Photo: @lava037
If Geoff Keighley wanted gamers to touch grass, he could at least have chosen a spot with less sand. Instead, the gaming industry’s resident hype man sent intrepid adventurers into the Mojave to discover an eerie, infernal monument sitting in the desert.
The spark was Keighley on Nov. 28, posting an image of the statue on Twitter with the caption “regal.inspiring.thickness.” Those three words map to a what3words location, and fans quickly traced that breadcrumb to a spot in the Mojave near the Joshua Tree area where visitors discovered the installation exists out there in real life.
Cue days of social media speculation fueled by side-by-side comparisons of individual carvings to various existing IPs (intellectual properties), threads that confidently identify skull counts like some sort of wildlife survey, and yet no one has provided a clear answer as to what this thing actually is. Of course, the bigger question hiding underneath the horror movie set dressing: what happens if the reveal is not what anyone wants?
What is the Mojave Statue, Exactly?
Up close, the statue reads like a maximalist nightmare. It resembles a closed door or portal covered in skulls and bodies, with creatures and twisted figures forming the bulk of its frame. Various angles shot by visitors highlight different details, but a few that stand out amongst the more skeletal figures include demons, a crocodile, a bear, and a large snake coiled throughout the design.
The main attraction is an enormous centerpiece resembling an eye with seven long tendrils protruding along its sides. At night, the obelisk becomes a different beast; multiple photos show the structure lit in red, amping up the hellish imagery to eleven.
The official Game Awards account has leaned into the tease on Twitter, posting a partially redacted reply to Keighley’s original tweet a week later that reads: “The █████ are silent. █████ bleeds. New █████ stir.” Predictably, the thread transformed into a game of Mad Libs; the word “bleeds” immediately sent Bloodborne fans into a frenzy, while “silent” spawned a number of Silent Hill memes and theories.
The Internet’s Best Guesses
The statue’s design is specific enough for internet sleuths to attempt to pattern match, but vague enough to support practically any dark fantasy or horror franchise. That combination has been like catnip for gaming discourse as it’s allowed people to both take a stab at solving the mystery and campaign for their favorite IPs.
A couple of the earliest guesses have already been publicly debunked. Sony Santa Monica Creative Director Cory Barlog has said it is not connected to God of War, and Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier has pushed back on the rumor that it is teasing a Diablo IV expansion. Some speculation pointed to a potential Lords of the Fallen 2 announcement, but that, too, was shot down by the game’s developer, CI Games.
After that, the “still possible” pile is less about evidence and more about fit. DOOM remains a natural reflex because the statue reads like a hell-gate, and Castlevania keeps coming up for the same reason. Bloodborne 2 is the wishcasting favorite because it would instantly dominate the conversation, and the statue’s gore-forward texture gives that fandom plenty of surface area to project onto. Elder Scrolls speculation hangs around, too, sometimes in the softer form of Elder Scrolls Online as a more plausible target for a marketing beat than a far-off single-player sequel.
The quieter possibility is that the statue is for a new IP. But with so much hype being built around what many assume to be an established title, could the element of surprise smother a fledgling franchise under the weight of player expectations?
The Stunt Could Backfire
The physical spectacle and its associated mystique feel like a promise, even when it is not one. A teaser image can be shrugged off. A statue that people treat like a pilgrimage object becomes a benchmark. If the payoff does not match the scale of the setup, the story flips from “cool mystery” to “why did you do all this.”
That risk is amplified by the shape of the speculation. Most of the loudest theories are established IPs with huge, emotionally invested fanbases. If the statue ends up unrelated to those franchises, disappointment is almost inevitable, even if the tease never explicitly promised anything. A new IP could still land beautifully here, but it would need to look bold and coherent enough to make the monument feel like a symbol rather than an elaborate mood board. If the reveal lands as merely “fine,” the portal becomes a punchline, and the stunt gets remembered as hype that outran reality.
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