Nightmare Fuel / FAITH: The Unholy Trinity

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CORRUPTION, THOU ART MY FATHER!

This being a game about exorcising a demon, of course there are gonna be moments of horror and dread.

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In General

• The game's aesthetic design itself, due to the simplistic pixel Atari style of the game. It leaves details up to the player's imagination and gives an eerie, inhuman tone which will haunt the player from start to finish. This also extends to the bit-crushed, synthetic voices each character speaks with; while they don't make for incredibly emotional performances, they sure are disturbing.
• The rotoscoped cutscenes. Suddenly going from incredibly simplistic sprite animation to full-on animation is incredibly uncomfortable, especially with how disturbingly fluid they are. They are rare, being reserved for the story's creepiest moments too, and work to great effect.
• Like all horror games, the player has very limited actions, only able to walk around at a moderate pace and raise up a crucifix. Fortunately the crucifixes are quite effective against demons, but when you think about it, what kind of a maniac has the faith required to go hunt demons with no other form of protection?
• The game is lauded for making great use of silence and atmospheric stillness to keep the player on their toes. Chapter III in particular takes advantage of this by ramping up the Jump Scares relative to the rest of the series. However, whenever something especially horrific occurs, be ready for a waterfall of shocking chaotic noise and screeches to run down your spine.
• The way the demons speak with John is very creepy: often they start out speaking in first-person, as if they are their host. However, once the jig is up, they revert to third-person and treat their host like a puppet, taunting John that he will never be able to free them.
• While some demons get rotoscoped close-ups, a lot of them are only ever seen in the simple Atari style. This leaves a lot up to the player's imagination, but some especially disturbing details such as horns, tails, umbilical cords, and eyes are unmistakable.
  • The demons themselves are a terrifying lack of context. Rather than elaborate backstories and fanciful names thrown about, the most you get is on the Big Bad which in and of itself barely gets any description beyond "unspeakable evil". The rest running amok? You only exorcise some of them, and the game leaves it ambiguous how many are still on Earth. In some cases, like the "Elevator Friend", there is no comeuppance for their crimes, and even "cleansed" areas in Chapter III aren't actually free of the influences.
• The full version of the game lets you speed up the game so John no longer moves around at a snail's pace. But when we say speed up the game, we also mean the enemies get faster too. Good luck even trying to fend off a berserk Michael at full speed!

FAITH

• While walking through the forest towards the house, a spider-like white monster — Michael — has a chance of attacking John. It can be repelled fairly easily, but is still a disturbing introduction to the game, especially with the Satanic mantras it recites as it goes. It also brutally murders an innocent deer, right in front of John. Made worse when you learn that this beast used to be human. Though occasionally hit with a little Nightmare Retardant when warding it off might result in him saying, "I GO UNWILLINGLY," this is in-between potential monotone screams.
• The forest itself is an Unnaturally Looping Location, as you can easily end up lost and seeing the same spaces over and over again on the path to finding the key and the Martin's household. The freaky thing is that once you've successfully pushed Amy out of the house and go back outside, the entire forest has paths and seems relatively normal. It's as if trying to work your way through initially was a fit of insanity in its own right.
• The first vision John sees of Amy is disturbing, as she slowly pulls herself up to stand at the foot of a bed — try not to think about that when you go to bed tonight. Then, John simply says: "She is here."
• Once Amy's hair parts away from her face, you'll notices that — well, she has no face, but instead a red hole. And then later, a whole arm reaches out of the hole.
• After exploring the attic, downstairs you'll find a loaded gun and "KILL HER" written on the floor in blood.
• Killing the man behind the shack and getting back in the car will reveal that Michael has been waiting in the backseat! He then attacks John while he tries to drive away.
• If John returns to the car with the gun in hand, Michael will attack and he will shoot him, causing him to stumble into the road and to be reduced to gore by a semi-truck. News reports mistake his body for a chupacabra.
• The secret deer ending is strange, but disturbing. If John shoots a deer, then his car escape will be halted by another deer leaping in front of him and causing him to crash. Injured and bloody, John tries to grab his cross, but is surrounded by vengeful deer who charges at him as the screen Smash to Black. News reports that a body was found mangled beyond recognition.
• Pausing the game while Michael is on the screen will instead show four different animations of him, giving you a close up and disturbing look at him and how he moves. The first, third and fourth show this with him crawling (or walking in the third) with a malicious grin on his face, but his second is notable in that he seems to have a sad look on his face and is clutching his head. As we see in FAITH II, Michael was once a little boy before he got possessed by the demon. Is he trying to fight it, and completely aware of his situation? Even worse is that a few of his lines sound as if he's trying to tell about his situation or lament about it.

  "I GO UNWILLINGLY."
  "I HAVE THE BODY OF A PIG!"
  "RUN! RUN! RUN!"

• The Optional Boss only appears if you shoot the mirror three times, as it's clear something is following you when you walk past the mirror. What results is that something pulling you into a Room Full of Crazy as it repeatedly tries to bumrush you amidst nonstop hellish noise. Once it's all done and finished, the note afterwards implies that this entire fight is Through the Eyes of Madness as some sort of psychotic breakdown from John, because nothing else explains what you just fought.

FAITH: Chapter II

Demo

• The demo begins with John leaving his car after it crashed. If you follow the tire tracks, you'll find that he was run off the road by a pickup truck. Examining the bloodstained driver's seat reveals the culprit to be a red man with a Slasher Smile. If you leave this screen and return, the driver is missing with a trail of blood leading into the nearby cornfield. You can catch a brief glimpse of him running away if you follow the trail.
  • John's car bursts into flames when you move between screens. Touching it causes him to run quickly while rapidly burning to death. And you need to do this as a step to unlock the secret ending!
• The cornfield. Once you enter it, you're trapped. There's a creepy scarecrow that cannot be exorcised, whose face deteriorates while you fight the demon in there. Said demon is completely invisible, you have to look at the corn stalks that get disturbed as it moves in order to fight it.
  • After you leave the cornfield, you're greeted with the corpse of a dog that it tore apart. Further along is a graveyard where six children were buried, who were orphans that were looked after in the nearby church.
    Graveyard Note: "What more could I have done? I warned them not to go into the fields. I warned them against straying too far from the sanctuary. Should I have shut them in their quarters and nailed boards over the doors? Now I am digging six graves here in the shadow of the church. Six little graves forever looking to Saint William. Some of the boxes are empty... the scattered remains we found couldn't fill them all. But I know they're all gone. I know their souls were taken by that thing in the field. I will finish my gruesome work and then renounce the ministry. I don't want to see anyone from the sanctuary ever again, not even that girl who stayed inside the house last night. I don't believe in the Devil anymore. Whatever did this is much, much worse."
• The Church itself is no less scary. Falling apart at the seams. Doors boarded up. A crucifix mysteriously falling off the wall. And seated on the pews are red figures whom you can't interact with at all.
  • After exorcising two of the objects in the church, you're suddenly charged at by some more red figures whom you must repel with the cross before you get a first-person view of John getting repeatedly stabbed to death with a pair of scissors. Say hello to the thralls, the series common enemy who will be more than happy to kill John.
    "CHAOS REIGNS"
  • And when you exorcise the three objects until the only colourless stained glass window regains its detail, you'll see it depicting a "saint" with a demonic arm reaching out of their face not unlike poor Amy. When you exorcise that, RUN AWAY. The three seated thralls' heads will begin glitching out before charging at you.
• But the scariest part of the church is the basement. It's pitch black down there, human bones litter the floor, and you have only got a small cone of light provided by a flashlight to light your way. And you have to fight a demon down there that randomly teleports, forcing you to find it before it can catch you by surprise.
  • The demon's taunting doesn't help.
    I'M HERE, PRIEST.
    HERE I COME.
    THEY ARE MINE FOREVER.
  • Whenever you turn around in the fight against the basement demon, sometimes you see something different in the areas you illuminate. Like two of the missing children, a different demon just standing there, or a grey man who runs at you.
• The notes you find tell how a nun named Miriam Bell came to the church as a volunteer caretaker. At first, all was fine. She was a cheerful character who somehow knew her way around the place, making her a seemingly perfect fit at the sanctuary. Then there was mentions of Sister Bell looking to the sky while the kids danced around her in a circle, or the kids standing on the edge of the cornfield while she talked to them inside it. Soon life-sized dolls made of sticks and dead tree branches appeared around the church, along with people painted red looking out from the corn, along with a painting of the virgin Mary laughing. Then Sister Bell was seen dragging the two surviving twins into the basement. The policeman investigating the other kids' disappearances was about to go down there, only to be stopped by the church's priest who went down in his stead and sealed the door behind him.
  The stairs don't seem to open from this side. All I could do is wait. I can't describe the noises I heard down there, but one thing is certain: the Devil is real. To anyone reading this: please, for the love of God, don't go down into that basement.
• The secret ending. To get it, you have to defeat the basement demon, exorcise the scarecrow when a pair of red eyes stare out of the hole in its face as it oozes blood, then set yourself on fire and run to the scarecrow before you die. The missing twins will stand there as you burn, before more children run towards you from off screen. After that creepy scene, you turn into a demon and have to move through screens full of the man-sized stick dolls until you find Sister Bell. You then get a cutscene where she turns to face you, before her face distorts as she lets out an ear-piercing screech.

Full Game

• During the intro, the player can find photographs of Michael's progression into a monster. It's heart-breaking watching his lively face deteriorate into a drained stare and than a devious grin, his hair falling out and his eyes turning red.
• Then there's the encounter with Michael strapped to the bed. He tries to emotionally manipulate Garcia, and after being subject to a crucifix, breaks his bonds and crawls away as the room goes pitch-black. After following him into the hall, you find Michael feasting on someone, and he turns towards the camera before letting an eyeball roll out of his mouth. He runs away, screaming "I have the body of a pig!"
• While walking through the cemetery, at one point bloody footsteps begin appearing behind John, following him.
• There's the cutscene where John looks into the mirror and stabs himself in the eye with a key. After you regain control, John is actually dripping blood from that eye, leaving a trail as he walks.
• A certain tree in the cemetery turns into a humanoid form and runs away screaming. Bizarre? Yes. Creepy? Yes. Is it ever explained? Not at all.
• At some point, you encounter a note in the center of a bloody summoning circle in the middle of the woods. It's a newspaper report detailing the ritualistic killings of three people, apparently for the sake of a demonic ritual. At least, that's what it looks like. Then the newspaper says that the three victims shouldn't be mourned, as they were all junkies and deserved what they got anyway. Then it starts addressing John by name, accusing him of committing the murders and taunting him that the works of the Beast can never be killed, and it becomes all too apparent that the UNSPEAKABLE is the real author of this document. As you scroll farther and farther down, the message devolves into Satanic prayers repeated over and over again, until, at the very bottom-
  I'M HERE, JOHN.
• But wait, there's more! The perspective then changes to a mangled demon that makes chaotic noise every time it moves. However, as it passes under a bridge, John emerges from the other side, untouched.
  • Alternatively, the player can choose to kill the couple having trouble on the side of the road in this demon form. Watch out for that semi, or you might end up a bloody smear across the asphalt while the "MORTIS" screen is replaced with ramblings and red scribbles.
• Every bit of lore about the "Candy Tunnel" near the end, which is crawling with demons and serial killers that murdered hobos and kids that had been lured inside. Special mention to the armless demon with hands on its face, which will kill John if he moves (with a special animation playing if you move while its back is turned), forcing you to watch it shamble around.
  • If you go too far into the grated-off area, you'll find a note about the disappearance of people in the tunnel. As you walk away, a thrall will suddenly rush you.
• Despite having Garcia with you, the final encounter is still quite terrifying, especially the introduction cutscene where its masked face screams "GET OUT!". After defeating it, its cloak and mask explode off its body, shooting out bloody tendrils and revealing a large eye as awful screaming plays.
• In an alternate ending, John finds himself in the midst of a Satanic ritual, where he is approached by a giant red abomination. His eyes cry tears of blood at the sight while a disturbingly triumphant church organ plays. Smash to Black.

FAITH: Chapter III

Demo

• At one point, the elevator opens to reveal someone — or something — peeking around the door before slinking away.
• Everything gets freaky when you're forced to give up your crucifix. After selecting the previously unselectable Floor 7 in the elevator, you head down to Floor 4. The power cuts out shortly afterwards, plunging John into darkness. The only light available is the flash from a camera found next to a pool of blood with "I SAW IT" scrawled on the nearby wall. With each flash, sometimes things are revealed such as faces in the walls, demonic symbols suddenly forming around John, and a thrall charging at you. It's used to especially great effect in the secret staircase, where a demon slowly approaches the camera, appearing closer every time there's a flash. It's the same one you encounter in Chapter II's Candy Tunnel.
  • You need to be careful with the camera as you traverse a secret passage joining two rooms. If you time it wrong, John can disturb the thralls surrounding what looks like a sacrificial altar. A note later on will reveal that they are instructed to take John and eviscerate him on there. Preferably alive.
  • Room 4A is a complete and utter nightmare: blood everywhere, a headless corpse in the corner of the room, strange masks on the floor (actually faces of possession victims), and a pentagram-shaped hole in the floor that's implied in a note from Gary to lead straight to Hell itself! And if you flash the camera too many times, a demonic face flashes on screen.
  • And when you escape the demon in the staircase; John inexplicably begins bleeding, leaving a trail of blood behind him.
• Whenever John gets momentarily possessed by the demon Alu, he is shown spewing a fountain of blood out of his mouth. The player then controls him as a limping, corpse-like being until he recovers his faculties.
• One of the best scares in the entire series occurs when John is possessed coming back up the stairs. When the screen cuts back, it shows him face-to-face with the demon from the pentagram room. As a shot-reverse-shot sequence occurs between the two, a droning noise gets slowly higher-pitched, until eventually the camera cuts back to John with his face becoming torn and toothy like the demon's, whose mouths begin dripping with blood. It's absolutely horrific, and is now the image for this page.
• Finding Lisa is very creepy — she seems normal at first, before growling "I'M NOT LISA."
• After defeating Lisa's demon, John turns to see a horrifying hooded figure with a pitchfork, ending the demo.
  "Hello, John. It is nice to finally meet you."

Full Game

• That clinic, that fucking clinic. It's John's first stop to investigate, and it's every bit as creepy as you would expect for a place Gary ran. Despite being abandoned and quiet, you feel watched.
  • Some ultrasound photos are left on the floor, which look normal until you look at the last one. That one shows a warped, demonic baby in utero. Bear in mind, this is the very same clinic Amy volunteered at before she was even possessed, which means she was unwittingly under Gary's thrall to bring these creatures forth!
  • The crowbar, though helpful, will only lead you to a major problem. Once you approach the barricaded door in the next room, a screaming demon^note According to Gary, his name is Jeffrey, who he reminds in a fax to "KEEP (HIM) OUT OF SIGHT." bursts through before knocking John out. It's quickly revealed that he strapped John to a gurney and left him in a room full of other bloody, occupied gurneys with intent to feed upon him. Now you're stuck hiding away at a very, VERY slow speed until the officer John met outside rescues you.
  • Jeffrey will not simply let you both leave, for it will make one last ambush through the windows. What makes this moment scary is that the frightened officer can barely hurt it with his gun.
    Officer: Jesus Christ... What is that thing?
  • Later on in the chapter is a note asking members of Gary's cult not to "ask what is behind the door in the basement of the Clinic." What's behind there? The first Optional Boss, of course. Getting to it requires you to willingly strap yourself back in the gurney again and wait motionless by the door before going in. You're met with a sequence of one of the bodies beneath a bloody sheet awakening and accosting John before he's sent screaming down into the basement. Below is a skull-faced "mother", who commands an endless horde of moaning, demon babies to crawl out of the vents all around the room and try to eat you alive!
    "Mother": The little ones haven't eaten for days. Don't you want to meet them?
    • It gets worse as the battle progresses. Once the "mother" is exorcised enough, these babies will eventually cling onto and practically engulf her. Some will crawl off her into a corner and suddenly grow into lanky abominations that giggle like a normal baby as it approaches and manages to keep up with John.
  • As of the V.1.3 update (fittingly released to celebrate Mother's Day 2023 early), a small scene was added before the fight begins. The baby being held by the "mother" will turn to look at John with an evil glare and a widening smile.
• While John's second mission into the apartment complex is about the same as it was in the demo, it has a few new horrors lying in wait. With the disturbing drone of the soundtrack assaulting your ears, you are now truly among the damned.
  • The demo had an Easter-egg where, if you try to access the 7th floor too many times in the elevator, a smiling, flayed, one-eyed demon will appear among the flickering lights before disappearing. It had a low chance of appearing in the halls after this, but it's relatively harmless. Here in the full game? It's not. And it's just hanging from the ceiling waiting to pounce. What adds to the horror is that its voice is not synthesized like everyone elses', but bitcrushed. And it sounds so giddy, even when it's driven away.
    • Also in the demo is a an invitation to a Halloween party that's missing the end to it. In the full game, the writer of this note has mentioned that their son Timmy has made a new Imaginary Friend. If you check the note by the 6th floor elevator, it's a drawing Timmy made of something he calls his "Elevator Friend". It's the demon. And a second drawing shows that they both play the notorious Elevator Game. Once you play and "win", you can find the demon leading poor Timmy away.
    • Oh, also? The full invitation mentions a certain "Mr. Miller, who has taken to Timmy so well and has become like a part of the family." It's Gary.
  • The Elevator Game mentioned above plays out exactly like it does in the frightening Japanese and South Korean legend. Same number of floors to input after 1^note 4, 2, 6, 2, 10, 5, 1, same old lady entering on the fifth floor^note apparently this doesn't always happen. If she boards, look away. Don't approach her. Otherwise, you'll be met with a close-up of her face distorting in demonic fury and your own death. And when you try to leave once it's over, she will ask "Where are you going?".
  • The second Optional Boss just might top the first. It's Tiffany, Gary's spurned former lover and the first^note recent attempt at a vessel for Malphas, rejected in favor of Amy. When you find her, she's seemingly torn off her own head, yet she's still somehow able to communicate with John... and the reason why soon becomes apparent, as the camera pans up to reveal a massive spider-like demon with an elongated jaw growing out of her empty neck stump. She has performed the ritual willingly for Gary. And she succeeded.
    Tiffany: AND NOW. I AM BEYOND. I AM THE SECOND DEATH. I AM THE DAUGHTER OF THE UNSPEAKABLE.
    • The fight itself is also horrific, as Tiffany can sometimes fly around the screen, unleashing an untold amount of souls as she does. The music also doesn't help, sounding like a facsimile of the frantic and wrong final boss of Silent Hill. And once you beat her and leave, her mangled body will crawl after John in a last attempt to kill John.
    • To put it into perspective how completely and utterly wrong a failed Second Death is, Gary - The leader of the Cult of the Second Death, Astaroth Himself - didn't know how to get rid of her and thanks you for doing it for him.
  • The elevator doesn't take you to the 1st floor at the end of the Elevator Game, but the tenth. After Tiffany's defeat, returning to the elevator will reveal a hole through the floor and the words DAMNATIO MEMORIAE^note Latin for "condemnation of memory"; basically the Roman way to Un-person someone. written around it in blood. And it leads all the way down to the 7th floor that supposedly "doesn't exist". One of the rooms here leads to a truly horrific sight. There's a massive, skeletal effigy in purple rags and crown standing in a strange, star-like sigil in the middle of the room. Blood trails to the walls to a pentagram and a bird-like shape. There's a wheelbarrow full of bloody flesh nearby. And laying in a strewn pile of it before the statue is Timmy's corpse. There's no explanation as to how he died, but one of his parents was trying to bring him back in the most horrific of ways.
    He promised me so much
    I just want to see my little boy again
    The replacement is almost fully formed
    Just a few more bodies
• It may be shorter than the other places of interest, but the abandoned daycare has its own creepiness to offer. You're not in danger, but you soon will be. The tunnels await.
  • Left behind by children are innocent drawings that naively depict a plethora of demons and disturbing imagery. Some of these are even shout-outs to other Airdorf and New Blood indie games. And in some cases, the children drawn in them look horrified. It's entirely likely they were intentionally subjected to proximity to demons and their influences. Which probably means the entire daycare was likely also controlled by Gary for the sake of a ready supply of sacrifices.
    • Look at one of the last ones. It depicts the children celebrating around a bloody and dead John, the UNSPEAKBLE triumphantly hovering over them all. That means they were being trained to kill John if they ever saw him. Suddenly the daycare's emptiness has become a blessing.
  • The police are completely set up outside the school, and will outright gun John down if he exits through the front door. The cult has become so overt now that the Profane Sabbath is a day away, that they've openly taken over the place to make sure all goes to plan. Good or neutral ending, John and Garcia inevitably leave the place to everyone dead in an outright war with Gary's followers, implying all the baddies Garcia was fending off weren't just in the cult base but outright running in across the whole damn county to kill them.
• What else is beneath a children's daycare school but an entire hellish labyrinth of tunnels, cultic edifices, sacrificial setups and the damn Crucible, which is intended to be the focal point of the demonic invasion. Notes openly spell out that yes, they're sacrificing children to their demonic god. This is where it lives.
  • Right at the beginning, we get one very shocking reveal in the form of a portrait. It's that of a beautiful lady, who decomposes into a frightening corpse if you look at it long enough. Even the shadow changes and grows a horn. A growl starts to grow in volume along with the crackling drone. And as a pair of white hands grasp the frame to drag it away, an all-too familiar screech. The overworld sprite of the picture is quite familiar too. It's none other than Miriam Bell. What's just as scary is that Gary's note nearby confirms she is his mother.
  • Gary manages to inject John with something that makes him freak the ever-living hell out and put him through a severe Mind Rape of seemingly unlinked scenes and violence^note they're really a visual reference to the lyrics of King of Pain, John's Dark and Troubled Past having seemingly been raised alongside Lisa in a church, and the visage of John wandering halls with a Slasher Smile as it's not entirely clear what the hell is going on. By the time you're in control again in the labyrinth with a trail of blood leading to you, heading a room over shows an entire group of cultists that were torn to chunks, with one last one crawling away pleading for help before expiring. John might just have the potential to be worse than the cult of the unspeakable evil.
  • The third Optional Boss is a floating, twisted red mass with a face, who will slowly chase John down from offscreen. And each time it appears, a flash of a Rorschach will flash over the screen for a split second. Getting caught by it will trap John in a short facsimile of his time at the Yale Psychiatric Institution, where you have to escape back to reality before you're caught again and are killed. Whatever this demon is, it managed to send John back to when nobody would believe him after the failed exorcism.
  • The cultists (often confused for thralls) are not like the thralls. They won't rush and stab you to death, but they will follow you while chanting "Gary loves you." or "The Second Death." This isn't so bad until you encounter the inhuman ones with large heads^note a reference to a monster in Puppet Combo's Tonight It Follows, who'll stretch their hands to grab John and then chew him to death. And they will respawn once you leave the room after exorcising them.
• Eventually John must partake of the dark in another tunnel right beneath the statue of Moloch. And it's so dark that even a lantern barely helps. The area is almost reminiscent of Silent Hill's Otherworld, with harmless bird scares and harmful screaming acolytes with their pigeon-masked heads bent and torn backwards and walking in the same direction. The open forest area after this is just as unnerving and feels worse. These freaks can come out of nowhere.
  • Within a cabin is a photograph of Gary next to a green, masked individual and a brown one with red markings around his eyes and forehead. If this man seems familiar, a nearby letter from Gary reveals that this is Jakob, from DUSK. Seems like Connecticut isn't the only state gripped with demonic activity. What's worse is that Gary was gifted one of the Horrors. And it's waiting for John right outside.
    ''P.S. I almost forgot to thank you for the pet. I will keep it outside my private quarters as a guard against intruders."
• "A riddle, priest. How do you make a portal to Hell?" With everything going on all around you, being asked this is bound to make you bound to feel uneasy. And when you go through the door at the end of the dark outdoors, you'll feel like you just stepped right through. You're surrounded by cultists, who slowly morph and become an indistinguishable, writhing mass the further down you go, all while Gary teases you with the riddle.
  Gary: SOMETIMES, IT WAITS FOR THE ONE WHO HAS ALREADY WALKED THROUGH IT.
  SOMETIMES, IT OPENS ITSELF IN THE DEEPEST, DARKEST ROOM WHERE NOBODY CAN FIND IT.
  AND SOMETIMES, IT COMES WALKING RIGHT UP TO YOU.
  • So how do you? When John finally comes face to face with Gary and earns the right to ask three questions, one of the last ones pertains to the Second Death. It's been explained and hinted at through the game, but here is the concrete answer: after preparing a vessel (victim) through the injection^note this is also something you can ask for the UNSPEAKABLE to enter (abuse), their face is carved off with a sacrificial knife. Then a living newborn is fed through the orifice before there's a response (most notes that are censored implies Miriam used seven newborns while Tiffany is heavily implied to have used seventy times that). The story never really explains why Amy seems to be the crux for the UNSPEAKABLE, or why no other Second Death participants were as potent as her given all the other people turning into demons from their heads — meaning any random person in the wrong circumstances could be the perfect candidate to cut their face off and summon the Devil itself.
    Gary: (...And that, John, is how you make a portal to Hell.)
• Gary. It's hard to imagine someone who looks like Walter White being the harbinger of the apocalypse given how normal he sounds in his letters. But if you haven't figured it out through his actions and correspondents in each chapter, the longer you're around him, the more you'll see there's something inhuman about him. But as everyone insists, he's a normal human being, just like you and me.
  • For starters, the questioning session. Each question asked makes his smile bigger and more monstrous, all while delivering a cruel chuckle. The answers he gives also deserve a mention too. His mission? To prepare the world for the Antichrist. Malphas? Not the UNSPEAKABLE, but the same demon John caught glimpses of at the apartment. And he's already been summoned. And the twins? They were miscarriages. It was all a coping delusion of a grieving Mrs. Martin. But John (and even Garcia) didn't know that. And Gary was banking on that fact to taunt the priest into chasing after them to lure him to his doom.
  • The battle with Gary also counts to an extent. If he's not teleporting and trying to skewer John, he will summon a rain of spiders as well as a slew of familiar, demonic shades to bring him to his knees. And look closely at the demons. One of them is Amy. Once you near the end of the fight, a giant, skeletal demon in clown makeup descends from the ceiling to scare the daylights out of John. Gary somehow found out about his coulrophobia and is taking advantage of it.
    • Unlike other bosses, John doesn't get pulped when he comes in contact with Gary or the demons. He drops his cross and is brought crawling to his knees. And if it's too far or he can't crawl to it in time before Gary catches him, John can next be seen with his head in a sheet and his face a bloody hole, just like Amy. And then a hand slips out to consume the camera. John has become the next vessel for the UNSPEAKABLE.
• The Crucible. If you break the seal, you finally have the right to enter it. And right below is not another ancient hallway or some foreboding woods. You're back in a dark, derelict, yet all-too-familiar house. And there's no explanation as to why the Martin's house is on the inside of the Crucible. It's just there.
  • It is here you discover a horrifying truth. Miriam willingly and successfully subjects herself to the Second Death. And after days of sacrifices into the portal, there's a response. A seemingly normal baby is pulled out and is given a name: GARY. And all through the house are repeating notes that all say the same thing: "GARY LOVES YOU. GARY IS A NORMAL HUMAN BEING, JUST LIKE YOU AND ME.". No, he's not. He never was.
• The last battle in Miriam's chamber. It's not enough John's in there with the desiccated body of Miriam Bell, but he's in there with one cornered and very angry Gary. By now he's seemingly melting and is coming after you as a bloated, crawling thing with an empty maw. What's worse, the already-summoned Malphas soon joins the nightmare.
  Gary: I will make you the first mortal to witness the Profane Sabbath, and the first to be consumed by it. But before I do, I will let you in on a secret: (Gary turns to face John) GARY DOES NOT LOVE YOU.
  • The title of the first part of the fight (and one of the vocals for the song in the third part) is Astaroth. Gary might not just be some demon, but one of the highest-ranked monarchs next to Beelzebub and Lucifer. All of a sudden, his actions and mannerisms suddenly start making sense.
• The true final battle. Both demons fuse themselves with Miriam to, after a fake congratulatory fanfare, become an unholy, floating mishmash of all three. Without Amy, this body may be Gary's alternative to his end goal: a vessel powerful enough to unleash the Profane Sabbath.
  • John gains an 11th-Hour Superpower that allows him to withstand the boss's attacks, but he's not fully invincible. With each hit, John seems fine as he entrusts God to protect him. However, the last hits show him bleeding out the eyes and the penultimate hit shows his face decaying to the point of being Stripped to the Bone. Indeed, "the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak".
  • Gary's fate after the final battle isn't much better. Once both Miriam and Malphas are vanquished, a possessed Amy arrives and Gary drags himself to her with one last prayer. Then, the red hand suddenly reaches out from her face and grabs Gary's. The UNSPEAKABLE simply tells him "Failure" while Gary has a look of absolute terror, before the arm drags him back to the Hell he came from by crushing his body through the hole in Amy's face. Whatever fate the UNSPEAKABLE has in store for Gary, it probably isn't going to be pleasant.
• Unless the Flashback of Amy's exorcism is truncated for the sake of expedience, the moment she got loose, she killed everyone but John in the span of a minute with him unaware beyond her seemingly teleporting every time he gets close. Then he tries to confront her to finish the job, and she's so horrifying that it caused him to flee for his life instead of trying to complete his task. The kicker is seeing John reach the front door, slowly turn around and see Amy, who is just giving him a blank stare from the kitchen… and then the UNSPEAKABLE hand reaches out of her mouth to flip the lights off, as if openly mocking him for his failure.
  • If you choose to go to the basement at this time instead of trying to leave out the front door, you'll hear someone calling out for John to come quickly. Eventually you'll find it's coming from Father Allred, right where you left him. Except it's revealed that he's dead. And the one speaking is Amy, who appears with an evil grin, moves his mouth and speaks through him to mock John. And then she crawls straight at him like a spider before the flashback ends.
  • The final flashback has John be visited by a being of pure light. John begs to be released from this situation, even after the being tells him that leaving will mean the forfeiture of Amy's soul and demands that he swear his intent to do so. John obeys before finally leaving the house, weary and broken. Airdorf has since confirmed that the being is actually Satan himself.
• The Bad Ending in the third game is one big nightmarefest compared to the other games' versions. To wit...
  • It is triggered if John refuses to investigate on any single day, instead getting in his car and driving back home. In doing this, Gary is ultimately able to bring about the Profane Sabbath and unleash Hell on Earth throughout the entire town. Perhaps the entire world. The thralls are everywhere, surrounding John's home with pixelated heads under the influence of the Second Death. They don't harm John immediately, as though they're welcoming him into their midst for his failure.
    • But they can still kill you before seeing the entirety of the bad ending. When you check the peephole and see a smiling group staring back at you, they start to break in through the windows. If you don't get the key from the basement, the whole entrance will be flooded with a large group of them. Checking the backyard after getting the key shows a group of them waiting beside the same kind of pentagram hole from the apartment. And going out the front has them surrounding John's car, which they set on fire. There's nowhere to run now. And any approach will incur their wrath.
  • The key to the locked room is down in the basement. Once you pick it up, a massive, demonic centipede-like beast crawls down from the stairs. If you're not careful navigating out of there, it will eat John alive. That hole mentioned before? That's probably what crawled out.
  • The player can look through the windows of the neighbors as before, but the inhabitants of one house are hanging from the ceiling, and the other has a child looking... strange with corpses lying about behind him. If the thralls don't convince you that this is truly the end of the world, this will.
  • John finally unlocks the door with all the crosses nailed on it and finds Amy. He falls to his feet, asking what's going on, and what the cult wants with him now. But he is cut off mid-sentence before he can finish the text in the text box as a demonic arm from Amy's face grabs him and the screen goes black. In the blackness, you hear Amy's demonic voice declare "UNFORGIVABLE".
  • When John comes to, he's back in the woods before the Martin house, and going inside shows the house is utterly dilapidated. As he wanders from room to room, John can only voice his regrets as he settles beyond the Despair Event Horizon. Finally, he comes to a room with two dummies, and kneels before them holding up his hands in surrender, possessed Amy and Michael flash in holding his hands up. As the scene goes back to sprites from the rotoscope animation, the room fades away, then the possessed children, until John is left kneeling in the abyss. And then the giant hand of the UNSPEAKABLE appears and snatches John away, and the screen cuts to the forest where the Martin house was. The key word being was, as it has completely vanished without a trace.
  • After all this, a final game over screen appears in the same font as MORTIS: DAMNATIO MEMORIAE, which is then followed by the name of the final ending, Ending III: The New Vessel. In Christian terms, Damnatio Memoriae means a "condemnation of memory" akin to Unperson where a person or event is stricken from all official records. Given how much John stated that he can't handle the nightmares and wants everything to end, the Unspeakable gives it to him in a sense: by making it so he no longer exists to suffer as he uses him as a new vessel.

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