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Nightmare Fuel / The Eternal Cylinder

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Don't let its silly looks fool you; there are a lot of scary moments.

As with all moments pages, Spoilers Off!


  • The Eternal Cylinder itself. A massive, rolling structure crushing everything in its path, obliterating entire landscapes, and can only be delayed but never stopped. The worst part: it appears to be sentient and with an unknown agenda.
  • The servants of the Cylinder are grotesque cyborgs with their fleshy parts appearing to be human.
    • Cleansers, the most commonly encountered type, have the front half of a car, and the back half of a humanoid upper torso with muscular arms.
    • Unifiers are bacteriophage-like mechanical beings, which wouldn't be so bad, if their midsection wasn't a limbless, headless naked human torso.
    • And there's the Mathematician, largest of the Servants and seemingly the leader of them all, which resembles a nude, Frankensteinian humanoid with a metal structure resembling an oil rig for a head, a left leg formed out of a smaller human lower body, glowing red-hot hands and feet, and what appears to be a human head inside its chest cavity.
    • The Liberator is half a human torso that moves around using a pair of hula-hoop like wheels spinning them like a wheelchair of sorts. It also disguises itself as an eeriely earthlike playground swing.
    • The Hand of Fate is a boss battle in the desert that resembles a ring-shaped hand with twelve fingers, and a tentacle-like head in the middle that resembles the Klaborok: but with multiple eyes and mouths.
  • There's also the fact that the Servants of the Cylinder were able to kill a Celestial Trewhaala.
  • Think you're safe if you managed to activate a set of towers? Sometimes the Cylinder will power right through them. And while this forces the Cylinder to slow down enough that you can outpace it by walking, it also generates a lightning storm that prevents you from getting too far ahead of it.
    • And sometimes, the Mathematician will show up and destroy an active tower, allowing the Cynlinder to continue on unimpeded. The soundtrack for these moments says it best: Run.
    • Mixed with Tear Jerker, but if at any point in the adventure where your tribe of Trebhum miss a tower and the Cylinder breaks through it, the normally Lemony Narrator ends the story with a chilling message.
  • The final "???" biome is a hostile wasteland filled with mutated-looking thorny plants and ominous green fog. Most unsettling are the various structures and ruins that litter the landscape, some of which bear unmistakable human faces...
  • Many of the native predators are equally frightening, especially from the perspective of a small prey animal such as the Trebhum.
    • Zooshgargs are flying predators that are essentially U.F.O.s that abduct Trebhum with a tractor beam and swallow them whole.
    • The Frozen Sklaa is a tundra predator that looks almost undead. Its icy armor seems to conceal its apparently-decaying body, and most disturbing is its heart, which dangles down from its chest by a fleshy cord.
    • The Omnogrom. It's basically a giant sideways mouth with four tiny legs, with its teeth and its eyes looking very disturbingly human-like.
    • The Tonglegrop is a giant lumbering apex predator that spews acid and has razor-sharp claws. And the biggest twist? It's the adult form of the harmless and bizarrely adorable Glickbol.
    • And there's the Treghrum, a predator in the Desert Biome that mimics a Trebhum, imitating them almost perfectly, until they wander too close and it reveals its centipede-like true form.
  • The creatures of the final biome deserve a special mention, with the implication they are not of this world and were unleashed by the damage inflicted onto the Cylinder.
    • The Grashtuub is a massive cylindrical carnivore with a hollow body and an exposed digestive system covered in rotating teeth. The first one encountered by the Trebhum is right in the act of greedily devouring a Trewhaala carcass, making horrid slurping noises as it goes.
    • The Grashtuub's entry mentions a now-extinct "Hypertonglegrop". Given that regular Tonglegrops are already nightmarish to begin with - what could a Hyper version have been like?
    • Roondaslocks are living orbs of flesh covered all over in eyes and mouths. When defeated, they explode into a gruesome mess of chunks.
    • Squadaboo are Puppeteer Parasite squids that can attach themselves to Trebhum and then forcibly march their unlucky victim to bodies of water to drown themselves.
  • Some of the gentler creatures may still be quite disturbing, such as the Great Gaaahr, which resembles a sauropod or a giraffe - until its entire neck peels open to reveal a Helicoprion-like mouth.
  • There's also the Fridge Horror that all the Trebhum Elders you meet (except for possibly the elder inside one of the Trewhaalas' stomach) are ultimately crushed by the Cylinder.
  • The fact that all the player Trebhums are literally newly-hatched infants having to deal with an apocalyptic landscape and Eldritch Abomination creatures running around the place, mere moments after just being born. Slightly made better by having a benevolent Hive Mind guiding the hatchlings to the right direction, but it's still quite harrowing to see, and many Trebhum hatchlings do indeed die.
  • The voice of the Cylinder itself, once the Trebhum enter its mind the third time. It is speaking about its end goal: that existence is suffering because of conflict, and it intends to resolve said conflict by destroying and assimilating all until it itself is all that remains.
  • While benevolent, the voice of the Trewhaala, once the Trebhum learn its song, is a raspy, snarling Voice of the Legion, which, coming from a colossal space whale-worm measuring countless miles long, is certainly quite nerve-wracking.
  • The final Trebhum temple has the decaying carcass of an Onkifurt lying beside one elevator, with its gaseous sac ripped clean off and all of its grisly innards in full view.
  • The genocide of the Trewhala by the Cylinder, seen during the end credits. The Cylinder has rolled over their infinitely long bodies, crushing and burning them, while their heads, pinned down by the Mathematician's spears, are still alive and screaming. How long did it take them to die?
  • Some of the Trewhala attack the Trebhum on sight, which seems odd given that they were once friendly allies - until they later explain that the Cylinder found and slaughtered the Trewhala because it heard the Trebhum's song. Apparently some of them are still raw about it.

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