Moment pages are Spoilers Off by default, so all spoilers were removed. Proceed with caution. You Have Been Warned.
"One of the more striking things about returning to Quake 2 is just how horrible the Strogg world is. This is clear enough in its desolated, brown environments and the Strogg's brutal approach to creating new cyborgs, mercilessly chopping up humans with sawblades and lasers. You can imagine the overwhelming smell of iron oxide as your press through rusting facilities smeared with the blood of your fellow marines. But it isn't the sights or scents of Stroggos that lingers in your mind, it's the sound. The compressed screams of Berserkers as they die, the shuddering moans of your imprisoned comrades turned mad through torture, the buzzing flies that surround a Strogg corpse after it's laid for a while in the alien sun. Quake 2 isn't a scary game, but its monstrously unpleasant world can be thoroughly unsettling."
— Rick Lane, "The diminishing reputation of Quake 2"
Even with all the quirks of its engine, and without the Lovecraftian setting of its predecessor, Quake II still manages to introduce some chill-inducing stuff among its action.
- The sheer Body Horror that is the Strogg, who amass their armies by taking humans and chopping them up messily to attach to their war machines. The blockier graphics leave more to the imagination, but this was a game where it becomes very blatant that Id Software was becoming more skilled in their craft. From the regular guards that have their visors bloodily mounted to the front of their faces, to the numerous soldier types like Enforcers and Gunners that have weapons for limbs and wires out the back of their skulls, and everything that are enemies like the Parasites, who are human heads stuck on mechanical canine-like bodies that suck the blood right out of you with prehensile tongues, and Flyers, who are also similarly severed heads reanimated inside boxy flying drones with flesh and wire connecting their wings to the body. Everything Quake IV brought to the table to really make horrifying, this game started it all.
- The Strogg themselves are even spookier than the Shub Niggurath's forces because, for the latter, most people will just write them off as the inherent evil of an Eldritch Abomination's influence. The Strogg? We don't know what they are, just that they have their own entire planet of Stroggos, and attacked humanity without warning and for reasons unknown besides for harvesting their hapless victims. Are they aliens? Some human sub-species that grew into bio-mechanical monsters? The leftovers of some war elsewhere in the universe? No one knows and no one will probably ever know.
- Even the Call of the Machine campaign in the 2023 remaster, if it's even canon to begin with, implies that Shub-Niggurath's influence may have created the Strogg — but beyond calling a pair of giant Shamblers the "Strogg Maker", raises even more questions about the ruins they protect and the mysteries involved. Did some semblance of space-faring humans discover the ruins and get transformed? Are the Strogg some artificial species from the ground up? Or is there something far more foul with their abominable existence?
- The entire mission of "Operation Alien Overlord" boils down to sending as many drop pod ships right through the Strogg's defensive line as possible and hoping at least one of them can take out the Big Gun orbital defences. The opening highlights the literal dozens of pods sent in without any defences, and how most of them are rapidly wiped out before they even realize what hit them; you'll find errant pods throughout the rest of the game, and every single Marine involved dead as a doornail nearby if not dragged off. It says something about how utterly desperate the war against the Strogg is that humanity has no better options than a gigantic suicide run and how damn lucky they are that Bitterman survived.
- There are levels with humans begging to be killed, such as "Detention Center", "Torture Chambers", "Guard House", "Processing Plant" and "Research Lab". The agony screams of "kill me now" and "make it stop" only add to the scene.
- The level "Processing Plant" is Exactly What It Says on the Tin: an Eternal Engine where humans are processed into Strogg food. There's red liquid (implied in some sections to be some sort of acidic fluid mixed with human blood) everywhere, and the machinery used to process the humans display them being crushed in full detail. The beginning of the level even has the normally calm communications guy losing his cool:"We have confirmed visual on troops being... (Beat) ...being disassembled."
"Somebody shut that place down." - The level "Research Lab" is a laboratory where Strogg scientists (represented in the game as Brains and Medic enemies, with some Iron Maiden and Parasites thrown in as security guards) perform all kinds of nasty experiments on the poor captured humans. Thankfully, if you're trying to unlock the Easter Eggnote , their suffering won't last much longer.
- The PlayStation version of "Research Lab" has one room containing "prisoner disposal tubes". These contain a dark red fluid, in which are floating several large chunks of nondescript body parts... and a couple of human faces.
- The level "Processing Plant" is Exactly What It Says on the Tin: an Eternal Engine where humans are processed into Strogg food. There's red liquid (implied in some sections to be some sort of acidic fluid mixed with human blood) everywhere, and the machinery used to process the humans display them being crushed in full detail. The beginning of the level even has the normally calm communications guy losing his cool:
- Falling into lava is virtually as harmful as you'd expect. It isn't a one-hit-kill but eats your health at a startling rate. Back in Quake, however, the impact was diminished with the game playing the "hurt by toxic waste" sound when you get hurt. Not in this game, where a new visceral pain sound was created for pleasant dreams.
- Call of the Machine is mostly a straightforward series of setpieces in the war against the Strogg. Then one of the six marines sent out to find data disks leading to the "Strogg Maker", ends up going through a slipgate amidst the various ruins depicting Shub-Niggurath, and loses his mind entirely with a mission failure. Actually fighting Shamblers is peanuts compared to the eerie tension and horror afloat with this part of the campaign.
