As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.
Run.
Released within the same year as Resident Evil (Remake), the realistic graphics and detailed enemies of this prequel are just as unsettling.- Resident Evil 0 doesn't have the remake's Crimson Heads, but it more than makes up for that with an enemy known informally as a Humanoid Leech (often referred to as a "leech zombie", or by its proper name, Mimicry Marcus), a swarm of T-Virus leeches that gather together into a human-like form. Aside from being full-blown Demonic Spiders, the things just love to hang around in narrow, claustrophobic hallways, move with a disturbing, boneless walk, and have a really disturbing musical theme
. What's more, humanoid leeches can and will make their way into rooms that were previously empty, meaning that you will reenter a "safe" area, only to find as soon as the screen finishes loading that one of these abominations is right in front of you. Oh and by the way, you absolutely must destroy them with either Molotov Cocktails or Flame Rounds from a grenade launcher (or the Handcannon if you have it on another playthrough). Otherwise, you'll render it without a top and then you have all of five seconds to get as far away from it as possible as it swells up to a bulbous mass and then explodes launching leeches all over the place. This explosion can kill your characters (especially Rebecca) if they're too close.- The worst part? They look like normal people. The first one you find sits there looking like an old man before his head falls onto the floor.
- The single scariest segment of the entire game lies just beyond the blue-colored door on the second floor of the training facility, unlocked with the Water Key from the basement's battle arena. There are two hallways here, connected to a series of rooms featuring a few key items. In both hallways and at least one of the rooms, this is the music that plays; otherwise, it's dead silent. That alone makes this area unsettling as old hell, but it also happens to be the place where you'll encounter more leech zombies than any other. They can pop up anywhere at any time (figuratively speaking; each appearance is scripted): around any corner, through any door, even in areas that you've previously visited. Have fun.
- Another potentially frightening part is that sometimes, they're just there, and your first indication is rounding a corner and suddenly there it is, standing there staring at you for a moment while the music starts up. This is best seen on the first floor restroom of the Training Facility. You walk in, pick up a bottle, an herb, and gasoline with no issues, but the minute you turn that corner again...
- And further dwelling on the scene from above the old man's body then splits into chunks as Rebecca screams in horror and then we're treated to the chunks all revealing to be leeches that all begin to huddle together in a grotesque and slimy mass and till they take on the shape of the man again only this time with obviously inhuman skin tone and then as the face reels forward, the camera zooms in as the thing stars at the screen with creepy, white, soulless eyes.
- Becomes even more unsettling on a second playthrough when you come to recognize that the old man the leeches took form of is James Marcus.
- Lurkers. Giant, mutant frogs that inhabit the waters of the Treatment Plant and jump out completely at random. If one hits you with the tip of its elongated tongue, you'd better hope that your partner is close at hand to hit it with as much firepower as they can handle. If not, or if your arsenal proves insufficient, you'll be treated to a lovely five-second animation where your character is slowly and helplessly dragged across the floor by the leg before being swallowed whole by the oversized amphibian. This is one of the few enemies in the Resident Evil series whose main attack is a One-Hit Kill, and it can take many players by surprise because there is no guarantee that you'll even encounter one in a single playthrough.
- In the Power Plant level, in the same room where you rescue Billy Coen after he took a tumble into the water, you find a stack of skeletons all piled on top of one another with grime on them. These were all of Dr. Marcus's victims after he went mad with testing the T-Virus on humans.
- Bonus points for the brief PTSD flashback that Billy experiences when seeing it.
- More of an instance of Fridge Horror combined with Tear Jerker, but Rebecca Chambers' last meeting with Enrico Marini, her squad captain becomes a whole lot chilling considering he's murdered only the next day by Albert Wesker, his commander and co-patriot whom intentionally sent everybody on this wild goose chase to see how they'd fare against B.O.W.s. Her words really hammer in the chilling realization:Rebecca: "I never saw him again."
- Billy, after parting ways with Rebecca, disappears into Raccoon Forest, which is still infested with the zombie dogs. To this day, Capcom hasn't explained what happened to him.
- In the kitchen on the back of the train, there is a giant fridge which you can't open. So just walk past it and ignore it. Once you enter the next room and back, a zombie bursts out of the fridge the second you walk past it. A very good (yet likely very predictable if you're familiar with the series) jump scare. Also in the fridge was a bottle of booze, hinting what that person was doing during his last hours hiding from the zombie outbreak.
- There's a gas chamber in Marcus's main lab. And it's not even hidden or disguised as something else; it's right out in clear view for people to see. And there's a body in there that becomes a zombie once you remove the gas from the chamber. Clearly, Marcus wasn't below sparing anyone (let alone his colleagues) a terrible death for simply knowing what he was doing.
- Most of the files you find in the Research Center are chilling reads as most of them are from attendants of the center and either witnesses or victims of Marcus's cruel research. Most of them are written with the writer fully aware Marcus was on to them.
- James Marcus's descent into madness which you can read about slowly through many files littered throughout the game. The man started out as a typical scientist only curious about the virus (in fact, he is annoyed when Oswell E. Spencer constantly approaches him about heading the training facility). He concedes eventually, and of course, with too much power in his hands and his unhealthy obsession with the leeches, he slowly becomes a monster.
- Marcus also didn't see his leeches as test subjects or even pets, but rather his children.
- The basement of the training facility is all kinds of disturbing. Not only is the theme downright creepy, but Rebecca eventually stumbles upon to her horror a full torture/execution chamber complete with whips, electric chairs and even some iron maidens which she examines to have a lot of dry blood on them.
- Further down in the basement you discover some sort of battle chamber/maze pit that at the push of a button from the command chamber overseeing the complex adjacent in the other room locks the pit with barred doors and drops Hunters in for some sort of battle sequence. The only skeletal remains you find in this pit are of people. Knowing Marcus, the implications here are a lot worse than you think.
- The Hunters' theme is bound to get you running to create some space between you and the creatures.
- The Proto-Tyrant (the prototype of the Tyrant from the first game) is the very epitome of body horror. Its lips have deteriorated, there are gaping holes at the sides of its mouth, it violently twitches like it's possessed every ten seconds or so, and to top it all off, its spinal cord is out in complete view. It also came insanely close to cutting Rebecca's last route of escape from the facility with a flick of its claw had she not already have called for the elevator.
- Marcus going on about how "the world will burn in an inferno of hate" and cringe worthily saying "we'll see which one of us is gonna die" is hilarious. Marcus puking up a storm of slime and leeches mid-sentence and transforming into the Queen leech is not.
- Billy's backstory, where his squad butchers an innocent village for no real reason and then pins the blame on him when he tries to stop it. Making it more horrifying is that this has happened before.
- It goes beyond "no real reason". The soldiers in Billy's unit were in Africa to intervene in a foreign conflict, but instead found themselves getting ambushed and massacred in the jungle. They finally get to their objective, after so many dead comrades and so much hellish fighting, only to find the village has no weapons and no rebels. It's easy to see how after that, they massacred the villagers because, otherwise, everything they went through would have been All for Nothing, because there had to be an enemy, otherwise the entire ordeal was meaningless. It gives the soldiers a bit more sympathy, but it does not excuse what they did. It also makes it especially horrifying, because by the end of it, Billy is the only voice of reason remaining, and is forced to watch his teammates and likely friends go to that dark, horrible place, betraying Billy. And it's Billy alone who we see charged with it and no mention of the other soldiers is made, meaning the military made him the scapegoat, or his squad simply didn't tell anyone and got away with it.
- What's especially horrifying about it all is the impact it has on Billy. The novelization goes into more depth of his internal feelings, but the game doesn't. However, with as many times as Billy saves Rebecca from danger is and is there for her, he proves himself a reliable ally AND FRIEND, something you wouldn't expect out of someone said to have massacred 23 people. As a result, Rebecca obviously pushes for the truth and though he does share it, he never outright tells her that he didn't hurt anyone. Let that sink in a little...this is a good man who prioritizes keeping people safe, but he's become so darkened and disillusioned by the betrayal that he no longer tries to defend himself, simply letting Rebecca believe whatever she wants to because he no longer believes in trusting anyone believing him, not even his current closest ally and friend.
- When loading a save file the game will usually display haunting messages like "there is still evil in this place," but one especially creepy message is "are those faint sounds of footsteps those of survivors?" Given the game in question, the answer is most likely a big "NOPE."
- There were hints in other games that there was more going on with Umbrella's motivations than simply the reckless pursuit of profit, and this was the first game to show how far that really went. Documents throughout the game show that while Umbrella appears to be an evil corporation, it operates more like a cult, with things like this 'employee pledge' at the forefront:Obedience Breeds Discipline, Discipline Breeds Unity, Unity Breeds Power, Power is Life.
- In fact, one puzzle in the main hall of the Training Facility is a subtle, but somewhat horrifying nod to Umbrella's view on "ethical research". You collect two statues and rebuild them into a statue of an angel and a devil. What are they called? Statue of Good and Statue of Evil. The two statues go on either side of a set of scales to balance it for a puzzle. While it simply is about progressing through the game, it does show how Umbrella brought maybe benevolent, but plenty of malevolent intentions into their corporation and somehow thought that was what they needed.
- There are more than a handful of files/documents in the game which Rebecca can collect that reveal Albert Wesker's past with Umbrella. You'd figure she'd probably have something to at least warn Chris Redfield when she meets him or even Enrico when she runs into him again about Wesker's impending betrayal. However, these files conveniently only mention Wesker's name by his first. The player knows which "Albert" the files are talking about, but Rebecca doesn't.
