Moment pages are Spoilers Off by default, so all spoilers have been removed and all entries folderized. Proceed with caution. You Have Been Warned.
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In general
- The elemental tech weapons all have unique death animations if they kill a humanoid victim with elemental damage. Explosion just blows them to bits, but the other three are much more disturbing...
- Fire weapons engulf their victim in flames, who screams and flails in an attempt to pat them out even as they burn him into ashes.
- Shock weapons make their victim stand up ramrod straight, twitching madly as the flesh melts off their skull, leaving two eyes staring at you from it. Then an eyeball pops out. Then a part of the skull pops off, exposing the brain. Then they fall over and their head explodes. In the sequel, they're merely vaporized. Not that it makes it any better.
- Acid weapons make their victim scream and wail as they dissolve in a splashing gush of green fluid. With Psychos and Bruisers, their mask gets left behind.
- The Badass Psycho can be quite disturbing when you first encounter him. You're fighting a group of bandits, when all of a sudden, a pale-skinned mountain of a man with a right arm as long as his entire body charges you and starts swinging away with a buzz-axe. Even worse, their left arm is atrophied, as if someone sucked the muscle and bone out and injected it into the other arm. Also, they seem to be even more crazed than normal psychos, to the point of being unable to talk, instead simply growling and screaming.
- Midget Psychos' screams can be terrifying. However, the sheer demented agony filling the screams of Crimson Lance soldiers dying to fire weapons is scarier than any other sound in the game.
Main game
- If you have a thing against giant hissing cockroaches or bugs in general, then the Scythids when you first encounter them in a tiny, hard-to-maneuver space is going to be fun!!!
- The Rakks themselves may be annoying, but hardly a thing of nightmare, even though they have moments of jump scaring. Rakk hives, on the other hand, are monstruous, towering mammoth creatures with a deformed, vagina-like face. Worse yet, when you have to fight one later at Trash Coast, you realize that it's not the first one you've seen in your travels... Thank goodness they're dormant.
- Sledge's Safe House, passing the Arid Hills, is extremely disturbing the first time around. "THEY GOT ME" written in blood on the walls, presumably written by the victims in their own blood at the command of their captors, bodies chained up all over and strung up like chandeliers leaking pools of blood, huge blood splatter everywhere, bodies stuck to the walls and ceilings via steel rods jammed through their eyes, a room with an armless body along with several dismembered appendages and a body stuck up on the ceiling, a small "Colosseum" where victims were presumably forced to fight the cannibalistic Psychos for sport, and on and on. In many cases, fresh blood still drips down from strung up bodies.
- Another area near Patricia Tannis's place at Rust Commons West has a body held out over the edge of a cliff by two rods. He's tied by his neck to the top and by his feet to the bottom, plenty of rope between his body and the rods, and with a brace on his neck so he doesn't actually suffocate. When you go up there, you find three bodies impaled on steel pipes to a wall, with dart boards visible behind them, and barrels under them to collect the blood. One barrel is on fire. So you go to the strung up man, and as you do, a flock of Rakks attack you. So apparently the man was put there to be fed on alive.
- In Krom's Canyon, you will occasionally see natural bridges of earth connecting the two sides of the canyon. Several people can be seen hanging by their necks from them, hands bound behind their backs. One of them was on fire.
- The Destroyer's arrival & its, ahem, "introduction" to Steele. Steele opens the Vault only for both you and her to discover that it's not a cache of Eridian tech like the vault Atlas found was. It's a prison for a civilization-destroying Eldritch Abomination/Out of control Eridian Bio-Weapon called The Destroyer that spears Steele on it's tongue and smashes her retinue to bloody paste with its Combat Tentacles before dragging her screaming into its maw. For such a derided Giant Space Flea from Nowhere that even gets mocked in future games with the phrase "Tentacles and Disappointment", the Final Boss of the main campaign makes an impact.
The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned
- The eerie soundtrack heard across the game, which only adds to the scary mood of the overall Jakobs' Cove area.
- Psycho zombies can be frightening if you don't finish them off once you knock them down. They get an insane speed boost, marked by their glowing eyes, allowing them to bolt right up to your face.
- Psycho midget zombies are even worse. Basically, as fast as a typical midget psycho, has a ranged attack guaranteed to knock down your shields, and they leap at you like skags. Not to mention, they are always surrounded by bigger, more dangerous enemies. Oh, joy.
- The descent into the caverns in which Undead Ned is fought. The tunnels are dripping with blood and gore and everything is far too tense and quiet.
The Secret Armory of General Knoxx
- The whole storyline of the DLC, because of its reveals about the utterly crapsack nature of the whole universe. Gross incompetence, corruption, nepotism... It's an awful stew of everything that could go wrong with the government and big business, to the point where the Vault Hunters, who are seen In-Universe as bloodthirsty anarchistic psychos who simply kill everything in sight for profit and pleasure, really do look heroic by comparison.
- There's an Atlas speaker announcement at T-Bone Junction which outright states that there are worse places than Pandora that Atlas personnel can be assigned to, such as Prometheus.
- The Drifters
. Effectively four-legged spiders with aspirations to be skyscrapers, towering over you and firing acid at you. To make matters worse, they have no movement noise, meaning they can easily sneak up on you. And one of the side missions require you to destroy a big one, appropriately called Skyscraper. - General Knoxx's descent into nihilistic despair is played in-game for laughs both during his addressing towards you and the Echo record searching side missions, but when the reality of it sinks in, it's quite chilling. The sheer resignation of Knoxx to his situation, the fact you literally interrupt his efforts at committing suicide, the fact he insists you ought to just blow Pandora up and kill everyone on it when he dies...
- Crawmerax The Invincible, the terrifying Superboss. The player is treated to a brief look at it as they enter Crawmerax's Lair (the loading screen), and its mere appearance is enough to get you quacking on your pants. A nightmarishly deformed Crab Worm-tarantula-walrus-whatever that absolutely towers over the player(s), it's no wonder why Crawmerax is the stuff of legends in-game.
- And then there's trying to beat the guy. Get close to him and he'll lunge and try to bite you. Go ahead, keep your distance — he'll start shooting out purple globs from his teeth that are composed of acid and will eat away at the fabric of your shields. You think you're able to avoid his glob-shooting? That's not even his worst attack. He'll burrow underground and then explode out at an unexpected point — unless you're able to avoid the blast radius or jump at the right time, when Crawmerax pops out again above ground, the sheer weight of him will send you flying.
- His maximum level is 72 — a full three levels above the set limit of 69...
- Easily the most difficult boss in the game — even with four players he's tough. While he's not really invincible, by God, he's damn close. Then the glitched ledge was discovered, and it subsequently became a bit easier to beat.
- His even more infuriating Mooks. That's right, he's got a handful of unique Crabworms that are far worse than the baby ones, if not worse than Crawmerax himself, because the Craw Maggots and Green Maggots love to charge at you and push you off the ledge when you're not looking, and all three kinds are resistant to all forms of damage except for their correlating elemental weakness (Craw Maggots are weak against Shock; Green Maggots are weak against Incendiary; Armored Maggots are weak against Corrosive). At least the Armored Maggots are slow and won't knock you off, but the other two maggots will put you in a flurry of crippling fear and seething rage.
Claptrap's New Robot Revolution
- Fighting the Bandit-Traps becomes disturbing fast when one of their death cries is "Please... Just let me die". Suddenly it puts the Claptrap conversion into a VERY different light.
- The first boss you actually fight in the storyline? KnoxxTrap. Yep, not even in death Knoxx can find some semblance of peace.
- The remaining bosses being claptrapped versions of their past selves, such as SteeleTrap and NedTrap give a scarier idea to the extent the Claptraps are going to go in order to make the Robo-Revolution a reality.
