Fridge Brilliance
- Sebastian finds weapons, tools, and health items scattered all over the place. Why would that be so in an environment literally created and controlled by someone who wants him dead? Because he's also contributing to it, and would very much want those things.
- In addition to that, remember that Ruvik is well-established in-game as being both a sadist and a megalomaniac. Consequently, it makes sense he'd scatter useful weapons, tools and healing items across his twisted Mental World; he gets off on watching Sebastian struggle through his traps and creatures, anticipating his dread and relishing his hope growing, only to be snuffed by the next disaster. Combine this with his sheer arrogance preventing him from believing that Sebastian might actually stand a chance of defeating him thanks to Ruvik's own help, it's no wonder that he's willing to "reward" Sebastian with the tools he needs to survive in exchange for entertaining him so much.
- Joseph is constantly in need of saving by Sebastian. How on earth is he in the business? With the knowledge that Ruvik lays bait in order to get his victims worked up, and that he is the only one who can consciously manipulate events in the mind-link, we can infer that Joseph probably isn't such a Distressed Dude in the real world - he has been made into one by Ruvik to toy with Sebastian.
- The bait theory is most blatantly supported when, only a few minutes after it's been spelled out that Ruvik likes to lay bait to torment his victims - which is in the first place after Sebastian and Joseph have gotten separated yet again - Sebastian sees Joseph run past a doorway directly in front of him, pursued by the Keeper, and naturally runs to help him... when Ruvik appears in front of the doorway just long enough to be smug before he turns the room into a trap room and keeps Sebastian from helping his partner. To say the scenario seems staged by Ruvik would be understating things.
- Ruvik pretty much tells Sebastian and the player that this is true when he calls Sebastian "Seb" and threatens Sebastian not with his wife or child, but with the fact that Ruvik has full hold over Joseph.
- The fish-like creatures which hunt you in watery areas are called Shigyo, meaning 'dead fish'. Might this be a subtle Shout-Out to Junji Ito's Gyo? We might never know, but the similarities are there.
- The save rooms. I feel like an idiot for not noticing sooner, but the design on the doors that lead to the save rooms? It's the emblem for Beacon Mental Hospital.
- The Spotlight Creature that hunts Kidman is a nightmare version of herself. It's a feminine monster hunting for Leslie armed with only a light, like her. Possibly it's some sort of internalized guilt about being in bed with a shady organization.
- Many players noted how Sebastian, Joseph and Juli rarely seem particularly disturbed by the stuff going on around them. It makes sense, in a way; they're trapped in a literal nightmare, after all, and it's fairly common for one's mind to accept and go along with whatever's happening to them in a nightmare even if their subconscious is terrified by it.
- Fire kills anything short of a boss nearly instantly, and their bodies are burnt to ash insanely quickly. Ruvik's been pyrophobic ever since his Cool Big Sis died in a fire. You're weaponizing the Big Bad's greatest fear.
- When you think about it, the localized title of the game has the very same meaning of Resident Evil; Both speak of the evil that resides within someone/somewhere.
- Ruvik's attempt at invoking a Freudian Excuse in chapter 9 fall extremely flat, both In-Universe and out of it. But there's a good reason for that; Ruvik's a psychopath — he has no empathy or sympathy of his own, so naturally he completely fails to understand how to induce either emotion in others!
- Furthermore, it fails because, ultimately, Ruvik's excuses are just that; frail, pitiful excuses that in no way justify all of the horrible things he did.
- The fact that Ruvik is basically lashing out at everyone in an act of Disproportionate Retribution, something obvious to both Sebastian and the player, is just icing on the cake of why he fails to win any sympathy.
- Listen closely to Ruvik's memory-dialogue at the start of chapter 10; it implies that at least some of the people found in his death traps were the people responsible for the fire. No wonder he's so blase about it; it's not just that he's evil, in his mind, it's a simple case of Pay Evil unto Evil.
- In the sequel, it's implied that Ruvik has coded his psychopathy into the S.T.E.M. system, mutating anyone who might usurp him as the core's ruler into becoming a partially-cloned thrall of himself. Hence why the final boss, an outsider, kinda looks like him. So why didn't the other two bosses inherit this trait? Well, Stefano is a master of surveillance being a serial killer shutterbug, so he has his Frankenstein doll monsters and that giant eye in the sky constantly watching for attempts to usurp him. Theodore is a pyromaniac cult leader, everything in his world is on fire, and Ruvik's pyrophobia means his code couldn't even think about attempting to possess him.
