All spoilers in this section are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.
It's big. It's mean. And only one of you are leaving its lair.
Despite this game’s cheerful aesthetic, and campy movie origins, the one thing this game doesn't Shrink away from is TERROR.
- The bugs. Every last one of them. Due to your vastly reduced size, even the normally tiny bugs like mites and gnats are now half your size, and most are happily willing to bite your face off. Special mention goes to the stinkbugs who are absolutely giant compared to the player, and can deal hefty damage with their gas attacks, unless you have a gas mask... which can only be made with stinkbug parts...
- The spiders. There is a very good reason this game comes with an arachnophobia mode. Aptly, these guys fit into the Demonic Spiders category, as they are typically fast as hell and can two shot or even one shot an unwary unarmored player. These suckers have their own fight music too!
- The orb weavers: The most common of these bastards, and the ones you'll likely see patrolling the backyard. While not as strong as their wolf spider cousins, they can still attack you with alarming speed and deadliness. Oh, and you can encounter them as soon as you leave spawn, and they can come in packs. If you explore the bush lab, they come in JR variants, which have the exact same damage output as normal orb weavers except smaller, so they're harder to hit.
- The wolf spiders: Take orb weavers, then add health, speed, attack power, the ability to poison you and the urge to murder you 200% faster than the orb weavers. The poison effect also has the neat side effect of being unblockable unless you perform a perfect block or use a proper shield, so even if you block every attack, the poison will slice your health to ribbons faster than you can blink. These guys can be usually found in areas further than spawn, typically don't roam nearly as far as the orb weavers and they only roam around during the night, but goddamn are they a nightmare to fight against! It's no wonder killing your first wolf spider nets you an achievement! Akin to the above example, you can also find them incredibly early too, right under the tree where BURG.L's lab is. Shmuck Bait at its finest.
- And as of the “Into The Wood” Update, they're even worse, because now Infected Wolf Spiders exist. Unlike most of the infected creatures, these wolf spiders look less like infected bugs, and more like parasitic corpses that lumber around aimlessly until they spot prey. They have much more lethal attack patterns, they have as much health as a mini-boss, and they can launch Fungal Mines at you. That is NOT hyperbole, infected wolf spiders can launch EXPLOSIVES. Thankfully they are few and far between... unless you plug the weed killer tank with gum, which allows the fungus to spread through the yard... including underneath the oak tree near BURG.L's lab...
- Diving bell spiders: While they may only be as big as a spiderling, these aquatic nightmares are still absolutely horrifying, due to their rapid underwater movement, high damage, and creepy brown bodies. Plus, because they can only be encountered underwater, this dramatically limits your offensive (only underwater tools such as daggers and tridents can be used underwater) and defensive options (If you wear armor to mitigate damage, you’ll only have at max 30 seconds of oxygen. If you equip aquatic gear to mitigate that, the defense they provide is piss poor at best.)
- Spiderlings: Thankfully significantly less dangerous than their big boy cousins but that doesn't exclude their pale white skin from this list. Their smaller size also makes them harder to smack with your weapon of choice, and typically where they are, the bigger spiders lay in wait..
- The Broodmother. Holy. Shit. The first fully fledged boss to be added into the game, and damn does it start with a bang. Not only do you have to go through a pretty complex series of steps to even summon this brute, but when you do summon her, you'll probably notice her design is based off of a demon orb weaver, making her look like some kinda mutated plate wearing monstrosity. Second, much like the spiders above, she hits like a freight train, and moves incredibly quickly, using venom and vicious combos to easily overwhelm your tiny defenses, along with lethal pouncing attacks. Third, she summons junior orb weavers and spiderlings to the fight when her health gets low. Fourth, she seals the arena up once she spawns, ensuring that once you summon her, it's a fight to the death. She also absolutely dwarfs the playable characters, being easily 5x their size. It's quite telling that even the trailer where she's introduced, has the announcers recommend the player enable arachnophobia mode, and that any character unfortunate enough to see her being summoned quite rightfully expresses massive fear.Pete: I'm really regretting my life choices right now!
- Oh but don't worry, all those other spiders will seem far less terrifying under the might of the most infamous of them all, The Black Widow. The black widow isn't a boss, which only serves to lull you into a false sense of security. First things first, the black widow is resistant to all forms of damage. Yes, you heard that right, ALL. FORMS. OF DAMAGE. Explosives? Nope. Minty? Nada. Spicy? Doesn’t care. Sour? BARELY A SCRATCH. Second, much like all the other late game spiders, the widow can inflict poison damage on you. However while spiders like Orb Weaver Jrs and Wolf spiders inflict 1 Stack of poison (And the Broodmother herself inflicts 2) the black widow inflicts three stacks of poison on you with every bite, meaning if you so much as get scratched by this thing, even with Mithridatism, your health is going to Plummet. Third, the Black Widow has an ungodly amount of health, which is compounded by, again, being resistant to all forms of damage. Fourth, The Black Widow is FAST. Even faster than the wolf spider or the broodmother. This monstrosity of nature is so terrifying, any teen that sees it immediately reacts with fear, something typically saved for Bosses.
- Good news from the 1.3 update: The Black Widow no longer resists everything, and now has a weakness to Sour. The bad news? She got a buff of 500 HP to compensate. The worse news? She now consumes the Black Widowlings around her for a boost in power and attack speed.
- The 1.2 update introduces the new top spider to be terrified of. You thought The Broodmother was bad? Say how-do to the Infected Broodmother. Yes, the INFECTED BROODMOTHER. Bigger, uglier, meaner, scarier, and will get back up twice after seemingly being put down.
- The Haze. The weedkilling gas has mutated a strand of cordyceps, which has infected countless insects and plants, making them into mutated monstrosities, adding new attacks, and a truck ton of health. Special mention goes to the mutated ladybug, whose Gentle Giant nature is now utterly gone, and can chuck explosive spore chunks at you.
- Finding the notes in the haze lab however reveal the situation is much much worse than otherwise thought. The reason the haze is covered with the weed killer? Dr Tully had the place drenched in said weed killer to keep the infection at bay. While this did work,it only did so because the weed killer keeps the infection placated. If you decide to go through the effort of plugging up the weed killer canister, you clear out the haze entirely... and allow the infection to spread to random pockets of the map, infecting the creatures there too... but if you don't plug up the weed killer, the haze will remain as a permanent obstacle to deal with... Tough decision huh?
- Factional Raids. If you've managed to properly piss off a certain faction of bugs (Be they ants, bees, termites, or the entirety of the Infected bugs ) There is a chance that they'll eventually take the fight to you directly and try to destroy your hard built base. The only warning you get (roughly 5 seconds before the raid starts) is a war horn and the eager roaring of the insects getting ready to tear your base to shreds.
- Living near the insect faction's home turf, or killing them are the two ways you can increase the faction’s hatred of you, which comes with some rather chilling notifications. (With the final notification signaling that you can be raided by that faction)
- Late in the game, you discover that a side effect of the shrinking process is a term called raisining, which, as you progress, is revealed to be the body dehydrating rapidly and unable to replace it's lost fluids, much like how a grape is dried to become a raisin. The human variant includes the loss of useable digits and limbs (though they're not outright lost), hair, and skin, among other things. The teens uncover various photos of Wendell's own raisining progression, and when they do find him, his case is so bad that he's resorted to being a disembodied head in a jar...which hardly even looks like a head, just a raisin-shaped bag of flesh with Wendell's glasses.
- It's pointed out that the cause of raisining is two factors; excessive use of the SPAC.R, and age of all things. The teens managed to escape the effects of raisining (for now) due to being only shrunk once, and their young bodies being able to counteract the initial effects. An adult like Wendell though? Not so much.
- The sheer vileness of Director Schmector's SPAC.R experimentation. He uses minors as test subjects to counteract the effects of raisining, and has them killed when he no longer has use for them. It's heavily implied that several adolescent teens have been killed by his callousness (and if their backgrounds align with the player characters, ripped away from their families) prior to the events of the game, all just for his grand ambitions of fame and war profiteering. He gets some long-overdue Laser-Guided Karma in the Golden Ending, but the deaths his actions have caused remain.
