YMMV / Cragne Manor

• Aluminum Christmas Trees: In the Cragne Manor library, you can read a massive tome called A Billion Random Digits. It consists of just that, and reading it all will turn you insane. A book of just random numbers sounds silly, but actually exists (only with a million instead of a billion).
• Awesome Video Game Levels:
  • The meatpacking plant bathroom, where you have to perform a demonic ritual to get rid of a shapeless, fleshless horse that's trying to kill you, is considered a highlight of the game. It's one of the longest individual puzzles in the game, but it doesn't feel unfair or cheap. The writing is full of jokes and Developer's Foresight, and it's loaded with genuinely funny Toilet Humor and moments that cross the line (such as your ancestor who kidnapped children and flashed his genitals to a priest, or a book detailing various terrible baby names that includes "Poonpounder H. Washington Jones").
  • The Workroom, created by acclaimed Interactive Fiction author Andrew Plotkin. The room revolves around reciting spells to navigate different spaces and find names of people, then look those up in a filing cabinet. It's challenging without feeling unfair, the way you can use the spells is open-ended and leads to a lot of creative outcomes, and reading the magicians' history is interesting.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • The Ear Worm puzzle with the altar. It's confusing, only exists for a Shout-Out, and doesn't have any impact on the game.
  • Getting locked in a padded cell during a visit to the jail. You don't know who locked you in there, it contains odd items that you don't need, the writing is noticeably more meta than usual, and not a single thing about it is mentioned after you leave the jail.
• Bizarro Episode:
  • The entirety of the meatpacking plant bathroom. The first thing you notice is a large pentagram on the ground. While trying to use the shower, you accidentally unleash a murderous boneless horse that was lurking in the pipes. You then lock yourself in a stall and use the toilet to Time Travel to acquire various odd things you need — including a bathroom reader book, Mountain Dew, Pepto-Bismol, and trilobite milk — to sacrifice and seal away the horse. If you sent the horse to the past, you get a small scene with it being discovered by two arguing paleontologists. There's also a journal kept by your Jerkass ancestor that details his various naughty deeds. It's completely bizarre even for Cragne Manor, and none of this is mentioned again once the room is over.
  • Going into the church's bathroom has you apply some lipstick and get put in the shoes of a high school girl. What ensues is a Catholic high school Teen Drama mixed with a Cosmic Horror Story, such as beating up the school's Alpha Bitch (because the voices in your head forced you to against your will) and asking out your crush to the dance (who leads you to have demon-induced convulsions).
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Bethany is well-liked for her quirky Nice Girl personality, and the hilariously bizarre bits of history she lets you in on. It helps that her segment is a lot lighter in tone than the rest of the game, with very little horror to speak of.
• Fan Nickname: Naomi is known as "Nitocris", after Mike Russo's LP, where he headcanoned Naomi as a Lovecraftian demon to explain her constantly changing appearance and backstories.
• Good Bad Bugs: The Back Garden has a chain of puzzles (solution: look at the shelf, take the vinegar, pour it on the ivy, get the garden shears, use it to cut the vines away from the pond, then get the screwdriver from the skeletal remains in the pond) that lead to you getting a screwdriver. However, if you know examine the remains first, you can take the screwdriver without doing any of the other steps. The Creepy Doll you get early on can detect the remains before you're supposed to know about them.
• Iron Woobie: Carol. Very few people interact with her, the Cragnes don't take good care of her, and she had to go to an all-girls boarding school mainly because her caretakers didn't want her around. It's noted that she did things like date an older guy she didn't like and put up with Christabell's sexual harassment for the sake of advancing her father's plans to fix America and summon the Deep Ones. However, Carol is glad to see you again and doesn't appear to be suffering any long-standing trauma. Even as an adult, and despite her ultimately evil plans, she's barely bothered by it.
• Nightmare Fuel: The incredibly disturbing scene in the church. Jessica and Brandon are both seemingly having intrusive thoughts akin to Demonic Possession. The church goes up in flames as Brandon is Driven to Suicide to take back his free will. Of particular note is the disturbing description of Brandon's suffocation as the noose tightens around his neck. Not helping is Naomi accidentally hanging herself and nearly dying afterwards, which is only canceled out by Brandon's simultaneous suicide, since only one spirit can inhabit Brandon's body and it's not Naomi's time to die yet. Naomi is notably shaken by the whole ordeal, very relieved to have made it out alive.
• Player Punch: Carol and Christabell's arc. You meet up with Carol at various points in her life: having a tea party with her as a kid, talking to her when she's a teen, and finally seeing her again as an adult. While Carol shows odd tendencies from the start, such as owning a disturbing collection of Creepy Dolls, it's because she's being neglected by her parents and has few friends. You learn later in life that she's putting up with all sorts of terrible happenings to further her father's plans, and Carol doesn't like Christabell anymore, with Christabell doing some perverted and creepy things to her. As an adult, she's a subtle Politically Incorrect Villain who worships Nixon, and her father wants to awaken the Deep Ones. You have to use a magic spell Christabell gave you to banish Carol, and Christabell, from existence. The last thing Carol says to you is "I'm sorry", and then the room is eerily empty. Despite Carol turning out to be evil, there's an odd sense of sadness to losing a character that you've spent so much time with, and who was genuinely nice to you.
• Scrappy Mechanic: The mildew. Taking the gloves in the greenhouse and not spraying them with pesticide will result in the text "(smelling faintly of mildew)" being added to something in your inventory, and you can't get rid of it since the pesticide is a one-use item. It spreads to items over the course of the game, unnecessarily bloating your inventory list with a lot of redundant and useless text.
• Signature Scene:
  • The boneless horse scene in the meatpacking plant bathroom left an impression on most players. It's very vulgar and shockingly hilarious, not to mention being one of the longest single puzzles in the game. It also comes relatively early into a very lengthy game, so most players will have encountered it.
  • Carol and Christabell's arc. In a game where most rooms are independent and there's not much continuity between them, having two rooms in different areas of the game that are completely interconnected (and with a LOT of optional dialogue) is highly unexpected. It helps that the scene is really impactful, with both characters being memorable in their own right, ending on a fantastic Player Punch.
• Squick: The meatpacking plant puzzle involves you digging up, and cutting through, the corpses of dead animals.
• That One Puzzle:
  • The early-game bridge puzzle had a lot of players stuck. It relies on you using an item from a totally different region of the game (not the beach, as you'd expect). Even once you figure out what to do, the puzzle is complicated and involves being at four different heights at the same room. It doesn't help that this is one of the first puzzles that's immediately required for progression, meaning if you get stuck here, there's effectively no more to explore.
  • The music room puzzle, with the ghost of Francine Cragne. It involves switching music modulators to visit different rooms in different places in time. It's hard to keep track of where everything is and know where to start. It doesn't help that the puzzle involves major amounts of Nightmare Fuel (learning that Francine is a serial decapitator, her child self having drawn an image of a planned murder, and opening the bag of the victim's body parts), and Squick (child Francine, and later you, directly vomiting).
  • The boiler room puzzle. The room's full of strange instruments that you can hook up to a dimensional stabilizer. While you get a fair amount of instructions for how to set it up, what mainly makes it That One Puzzle is just how tedious and unwieldly it feels. Many of the items conflict and have long names, forcing you to go through repetitive disambiguations, and the punch cards are all identified through various strings of 8 characters that you have to retype. The final puzzle is reliant on you spelling out a word in hexadecimal.