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The Nier Automata church mystery has now offered up a boss battle, and fans are even more confused.
Earlier today, on July 28, Reddit user sadfutago, who initially uncovered the new area in Nier Automata earlier this week and has been providing gameplay snippets ever since, uploaded the section seen below. This time, they're fighting a miniboss in a church, showing 9S battling a shifting enemy made out of tiny blocks while pelting it with ranged attacks from a Pod.
The player doesn't beat the boss, succumbing to one hefty attack that completely obliterates them. What's weirder is that this boss already exists in Nier Automata. If you skip ahead to the two-hour, 50-minute mark in the playthrough video just below, you can see 9S battling against the same boss made out of small blocks, complete with the same moveset and attacks.
However, the plot thickens in another area. Elsewhere in the video, user sadfutago manages to open a locked chest, revealing brand new storyline details for the new church area. Dataminer and modder Lance McDonald, just below, reveals that none of these assets exists in the base version of Nier Automata, meaning they're all brand new additions to the game.
A new video has been posted where the player opens the locked chest in the room, revealing new storyline elements and an encounter with a new enemy. None of these assets exist on any known datamined build of the game across PC or PS4 and can't be replicated by known modders yet. pic.twitter.com/tvx0WojS2oJuly 28, 2022
But the mystery doesn't even end there. Just hours after the initial boss battle discovery, sadfutago released another video, seen just below, revealing they'd uncovered even more footage of the new section. Around the seven minute mark in the new video just below, you can see 9S stand by a bird bath, which is actually an asset used in the original Nier Replicant and its 2020 remaster.
This means, whatever this new content is, it's deliberately reusing assets seen in past games in the series. As we wrote in our Nier Automata secret church mystery explainer yesterday, this is either some genius marketing, a total hoax, or some modders having a lot of fun. Either way, it's been a fascinating thing to watch play out over the last few days.
Since the publication of this story, Nier Automata's secret church mystery was revealed to be the result of unprecedented new modding tools. You can read up on our Nier Automata's secret church mystery explained feature for a full look back on all the wild events of the last week.
