"Red... Everything... All red... Red... Red everywhere..."
Even with its more grounded setting, Slow Damage still gets to show plenty of gruesome and visceral moments that can make even the more desensitized players squirm or gasp in shock.
Warning: Spoilers Off applies to these pages. Proceed at your own risk.
General
- Early in the game, the player is told of how Japan's economy fell into decline and the grave consequences it had for everyone living there. What's scary is that this is already happening to several nations in real life, and one can easily imagine their own country suffering a similar fate in time.
- Towa's "models", who he subjects to a "euphoric session". These "models" may seem normal at first glance, but Towa can easily tell that there's more than meets the eye with them. Once there's enough of a crack for him to slip through their masks of normalcy, Towa then uses his power of persuasion to coax them into showing their true selves, with each "model" exposing their inner darkness.
Taku's Route (Chapter 3: Nostalgia)
- Taku's Madness ending easily takes the cake for being the most disturbing bad ending for Slow Damage, simply by showing how Drugs Are Bad to a frightening degree. In this ending, Taku decides to keep Towa safe from harm at all costs. After keeping his end of the bargain with Toono, Taku drags Towa to the clinic basement and confines him there, drugging him periodically to make him too addled to escape. Eventually, Towa gets addicted to the drugs and his mind and senses are so mangled that he hallucinates insects hatching from inside him and crawling out his flesh whenever he and Taku have sex. It all caps off with the last CG of the ending— which show him and Taku locked in a bloody embrace, with looks of maddened ecstasy on their faces as they see the insects they "birthed" grow wings and fly above them. As stated in the narration, this isn't the first time that this has happened, nor will it be the last. This is their ultimate fate: trapped in a tragic cycle of bloody delusion.I'll never let go again... We'll always be together... Until the day we die.
Fujieda's Route (The Last Chapter: Equal)
- Towa's childhood is nothing short of horrifying and traumatic. Long story short, Towa's mother used to run an establishment called "Euphoria", which seemed like nothing more than a high-class nightclub. But in secret, it's actually where certain customers can fulfill their darkest desires, with their victims often being children. Needless to say, Towa was frequently visited by Maya's "clients", and thus was subjected to all kinds of treatment from torture to mutilation to rape. Again, his mother allowed it all to happen, and purely for both amusement and profit. Is it any wonder Towa grew up so hedonistic and emotionally detached?
- The new wounds all over Towa's body in the Madness ending are a garish and shocking sight, but the image is still relatively tame compared to everything else the player has seen by that point. What makes the scars really unsettling, however, is how and why Towa even got those cuts. Was it his attempt to feel pleasure again? Or was it a sign of him battling his own mind and trying to break free out of his own body, which has succumbed completely to Maya's influence? Whatever the answer really is, neither Fujieda nor the player will ever know.Towa: This is what happens to me when you're gone...
It's okay.
It's okay.
It's okay.
