ENA: Dream BBQ – All Mysterious Doors and Where They Might Lead

In Chapter 1 of Dream BBQ, there’s a suspicious amount of doors in secret areas. Sometimes, the same door appears in two different locations. In this guide, I’ll list the ones I know about in order to show where they might lead.

It’s not clear why these doors exist, since none of them can be opened right now. It might be something that was scrapped in development, something that unlocks in future chapters or after you finish the game, or just reused assets that don’t mean anything. In the second part of the guide, I’ll make a case for why I think the second explanation is true and we’ll be able to return to the lonely door in future chapters.

This guide has spoilers for the entire first chapter of the game and several secret areas in it.

The first instance of the door is at the end of the frame-perfect mannequin jump in the tunnels, behind an invisible wall at the end of the first hallway. The second is in a bedroom that can be accessed by knocking on a certain door in the Lost Village.

Both instances of the door have the same design, and it’s even mirrored like a real door would be when viewed from both sides. The same music also plays in both of these places.

When interacted with, the first version of the door displays the message “It seems to be locked from the other side.” This is even more evidence that both instances are two sides of the same door.

The first instance of the door is in the main area of Uncanny Streets Dark (the area you first enter on the way to the purge event). The second instance can only be accessed by hacking, and is in the catacomb area of Uncanny Streets Dark.

The second image is from this youtube video.

Here is the catacomb area. You can access it during normal gameplay by jumping into a hole from one of the golden earrings near the giant ear. The door is further into the tunnel, past the character in this image.

The first instance of the door is at the end of the frame-perfect mannequin jump in the tunnels. The second, although I couldn’t find a picture of it, is past the circle of watchers in Uncanny Streets Dark and can only be accessed by hacking.

The second instance of the door looks exactly like the first one. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to have been found by as many people as the other door on this list that requires hacking, since I’m having trouble finding anything about it other than one screenshot or video I saw earlier, which I can’t find anymore. If anyone took a screenshot of it and is willing to let me use it, please send it to me.

This door in the hub looks similar to the other double doors I’ve shown in this guide, especially the golden door. However, I don’t have any evidence that it’s related to them at all.

Behind the mannequin jump, along with the castle and metal door, are several of the same door. They look like electrical room doors, with several warnings and labels on the front. Because they’re in the same secret area as two of our other doors, I think they might be related to this mystery.

Several unexplained garage doors can be found near the receptionist’s area in the hub. I doubt these are related, but I wanted to mention them anyway, just in case. The fact that they play a cutscene when knocked on makes me think they might be part of their own mystery.

I think we’ll be able to go back to the Lonely Door in later chapters (or after completing the game), and that we’ll be able to unlock these doors somehow. Here’s a bunch of evidence that this might be true. Feel free to skip this section and the one after it if you’re just here to look at the doors.

When knocking on the metal door behind the mannequin jump, it displays the message “This cannot be opened now.” This implies that we’ll be able to open the door at some point in the future and is my strongest piece of evidence for this theory.

Aside from the doors in this guide, there are several other things around the Lonely Door that I think we might be able to unlock in the future.

The coral picture on the left is behind a building in Uncanny Streets Bright. (If you noclip into this area, it has the npc you can see through a hole near the taxi driver head in the tunnels, which is interesting but not entirely relevant to this theory.) The coral picture on the right can be accessed by using the humanboard in a certain place near Nonkey Jong.

There’s not a strong reason for the coral on the left to be there. On my first playthrough, I thought we’d be able to get through it somehow, but currently it seems like it’s just a decoration. When interacted with, it’s described as “a piece of coral from out of this world.” Maybe the “world” it comes from is the Horse or Crowd Door. The same coral also lets us see the area behind Nonkey Jong without allowing us to actually go into the area. I think the coral design is used again for a reason, and we’ll be able to get past it using an item in future chapters.

(This is a tangent but: I think the castle door and the locked off part of the backstage area of the ship might also be unlockable with the same item as the seaweed. If you’ve gotten the “weird dog” achievement or gone to the area behind Nonkey Jong, you know that the “fertile soil” for the humanboard doesn’t always have to look exactly the same, so why couldn’t this be the same situation?)

These holes appear in multiple places throughout the game, in the Hub and in Uncanny Streets Dark. The fact that they’re both inside the Lonely Door and outside of it is strange. I think something with these holes will also unlock in future chapters.

This mermaid/fish statue can be seen in a secret passage in one of the corners of the Lost Village. It’s the only notable thing in the outdoor area it’s in. Its blue color is similar to that of the other doors we’ve seen. (I can finally use the word “door” to refer to its actual meaning in the game!) I think we might be able to use it in future chapters, or maybe it’s just here to be mysterious, who knows.

I didn’t get a screenshot of it, but if you go over the bridge on the side of the ship in Uncanny Streets Bright and follow the arrow on the ground, you’ll eventually find a grey statue. When interacted with, it displays the message “Missing chaperone; Cannot establish link.” My best guess is that we might need to bring a character here in the future to help us “establish the link.”

I think ENA might be in a time loop.

Please hear me out.

There are a few allusions to clocks in Dream BBQ. There are also references to bells, which might connect to the chimes of a clock. Here’s a list of all the ones I could find.

• Above where the fourth witch is found, there’s a clock. This seems to be the only building with this detail (it moves behind the witches after you bring the fourth witch to her relatives). The clock is made up of 8 symbols.
• In the tunnels, there’s a room with a large swinging pendulum.
• In that room, you can use the humanboard to climb up and talk to a rainbow matrix head. (I can’t come up with a better way to describe him. If he has a name, please tell me.) He says,
  Bells… Ask not for whom the bell toils, ENA. They key to enter the bathroom… two isn’t enough. They say if you hear three, you can see it.

  What he’s trying to say is a mystery in itself, but the point that’s relevant to this theory is that he talks about bells in a room that already has the imagery of a clock.

• A similarly mysterious dialogue can occur with the person trapped in the building. If you look at them for a little while in Uncanny Streets, they’ll appear in the grey world, and you’ll be able to talk to them. They mention something about the “bells of creation.”
• The main reason I’m even listing the mentions of bells here is that, every time you pause the game, there’s a sound effect that sounds almost like the chime of a grandfather clock. I haven’t seen anyone else mention this, and I thought it might be significant because of the other references to bells and clocks. (I did try pausing three times in a row near the matrix head guy, and it didn’t seem to do anything.)

If I really wanted to reach, I could say that the hourglass dogs are another reference, but I doubt it. There are also other references to bells, like the bell trees and the bell-shaped suspicious man, but I can’t really argue that those are related to clock chimes the way I can for matrix head’s dialogue.

These lines from the phone call with Froggy after destroying the smoke machine have always bothered me:

I can’t see another way to interpret this. In this scene, he goes on to talk about how the door is about to close and trap ENA inside, which explains the “predicament” part, but what about the “looping” part?

Maybe if ENA fails, it loops her back to the beginning of her journey. This would explain how we’ll be able to come back to the Lonely Door to unlock everything that needs unlocking, even though the door has already closed and the world is grey and empty.