"Embrace the darkness..."
If you're a big fan of the horror elements in QUAKE and Doom, DUSK cranks them up a notch, with very grotesque and sometimes downright mortifying enemy designs and level themes.
- You start the game prying yourself loose from two meat hooks in a dingy basement, and the first thing you see is three Leathernecks - bag-headed mooks with revved-up chainsaws - shuffling their way towards you, while you have only two fairly weak sickles to defend yourself. It's a dismal and chilling scene, firmly setting the tone for the rest of the game and can be startling to players used to being dropped into tutorials or empty rooms to start out. During one of the game's final levels, you return to this area and end the level by impaling yourself on the meat hooks again.
- Black Phillips, mutated, demonic-looking eviscerated goats with their ribcages exposed that shoot bloody projectiles that do quite a bit of damage on harder difficulties. The devs love to hide these guys away in secret areas.
- Possessed Scarecrows. They're Scary Scarecrows, alright, and the way they're introduced in the second level is even more unnerving - at first, they just appear to be simple background props. Then you find your way through the cornfield maze and one suddenly breaks its post behind you and starts blasting you with a double-barreled shotgun. They're pretty resilient, too, for being so thin, able to take at least a few normal shotgun blasts before being put down.
- Fork Maidens. They appear shrivelled, undead and ladylike, with gaping eye holes, pale grey skin and scorched, bloodied clothes. Despite their frail appearance, they take a lot more firepower to bring down than other mooks, especially early on when you first encounter them. It doesn't help that your first encounter with them is in a trap where you have little to no option to cover yourself, then in a mine which works like an almost pitch-black maze.
- Scientists. They sport creepy surgical masks with sinister eye slits and grey mouth guards. They take less punishment than other foes, but their syringe-stabbing attack is one of the most damaging in the entire game - it takes off at least half your health on harder difficulties even with full Morale, and on Cero Miedo, if you don't have any morale it's an instant kill. Hearing their laugh can raise some hairs, especially in the more confined underground stages of Episodes 2 and 3.
- Wendigos, dear lord the Wendigos. New Blood chose these guys to be front-and-centre on the store page's banner for a reason - they look like large, demented ghouls with deer skulls for heads, are both tough enough to tank several Super Shotgun blasts and are very agile, and worst of all, spawn in as Invisible Monsters, who only reveal themselves when struck by one of your weapons, accompanied by a Scare Chord for good measure. It's not uncommon for a player to hear their characteristic, spine-tingling heavy breathing, swap to the Mortar/Riveter and start flailing about firing blindly in a frenzied panic.
- You're introduced to them in the second level of episode 2, The Unseen, in a rather terrifying set piece - from the start of the level, you head into areas littered with the corpses of dead Possessed Soldiers. That's when you notice, something else got to them before you did. You proceed to the unlit, dim ruins, with only the light of your flashlight to guide you, and when you pick up the red key needed to progress, you hear a breathy bellowing noise, see a sign written in blood on the wall that says 'DON'T TRUST YOUR EYES', begin to turn around and suddenly notice there are very heavy breathing noises getting louder and louder and bloody footprints making a beeline towards you. In earlier versions, this was much worse - you could only pinpoint the location of a Wendigo based on the sound of their breathing or objects in the environment being pushed around.
- During a segment in The Escher Labs, you find a teleporter simply labeled "DON'T" in blood. Stepping through teleports you into the gigantic, flayed ribcage of an unknown creature as a loud drill-like screech pierces the air. It's bad enough to have to go here for the red key, but worse yet is that this room is seemingly tailor made to give the two Wendigo hiding inside it directly behind you a chance to blindside you with the visual and auditory noise drowning out their two most obvious signals, and no physics objects for them to shove around.
- Horrors, pictured above. They're introduced in the last few levels of the game, and while not the most dangerous enemy, their appearance is very unsettling, sporting an anguished Nightmare Face with no eye sockets and a signature elongated mouth. They gasp and wheeze loudly, run very quickly once they spot you, take quite a bit of punishment and spit out several green gobs of goo that can be fairly damaging especially in close quarters, which you will be forced into in their debut level due to it taking place in a series of cramped underground catacombs. They too are also introduced in a fairly horrifying manner - you hear their heavy, tortured breathing long before you encounter them, and you're required to a flip a switch that opens up the basement, where the first one is waiting to ambush you just around the corner. It only gets worse from there.
- And let's not forget the Sickening "Crunch!" they make when they die, as their limbs fold in on themselves like a dead spider.
- "The fall broke your flashlight." While its mercifully only a short time before you gain a replacement flashlight in these sections, you'll likely spend the whole time terrified by the thought of having to fight wendigos in the dark.
