🌌 Hidden Gems of NieR: Automata – Secrets, Lore & Easter Eggs
Welcome, fellow androids. Whether you're on your first playthrough or your fourth, NieR: Automata is packed with hidden moments, obscure lore, and mind-bending Easter eggs that are easy to miss if you're not paying close attention.

This guide is a love letter to the strange, beautiful, and often heartbreaking details tucked into every corner of the game. No huge story spoilers here — just a curated list of secrets, optional scenes, and clever nods that show how deep the rabbit hole goes.

🥚 1. The Secret Ending Nobody Believed (until someone found it)
For nearly four years, fans believed there were only 26 endings to the game. That was until dataminers (and eventually the dev himself) confirmed the existence of a hidden, cheat-code-based ending. You can trigger it extremely early in the game using a very specific input after defeating the first boss in the prologue.

✅ Stand between the two barrels after the Goliath fight.
🎮 Enter: Up, Down, Up, Right, Left, Square, Circle, Triangle, X (Hold R2).
🧠 Result: Instant jump to the credits, complete save wipe options, and an ending no one expected.

This was confirmed by Yoko Taro as a "secret that no one would find" – until someone did in 2021.

🎭 Peeking Behind the Curtain: NieR’s Hidden Details Explained
“Everything that lives is designed to end. We are perpetually trapped in a never-ending spiral of life and death.”
— 2B

Nier: Automata isn’t just a game — it’s a deeply layered narrative experience hiding its true face beneath layers of combat, side quests, and meta-winks. It's a world of broken machines, fallen civilizations, and puppet strings — and the deeper you look, the more you realize that not everything is what it seems.

This guide is for those who want to read between the lines, chase after the whispers in the ruins, and unearth the small details that make NieR: Automata not just a story, but a conversation. From visual symbolism to eerie worldbuilding hints, we’ll peel back the layers of a game that’s constantly asking:
What is the point of all this? And does that even matter?

🕯️ 1. The Desolate Amusement Park – A Place That Once Knew Joy
The Abandoned Amusement Park is one of NieR: Automata's most hauntingly beautiful locations. But it's more than just a visual setpiece — it’s a graveyard of memory.

The machines here wear party hats and wave white flags. Some are mimicking joy, while others seem genuinely content. The soundtrack even features children’s laughter faintly echoing under the music. But why?

Dig into the terminal data logs, and you'll find evidence that this area was once a testing ground for human emotional replication. The machines aren’t just playing — they’re desperately trying to imitate the concept of happiness.

The boss, Simone (Beauvoir), is a tragic parody of vanity and love. Her obsession with beauty stems from a desire to be noticed — a concept she learned from watching humans fall in love. Her boss arena is literally decorated with discarded corpses of machines, dressed like mannequins, as if she’s building her own audience.

This entire zone is a metaphor for how artificial beings try to fill the emotional void left behind by humanity — not perfectly, but with eerie sincerity.

📼 2. The Machines Remember More Than They Should
Throughout the game, machines will often say things that seem… off. Things that imply they remember fragments of a past they shouldn’t.

In the Forest Kingdom, some machines speak in vaguely medieval terms, as if they've inherited memories of chivalry and royalty. This is no accident — the forest itself is built around a half-decayed robotic baby king, and its followers are enacting a corrupted version of feudal loyalty.

One machine in the desert cries out: “Why did this happen to me? I only wanted to love someone!” This isn't programming — it’s residual memory. Many theorize these machines are starting to absorb remnants of human consciousness stored in old data networks.

This ties directly into the idea that machines are evolving not just physically, but emotionally. The philosophical question becomes: if a machine can feel pain, can remember loss, can cry out in confusion… is it still just a machine?

🧬 3. DNA of a Dead World – Environmental Storytelling
The ruined cities of NieR: Automata tell their own story — one that’s easy to miss if you’re always sprinting from mission to mission.

Look at the City Ruins: Cars frozen mid-traffic, streetlights still standing, office buildings collapsed inward like they were hollowed out. There’s no evidence of an explosive end. This was a slow decay. Humanity didn’t go out with a bang — it just faded.

Near the Resistance Camp, you can find vending machines still standing — a visual echo of a world that once catered to convenience and consumerism, now completely obsolete.

If you venture into the Flooded City, the buildings are bent sideways, pointing downward like fingers reaching into the ocean. It’s as if the city bowed to something overwhelming — possibly symbolic of guilt, defeat, or natural collapse.

These visual cues are deliberate. They reflect the state of humanity’s soul just as much as its infrastructure: decayed, fragmented, and half-remembered.

📚 Lore & More: What You Might Have Missed in NieR: Automata
Nier: Automata doesn’t just tell a story — it buries one beneath layers of tragedy, ambiguity, and misdirection. You can finish the game and still only scratch the surface of what’s really going on. That’s part of the beauty — and heartbreak — of Yoko Taro’s world: it hides the truth in plain sight.

Here’s a breakdown of subtle lore elements, quiet connections, and seemingly throwaway moments that carry enormous weight once you know what to look for.

☀️ The Sun Never Moves
You might notice something odd as you sprint through the City Ruins or Desert Zone: the sun never changes position. It’s always locked in a golden hour glow.

This isn’t just an artistic choice — it's a hint at the illusion of time in the world. Humanity is long gone, but YoRHa and the machines are still acting out a script as if it’s the present. The frozen sun reinforces the idea that this world is stuck in a loop, cycling through purpose and destruction without progress.

🧬 Those Black Boxes? They’re Something More
It’s revealed that androids’ black boxes are made from machine cores — meaning the fundamental tech of YoRHa is derived from the very beings they’re fighting.

This one detail reframes the entire android-machine war. It's not just tragic irony; it's commentary on the blurred lines between “us” and “them.” Both sides are evolving, both trying to find purpose. The idea of self-sacrifice becomes even heavier when you realize they’re destroying each other with the same hearts.

🌐 Email Logs and Side Quests That Expand the Universe
Many players skip over their inbox or rush side quests — but hidden in these quiet moments are crucial lore drops:

📩 Emails from Command sometimes contradict what you hear from 6O or 9S. This subtle dissonance hints at the false narrative YoRHa is enforcing.

🧓 The side quest "The Manager" seems lighthearted — until you realize the machine is essentially re-enacting burnout and consumerist obsession, echoing real-world human dysfunction.

💔 In "Emil’s Memories", you learn fragments of his identity — and the devastating connection to the original NieR game. He’s not just comic relief. He’s the last survivor of a dead world, holding on to memories that slowly destroy him.

👁️ Symbolism Everywhere
2B wears a blindfold (called a “visor” in-universe) while 9S wears a bandana-style one. The meaning? 2B is a "Battler" class — taught not to question. 9S is a "Scanner" — meant to observe. Their headgear reflects their roles in hiding or uncovering truth.

The abandoned factory is circular — echoing the cycle of rebirth, destruction, and repetition. It’s also where the story begins and ends, reinforcing the theme of endless loops.

Nier: Automata doesn’t shout its lore — it whispers. It expects you to pay attention, to question what’s said, and to notice what isn’t. The more you look, the more you find that beneath the rubble of its broken world lies a mirror — held up to us.