Nightmare Fuel / Mafia III

Sign of the Times...

Mafia III isn't just the third sequel for the Mafia series, it's the darkest and bloodiest sequel to date.

Main Game

• The ending of the prologue mission "The Home Fire Burns" ends with the Federal Reserve heist being successful and the Black Mob, Lincoln, Danny, Giorgi and Sal Marcano celebrating, only for Giorgi to suddenly shoot Lincoln Clay in the head, Richie Doucet stabbing dead Ellis, Danny being stabbed to death, Sal shooting Sammy dead, and Giorgi setting the bar on fire, and while Danny isn't seen, he was murdered as well. That's right, Lincoln not only has his adopted family murdered right in front of him, but is brutally betrayed by his friend and has the money Sammy went through so much effort to obtain stolen from him.
  • When you revisit the bar after awakening from the coma, you're treated to seeing a PTSD-like montage of the scene, which is equally as disturbing as the entire bar has been destroyed.
  Giorgi Marcano: You shouldn't have said no.
  • Later on, when you meet Burke, he gets upset about Danny's death and mentions Danny's body was so badly burned the coroner refused to let him look at it.
• How Thomas Burke kills Barbieri. Maguire notes that his body wasn't found until the mid-1980s, where it was found in the trunk of an old car sunken in the Mississippi River. According to him, his legs were broken so many times that there was hardly any bone left.
  • Thomas Burke himself. Despite being a Jerk with a Heart of Gold, he's an Ax-Crazy Blood Knight prone to anger outbursts and willing to open fire to the slightest provocation.
• Vito's anecdote about Joe Barbaro's fate is utterly horrific. According with Vito, Joe Barbaro's death is a mixture of No-Holds-Barred Beatdown, fingore and Facial Horror combined. A very sickening way to murder someone when you think about it. The only satisfaction is that this ends up being just a rumor, as Joe reappears at the end of the game.
• Lincoln Clay's executions are incredibly graphic, which is explained by Donovan as a form of psychological warfare meant to send a message.
• Almost everything about the Dixie Mafia and the Southern Union. Both practically treat Black people from all walks of life as inferior, to the point that they turn any that they hold captive into slaves, which in the Southern Union's case is literal at one point.
• This is the first game in the series to feature wildlife, and fittingly for the setting, it's alligators. You can dump dead bodies into the various swamps and rivers, and watch as they float there for a few seconds before an alligator suddenly and loudly drags them down to the deep. But should you decide to get your feet wet, you can find yourself on the alligators' menu, too. And a few missions, such as the assault on the Haitians in the prologue, require you to go swimming. Have fun.
• After you finally capture Grecco and take him back to Vito's place, Vito turns on the meat grinding machine and tells Lincoln to leave. Not to mention that Grecco is never alluded to by anyone else after this point.
• The destruction of Uncle Lou's steamboat in "Real Nice Time", especially since it's the only mission where civilians are bound to be killed either in the gunfight between his goons, from the fire on the boat, or by falling into the bayou water and being eaten by alligators. Worse still, a radio report heard after this mission states that there were no survivors found.
• Olivia Marcano's death at the hands of Giorgi, who slashed her from ear to ear and left her to bleed to death on the hospital bed, as Lincoln refused to outright kill her.
• Lincoln himself is rather scary if you adopt a stealthy approach to missions. A quiet, hulking brute who lures people away from their friends before pouncing, brutally slitting their throats and leaving without a sound? Are we describing Lincoln Clay or a slasher movie villain?

Stones Unturned

• Your first encounter with Connor Aldridge's handiwork is a Cuban restaurant where he murders every single patron, waiter, and person inside in a disgusting massacre. It is a good Establishing Character Moment that shows him to be a monster with absolutely no regard for human life.
  • What makes it worse is that there was a birthday party being held at the venue when Aldridge tore through the place, all the presents and cake are still there when Lincoln and Donovan come to investigate.
• Your second encounter with him has him massacre an entire CIA sub-station, slaughtering and torturing the people inside. It's somehow even more grizzly than the initial massacre and helped by the fact all of the people were nothing more than paper pushers who couldn't put up a fight against Connor or his mercenaries.
• There's something about the fact that the encounter with Aldridge is so personal and traumatizing to Donovan, that a man who openly admits to helping Lincoln Clay murder hundreds of people lies to the Senate about encountering Connor again.
• When you finally meet with Aldridge face-to-face, he tortures a safe's location from a man before executing him. This despite Donovan warning the man that Connor will kill him anyway.
• Lincoln and Donovan's conversation that a nuclear weapon in the hand of a rogue power could result in a Mutual Kill of all humanity by triggering nuclear war. This is a real-life fear many people have to today, even with the end of the Cold War.

Sign of the Times

• "Sign of the Times" is pure Nightmare Fuel and unusually disturbing, even by the standards of your average crime video game. Take a look at the main picture above for a taste of what's to come in this DLC.
• It utterly lives up to its promotional material, with the Ensanglante being built up around the insane ramblings of Braxton Harless, a demented Civil War general who prophesied blood and death, resulting in this racist cult who used women down through the ages to pass on the seed of evil, and threatened to carry out horrific deeds in the name of purification, with its current leader, Bonnie, using a strong strand of LSD to indoctrinate people.
• The cultists are just plain disturbing with animal masks, female members jumping out at you, and their weird savage reactions to everything. They're a possessed of a Suicidal Overconfidence and are Ax-Crazy one and all. The fact they're all implied to be high as a kite doesn't help matters.
• The way the cult initiates people via Human Sacrifice. Worse, it's based on white supremacy so they have to murder a black man in order to become part of the cult.
• The cult maintains "Places of Darkness" where horrific tragedies take place like Sammy's Bar and a school where a bunch of children died in a fire. These places they fill with their incense and weird altars plus bloody pictograms to make some truly chilling places.
  • Oddly the scariest may be a Mardi Gras warehouse where the decorations, darkness, and difficulty navigating make it Nothing Is Scarier.
• The cult have kept the plantation where their founder lived "up" (for some values of the word up) and have his skeleton propped up in the basement as an idol.
• It ends with young Sacrificial Lamb Anna, raped in order to bear the next descendant of the general (as the current leader was sterile), being Driven to Suicide upon realizing she's pregnant, and Lincoln going on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge through the cult's creepy island hideout.
• Did we mention the cult's creepy island hideout is a Bedlam House ruined sanitarium where trees have grown through the place, corpses are used for decoration, and It Was a Dark and Stormy Night?