Nightmare Fuel / Overwatch

Despite its cheerful and utopian environment, Overwatch carries a rather dark and seedy underbelly that can get right under your skin when you least expect it.

As per Nightmare Fuel guidelines, all spoilers below are unmarked!

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General Lore

• The Omnic Crisis. You wonder why people distrust Omnics so much and just can't put aside their petty grievances? Well, for starters, Omnics were built by Omniums - huge, self-operating factories that produced everything from basic construction to state-of-the-art military robots. There were several Omniums, at least one in every continent, possibly more. Originally Omnics were just subservient robots, created to make life easier and to bring about a new industrial and economic golden age. For a time, this was good. However, over time the Omniums developed "faults" and fell severely short of what the Omnica Corporation - the company that designed & made the Omniums - had promised. The Omniums were shut down as the corporation that owned them went under. For reasons unknown the Omniums somehow reactivated themselves and just started a war of extermination against humankind, churning out Bastion units and other monstrosities at alarming rates. The Omnic Crisis wasn't something that happened "out of sight, out of mind", anyone alive during the Omnic Crisis would remember seeing robots slaughtering innocent people; man, woman and child. This was happening everywhere, in the streets of your hometown, possibly even next door to you. The human armies were about evenly matched with no obvious technological superiority against the Omnics, so at best they could fight the Omnics to a standstill, but that wasn't nearly always the case. This was one of the reasons that Overwatch was founded - to find a way to neutralize and contain the threat of the Omnics for good. So when you think about the Omnic Crisis, think about the battle scenes from the Terminator movies - merciless, never-tiring, and nearly endless armies of machines out for your blood (with, as seen in the flashbacks in "The Last Bastion", airlifts like assembly lines delivering reinforcements to the battlefield). Countless cities and whole countries (including Australia) were nearly completely decimated after the war, and thus people have ample reasons to hate Omnics and be distrustful of them, particularly those who were around the time it happened.
  • The novel Sojourn provides a ground-level experience for how the Omnic Crisis began: one night like any other, you're visiting an amusement park with your sister and niece, accompanied by an omnic nanny and surrounded by several other omnic workers. Then, within seconds, every one of them is trying to kill you. All those charming robots that you largely trust as loyal workers and perhaps human-adjacent kin are now the purest definition of killer robots — even that omnic nanny is now dragging the child she was just taking care of to a lake and begins drowning her. Sojourn and her family barely manage to make it out in part thanks to her combat background, and even she ends up blacking out before she can properly save her niece. When she wakes up, Toronto is in chaos, the Canadian Armed Forces has lost 5% of their entire manpower in a single night, and just like that, the world they once knew is gone forever — and that's just how the war starts.
• Even worse is that the Crisis wasn't any easier for the Omnics. Anubis overrode the core programming of all Omnics.
• For a peacekeeping organization, it can be rather disturbing to know that many Overwatch personnel let Blackwatch's gruesome activities happen within their walls for so long, either out of ignorance or because they saw it as a Necessarily Evil and willingly turned a blind eye for the greater good.
• Talon. They're a worldwide terrorist organization with enough technology to rival that of Overwatch. They use that to kill innocent people and have enough connections to ensure that they can get away with it. They've made it their goal to spark the fires of war across the world, and if it means having to assassinate peaceful leaders to cause a crisis, then they will make it happen. The scariest part, however, is that if they want you to join them, you WILL join. If that means kidnapping you, putting you through an extensive process of torture and abuse to break your will, then neurally reconditioning you into killing your closest loved one, then so be it. This is what became of Amélie Lacroix, the harmless civilian wife of Overwatch agent Gérard Lacroix, who now serves as their top assassin after going through this "program". Whatever it took to break her, it must've been brutal, as the details have been scarce and probably wouldn't be appropriate for a T-rated game. Just the sheer fact that they can subject this Fate Worse than Death on anyone makes Talon truly terrifying.
• The Vishkar Corporation. It has power rivaling a government, sometimes kills its rivals, and has the authority to essentially kidnap children from their homes, especially if said children have talents they can exploit to increase their profits. They also have the ability to forcibly take over poor neighborhoods and run them like police states like they once did to Lúcio's in his backstory, and they will go out and destroy your homes if you don't accept their changes, not even caring if people die for the sake of maintaining "order". And oh, if you refuse their "improvements", they'll either secretly destroy your home so they'll come swooping in to save the day when you find your house wrecked and decide to call for their help, or outright destroy your home and improve it anyway so you'll have no choice but to accept their offer. Their practices are so callous that Symmetra, one of their most talented employees, starts doubting if working for them was a good idea. And they justify their horrible, horrible actions with the excuse that it's for everyone's own good, even using More than Mind Control on their employees to push them into following their beliefs. It's surprising how they managed to escape comeuppance since the stuff they pull would've caught attention quickly.
• Winston's backstory has those rampaging gorillas in the moon colony where he used to live as a child. Said gorillas were genetically enhanced to increase their intelligence and give them human-like capabilities, but when they saw Winston being given special treatment for being smarter than them, they developed a hatred for humanity and well, they went apeshit. The thing is, they didn't just take over, they murdered the human scientists including Winston's adoptive human father Dr. Harold Winston, and Winston himself narrowly escaped with his life.
• According to D.Va's backstory, there's a giant Omnic in the waters outside South Korea. Every few years or so, it rises and attempts to burn the whole countryside and surrounding areas down. Its shape and form is different every time, it learns from its mistakes, and recently it managed to disrupt or even fully hack the mini-mechas specifically designed to fight against it, forcing the South Korean military to scrap the autonomous design and go for piloted versions. It's essentially a mechanical Kaiju.
• Even though relations between humans and Omnics are looking very hopeful (ex. Numbani has the two co-existing peacefully), the Fantastic Racism still runs deep due to the kerfuffle that is the Omnic Crisis. Despite the presence of good and heroic Omnics such as the playable Zenyatta, some people (like Zarya and Roadhog) still believe that all Omnics are evil, destructive monsters and feel sickened by the very thought of co-existence with them.

Characters

• Reaper may be Nightmare Fuel incarnate. One, he's dressed up like the Grim Reaper, only he wields dual shotguns instead of a scythe. Two, in the cinematic trailer, he didn't have qualms about attacking Tracer and Winston in a public area where there could be children around. Three, how he kills his victims is as stated in his profile: "The few bodies recovered of those he kills are pale, empty husks drained of life, their cells showing signs of intense degradation." Brr. Four, he moves and acts like a wraith; he could pop up behind you unawares, and the only clue that he's there is his evil laughter before he shoots you dead. He can teleport and become intangible.
  • He also has the ability to come back from seemingly fatal injuries through From a Single Cell. However, it's a double-edged sword - if something kills him, no problem! He'll just go back to being Reaper and filling his enemies with bullets in a matter of minutes. The bad part comes in the form of having a severely screwed-up body where cells constantly die and regenerate, ensuring that every time Reaper revives himself, he will experience excruciating pain. A respawning voice line indicates that he acknowledges it as being Cursed with Awesome, but at the same time, he's not happy about having it either.
    Reaper: This is my curse.
  • According to Moira's origin story, she was the one who gave him these powers through genetic alteration.
  • When Ana sees his face in the comic Old Soldiers, she's horrified. As a reminder, Ana is a veteran that's fought for decades and has likely seen a lot of awful things, and she's still horrified. Doesn't imply good things about what happened to him.
  • As more information on Reaper's backstory is revealed, we learn that he was once Gabriel Reyes, a member of a legendary strike team that would become Overwatch. But the lack of fame and attention for his deeds in the Omnic Crisis and his career as an Overwatch agent drove him to betray his own teammates and organization out of spiteful jealousy. Which brings this question to mind: How long had Jack Morrison and Reaper's fellow teammates been ignoring his feelings of jealousy and resentment? Were they ignorant the whole time, or did they know all along but ignored it on purpose, prioritizing global safety over one man's emotional health? Judging by Overwatch's destruction and fall into infamy, it can be safe to assume that things got pretty bad enough to make Reaper want to wipe his former organization off the face of the Earth along with any chance of former members reviving it.
  • And one more? Reaper is a member of Talon. What makes him more terrifying is that, unlike Widowmaker who had to be severely conditioned to be loyal, Reaper has no such excuse - their goals align, to hell with morals, he's in. His only apparent complaint is that his method of reviving himself kind of hurts, but aside from that, he's wholeheartedly friends with such a terrifying terrorist organization.
    • Though it's also suggested on the Tear Jerker page for Overwatch that the constant pain he may feel from regenerating may have been so bad that he joined Talon just to make it stop.
    • What in God's name did Reaper do in Blackwatch? The fact that Blackwatch was a sister black ops branch of Overwatch was bad enough. The fact that, apparently, Blackwatch's activities helped destroy public opinion of Overwatch was also bad enough. But what's worse is that as Gabriel Reyes, he apparently did something ...or enough things... that even McCree, a former arms dealer and gang member, was disgusted by him.
    • Retribution sheds some light on one of possibly many things that Reyes did as head of Blackwatch: killing his targets without just cause. All it took was one small "The Reason You Suck" Speech to make Reyes snap and kill Talon agent Antonio in cold blood. And to top it all off, Antonio's calm tone throughout the encounter gives heavy implications that Talon set the entire scenario up, having been one step ahead of Overwatch the entire time. Reyes not only killed out of anger but also a damaged ego.
  • The Fridge Horror page posits something even darker. Him being so edgy and over the top? Gravelly voice, dramatic costume? He's basically every edgy emo teenager or wannabe school shooter, but with the skill, firepower, and connections to make his fantasy of ultra-violence come true. And worse? Reaper is too smart to not know that people acting and looking this way were perceived as dangerous, such as the Columbine shooters. He's copying them.
• Everything about Widowmaker's backstory. Imagine being a harmless civilian, only to be kidnapped, and tortured until your will is broken, experimented on, and neurally reconditioned into being a living weapon, all for the sake of murdering your closest loved one. That's what became of Amélie Lacroix, the wife of prominent Overwatch agent Gérard Lacroix, who thwarted the plans of terrorist organization Talon at every turn, so they made her into their assassin just to kill him. It's hinted that the old Amélie still exists on some level and that she is at least partially aware of what she has done, and wishes she could die. Truly a Fate Worse than Death, as even if the old Amélie were ever revived, she would have to live with the guilt of murdering so many people in cold blood, the first being her own husband, followed by countless others.
  • Widowmaker herself. The fact that she was once a harmless Nice Girl could actually amplify how scary she can be now. She is a cold-blooded murderer who has killed a great number of innocent people — while enjoying every moment of it. So far, almost everything she's done has been completed with frightening effectiveness. She has also yet to show much in the way of humanity. While she will try to focus on the mission at hand and not attack a non-target unless provoked, she has no problem doing so if push comes to shove. When a teenager less than half her age got in her way, she didn't even hesitate to aim her weapon at him. Her character can be described as extremely tragic yet terrifying at the same time.
  • Moira's reveal puts Widowmaker's situation in a whole new terrifying perspective. Moira is a Mad Scientist who enjoys enhancing people on a genetic level. With this in mind, remember that Widowmaker has been considerably altered to the point where she can hardly be considered human anymore. It is all but confirmed that Moira is the one who transformed her, and possibly even rewrote her personality.
  • Overwatch 2 adds more fuel to the fire through her and Moira's interactions with each other. Although it's all but stated that Widowmaker is getting some of her emotions back, Moira seems to press her constantly about whether or not she has regained them. Widowmaker claims the notion is ridiculous, but the instant Moira mentions "getting ideas" about her loyalties to Talon, she suddenly and hastily says "No. Never." While Widowmaker may work with Moira and respect her as a Talon colleague to some extent in the current time, she very clearly fears her as the one who turned her into what she is now and as the one holding the proverbial leash on her, only keeping up appearances because disobedience could lead Moira to do even worse things to her in order to reset her back into a truly emotionless killer, instead of her being allowed to take some form of revelry in her new life as a Talon operative. It's just as twisted and horribly abusive as one could imagine.
• Sombra is this, despite or perhaps even because she's Faux Affably Evil. Her chase of Katya Volskaya shows that she's frightfully good at improvising, and a terror in combat. The worst of it comes from her Thermoptic Camo, which allows her to sneak into Katya's Panic Room without anyone noticing and dispatch both of her guards in mere seconds. And that's not even getting into the fact that she's a master of digging up blackmail on just about anyone, allowing her to convince Katya to be her "friend" before escaping using a Translocator she'd placed earlier to escape her guards. Also, there's the fact that she's willingly on the side of evil. Whereas Widowmaker had to go through intense brainwashing in order to join up with the bad guys, Sombra does everything she does out of her own accord, while taking pleasure in doing so.
  • Also, the "Boop" thing that Sombra does to Katya when she leaves? Remember how cute that made her look? Someone on Tumblr noticed that's something that Katya does with her daughter. Yeah. Not so cute now, is it?
  • Adding to that, Sombra is "willingly on the side of evil" because she sees it as the best way to unearth The Conspiracy that has already put its hooks into both Talon and Overwatch and forced her to go underground and totally change her appearance when she accidentally stumbled across it... which is nightmare fuel in and of itself.
• As goofy as Torbjörn can look normally, Overload lets him superheat his entire body to become a difficult-to-hit firey demon of a man◊.
• Soldier: 76 is no slouch either. Originally an Ideal Hero, Overwatch's fall into disgrace and destruction, as well as his "death", turned him into a cynical Well-Intentioned Extremist obsessed with catching the people responsible. What's more, 76's real name is John Francis "Jack" Morrison, the once-celebrated Overwatch hero and leader. After the conflict with his former best friend, Gabriel Reyes (who would soon become Reaper), and Overwatch's destruction, Jack became disillusioned at this turn of events and intended to uncover the truth behind Overwatch's fall, no matter the cost, how many rules he has to break, and what brutal methods he has to use. Likewise, he starts to use violent methods of dealing with criminals, and he has zero qualms about killing them if it means ridding a city of their influence. Doesn’t help that he embodies Good Is Not Nice. It's what happens when you realize how much trauma he has been put through.
• What happened to Tracer pre-Overwatch could send chills down your spine. Imagine becoming a ghost, unable to interact with your surroundings and never knowing how long you might disappear. If Winston hadn't fixed her "problem", Tracer could disappear for good. What's worse, Tracer probably had friends and family, so if Tracer "died", they'll probably be sent into a state of grief never knowing what happened to her along with how and why she just suddenly vanished one day and never came back.
• How did Ana get that eyepatch? She was shot by Widowmaker in the eye.
• Doomfist. For several reasons.
  • Before he got sent to prison, he took on Winston, Genji, and Tracer while barely moving, easily downing Genji and even able to grab Tracer midfight, having timed things out to grab the back of the Chronal Accelerator and tear it out, effectively destroying it. Only Winston in his Primal Rage is able to stop him.
  • At the present time, when he sensed that the time had come for him to return, he had simply punched his way out of his prison cell with his single bare-yet-to-be-reequipped with his gauntlet hand, busting a gigantic hole through the cell door.
  • He then engaged with the newly unveiled OR15 defense robots, bare hands. The end result is one-sided, with Numbani's first attack spawn being utterly trashed. Scrapped defense robots lie destroyed on the ground, and one lies in a giant crater in the wall. All the while civilians are nearby, including an 11-year-old Efi Oladele.
  • Then he stole his gauntlet back. The thing that can level skyscrapers and is the reason for Payload escorts in the Numbani map.
  • Did we mention that he is a leader of Talon, and he got both the Gauntlet and his position by killing Doomfist II? And that his goal is to plunge the entire world into conflict, sincerely believing in Social Darwinism? His belief that humanity will grow stronger through war is a mixture of Talon's ideals and his own experiences. This is a man who's mastered two forms of martial arts, beat every tournament he was in, all while doing so as a hobby. He seems very disconnected from the norms of the human species.
  • To top it all off, Word of God says that Talon is going to be more effective now that he's back.
  • Overwatch 2 adds some more horrifying details about Doomfist's actions as a Talon leader. Remember his rivalry with Efi Oladele and Orisa? Yeah, it turns out that it's a lot more personal than initially believed: Doomfist corrupted Efi's cousin Sibi, manipulating him into becoming a Talon soldier, and then left him to rot in prison. There's also this interaction with Hanzo.
    Doomfist: The Shimada could rise again, if you so choose.
    Hanzo: There is nothing to that name, but pain.
    Doomfist: Pain...and a sleeping dragon. Wake. Him. Up.
• Roadhog is a huge, anarchistic murderer with a deep, distorted voice. And he's the only playable character in Overwatch who's NEVER shown his face. We've never seen Reaper's current face, but we've seen how he looked when he was Gabriel Reyes. Not Roadhog. Not to mention how he calls his enemies "little piggies". His play style is also horrifying, as it amplifies how sadistic he is; he's grabbing opponents and dragging them to him (the hook can also impale the target), then when they are face-to-face with Roadhog, he shoots them at point-blank range, presumably while they are in shock and screaming before and after being murdered, letting out an Evil Laugh as he marches off to find his next victim.
• Moira's entire characterization. She's one of the world's greatest scientific minds. There's just one problem: she's a Mad Scientist willing to do anything for the sake of furthering human evolution. She can and will use whoever she can get her hands on in order to experiment on them and enhance them. She did this to her former colleague Gabriel Reyes, having a hand in turning him into the being known as Reaper, and it's also very likely that she is also the one who created Widowmaker, as Moira has the smarts and the means to completely change people on a cellular level, directly altering their DNA.
  • Almost every character in the game has a tragic backstory that gives them some sort of redeeming quality, no matter how evil they are. Moira? She has none of those. She performs unethical acts with absolutely zero remorse and is completely unconcerned with the very concepts of good and evil. This makes her one of the most terrifying and downright monstrous characters in the game.
  • Even more horrifying is Moira's "Self-Experimentation" spray, which blatantly shows that her own methods are horrifically painful, and yet she seems to have absolutely no regrets or qualms with doing it again to someone else. It makes you wonder what else she could do, given sufficient time and funding...
  • Look into her skin, and you find out she's a Minister of Genetics for Oasis. That means Talon is manipulating the government already...
  • Moira's animations during the title screen. Like other heroes, she’s looking at you, the player. Unlike the other heroes, she doesn’t look focused or confident, but disinterested. She shows more interest in examining her biotic orb, smiling even, but when she looks back at the player, she just stares blankly. Taking what’s known about her or her voicelines into consideration, she probably thinks very little of the player and people in general unless they're the subject of her experiments.
• Sigma is shaping up the be the most terrifying character released yet. Once an eccentric but well-meaning astrophysicist studying gravity, what was to be his breakthrough experiment went horribly wrong and he was critically injured in the ensuing accident. He survived, but a covert government agency took custody of both him and his research, imprisoning him within a secure facility and labeling him "Subject Sigma". It turns out that the accident not only gave him the ability to control gravity itself, but it also shattered his mind into fragments, leaving him dangerously unstable and insane. Talon caught wind of his existence and decided to free him from his imprisonment. Now he works for them, hoping to control his newfound powers, but due to no longer being in his right mind, he is blissfully unaware that he is working for an evil terrorist organization that wishes to use his research for less-than-ethical purposes.
  • His entire origin short is an unnerving mind-screw from start to finish, to the point where it would make the perfect horror movie trailer. Typically, new heroes inform the audience of their backstories and motivations from their perspective in their origin stories. Sigma seemingly starts off like this in the first few seconds... then it quickly becomes clear that he's not telling his story; it is happening to him. His character image and his very perspective constantly switches from him beginning his gravitation experiment, to that experiment going wrong, to him being carted through a hallway lying in a comatose state in handcuffs and a prison jumpsuit while fully conscious, to short glimpses of him unleashing untold violence as a villain. What exactly had happened to him is left ambiguous, but the point is clear; he is trapped in his own mind, he's steadily losing his sanity, and is completely terrified throughout the entire thing.
  • What arguably makes Sigma's backstory worse than, say, Reaper's or even Widowmaker's is that, from the looks of things, his fractured mind isn't the result of Talon's handiwork — he just...broke thanks to whatever the hell happened in that failed experiment of his; Talon hardly had to lift a finger to recruit him to their cause — they simply recognized the opportunity a newly-insane scientist presented and swooped in to take it. Ignoring for a moment the sci-fi aspect of Sigma's accident, the idea of a good, well-meaning person suddenly going through a horrific, mind-ruining accident and just... never being the same again is terrifying in a very realistic way — plenty of poor people in real life have gone through exactly that.
  • Just the fact that he's a villain. Not just the deadly power he wields in comparison to other heroes, but how his personality appears to be as of now. Most of the origin short showed Sigma from his perspective panicking throughout before and after the incident, while there were only brief flashes and few amounts of dialogue from his new villainous persona shown, who appears to be menacing, calm, and in control of himself rather than the mentally damaged victim of an experiment gone wrong presented in most of the short. What's going on in his head now?
• Rammatra may have a tragic backstory, but that doesn't change the fact that he is still a war machine at heart, nor does it change the fact that he's currently the leader of Null Sector, an extremist Omnic organization hellbent on securing a future for their kind, even if it costs the lives and livelihoods of humans in order to do so. Worse? He's an ally of Doomfist's, meaning Null Sector is now subservient to Talon alongside other enterprises like Vishkar.
  • Affably Evil though he may be, Ramattra is solely fueled by his rage and grief at his people's suffering and all that untempered fury has turned him dangerously insane. Case in point, in "Rammatra: Reflections", it's revealed that he was the one behind the Uprising event. Null Sector was once a group with many members leading the charge alongside Ramattra until the day Ramattra planned to take an omnium in King's Row and use it to create a robotic army to strike back at humanity, letting them know that the organization meant business. The other leaders all objected to the plan, under the pretense that the omnics that would be created by the omnium would be significantly out of date, and they would effectively be created just to die. Ramattra refused to listen to them, and sure enough, Overwatch not only soundly defeated him, but killed one of the other Null Sector leaders who chose to battle alongside his forces. In the wake of his wrath and indignation at his own failure, the others realized Ramattra's growing madness would end up hurting not only human-Omnic relations but also himself. Unable to watch someone who was once their friend do this to himself anymore, the other leaders left Null Sector. And Ramattra continued on alone, a one-man crusade who will make a peaceful world for omnics, whether they like it or not.
• Mauga may seem like a laid back guy, but that nonchalant attitude only serves to make his atrocities all the more disturbing, especially compared to the rest of Talon. While Widowmaker and Sigma have both succumbed to Talon's manipulations, Doomfist and Moira believe their actions serve some kind of greater good, Sombra has her own mysterious agenda, and Reaper wants revenge on a world he believes has wronged him, Mauga has no apparent reason to murder, steal, and destroy other than the fact that he enjoys every second of it.

Gameplay

• King's Row is a payload map where one team is escorting a truck with some sort of device to its goal. What is the device? An EMP generator designed to kill a camp of Omnics below the delivery point. Have fun.
  • Adding on to that, it's specifically an EMP bomb, which are very nondiscriminatory in what's affected within the blast radius. Better hope there's no hospitals or people with pacemakers nearby...
  • And guess what? You're the one responsible for bringing it in the first place. You Omnic-hating bastard.
  • And you can play as Bastion or Zenyatta while doing so. Not only are you forcing them to kill their own people, they're going to die when it goes off, too.
• Crossing over with Awesome, when Reaper kills 76, he says a chilling one-liner full of Tranquil Fury... and, if you haven't bought the Origins skin, one hell of a Wham Line...
  "This is how it should have been."
• Winston's Primal Rage ultimate briefly reduces him to his hostile primal instincts, turning him from a gorilla who can speak human languages and perform scientific duties into a roaring, terrifying monster with Glowing Eyes of Doom who will stop at nothing to beat his opponents into a pulp. Even Winston himself seems completely terrified of reverting to his baser instincts once he returns to normal, as well as the consequences every time he uses his ult. For extra unsettling points, remember the gorillas who took over the human colony on the moon in Winston's backstory? Winston was shown to be terrifying whenever he uses his ult (as Reaper found out in the cinematic trailer). To gain a sense of understanding how destructive the moon gorillas can be, imagine a group of Winstons in constant Primal Rage mode. With none of his morals, restraint, or empathy. Or his love for humans. Or his desires to be a hero and fight alongside his friends and mentors to make the world a better place. Who happens to be genetically enhanced AND in control of an entire moon colony with resources we know nothing about. Sleep tight...
• Throughout the King's Row map, there's a lot of Omnic-phobic graffiti across the walls, such as "OMNICS STAY UNDERGROUND", "NOT HUMAN" sprayed over an "Equal rights for Omnics" poster, and "SCRAP ALL ROBOTS". Awfully chilling when you consider real-life cases of racism and other forms of bigotry. Even some heroes who are Omnic-phobic such as Torbjörn would praise it.
  Torbjörn: If you ask me, the Brits have their heads on straight! Omnic rights? Pah!
  • What makes this worse? Apparently, King's Row wasn't like that before. There had been efforts to make the place acceptable for Omnics, but thanks to Widowmaker and ultimately Talon, any hopes of peace between humans and Omnics were effectively squashed and as a result, King's Row became an absolute hellhole for Omnics.
  • On a similar note, putting Omnic-phobic heroes such as Torbjörn, Zarya, or Junkrat in the Numbani map will cause them to react very negatively because it is a civilization where peaceful human-Omnic relations are the norm. Torbjörn lets out a Rapid-Fire "No!", while Junkrat proposes turning it into yet another anarchic wasteland. Zarya, while less extreme, sees Numbani's human population as foolish and believes their efforts in racial integration will backfire.
• Mei has earned her reputation as a Memetic Psychopath for a very good reason. Before her rework in Overwatch 2, her Endothermic Blaster allowed her to freeze her opponents solid, which renders them immobile and vulnerable to attacks from her and her teammates. If the frozen player's team fails to intervene, they'll most likely die in seconds. What's worse is her ability to separate players from the group with Ice Walls. For most Heroes, being caught by her in a tight space and trapped with an Ice Wall is practically a death sentence.
• Ana's "Nano Boost", which amplifies the defensive and offensive power of whoever is targeted by the Ultimate. Recall that there's no small list of heroes in Overwatch whose own Ultimates amplify their own stats, so two players can stack Nano Boost with another Ultimate, and turn the recipient into a God Of Destruction. If you hear and see Ana's Ult trigger, immediately followed by, say, Soldier 76's "Tactical Visor", pray to God.
  • To further add to the terrifying combination of ultimates, Lucio can also speed-boost the Nanoboosted Target. This has produced horrifying yet strangely visually humorous sights such as Reaper reaping at the speed of sound.
  • Until the patch that removed the speed boost, Ana Nano-Boosting Reinhardt was one of the worst things you could possibly hear, due to the Nano-Boost turning the Mighty Glacier into a nigh-indestructible Lightning Bruiser with horrendous damage per second:
    Ana: Warihum qutuk!
    Reinhardt: ARE YOU READY? HERE I COME!!
• One of Roadhog's primary abilities, Chain Hook, stuns and grabs a target into Scrap Gun meatshot range. Not only is being ambushed by a Chain Hook a huge jumpscare but many fragile characters such as Hanzo and Tracer can also be killed instantly with a single Scrap Gun shot without any time to return fire or dodge.
• Zenyatta's Orb of Discord ability attaches a purple orb to an opponent which causes internal doubt and chaos, making them 30% more vulnerable to damage. There's just something creepy about Zenyatta knowing the struggles that every character faces and using it as a weapon against them.
  • This gets even worse when you realize how many characters have suffered from horrifying events in their past (Winston watching other gorillas murder the human scientists, Hanzo being forced to murder Genji (this counts for Genji as well), Mei being in cryostasis for 9 years straight and losing her colleagues in the process, and Bastion (who ALREADY suffers from PTSD) living through the Omnic Crisis), and that the Orb of Discord would likely force these traumatic memories to resurface in their minds.
  • Also, remember that Zenyatta has been Genji's teacher, gently helping him out of the self-loathing brought on by his cyborg body. He knows the doubts that plague Genji because Genji trusted him enough to share them with him. Now he uses that trust as a weapon against Genji.
    "I know the doubts that plague you." (when used on Genji)
  • His right-click is also something to be feared if the player is particularly good at aiming with it, especially if Zen managed to put the Orb of Discord just before all of the orbs hit you. A Zenyatta who is good at this is practically a support DPS/sniper, capable of eliminating almost every hero with a single or multiple accurate volley(s). This is best exemplified with pro player JJoNak from Overwatch League, whose incredible game sense, aim tracking, and mechanical skill allows him to pump out ridiculous◊ amount◊ of◊ damage and eliminations as Zenyatta, most of which contributed to his amazing use of Zen's right-click volley.
• There is something slightly unnerving about the fact that out of all the R.I.P. victory poses, Reaper is the only one to crawl out of his grave.
• King's Row features the "fake window"; a window that shows a room when viewed from the outside, yet when you go into the room, not only are the contents of the room significantly different from what the window shows, but from the inside, the window isn't there. Whether it's a Special Effect Failure or intentional, it's quite spooky when you notice it. A milder, but still rather spooky variant of the false window also appears on Oasis's Garden sub-map. The fake window on Oasis looks more like the kind of actual fake window that might be installed on a building in real life to give it a certain look. Considering the apparent wealth of Oasis, it wouldn't be out of place for them to include false details in their buildings like that. There still isn't any explanation for the King's Row example other than the supernatural, but considering the overall feel of that map it somewhat fits.
• The otherwise-peppy D.Va has one particularly chilling respawn line: "I'm too young to die!" While it's probably meant to be a badass Determinator one-liner, it also brings to mind the fact that she's only 19 years old, only a third as old as Overwatch veterans Reinhardt and Ana, and yet she was conscripted into military front lines where her death was very much a possibility.
• Sombra's Hack ability seems like it would only work on technology such as Bastion, Zenyatta, D.Va's mech, Torbjörn's turret, and Reinhardt's shield. Yet somehow, it can also prevent enemies from doing things that strictly involve their bodies, such as Junkrat throwing his Concussion Mine and Soldier: 76's sprinting. Just what exactly is her Hack ability? Also consider human characters with cybernetic implants such as McCree's left arm or worse, Genji, who is mostly cyborg; it's possible she has the skill to render the latter a helpless-but-conscious hunk of metal.
  • It's especially a nightmare for a Tracer, who's a Fragile Speedster who's mostly dependent on her ability. Take the speedster part out in the middle of a fight and then she's just fragile.
  • It's same for heroes that have shields to make up their health (Zenyatta, Symmetra, and Zarya). Sombra's EMP can shut them off and leave the former two with even less health than Tracer. When it comes to Junkrat's concussion mine, it's very obviously activated by a remote detonator, so it could just be Sombra jamming the signal so it would be useless to throw one because he wouldn't be able to detonate it.
  • Even putting aside from her Hack and her personality aside, she's Paranoia Fuel incarnate. Her Stealth gives her invisibility and enhanced speed, her Translacator instantly teleports her to where she set it. She could be anywhere on the map. While she doesn't do much wide spread damage to the enemy team on her own, her machine pistol is still enough to pick off individual targets, tanks included if she hits them with every shot. What's worse is her Opportunist passive ability, which lets her see Critically injured heroes through walls. So even if she doesn't manage to kill you, she'll still come back, hunt you down and finish you off as you look for either a healer or a health pack... which might be hacked.
    Sombra: Been here all along...
• Any sort of 1v1 match. The chaotic and fun firefight becomes a tense, paranoid bout of looking around constantly for red outlines, worried your singular foe could pop out from behind any wall, with no one to watch your back. Especially if it's the Mystery Duel in Antarctica, which is a confined and almost mazelike area with no safe spots and no healing items, complete with a creepy atmosphere...
  • Even 3v3 Elimination is not safe from this. "All teammates eliminated!" Even worse if this happens without you hearing "Enemy eliminated!" at least once, as it's now you versus three enemies who can easily gang up on you or ambush you and finish the job.
  • The anniversary update makes it worse by adding the loud siren sound effect to these modes, playing whenever you or a teammate is eliminated. Duel with its "your opponent can be anywhere waiting to snipe you in one hit" nature becomes a tad more terrifying.
• Symmetra's Sentry Turrets and Photon Projector sound less like Frickin' Laser Beams and more like they're microwaves. The sound of either chipping away at your HP can feel as if you're being fried from the inside.
• Zarya's Particle Cannon makes a dreadful buzzing/droning sound as she's holding down her beam that gets even worse as it gets charged. By the time it reaches maximum charge, it becomes the sound of hell incarnate, which is scarier if you're her next target.
• Snipers in general, excluding for the most part Ana. As noted in YMMV, a team may be stuck with that one player who chooses a sniper, isn't good with them, and ''refuse'' to switch. On the other hand, you could come across a sniper that's actually good at what they do. Great. Only for the opposing team, this means any of them who isn't a tank could die instantly without warning. It's possible that they could consistently change their position too, so you won't know where they might fire next until it's too late.
  • Widowmaker herself adds more fuel to it because of her Infra-Sight. Imagine that you're just coming out of spawn, or your whole team gets wiped out and you're trying to escape. Then she softly whispers and now she and her team know where you are. It even worse if you don't know where she is. A player would have to hide in cover until the Ultimate ends or risk getting headshotted. While she and her teammates are possibly moving in to finish you. It should be reminded that Widow enjoys killing people and that, from the perspective of the player using her, she's very much aware of the terror her target could be feeling.
    Widowmaker: Come ouuuuut~
  • On that note, Hanzo can be arguably worse. His sonic arrow detects enemies as well. While it has a far smaller scale than Widow's ultimate, it's a secondary ability and can use it more frequently. Widomaker can convert her rifle from sniping mode to an automatic fire that deals relatively low damage in case she gets into close combat. Hanzo has no automatic mode. Every one of his arrows still do massive damage and you risked being killed instantly every time you fight him. And unlike Widowmaker, whose whereabouts can be traced through the red trail and thundering sounds left by her shots, the only warning you get from him is a near-silent "swoosh".
  • Although Ana doesn't have the killing power of the two above, she can still induce terror in other ways. She can negate healing with her Biotic Grenade, which is particularly bad if you're low on health in the middle of a fight and have no protection. Then there's her sleep dart. It'd be enough if she were alone or trying to escape if it hits you, but it's claustrophobic when you're in the middle of a firefight or if the rest of her team surrounds you. It's worse in Total Mayhem where her cooldown is reduced enough so that she can use it again and again without pause. The devs even thought this was too much and increased the cooldown for Total Mayhem in the Moira patch.
• For more anti-omnic locations, there's Junkertown. The first part is pretty tame, if not low-tech and run down. Then comes the final stage of it, where you can find an actual pile of Omnic corpses under a bridge. One of the hands are still twitching. Think about the implications.
• With Torbjörn's late 2018 rework giving him an extra-hot new Molten Core ultimate, every hero was given unique voice grunts if they're being burned by it. Most of them sound like they're desperately trying to brace through the pain (or when taken out of context, something else), but Lúcio straight-up screams in agony.
• Sigma's Ultimate. Full stop. It's heralded by a very loud explosion accompanied by dissonant piano music followed by him shouting at the top of his lungs "THE UNIVERSE IS SINGING TO ME!" in Dutch and engaging in a fit of Laughing Mad.
  • There's also something to take note of in the case of his laughter. When using his other abilities the player can hear faint whispers through the sound effects, along with piano music when casting Gravitic Flux. And none of it, including his laughter when he activates his ultimate, is audible to other players.
  • Even Sigma's cosmetics are disturbing. "Damage" shows a diagram of his brain activity with the image of a black hole, "Diagnosis" shows him tied up in wires while seemingly undergoing painful shock treatment. "Sigma's apple" is an apple peeled into rings; the outer skin shows a red shade giving a menacing gaze while the inside is him in normal skin color screaming in terror, and "Spaghetification" shows him getting distorted and sucked into a black hole.
• Anything that renders you immobile, like being frozen, put to sleep with a tranquilizer dart, trapped by a bear trap, or stunned with a flashbang, in such a fast-paced game in which every second counts and blinking might get you killed, makes you feel truly helpless. Sometimes all you can do is just watch stressfully, listen to your heart pounding, and wait for the McCree to empty the revolver's cylinder on you, or the Doomfist to crush you to paste against a wall or for the Mei to stick an icicle through your skull.
• 99% of the time, Mauga's in-game dialogue is loud, hammy, jovial, and packed with enough doofy one-liners that you can easily forget that he's still a villain working for Talon. The remaining 1% is a jarring wakeup call — if he watches an enemy he set on fire burn to death, he simply says "Burn..." in the most unsettling growl possible.
• The Mirrorwatch event showed the heroes of Overwatch and Talon switching sides, and while most of the heroes becoming villains is naturally uncharacteristic in a cool kind of way, special mention has to go from "Fallen Knight" Reinhardt, who isn't merely "evil", but a raging berserker who doesn't sound completely there in the head, only living to destroy. After years of knowing Reinhardt as one of the most lovably hammy heroes in the game, hearing Darin De Paul put that same power to turn him into a furious, animalistic monster screaming about how much he wants to hurt you feels fundamentally wrong.

Events

• The Christmas brawl: Mei's Snowball Offensive. A 6v6 of Meis on Ecopoint: Antarctica with modified abilities that makes for a Snowball Fight sounds adorable, right? Wrong. These snowballs are silent one-hit eliminations, and if you die, you stay dead until the next round. You only get one snowball before having to reload on glowing snow piles that are usually out in the open, meaning every moment and every shot counts. One of the maps is set in Ecopoint: Antarctica at nighttime with an eerily minimal music box version of Jingle Bells playing as the ambiance, though this is occasionally broken by Mei's creepily cheerful lines throughout the match like "Come out..." and "I'm gonna get you!" It's likely meant to be playful in tone, but the end result is Paranoia Fuel at its finest.
• The Yeti Hunt, where it seems Blizzard responded to the feedback of the Snowball Offensive being accidentally terrifying by making a brawl that's deliberately terrifying. As the yeti consumes more meat, the music subtly shifts from an almost soothing tune to an ominous, suspenseful track that wouldn't sound out of place in The Thing (1982). Once the yeti enrages, the music shifts to full-on terrifying as the yeti's roar can be heard throughout the map, with it able to suddenly pop up and kill you in two hits if he finds you and making hiding in a corner necessary but ridiculously tense, especially if his shadow passes by you. Talk about Mood Whiplash!
• Zenyatta's Nutcracker skin is fairly creepy, especially for those already put on edge by the original material. The beloved robotic monk becomes a levitating, possessed, killer wooden soldier that just looks wrong in comparison to the other holiday skins.
• The Year of the Rooster updates feature the "Tal" skin for Ana and "Sanzang" skin for Zenyatta, based off of Korean Hahoetal masks and the character of Xuanzang Sanzang of Journey to the West. These wouldn't be so bad, except their faces are absolutely creepy as hell, with Tal Ana's mask in a perpetual smile, and Sanzang Zenyatta's face that looks to be made of porcelain looks just as unnerving as Nutcracker Zenyatta.
• Uprising takes place seven years ago in the King's Row, which is utterly decimated by a month-long assault by the Omnic terrorist group Null Sector. Buildings are half-toppled to make room for giant anti-aircraft guns, and the streets are swarming with Omnic soldiers, from shield-bearing Eradicator units to Slicer drones armed with cutting lasers to Bastion units, all hell-bent on destruction. Whatever armed forces the United Kingdom has in sixty years are hopelessly outmatched by Null Sector, and before Overwatch intervenes, all Tracer can do is lament about how hundreds have died, thousands have been displaced, and London will never fully recover from the destruction due to the loss of thousands of years of places and items of historical significance.
  • The Null Sector Omnics are unsettling - the sounds they make in particular are often disturbingly human-sounding. What's worse is not only the OR-14 units' distorted growls but the Bastions in Tank configuration, whose otherwise cute chirping of the "Charge!" fanfare has become chillingly distorted. It straight-up sounds like they're wailing in pain.
  • Want to get a taste of how grim and hopeless the Omnic Crisis was? Play Uprising on Legendary and suffer. Statistics at the end of the event showed that more Uprising matches - across all difficulties - were lost rather than won.
• Retribution gives us a hint as to what started Overwatch's downfall. A Blackwatch Strike Team comprised of Reyes, McCree, Genji, and Moira was secretly dispatched on a black ops mission to Venice to covertly capture and extract a Talon executive responsible for the bombing of an Overwatch facility. According to Morrison, something went horribly wrong.
  • The opening cinematic reveals just where the mission went wrong: after the Blackwatch team take out the guards and find themselves confronting a waiting Antonio; the following exchange occurs:
    Antonio: Good evening, Commander Reyes. (chuckle) How will this look on the news? Overwatch unlawfully abducting a respected businessman? Even if you take me now, my friends will have me released within the week. All this...theatrics, have been a waste of our time.
    Reyes: ...You're right. (BLAM)
  • McCree's shock afterwards, as well as his anger towards Reyes, is justified. What's unsettling is that it's the first time we see him angry and panicked.
  • Genji is the only one who explicitly kills Talon grunts in the intro cutscene, sheathing his sword as the last guard in the room falls over. Add that to his complete non-reaction to seeing Reyes kill Antonio, and a disturbing image of his personality prior to meeting Zenyatta is painted.
  • One of the Talon elites is the Assassin, an Axe-Crazy, Arm-Blade-Wielding Lightning Bruiser who can, and will pin you down to the ground in the blink of an eye, and start slashing away at abnormal speeds, leaving you helpless as your health begins to deplete, all while you are unable to defend yourself. ^note If you've ever played Left 4 Dead, picture a Hunter... with the ability to silently teleport from wall to wall before striking. What can possibly make her even more terrifying? When she's not in the midst of having another giggling fit of sadistic glee, you can hear her crying and moaning in absolute pain. Considering the Assassin is a Talon asset, it's clear Widowmaker wasn't their first attempt at procuring a brainwashed soldier...
• The Endless variant of Junkenstein's Revenge involves you surviving 12 waves in order to ensure that the people you're protecting escape unharmed. Then you get to the bonus waves. Ever thought Witch Mercy reviving everybody was annoying? Especially on harder difficulties? Now you have to fight two of each boss at once. That means 2 Reapers, 2 Roadhogs, 2 Symmetras, 2 Junkrats, and yes, 2 Mercies reviving everyone. And that's only the first few waves. After surviving the Mercies, the number goes up by one, so in the second cycle, you have to contend with 3 Symmetras/Junkrats/etc., on top of the enemies you normally fight increasing in numbers.
• You thought Sanzang and Nutcracker Zenyatta were bad? Meet Cultist Zenyatta◊. Chains wrapped around him, tentacles on his face, way too many eyes in places they shouldn't be (including his palms and his Orbs), creepy voicelines about embracing Oblivion, the darkness being over you when you're discorded, and so on... What's not to like?
• Echo's "Ragdoll" skin switches out her signature sleek design for a full-on Creepy Doll look of crude patchwork and stitching, also replacing her expressive face with an eerily blank and frozen sewing/button combo that looks like it would be right at home in Coraline.
  • And then they take that to the next level when they put her in "The Bride of Junkenstein". Players are told they are put under the spell of a being known at "the Marionette" which drags them into a kind of waking nightmare, heralded by the tolling of a clock. The players are then placed staring the ragdoll skin in the face! The puppets then come to life, and attack the party, while the whole time clock bells continue to ring ominously.
• The Stinger of Storm Rising. Doomfist is shown talking to an unknown individual who is slowly revealed to be an Omnic. Doomfist commends the Omnic for his cause, which remains unrevealed, but then coldly tells them that it's doomed to failure without Talon's assistance. The Omnic in question is then revealed, taking off their hood to reveal his face, which looks like a mix between the symbol of the God Program Anubis and Reaper's mask. This only serves to bring up more terrifying possibilities about how exactly current events came to be, none of them good.
  • What's worse? He's purple, Null Sector purple. And as it turns out later, there's a reason for that: the Omnic in question is Null Sector's current leader: Ramattra.

Animations

Cinematic Trailer

• The fact that two kids were left unsupervised in a museum exhibit when Reaper and Widowmaker attacked. Even though Widowmaker gets off from killing people, she at least has enough restraint to focus on the mission at hand and will only attack if provoked. Reaper on the other hand, being the bloodthirsty maniac he is, is more likely to fulfill the mission and kill the two kids as an extra bonus. If Winston and Tracer hadn't intervened...
• The fact that apparently live weapons like the gauntlet are kept in a place with public access behind nothing more than a pane of glass instead of a much safer mock-up.
• Brian taking the Doomfist and punching Widowmaker across the room with it was indeed a Moment of Awesome. What's less awesome and more horrifying to think about, however, was that Widowmaker got up several seconds later, looking visibly angry at the 15-year-old. What does she do? She picks up her gun and aims it at Brian. Fortunately, Winston came in just in time to save him. Still, it's scary to think that if Winston hadn't shown up when he did, we would've had to find out if Widowmaker would've simply made Brian hand over the gauntlet at gunpoint, or if she would've opened fire on a defenseless person who is less than half her age.

Recall

• The ending reveals another reason why Reaper is Nightmare Fuel personified. He has the ability to come back from the dead, so as long as From a Single Cell is in full effect since he was able to survive being disintegrated by Winston's Tesla Cannon.
• Before that, it's revealed that since Overwatch's destruction, Reaper has been hunting down and killing anyone associated with Overwatch, and would've succeeded with Winston if he hadn't decided to hold the Villain Ball and rub it in his would-be victim's face.
  • His wanting to kill former Overwatch personnel is also why he wants to extract a full list from Athena's databanks. Using the information, he'll know exactly where his targets are and track them down, no matter where they go. If Winston hadn't stopped Reaper, all of his friends (including Tracer) would've been murdered.
  • The Pre-Mortem One-Liner Reaper delivers to Winston makes his Near-Villain Victory even more frightening.
    I'll be sure to send them your regards, monkey.

Alive

• In the ending, thanks to Widowmaker, King's Row turns into a hellhole for Omnics as racial tensions rise, with no one kind, compassionate, and brave enough to make everyone see the error of their ways and pave the way to racial integration.
• Widowmaker is a terrifyingly efficient sniper, and she has the brains to back it up. Although initially hampered by Tracer, she manipulates the girl into making a mistake by lining her up with her intended target and shooting at her Chronal Accelerator, making Tracer teleport out and accidentally leave the person she was assigned to protect completely vulnerable to Widowmaker's bullets. When Tracer demands why she would do such an evil thing, Widowmaker's response is to gloat by laughing in her face.
• Widowmaker is shown to get off from killing her targets, saying the act of killing makes her feel alive. Her response to killing a greatly respected Omnic rights leader? Laugh.

Are You With Us?

• It's implied continuously in Overwatch's lore that the Omnic Crisis was devastating. Here, it's revealed that children were among those who died when the Omnics attacked.
• Overlapping with Tear Jerker, if you look at Winston's set of images involving the various current crisis around the world, we get some truly horrifying images, including a monorail that was blown up by terrorists with its passengers still inside while bystanders look in horror; a group of children being held at gunpoint while crying over the body of their dead Omnic guardian; and a city in the Middle East implied to have been hit by a plague. It's at this point that Winston's speech turns into a desperate call for help.
  Winston: But look around! Someone has to do something! We have to do something!

Dragons

• We are given a brief, yet still obscured look at a portion of what lies beneath Genji's cybernetic helmet. They weren't kidding when they said that Hanzo wounded him to the point where he was believed to be dead by the end of it. Genji's skin appears to have become necrotic with several cuts and scars across it, and his eyes have a dull, dead look. Another layer to it is that what we see of his face looks creepily realistic compared to the normal art style used.

Hero

• This short reveals another reason why Soldier: 76 is Nightmare Fuel incarnate. His beatdown of the Los Muertos gang, firstly by stealth (including a punk who's dragged into an alleyway screaming for his life), then in brutal hand-to-hand combat involving bashing his opponents into walls, electrical outlets, each other and with their own weapons and then in ranged combat where he outright blows up one of the punks with his Helix Rockets (said punk was firing a minigun at him, so fair game) and kills three more attempting to shoot him from the rooftops (if the bullets didn't kill them, the fall certainly did). What caps it off is the way he beats the last conscious punk (who's now begging for his life) over the head with a burnt piñata while shouting "These! Aren't! Your! Streets! Anymore!". His actions utterly terrify the little girl witnessing the whole ordeal, so much so that when he looks at her, she immediately thinks that she's next. Fortunately, the horror is softened when 76 shows that he's still a hero at heart when faced with the decision to chase the remaining punks down or save the girl from a thrown grenade, and things turn heartwarming shortly after that.
• Early in the trailer, a group of thugs beat up a lone Omnic, and try to coerce the little girl mentioned above into "giving what he deserves". Even worse? The Omnic they were beating up was simply in the wrong place, at the wrong time. After the events of "Alive", attacks like this have become extremely common. Another horrifying detail: you can see the poor, beaten Omnic flashing a peace sign to his attackers. He could have been aggressive and taken them down to get them off his back but instead opted for pacifism.

The Last Bastion

• While most of this short is full of Heartwarming Moments, the scene when Bastion walks into a field of its fallen "siblings", attempts to fix one of them, and ends up flashing back to the days of the Omnic Crisis is pretty terrifying. The sky is red, Bastion units are everywhere, and not even frikkin' Reinhardt and the Crusaders can quell the slaughter, as Bundeswehr infantrymen are shelled and shot to pieces by Omnic weaponry. This is also the first onscreen, fully animated depiction of the Crisis, and it manages to show just how bad it was.
  • There are millions of other Bastion units opening fire toward the humans, millions of them firing all at once. A Crusader uses his Fire Stike to take out some of them, but it's virtually NOTHING compared to the horde still fighting. Battleships bigger than any ship made today are flying in the sky, deploying more Omnic troops so fast you'd swear they were raindrops. In the background, you can see gigantic Omnics slowly stomping their way toward the human city. The few jets the humans are using are shot down within seconds. And throughout the entire thing, there is not a single frame where bullets are not flying. Oh, and for EXTRA-added horror? This is just ONE city. ONE. The Omnic Crisis was a worldwide event. So just imagine this one twenty-five-second-long clip of horror - and then impose it over every other city on the planet.
  • Worse still, if you analyze how the battle is ongoing, you'll see that there's essentially a large number of German infantry who are fighting on an open field with shallow hills that provide absolutely no cover and no vehicle support - the worst environment for an infantryman to be fighting in, while the Omnics have air and artillery support. The only reason for light infantry to be fighting in such an environment is pure desperation. Either they've been sent out there to hold off the Omnics and buy time with their lives, or they were fleeing from another battle and trapped in the open by the Omnics before they could get to safety. Either way, those German soldiers are facing a grim Last Stand.
• Earlier in the short, Bastion's programming kicks in from hearing a woodpecker and ends up mowing down the entire section of forest it was in. The echo in the forest eerily sounded similar to gunfire, triggering Bastion’s protocols. It didn’t know where the “gunfire” was coming from, so it attacked in all directions.
• There's one that's filled with Fridge Horror after the flashback, too. After it "snaps out of it", Bastion's eye turns red and it straightens up, resuming the mindless, genocidal programming it had when it fought during the Omnic Crisis. It then cocks its machine gun and starts marching toward the city in the distance. If Ganymede hadn't found Bastion and snapped it out of the Crisis-programming...how devastating would that have been? The Fridge Horror deepens when you remember the "Mission Statement" comic and exactly what the Anubis God Program could do, that is to say, Hijack Omnics and make them serve it. Bastion's "resuming" of its wartime programming might have been it being re-infected with the orders of a God Program, only escaping through willpower and The Power of Friendship. Now imagine the fact that every single Omnic in the flashback described above was to some degree sentient, and may have been forced to move and fight against their will.

Infiltration

• This cinematic shows what a Talon assault is like for ordinary people, and it's terrifying.
  • To further explain, imagine yourself as a simple trooper who's just doing his job. All of a sudden, you're assaulted by the moving shadow of death that is Reaper, who then effortlessly massacres your friends. And even if you survived that, suddenly, Boom, Headshot! from Widowmaker. Katya just narrowly avoided being shot—"narrowly" meaning Widowmaker's would-be kill shot taking off half an earring instead—and even then the near-miss was only out of pure luck.
  • The cinematic also shows just how horrifyingly powerful the playable characters are compared to normal humans. Normally shooting at range with Reaper is unadvised due to how low his damage output gets. Against normal humans though, Reaper's shots are capable of instantly killing at a frightening distance.
• The second half of the short is basically one massive punch of fear, especially with how crystal clear Sombra makes her threat to Volskaya without ever saying it aloud: either do what she wants or say goodbye to your child.
• When Reaper infiltrates the base, he very noticeably snaps the neck of one of the guards just offscreen. The worst part might be that we never see the aftermath, and considering what Reaper does to his victims...

Doomfist Origin Story

• Doomfist does not mess around. In the flashbacks of the fabled fight with Winston strewn throughout the trailer, he was able to simultaneously take on Winston, Genji, and Tracer with minimal effort, and he's even able to grab Tracer midfight, having timed things out to tear off her Chronal Accelerator. And to make things worse, we see Tracer glitch around... before fading out (albeit that is shown reflected in Winston's glasses). The trailer then ends by revealing that he had simply punched his way out of his prison cell with his single bare, yet-to-be-reequipped-with-his-gauntlet hand, busting a gigantic hole through the cell door. And if you remember Orisa's backstory, Doomfist wrecked the whole squad of OR-15 units with just bare hands.
  • It wasn't just how Doomfist attempted to kill Tracer, but notice Genji noticeably starts short-circuiting and clutching at his chest piece after getting punched in the chest by Doomfist. It's heavily implied Doomfist's objective wasn't to play around with our heroes, but flat-out kill them in cold blood. Watching Winston's horrified expression turn to absolute animalistic rage at seeing his friends nearly get killed by Doomfist just shows how scary the match-up is. Just thinking about what was going through Winston's head, that two of his family members are dying right in front of him due to the man in front of him, at that point is a bit terrifying to think about. It makes you wonder how Winston managed to come back from that particular bout of his primal rage...
  • It's easy to miss in the chaos of the moment, but as Tracer is fading out, she can clearly be seen violently wrenching herself into some agonized positions. We all know how her condition works, but what about how it feels? What if it hurts? And just what would that mean for those months of isolation she spent without a treatment?

Rise and Shine

• We don't get to see just what Mei saw in that failed cryo-pod, but considering her horrified reaction it's pretty clear that it's nothing pleasant.
• Just the sheer weight of everything Mei finds out upon waking up. The knowledge that the very anomalies you were studying have worsened significantly while you were 'away'. Discovering a cause you were a part of collapsed during your absence, under its own baggage and public outrage. Realizing that you are, quite literally, the last one who can do anything, not only because you're the last of your team, but the last active Ecopoint member period. Mei quite literally has the potential fate of the world in the palm of her hand (technically in the jump drive in the palm of her hand). The sheer level of responsibility there is terrifying the more you think about it. It's no wonder she tears up when she finally sees Winston's Recall message.
• She's plucky enough not to show much fear, but just consider Mei's situation. She's alone, stranded in the middle of a frozen wasteland with all of her companions dead. Literally no one knows where she is, that she needs help, or even that she's alive. She has no transportation and no way to call for help. And the power is failing. Her whole predicament is just one monster short of a survival horror game.

Honor and Glory

• The OR-14s up the nightmare fuel level set by the Bastion units. The first one is introduced emerging from the smoke of a high altitude insert, emitting a terrifying distorted tone as a warcry. It then proceeds to stop a Crusader's charge dead and nearly kills Reinhardt with a nasty-looking blade. And then more of them appear, creeping through the ruins and leaping from rooftops with far more agility than such bulky machines should be capable of, all while emitting their terrible distorted howls.
  • Makes what Doomfist did to the OR-15s in Numbani even more nuts given they're supposed to be an improvement on these things.
  • Take a moment to let the Fridge Horror sink in. Numbani Omnics showing up in Germany. Whatever caused the Omnic Crisis, it was coordinating on a global scale and was starting to mix its forces to trip up defenders.

Shooting Star

• Hana's flashback to fighting the Gwishin is pretty terrifying (and a far cry frown on how Korean news media portrayed the fight). Stormy, pounding rain, with the only thing visible being the gigantic Gwishin itself dwarfing D.Va...all the while hearing the panic of her teammates as they're going down. There's little wonder that she ends up taking pause as she remembers she's the only one healthy enough to respond to another threat.
• The Gwishin's evolving strategy comes into play. It knows how many MEKA are left after the attack while also knowing about the intervals between when it can attack next. So it almost caught everyone off guard by keeping a reserve squad of missile-armed fighters and sending them out while the main MEKA force is still reeling. Had D.va not been the workaholic she is, they would have killed thousands before anyone could respond.
• It's slightly hard to make out because of how blurred it is, but after the attack, you see D.Va fading in and out of consciousness as she's being tended to by medics after the fact...and there's a doctor ready to use defibrillator paddles on her. The fact that she may have had to be shocked back to life, or at least to avoid her coding on the table, sells how seriously lucky she was to get out of that alive.

Sigma Origin Story

• Sigma's descent into madness after the black hole experiment. It's not helped by the Soundtrack Dissonance of the piano the whole time. He has only the faintest idea of what's happening to him or where he actually he is.
  What is that melody-? Hold it together... Hold it together- hold it to-holdittogether, HOLD IT TOGETHER!! Density, mass, momentum... IT IS TOO- It's too much to hold onto. I will bring you a new understanding of the unive-VIOLENCE! The universe is SINGING to ME!! WHAT IS THAT MELODY?!?
  • One sequence of his comatose state while the room he's in flashes red from alarm lights while sounds of sirens and gunshots occur in the background. In a blink and you'll miss it moment, you can see him smiling as he rises from his stretcher.
  • Near the end of it, his panicking throughout just... stops. He reaches a state of calm and seemingly accepts his current state.
    Sigma: Freedom. Imprisonment. It's all an illusion.
• Towards the end of the video, Sigma claims that gravity is a harness, and that he has "harnessed the harness". His flickering head, his "hold it together" mantra, and the backmasked audio^note "Release me!" imply this is anything but … or, indeed, that the harness has harnessed him.

Kiriko

• The Hashimoto Clan are ruthless, shaking down an old man and his granddaughter for his son's debt.
  • One enforcer grabs the little girl and flings the old man into the path of gunfire. Although no blood is shown, this seems to be a fatal shot.
• Kiriko makes her entrance by flickering all of the normal lights in the hallway, forcing the red emergency lights on.
  Kiriko: I'm going to kick every one of you in the face.
• On the karmic side, Kiriko and a little girl become this to the Hashimoto enforcers; with Kiriko showing how much she has been holding back before using her Ultimate and an empowered little girl swinging and screaming like a berserker.

Mauga Origin Story

• The video opens with Mauga kicking back with a drink and relaxing on a yacht... and ends with the camera zooming out to reveal that it's covered in the corpses of its previous owners.
• His first reaction to waking up on a hospital table? Look at the doctor who presumably saved his life... and strangle him.

Comics

Train Hopper

• Those people were fortunate that they had McCree with them when their train was hijacked by Talon soldiers, who were commanded to take no prisoners. If he hadn't been there, things would've been a lot bloodier. And it's implied that the Talon soldiers' ruthless tactics came from their training as former Blackwatch.

Going Legit

• What's the quickest way to being sent to Kingdom Come? Hire a few criminals, give them a seemingly harmless task, and set them up to take the fall for you. This is what happened to the CEO who hired Junkrat and Roadhog, who fortunately were smart enough to catch on.
• The CEO Junkrat and Roadhog killed for hiring them to take the fall for his insurance fraud scheme deserved what he got, but what about the other people who worked in his office building? Either Junkrat and Roadhog didn't know there were extras (and didn't care), or associated the workers with the "suit" who nearly screwed them over and set off the bombs.
  • No worries. It's a skyscraper that hasn't been finished yet, and there's a throwaway line that implies that the building is empty while the drones are constructing it. Not that that would likely have stopped them, seeing as how Junkrat is constantly forgetting that his initial plan involved hostages, and ends with the building reduced to rubble.
  • Junkrat and Roadhog's situation is terrifying in context. An honest and hard-working employee gets screwed over by people in the legal system who use loopholes in said system to fire and ruin him. In revenge, he goes on a rampage killing everyone he feels have wronged him in some way or another. Even those who are innocent are targeted anyway simply through association or were just in the way. Granted, Junkrat and Roadhog were criminals to begin with, but the connections are there.
  • And it's implied this incident wasn't the first time it happened. Junkrat and Roadhog just so happened to be the first people hired by that CEO to figure out his intentions (and were sufficiently armed and skilled enough to actually retaliate).
• It's also implied that many people use hostile Omnic activity as an excuse to cover up or justify morally ambiguous activities, like how the CEO lied about Omnic terrorists kidnapping his workers in order to set up Junkrat and Roadhog. Or how the gang from Soldier: 76's cinematic is shown beating up an Omnic.
• Also with this, it could be implied that this is the legal system running in the world, meaning all companies, even Vishkar Corporation, had to comply with this system, meaning that such corrupt system and abuses to the honest workers are standards. All of a sudden, Vishkar just looks like it has a lot of competition for 'the most despicably amoral company' and it paints the darkness of the business world in that world...

A Better World

• The Vishkar Corporation. Here they actively make plans to tear down a slum favela to make way for one of their new buildings, but when they are outmaneuvered, they send in Symmetra. When Symmetra uses methods that her bosses think are too soft for their tastes, they go "Fuck it" and decide to blow up the entire favela, killing/injuring many residents and displacing many more, just have a quicker way to force the favela's mayor to have them step in and allow them to rebuild the place. A young girl Symmetra takes a personal liking to is injured in the chaos, but although she is saved, she is permanently disfigured by the resulting fires and will remain that way for the rest of their life. A horrified Symmetra voices her concerns to her superiors, who brush her off insisting it's for everyone's own good, causing her to doubt her company's noble intentions.

Mission Statement

• Apparently, before Pharah became a beacon of justice and protection, she was a General Ripper who was callous enough to dismiss injured civilians as mere collateral damage and leave them to die in favor of fulfilling a mission. If Character Development hadn't set in, who knows how she would've acted by the start of the game?
• There's Anubis, which is what's called a "God Program", which were presumably built to serve as some sort of command units during the Omnic Crisis. But somewhere down the line, Anubis went rogue, forcing Overwatch to quarantine and contain it (but not destroy it, which they should've done in retrospect). One of the things Anubis can do as a God Program is hack and freely control any Omnic within his range of operation into doing his bidding by turning them all into his own personal Hive Mind. Imagine being one of the Omnics who only wants to live in peace with humans and having that thing wake up near you, suddenly turning you into the Kill All Humans stereotype you've been trying to fight off for years. It's implied that God Programs are more powerful than the ordinary Omnic, as Pharah and her team barely manage to defeat Anubis and shut his system down. Made worse by how one of Pharah's soldiers for the mission was an Omnic... who shoots himself in the head when he detects Anubis trying to take over him.

Destroyer

• Remember how Omnics were previously shown to be self-aware? Well here, it's revealed that some Omnics are giant-sized enough to be piloted by humans, a la Gundam. This means it's possible for anyone to go and lay waste to countries by using these things, and pin the blame on innocent Omnics, further stirring up Fantastic Racism. Torbjörn's former partner Sven used one such Omnic to lay waste to Kurjikstan's capital city, bringing destruction and death. Sven claims that he's doing this to prevent a greater evil, but his true motives are actually fueled by greed - specifically, the cash bonus offered by whoever hired him to destroy countless innocent people. And the worst part? Torbjörn was responsible for the creation of these Omnics.

Uprising

• Although it's brief, we see Genji during his time with Overwatch. He has a darker color palette, there are tubes protruding from his body, and his left arm and face are exposed, revealing numerous scars and red eyes. And there's a Blackwatch insignia on his chest. Blackwatch, the black ops branch that did things hidden from the public that disgusted McCree and factored into Overwatch's downfall. This is who Genji was before he met Zenyatta and found peace when he was just dismembered by his own brother and went to topple his clan's empire. All in a few panels. So if you look in Hanamura where the first "fight" between Genji and Hanzo happened, there is the torn flag of the Shimada clan. With the release of the new skin, the implications of the confrontation between the two get worse. Judging how much is left of Genji's body and how he was cut, Genji was not facing Hanzo when he was slashed. There is also how the slash on the flag is positioned and the blood splatter that stained it signifies that it was an upward slash. Hanzo slashed him in the back so Genji never saw it coming at worst. There is also the line where if you have Genji attack someone with his sword in the back, he'll say, "I learned that from my brother."

Masquerade

• In a conversation with the newly freed Doomfist, Reaper casually reveals that while he was stopped by Winston in Recall, he did get some names and locations from Athena's database and had been killing them offscreen. Who's to say that he won't visit your favorite hero next?

Wasted Land

• The introduction of Roadhog. A group of scrappers try to raid the home of The Dreaded Roadhog, with one of them brushing off the warnings before Mako himself slams the door open with angered red-orange eyes due to the lighting reflecting off his gas mask. He fires at them and effortlessly hooks one of said scavengers to him, listening as the man begins pleading for his life as Roadhog stares him down without a word. Roadhog ends up deciding to let them leave after taking their offer and his own twisted sense of sympathy, and it's implied that others were not so lucky.

Retribution

• The entire comic has an ominous tone, taking place in Overwatch's twilight, and while we all know it's going to end badly, the clarity makes things even more horrifying. Gérard is nearly killed by a bombing within the Blackwatch facility, Overwatch is running out of legal options to combat Talon as innocents are still dying, and the Blackwatch squad of Reyes, McCree, Genji, and Moira are headed off on an unsanctioned mission to hunt down a Talon operative in Venice. Given the confidential treatment of the "Venice Incident", this could very well be a leadup to Blackwatch's final descent, punctuated by a final frame: he's not wearing a mask, but the hooded Reyes already looks just like Reaper.

Campaign

Invasion

• The Reveal in the Toronto mission that Ramattra has been pushed to utterly monstrous extremes. Not only is he kidnapping Omnic civilians, he's co-opting what Aurora sacrificed for his own purposes. His ultimate plan is to merge all Omnics' minds together through the Iris, stripping them of their free will and becoming a Hive Mind, effectively "saving" them by committing mass genocide on his own kind. The devices he places on their heads effectively strip their souls away, killing the part of them that's "alive" and leaving only an empty husk as their minds are uploaded...somewhere else. Their bodies are still alive, but there's no mind inhabiting them anymore.
  • The thing that causes this is even more terrifying. Enter the Subjugator, a new type of Null Sector weapon that is literally a brain-sucking alien robot designed to forcibly upload the minds of Omnics out of their bodies. We get to see a helpless Omnic civilian fall victim to it, and there's nothing Overwatch can do but look on as the Subjugator approaches its target and places itself atop their head. The poor Omnic struggles in vain to get it off for a few brief moments, only for his body to suddenly go limp and fall to the ground, lifeless.
  • Worse still is the fact that Ramattra is doing all of this without having any real knowledge of what exactly the Iris entails. He's doing all of this on a hunch, what he believes is guiding his fellow Omnics to enlightenment and safety from human cruelty. There is a very real possibility that he is not only being manipulated by Talon, but he also might be playing into the hands of another dormant entity with malicious intentions for humans and Omnics alike - the God Program Anubis.
• The Stinger. Zenyatta is seen meditating inside a temple, reminiscing on the day Ramattra left the Shambali. But while he's lost in thought, a pair of familiar-looking silhouettes sneak up right behind him. The shot pans, and it's none other than Sombra and Widowmaker. Talon already has their sights set on Zenyatta, and whatever reasons they may have for wanting him, they're definitely not good.

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