Hearing your teammates screaming in pain when hit with status effects like corrosion can be pretty unnerving.
The mission "Why Call Them Back From Retirement" has the Unplanned Variable investigating a new district of Byzantium exclusively established for workers who've won a lottery for early retirement. All the glitz and glam from the area's entrance quickly disappears as you take an elevator down to the "district" which slowly becomes more decrepit as the announcer on the PA grows distorted. The ride culminates in a dark floor where automechanicals await to murder anyone who enters, the blood, bones and bodies of "retirees" still littering the floor. Truly a nightmarish scheme from the Board to Kill the Poor.
Sophia Akande's plan for dealing with Edgewater if Adelaide becomes mayor. Viewing the town as a haven for dissidents instead of a loyal company town, she has the Unplanned Variable use automechanicals to slaughter every person in the city, including all the NPCs the player met. Akande also confirms something most players who investigated the geothermal plant had probably already expected: That Spacer's Choice had used the same strategy earlier on the plant itself and its workers to cash in on the insurance, since it wasn't profitable enough in their eyes.
In fact, the employee who came up with the scheme got promoted due to their Outside-the-Box Tactic.
The full story of the Hope and why it never reached Halcyon. Engine troubles took it out of skip space, meaning five additional decades were added to the ship's journey, while the crew only had enough food rationed for one more year. What followed was a civil war where most of the crew became cannibals bringing frozen passengers out of hibernation to eat them. You can even come across the larder the cannibals use full of blood and empty cryopods. The only reason the Hope made it to Halcyon at all is because the captain and pilot remained sane enough to keep the ship on course.
The Spacer's Choice Human Inquiry & Auditing facility from the Peril on Gorgon DLC. Spacer's Choice took "volunteers" from the incarceration centre on Tartarus and subjected them to numerous tests with their drug Adrena-Time. This involved pumping them full of the stuff until they went completely insane, becoming extremely violent and constantly demanding more of it. The ones that were deemed too difficult to control were subsequently terminated and their corpses tossed into a human trash compactor, where they were mulched into cubes and thrown out with the rest of the garbage. The worst part is that the subjects that survived are still there, abandoned and forced to live a meaningless existence of primitive savagery. If you decide to bring them with you, your companions will comment on just how utterly nightmarish and evil the entire operation was. There's an added bit of Fridge Horror since it turns out this is the origin of the Marauders seen throughout the game. All of them were victims of Spacer's Choice's callousness and greed.
Oh and those mulched flesh cubes? You pass through a room full of them early on in your trek through the HIA building. It's unlikely that you'll know what they are the first time you go through, however (the room is quite dim); It's likely that you'll mistake them for the cubes of compacted trash that you can find elsewhere in the colony.
In the bar in Amber Heights, you can meet a retired mercenary named Ash. Buy him a few drinks and he'll tell you some eerie stories about the most dangerous places on Monarch, and the strange, otherworldy experiences he had there. While it is less visceral than the above examples, listening him tell his tales, accompanied by the solemn ambient music of Amber Heights, is chilling in a very subtle way.
Ash claims to have visited the Hot Pole - the point of the moon that always faces the gas giant Olympus, making it the hottest place on Monarch. He describes it as a plateau in a vast mountain range, with volcanoes so tall their peaks are in space, but with a strange circle of smooth rock in the middle. Acting on an impulse that even he can't explain, he places his ear to the ground and hears a sound from deep under the earth: tapping, like a bird hatching from an eggshell.
Ash: When there's a groundquake now, I hold my breath. Because I don't know if it's Olympus squeezing us with gravity... or wings getting stretched.
With the gravity disturbances caused by Monarch's proximity to Olympus, the tides of its oceans are extreme, pulling back for miles at low-tide and sinking islands at high-tide. Ash explains how, on a journey east at low-tide, he saw something gleaming in the sun. Setting out to investigate, he finds a circle of six silver columns, each about two stories tall and made from seamless metal. Standing in the middle of the circle, he feels a pounding in his ears and sees shapeless things in the corners of his vision, disappearing when he tries to look at them. He is forced to retreat back to high ground when the tide starts to come in; when he returns at the next low-tide, the columns are nowhere to be found.
One side quest in Stellar Bay involves checking in on a worker called Braxton and finding out why he hasn't been coming to work in the warehouse. You eventually find pointers that he went to an isolated house outside the Bay to take meds to the people who live there; upon arriving, you're met with a strangely cheerful and welcoming family who enthusiastically invites you to stay for dinner, and claims to know nothing about Braxton. From the get go, it's painfully obvious something's not right (and should Nyoka be with you, she'll be sure to point that out to you and urge you to get the hell out of there), and, if you're familiar with videogames in general, especially the ones that seem to haveat least partially inspired The Outer Worlds, you'll most likely have a feeling where this is going...
You can turn around and try to leave right after entering the kitchen through the front door, only to find out that said door has been locked behind you...
In the Murder On Eridanos DLC after going to the hotel basement you find that the staff are living in terrible conditions with tiny, dirty rooms compared to the luxury suites the guests above use, while going past a door to one of the staff rooms you hear an employee who got locked in calling for help, when you manage to get into the room through a loose panel on the back wall it turns out the employee is long dead and you've been actually listening to an audio recording of her last words.
