In this game you play as a man named Tom - Tom apparently got involved in something horrible back in the city, and as such he's hiding out in a rural town, where he's taken a job as a security guard at an abandoned factory. While he questions the need for security at an abandoned facility, he needs the money, and continues the job anyway. However, in between his almost prophetic night terrors, a constant bad feeling and slowly finding little hints that something very wrong may have occurred in the factory, he must uncover the truth behind this place and what it's trying to hide.
Despite the name, it is not to be confused with the Uncanny Valley trope. (Though it does contain it at points.)
Uncanny Valley contains examples of the following tropes:
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Something happened to the A.I. controlling the androids that's made them go berserk.
- Always Night: With a few exceptions, it always seems to be dark around the factory. Justified, since Tom has the night shift.
- An Arm and a Leg: In one of the endings, Eve cuts all of Tom's limbs. Because she cauterizes the wounds immediately, he doesn't die, and so he is left in the facility's basement to enjoy her "love" for the rest of his days.
- Androids Are People, Too: Subverted. No, they are NOT.
- Blackout Basement: The entire facility becomes one when the power goes out.
- Boom, Headshot!: The fate of Tom should the gangsters find him on the fifth day.
- Dark and Troubled Past: The reason Tom didn't find a job closer to home. He's in some trouble with a group of gangsters, who will show up and kill him after five days, unless he either escapes on the first night, or gets Eve to kill them.
- Dark Is Evil: Those...THINGS that chase you in your nightmares.
- Fat Bastard: Buck isn't that terrible, actually, but Tom's chronic lateness annoys him.
- Halfway Plot Switch: The game focuses heavily on the shadow people in Tom's nightmares. They just turn out to be a bunch of mundane gangsters after Tom because He Knows Too Much. If Tom sticks around for all five days, the gangsters show up to dispose of him, only be quickly disposed of themselves, and the rest of the game is about trying to escape from a facility full of Killer Robots.
- Infinite Flashlight: Played straight, as Tom's flashlight seems to have unlimited batteries.
- Jump Scare: If you've gotten used to the text speech used everywhere else in the game, the moment a android gets up and verbally shouts "HEY! YOU! COME HERE!" will set your teeth on end.
- Multiple Endings: Many of them. There's also a fair bit of Developer's Foresight here.
- Tom either doesn't bother to show up at the work at all, or simply does what he's supposed to do without sticking his nose in any further. Either way, gangsters show up after five days and kill him.
- Tom escapes town on the first day via train. You are then simply shown a newspaper saying "Two dead in horrific car accident." If that's the first ending you got, you wouldn't know the context, and may assume it refers to Tom, even though he traveled by train. In fact, that's just the fate of the two gangsters he was running from, and who were going to kill him.
- Tom escapes alone on the second, third or fourth night. However, the gangsters have already picked up clues about him, and so the newspaper now says "Mutilated body found, remains a mystery."
- Tom escapes with Buck on the second, third or fourth night. This time, he and Buck run through the forest, while pursued by Eve. Eventually, she pleads for you to come back, saying her programming makes you unable to go beyond that point. You ignore her and again board the train. The gangsters have also learned enough about you over the extra few days to kill both of you, but at a cost to themselves - newspaper instead states "Two random deaths linked - crime ring exposed."
- Tom escapes on the second to fourth night, but listens to Eve's pleas and chooses to come back. However, she decides that she must keep you from "hurting yourself", and so she ties you up, and then cuts off all of your limbs, immediately cauterizing the wounds, to ensure that you can never escape from her.
- Tom escapes on the fifth night. He is met by gangsters who shoot him in the head.
- Tom escapes on the fifth night after already failing an escape from Eve once. She shows up just a little after he gets shot in the head. She either kills the gangsters or they run off, and afterwards, she takes his body, and decides to fit it on the facility's rigs to "make him wake up."
- Nightmarish Factory: The actual facility downplays the trope. Its empty corridors and low lighting will keep you on edge, but there's no real reason to think it was a terrible place in its heyday. It then proceeds to play this trope straight when the true nature of the factory is revealed.
- Non-Standard Game Over: Get taken down by one of the robots, and Eve will chain Tom up and saw off all his limbs so that he can't escape or even kill himself.
- Nothing Is Scarier: The sheer emptiness of the factory, as well as the lack of backstory and understanding of the situation, is enough to keep you on edge. And every time you pass the elevator leading to the basement, it almost seems to stare at you — never doing anything, but always watching....
- Video Game Caring Potential: During one nightmare, it's possible to save a stranger who's tied to a chair. If you do this, he'll appear in the next nightmare at the hospital and help you escape before the shadow monsters can get you.
- Yandere: Eve acts as one. Choosing to listen to her pleas and come back has her cut off all of Tom's limbs and cauterizing the wounds, to ensure he can never escape or "hurt himself", then hug his limbless body and say "I love you".
