This page contains unmarked spoilers. You Have Been Warned!
"...All we know is that deep down, somewhere in there, we enjoy it. Destruction and violence... it's just part of our nature."
For the first game, see here.
General:
- Once again, like its predecessor, the entire game can be pretty nightmarish due to its absurdly graphic nature. Yes, it's fun. Yes, it's challenging. And yes, it explains some of the mind-screws of the first game. But what the players are doing is violently, relentlessly and ruthlessly killing hundreds of people in the most graphic and gruesome ways possible. The characters controlled by the players may be completely crazy, they may be psychopaths, or they may be forced into it against their will... but they're still extremely violent mass murderers killing everyone in their path, painting the environment red and leaving behind massive trails of bloody body parts, intestines, blood and corpses.
- Not to mention, but this game is actually even more violent than the first game by taking its extreme amounts of Gorn and cranking all of that up to eleven, with the deaths being much more graphic and detailed, including people getting cut in half, torn to shreds by gunfire, getting their brains bashed into the ground, being disemboweled, chainsawed, etc., and an assortment of other disgusting things that you could imagine painted in incredibly unnecessary detail (complete with gruesome sound effects), and all of that (alongside the extremely trippy, Mushroom Samba-esque neon-heavy visuals) can be summed up as "candy-colored ultra-violence on some of the most illegal hallucinogens/weed you can imagine." Basically, it becomes so demonically gruesome that if you don't like seeing complete carnage, RUN. If you don't, you will need a full transfusion of bleach into your veins to purge the bacchanalian brouhaha and a thousand palate cleansers. So needless to say, good luck trying to endure all of that extremely brutal and gruesomely detailed chaos.
- The cover, especially when you realize it depicts Beard dying during the nuking of San Francisco. Behind him are the flaming visages of some of the other playable characters (these being the Fans and the Son), as well as the Colonel and one of the Janitors. The Fans' in particular are the scariest, being depicted as the beasts that the Son sees them as during "Apocalypse".
- Just everything about The Fans. A group of five seemingly normal people with jobs and average lives who are actually veterans moonlighting as incredibly violent vigilante serial killers, simply because they're bored and cannot adjust to normal ordinary life outside the war. Even their deaths are disturbing, because it shows just how insane Manny really is and how horrific The Son's hallucinations are.
- Manny Pardo himself. Sure, he's a jerk, which is bad enough, but he's a Rabid Cop... and his interrogation of Alex is disturbing as hell, almost predatory. Probably because it is, considering that he has a Bound and Gagged man in his car whom he plans to murder later. And he's planting the dead guy's wallet in her apartment.
- The reveal that Pardo is the psychotic and visceral Miami Mutilator is plenty disturbing in its own right. It's even more creepy when you realize that even with this reveal, his motive for the murders is still unknown.
- While majority of other playable characters don't hesitate to kill and pretty much have it coming, there's a good amount of Fridge Horror in the fact that Evan is an unviolent family man with a wife and at least two kids. Seeing him getting unceremoniously shot/stabbed/mutilated to death while holding this thought can be rather unnerving, to say the least.
- It's also incredibly jarring to see a man who is largely a pacifist start killing people for no reason, other than the player willing it to happen.
- The fact that San Francisco is obliterated in a nuke, and that you witness it first-hand.
- Despite the fact that it's a background element to the story, the fact that the sequel portrays a scenario where the Cold War escalated to violence with such realism makes it that much more chilling. Coupled with the ending and the brutality of the nuking of San Francisco, it really puts into perspective how the conflict could have ended in real life.
- 50 Blessings in it's entirety. A completely ruthless conspiracy with all sorts of operatives acting for it, seemingly impervious to the law and with many sympathisers everywhere. Starting out arguably as extremists with an understandable motive, by the time their plans are in full swing they become fully and irredeemably evil. They not only sanction mass murder, but don't care about having their own agents killed en masse at the drop of a hat, too. Even their lowest level admin staff are complicit in murder and cover ups.
Levels:
- Good lord, "Final Cut". In this level, Martin plays as a creepy serial killer who breaks out of prison by twisting a guard's head by 180 degrees and mercilessly bashing another guard's head on the ground. As the creepy "Decade Dance
" plays in the background, numerous cops are massacred, the SWAT leader gets his head and spine torn out, and the bastard uses keys to try to abduct Amanda (the same woman Martin's character raped earlier) before she accidentally kills him. While the horror is somewhat mitigated by the fact that this mission is a scene being filmed for a movie, the atmosphere and the brutality Martin unleashes still make the finale of Act 1 one of the most terrifying levels in the game.- The fact it's a scene filmed for a movie doesn't negate the fact that it's implied Amanda legitimately killed Martin with live rounds instead of blanks.
- There are also several disturbing implications that the events of Final Cut happen for real in some way. Later on Manny meets a real SWAT leader who looks just like the one in Final Cut. At the end of his story he receives a strange call from the police station where they need his help with "a situation." It's left ambiguous if this is to do with the incoming nukes or if Martin Brown is a real murderer and is going insane at the station and killing everyone. Presumably if it also happened for real, Martin was eventually killed by the cops and hallucinated his victim in the movie shooting him. It's also jarring and creepy how sickened the cop interrogating Martin in Final Cut seems to be; a great acting performance, or is Martin really a twisted killer outside of his acting career?
- In "No Mercy", there is a dream scene of the Henchman driving along in an idyllic dream, listening to a weather advisory warning about a storm approaching Miami. Suddenly, the radio shorts out, and Richard appears. And then, that's when you notice that the road is now full of dead bodies and wrecked cars, some of which the Henchman actually drives over.
- The Fans' beatdown of The Henchman at the end of "Execution". Even scarier is how he is so full of drugs that he is just as disconnected from the beating as the player is:WHACK!"What... are you hitting me? I... I just wanna go home. Can you call Mary? She'll... she'll come get me. Is that blood... Am I bleeding? Do I need to go to the hospital? Guys...? Look, I just want to go home, OK?"WHACK WHACK WHACK WHACK WHACK!...WHACK!
- It also really hits home how brutal and senseless the butchery of enemies in each level is. The Henchman was a Punch-Clock Villain at worst; who's to say how many other white suited bad guys also didn't deserve to be slaughtered by Jacket and The Fans?
- "Into The Pit". Everything starts off real basic, but then you find a manhole leading into the junkie-filled sewers. What follows is a short yet disturbing experience with a haunting atmosphere and bodies being melted away within acid tubs.
- And the name of the song attributed to this section? "We're Sorry".
- The page image shows The Colonel, a seemingly affable if stern man, finally snapping and slaughtering a panther in "Casualties", carving its face off and marking the forehead with a 50 Blessings logo, and wearing it as he descends into a rabid speech about how he believes, deep down, humans are inherently savage, so he might as well look the part. When the mask slips off, his face is covered in blood, and his eyes are pale. The next day he has sobered up and seems embarrassed, but it's implied that he would later go home and become the founder of 50 Blessings, the terror cell which finally causes the Cold War to ignite and end the world. It's chilling to realize that this drunken rant in a jungle is the thing which set an eventual nuclear apocalypse in motion.The Colonel: Do you see this? Can you see my face? This is my true nature! You see, don't you? This is who I am! This is who we all are. We're animals! There's no denying it! A bunch of goddamn animals! They're sending us out to slaughter or be slaughtered... And here we sit until they tell us what to do, and how to do it! No will of our own, just mindless obedience! We don't even know why we're fighting now, do we? All we know is that deep down, somewhere in there, we enjoy it. Destruction and violence... it's just part of our nature.
- In "Caught", The Miami Mutilator, or rather the representation of it in Pardo's mind, is a rather creepy ventriloquist dummy that tries to grab Pardo before the latter knocks its head off.
- The Son's hallucinations under the drugs in "Apocalypse". The Dogs are tri-headed cerberus, the typical Mobster is a devil (you can even see one who's seemingly eating a fellow Mobster), and the Thugs appear to be completely bloated. All that, coupled with how the Son sees the assaulting Fans (Mark as a bear, Corey as a speeding zebra, Tony as a giant tiger, and Alex and Ash as a hydra-esque twin-headed swan), is only the start of it.
- The hallucinations gradually get even worse somehow as the level goes on. Before the fight against Alex and Ash, you see several corpses changing shape and phasing in and out of existence. One of them has a shotgun wound to the stomach open in slow motion with guts spilling out, only for the guts to return back in with the wound closing up, which repeats endlessly until you move to the next stage.
Other:
- Blowing up a meth lab (headphone users aware!) could count as a Jump Scare for anyone playing the game for the first time and not having learned anything about the meth labs up until that point.
- Some of the game's tracks are eerie as hell to listen to even on their own, such as the aforementioned "We're Sorry" and the incomprehensible vocals in "Run".
- The opening cutscene for Hard Mode is just plain eerie. Richard and all the playable characters sit around a table as he berates them and the player for starting the game over from the beginning knowing what's coming. Each of them in turn displays confusion and anger and refuses to listen to Richard's warning, or convince themselves they're in a dream. When they have nothing more to say they transform into their own corpse. Jake gets a bullet wound through his head. Martin Brown's body falls down riddled with bullets. The fans' bodies are heavily bloodied, Ash in particular is decapitated while Alex is lying prone in a puddle of her own blood. The Henchman's head is smashed like a melon and The Son's mutilated corpse looks like it likely did when he fell from the Colombian building. Most haunting are the bodies of Richter, Pardo, Evan, and Beard, which are reduced to skeletons due to them dying in nuclear blasts. After Beard returns to his corpse form a projector starts rolling and the opening of the game begins again.
- One especially creepy detail is when Manny begins getting defensive with him, Richard admits he doesn't understand him or why he does any of the things he does. Considering that Richard seems to always know more than he lets on and is able to predict the characters' fates, the fact that he can't figure out Manny speaks volumes to how much of a lunatic Manny is.Richard: You, I don't get. Why is it you do the things you do?
- This scene gets worse if you subscribe to the "Richard is the Grim Reaper" theory due to the implication that the entire game, from the VHS tape level select to the fact that you can start it again and again, is an attempt from Richard to get the playable characters to realize that they're dead. The way Richard talks implies that it isn't the first time he's had to try to convince them and it won't be the last. Knowing that even the playable characters are too scared, too confused, or too stubborn to move on and are doomed to repeatedly relive their final days is a horrifying fate to imagine.
- One especially creepy detail is when Manny begins getting defensive with him, Richard admits he doesn't understand him or why he does any of the things he does. Considering that Richard seems to always know more than he lets on and is able to predict the characters' fates, the fact that he can't figure out Manny speaks volumes to how much of a lunatic Manny is.
