'The Game: You Never Play Alone' Ending Explained & Finale Recap: Who Is "Clearminds83"?

The Game: You Never Play Alone’s finale is filled with direct confrontations as well as subtle suggestions, which reveal most of the truth to us and yet keep us guessing, possibly to maintain intrigue for a 2nd season. Despite being targeted and attacked multiple times, Kavya Rajaram continues her fight against patriarchal injustice and tries to figure out the exact details of the attacks carried out on her and her supporters. With the help of Inspector Banumathi and her team, most of the case is solved as well, but the ending of The Game: You Never Play Alone introduces one more twist, which further implies that more people closer to Kavya have been involved in the whole matter as well.

Spoiler Alert

How does Kavya help the police identify her attacker?

After her niece, Tara, is rushed to the hospital following her failed suicide attempt, Kavya is once again attacked viciously by a masked man who follows her to her house. But Kavya not only manages to avoid any serious injuries by fighting back and driving the intruder away, but she also crucially manages to pull off his mask for a split second and take a quick glimpse of his face. The tall and stocky build of the man, along with the beard on his face, makes her feel like she had seen him somewhere recently, and she reports this to the police as well. As Inspector Banumathi encourages her to try and remember where she might have seen the man, Kavya finally figures out who he is.

Some time earlier, when Kavya had been living with her best friend, Meghna, the same man had come to the latter’s house, saying that he was an employee of the Silos Internet company and was on a routine checkup run in the neighborhood. As she reports this to Banumathi, the police try to find a connection with the mysterious murder of Madhesh, who had been one of the suspects in Kavya’s online harassment case. Kavya’s close friend and colleague, Dani, had earlier figured out that the vile videos of her were being uploaded from an address belonging to a man named Madhesh. However, when the police had gone to pick the man up for questioning, they found Madhesh to have mysteriously hanged himself just a few minutes before they arrived at the scene.

Believing that Madhesh had actually been murdered, Banumathi had been looking into security camera footage from around the building, and one of the men seen entering the building was an internet company employee. As a man fitting the same role is found at two different crime scenes, Banumathi takes the images of the serviceman captured from the CCTV footage from Madhesh’s building to Kavya for confirmation. The protagonist immediately recognizes the man, and as Silos Internet is approached for information, they reveal the man to be Siddharth, a disgruntled employee who had received repeated warnings for his disobedience towards his female boss. A quick visit to Siddharth’s house reveals to the police that the young man had grown up in a toxic household, where his father had always been abusive and dominating towards his mother. This then confirms that Siddharth is most definitely the misogynist who had targeted Kavya, but the man cannot be arrested just yet, for he is absconding.

What happens to Tara’s blackmailer?

After sending a few intimate photos and then her grandmother’s credit card details to her supposed boyfriend, Tara had sadly realized how she had directly walked into a terrible trap set by the young man she had been dating. The teenager’s boyfriend, Dev, is supposed to be a usual 17-year-old youngster with a passion for playing the guitar, for which he asks Tara for a loan. But in reality, Devanathan is a 23-year-old man who repeatedly lures young girls, ranging from 14 to 17, through Chat4key, an online texting app, and pretends to be falling in love with them very convincingly. The man manages to get intimate photos from the girls, which he then uses to blackmail them, knowing very well that the teenagers hailing from middle-class families will surely pay him the ransom by any means necessary. Devanathan then deletes the photos after receiving the money and then moves on to a new target, keeping up his cycle of online blackmail and extortion.

Feeling that she had been cheated by her beloved boyfriend, Tara had tried to take her own life at the swimming pool, and it was only when Kavya and Anoop had managed to save her that they found out about the horrific things the teenager had been subjected to. They had informed Inspector Banumathi about the same, and the police quickly started searching for the perpetrator using the intimate video of Tara, which had been uploaded to a fake profile on social media created in her name. Getting into the finer details of the IP address from where the video had been uploaded, and by going through the information on Chat4Key, the police find Devanathan’s location and also find proof of his repeated offenses against minor girls, which is enough to build a case against him. Thus, the police reach his location and arrest him, along with his accomplices, bringing an end to the horrific extortion ring that he had been running.

Who Is “Clearminds83”?

It had long been confirmed by the police that an online misogynist gang called the Deadbeat Dudes had been behind the attacks on Kavya, but since the members had all signed up using aliases and codenames, it was initially impossible to find their real identities. Eventually, it is revealed that 3 men had been at the center of the attacks, with two of them being Madhesh and Siddharth. Madhesh had already been killed by Siddharth when the latter feared he would reveal the truth to the police. Siddharth, the most vicious and criminal-minded among the three, had carried out the attacks on Kavya and then also on Aparna, an online influencer who had shown her support for the protagonist. But as one of the criminals remains absconding and the other is dead, there is no way for the police to confirm the identity of the third perpetrator just yet, and only his username on the chat site, ‘Clearminds83,’ is known.

But it is Kavya’s close friend and colleague, Dani, who solves this last piece of the mystery, as he combs through the chat site for more information and finds a phrase that Clearminds83 used often in the chat rooms. Only some time later, Dani’s colleagues ask him to join their team in an online video game, stating that their new colleague, Vikram, is actually the leader of the team. In their effort to further convince Dani to join them, the colleagues reveal how Vikram uses a certain phrase to encourage them while playing the game, and this phrase happens to be the exact same one used by Clearminds83 on the chat site. Dani now realizes that Vikram had been the third perpetrator, and he immediately calls up Kavya and warns her about the matter. On the other side, Banumathi had been suspecting both Vikram and Anoop and had asked her team to pull details about their movements on the night of the first attack. She soon receives confirmation about Vikram having left his house late on the night of the attack, and of him having driven to the area where the attack had taken place, and this finally confirms Vikram to be Clearminds83. 

Why had Kavya really been targeted?

As Kavya confronts Vikram on the beach after she is alerted by Dani, Vikram reveals the whole truth, which is slightly different from what it initially appeared to be. The very first attack on Kavya had taken place on the night that she had won the prestigious New Wave Game of the Year award at a gaming awards ceremony for her celebrated videogame, Honey Ruin. Vikram was one of the other two nominees for this award, and he wholeheartedly believed that his game, Black Ravine, deserved to win the prize. Therefore, when Kavya won the award, Vikram felt that she had been given the prize only because she was a woman, and his extreme jealousy drove him to take action against her. 

There had already been a number of haters of Kavya lurking around on the internet because of her being a strong, opinionated, independent woman, who was naturally hated by conservative-minded misogynists who could not stand women taking their own decisions. Among these haters were the Deadbeat Dudes members, Madhesh and Siddharth, who were already spewing hatred against Kavya at the time. On the night of the award ceremony, Vikram got in touch with these goons and asked for their help in stealing the trophy from Kavya. As Vikram keeps repeating at present, he had no intentions of harming Kavya or getting her beaten up, he only wanted to get hold of the trophy, as he felt that he deserved it more than her. However, Madhesh and Siddharth clearly had different intentions, as they simply wanted to beat up the woman for everything that she stood for, and they hated Kavya and all women like her. As a result, they continued beating Kavya and groping her even after Vikram had managed to steal her trophy and escape the scene, and they might have even sexually assaulted her had the local fishermen not been close by. Therefore, Kavya had been targeted both because of her choices and decisions in her personal life and because of the success in her professional life. The Game clearly wants to highlight how working women in India have to face this kind of double-edged sword even at present, which is not far from the truth at all.

What happens to Kavya, Anoop, and their friends?

The finale of The Game takes place at the beach house owned by Kavya and Anoop, when they take Tara there to give her a much-needed change of scenery, and are also accompanied by their colleagues, Anne and Vikram. As Kavya and Vikram go for a walk on the beach, and Anoop goes for a quick grocery run, the evil antagonist, Siddharth, walks into the house with the sole intention of killing Kavya and making an example to all other women wanting to be independent and live life according to their own wishes through her murder. As revealed earlier, Siddharth had grown up in a toxic patriarchal household and had developed a strong belief about women being subservient humans who should be ‘kept in control’ by the men in their lives.

Therefore, Siddharth had followed Kavya to the beach house, and now in his effort to find and kill her, he attacks Anne and injures her brutally. Thankfully, Kavya manages to return home soon after and is followed by Vikram, who keeps trying to apologize to her. Vikram had seemingly grown extremely remorseful and guilty for the incidents from the night of the first attack, and although he had wanted to apologize to Kavya a number of times, for which he had even taken up the job at Moon Bolt, he could never muster the courage to do so. Now, Vikram gets the ideal chance to show his true allegiance, as he throws himself on Siddharth to protect Kavya and buy her the time to escape. Ultimately, Kavya has to take up the matter into her own hands when Siddharth attacks her husband, Anoop, and she bashes Siddharth’s head with the trophy that she retrieves from Vikram’s bag. But as Banumathi explains, Kavya will not have to face any charges, because she had only acted in self-defense and so was not technically responsible for the death of Siddharth. Vikram was left unconscious from his injuries, but the police will charge him for having played a role in the attacks against Kavya, and he will be put behind bars at least for some time. Lastly, Anne recovers from her injuries as well, despite it initially seeming like she had been killed by Siddharth.

Who had paid for the attack on Kavya?

Although most of the case is solved by the end, Banumathi and her team remain confused about one particular matter. 700,000 rupees had been recovered from Madhesh’s apartment, which was clearly a hefty fee that the goon had been paid by someone to carry out the attack on Kavya. Upon further investigation, the police found that the money had been originally paid in euros from a source in Europe, and it had then been converted by Madhesh. Seemingly linked to this matter is the fate of the gaming company that Kavya and Anoop work for, Moon Bolt, which gets acquired by their European investors, Omni Force, at the end of the series. The boss at Moon Bolt, Roshan, is understandably not happy about this deal, as he will now be removed from the position of the leader as per the demands of the authorities at Omni Force, despite him having founded Moon Bolt and run it for all these years.

The Game’s ending suggested that Roshan has also been involved in the pre-planned attacks against Kavya, along with another employee at the company, Gautham. We directly see Gautham writing messages on the online anonymous chat site, and it is revealed that he had also been present at the club on the night of the attack on Kavya, along with Madhesh and Siddharth. It was Gautham who had approached Kavya after she had left the club, which is why she had acted as if she had met an old friend, as witnessed by the people at the place. Kavya and Gautham had indeed been friends and colleagues for a long time, and they had even had a very brief romantic stint for just a night 7 years back. It seems most likely that Gautham had not liked the fact that Kavya had chosen to not pursue any romantic relations with him, because of which he harbored a deep feeling of anger against her. However, someone is clearly seen ordering Gautham to take necessary actions against Kavya, and it is suggested that the top boss, Roshan, is the one pulling the strings. Roshan also carries a feeling of anger and frustration against Kavya, as seen throughout the series, and perhaps against all women, as his fragile male ego also revolts against the idea of having to work under a woman, Ms. Renaud, who oversees the operations at Omni Force. It seems like Roshan had been planning to remove Kavya from the company, and also possibly from the world, because of her strong opinions, for which he had asked Gautham to make a deal with the Deadbeat Dudes. The 700,000 rupees had been paid by Roshan, through his professional contacts in Europe, as he seemingly saw Kavya as a threat to his professional position and wanted to remove her from the scene at all costs. It would be interesting to see if The Game returns for a 2nd season, in which Kavya will have to directly fight off against the villainous Roshan and Gautham, with her loyal husband and friends by her side.

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