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Nightmare Fuel / BioShock 2

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"Big Sister is always watching."

  • The fact you're called Subject DELTA implies that, even with all the screwed up stuff you learn about your past, there are/were 3 more Alpha-Series Big Daddies before you. In one of Alexander's Audio Diaries, they mention that they were currently testing Subject Sigma. Its implied that Delta may be the only one with sanity and considering later events, it is implied that Alpha Series Big Daddies are still being made. Makes it something of a relief that you actually get to play Sigma, huh?
  • Injecting your first plasmid is just as nightmarish as it was in the first game. Subject Delta is brought to his knees, violently spasming in excruciating pain while electricity sparks from his hands. And the entire time he is grunting in pain. If it wasn’t for his vocal modifications he would probably be screaming bloody murder.
  • Amusement park animatronics are naturally creepy already. So what about damaged, vandalized, abandoned ones that spew propaganda? Hell, even Ryan himself said he was creeped out by them.
    Ryan: Seeing myself transformed into that... lurching waxen nightmare... Do children really respond to this?
    • Then you see Ryan's own animatron at the very end of the park. Only, by now, it's seen much better days when it still looked at least human.
    • And speaking of propaganda, it's not quite the concept of the propaganda itself that is the most unsettling, but the content. It goes on to explain how the governments seize crops and scientific assets, censors what doesn't benefit them, and most disturbingly, drafts youths into war to die early. And by the way, whenever Ryan sums up what the "parasites" say in a low growling tone, the display is illuminated with a red light as a huge hand representing the powers that be. As if we needed more hints of how Ryan views the world.
  • Sofia Lamb.
    • "This is not your daughter. Her name is Eleanor, and she is mine." There is no love in this voice. No affection. Merely possessiveness. Lamb sees Eleanor solely as something belonging to her, to mold and shape as she sees fit. And then she tells you to remove your helmet, put a pistol to your temple...
      • With a plasmid that you probably have used in the previous game.
      • And that you'll probably use in this game still. Hypnotize Level 3.
      • Don't think of it in terms of Big Daddy/Little Sister. Think of it as a father watching his daughter watch him commit forced suicide.
      • She didn't even need to make Delta shoot himself, she could have pulled the trigger herself.
    • The fact that Lamb used her psychiatry sessions not to comfort vulnerable and needy people, but rather to Mind Rape them into believing they were horribly selfish, "cure" them of their "selfishness", and get them to join her creepy Utopian cult is utterly evil, and utterly terrifying. More than one diary talks about how the speaker was so awful before Doctor Lamb "cured" them, but now they can serve the Family and do some good...
    • The fact that she is just waiting next to Eleanor when Delta finds her in Persephone, prepared to smother her own daughter just to stop him. This pretty much drives home the fact that she doesn't see Eleanor as a daughter; as something to care for as a person. She sees her a tool to be used as she sees fit and for nothing more and no-one else, and is fully prepared to nearly kill her if it means she's denying her to someone else.
    • Her line right before is enough to make your heart sink.
    Sofia: But there is one detail of your mutual bond she failed to account for: your body was designed to lapse into a coma when her heart ceases to beat. Eleanor... forgive me.
    • Her demeanor, which seems so cold and detached in comparison to Ryan. He at least showed passion in keeping "his" city, whenever he communicates with Jack. Sofia just seems cold and uncaring, speaking to Delta like he's just some especially troublesome organism on a lab table that won't stay still.
    • The novel makes it clear that Lamb was like this before coming to Rapture, but it wasn't until she had access to desperate people incapable of escape that she started thinking about a 'revolution.' At first you chalk up Ryan's hatred of Lamb to her being a Dirty Communist, but then you realize the utter disconnect between her terrifyingly soothing public face and her utter lack of empathy for anyone, from her followers to her daughter. Lamb emphasizes 'caring for everyone equally' to the point where she does feel the same thing for everyone: Absolute indifference to their status as humans, concerned only with how they can advance her Greater Good.
    • After Eleanor and Delta begin their escape, Sofia chimes in with this. She's gone off the deep end. And she intends to drag everyone down with her.
    Sofia: Subject Delta... I know you can hear me. You have stolen my life's work, and with it — my only daughter. But Rapture is the house of monsters. The surface will not have us. And now, we shall be buried as a family. Side by side.
    • Unlike any other character in the franchise, including Atlas, Sofia doesn't show any genuine emotion. At all. Not even sadism.
    • Even creepier is one later on, where she reaches out to Eleanor in a vain attempt to change her mind. And she ends it with "Mummy loves you."
    • And there's Sofia's goal. She intends to use the resources of Rapture to create what she calls a Utopian; to her, a utopia is not a place but a people, something that will only exist when the right people are "fit to occupy it." Her way of achieving that? Creating a being who has the power to serve the common good, filled with the minds and DNA of all of Rapture's greatest geniuses, but with absolutely no sense of self- no desire, no free will, not even true consciousness. This is her ideal state of being for humanity- to Sofia, being forced to do good is morally better than having the choice to do evil. What's worse? She intends to force this transformation onto Eleanor, her own daughter.
  • Early in the game the player comes across a photo reading "Rapture's best and brightest 1952". Who's on it? Tenenbaum, Cohen, Alexander, Ryan, Lamb, and Suchong. Tenenbaum looking nervous and childlike, Cohen looking oddly warped, Alexander distant and unfocused, Ryan glaring at the camera, Lamb smiling calmly, and Suchong utterly indifferent. In other words it perfectly captures everything that makes each character scary. Talk about a picture being worth a thousand words.
  • LAMB IS WATCHING
  • Being able to overhear the conversations that the Splicers have with each other, often the perfect balance of lucid and deranged:
    Male Splicer 1: "Canned beans! (laughs stupidly) We're gonna be rich!"
    Male Splicer 2: "Well la-ti-da, princess! The next time you're eating out of the garbage, you think of me!"
    Female Splicer: "A lady has to have some standards!" (begins sobbing)

    Male Splicer: "We got plans for you, sweetheart!"
    Female Splicer: "Unhand me at once!"
    Male Splicer: "Paid good money."
    Female Splicer: "I ain't no hooker!"
    Male Splicer: "He he he."
    Female Splicer: (Screaming) "HELP!"
  • The Big Sister. No matter how many times they signal their presence with that high pitched scream, it never loses its effectiveness. You'll still be madly scrambling about, trying to set up a perimeter for their imminent arrival.
    • It doesn't help that you can often look out the windows and see them swimming around, seemingly stalking you.
  • There's Ryan Amusements, an Objectivist-themed amusement park meant to "educate" kids about the dangers of the outside world. Even Andrew Ryan himself thinks the Nightmare Fuel is overdone, noting the Uncanny Valley quality of the figurines. There are giant hands that would be sitting around, ready to represent whatever Ryan didn't like. Ryan animatronics that you can whack the head and arms off and the torsos continue to twitch around. The last one is mangled and strung up hanging from the ceiling.
    • It's sickening once all the farmer's limbs are taken off, and once the animatronic starts, the farmer's headless, limbless body is just... jerking around.
    • Perhaps most disturbing is the audio diaries. Apparently, once the populace started to revolt against Ryan, he had many parts of Rapture quartered off, one place being the park. You come across a series of audio diaries from a chaperone leading a field trip when the park was closed off. You get to follow along as she and all the students slowly die of starvation.
      • Although, it's implied that (some of) the children did survive, as the chaperone and some other adults gave them all their food. What happened to the children afterwards, though, is probably not worth speculating on...
  • Siren Alley. The brothel area has its multitude of dead hookers pinned to the walls and ceiling with speargun ammo.
    • The end of the level when the place starts to flood and Lamb chimes in to add another layer of creepy to things.
    "Subject Delta, I want you to commit this moment to memory for me - this howling, brutish slog through the dark. This is who we are."
    • The flooding of Siren Alley. Sofia Lamb overloads the pumps and water starts flowing in fast, the entire place falling apart and crashing down around Delta as he hastily makes his way out through the currents of water now overshadowing the floor. All around you, you can see the lights flickering and going out, the bulkheads being twisted by the water pressure and seconds away from bursting, and you can hear the Splicers, Lamb's own followers, the prostitutes in the brothel and a few others all screaming in desperation among the rumbles and screeches of metal, some of them unable to even do anything but lie on the ground and cry.
      • Even worse: Lamb's reason to do this wasn't even to really kill Delta. After he's blasted by the water bursting out a bulkhead and the place is fully flooded, Sofia just adds a new comment as if she knew he'd make it. She killed several of her own people because she wanted to show Delta how little the city itself means to her master plan. She drowned hundreds of people to prove a point to Delta.
    "Look, Delta, it is the world for which you strive. You... alone... among the dead."
    • How about the Little Sisters Orphanage in Siren Alley? When you go in, you find a few bodies about you can search, including a spider splicer pinned to the wall by a spear (and keep in mind, those are a new enemy at this point, so you're not quite used to seeing those freaks yet). On the way up, you catch a glimpse of a live spider splicer as he darts around a corner, but other than that, no real fights. But then you reach the end and get your loot and the power goes out, leaving your flashlight your only illumination. As you charge back the way you came, by that beam you keep catching glimpses of the spider splicer darting around corners one step ahead of you until eventually they trap you in the second floor hall. The following standup fight with the spiders and a brute is outright catharsis at that point! Oh, but on the way out shine your flashlight at the "dead" spider pinned to the wall: he's about to leap at you.
  • In a certain area of the game where you're told, specifically, EVERYONE DIED OF DROWNING, you come across a disjointed audio log from a shy little boy who has a crush on a Little Sister. It's heavily implied he was killed by her Big Daddy, or drowned when the place flooded.
  • Cohen's Collection. Listen carefully when you start up the gathering event in the area. You can hear Cohen laughing...
  • Gil Alexander's fate.
    • When confronted with that... thing, you have the option of either fulfilling the person it used to be's final request for euthanasia, or letting it live, after it promises to "go outside." Now imagine that swimming around in the cold, lightless depths of the Atlantic...
    • And just for a final layer of horror the choice you are making is really between two people. Gil Alexander and Alexander the Great, same body but at this point Alexander the Great has diverged enough to be considered an individual all his own not just a rambling mad man. Sure he might well be crazy but he is coherent enough to hold conversations putting him a solid step above the splicers, and he wants to live. Gil Alexander, the man who died before becoming Alexander the Great, wanted to die because he knew what he would become though so who do you listen to? The man he was or the man he is?
      • Worse is imagining that swimming around in the very brightly illuminated depths near Persephone. The luminescent biomass the bottom of that trench is confirmed by Word of God to be the ultimate source of ADAM. Gil can't avoid seeking the stuff, as revealed by the plants attracting him to the front of his tank even when he knew that they could kill him. Imagine what might happen if he found his way down to the bottom of the trench and gorged himself for decades on more ADAM than he could possibly consume.
      • Especially since he looks more akin to an oversized fetus than anything else. *shudder*
    • And to add another layer to this, Gil was Sofia's first attempt at creating a Utopian, and he provides a subtle but chilling hint at what may befall Eleanor in this experiment.
    Gil: Whatever you saw inside the tank, that was indeed... me. I fear the fate of Eleanor Lamb will be less physical, but no less grotesque.
  • The fate of Mark Meltzer, who went to Rapture looking for his daughter Cindy who was kidnapped and turned into a Little Sister, and he wound up being turned into a Big Daddy so he could be with her. Then you wind up killing him near the end of the game, but you can still save Cindy.
  • Seeing Rapture through the eyes of a Little Sister. The fact that everything is beautiful and sunny, with rose petals across the ground and butterflies floating around only makes it THAT. MUCH. WORSE.
    • Especially when you get short flashes of how it actually looks.
    • The rose petals are blood stains on the floor. Also, all the walls and ceilings seem to be covered in the same stuff as a padded cell.
    • Really doesn't help that you get to listen to the echoes of creepy laughter every few seconds if you decide to hang around long enough to harvest ADAM and collect items.
    • When you get close to the windows as a Little Sister you can see the glass isn't smudged or cracked like normal, but rather spotted... with tiny, childlike handprints.
    • Or that they see the Big Sister armor as a tiara (the helmet), pretty dress (the suit) and silk glove (the weapons). When I grow up I wanna be a princess!
    • The silent splicers.
    • The little sisters always see this... every second, a perfect world where no one gets hurt and nothing is scary. This is due to the conditioning they went through. When you rescue a little sister, you remove this perfect dream world, throwing them permanently into a world of sheer horror, death and destruction. When you don't, the little sister's see nothing but their daddy there, ripping out the very thing keeping them alive. Their last thing they see is the one they trust most of all murdering them, most likely staying in their perfect little dream world. Those Sisters had support in, at minimum, each other and Jack. Best case including the DLC, the Little Sisters in 2 have each other, Eleanor, Tenenbaum, Charles Porter, the Thinker, and the unnamed star of the Protector Trials, the Alpha-series who might just be Subject Alpha. The Thinker can and does undo ADAM modifications that helps change Porter from Subject Sigma back into a normal human. If it takes a while for the Sisters' programming to break, then at least it's been a while since they swallowed corpse juice or had people trying to kill them, and they live somewhere better than Rapture, so the contrast would be less sharp. Worst case, Eleanor kills them for any residual ADAM in their systems, of course.
    • According to Gil Alexander's audio diaries, when the original Little Sisters grew up, their programming started to decay, and they became feral and insanely aggressive: in other words, picture the first option mentioned in the entry above... and inflict it on a teenager who has spent years happily wandering her own dreamworld, and by now has enough ADAM-induced superpowers to be extremely dangerous. After suddenly experiencing the real world after a decade of comfortable hallucinations and learning that everything there is trying to kill you, going insane is horrifyingly understandable.
    • When you find the Big Sister suit and reality intrudes, you can hear drilling and someone screaming. For all we know, that might be Sinclair!
  • Almost the entire endgame in the Persephone penitentiary facility.
  • Even if you've been a paragon of virtue, Eleanor is still terrifying. She's every bit as aggressive as any other Big Sister, and, in between slicing up legions of splicers, can be heard to shout things like "This one died alone and afraid! Stand in our way and you'll get the same!"
    • Just think: not only was Sofia prepared to smother her daughter, she was standing there, waiting to do it. And she waited until Delta was there and would have to watch.
  • Using a fully-upgraded Hypnotize on Sinclair in his Big Daddy form. He brokenly pleads for death while fighting the mind control. Listening to him beg in that horribly strained and desperate voice is horrifying. Having to hear anyone do that...
  • The Spider Splicers. Dear mother of God and all her wacky nephews, the frigging Spider Splicers.
    • Especially the one in the movie theater area of Dionysus Park. You find yourself in a totally abandoned toilet block. No splicers anywhere to be seen, full of food and health packs... and one gene tonic. By now, you're pretty certain that nothing is coming for you, so you take the tonic, and nothing happens... Until you're halfway out of there, and a Spider Splicer just DROPS on you.
    • Another thing: don't. watch. Marble Hornets. and then play this game. The Spider Splicers might just look like everyone's favorite tall, slender stalker...
    • Just looking at what happened to the Crawlers is horrifying; they're barely human anymore with their elongated heads and arms, their huge feet with just 4 big toes, and their constant misery of hearing voices in their heads and killing people to get them to stop. Using Hynotize 3 on them implies that they get hypnotized by Lamb and what they say is a little heart breaking.
  • The lovely little "unstable teleport plasmid".
    • Doesn't help that the statues look like more of Cohen's work, or that, if you listen carefully, you can hear what sounds like someone taking a picture of you when you take the gene tonic.
    • Just hear it? If you turn around after grabbing the tonic, the camera flashes in your face before you immediately teleport back... Urgh. And the ambient sounds in that room are ever so creepy. What sounds like wind and gentle breathing...
  • The inner thoughts of splicers, still trying to convince themselves life is normal or that Lamb will cure them. Or the fact they might actually know what has happened to them.
  • What happens if you harvest a Little Sister instead of rescuing her: the little sister will squirm in your arms, crying and begging you not to hurt her. Then, the screen goes black... and you're holding the poor girl's slug which had been implanted in her stomach. The worst part is that the Little Sister simply doesn't know why her supposed protector betrays her. Tearjerker indeed.
    • If you harvest Little Sisters, whenever you adopt one, she'll say things like "Daddy...? You're never gonna hurt me, right?", "Daddy's home! I've been good! Promise!", "Daddy isn't angry, is he?", "I'll be extra quiet! I won't make you upset!", and "Where are we going? Daddy?" They used to see you as a knight in shining armor. What do they see you as here?
  • Everything that terrified you and made you feel sorry for the Little Sisters gets so much worse in this game when you remember one simple fact: these Little Sisters are girls who were kidnapped from the surface.
  • While the passive state of the Insect Swarm plasmid is less horrifying in this game (honeycombs on your glove, instead of having to watch bees crawl through your flesh), the effects have been appropriately ramped up. Now you get a swarm of angry bees with a smarter, more aggressive AI actively seeking out targets across several rooms. When they're not burrowing into corpses to lie in wait for the next hapless Splicer to come into range, that is...
  • "Daddy, Big Sister doesn't want you playing with me..." OHGODSHE'SONMYHEADGETHEROFFGETHEROFFGETHEROFF!
  • Eleanor in the Bad Ending.
  • If using Incinerate at any time while you have a Little Sister on your shoulders, she may cheerfully chant "Marshmallows!" Though it's slightly funny, it's also slightly disturbing, as the process that turned her into a Little Sister possibly resulted in the girl finding humor in someone burning alive.
    • Though remember, the Little Sisters don't see the world in the same way we do. Chances are, the people you burned don't look like people to them anymore. It's your call as to whether that's more or less morbid.
  • In Persephone, if you search hard enough, you can encounter some prisoners. Not splicers, but just normal people. They don't acknowledge the player in any way, and just cycle through a crying animation until they are killed. Your HUD doesn't register them, unlike everything else in the game, meaning you could try meleeing one to get a reaction, only for it to crumple up dead. They don't even drop anything. Such a minor detail, yet chilling nonetheless.
  • Colin Fix's early concept art for the Alpha Series. If you ever wanted to know what a Big Daddy looked like under their suit, this might just change your mind.
  • The Little Sisters unfortunately don't have perfect conditioning even in the new lines. They know when their daddies die and cry accordingly, though luckily for most of the game you're there to step in and they recover quickly. It's likely that what Eleanor saw was so contrary to what her programming is supposed to do that she got a glimpse of the real world. Ouch, that one is going to leave some emotional scars.
  • The physical appearance of Splicers in general is much more disturbing than in the first game. Their faces look half-melted, like something you would see with a serious burn victim who survived and the flesh healed as much as it could. They look like portions of their flesh have become swollen and detached from where they should be, and now are hanging down and bulging out with skin stretched over to contain it. And most of them do not wear masks now. Lovely. One Leadhead Splicer model has only two toes... that are about two or even three times the size they should be.

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