Nightmare Fuel / ULTRAKILL

Per wiki policy, Spoilers Off applies here and all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.

Welcome to Hell. Here's your welcoming party.

MANKIND IS DEAD.
BLOOD IS FUEL.
HELL IS FULL.

When the premise is all about the Killer Robots that caused the end of humanity invading Hell itself in search of sustenance, you know there are going to be lots of scary moments.

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General

• The game's premise is terrifying on its own. Killer Robots are literally fueled by blood, and they wiped out all life on Earth, leaving the planet a desolate husk of itself. The fact that said unstoppable blood-fueled robots now have their eyes set on the Afterlife isn't making things better and at the rate they're going, any kind of life will probably be non-existent once they are done. Outright confirmed for the worst at the end of Act II that the machines are practically obliterating all of Hell, having successfully destroyed all of the Limbo and Lust layers in their entirety and making fast progress through Gluttony by the time of the rematch with Gabriel. Thanks to V1's actions, the floodgates are now open and the ravenous machines are draining all the life in Hell, and presumably everywhere else in creation, just to satiate their endless appetite for blood.
• Perhaps the most terrifying fact about the ULTRAKILL universe: God Is Dead. No ifs, no buts, He is dead. All that remains of Heaven's leadership is a corrupt, dogmatic Council of Angels trying to pick up the pieces He left behind... and Gabriel butchers them at the end of Act II. Perhaps even worse than this is that the Testaments you find at the end of each secret level tell a story, about someone trying again and again to create a human mind without free will, and failing each time. And it's strongly implied that the narrator of these Testaments is God Himself.
• And then another bombshell falls after this: HELL IS ALIVE.
  • It's been implied on this Library of Babel link that Hell itself caused the extinction of Humanity, which started when Tenebre Rosso Sangue was uploaded onto Hakita's channel, in where viewers were involved in an elaborate ARG from an error code in the P-2 terminal. The upgraded husks, the teleporting enemies, the doors slamming shut in certain areas? A lot of in-game mechanics are all for its own twisted sense of amusement.
  i can only hope this encrypted message is received before the organism learns to read it and intercept it. whatever happens, we can not let this being find a way out and spread to the surface. we ha

  a n o t h e r d i e s . b r i n g m e m o r e . i h u n g e r .
  • The prompt that tells you to give the trees in 7-3 blood uses Red text, with each letter spaced apart saying "F e e d i t." The very same text Hell itself uses, implying that its influence is getting stronger the deeper you go.
• The character we play as, V1, is a different level of Nightmare Fuel and we thank Hakita for making them the Player Character instead of one of the game's bosses. A blue colored combat robot that is able to absorb the blood of their enemies to heal their wounds, a proficiency in all their arsenal which includes: a revolver that can be charged to make more damage with the fact that they can throw coins (that are made out of the excess of iron of the blood V1 consumes) into the air to ricochet the bullets and always make an accurate hit, a heat shotgun that is able to turn anyone near them into Ludicrous Gibs in a blink of an eye, a railgun that can disintegrate anyone on it’s path, a missile launcher that V1 can ride on their own missiles, a nailgun that acts as a chaingun that can be upgraded into a sawblade launcher. V1 is so strong that they can parry the punches of the gigantic Corpse of King Minos, win - twice - against Gabriel, the most powerful arch-angel and the most loyal of the Council of Angels, and kill the Prime souls of King Minos and King Sisyphus, who are so strong that the Angels had to procurate that these two couldn’t escape from their prisons. They are motivated by the same reason as their fellow machines: take as much blood as possible to stay alive, and they are the strongest of all the Machines. It is heavily implied by the Terminals that the line of robots that V1 is part of is actually made to fight and kill the 1000-THR Earthmover robots, who are titanic robots in the shape of a horse that are so tall that they dwarf both the already massive Corpse of King Minos and the titanic Leviathan, and were built with lightning cannons that can nuke entire cities and mountains with ease. Just the fact that V1 was made to kill these colossal monsters is as awesome as it’s fear inducing.

Regular Enemies / Minibosses

• The Husk designs are so grotesque they wouldn't be out of place in a horror game.
  • The Filth, as basic and easy to deal with as it is, is still a far from a pretty sight. It can get very distressing when they start coming at you in hordes.
  • The Stray is a skinless humanoid whose muscles and organs are fully visible.
  • The Schism's head is fused into its right shoulder, its spine is exposed, and it has two distinct left arms in its left shoulder. The kicker? Schisms are a result of two Husks accidentally fusing with each other by manifesting in the same spot. Imagine the horror if multiple Husks are merged together.
  • The Stalker's body is emaciated and twisted at an unnatural angle. The gas-mask doesn't help either.
  • The Sisyphean Insurrectionist is a giant bisected zombie whose ribs and organs are visibly exposed, as if the missing head and malformed arm weren't creepy enough. Speaking of the ribs, if you look at them closely, they look like giant teeth!
  • The Ferryman, while not that intimidating in appearance compared to the other Husks, still makes for quite a scare when it shows up blitzing you down with its oar. The chimes that accompany its appearance acting as a pretty effective Scare Chord.
• The Demons are a twisted bastardization of the art of man in every sense of the word, being a freakish combination of flesh and stone that can either shoot Hell energy at us or trying to hit us with their rock shells.
  • Malicious Faces are relatively tame compared to later specimen, but they give a good taste of what to expect. After fighting hordes of zombies earlier in the level, you're suddenly greeted with an enormous stone face that shoots entire barrages of Hell energy and explosive beams, something not seen so far. A closer look reveals they're not actually levitating, but possess four transparent spider-like legs, giving them an even creepier design.
  • Going into 0-5 "Cerberus", you might expect to face a classic triple-headed canine as a miniboss. And then you reach the boss room and suddenly one of the statues you have been seeing this whole time stands up and proceeds to strike you down like a murderous basketball player. Worse still, a second one stands up once you whittle the first to the half hp. The utterly unexpected Bait-and-Switch and the power level of the boss compared to everything seen before is terrifying and goes to show not only how insane the things are going to be, but how much the story and world of the game, while based on Divine Comedy, will be much different and as spine-chilling, if not worse. After all, this is just Prelude.
    • As a final trick, once you are done and enter gates of Hell proper, you're greeted with more of these statues, thankfully inanimate. Now knowing these things may come to life, you can't help but wonder if they will appear again. And boy, do they.
  • The Hideous Mass is a massive scorpion-shaped Demon with its flesh practically bursting out of its stone carapace from how big it has grown. The expressionless human-like face makes it even more unsettling.
  • As you make your way through the halls of 7-1, you'll start coming across rooms littered with nothing except rows upon rows of posed, white, bloodstained statues with upside-down faces that go into a different pose every time you turn away from them and look back, all accompanied by a music track consisting of a music box and eerie droning. The first checkpoint in the level sees V1 entering a room absolutely full of them in order to obtain a red skull. The second they pick it up, the music stops, and when V1 turns around, they are greeted by all of the statues in the room completely surrounding them. As you exit the room to make your way back to the red skull altar to open the door, the statues in that room suddenly jolt to life, CRAWLING towards you at breakneck speeds. Meet the Mannequins, the broken down and mangled bodies of sinners who have been turned into Demons against their will.
    • A closer look at the Mannequins resembles how horrifying they are, with the upside-down faces mentioned above being the least wrong thing about them. Their bodies are made of mish-mashed segments joined together in a grotesque parody of the human form, with the worst offender being their limbs: they're made of severed forearms joined together with each hand holding the next segment. They give off a feeling of being a nightmarish inversion of the Venus de Milo, a figure that famously lacked her arms; the Mannequins have too many. To make them even scarier, unlike other demons, which are characteristically slow due to their stony exterior, the porcelain exterior does nothing to hinder the Mannequins' mobility while still giving them surprising durability despite their thin frame, allowing them to move way too GODDAMN fast for a demon. They can crawl on walls and ceilings on all fours like a Spider Splicer and deal devastating ranged and melee attacks. In short, Mannequins are an unholy combination of speed, mobility, durability, and deadliness, and these things are the first enemies introduced in Act 3.
    • How they're created is just as horrifying. After the Angels left the Violence layer due to God disappearing the sinners decided this was the best chance to actually escape Violence...Then they got to the Garden of Forking Paths, which like most of Hell became sentient and started to fuck with them by making them get lost inside till they collapsed from exhaustion into a deep sleep. They would then be torn apart joint by joint and have their remains stuffed into a hollow shell, turning into a Mannequin. Said remains are still alive and conscious but have no way to control their bodies as they are puppeted into combat in constant agony.
• The Machines are Mechanical Abomination incarnate. These robots were made to fight in a dreadful war known as the Final War that lasted centuries, this war was so destructive that it nearly drove humankind into extinction and they really show why they were one of the most terrifying Killer Robots in all of fiction when compared to the likes of the Terminator or The Matrix. The Machines were so destructive and monstrous that an evil force from beyond took notes from them and to top all of it, they are now invading Hell after exterminating all life on Earth's surface for more blood to feast on, and if anything, they have completely destroyed Limbo and Lust in a matter of hours.
  • The most unnerving thing of the Machines is the fact that each and every single one of them use blood of the living as fuel. They all have an organic component under all the metal that composes their bodies to use that blood and they need it in order to stay active and should a Machine lose all of their blood, they deactivate and die. This is why they are invading Hell, because they have destroyed all life on Earth and seek to devour the blood of their previous victims once again even after their deaths. Imagine dying to the Machines while you were alive and when you thought you were finally away from them (aside from the fact that you're being tortured for eternity), you see them again with their weapons aiming at you.
  • Streetcleaners are fire wielding Machines with the ability to run at you at scarily fast speeds all while being able to evade your shots before going in for the kill with their flamethrowers. Their heavy breathing doesn't help at all.
    • Special mention goes to their introductory level, 1-2, where V1 eventually comes across dead enemy gibs and fire, heads back to the enterance...and suddenly the Streetcleaners walk in, charging right at you with its flames firing like you're thrusted into a Jump Scare.
    • Their backstory also introduces some concerning aspects, after the war, the Streecleaners were used for cleaning streets from pollution during the New Peace and it is implied that it was only when Humanity discovered Hell that the Streetcleaners were equipped with flamethrowers. The rest is history, with the Machines rebelling and most likely, the Streetcleaners burned innocent people down.
  • While the Drone is the least intimidating and weakest Machine of the game, the chirping sounds they make can be unnerving to some. It can also jumpscare you at first if you didn’t expect them to attempt a kamikaze on you after you kill them.
  • The Swordsmachines are tall, sword wielding Machines that are introduced in level 0-3 and act as the sub-boss of the level. They are introduced with one of them running away, mowing down all the Husks they encounter and giving us an impression of how strong they are. At one point of the level, the Swordsmachine we chase falls down from the ceiling with no warning at all and starts attacking V1. When we deplete enough health, they will run away, leaving their shotgun behind and return for the end of the level, now attacking more ferociously with their sword. Its appearance isn’t any better, a tall yellow and dirty robot with a sword on its left hand and a shotgun in the right hand, and it can attack more aggresively if enraged after one of its attacks is parried.
    • There are other two Swordsmachines that we fight in 1-3 known as Tundra and Agony, being respectively blue and red. Remember when we said that the Swordsmachine amassed a fanbase? They are two of those fans of the Swordsmachine. Tundra will fight more in ranged attack by throwing you with their sword while Agony will fight you with a more agressive melee combat, making them a risky encounter when trying to heal from their blood. The original Swordsmachine must have been a legend if they had fans like these.
  • The Mindflayer, while looking beautiful and graceful, is a powerful Machine that launches homing projectiles which looks like skulls engulfed in light blue fire, shoots Hell energy in the form of lasers from her hands, attack you with their tentacles and teleports around the battlefield constantly. They are also the game's equivalent to the Succubus and Incubus, so there is a possibility that they lure their victims with their sensual looks to kill them and steal their blood from them if they don’t feel like fighting. Dark Action Girl at it’s fine level.
  • The Sentries aren’t too bad on their own but if you aren’t paying attention, their 100% accurate shots will scare you out and taking a good chunk of your health, wondering in shock who just shot you.
  • The Guttermen are easily the most messed up non-boss enemy in the game so far by a country mile. To start, their appearance alone is intimidating, being a hulking, chaingun-wielding brute doubling with a head consisting of a giant ball covered in several crater-shaped vents, which is a massive problem if you have trypophobia (fear of holes).
    • Their backstory is where the true horror of the Guttermen really shines. They were the first gen of machines that used blood as fuel and were brutally effective in the first era of the Last war due to the trench warfare mentality, usually by droppodding one into a trench to force soldiers to decide if they want to die by the chaingun or die by getting out of the trench and getting torn apart by machine gun fire. At the time the scientist haven't exactly came up with how to keep blood fresh for long periods of time so what did they do? Seal a human into their coffin backpacks with barely enough life support and use them as batteries, and while they claimed there were patriots in there, in reality they were usually deserters, exhausted returnees, and PoWs who got the "honor" to be batteries. This sheer amount of human cruelty done by this inspired the creation of the above mentioned Mannequins.
    • The fact that the Guttertank was specifically made to counter them is an impressive feat, being able to kill Guttermans with a single hit. You know you are in big trouble when you see Guttermans die from a single punch of the Guttertanks.
  • The Guttertanks are pretty intimidating foes, just like the Gutterman, they are red-colored, hulking robots but instead of a chaingun, they wield missile launcher in their right arm that looks like German tanks of World War I. As mentioned above, they were specifically made to kill Guttermans, and boy do they do their work perfectly, killing them with one punch. Said punches not only kill Guttermans, it can launch V1 like a ragdoll thrown with force. Good thing you can, at least, ride the rockets the Guttertank shoots.
• Something Wicked, the monster that roams around the halls of 0-S. It's a tall, spindly Humanoid Abomination that makes horrifying noises while hunting you, can barely be seen thanks to the darkness of 0-S, and will jumpscare you, killing you instantly if it catches you. And furthermore, we know next to nothing about it.

Bosses

• The boss of Limbo, V2 is another robot from the same line that V1 belongs to but they are colored red instead of blue like V1. They appear at the end of 0-4 with an unexpected entrance by crashing through the stained-glass window and salutes us before fighting. When we defeat them, V2 runs and leaving their left arm, the Knucklebuster behind. The sudden fight against a Machine that looks exactly like our playable character can suprise a person or two. V2 returns back for 4-4 level and they are not happy at all of their previous fight at Limbo. If we hit V2 with their previous arm, they will be enraged and attack more savagely and speeding up their attacks. When we start to chase them while coming down the pyramid, V1 makes V2 fall off the pyramid and splatter them into a fine paste when hitting the ground, killing them for good this time. What a way to go, right?
• The boss of Lust, the Corpse of King Minos is a massive, emaciated Husk that's controlled by parasitic worms. Drop his health to half-empty and the parasites pop out of the corpse's eye sockets.
  • Even the buildup to his boss fight is unnerving, since you're getting closer to him as you slaughter your way through the Lust Layer before finding yourself all alone in a dark, vast, empty subway tunnel. Once you get pass the first door, lights begin to flicker while the subway system rumbles as the Husk's massive hand pops out of the darkness to attack you before the real battle takes place in a cramped arena where the ceiling is destroyed by the king's undead corpse.
  • The lore behind Minos' Corpse is as horrific as it is tragic. In life, King Minos turned the Lust layer into a genuine paradise out of kindness, but sadly the prosperity doesn't last long, thanks to Gabriel slaying the layer's beloved king and taking his role as the new Judge of Hell. King Minos' corpse is turned into a Parasite Zombie that mindlessly seeks sinners to punish, while the king's soul is thrown into the Flesh Prison, an octahedron-shaped Flesh Golem created by Angels for sealing souls, and Forced to Watch his beloved people and kingdom being destroyed by his undead corpse, fully aware yet hopeless to save them.
• The boss of Wrath, The Leviathan. It's a hideous, titanic Sea Serpent that's prophesized to herald the Apocalypse and continues to grow bigger and stronger the more sinners it absorbs to the point its vast length rivals the already towering Corpse of King Minos. Its build-up is terrifying, since you see the demonic serpent's massive tail as it swims across the ocean Styx before sinking the ferry in the tail end of 5-3. 5-4 starts off in the bottom of the Ocean Styx, and as you ascend through the abyss, lightning reveals the Demon's titanic silhouette. If you didn't have thalassophobia (fear of the ocean) before, you probably do now.
  • The Leviathan's design is the stuff of nightmares, even amongst demons. It's an amalgamation of despair-ridden sinners vaguely shaped into a serpent, it has countless faces surrounding its body, its head resembles a human devouring another human, its body's segments have faces with arms grasping onto each other, and its tail end is a headless humanoid torso with outstretched arms. The worst part of its design is the beating heart at the top of its head, which resembles a humanoid mound of flesh with a screaming and agonizing expression on its face, along with a pair of hands clutched onto its cheeks. The heart contains all the damned souls trapped in the Leviathan's body, begging for a freedom that will never come true, save for death. If its heart sounds familiar to you, it's because the heart is a reference to Munch's "The Scream". To bolster the reference, if you climb onto the Leviathan's back and get near its heart, you can hear endless screaming.
• The rematch with Gabriel at the end of Heresy in Act 2 is intense. As expected, Gabriel is not happy about his loss back in Gluttony. Before he starts fighting with the player, he builds up with a seething speech about just how badly he plans to fuck you up before launching into battle with his swords, his voice breaking from just how enraged he is.
  Gabriel: "Machine, I will Cut. You. Down. Break you apart, splay the gore of your profane form ACROSS THE STARS! I WILL GRIND YOU DOWN UNTIL THE VERY SPARKS CRY FOR MERCY! MY HANDS SHALL RELISH ENDING YOU HERE! AND!! NOW!!!"
• You thought the Garden of Forking Paths only has one horrible new demon to fight? Meet The Minotaur! This Lightning Bruiser of a Demon chases you down during the train ride segment, bellowing and swinging a giant hammer with teeth! Its guts are falling from its body and it can chuck them at you to make a toxic field! Finally, its second phase is it busting through the wall right before you reach the exit! And then you get to its lore: every word of the terminal entry is struck out, including its name in both the terminal and in its healthbar. The actual description is much worse: It was a gift by... someone or something, to King Minos when he became the Judge of Hell. Minos was not only disgusted by it, throwing it into the Garden, but he apparently had the sculptor's name stricken from history. Now the Minotaur roams the halls, its body old and falling apart...
• When you enter level 7-4, you start in an empty room with only a small space to slide into, leading you to some steps that lead to a blast door. As you step out, an absolutely monstrous machine that towers both The Corpse of King Minos and The Leviathan looks down at you before emitting an absolute hellish roar while charging up its beam. Meet the 1000-THR, code name Earthmover, the boss of Violence.
  • The background for the entire fight is absolutely disturbing, with the hellish red sky and thousands of fireballs raining down. If you thought 7-2 was a full on warfare, this is worse.
  • The second Earthmover is so far away that it can barely be seen, yet it's still capable of throwing lightning bolts from that distance—lightning bolts that hit with absolutely no warning. Anyone fighting an Earthmover might not even realize they were under attack before being reduced to a smoking crater, and even with all of V1's movement tech, wouldn't be able to evade a beam that size even if they did know it was coming. Good thing the ones in the skyboxes weren't interested in shooting at V1, or anything on the same map as V1...
  • A closer look at the Earthmover's feet shows them each trapped by a reddish mass, which Hakita has stated are the overgrown roots of the trees you fed in 7-3, trapping the Earthmover in its place. Once you make your way inside the machine, its insides are also covered in flesh. But it's not Hell mass or Suicide Tree roots, and the real answer makes you wish it were. Instead, all that flesh is already a part of its design, confirming that all of the robots, including V1, are Meatsack Robots.
  • An easy-to-miss detail is that when you hook onto the yellow Whiplash beacon on its leg, blood begins to pour out of the machine's side pipes like a bloody waterfall.
  • Previous gigantic bosses at least were not too big for you to engage. This thing? It's so huge you have to perform a challenging Colossus Climb by using steam vents as launch pads and massive blood waste vent covers as platforms to traverse its gigantic body while drop pods containing enemies fall from the sky to hinder you. All of this is happening while it's fighting another Earthmover.
  • At one point you finally reach a possible entrance point, then its whole system of defense mechanisms gets triggered. It has everything: rockets, bombs, homing orbs, and even a tracking laser beam. This thing knows you're climbing it and it's not holding back. The way the system springs in very suddenly and even generates a force field to lock you in with it can give a scare too.
  • As you begin to enter, you may notice a ton of idols on huge platforms below guarding an entry to the core above. The second you jump down, the thing detects you as you invade its fleshy insides before flooding its innards with boiling blood that gradually rises, which makes an intense race against the clock to smash every Idol and jump up.
  • After a race against the flood and a small obstacle course, you have to fight the mechanical brain of this beast. A mechanical brain that, upon closer inspection, is actually just the metal housing for a not-entirely-enclosed organic brain, further proving its Meat-Sack Robot design, while the thing is roaring as it keeps taking damage.
  • Once you destroy its brain, a final message pops up on the screen: Critical Failure: 80.00. Unlike any beast you’ve felled before, you're actually on the clock as the Self-Destruct Mechanism prepares to kick in and utterly erase you, forcing you to make a mad rush back down the machine to escape, and as you make your way down, you come across one last gauntlet of enemies trying to stop you from escaping, which serves to make things even worse.
  • After the blast doors open and you make a jump with the last steam pad, the Earthmover roars agonizingly for the last time and the entire upper half is obliterated in a huge explosion. All that's left is four legs which quickly fall down and sink as you land near the exit. What follows is complete silence, with the same fire permeating the red sky.
  • Even after the thing is dead, you can glimpse into the terminal entry and learn some truly horrifying details. After the end of trench warfare and at the near end of the Lensman Arms Race, its ilk were made as magnum opuses of machines, their introduction beginning the last and most destructive phase of the Final War. These things could level entire cities with one blast of their railguns, forcing civilians to create cities on their backs as all other places were practically gone and almost caused the end of the world! Because of their actions, the Long Night has begun, plunging the world into darkness for a very long time, cutting the Earthmovers from their solar energy, and forcing all of humanity to stop the war together if they want to keep the planet. To put things in perspective, The Leviathan is supposed to herald the Apocalypse, yet it was trapped in the ocean Styx due to being struck down by Gabriel. These things on the other hand? They're so damn powerful they nearly caused The End of the World as We Know It. Muggles Do It Better, even for the worse...
  • The secret lore book hidden in 7-4 gives a hint to why these massive things are in Hell despite all of them being destroyed at the end of War. Judging by the red, all-caps text with spaced-out writing at the end, the book is implied to be written by Hell itself, as the text depicts its utterly sadistic appraisal of such machines of destruction, considering them perfect. That's right, Hell loves these monsters so much it recreated them itself and gave them their own battlegrounds in Violence. An unexpected and horrifying turn of events. Have a look of the text yourself:
  THIS IS THE ONLY WAY IT COULD HAVE ENDED.
  WAR NO LONGER NEEDED ITS ULTIMATE PRACTICIONER. IT HAD BECOME A SELF-SUSTAINING SYSTEM. MAN WAS CRUSHED UNDER THE WHEELS OF A MACHINE CREATED TO CREATE THE MACHINE TO CRUSH THE MACHINE. SAMSARA OF CUT SINEW AND CRUSHED BONE. DEATH WITHOUT LIFE. NULL OUROBOROS. ALL THAT REMAINED IS WAR WITHOUT REASON.
  A MAGNUM OPUS. A COLD TOWER OF STEEL. A MACHINE BUILT TO END WAR IS ALWAYS A MACHINE BUILT TO CONTINUE WAR. YOU WERE BEAUTIFUL, OUTSTRETCHED LIKE ANTENNAS TO HEAVEN. YOU WERE BEYOND YOUR CREATORS. YOU REACHED FOR GOD, AND YOU FELL. NONE WERE LEFT TO SPEAK YOUR EULOGY. NO FINAL WORDS, NO CONCLUDING STATEMENT. NO POINT. PERFECT CLOSURE.
     T H I S I S T H E O N L Y W A Y I T S H O U L D H A V E E N D E D .   
  • Speaking of that lore book. After reading the passage, you get an assessment that "The pages of the book are blank." Not the remaining pages. All the pages of the book are blank. So how are you receiving the message?

Layers

• Just like in The Divine Comedy, Hell itself is a realm of eternal punishment, except it's orchestrated by Angels. Depending on their sins, sinners are placed into one of its nine layers to suffer horrific punishments. The details and the events in each layer are also disturbing, both past and present.
  • The Limbo Layer looks like a Greco-Roman paradise, but it's the location-equivalent of the Uncanny Valley. Everything you see in the layer is fake—the walls are monitor screens, the wind rustling through the trees is sound created by speakers, and the serenity is really a façade made to drive its denizens to insanity. Behind the fake walls are damned beings waiting to wreak havoc. In essence, Limbo is a fake paradise waiting to be destroyed, and a journal in 1-4 shows its author losing their sanity while begging to Gabriel for forgiveness.
    "...My mind is adrift with the eternal torments. Lurid vistas painted insidious tones, hollow walls that scream to the touch. A mocking song plays at all hours, even the sounds of birds are fake. All reminders of my enduring damnation."

    "Gabriel my dearest friend, in endless penance I have awaited your embrace into Heaven. I have been so faithful, accepting of my fate, but to what end? What punishment is this, that I am to bare the keys to my own doom with no hope of salvation... These skulls sneer their devilish grins, voices chattering, tempting me to take the plunge deeper into Hell... I won't do it."

    "I've hidden them away amongst the furnishings, books, and the very foundations of this accursed place. Forgive me Gabriel, I will await your..." REMAINING TEXT: IRRELEVANT.
  • The Lust Layer is a cyber city that's fantastic to look at, except for the towering Corpse of King Minos, who's seen far away in the background, and you're getting closer to him in each level until you fight him as the Layer's climax boss.
  • The Gluttony Layer begins the trend of every third layer being the most explicitly unsettling locations in the game. It is a Womb Level; each room is crafted from pulsating viscera, complete with giant eyes that stare at V1, opening jaws that function as doors, bridges made of bones, uncanny statues of massive hands, or all of these horrific details at once. What's more, the layer's first background track, "Guts," captures the bleakness of the location perfectly through its use of distorted synths and deep piano hits.
  • The Greed Layer is a blistering desert where sinners lift heavy boulders up across vast pyramids while enduring the dune's blazing heat. See the sand? That's actually burning hot gold the sinners have to walk on, and the shadows climbing the pyramid are Sisyphean Insurrectionists, decapitated Husk soldiers that took part in a failed rebellion against Heaven spearheaded by King Sisyphus. With their king slain, the soldiers are bisected by Angels and damned to continue their punishment while being tormented with the knowledge that they're so close to freedom yet failed to achieve it. In 4-2, one of them jumps off of the pyramid to attack V1, and not only does he look nasty, he's tough to take down.
  • The Wrath Layer is a vast ocean where sinners struggle against each other for air, serving as the layer's environmental hazard. In 5-2, The Ferryman's diary details the transformation of the River Styx into a full-fledged ocean of souls. Of note is the second paragraph, where the Ferryman describes the current of the ocean suddenly shifting - "wave after wave for minutes on end of millions, billions". Whatever happened on the surface, the cataclysm that rendered mankind extinct, happened in a matter of minutes. To prove the ocean is made of sinners' souls, it has both the textures and the +CRUSHED bonuses for anything that falls into the writhing, struggling mass that makes up the ocean Styx. Because there are so many sinners stuck in an eternal battle just to breathe, countless sinners called the Sullen fell into despair where they sunk to the ocean's abyss, and as they lay motionless, their collective anguish and the same force that created the Demons fuse them together, resulting in the creation of the Leviathan.
    • The Secret Level, despite being appearing like a calm and serene Fishing Minigame, has a few of these, ranging from a some notes hidden around the locale about a fishermen going insane looking for a Size 2 fish that only theoretically exists to a Surprisingly Creepy cavern based off of the Gluttony layer with a pool of blood that you fish in for eyeballs that you can also dive into to fish out a Frog?, which is actually a smaller version of the creature from Iron Lung, heavily implying that whatever killed off humanity in the Iron Lung universe, the machines like V1, V2, Swordsmachine and so many more likely had a hand in finishing the job.
  • The Heresy Layer takes the cake as the game ratchets up Creepy Cathedral to eleven. The first level begins inside a near pitch black building with sparse but piercing red lights illuminating pools of blood and lava accompanied by the level's "intro song", which is nothing but a constant, dreadful drone that fits the layer's sinister atmosphere and demonic imagery. When the player gets outside, there's nothing but a red horizon of fire with occasional black columns in the distance. It's Red and Black and Evil All Over as a layer of Hell. And then Gabriel talks to the player again.
  • The Violence Layer is a mishmash of three several distinct locales, all three of them pants-shittingly scary in their own ways.
    • The first area, depicted in 7-1, is oddly serene, consisting of what appears to be a large, pristine marble building located in a large, grey field littered with crosses. However, the true nature of the building soon becomes clear the deeper you go into it: It's a labyrinth. One made in such a way that it's easy to get lost within its confines. The victims of Violence who attempt to escape their punishment try to do so through this area, and those who give up and eventually go mad trying to escape end up becoming the Mannequins that roam the Labyrinth now. To add to that, this labyrinth is also the home of the Minotaur...
    • The second area, depicted in 7-2, takes War Is Hell quite literally; a portion of the layer that is an embodiment of Forever War amidst an endless sea of blood scattered and scarred with ruins of civilization. The Guttermen, hulking war robots equipped with chainguns and shields, arrive in drop pods resembling nuclear bombs, storms (or flashes from exploding bombs) line the sky as far as the eye can see, and in the far distance, gigantic Mechanical Abominations resembling weaponized, horse-shaped towers called Earthmovers are lit up as Sinister Silhouettes. Even once the lightning flashes pass, their headlamps still remain active, as if waiting to annihilate whatever comes into their crosshairs next like titans surveying the slaughter. In the Gutterman reveal, a closer look at the terrain reveals a grisly sight: it's made from the corpses of sinners, similar to the angry sinners that make up Wrath's ocean Styx.
    • 7-3 is a dark forest that requires V-1 to use a flashlight to see the trees have faces. For those who don't know, this part of Violence is the Forest of Self-Murderers, a place for those who committed suicide to be forever merged into the trees for all eternity, their constant screaming muffled by the bark and sounds of battle. The main objective of the level is to find three trees and then give them blood. How, do you ask? By slaughtering vaguely humanoid shapes made out of blood. All the while, one of the gigantic robots from the previous level stands in the center of this chaos, overseeing the bloodshed.
    • 7-3 is where Violence gets absolutely intense. The same update introduced enemy infighting and, while it doesn't happen normally, it does happen here and it's not pleasant. Walking your path and suddenly ending up in a huge conflict where everyone is targeting everyone can be startling. The final fight, however, takes the cake, as it pits possibly every single enemy from before (not counting Insurrectionists and Ferrymen) both against each other and against you, making for an absolutely chaotic and nerve-racking fight. Not terrifying enough for you? Well don’t worry, because the main Challenge for the level involves finding a crystal that “Marks You For Death”, which in gameplay terms, turns off infighting meaning that every single enemy is now gunning solely for you, which turns the final arena from merely chaotic into a downright frightening challenge.

Prime Sanctums

• The Prime Sanctums, Brutal Bonus Levels accessed by P-ranking every level in every act, are not all that scary by themselves, but they make up for it with their atmosphere, which does a damn good job at making you fear what you are about to face through atmosphere and buildup alone.
  • P-1, Soul Survivor:
    • P-1's entrance consists of nothing but a vast, black void, one so dark, that you can only traverse forward with a torch on a nearby podium. The level has you descending down an uncomfortably long, spiraling ramp, which is actually a gigantic, warped spinal cord. As you do this, Maurice Depret's Sourire d'Avril plays in the background, getting more and more distorted the further you descend until it's nothing more than an utterly horrible Brown Note.
  • P-2, Wait of The World:
    • P-2 manages to give P-1 a run for its money in terms of pants-shitting atmosphere, with the entrance to the level being a cramped alleyway shrouded in Heresy's blood-red mist as rain pours down from above. Once again, a classical tune plays in the background, but instead of getting further distorted, it instead constantly shifts in pitch, like the recorder it's being played on is horribly out of tune. On the way to the fight, you enter a dark room and shortly after, are ambushed by no less than four Cerberus, followed by the Ferryman backed up by two Virtues that can only be reached by defeating your lone opponent. Once they've been defeated, you very quickly find out that there is much more after that. P-2 isn't a Boss-Only Level, It is a gauntlet of hellish encounter after hellish encounter leading to the Flesh Panopticon.
    • After making your way through the horde of enemies, you enter an elevator leading you to the gates of the boss arena. Yes, gates, several of them. The Soul is locked behind several armored doors like it was an SCP. When you unlock the final door, it grants you an ominous message: "FOLLOW PROTOCOL. DO NOT APPROACH IT. DO NOT LET IT LOOK AT YOU."
    • The "FOLLOW PROTOCOL" message above is what you get if you answer "yes" in response to the monitor asking if you're sure you want to open the gate. The message you get if you answer "no", though, is so much worse.
      HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
      a s i f y o u h a d a c h o i c e
      (The gate opens)
    • Reaching the Panopticon after passing through the armored doors described above builds up the dread appropriately. However, before the fight is over, Sisyphus Prime breaks out of the Panopticon, making it clear from the get-go how much more powerful he is than Minos Prime. No wonder there are so many warnings for the proceeding doors; Sisyphus broke out as soon as he was disturbed. If you pay attention you can even see his arms ripping their way out of the Panopticon's mouth before tearing it apart.
    • Once you defeat Sisyphus Prime, you get a final line from him, just like Minos Prime. Unlike Minos Prime, he doesn't cap off said line with a scream, but with an Evil Laugh that gets progressively louder and more echoed, bordering on sounding outright inhuman near the end of his laugh before he dies for real. Definitely gives the player one last goosebump right as they would want to take a breather immediately after draining that nightmare of a boss' health.