Per wiki policy, Spoilers Off applies here and all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.
Just some dog heads in the middle of a white void.
- GET. SCARED.
You wouldn't think that SUPERHOT, the most innovative shooter we've played in years, would have some Nightmare Fuel in it, would you? THINK. AGAIN. Beneath the innovative gameplay mechanics lies a Psychological Horror game about a Descent into Addiction gone way too far.
- Without even showing the face of your friend during the dialogue sections, it becomes a combination of this and a Tear Jerker when they end up blocking you because your responses keep getting changed to "SUPER HOT SUPER HOT SUPER HOT" against your friend's request.
- The game finishes with you killing your real-world body and becoming one with everyone else who has gone the same route as you.
- Even if you don't want to, you see message "NO", "KEEP IT", AND "WRONG SIMULATION" pop up on the screen, leaving you no choice but to finish this.
- The way you go about it is also unsettling. You walk up to your own body in the real world with a shotgun to blow your own brains out. With the transfer finally complete, you hear the "SUPER. HOT." trance kick in after a moment of silence. It continues repeating those words as the screen grows red, and the message is instead replaced with "HAND. OVER. CONTROL.", revealing that the "SUPER. HOT." chant was brainwashing you.
- Being trapped in a pixelated, low-resolution prison is terrifying enough on its own, but for fans of Imscared, it's bound to trigger some flashbacks.
- The fact that, judging by the last level, even the organization in charge of the SUPERHOT program can no longer control it.
- The presence of police cars in the fourth level implies that, for at least that level, most of the enemies you kill are police officers. Think about it; who exactly else have you been killing?
- Just the general idea that you've been taking control of people all this time and forcing them to kill their own friends.
- The way enemies' bodies shatter like glass can bring up some disturbing images if you think about what that looks like in the real world. Same goes for Mind Control Delete's unique enemies: One has a body made of concrete except for one limb, one is fused to its weapon to the point where it's a part of its flesh, and the last has spiky fungus growing out of it and explodes into Bullet Hell upon death.
- You, from the perspective of the enemies. Imagine you're in a cramped room with your buddies, all three of you have guns and you're about to kill this unarmed chump. Said chump dodges your nearly point blank shots, punches the guy next to you, takes his gun, kills the other guy next to you, then kills the guy he took the gun from, and before you can even process any of this happening, you're dead too. Alternatively, imagine you have a Bottomless Magazine M16, you're in a long, thin hallway, and you're about to kill the guy on the other side of the room from you who has nothing. This freaking guy walks towards you, side-stepping each individual bullet from your gun like it's nothing, never even slowing down, and once they reach you on the other side of the long, narrow hallway past your Bullet Hell, they punch the gun out of your hand and pop your head off. Perhaps the worst/best part is, aside from the Hotswitch, you don't have any superpowers as far as the enemies can tell. You're just inhumanly fast and accurate, and your mind is calculating each and every action with the speed of a supercomputer.
- Even more severe in Mind Control Delete with the .hacks. If you have a katana and the fast reflex or deflect all bullets upgrade, you can deflect an entire shotgun blast in one move, or the equivalent of one move. So you have your shotgun ready, the guy with a sword is trying to get close-quarters with you so you try to shoot him point blank, the guy makes a hand movement you can barely see and then you're dead. From a longer distance, you can see each individual bullet you fire just turn around and fly directly towards you as soon as it gets close to the guy. Hell, with the fast reflex upgrade you can get shot point blank, kill the guy who shot you, and then deflect the bullet. Imagine seeing your buddy die to that.
- The extra videos can be a little disturbing, specifically the third one. It's a trailer for an April Fools' Day game called Ready Steady Mental
, the point of which is to scream and shake your head as much as possible for 10 seconds. The Nightmare Fuel part comes from the fact that the trailer is nothing but people shaking and screaming while a distorted text-to-speech narrator assures the viewer that the people are completely fine, and the fact that the game involves doing just that never brought up, making it seem like the narrator is lying. On top of that, the game's title only flashes briefly once during the trailer, which many people miss and assume the trailer is for SUPERHOT. - If you leave the area of a level you're supposed to be in, you can often find unsettling level design and secrets. This ranges from general surrealism, with catwalks and stairs hovering in mid air and objects merging with walls, to more creepy themes like abandoned playground apparatus perpetually in motion, robotic dog heads and computer screens giving cryptic messages about the plot.Why do my enemies shatter when I kill them?
WHY DO YOU ASSUME THEY ARE ENEMIES? - In the extras, you can go into a fake chat room with people who play SUPERHOT in-universe. They are really cagey about discussing it. They act like normal people chatting but they come across as cultists with the way they worship the game and protect its secrets (if they even realize the true nature of the game). One user comes in and tells the rest of the guys a story about how someone in Warsaw killed 20 men for no reason presumably after going crazy playing SUPERHOT. After you get all the secrets, it's revealed that the chat's Moderator is under the control of the System and is using the chat room as another recruitment front for it.
- In the VR game, it is implied that the hacker group destroys the core and seemingly ends superhot.exe. Then the core appears to you outside of the game.
- But wait! Not only that, but the core is actually hiding a handgun! No points for guessing what happens next.
- Around the mid-point of the game, superhot.exe forces you to punch your real body in the head to make a point that it is not a toy, it is a tool. So much that it causes head trauma, with the program telling you to seek medical attention and to leave. Of course, you don't listen.
- MIND CONTROL DELETE has the Dog. An enemy in the shape of a human with a dog's head, easily identified by its Primal Stance. Its entry cue is pure Hell Is That Noise, and it is fast. Time still only moves when you do, but its charge allows it to cover a lot of ground even as you turn your head to look at it. And it's invincible.
- The Dog's backstory, doubling as a Tear Jerker, in which it was outright tortured into Blind Obedience to the System and having its intelligence deteriorated to that of an animal. Reading its .mem entries is absolutely heartbreaking.
- There is also the Nindza and the Addict, enemies that share the Dog's invincibility but possess unique powers. The Nindza possesses the RECALL Core, enabling him to throw and recall his katana in bids to strike you. The Addict will Hotswitch you, potentially stealing your weapon whilst getting rid of his old one to deny you.
