Not a pretty sight...
- Talbot. The fact that he's extremely loyal to Marlowe and yet so disturbingly cold and merciless in relation to his enemies is one thing. It doesn't help matters that he's also largely shrouded in mystery, seemingly able appear or disappear at the most inopportune of moments for Drake without logical explanation. It's no wonder that his tarot symbol is the Magician.
- Players are treated to spiders. And not just a handful of spiders but entire swarms of thousands upon thousands of potentially man-eating spiders similar to the creepy crawlies in the first two Mummy films. They make the bad guys decision to burn down the entire building quite reasonable. The creepy hissing the spiders make doesn't help.
- The tomb where Drake, Sully, and Elena learn the coordinates of Ubar provides some eerie {foreshadowing. In the deepest room, every wall is a mural showing creepy, gnarled hands reaching up at ghastly, horror-stricken faces. From said murals (and the doorway) emerge more of the aforementioned spiders (which are also more aggressive than the ones encountered prior). The ensuing Escape Sequence leads the trio to a room with ominous warnings written by Sir Francis Drake himself, who based on what he learned here decided Ubar was better left undiscovered.
- After Drake and Sully in Umar, they take in the sights, and then Talbot pops up out of nowhere and shoots Sully before running off. Drake chases after Talbot, roaring his name and evidently having lost it.
- After this, the world starts to distort around him in terrifying ways as he progresses. Highlights include fighting soldiers with their heads on fire that can seemingly teleport, solving a puzzle by mimicking his independently-moving reflection, and then getting strangled by said reflection.
- When he finds an apparently-alive Sully, Drake points a gun at him and asks how he can know he's real. Sully's fine (that whole business described above was a hallucination), but Drake being so shaken and unsure of his grip on reality that he's willing to shoot his oldest partner and friend is disturbing.
- The hallucinogenic water. When you ingest this and it filters through your system, your entire world becomes blurred, and you live out your worst fears. Not to mention the bad guys can manipulate you into turning against your friends through it. Unlike the previous two games, we're never told exactly what is causing the hallucinogenic effect, other than that it's caused by whatever is sealed inside the brass cauldron at the bottom of the reservoir that Marlowe is trying to salvage. According to legend, it's a Sealed Evil in a Can, malevolent djinn trapped there millennia ago by King Solomon. Unlike the previous games, we're never shown that this isn't true, and the last we see of it is the cauldron sinking back to the bottom of the water, still sealed. And Marlowe wants to use it to control anyone and anything her secret society wants to.
- The sequence where Drake is lost in the Rub' al Khali. Imagine finding oneself stranded in one of the most inhospitable deserts in the world, with no supplies, and no idea where you are going, as you slowly start to weaken from lack of water and the extreme conditions of scorching heat during the day, and freezing air during the night. Drake was lucky he found that village and Salim's tribe when he did.
- During this sequence, Marlowe's voice is heard reciting lines from the poem "The Waste Land" by T. S. Eliot. The poem itself is essentially about how the world is hopelessly lost and that life is unable to regenerate.
