant following the studio's closure.
Joey would regain ownership of the Ink Machine after the closure of Gent, and with the help of Evan he would create a set of experimental glasses that would mentally transport those who wore them into the cartoons using the ink. Working at Kismet Production Studios Joey would create a show where, after an introduction in a recreation of his office, old Bendy cartoons would replay after being remade with the ink. He gave out a few of these experimental glasses to test families, including the recently hired Rose Sorenson. After the first show in January of 1953, Joey wandered and discovered a door that led him to an inky recreation of his old office.
Remarking that wandering is a terrible sin, Joey quickly left the inky world (as he called it) and began to experiment with it. First, he found a way to safely interact with the world from a distance. Upon finding one, Joey would use the Ink Machine to add more rooms to the inky world and would blame his hallucinations of Henry on the inaccuracies in its layout. The first rooms added were the foyer, the recording studio, the projection booths, and Heavenly Toys. As these rooms were added, the souls within the Ink Machine began to exist within the inky world as well. Among the first creatures to exist in the inky world were the Lost Ones, the Projectionist, and the Ink Demon. Either through his own deteriorating mental health or the influence of the Ink Machine, Joey's hallucinations began to become more vivid and he would demand the assistance of those not currently work for him, like Grant Cohen and Abby Lambert.
Eventually, the test families would wander as well and find themselves trapped within the inky world. As a scientist, Joey would watch over them. After his death to the Ink Demon in the real world, Archie Carter would be reborn in the inky world as a Lost One and safely guide the test families to Heavenly Toys, where Joey would communicate to them using an audio log. Eventually Rose would enter the world to save her brother Ollie, and Joey would reveal the origins of the place and his goal to fully recreate the studio within it. He initially remarks that he isn't sure what purpose it will serve, but upon learning from Archie that those within the inky world are forced to die and be reborn in a perpetual loop he begins to form an idea. All but one of the test participants manage to escape using cartoon logic and their imaginations.
Eventually, Joey loses everything again and in his anger he repurposes the inky world to be a never-ending cycle in order to torment a version of Henry as revenge for his perceived abandonment. Though his later meetings in life with Allison Pendle would cause Joey to have a change of heart and grant this version of Henry help in the form of an angel, the Cycle would continue for decades after its creation, persisting even after Joey's own death. Shortly after his passing, Nathan Arch purchased the rights to the Bendy franchise and moved many of Joey's possessions including the Ink Machine to an exhibit at the newly formed Archgate Films.
There the machine was discovered by Wilson, who found a way to enter the Cycle and began efforts to seize control of its world for his own gain. By imprisoning certain individuals that he deemed "Cyclebreakers" - Henry among them - Wilson brought the repeating loops to a standstill, allowing him to continue making changes even as the studio began to decay. His plans eventually led to him tricking Audrey into activating the Ink Machine and dragging her with him into the Ink and the Cycle.
Appearance[]
The Cycle appears as a massive complex of rooms, corridors, and areas from multiple facilities and companies related to the life of Joey Drew: Joey Drew Studios, Gent, Heavenly Toys, Bendy Land, and others. An entire generation in the real world later, other locations had been added, including a mansion and a train station, though the "City built on Broken Dreams" between said two locations consists of a replica of the GENT building and a movie theater playing "bad movies" from Bendy's silver screen career (including one titled "Temptation"), which also tie to Joey Drew's life and career. All of the environments within appear to be sketched, giving the entire realm a cartoon-like appearance. To that end, the world's color is entirely sepia, shaded with lighter or darker tints of yellow, tan, orange, and brown.
Within the Cycle are corrupted monsters born from the ink that stains the world, including versions of Joey Drew Studios characters like Boris, Alice Angel and Bendy. The creatures are also trapped in never-ending loops of their own, always returning to the ink to be reborn if they are destroyed, something that many appear aware of.
The Cycle exists in parallel with the outside world but is not subjected to the march of time like normal reality. While "time" in the Cycle can be measured in days to real-world people depend on how many times they go in the realm, those trapped within it don’t have definitions of time or at least not truly aware of how much time passes in their world.
Bendy and the Ink Machine[]
The first game in the series has players exploring the Cycle as the ink-incarnated version of Henry for one such loop of events, acting under the impression he is the real Henry who has been called to the old studio by Joey himself. After surviving the terrors of the Cycle and successfully vanquishing Beast Bendy using the End reel, Henry finds himself stepping back to the very beginning of the game with seemingly no memory of the previous loop, setting the Cycle off again.
By using the Seeing Tool to find Secret Messages on a second playthrough, it is revealed that this Henry has already repeated these events at least 102 times before the events of the game. He also appears to be at least subconsciously aware of this as the messages detail things like the fate of Boris, warnings to not turn on the Machine, and that Henry is powerless to stop events playing out.
Boris and the Dark Survival[]
The Cycle's appearance within Dark Survival is much less fixed, being randomly generated in its layout and details whenever Boris exits his safehouse to find new materials. However, the game's endless nature reinforces the same about the Cycle itself, being a place that Boris can only ever survive within rather than completely escape.
Bendy and the Dark Revival[]
Wilson asserts that it has been 211 days since he "destroyed" the Ink Demon with the help of the Keepers. The death of the Ink Demon proves to be a lie, however Wilson had discovered another method to subdue and control them using leftover Gent technology. Audrey is pulled into the Cycle as part of Wilson's plans to seize ultimate control so he could begin manifesting his own creations, eventually hoping to bring those creations into the real world to assert his own power and control. While exploring, Audrey is told by an ink-created incarnation of Joey Drew himself that Wilson is trying to stop the Cycle entirely and change it to be of his own design, imprisoning people who would try to see events through to their completion and reset everything as intended.
The appearance of Twisted Alice who is very much alive, Sammy Lawrence who is still loyal to Ink Bendy, Buddy Boris who hasn't been mutated into Brute Boris, the Projectionist's decapitated but still living head, and the decaying head of Bertrum imply that Wilson interfered and managed to halt the Cycle and the circumstances so drastically that it is almost no longer the same story as it was before.
Though the inhabitants of the world and The Ink Demon himself try to stop her, Audrey with the help of friends she met along the way manages to successfully use the End reel to reset the Cycle and repair the damage Wilson had done. After seemingly returning to the real world, Audrey remarks that while she knows she may not be able to end the Cycle, she can make things easier for everyone inside now that it is within her control. She also proves that Wilson's ultimate plan could have succeeded as she turns to reveal Bendy standing by her side. Implying that the other residents could eventually be freed as well.
Although the fate of Wilson and the Keepers remains a mystery after the reset, the end credits show a brief scene of the Ink Machine loaded into the back of a Gent truck which quickly drives off, implying it was stolen from Archgate in order to continue the experiments on the ink world of the cycle.
Bendy: The Cage[]
Although it's unknown what The Cycle will contain this time, Bendy: The Cage will still be taking place in the sepia-toned world, since the game has been confirmed to be a prequel to the finale of Bendy and the Dark Revival.
Maps[]
Bendy and the Ink Machine[]
| The following information contains spoilers. To view them, click the [show] tag. |
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Audio[]
| Description | Audio |
|---|---|
| The prototype ambiance for ink dripping. | |
| The prototype ambiance for when the studio is flooding | |
| The ink flood ambiance. | |
| The sound of a single drip of ink while the place is flooding. | |
| The ambiance for ink flowing in the pipes around the studio. | |
| Pipe stress. | |
| The start and ambiance for ink dripping. | |
| The sounds for ink gushing. | |
| The sounds of ink dripping. | |
| The looping sounds of the lights flickering. |
Gallery[]
