Spoilers off, Per Wiki policy.
open/close all folders
Main Quest
- When you find Hades, he's been subjected to Cold-Blooded Torture by Sylens, and the result means that his form, which was very cohesive at the end of Zero Dawn, now takes the form of something fragmented and erratic. And then there's the noise that he utters whenever Aloy asks something only for the data to no longer be accessible. Hades, at the point you find him, looks like the physical representation of someone having taken a hammer to a hard disk, repeatedly.HADES: Data Error. Memory StruCtures DisINtegraTED.
- You know how all the ruins Aloy explored in the previous game were empty and well-lit? Well, the AI of Plainsong's repair hub is still alive and knows she's there. When she gets too close, it shuts off the customary blue lights, bathing everything in a dim red glow, and starts closing doors.
- Earlier in the level, Zo sees firsthand HEPHAESTUS turning one of the peaceful "land-gods", who have sustained her community for generations, into a terrorist weapon. The Focus doesn't even register it as the same species.
- Even if Aloy eventually turns the tables, watching Specters hunt her throughout the HADES testing facility is disturbing. Let's not forget the fight preceding that hunt: Gerard, having decided that Aloy is an annoyance at best and a possible threat at worst, sics his top enforcer, Erik Visser on Aloy. Calling what happens next a "fight" is charitable. Nothing you throw at him (and if you're on New Game+, that means quite the arsenal) has any effects, all attacks harmlessly bounce off his shield like he's bloody Superman - the game even lets you spend a few seconds trying to attack him in vain before pointing you towards the couplings on the central machine, just to make it clear that there is nothing you can do against this guy. No trick or attack will work, the only thing Aloy can do is dodge and run for dear life. Then come the Spectres.
- In the course of searching for DEMETER, Aloy and Alva come across a test facility for the biomass conversion system that ended up in the Faro Swarm bots. And accidentally activate it. Aloy immediately screams to shut it off in one of her largest displays of raw panic in the series, but the override no longer works. You get to see how terrifyingly efficient the biomass converter haze strips all vegetation, leaving the ground gray and dead.
- Beta doesn't want to be captured because she knows she can be imprisoned alone forever. Her worst fears came true when Far Zenith does end up recapturing her and force her to complete the HEPHAESTUS-GAIA merge, and inflicting psychological torture on her whenever she tries to resist. When Aloy finds her, she's been strapped to her chair with tendrils of nanomachines plugged into her head. Small wonder why she would've preferred to die at her sister's hand.
- Thebes, being the hidden bunker of Ted Faro, the man who destroyed the Earth, is understandably full of this.
- The whole bunker resembles an Egyptian temple, with statues of Faro doing the Osiris pose. The entire place oozes the madman's ego.
- The data points scattered around Thebes follow the bunker's slow deterioration as Ted starts murdering people who discover that he murdered the Alphas. Oh, and how does he murder them? He had Dr. Narong Somptow put some sort of "off switch" in everyone's heads, so they just die in their sleep when Ted is mad at them.
- One of the halls of Thebes has two WORKING Scarabs/Corruptors, the last surviving members of the Faro Swarm that destroyed the Old Ones, untouched by MINERVA'S codes, guarding the entrance to the bunker's medbay. Those things promptly attack Aloy when she analyzes them. Hopefully Thebes' collapse destroyed any that remained inside, or the world could be in horrible danger once more. It seems likely these were Scarab-models in the Chariot line but not actually part of the Hartz-Timor Swarm. Isolated from that they weren't subject to the Glitch and could still be controlled by Ted. If the Swarm outside had been able to get a signal in and hack and recruit them, though...
- Even though he deserved it, Ted Faro's final fate after killing the Alphas was so terrible that death was a mercy. He was attempting to achieve immortality with the help of Somptow, whom he brought along to Thebes, so that he could be around to see and teach "Lis' children", the new humanity. But while his doctor was able to stop the aging process, there were problems with 'mutations' because Somptow was lacking much of the resources and technology he needed to perfect the process. Later on, Somptow ends up committing suicide, which obviously meant he couldn't address those problems. Ted decided somehow that he just needed time and energy and the growths would fix themselves - and hey, there's the geothermal reactor right there, with all the power he'd ever need. This didn't work. When Aloy explores Thebes many centuries later, Ted is alive, but is trapped as a giant fleshy mess covering the inside of the reactor as illustrated by the hologram Aloy pulls up. To further add on to the Nightmare of how badly gone Ted's body has become, Aloy finds an active monitor of his biometric data, showing under "WARNING" that his heartrate and blood pressure are elevated beyond healthy levels while his brain activity is "Minimal." note From his wails when the reactor door opens, one can conclude he was in a lot of pain all that time. He is so hideously mutated that we don't even get to see him, and anyone who does reacts in pure disgust, and yet when Ceo sees him in person he's apparently recognizable enough that he doesn't ask "What is that thing?" but "Is that him?". A fitting end, but horrifying nonetheless.
- To add insult to injury, the DualSense controller vibrates to sync with Faro's agonized screams. Y'know, in case the end result wasn't unnerving enough.
- The Reveal that Far Zenith isn't the one who sent the Extinction Signal that woke HADES.
- It was a rogue AI of their creation named Nemesis. Back on Sirius, this AI destroyed the Zenith's highly advanced colony in a manner of hours, leaving only thirteen survivors. Not content until all its abusive creators are dead, Nemesis chased them across the stars, sending the signal ahead to ensure the Zeniths are unable to take refuge on Earth. With HADES gone, Nemesis is now on course towards Earth to finish what it and the Faro Swarm had failed; the destruction of all life on Earth.
- Just from the hologram alone of what Nemesis might look like, which Beta described as a swarm of machine numbering in astronomical figures. It is the embodiment of the Zenith's worst traits that went against its creators for abandoning it and will stop at nothing until they are all dead. And from the way it is shown on the hologram, it is like the Necromorph's final form. If you think the Faro Swarm is bad, Nemesis in comparison, is something out of a Cosmic Horror Story.
- Nemesis cannot be defeated. It destroyed a highly advanced civilization in a manner of hours. The Zeniths are so scared shitless of it that their entire journey to Earth is just a pitstop for them. Once they succeed in retrieving GAIA, they plan to hightail again out of the planet and let Nemesis destroy it. Even the ever smug Sylens agrees to their plan to leave Earth with the APOLLO database and he is right - if the highly advanced Far Zeniths couldn't defeat Nemesis, what are the chances that an entire planet of primitive tribes could?
Other
- Reading through some of the data point materials at the Tenakth's Memorial Grove reveals that the Kulrut Arena... is actually a blast crater from a nuclear weapon that somehow got escalated to during the Hot Zone Crisis. There are reassurances in some of the relevant data points that it was scrubbed by eco-robotics efforts, but still... a civil war in the USA escalated to nuclear weapons. A data point in the arena explains that the nuclear explosion that produced the crater was probably caused by rebel weapons rupturing the power cell of a combat drone fielded by federal forces. Which just raises more troubling questions, what with the military using battle robots that can accidentally explode with the force of a nuclear weapon under combat conditions.
- A rebel camp shows how Asera permanently overrides machines: she herds them into a pen and impales their bodies with stakes all over, implanting an override inside them so they can never ever break free. Even though machines can't feel pain, it's no wonder HEPHAESTUS is angry.
- Blighted meat can be sold for a fair amount of money. That's how bad the famine is.
- The extensive underwater exploration in this game also comes with a nasty new foe: Tiderippers, which are basically mechanical Plesiosaurs armed to the teeth. Expect to see them patrolling in deep, large bodies of water where they basically are Sea Monster that Aloy has absolutely nothing she could fight against while underwater. The part where it appears as the boss of the Poseidon arc in the flooded underground city of Las Vegas and the one that Aloy has to go up against in Cauldron KAPPA can certainly give players shivers, especially those with Thalassophobia. Speaking of underwater, the Snapmaws themselves are also just as threatening as the Tiderippers, and you face those things a lot more commonly while underwater, too.
- You thought Stalkers and their stealth ability is already scary enough? Introducing Dreadwing, a flying machine almost the size of a Stormbird that can go into stealth, where it can attack you from anywhere in the sky without warning. If that isn't bad enough, in one area of the game you have to face a Dreadwing and a Stormbird at the same time.
- The last moments of Hernán Cacheiro and those assigned to his group. The man spent his time working on a Mobile Cover Prototype system and, when the last line of defense met the incoming Faro Plague, Hernán asked his three compatriots to bring their access keys so he could take the Prototype away from the battle. None of them made it. The true horror, however, comes as you explore the area and see the lingering remnants of the battle. Corruptors that have been frozen in time just as they were penetrating the defenses, with the most horrific being the one that was coming for Hernán himself. His body is the only one found in the facility, giving the impression that he was all alone when the very last sight he would have seen is them prying the doors open.
Burning Shores
- The activation of the Horus in the Burning Shores DLC Trailer is nothing but nightmare fuel since it regularly took entire Brigades to defeat just one of them with casualty rates being as high as 100%. In the game proper, Londra ultimately reactivates the Horus to serve as the DLC's Final Boss, and it's every bit as ferociously powerful and creepy a threat as one would assume from simply seeing its derelict corpse. The one thing that keeps it from being hopeless is that the particular Horus has long been abandoned for a good 10 centuries, exposed to all the elements (combined with wear and tear).
- Lan is an enthusiastic believer in Walter's faith that we first encounter when infiltrating their base, along with his less enthusiastic friend Otosu. When Walter's manipulations are exposed, he goes into denial and later goes with some surviving members who take him prisoner. When Aloy frees him, he berates her for killing Walter's messengers before being taken back to Fleet's End. Back in town, Otosu tries to reason with him to no avail, and he despairs of ever changing Lan's mind. This sort of dynamic is unfortunately all too familiar to those with loved ones lured in by cults in the real world.
- Walter Londra intends to re-create his friend circle on a new colony. Part of that means finding a woman to mold into being his ex-wife. Since she was a movie star, he has Quen followers read a line from one of her movies to see if he feels a spark. One of the prospects is the young sister of Aloy's sidekick Seyka, Kina. Kina is maybe 18 at the absolute most. Kina's the one he takes a liking to, and though the scene is short, seeing this play out is just as skin-crawling as it sounds.
