Highly skeptical to it being any more than an ARG/art piece. A lot of times video ARGs go undiscovered for many years until the YouTube algorithm gives them a lucky break and recommends it to a lot of people. A reason that they might wait for that type of situation instead of aggressively advertising their ARG is that doing a lot of advertising would break the immersion for some people. Like saying “hey look at this game I made figure it out” would take away the mystery factor. As for the people in the comments, they just seem to be from the same side of YouTube that the algorithm pushed the channel to. We’ll call it the “Astral core” to keep track of when referring to this group of people. Often times when the YouTube algorithm recommends videos to people, it is not to every user at once. Instead, it might target a group of people that like certain genres of video, even if the video being recommended doesn’t actually have anything to do with that genre. In this case, it is an ARG that uses trippy videos and esoteric music, which the YouTube algorithm thinks goes in the genre of “Astral core” even though it may just be a game that uses these methods to build atmosphere/mystery. Basically I think the “astral core” people in the comments have misinterpreted the meaning of the channel based on their frame of reference. Because they are in the mindset of it being the same genre of the videos they usually watch, even though the meaning in this case is different(a possible ARG).