Nightmare Fuel / Pathologic

The Nightmare Fuel page for Pathologic.

Warning: Unmarked spoilers below!

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• The fate of Isidor. When you finally get access to his room, it looks like he exploded from the inside out and painted the walls with his organs. This is generally when you realize the plague is far worse than anyone could have thought.
• Those terminally infected by the Sand Plague are often wrapped in thick, burlap robes. Meaning not only do we have no idea what they look like under their clothes, but whatever it is, it's guaranteed to be absolutely horrifying considering that the plague covers houses with Meat Moss. While you at first feel awful for them, it quickly becomes apparent that they are trying to intentionally infect you.
• The Albino, a mysterious Steppe entity who is said to be an embodiment of the Plague itself. Simply standing near him erodes your immunity and infects you, and his proportions are nothing short of terrifying.
• The first sign that the Plague is not any mundane disease is that the clouds of its germs form into screaming, tortured faces... or, in advanced stages, the Grim Reaper.
• You know what's absolutely terrifying in this game? The infected districts. The unnerving music that starts playing, the men and women in cloaks stumbling around, the scab-like growths on the houses, the children writhing in pain... but worst of all are the houses in the districts. Dilapidated green walls, and you can only stay there for a limited time because the fog that occurs in the streets that makes you ill happens inside, too, but now it's chasing after you. Sometimes, deep in the house, you will find people in the fetal position, unresponsive or weeping. Other times they're deserted instead, resulting in a good amount of Nothing Is Scarier. When they're NOT deserted, creepy marauders clad in black are trying to kill you. They jump right the hell out of nowhere, so it's even worse.
  • Oh gods, the infected houses. Not only is there everything in the above paragraph, but the rooms are so claustrophobic and the clouds are so fast that just going in is extraordinarily stressful.
  • Compounding it, there is no logical reason for the houses to look the way they do. Furniture has been thrown around like a tornado had just ripped through the building, despite the infected being barely able to move let alone rip shelves off walls. Blood is splattered everywhere, and it seems like entire houses are rotting just like a piece of meat.
• Say what you want about Aglaya, but her desperate begging for the Player to bring back Artemy can give chills, especially if You choose to tell her that everything that made her love him was done by you.
• The worst part of Pathologic is simply the creepy juxtaposition of the supernatural, surreal horror in an otherwise realistic setting. It's just so extremely unnatural and wrong, and evokes strong feelings of how this should not be happening. Plus there's the Psychological Horror aspect of how people realistically react to such a supernatural and nebulous foe...
• The use of the first-person perspective breeds tons of nightmare fuel on its own, due to you not having any peripheral vision. There could be a disease cloud right next to you and you won't know it until you either turn the camera or it's right upon you. And of course, there's always the fun game of guessing what's going to be in store for you when you turn around...
• The bad ending. Just... the sickening montage of the town itself literally rotting from within due to the plague, the images of the diseased people lying in the streets (including a child)... it's a pretty big incentive to not screw up during the main game. Oh, and speaking of which, while you watch, you know that it's your fault for failing to save your Adherents or being unable to make a choice during the final council.
• The Kickstarter video. The burning pyres, the utterly still Tragedian resembling a standing corpse, and the fact the devs speech to you is from the perspective of them cutting you open and tossing out random bits, which include a heart, what appears to be your spinal cord, and... a rock, which they just drop in the plate without commenting on it. Combined with the eerie speeches about the Sand Plague and eternity bleeding into the ground, it's probably one of the most eerie Kickstarter videos ever made.
  • The rock is not necessarily out of nowhere. Minerals can gather in various internal organs and form a stonelike mass, such as gallstones and kidney stones. Stones the size of a fist like in the video are not unheard of in humans.
    • In the video, they're operating not on a human, but on the Town (which is alive, sort of).
• The most nightmarish part of the game by far happens on Bachelor's Day 2. You go into Isidor's incredibly claustrophobic house to check for evidence of the plague, and find one of his neighbors inside. She's in an advanced stage of infection, delirious with pain, and fully aware that there's no help for her; the only thing she asks of you is that you don't kill her sisters roaming the house, as they've already gone insane from the plague and don't understand what they're doing. By the time she's done ranting, you will probably be creeped out enough to immediately skedaddle through the very corridor by which you entered... only to see both sisters standing between you and the exit, staring blindly, shuffling towards you and reaching out to grab you so you don't leave them to die. They are the only walking infected in the game who aren't covered in rags, their models identical to those of ordinary women, but their animations are very, very different.
• The final letter the Bachelor gets from the Powers That Be is signed "The People Who Own You". When he follows their instructions and meets them, and it's revealed that he is literally a doll in the hands of children using him and the whole game's scenario to process a death, it's Played for Drama and even horror. His dreams and ambitions are crushed as he realizes it was all in vain, and when he gets heated up about it the children threaten to take him to the cemetery and leave him among the wreathes. Back in the town he can complain about his reality to various other characters. When the Changeling asks what he would have done if he knew beforehand, the Bachelor can say either "I would have acted more confidently" or "I would have shot myself."
• The Haruspex is on good enough terms with the Inquisitor to talk to her about this same revelation and finds that she's known all along that she is a toy, specifically one that had belonged to the childrens' mother, and that she's loved them all their lives but they hate her.
  "Tell me, did the heavens open up? Did the Focus of this town show? Did these... hands... reveal themselves?"
• Clara is aware not just of the children but of the world's state as a game, of herself and the other player characters as animated by some other will.
  "I don't know who's acting under my guise right now. I can only feel their hands."