Nightmare Fuel / Limbus Company

"I'll turn on the lights, so open your eyes wide! Tadaa!"

Given the subject being some of the most horrific and unhinged Cyberpunk dystopian Crapsack Worlds possible in a fictitious work where every single manmade horror imaginable is not out of the window, Nightmare Fuel is a given.

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General

• Welcome back to the City, where every single bad thing about Cyberpunk is taken to its logical extreme. And instead of playing as a bigshot with all the well-meaning and well-done people going against you, you now take control of "Sinners" that are near the bottom of the foodchain with incredibly insane and sadistic people that are the face of the city rather than the exceptions, around the corner waiting to make your Sinners prey.
• Unlike in Library of Ruina where the Fixer and Syndicate communities are in the forefront, this time, the Wings are the main focus, and in several instances, even their executives are visible and upfront. You'll quickly find out the notorious reputations of these institutions are well-earned and deserved; expect every one out of three people you meet to be some heinously awful and/or insane lunatic who has no qualms and no remorse committing all sorts of horrible atrocities for every reason you can imagine, be it pragmatism, practical usage or simply for no reason bar being pure evil for the sake of. It's such a horrible setting that it would make the Corpos in Cyberpunk look like amateurs.

Abnormalities and E.G.O.

• The very concept of E.G.O Corrosion. Whereas its introduction in Wonder Lab was very minor and only noted it to be dangerous in the long run, we get to see its full extent in this game. An E.G.O. Corrosion is effectively the Abnormality itself as long as it exists. The Gameplay and Story Integration also counts, since an E.G.O. Corrosion can only happen ingame when you activate an E.G.O. while the Sinner has low sanity (that, by the way, is reached by letting them see their allies die one by one), which means that their psyche has to become unstable enough. They'll have a Sanity Slippage and become Ax-Crazy, and thus, E.G.O. Corrosion can be considered a catharsis of all the built-up despair, from being overwhelmed by it all. Letting a sinner Corrode their E.G.O. is essentially torture in itself.
  • Whereas standard E.G.O. use outfits the Sinner in an outfit that draws inspiration from the Abnormality it comes from, Corrosions warp the user's entire body. In Fae Lantern's corruption, Gregor becomes part of the tree; in Pursuance's corrosion, Meursault changes his face to only have eyes on it, Rodion becoming even more of an Angelic Abomination completely with Gekidan Inu Curry-like eyes around her; and in Fourth Match Flame's corruption, Yi Sang becomes a walking, charred corpse. Anyone corroded by the Telepole E.G.O. takes the form of the wolf it comes from — but not just the wolf; their face and body replaces the charred corpse on the wolf's back.
    • On the topic of the latter, if one looks closely, it appears that Heathcliff's arms move even in the Corrosion, possibly implying his consciousness remaining active.
  • Their voicelines change in such a way that it becomes hard to see where the Sinner's mind ends, and where the Abnormality's influence begins. Considering that what is said lines up perfectly with what the Abnormality would say, it's not much stretch to see that a Corroded Sinner is so overwhelmed by the Abnormality that the experience has to be comparable to delirium. Given just how...otherworldly some of the Abnormalities involved are, this goes part of the way to explaining why it is important to keep Sanity levels in the positive, even though Corrosion lends for a stronger attack. Beyond that, though, a Sinner would most likely remember what they did when Corroded, and why they did it after it wears off. The decision to do something terrible would always feel like it was, on some level, their own.
  • Certain weird situations, albeit rare, can happen if a Sinner uses their E.G.O while not being at full Sanity but not low enough to cause immediate Corrosion (i.e somewhere between 15 and -30 for a given rough estimate). At first, the normal image will appear and the Sinner will carry out the normal E.G.O attack...but pay notice to the borders being black and the text of the spoken line being wonky as if it was a Corrosion. This implies that the Sinner is trying their damnedst not to Corrode, but is only halfly succeeding in doing so; their mind already being so far in the process that it's almost succumbing.
  • Remember how Kali heard Nothing There talking to her while she used its E.G.O? Turns out, Abnormalities do talk to the wielder of their E.G.O, and the reason why employees at Lobotomy Corporation couldn't corrode, were the requirements that were put in place by the corporation itself to prevent inexperienced people wearing E.G.O they couldn't handle, and the reason why the librarians can't corrode is Angela deliberately finetuning the Abnormality voices (which is why there is a line from the Abnormality only appearing above their head the moment that they use a page from them). But in Limbus Company, there is nothing to prevent the Abnormality voices from having free reign.
  • Though not as outwardly Body Horror as some of the others, the attack animation for Faust's Hex Nail ends with a cereal box falling out of the gaping hole in its front in a pool of blood, giving it imagery disturbingly close to a miscarriage.
  • With Canto V (Part 2) comes Faust's version of Skin Prophet's E.G.O., 9:2, while the flesh-based version of her uniform isn't anything new considering similar cases, Effervescent Corrosion and Impending Day, but the real nightmare fuel comes from when she undergoes Corrosion, where her line during attack has her sounding uncharacteristically manic before devolving into insane laughter that makes her The One Who Grips ID look mentally stable in comparison.
• The Refraction Railway's final bosses may lack in run-ending punch, but they sure as hell carry an atmosphere worthy of their status:
  • My Form Empties is a pretty unnerving Abnormality by itself, being a strange, bleeding Buddhist statue that can brainwash people, but its unique battle theme is even more unnerving: unlike the more rock-heavy and fast themes of fights, My Form Empties' theme is eerily quiet, with only ominous sounds like the wind blowing, a bell ringing or monastic hymns breaking the silence.
  • Sign of Roses is a very visceral Abnormality, being some freaky mass of white flesh with too many eyes and surrounded by rose all around (described in its Mirror Dungeon event to be intestinal in texture), propped up in an X-shaped faux-cross of wood and many vines, like a twisted form of cruxificion.
    • The roses it spawns in its battle appear to be talking if the differently-colored text in its combat encounter event, which is freaky in its own way, not only because of the unorthodox communication method this Abnormality is implied to take, but also because its dialogue has it tempt the Sinners into "succumbing to their sins" through said event.
    • Hong Lu's Observation Log on the Abnormality also deserves a mention, especially what happens when someone dies to the Roses. It's not just that they get crucified by their respective Rose, the death by the Roses is also said by him to cause the respective Sinners' emotions to snap in half, like a reverse Emotion Bomb that eats all of the emotion all at once. Topping it off is how the Rose-killed Sinners exploded into...just petals, after the Abnormality itself is suppressed.
    • To top it all off, its battle theme continues the minimalistic yet creepy theme set with My Form Empties, being just a series of quiet Ominous Pipe Organ tones with a side of For Doom the Bell Tolls.
• Dongrang proves definitively that gaining an E.G.O isn't a sign of moral character or heroism, it's simply pure determination and the acceptance of the self as you are - even if that self is remorseless and unempathetic. Awakening an E.G.O makes Dongrang worse, since it effectively solidifies his will and removes even the facade of friendliness he put on.

Mirror Dungeon Events

• One event features the Sinners coming across a horribly mutated creature wandering around, with the description noting that it was a passenger twisted and lost between dimensions, with no one even knowing they disappeared... and then confirms what the player may be thinking and clarifying that the transport company would know and pretend the passenger never existed. That's right; W Corp's WARP Trains not only have the horrific experiences like Love Town happen regularly, but sometimes the results of said experiences manage to escape the Trains. Leaving the poor bastard trapped in that state, wandering between dimensions forever.
  • Successfully giving the passenger directions make the situation even worse; they drop a Wing-branded lighter, with the game confirming that they weren't a passenger; they were one of the WARP Cleanup Crew. Not even W Corp's own employees are safe from being victims of the WARP Trains.
• One of the encounters features an Abnormality in the form of a bronze bull, with the being inside it constantly begging for water. No matter how you react, it can't get water either way, and going by the way Abnormalities work, the being is likely trapped and tortured for eternity, unable to die.
  • What's worse, the E.G.O stemming from it gives the user bullfighter attire - bullfighting is notoriously torturous for the involved animals.

Cantos

Canto I

• One of the first things we learn is how Mephistopheles gets fuel: by being fed live people into a meat grinder, as some unfortunate Backstreet thugs found out.
• G Corp is now known as Gravity Corp, but it used to be a much more macabre Gene Corp that fused humans with insect DNA to create human-insect hybrids for war. And as Gregor can testify, its executives were anything but nice people.
• Through Gregor's memories, we get another view of the dreaded Smoke War, this time on the side of the old Gene Corp soldier fighting for the old L Corp before Lobotomy Corporation took its place as a Wing. And oh boy, it's just as horrifying as it was described by Roland and Salvador during Library of Ruina.
  • Not only do we get to see thousands of soldiers of Gene Corp facing Fixers in a battlefield of massive proportion, but we also see why Gregor is considered the poster boy of Gene Corp. Unlike him who's procedure was perfect, soldiers of Gene corps are shown mutating during the war. Some are growing wings during the fight, other have their arms and legs completely changing into insect appendages like scythes and claws. The worst are the ones like Tomah who have antennae or weird worm-like appendages coming out of their mouths and eyes. YUCK!
• The culmination of Gregor's walk down nightmare lane in his flashbacks to the Smoke War ends with tons of giant hands materializing from the sky and slamming down to crush the G Corp soldiers in the flashback as if they really were nothing but bugs. Especially horrific once one learns that the hands are meant to represent Hermann, the scientist who performed his procedure and the one he calls "mother".
  • Even worse? After spending so much time trying to flee from the hands and avoid getting crushed, Gregor realizes that the only way to end it all is to give up and allow the hands to catch him. Ultimately, he feels that the truth is he really can't run away from his past, or her.
• In a flashback to his time after the war, we're treated to a scene where after a good samaritan tries to check on Gregor when she notice something is wrong, his arm goes wild without his meaning to and nearly impales the poor woman. He's audibly terrified and desperate, begging the guards on the train to cut off his arm to keep him from hurting anyone. Being betrayed by his own body to the point the only way to keep others safe is to mutilate himself to even temporarily cease being a danger.
  • What's worse is the last thing we hear of that scene is the arm immediately growing back after one of the guards complies and cuts it off. We don't see what happened afterwards.

Canto II

• Though it's used as a throwaway line, Gregor mentions that even though he doesn't mind dancing to placate the Mariachi Syndicate, he thinks he ought not to because the stimulation of something as simple as dancing might cause him to go out of control and cause his arm to attack the audience.
• Kill the loved ones or comrades of a Middle Finger, and on the next day they'll slaughter the entire neighborhood you're in. Rodion learnt this the hard way when she killed a tax collector that happens to be the sister of a Middle goon.
  • This is essentially the same problem as the Thumb; the Fingers all have traits and culture that would otherwise be admirable virtues, but since they twist it to the most logical conclusion, they instead define them as the horrific organizations they are.

Canto III

• Everything about Nagel und Hammer. A brutal, extremist organization that's effectively a natural body supremacist cult, they're introduced wanting to kill Dante for the simple crime of having a prosthetic head and only get worse from there. It's revealed they murdered effectively an entire innocent village just because of their craft of making prosthetic bodies, and did so via one of the worst ways to die historically; Impalement, with a notice that most of the victims are still barely clinging to life and can take days to finally die from their mortal injuries. And these victims are scattered throughout the entire chapter, numbering in the hundreds in all likeliness.
  • At one point, the Sinners stumble across a pair of Inquisitors torturing one of their victims in the Chapter's dungeon. Said victim, due to their prosthetics, is still alive even as the Inquisitors effectively disembowel them, begging them to stop only for the Inquisitors to cruelly taunt them by asking if they can still cry with their prosthetics, only to dismiss it as "fake" when they actually do.
  • The worst part of the Inquisition? They're not just a brutal syndicate or a lone schmo; they're corporate backed by N Corp, and its members are all N Corp employees. The massacre happens inside K Corp's nest but because they're members of a Wing, not a single security force is raised to stop them.
  • This seems like a one-off case of random lunacy, but in The Distortion Detective (likely way before the company started to turn a bunch of its employees into lunatic inquisitors), N Corp did attempt to kill Moses's crew because YuRiA filmed a bunch of Sweepers in the Night of the Backstreets, which is otherwise unaccountable. In Leviathan, Vergillus's squad was slaughtered for the same reason right before he was forced to join Limbus Company alongside Charon. That's right. On top of Fantastic Racism against prosthetics, they have a whole set of 14 infractions that are grounds for slaughter, and it's not the first time they kill people over bizarre reasons. N Corp is infamous for things like this.
  • The implications on why the N Corp. employees are even allowed in to smash high-end prosthetic plants and kill people inside K Corp's turf with little resistance whatsoever. When Don is beating Sinclair, he tells her that back in the day, groups like that didn't even exist in Nest K, but one day they "just happened" to show up. Given that those are actual Wing employees and not a Syndicate, it suggests that this happens because both Wings had a fairly lucrative business deal going on. As for the deal itself? K Corp. is a Wing that focuses on medicine and bio-augmentation, so a prosthetic plant in their turf obviously isn't a welcome addition. The rest speak for themselves; said plant is hurting their economic baseline or ideals, so they're hiring N Corp to clean it up. The Inquisitors aren't even invaders looking for trouble, they are legitimate employees deployed through legitimate procedures doing throughly sanctioned business. It says a lot about how grim the situation is for the people living in Sinclair's town when the more well-going Wings are willing to let the actually insane ones they are doing business with do whatever they want over a neat business deal.
  • Meursault (a former employee of N Corp.)'s reaction to all of this. While it's the first time he saw the employees working for Nagel und Hammer raze entire cities, he's not surprised that something like this would happen, telling the group that they are the Wing who believes it "acts in the interest of humanity" and even implies to Heathcliff that he once considered joining the group but turned down the offer. The implication being he always knew them as violent, order-obsessed ilk and it's not just several nutcases with a severe case of Fantastic Racism.
• Kromer is another very disturbing and irredeemably evil character like Elena before her. She acts like a very disturbing Yandere to Sinclair and is deployed by N Corp to devastate his hometown under her superior's orders to obtain the Golden Bough in the L Corp branch under it. She also purposefully desecrates his family's grave (of which she previously killed) to spite Sinclair. She enjoys every bit of sadism she throws out as much as Elena shamelessly enjoys killing her four thousand or so people. Oh, and this is an official N Corp employee out for a slaughter (that is very likely also sanctioned by the Wing's higher-ups, considering they did nothing over it) and not a random Syndicate leader or a lone wolf threat.
  • To add onto her possessiveness of Sinclair, Kromer believes wholeheartedly in some destined partnership between herself and Sinclair because she saw a vision of an alternate timeline where Sinclair actually joined her in Nagel Und Hammer's zealotry. And even in the game's timeline where she doesn't have that reality, she does everything in her power to get him to obsess over her, even if that obsessiveness is nothing but hatred. She takes just as much glee in the idea of him horrifically brutalizing her as she does in the partnership she desires from him. Yikes.
  • The battlefield she fought, manifested by the Golden Bough's power, is a Corpse Land that symbolizes her fanaticism of destroying all prosthetic users.
  • Kromer's One-Winged Angel form is very disturbing. Her lower-body turns a pile of flesh with centipede-like legs with an iron maiden-like jaw on her chest.
  • The aftermath of Kromer's fight. Sinclair is barely struggling, the rest are wiped out and even Dante realizes the risk of danger. The whole group of Sinners might had been dead on-spot if not for Demian's intervention. What makes this even worse is the Nagel und Hammer front itself is implied to be still intact despite their leader's death, and can regroup to wreck more havoc if some other Wing wants them to.
  • Speaking about Kromer, her (and by extension, The One who Grips Faust) whistling sounds creepily realistic - to the point that it can be easily perceived as being from someone catcalling just outside of the player's house.
• This whole thing paints N Corp as a very disturbing Wing. While most Wings are described to be insane corporate overlords with little or no common sense, just like W Corp before them with their WARP Trains, N Corp takes it to a whole, new level. Contrasting the few Wing Employees we do see, including the Head, who are Punch Clock Villains or Affably Evil madmen, every other major N Corp employee we see bar Vespa Carabro are either Mad Scientists or insane lunatics of the highest caliber. As Vespa and Kromer suggests, whatever they sent in will be hell even for high rank Fixers, and they will gleefully deploy them on random people for bizarre reasons such as filming in the Backstreets or using prosthetic arms. One only wonders do they still have people like Hermann or Kromer ready to launch at the next group of unfortunate Fixers who just happened to accidentally break a Taboo or offended them.
  • Even worse is that according to Mersault in Chapter 3 and in Dante's Notes, the Nagel und Hammer Inquisitor subsidiary is not supposed to operate on such a gigantic scale, and used to be a small-scale movement when he was working in N Corp. One only wonders is there a massive Singularity experiment within N Corp. that uses its own employees as test subjects.
  • They have access to a type of tech known as "Canned Experience" which allows anyone who consumes them to experience something without actually going through it. According to Leviathan, they have a vending machine that sells canisters that cause anyone who consumes them to experience suicide. It gets worse from here — N Corp. Heathcliff and Mersault's entries imply that most, if not all Nagel und Hammer inquisitors are Wing employees brainwashed through this Canned Experience tech, turning them into the Ax-Crazy inquisitor cultists with an insane hatred against prosthetics we do see. Oh and that's not all — Mersault suggests that the Inquisitors were a fringe group back in the days, rather than the massive organization of Knight Templar crazies they are now. One only wonders if there is a singularity experiment that uses its own employees as test subjects. Whatever this is, like with W Corp's Love Town trains, it makes little to no sense and nobody knows what the higher-ups are thinking with this absolutely wicked idea.
• From Sinclair's perspective, and depending on how you personally view the process, his quiet observation as his family undergoes a full body prosthetic replacement procedure one by one is a silent sort of horror. One by one, the familiar faces of his family are replaced by metal heads completely void of any human features. Until he's the only one left at the family breakfast table who can actually eat anything anymore. Combined with the knowledge that, one day, no matter his personal reservations or arguments, the same thing is going to happen to him whether he likes it or not. The window in his base E.G.O art has the table set at christmas, but there's not just the three mechanical humans resembling his family - there's four. As much as he would bear a hatred over Kromer for killing his parents, Sinclair is noticably disgusted and terrified by this. There's no wonder why there are actual timelines where not only he didn't end up being an Arch-Enemy of Kromer (or a variant based on Faust), he became cohorts with her to purge all prostethic-modified humans.
  • There's also the implication that the Sinclair family may have also had a pet dog that they also made undergo the process, with all the unsettling implications of choosing to give an animal that can't understand the changes a mechanical body would bring. Though it's left a bit more ambiguous as to whether the robotic dog Sinclair mentions in his flashbacks was ever originally a living animal or was simply a robot that looks like a pet, the plausibility on its own is a bit chilling.

Canto IV

• Right off the bat, we get the Brazen Bull Abnormality rampaging in the middle of K Corps Nest. Previous games have shown that the Nests of non-fallen Wings are thought to be safe havens where you don't have to worry about something big and nasty tearing them apart, and thus if said something does get though, it's treated very seriously and becomes more than a commotion amongst the Wing's management and the Fixer community alike. They still are... unless the Wing itself decides to have some fun with it. While the Bull was dealt with before it could cause too much damage, at least a city block was destroyed and countless people were killed. It doesn't help that K Corp wasn't trying very hard to contain it and was actively suppressing evidence that something was going horribly wrong, and after the Sinners deal with the Abnormality and had a chat with some K Corp employees, we know why. The Abnormality was deliberately let out to test Limbus Company, something that the Sinners merrily let slide unlike Kromer's Inquisition. There's something very wrong when one of the more well-to-go Wings set up a catastrophe with hundreds dead just to draw the attention of our heroes, who also couldn't care less.
• The seemingly benign K Corp has a rather...odd dark secret. It's not something overtly destructive as W Corp's "Love Town" Trains or N Corp's taboos or brainwashed Inquisitors, but an ethically distasteful one. Remember how Lobotomy Corporation's text suggests the City has infinite, cheap food supplies? Well, turns out K Corp manufactures genetically modified chickens that have their body parts routinely cut off for quality meat and regenerated with HP bullets. Truly an animal rights group's worst nightmare.
  • When the Hell's Chicken event was running, the prize screen had a note stating that the food products of Bodhisattava Chicken was not produced by K Corp.'s Singularity. Which means that said 'dark secret' may not be so secret after all...
• The Shi Association's assassination of Shrenne. One moment she's alive and speaking, then you hear and see a slash down the middle of her body as she falls silent... And a thin red line appears down the middle of her whole body before she falls over, dead and split in half with a sickening squelching noise as the narration discusses the splashing fluids from her sliced brain hemispheres. And nobody in the room even realizes what's happening except Ryoshu, who tells everyone to shut up, stay still and not even breathe. Then the wall gives way as the assassins make their getaway, revealing that the assassin sliced through a wall and still cleanly killed off Shrenne in a single blow. Ishmael then reveals that it had to have been the Shi Association's doing, and that the assassin couldn't have been a low-ranking member from Sections 5 or 6, meaning that this was the doing of someone who was from Section 4 at minimum. It's a reminder that the Section 2 Shi Association Fixers we fight in Library of Ruina are beaten fairly quickly as jobbers only because of the Library's inherent magic and they're heavily weakened before they're thrown into the Library — they're apex predators to the typical cityfolk who don't even have the resources the Library has.
• The truth behind K Corp's HP bullets and healing serum. They're not nanomachines as Dongrang initially claimed, but the tears of a captured entity that K Corp forces to watch recorded videos of human suffering, before collecting the tears that it sheds after. All of this sheds light on some of K Corp's prior actions: the recording of dying civilians seemingly for media purposes, the lack of response to the Brass Bull's rampage, and even the sanctioning of Nagel und Hammer to terrorize their own territory - all of it which were seemingly also mutual-benefit business deals that also get more recorded agony to fuel the entity's suffering. There's no wonder they're so laid back and well done when they themselves don't even need to get their hands dirty for the sake of energy gain.
  • The entity itself is also pretty grotesque, being an enormous mass of flesh and wires with a single bloodshot eye that is being pried open by K Corp's machines. When being shown footage, it is shown visibly suffering and panicking as its pupils dart around. And Alfonso even mentions at the end that this isn't actually its true form, and merely a "child entity" split off of the original.
  • The tears are also not "healing" in the normal sense: they merely revert the target to its original form. Unfortunately, the serum doesn't know what an original form is, which is where the refining process comes in. Restoring the human body is one thing, but it can also be used to forcibly mutate or regress individuals, such as how test subjects who were forced to believe they were insects through mental suggestion were literally regressed into insectoid monsters. If the tears have no refining, then anyone that touches them will be reverted back to the "original form of humanity", instantly killing them without any trace left behind.
  • Even worse, this is not how the Singularity used to run — the previous Manager of K Corp made it cry by telling it sad stories. Unfortunately, said CEO died of old age, and another more ruthless CEO got in and declared that the previous one is too ineffective. Dongrang, who just happened to be escaping T Corp's wrath by selling himself to K Corp, sold her the mirrors and used it to broadcast atrocities across the City for the eye, causing it to cry more. The new management successfully industrialized their Singularity in an astonishingly constructive way, but by this point, all scientific morals might as well as be flushed down the drain. Given that K Corp still manage to do more good than harm with their Singularity and they're very good at Obfuscating Insanity to the point that a run-of-the-mill Cityfolk won't even notice it unlike other Wings, but at what price?
  • The origin of the Tearful Thing raises a number of unsettling implications. Stephanette's companion ventured outside the City with her, and was transformed into the Tearful Thing by an unseen force as a result of his wish. Which begs the question - what exactly happened out there, and what mysterious force outside the City is capable of granting wishes in such a manner? It's a frightening notion to consider that even with all of the reality-warping Singularities and Eldritch Abominations within the City, we still have no idea what lies outside of it, nor if it's even worse than what's inside.
• If you're the type who does things and hobbies for the sake of satisfying intellectual curiosity, then the story of how the League of Nine Litterateurs eventually met their end is definitely a huge nightmare fuel. It is a slow, gradual sort of horror, but nevertheless, there is a reason why people tend to keep their funky tech in their own little Syndicates — the Wings will go out of their way to grab them for their own use in ways that would make Nineteen Eighty-Four look like child's play. To put in some detail: when many parties began to catch wind of the technologies invented by the Nine Litterateurs, they eventually caught attention of T Corp's tech agency due to their inventions being "unregistered". While at first they only received the notice that the technology needs to be registered to the agency, what followed afterwards basically amounted to a witch hunt to the point its members eventually disappeared one by one after several visits from them. T Corp simply read their past, present and future and landed exactly in their direction to capture and vanish them, and the only members who survived are the ones who sold themselves to other Wings like K Corp and N Corp. They also didn't immediately arrest the targeted members, but instead decided to work in such way that utterly crushed the hopes and spirit of the target. It is both nightmarish and depressing to think that the thing they initially built as nothing but pure expression towards their love for technology ultimately became the Litterateurs' downfall.
  Dongrang: Loud ticks of clock at your front door are a sign that T Corp's tech agency employees have come to your house. (...) The first visit tends to be sudden and quiet. Most are flustered by the unexpected arrival... but they still keep their pride and faith as a member of the League. The agency knows that as well. They also know that their visit instilled fear that they might come again whenever they'd like. The second visit is when things start to change. They now know where my time flows from and where it's headed. They have my past, present, and future. The shapes of all weaknesses and desires are in their hands.
• At the end of Yi Sang's flashback, we learn Hermann's goal: the complete obliteration of all Mirror Worlds, leaving the canon version of the City as the only timeline in existence. The Mirror Worlds are not actual alternate universes but possible futures diverged from the canon timeline, but it becomes even worse once you remember that in Leviathan, we're shown that one such world is our own universe.
• T Corp itself is very disturbing and is easily some of the most batshit insane Wings ever seen. Not because it represents some dystopian future society, but represents a time that very much existed in the 1800s, when living standards were ironically at their lowest for the working class despite the industrial revolution, cities were bleak and miserable for all but the high class, factory slaves and child labour was common and legal. Even the T Corp collectors are essentially Steampunk Pinkertons. There's truly a price of silence — the Wing essentially sacrificed every single thing inside their quarters for the sake of every one else, given how they do make full, constructive use of their Singularity.
  • For a show of how absolutely dystopian T Corp is, the sepia tone present throughout Yi Sang's flashbacks isn't an Art Shift. T Corp legitimately made it so that even the concept of color within their district is something one needs to buy. Why? Because it gave the poor too much joy for it to be free.

Canto V

• The Sinners have just crossed a border between two different sections of the Great Lake when a massive tentacled thing bursts from the previously calm water behind them. This is but a glimpse at what to expect should one of the numerous 'Laws' of the Great Lake be broken, one of which is staying too long in a particular section.
• Just a moment after meeting the tentacled thing, two ships of U-Corp approach. Thanks to their tuning forks, these ships are able to fuse and separate at will if they are on the same frequency. But if something or someone happens to be between two of those ships during the fusion process without being on the same frequency, it's not getting crushed like one might think - it's straight up getting deleted like nothing was ever there. And given that nobody on the U-Corp ships cared about the possible collision, it might very well be that such things happen regularly.
• With the massive amount of different 'Laws' the Great Lake has, you would think that someone would have written it down somewhere, right? Well U-Corp doesn't think so, as that's one of their Taboo's. And don't think you can get around it by tattooing it onto your body, they consider that written down as well.
• In order to make up for lost time, Outis comes up with the idea to make a straight line for the Lobotomy Corp branch facility since a roundabout route, while safer, would take three days of traversing the open seas and risk dealing with pirates. This would involve directly dealing with the Waves of the Lake, a result of not following its Rules. Upon entering a section already beset by the Waves the crew comes face to face with their first Whale: The Whale of the Porous Hand, which appears exactly as its name implies: a giant blue hand covered with holes from which emerge bipedal fish-like creatures known as Mermaids. It's enough to make tryptophobics recoil in fear.
• After defeating the Whale and its Mermaids, Ishmael reveals the truth of why she believes Dante would be unable to turn the clock back should they die at sea: Mermaids are all victims of Whales that have been parasitized and transformed to serve their needs, while still being living humans.
  • On top of that, some of the exports and merchandise of U Corp are products like "Mermaids Tears" and "Mermaid Perfume". Knowing now what Mermaids actually are, that means these products are all made from humans.
• The Sinners find a raucous cruise party in the middle of the Great Lake and swoop in to investigate, only for it to be completely silent by the time they arrive. It's soon revealed that in their partying, the partygoers forgot about the Laws of the Great Lake, and were seemingly completely and instantaneously erased by the subsequent Wave. The perpetratior of the Wave turns out to be the Whale of the Thousand Strands, a gigantic pillar of tentacles who has devoured all the guests and turned them into things resembling shambling masses of muscle fibers puppeted by the Whale's own tendrils.
• The Sinners finally arrive at the L. Corp branch, only to find that the entire place is covered by a bizarre, white Meat Moss. Ishmael then confirms that this was the doing of the Pallid Whale - one of the Five Calamities of the Lake. The branch is technically still standing, but the Calamity has warped it into something so grotesque that Dante notes that complete destruction of the branch would have been a mercy.
  • Once they enter, what happened to the branch becomes more clear. The Pallid Whale devoured the entire thing, taking the Golden Bough and Abnormalities with it - but instead of swallowing things, the Whale regurgitates anything it devours, but in a "Pallidified" state warped beyond recognition by masses of proliferating tissues. This also applies to living beings, as all of the previous survivors at the branch have been consumed by the fleshy growths and turned into near-mindless zombies.
  • Ishmael also mentions that unlike the normal Whales, the Calamities are free from the Laws of the Lake. The only thing keeping the horrifically powerful sea monsters in check won't work on the Calamities.
  • As Dante discovers the Golden Bough can temporarily reverse the Pallid Whale's effects, Ishmael is borderline elated, as it means that her captain might still be alive. The same fanatical captain who enticed an entire crew into hunting the Pallid Whale, only for the whole crew to be devoured except for her. But she's not happy for a normal reason - she's happy because if her captain is alive, she can find her and personally give her the most brutal death imaginable for leading them into a death trap.
  • Even the battle music against these Pallidified figures gets in on the horror too, sounding like something out of an actual horror game.
• After leaving the L. Corp branch, Limbus Company is assaulted by a Big Brother of the Middle for stealing his hair coupons, who proceeds to swiftly annihilate the entire cohort without a scratch. It's as absurd as it is terrifying, with Ricardo's beatdown being so brutally one-sided that Dante and even Faust start to despair, as endless resurrection means nothing against a foe so overwhelmingly powerful, especially since their trump card Vergilius is too late to get to them in time. Dante can do nothing but watch as Ricardo eventually tires of slaughtering the Sinners and goes for Dante themself despite Ishmael's enraged pleading, but can't immediately bring themself to self-destruct as Faust instructed, terrified of the prospect of losing everything again.
  • Like Shrenne's death, it goes to show again just how lucky players were to be in the shoes of one of the City's major players in the previous games - the Library was able to handle multiple Index Proxies and Thumb Capi/Sottocapi with relative ease, with them being the rough equivalent of the Middle's Big Brothers/Sisters, and The Black Silence (more specifically, Roland) was able to cripple an entire section of the Middle all by themselves. Yet here, even one is a completely hopeless fight for the Sinners.
  • The fact that Ricardo is classified as an ALEPH in the files is a little scary if you realize what that implies. Ricardo is an ALEPH capable of breaking through whatever Identity Ishmael has equipped, despite getting angry over a petty reason and not even being the Middle's leader. When they said to not mess with the Middle, they meant it.
  • Furthermore, the ability to exploit to 'win' is Test of the Big Brother. When you win clashes against him, the Sinner is the one sent reeling, and each individual clash does not have a pause in between, showing he loses no momentum. Ricardo is screwing with the team, not even going all out, and eventually when he decides the fight is over massacres everybody in one attack.
  • To top this all off, this was over stealing some coupons. If the bar for murder is this low for the Middle, then it's no wonder everybody's terrified of them.
• The Sinners and the Indigo Elder hunt down the Pallid Whale, aggravating smaller Porous Whales (note "smaller" still meaning island-sized) and venturing into a pitch-black lake encroaching into the Outskirts. There, countless whales are sleeping, each so massive that their tails poking out of the water are mistaken for landmasses. Fortunately, the Indigo Elder is able to lure the Whales away before they cause any trouble.
  • The Sinners finally encounter the Pallid Whale itself, a white leviathan so massive that it dwarfs every other whale in the lake. When the Sinners and Indigo Elder approach it, it awakens and stares directly at them with a particularly horrific brand of Black Eyes of Crazy. Of note is how the Pallid Whale is the most normal-looking of the whales seen so far, but it somehow ends up being possibly the most horrific.
  • Limbus Company's plan to retrieve the Golden Bough involving being voluntarily swallowed by the Whale. With how bad the Whale is on the outside, whatever is inside it is surely more horrific.
  • During the entire encounter, Ishmael becomes increasingly aggressive and psychotic, with her personality doing a complete 180 once she sees the Pallid Whale again, bellowing out orders like a ship captain and giddily Laughing Mad at the prospect of attacking it. This is on top of the vision Dante saw of her true desire, namely tearing Captain Ahab's body to bits with her bare hands while wearing a maniacal Slasher Smile.
• And yet while the Whale is horrific inside with an acid that can melt people in minutes and crawling with mermaids... it's Ahab who's the true horror.
  • To start, she constantly gaslights her crew and with her incredible charisma draws them into her delusional quest no matter how sane they are. It's essentially what Carmen did, but on a much smaller scale and minus any possibility of genuine good intentions. It's to the point where it's likened to a Whale turning people into it's Mermaids.
  • She also stabs you in the back and has Queequeq try and off you. While that doesn't work, and the team meets with her again, Dante sees what she did to get there. She has constantly sacrificed crewmates for the slightest reason, and she still goes on about how she gave them purpose.
  • After she loses her first fight, she manifests EGO. And like Dongrang, it's not virtuous in the slightest, as she absorbs Starbuck, Pip, and Queequeg into it, and effectively uses their souls as fuel for her new power, a pallidified harpoon fused to her. It's to the point where it's not even her special moves or skills she's attacking you with, it's the absorbed crew's potential EGOs she stole, as the effects of each phase has a resource literally labeled as such. And to cap it all off, the design and function of each soul rod is similar to how a Claw uses their Serums.
  • The scariest part? Ahab is a realistic villain in a world that usually exaggerates characters' evil characteristics to the point of intentional absurdity. Remove the fantastic whale-hunting, and Ahab's egocentric and destructive behavior becomes disturbingly close to home compared to Kromer's zealotry in Canto III, which makes her horrid actions feel more real and haunting than ridiculous. Shady cults of personality like Ahab's Pequod exist in real-life, and their leaders are often backstabbing, self-serving pricks like her who are willing to sacrifice their own believers and hide entire cabinets of skeletons under their premise of salvation.

Canto VI

• While Hindley being sent to a mental facility as his "inheritance" is funny, we have no idea how M Corp. actually works outside of their moonlight stones, and with a name like "Abyss Trauma Center", it's probably not a pleasant place. But the bigger one is the fact that Cathy booked him a WARP Train there, and you can look at this two ways: either Cathy knows about what happens on the trains and purposefully gave him that ticket to have him suffer 10,000 years of torment as a last bit of revenge, or genuinely has no idea and is unintentionally dooming him out of an earnest desire to help her brother. Even worse, we don't know if it's a first-class seat.
• The entire truth behind the Dead Rabbits is several degrees of And I Must Scream. Imagine being abducted off the streets, subjected to who knows what kind of experiments to synchronize you to the Mirror Worlds, eventually having your own identity completely overridden by someone completely different from a different timeline entirely. Even their boss isn't immune to this, with Mirror!Heathcliff's corpse having long blonde hair that didn't belong to the original. That No-Holds-Barred Beatdown mentioned below? Delivered on someone who was ultimately being controlled by external forces and who for all extents and purposes was completely innocent.
  • With the release of Part 3, this corpse is revealed to be Isabella, Linton's sister, who left her home innocently looking for love, only to be effectively kidnapped, used as a vessel for a malevolent entity from another world, and then beaten to death in the most brutal fashion possible. It's uncertain whether she was chosen to host Mirror Heathcliff at random or Mirror Heathcliff actively chose her just to Kick the Dog further, but considering that Heathcliff in the original book lured Isabella into an abusive relationship just to get revenge on her brother, the latter option wouldn't be unlikely.
• Heathcliff unleashing an extended Extreme Mêlée Revenge using Bodysack on his Mirror counterpart. Unlike Yi Sang or Ishmael using their E.G.O.s in the previous two Cantos, there's no big emotional speech or music swell; just Heathcliff beating his counterpart with Bodysack over, and over, and over in eerie silence as the damage counter gets higher and higher until it outright breaks entirely. And it gets even worse when you remember the person he's beating this severely is himself.
  • The cinematic of Heathcliff using his extended Bodysack E.G.O doubles as nightmare fuel and Five-Second Foreshadowing; once he begins to lay into Heathcliff? in earnest, his damage type turns from Envy to Wrath, the corrosion damage counter appears in the corner, and the background begins to turn red as well before shattering. He's so manic he manages to corrode his base E.G.O; something no other Sinner has done so far.
• Like in the previous game, the concept of Distortions is terrifying. But somehow, the fact that Heathcliff Distorts is even more terrifying, given how wrathful, angry, and emotional Heathcliff gets while fully human. The fact that the game doesn't show you what Heathcliff looks like during the scene where he's talking to Carmen but you hear the noise of breaking bones and skin, and it's the end of Part 2, so for seven days no one knew what form he took, making it worse.
  • The third part of Canto VI reveals what it looks like, and it isn't pretty. Heathcliff the Heartbroken is a gigantic metallic wolf that looks like a cross between the Alleyway Watchdog and the Berserker Armor from Berserk, with a bloody body covered in ragged bandages and skewered by countless metal spikes, and the gory bodysack from his E.G.O. chained to his body.
• During the end cut scene of 6-34, Artwork of Carmen from Lobotomy Corp and Library of Ruina briefly flashes. This counts as CG Art, so your reward for beating that level means that Carmen can now show up on your loading screens. If you didn't catch the flashes the first time, this can be terrifying to randomly see for those who played the other games.
  • Special shot-out to the one CG art where she is staring at the camera in the grass. In Lobotomy Corp, this was the Artwork when she was talking to Ayin about how warm the grass is, and her looking at the camera would have been her looking at Ayin. Instead, she is staring at you, the player. No dialog going on. She is just staring while your game loads with her lightless blood-red eyes.
  • Notably, this is the first time we actually see what Carmen is saying when she talks to someone on the verge of Distortion. And it's... practically nothing. She only asks a few questions and gives a few nudges. All those times we've seen someone talk to her before they Distort? Carmen wasn't giving them any kind of Breaking Speech to make them cross the Despair Event Horizon. They came to that conclusion all on their own.^note  Not to say that Carmen isn't capable of dialogue, as her and Vergilius have an entire back-and-forth before he summons his E.G.O in Leviathan.
• There's something deeply disquieting about how fanatically devoted Linton is to Catherine, even in her passing. Knowing that she truly loved Heathcliff and not him, he became disturbingly dedicated to her, carrying out every one of her requests and even facilitating a human trafficking and experimentation ring out of desperation for even the smallest scraps of affection. This culminates in Linton plugging himself into the machines in Wuthering Heights' basement after his minions are killed, literally melting himself into fleshy sludge so his body and life can be used to further Catherine's scheme. Ishmael, who is no stranger to fanatical obsession, is horrified by the lengths Linton goes for a woman who never truly loved him back.
  • Aseah mentions that Linton turned himself into something close to a "pure human", which serves as the perfect template to impose an Identity onto, no matter how detached the identity is from the original consciousness. Who is the Identity imposed onto Linton this time? Mirror Heathcliff, who not only returns, but has been elevated to his full power due to Linton providing an ideal catalyst.
• The Wild Hunt. Using his domination over the Wuthering Heights in countless worlds, Erlking Heathcliff summons thralls of countless Hindleys, Lintons, Josephines, and Peccatula who were slain in their worlds and enslaved to the will of the Erlking, complete with Glowing Eyes of Doom as they swarm the Sinners. It's only thanks to Vergilius' timely intervention that the Sinners escape to pursue Erlking Heathcliff.
  • On the topic of Vergilius, getting to see him in action since dismembering Lion and Wolf all the way back in the prologue can be rather scary no matter how badass it is, as he demonstrates precisely why he's a Color Fixer, and as Roland describes him, the most dangerous one of the lot, when he joins the battle against the Wild Hunt. Every single numerical value you can find upon examining his profile in combat are only denoted as "?" or "???" besides his skills' attack weights and coin counts, and he's packing NINE skills, all Wrath affinity, across both his base form and after he activates his E.G.O, EIGHT passives, and will similarly inflict "???" damage every time he strikes, turning whatever he's hitting into paste no matter what. And when he clears a path for the Sinners to chase Erlking Heathcliff, he'll use his E.G.O to impale an entire horde of enemies with spears of blood, before reducing them all to bloody giblets with one last spear throw. You will never want to cross a Color Fixer ever again after seeing Vergilius take the field.
• Those who were expecting Cathy to be Evil All Along or completely off her rocker by the end of the chapter may be surprised when this world's Cathy turns out to be (relatively) sane. Enter Every Catherine, seemingly the culmination of every Catherine in every world that has been driven completely mad by grief after realizing that Heathcliff can never be happy as long as she exists, with Cathy's original plan being to take on their Identity using her body, so that Every Catherine could kill every Cathy in every world, a plan just as insane as the Erlking that she's working with. Even when Cathy has second thoughts and botches the summoning, Every Catherine still manages to manifest as a constantly screaming, ghastly pale specter of her original self, and is fought as the Final Boss alongside the Erlking.

Intervallos

Intervallo I

• Hell's Chicken might be a silly story, with the Sinners having a comically disastrous cooking contest and the primary "enemy" being a Distortion of a chicken-headed man who commands headless chickens. However, even a Distortion as relatively harmless and goofy as Papa Bongy is still dangerous to the populace at large, with his chickens sending multiple people running and screaming as they get killed and have their bodies hijacked.

Intervallo II

• As if to remind everyone that this is the City, U Corp.'s waterfront is a beautiful beach with blue skies and a glittering sea — if you're in the Nest. The Backstreet's, on the other hand, is worse than a dump, with trash heaped everywhere, water that looks like sewage, and swarmed with large, hostile crabs that will attack people on sight. However, that's not all — the Nest's beach is divided from the Backstreet's with an invisible plasma barrier that obliterates anything that comes into contact with it, as the Sinners realize upon seeing their volleyball get reduced to scraps by it. And as Rodya points out, there shouldn't be anything stopping the Nest's technology from simply causing any would-be intruder to disappear completely instead of leaving behind a shredded mess, meaning it only functions that way so the wealthy inhabitants of the Nest can have a laugh seeing unsuspecting Backstreet dwellers get gruesomely killed trying to trespass.
• Ishmael's increasingly neurotic and panicked state as the story progresses is more than a little unsettling. While she doesn't make her sheer dread immediately apparent, she steadily grows more and more unstable as she desperately tries to make everyone reconsider heading into the Great Lake, believing they'd all be killed without at least six months of time to prepare and get stronger, and even implores Dante to help her convince Vergilius of all people to go after another Golden Bough instead. It ultimately culminates in her getting into a nasty argument with Heathcliff that quickly turns violent, ending with Ishmael about to bash in his skull in a fit of neurotic wrath. Afterwards, Vergilius says he's only barely capable of keeping her in line after having a "talk" with her about her brawl with Heathcliff — even he is just a little bit scarier than whatever she had to endure out there.
  • Ishmael's description of the Great Lake itself. The Lake is apparently plagued with all kinds of natural disasters (among which are typhoons of acid), death was so omnipresent that she could look away for just a moment and her crewmate would be dead, and everyone gets driven insane and transformed by something. And then there's Dante's brief vision of Ishmael's past on the boat — bloodied and terrified, gripping the boat for dear life with a harpoon in hand, and in a storm that is shredding people's flesh and limbs off. And during all of it, there's a colossal eye looming over the ship and staring right at her. Say hello to Moby.

Intervallo III

• Remember how, at the top of the page, we mentioned how much of an atrocious place The City is? The Outskirts, the area directly outside of the city, is worse. We still don't know much about The Outskirts, but a place where gnomes hunt down humans, literally disassemble them, turn them into toys, and distribute them to other sentient races of The Outskirts sounds like a living nightmare. And that's not to mention the non-sentient monsters.

Intervallo IV

• At one point, the Sinners run into larger versions of the Peccatula, specifically Irae and Morositasis. They start to discuss what the Peccatula are and why they seem to be getting stronger as more Golden Boughs are collected, which caused Dante to snap into a frightening ramble about Sin and E.G.O. which was mostly blocked out. At this point, it became apparent that the fire on Dante's clock was growing dangerously hot, with the Sinners worrying that their self-destruct sequence might go off on its own. They were able to get Dante to calm down from this panic (which they couldn't remember), but since they couldn't understand why this happened, the Sinners had no choice but to not bring it up again for the rest of the Intervallo.
  Dante: And in a world perceived through their own █████ ██ ███ ████████ ███ ███ ██████, the ███████ shall be unveiled: to █████ their egos ███ ████████... ██ ██ melt into ███ █████ by ████████ ████ ██ ████ ██████ ██████ of sin... Only those who define their own ████... Only those who are awakened to their own █████...

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