My, what big teeth you have.
It's a game whose main influence is H. P. Lovecraft works. What else did you expect? Even though you're armed to the teeth with weapons, you'd better use them well or be torn apart by the horrors of the Quake worlds.Moment pages are Spoilers Off by default, so the different moments have been folderized as a security measure. Proceed with caution. You Have Been Warned.
open/close all folders
Enemies
The blocky, low-polygon enemies along with their jerky, stop-motion-esque movements and some having malformed appearances can make them unnerving.
- Even the most basic enemies of the game, the Grunts, make one hell of an impression. They seem to be former marines, just like the Player Character, albeit mutilated and appear to be haphazardly sewn back together. Their faces are bloody and twisted into hateful snarls, and they make growling noises that sound like the mind of a rabid animal in the body of a man. Just what did Shub-Niggurath do to these guys?!
- The Enforcers may not be as scary, given that they look and act more closely to humans than their previously-mentioned lackeys, but if you look closely at the visor of their helmets, you can see a faint pair of glowing red eyes staring at you underneath. It's a little creepy.
- The Rottweilers can be this for anyone with cynophobia, with their bared fangs and blood-soaked fur. They emit loud barks whenever they spot you, and lunge at you with nearly just as much ferocity as a Fiend.
- While also counting as Black Comedy, the Zombies attack you by tearing off chunks of their own rancid flesh and throwing it at you.
- The Shamblers (pictured) and their malformed faces, huge bodies, horrifying roar, and surprising strength & agility are a force to be reckoned with. If you're not able to take cover, their lightning attack can hurt pretty badly too.
- One particualrly terrifying Shambler appears in E3L4: Satan's Dark Delight. After a room with a Fiend and an Ogre, you come to a descending staircase with four health packs and a Lightning Gun at the bottom...only for a Shambler to spawn right in front of you.
- Fiends and their alarming speed as they leap around, along with their brutal melee attack, make a deadly combo for the unprepared player. The feral sounds they make further add to the nightmare fuel.
- Vores (Shalraths) have haunting high-pitched vocalizations, facial body horror, and a homing attack that will inevitably hit you unless you're far enough away. Otherwise, your options are to run away with physics tricks, like bunny-hopping and the Rocket Jump.
- Spawns. Not by design, but mechanically. Design-wise, they are pretty silly compared to the rest of the monsters you face: Just purplish blobs that bounce around the place. Mechanically... They are a nightmare. They basically leap strike you like the Fiends do, but they have almost no reset time before they leap again, allowing them to bounce around like crazy, gunning for you the whole time making it very difficult to get away from them. Their ability to pursue you so well is doubly terrifying because when they die they explode to deal a lot of damage. When they're introduced, they're pretty shocking at first, but easily dispatched from a distance. In the later stages, however, the game starts filling rooms with them, making an initially silly enemy into a near-inescapable terror.
- Dissolution of Eternity kicks things up a notch by introducing a unique, tar-green variant; Hell Spawn, capable of duplicating themselves indefinitely so long as the original Hell Spawn remains. Thankfully, you can pretty easily tell the original from its duplicate offspring, by way of it being wholly covered in bright orange eyeballs.
- The Final Boss of the game, Shub-Niggurath is pretty freaky looking, despite being an Anti-Climax Boss. She's an enormous blob of fleshy tentacles with a grotesque, grate-like "mouth" that drools blood. Although she doesn't directly attack you (she leaves that job to an army of Shamblers and Vores at her disposal), she's pretty much invincible to any attack except for telefragging her.
World of Quake
- The exit arches in Episode 2
◊ can be eerie, suggesting goat sacrifice and having human faces stretched out on display. - E4L4: The Palace of Hate, is a very moody level with dim lighting. Once most of the monsters are dead, Nothing Is Scarier takes form as you try to locate the exit key in the nerve-wracking dark halls. The tension is elevated by the significant numbers of Shamblers populating the palace.
- E4L8: The Nameless City, is one of the bleaker levels of The Elder World, with many dark corridors, a windy nonsequitur layout and featuring "Falling" as the musical track which sounds like white noise from a haunted television. The level is easily one of the toughest in the game.
- Even the base levels set on Earth are unsettling. These surreal military fortresses are practically void of life aside from the possessed marines lurking through the corridors. The soundtrack in these levels truly emphasize the eerily dream-like feel they provide.
- Unsettling perversions of religious imagery are present in Episode 3 and other later levels, ranging from a large painting of a crucified figure plastered against a wall in E3L2: The Vaults of Zin, to zombies crucified against walls as they moan and writhe around in agony.
Other
- Trent Reznor’s soundtrack is famously freaky, with its dark, ambient style allowing the game to retain a consistently unnerving tone even during its most exciting moments.
- The Main Theme is a badass rock piece for its first section, but as the main melody ends, the audio segues into Trent Reznor's eerie electronic scream (The same one from the Title Track of NIN's The Downward Spiral, an already disturbing song), continuously rising and lowering in pitch. It’s a good first indicator that this game, though still another of Id’s familiar shooters, is going to be a lot darker than their prior works.
- "The Hall of Souls" stands out for its variety. Beginning with a horde of incomprehensible whispers, the track develops an increasing collection of disquieting tones, from a piercing sawblade-like sound to a droning bass line. The most frightening movement begins almost five minutes into the track when the mostly repetitive ambience is suddenly punctuated with a loud melodic section, which dissolves back into the mix only a minute later. Since the first few levels that the track appears in are fairly short and easy, it’s not unlikely that a player would become familiar with it without ever hearing this section, leading to their first time reaching it is even more of a shock.
- What's even more disturbing about aforementioned Creepy Awesome melodic section is that if you listen closely, you can hear gross, meaty squelching or chewing sounds, almost as if you're hearing a carnivorous monster devouring its prey.
- "It Is Raped" is a distant, truly unsettling track that uses various ambient and noise loops that fade in and out. It's made even more unsettling with the noises in question including what can be only described as demonic horn instruments and various screams and shrieks.
- "Parallel Dimensions" uses a deep, repetitive, constantly throbbing bass mixed with all kinds of creepy ambient noises, including howling wind and slow breathing, alongside noise loops and cymbal loops that give way to slithering delay loops and what sounds like a rotating fan.
- "Life" is centred around a never-ending drumbeat noise, which is muffled and echoing, as though it were being generated by something very powerful somewhere deep beneath the surface. The title (which wasn’t publicly known for several decades) could imply that this sound is meant to be a heartbeat, which is even more unsettling.
- "Damnation" features all of the dark ambient sounds, moans and slow beats found in the rest of the tracks, but adds in a barely-audible recording of a baby crying, just to creep you out a wee bit more.
- "Focus" is no slouch either, mainly consisting of an eerie ringing echo and electronic chattering noises. It fits well with the death and graveyard-themed levels its mostly present in.
- Meanwhile, the N64 port comes with its own soundtrack, courtesy of Aubrey Hodges from the PSX/64 versions of Doom, bringing his own brand of creeping ambient dread to the mix. Sweet dreams.
- The Quake 1.5 Game Mod takes the boss battle with Shub-Niggurath a step further once you enter the teleporter without ending the level in a rather anti-climatic manner. If you manage to do so, you'll end up being inside the said monstrosity. To make things worse, there are Giant Spiders and The Thing-esque creatures that will attack you on sight while you're trying to find Shub-Niggurath's heart and destroy it. Once destroyed, a message will pop up on your screen shouting "RUN!" And yeah... you better run or the Eldritch Abomination itself will take you with her.
- Also, during the said segment, you'll hear groans in the background as you progress through the entire level. Plus, those are the same sounds heard from Half-Life.
