Share no secrets.
Unmarked spoilers below!
- The city of Oakmont is a decaying hellhole with all of the buildings falling apart and affected by weird growths. The city is trapped in a perpetual rainstorm and overcloud with sunlight never touching the place. Much of the horror is the sight of how far the city has fallen since the Flood.
- All the dead whales spread throughout the city's river ways is particularly nauseating, especially when you realize the people are starving and probably hacking bits off to eat.
- Robert Throgmorton is square in the Uncanny Valley as he looks like a hybrid between man and ape with just enough genteel manners to make him even more terrifying. Of course, this being HP Lovecraft's universe, there's a reason why he looks this way.
- There's even more horror to be found in the appearance of the Innsmouthers. They look very much like the Creature from the Black Lagoon but speak and act like normal humans, which only increases the unsettling effect.
- The effect of the madness plague on people leaves them babbling, violent, and terrified. There's also nothing to do for them. This is especially true when you find the survivors of the expedition underwater.
- As you walk to the undersea grotto in your diving suit, you catch a glimpse of some massive, tentacled thing
◊ swimming out in the ocean. - Also a moment of awesome by the developers, the undersea grotto you dive into during "Lost at Sea" has a lot of stone formations that you pay no attention to. However, if you stand just right at a photography point, you will realize you're staring at a statue of Great Cthulhu himself.
- The "Letters From Oakmont" quest has a lot of these as you're exposed repeatedly to horrific tragedies and Apocalyptic Log stories that share the grizzly fates of many Oakmonters.
- "Forlorn Woman" has a husband imprison his wife and the mother of his child despite the fact that she's become an inhuman monster. The son is able to visit with it and feeds it, trying to make sense of the fact she's "sick." Reed has the option of putting it down.
- "Mirrors, Mirrors" is about an Oakmonter being stalked by an invisible attacker who hunts them down and kills them from their own reflection.
- "Terrible Fetus" talks about an unnatural newborn child that kills its mother than proceeds to attack and kill a nurse. It's killed by the doctor using an expensive pen.
- "Innsmouth Notes" has Reed find an initially saucy adventure of Obed Marsh sleeping with a native woman on an island, only to find out she's strung up her husband's skinned body above them. It's possibly also still alive.
- Your investigation for Doctor Grant find families that have been corrupted into monsters, men driven to suicide by their own dreams, a cannibal chef, and a monster created by dozens of bodies molding together.
- The cannibal chef is particularly horrifying as he's not only got an I'm a Humanitarian larder but he was planning on feeding a young woman to her parents.
- Most of the Cursed Tomes might be guarded by run-of-the-mill wylebeasts at most. That changes when you get to the Bewitched Tome, however. On approaching the search area, you’ll notice what appears to be a person calling for help. Get too close, though, and the “person” is revealed to be part of a creature reminiscent of the Tripods from Dead Space 2. One that continues to let out distorted shrieks that sound vaguely like a distressed woman even as it’s lashing at you with its tree trunk-sized limbs. Oh, and the tome it’s guarding? None other than the Necronomicon.
- In "Through the Looking Glass", Bethany Throgmorton, gone insane from long lonely years of grief and abuse, thinks the only way to restore her son Hammond is to release his soul from Randall's mirror into the body he left behind — in other words, a now-adult being trapped in a child's rotting corpse. Worse, if you let her do it, you can hear the resurrected Hammond mewling and scratching at the inside of his tiny coffin. The other option is to hand his spirit over to his brother who wants to put it in an orangutan.
- George plans what amounts to a massive terrorist attack by poisoning the fish of the populace in order to discredit the EOD. Even if you stop his plan, plenty of people are implied to still die from ricin poisoning.
- Joy Hayden has her mouth sewn shut by Granny Weaver for the crime of sharing the secrets of Oakmont with newcomers. Even if you defeat the witch, you cannot help her as she's terrified of her fellow Oakmonters taking revenge if she doesn't keep to the punishment for the remaining two years.
- What was done to Joy's dog by Granny Weaver is also enough to want to Burn the Witch! as well. Which is, specifically, killing the animal and skinning it to make a teddy bear. Oh and she also killed Joy's neighbor, who was Too Dumb to Live and tried to take a picture of the evil witch.
- The Stone-Worshippers cult. Reed travels to their hideout to retrieve a part of the Monolith and learns the cult were so crazed they had started eating the Monolith rock, breaking their teeth in the process but unable to stop themselves. This somehow turned the cultists to stone, frozen in place as they were going about their business. Then, after he gets the missing part of the Seal, Reed exits the office to find the stone cultists have somehow moved to the bottom of the stairs in a pose of anguish. And then you hear the sound of movement and look behind you to see the ones in the office are now right behind you. Nothing happens, but it's still one of the creepiest parts of the game.
- Each of the Multiple Endings are a mix of this and Downer Ending, as is to be expected from a Cosmic Horror Story.
- Leap of Faith: Reed sacrifices himself to restart the Cycle by leaping off of a cliff. The final scene is of Johannes standing at the docks, awaiting the arrival of the next Chosen.
- I’m Out of Here: Reed uses the Seal to break the enchantments keeping Oakmont sealed off from the rest of the world, before fleeing back to Boston. However, he’s later approached by Johannes who taunts him with a newspaper detailing a flood in Boston, hinting that Reed has only delayed the inevitable.
- The Stars are Right: Reed accepts his fate and opens the gates of Cthygonnar, and is promptly consumed by Cthylla, who then heads to the surface to kickstart The End of the World as We Know It.
