And to think that these are just some of the regular enemies.
- If you didn't have trypophobia (pathological fear of objects with irregular patterns of holes) before, then the game may as well give it to you.
- Any scenes where you're wading through a tunnel or pool filled with corpses and blood. It's guaranteed to make you feel sick to your stomach.
- The transformation of the humans. Oh, the Body Horror, and the Facial Horror...
- The masks some of The Haunted wear. You'd think that a cheery, doll-like porcelain white mask would be a better visage than the torn and mutilated face you know lies beneath. You'd be wrong.
- The loading screens themselves are creepy as hell.
- One loading screen is an extreme closeup of a Haunted's mask hanging on a wall, which gradually becomes cracked and bloody.
- One is a window being lit by lightning, which is eerie but mundane. Until one flash suddenly reveals handprints of gore and blood spatter suddenly staining the glass, which then vanish with the next flash.
- There's a variant of this one in chapter 9, where the blood splatter is replaced by the looming form of spider-Laura...
- One has a group of female mannequins who develop both tear-stains of blood on their cheeks and thick gory smears around the seams of their necks, making them look like their throats have been cut. For the icing on the cake, once the blood is at its thickest, their eyes visibly shift to look at you.
- Even the HUD is kind of scary - on Casual Difficulty, whenever Sebastian is in range of a monster's search range, a Faceless Eye appears at the top of the screen and starts scanning the fourth wall. If the monster finds him, it switches to a wide-eyed Death Glare that gives you a full view of its slitted pupil. Not fun.
- The Reveal as to where these monsters you're fighting are coming from... let's just say the title of this game is warranted.
- Tldr; the monsters are the people that have died inside the STEM machine, and have taken the form of the greatest fears of the living people that are currently connected to STEM. They're literally pathological fear, personified.
- On a related note, the revelation that you're inside Ruvik's mindscape. You are literally alone inside of the fantasies of a serial killer.
- The first enemy you encounter, the Sadist. You come to hanging upside down in a grimy, makeshift abattoir among several corpses, while a hulking psychopath is just out of your view, hacking off the torso of the only other living victim strung up with you (yes, listen for it; the guy was still alive for part of that) and then dragging the upper half of the luckless victim's body to a table for carving.
- The most terrifying aspect of this level is the reality of it: Asides from the one part with the hallway filled with sawblades and the Sadist's 'body modification', this sequence is a pretty realistic representation of how most ordinary people would end up during an encounter with a rampaging psychopath. You can't fight, all you can do is run and hide.
- Not to mention the fact that the entire ordeal is reminiscent of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The nature of the protagonist makes it even worse; Sebastian is a gruff, hard-bitten police detective in his late 30's who gives every indication that he can take care of himself just fine, so to see this guy helplessly fleeing in terror for his life is so much more effective than it is with the demure schoolgirl archetypes we usually see put into this type of situation.
- And when we say you can't fight him, we mean it. It's possible to hide and try to stealth-kill him after you get yourself free. He promptly No Sells the attack, and then comes the counterattack...
- Everything involving Rebirth Laura. If you're afraid of spiders at all, you'll hate her. Not to mention the constant heavy breathing that she does while chasing you, and her unholy screaming when she first appears (always out of a dead body and/or pool of blood). And like many enemies, she just keeps coming back, even if you think you've killed her. Her final appearance is in chapter 10, and even then, you can't kill her unless you've already beaten the game and have the rocket launcher. Even running away or trying to avoid her can be terrifying, since she usually walks slowly or teleports, but occasionally, she'll sprint toward you.
- When you learn why she can only be killed with fire, it becomes a tearjerker: she was burned to death after pushing Ruvik from a burning barn, saving him but causing herself to get killed.
- The way she kills you gives some Nausea Fuel. Always an instant death, in which she knocks you down, hits you in the head hard enough to break your neck, hits you a few more times, and eventually crushes your head to the point that blood spews from you neck, as she leans over you in a way that's almost seductive. After a certain number of hits, you get to see Sebastian's face caved in. Yum.
- Some players noticed that she's wearing shoes, which seems funny at first. Then you realize it's a link to her old humanity, and it becomes Harsher in Hindsight.
- Chapter 9 is especially Jump Scare inducing, since you're exploring an old mansion and Ruvik will occasionally warp into existence and chase you. The worst part is it's completely random and you never know when he's going to appear; your only warning that Ruvik is coming is if the screen suddenly turns blue and the music changes. Your only options are to run or hide, and if he does find you, he kills you instantly by liquefying you with his mind.
- Laura being burned alive after pushing Ruvik out of a window of the barn which villagers set on fire. No wonder Kill It with Fire is so effective against your enemies...
- The brain puzzles in the area are kind of disturbing as well, with having to insert a needle in a certain portion of the brain of a bisected head. And the only clue you get is through and audio log of Ruvik's where he is horribly experimenting on the screaming victim. Oh yeah and if you notice closely, the eyes on the operated head twitches
- The mannequin hallway
◊. If mannequins creep you out, DON'T click on the image link. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
- The boss battle with the Keeper deserves special mention; he gets quite a bit of buildup (including a document written by some other poor sap trapped in the catacombs who describes being chased by him) only for the guy to go down rather quickly (an explosive arrow and a couple rounds of buckshot will drop him). But then he just keeps coming back.
- Not to mention that at one point, when he's unable to get to Sebastian through a steel cage, he rips his head off deliberately so that he'll come back behind the bars to keep chasing you.
- The entirety of Chapter 10, The Craftsman’s Tools, is panic-inducing nightmare fuel. The dim lighting, narrow and maze-like hallways, room after room of traps, the new Trauma enemies, the carousel of death, the return of Laura. This is one to play with the lights on.
- Chapter 12 is fairly short, but is equal parts this and Nausea Fuel. Sebastian finally reunites with Joseph and they find a school bus. But before they can see if it works, Kidman frantically runs onto the bus and starts it as something resembling Urgot's big brother tears the roof off and begins chasing them. This thing is Disgusting with a capital D, with hoses running into its mouth and the ability to spawn maggots the size of pitbulls.
- The environment itself is out to get you, filling the areas you're forced to explore with tripwires, bombs, and other traps that can kill you or drain your health if you're not constantly keeping an eye out for them. In The Evil Within, everything really is trying to kill you.
- As you approach the Asylum on a bridge made from train cars, a raging storm outside, three girders come crashing into the train, each with a single word written in red. "You. Will. Suffer." Up until now, you've been nothing but a nuisance to Ruvik, as he has been more focused on his own goals than on you and is more than willing to just let his traps or the monsters kill you. He may have tried to kill you if he saw you, or briefly fight you, but you were never his focus, just a minor nuisance that kept coming back again and again. However, in this moment, he makes it clear that you have gone from a mere nuisance to a threat and that the gloves are coming off. Let that sink in: The psychopath with near-godlike control over all aspects of this world has decided to focus his efforts on killing you. That feeling in your trousers right now is the appropriate response for the gauntlet that is coming.
- Near the end of the game, Sebastian finally makes it back to the asylum and comes to the same hallway where the three cops were killed by Ruvik at the beginning. Sebastian sees it play out again, only this time he's not looking through a camera. Ruvik goes after Sebastian next and out of desperation, he smashes his lantern against Ruvik's face, which sets him on fire and burns his cloak off... Revealing that Ruvik has a glass plate in his skull that shows half his brain.
- Ruvik himself. As if his Eldritch Location of a mind isn't enough, the man (at least the mental manifestation of him anyway) is a Humanoid Abomination that was a sociopathic Serial Killer when he wasn't being a Brain in a Jar. He hasn't changed in the slightest. Although considering that The Sadist was formerly a murderer and now a Chainsaw Crazy animal, it would have probably made Ruvik worse.
- Made even more worse if Ruvik managed to pull off his Grand Theft Me on Leslie. If this is the case, then that means that the completely insane psychopath that you've been opposing to get out of his mind is now loose on the streets. Oh, Crap! indeed.
- At the beginning of Chapter 5, Sebastian finds himself in a corridor with doors to several rooms either side. Going into some of these rooms results in some unsettling moments:
- One room has the corpse of a woman lying on the floor. If you walk past it and then turn around again, the corpse disappears. Then, when you go to exit the room, a Haunted can suddenly be seen walking past the door. However, once you get back into the corridor, this Haunted is nowhere to be seen.
- Another room has a Haunted turned away from you. Approaching him causes him to suddenly turn around and lunge for Sebastian, before disappearing into thin air.
- Perhaps the creepiest room is one of the last ones you can enter. The only thing in the room is a single chair, surrounded by large, red curtains covering the walls. Even creepier is the fact that you can hear the sound of a woman laughing, and it sounds like she's right in the room with you... but no-one is.
- The twisted hellscape you find yourself in before you finally face off with Ruvik. The floors and walls are covered in glistening, bloody viscera and the sky has been replaced by a pulsing mass of flesh filled with giant eyeballs staring down at you. Screaming Mad George would be so proud!
- From The Assignment DLC: Leeeeeesliiiiiie....
- The searchlight creature that says that is worse!
- When you reach the second save point in Chapter 1 of The Assignment, you'll probably already be tense from the previous enemy encounters. Then you'll notice a Haunted sneaking up behind Kidman while she's sitting in the chair with the cat. Then as soon as you sit up... he disappears.
- In the beginning of the game, you have to hide in a locker to escape a Haunted trying (and eventually succeeding) to break down the door, he then steps into the room and eyes the locker you are in before the Searchlight-monster strides in, horribly butchers the Haunted watching the locker, takes a look herself, and then stomps out. Cue soiled pants.
- There's also the final chase sequence in The Assigment, where Kidman is chased by a shadowy apparition of her boss, who never moves faster than a Menacing Stroll, but will occasionally appear in front of her. The worst part of it all? When he gets close to you, you can see multiple hands stretching out of the darkness behind him and trying to grab Kidman.
