Nightmare Fuel / We Happy Few

That's NOT a piñata...

People won't face facts. Not until we take their Joy. And when we do that... They'll murder each other in the street.

WARNING: Per wiki policy, all spoilers are unmarked on Nightmare Fuel pages. Folders for specific acts may contain spoilers for later acts.

Promotional material

• There's some seriously creepy details in the gameplay trailer:
  • The butcher shop has signs in the window saying "We will buy your fat" and "Cash or Trade for any meat". That's... not how butcher shops are supposed to work.
  • The first line from a Downer besides Arthur? "I just want them to stop screaming!"
  • Signs from fellow Downers reveal that the histoplasma (plague) mushrooms are deadly... right next to a raggedly-dressed corpse with either their face torn off or a pink mushroom growing out of their head.
  • Uncle Jack reminding the Wellies to use the playgrounds. "After all, if we don't, who on earth will?"
  • And to top it all off, if you don't do as you're told and take your Joy, and the greasepaint-faced lunatics surrounding you find out about it?
  Uncle Jack: One less mouth to feed, eh?
• The official announcement trailer is chock-full of evidence (as if any more were needed) that Wellington Wells may not be as nice as it seems:
  • We open on an upside-down view of a colorful, sunny city skyline... which inverts itself to street level and becomes dark and gloomy as we see a Downer trying to hide from a squadron of patrolling Bobbies. It looks like he's managed to hide in an alley and slip past them... until his Joy bottle falls out of his pocket. The high definition graphics don't help either, as the Bobbies' masks when they turn around are deep in the Uncanny Valley.
  • At one point, Arthur is in a house next to a Wellie who says "Got you!" in a sing-song voice. This is never explained. In fact, much of the trailer runs on Nothing Is Scarier, such as the shot of a Gas Mask Mook tipping his hat to Arthur.
  • One scene shows an old woman being arrested by a pair of Bobbies, who ignore her protests. It's pretty chilling to see that not even ordinary Wellies are safe.
  • At one point, we see a POV cam of Arthur on the ground being beaten senseless by a Bobbie.
  Bobbie: I'll fix you!
  • At the trailer's end, the Downer from the beginning is held down by the Bobbies and has Joy forcibly shoved into his mouth... and it's back to sunshine and smiles once again. It's profoundly unnerving, and it gets even worse when you consider that that Downer might be Arthur.
  • Another example of Fridge Horror occurs when you realize that the trailer describes the protagonists as "three moderately terrible people." What have Arthur and the others done to merit that description?
  • The lyrics to the trailer song are pretty dissonant from the cheery instrumental.
  Screaming dreams... all the things I can't unsee... rolling heads and falling tea... when I'm not with you...
• The Story Trailer has some seriously creepy moments as well.
  Ollie: It's not a lovely day for it! It's a fucking terrible day for it!
  • Sally and Arthur meet up, and realize just how dire their situation is.
    Sally: Arthur, we are practically the only two people in this entire city not stoned out of our minds on Joy!
  • There's a shot of two Bobbies inspecting a body, surrounded by signs reading "DOWNER BREACH". A nearby metal pipe with blood all over it suggests that the poor guy's death was not a pleasant one...
  • Another creepy shot is that of a big, metal arch... with three corpses hanging from it.
  • A shot of two people sealed in a Room Full of Crazy, paired with Arthur's commentary, suggests that the Wellies have more than one method of dealing with Downers.
    Arthur: If you force people to have the emotions you want, then you've turned them into... robots made out of meat!
  • One of the last shots in the trailer is of Arthur screaming as he falls into a deep pit.
  • Just about everything in the last few seconds of the trailer: an unidentified figure placing a Creepy Doll on some kind of shrine, a Wellie smashing beakers on a table, another Wellie sobbing into a camera, a figure tied to a chair in a darkened room with unintelligible writing on the ground, and finally a close-up of the bowler-hatted woman (without her mask) concluding the following line.
    People won't face facts. Not until we take their Joy. And when we do that... They'll murder each other in the streets.
• The Haworth Labs promo for Joy. It's all the worse since it's live-action. A happy woman, obviously off her mind with Joy, cheerfully stands in the middle of a field with horses nearby, petting her dog. She laughs, gleefully remarking that "she can't remember", but that "it's better". She keeps repeating the word "better", until she manages to weakly ask: "...isn't it?". She briefly comes down from her delusion, showing her to actually be in some dark room, petting an unidentified hunk of meat. But soon enough the Joy kicks in again, and she's back in the field, smiling vacantly.
  • The Haworth Labs webpage, predictably, is dedicated entirely to Joy. The big problem is that the disclaimer is... well, frankly, disturbingly long.
• The Make Believes Music Video has Uncle Jack show a clip of the band singing a song only for one of the members to crash mid song. The other band members then turn on him and force him to take some Joy picking up where they left off.
• The Launch Trailer has several: Sally knocking out a doctor with gas only for a second one wearing a Plague Doctor like gasmask to step out of the gas cloud, Sally walking into a dark alley to find another doctor with a Dishonored-like powercell powered circular saw and a bobby throwing a desk across the room to attack.

General

• The Very Bad Thing, which even before the truth is revealed, is shown to be so horrible to the people of Wellington Wells that merely knowing about it causes severe depression from the sheer guilt. The mere mention of Germany and its people, and the war briefly causes Uncle Jack's happy façade to slip. And then it's revealed just what the Very Bad Thing was: during the war, with Germany's armed forces invading Britain, the people of Wellington Wells were forced to give up their children to the enemy, not resisting their demands at all. They learned right after that the "army" sent to invade them was a complete fakeout, meant to trick the British that the enemy was bigger than it really was. Things went from horrible to Very Bad when the Wellies tried to get their children back, only to discover that the train carrying them had been destroyed in a bombing, killing them all and rendering the town's surrender All for Nothing. Upon learning the truth, people understandably went mad trying to forget it, up to regularly drugging themselves to dull those memories. Losing your children to war is one thing, but unwittingly losing them to your own foolishness is another.
• The "Crash" state that turns the entire world dark and dreary with Wellies sporting glowing red eyes. One of the events when crashing is Arthur vomiting up what he perceives as worms and cockroaches.
• Joy is quite dangerous. If your body isn't used to it (Downer), it heavily wrecks your metabolism; but even if you are used to it (Wellie), there are terrible side effects, such as total obliviousness to anything outside the norm or flying into a murderous rage at the sight of someone who is simply not happy enough. Then there's the chance that you're allergic to Joy (Wastrel), which means that taking Joy makes your bad memories worse, on top of all the negative physical effects of the pill.
  • At one point during Uncle Jack's broadcast, he gets a question about a "Joy Spiral". Basically what this entails is that, whether by accident or on purpose, a Wellie takes too much Joy. Because Joy is a drug that makes you forget, they start to forget things they're not supposed to forget... Including the fact that they took their Joy that day. So they take another dose of Joy, and then forget that they've taken that, and than they take even more Joy, and so on and so forth until they overdose. Uncle Jack dismisses this as a hoax, but then again, he hasn't proven to be very trustworthy...
  • One Bobby points out Downers who stopped taking Joy usually don't want to take Joy again because they start seeing eyes everywhere. On the bridge to Maidenholm, Arthur encounters a Downer who tries to rehabilitate himself. He's at his sixth try and all his answers to the quiz are the ones involving eyes.
  • One sidequest is about a woman convulsing in the street from a Joy overdose, with the crowd having no idea what to do. If you inject her with Crash, she'll recover instantly, but people will insist that she takes her Joy right away. She refuses, knowing that taking more Joy would just trigger another seizure, so the crowd all pulls out weapons and starts to chase her down and beat her to death.
• The Doctors are by far the creepiest enemies in the game. Their smiles are straight up Slasher Smiles, they walk like they're constantly creeping up on people, and they can instantly tell if you're off your Joy by smelling you. This means that they're the only things in We Happy Few that can tell the difference between the effects of Sunshine and Joy. Getting close to them without taking Joy or Mojo will set them off, causing them to break out giant chainsaws while cackling like maniacs.
• Overdose on Joy or eat mushrooms and you'll start hallucinating. You could be standing around minding your own business, until someone randomly runs up to you (with the HUD not showing their names), hostile for no discernible reason, and attacks you. Do something like shove them away, and they suddenly disappear.

Arthur's Story

• The prologue has some very chilling moments:
  • Arthur is invited to a birthday party for one of his co-workers. On the way to the party he passes by a big picture window showing another office, where one of his co-workers begs for mercy right before a Doctor stabs him in the neck with a hypodermic needle full of Joy. As the man falls into a daze and vacantly waves at Arthur, the Doctor - his face frozen in a maniacal grin - walks up to the window and shuts the blinds without a word.
  • One of the offices you can enter is Prudence's empty one- there's an old "Welcome Back!" banner that's falling apart, and a basket and plate of rotten fruit. Most importantly, Prudence is off her Joy (full bottles of Joy), and she went on a vacation, to never come back.
  • At the party, Arthur's co-workers are whacking a piñata on the table. The co-workers are under the effects of Joy while Arthur has just stopped taking it. They invite him to whack it with a broom, so he complies. He hits it and blood splatters all over the screen, and it is revealed that the "piñata" was actually a big rat, which the co-workers, high out of their minds on Joy, are picking apart and eating. It's somehow worse when Arthur's co-workers realize he's off his meds and turn against him in an instant.
    Angry Mob: Take your Joy! Take your Joy! Take your Joy! Take your Joy!
  • For viewers with careful ears, while the other co-workers are hitting the piñata, you can actually hear the sounds of the rat squeaking and squealing in pain, as well as every wet, bloody smack from the objects they're hitting it with. It really makes you wonder for how long the poor thing was alive.
• After Arthur clears the first bridge, he comes across a giant, metal arc... and then starts hallucinating three corpses hanging from it. Turns out the Wellies bent over backwards to appease the Germans, including sending their children as hostages while making them believe nothing was wrong. Three people were accused of breaking into the archives to burn the records so the Germans wouldn't know who had children to take and the Wellies had them lynched on false charges just to avoid the wrath of the Germans. Arthur actually wonders if trying to resist would have changed anything before stumbling to the side of the road and vomiting, either out of disgust or due to whatever triggered the hallucination.
  • It gets worse, later we find out two details, A) Arthur and Percy were the ones who actually burned the files making them indirectly responsible for the lynchings and B) Arthur and Ollie later find out the "German Tanks" were actually fake and the British army knew that and went along with it anyway respectively.
• If you want a rubber suit (to enter the "House of Curious Behaviours" and/or protect you from electricity) a Nosey Old Lady can sew it for you. You find her frolicking in a pool of Moteline, which is the substance in the fuel cells. Arthur notes that one spark would cause her to go up in flames. And like everyone else, she's completely out of her mind on Joy and/or the effects of the presumably noxious chemical. With no concern for her welfare, and no attempt to do anything about the spill, the Bobbies have just barricaded her in with police signs and she has no idea what's happening to her.
• At one point you find a dead Wastrel with a letter she had written, saying that she was desperate for the new Joy flavor to come out in case she would be compatible with it and could finally become a normal "Wellie" and escape from her hellish life. She didn't even survive the few days until the release of the new flavor.
• The Wellington Health Institute is a terrifying place. It's absolutely crawling with Doctors, and you encounter more and more disturbing things as you go along.
  Arthur: Well, this should be fun. A building full of fanatics who can smell me. Naked among wolves...
  • There are multiple occasions where you can find a dead plague Wastrel on an operating table. That would be bad enough, but the PA announcements suggests that the Doctors are dissecting them!
  • When Arthur manages to get into the Quarantine Grid, he opens a door leading to many glass cells with Plague Wastrels in them. He's then caught by two Doctors, who hold him down and inject him with something that knocks him out instantly. He wakes up in a tiny room, with his arms and legs shackled to a chair. He is then dosed with what the Doctors say is coconut Joy, and shown a series of disturbing stimuli to see if they have any effect.
    • The first one is an image of a woman screaming in a bombed-out city, complete with explosion and screaming effects. While Arthur doesn't visibly react, it's still startling if you don't know what to expect.
    • The second one is a child crying as a woman carries them to a train, which causes Arthur to flinch and curse as it obviously brings back bad memories.
    • The third one is Percy, banging on the glass and screaming Arthur's name. While Percy isn't actually there, it's not clear if the Doctors staged that deliberately, or if Arthur was just hallucinating, but it was shocking either way.
  • A machine ends up exploding and shattering the glass separating Arthur from the Doctors, which knocks them all out. Arthur wakes up first and escapes through the broken window, wandering around the room as he comes down from his high (and the player recovers from the shock), all the while Uncle Jack sings "Good Morning To You" and laughs manically in the background. On loop.
  • The button to lift the quarantine does exactly what you'd expect and lets all the Plague Wastrels out of their cells. Arthur has to escape the Institute through the chaos of a full-out brawl between Wastrels and Doctors, all the while cheery pop music plays in the background.
    • Not only that, but as you're coming off of the Coconut Joy, the side effect of it wearing off is worse than with normal Joy. As you escape to the Broadcasting Tower, not only is everyone automatically hostile to you, but everything is dark even if it's daytime and everyone looks like a horrid monster shrouded in darkness with red glowing eyes.
• The Butcher Shop in St. George's Holm. At first, it just seems like a package delivery mission, even though you're probably already assuming that the mysterious V-Meat is actually human flesh. And if you had any doubts, you'll know for sure when you meet Mr. Cutty. Hoo boy...
  • He sends you to pick up a "possibly heinous package" hidden in a carriage carrying flowers. The package is conveniently human-shaped with a mouthpiece on top.
  • After you stash it behind the shop, Mr. Cutty asks if you want to be his apprentice. Either way, you walk into the back of the shop and he knocks you out with a Spanker. You awaken in an enclosed room with Mr. Cutty on the PA, telling you that you’re about to meet the meat. Oh, what fun, he says!
  • And the best part, seeing how V-Meat is made! Take the carcass from earlier and hook it up through the mouthpiece to various blood-splattered machines. First is the Exsanguinator, which sucks the liquids from the body. Second is the Extruder, which inserts a drill that unfolds into a blender blade through the mouthpiece to slice up the guts from the inside like a blender. Third is the Exfoliator, which, moisturizes the carcass so the skin can be removed, like blanching a tomato. Then it gets packaged by another machine into various meat recipes, like meat pie. Also, disobey or take too long, and Mr. Cutty will zap you with a Spanker. All while cheesy store music plays in the background.
  • When you sabotage the last machine and run off while Mr. Cutty checks on it, he screams that you've blown it all to hell and that people are gonna starve.
  • When you flee to the cellar, Mr. Cutty goes after you. If you don't hide and make it to the ladder, he electrocutes you with the Spankers set up all over the cellar and you awaken to find yourself back in the enclosed room again. Imagine being stuck there making V-Meat forever... or until Mr. Cutty deems you useless for anything other than being V-Meat...
  • In Mr. Cutty's journal, he says that he's fixed the machines so that less accidents can happen, using a hypothetical example of Ed MacMillan getting his hand cut off and turned into V-Meat. This is Truth in Television for workers in the meat industry (notoriously, the fast food industry).
  • Once you escape, Arthur explains everything to the security guard, who is appalled and goes to arrest Mr. Cutty immediately. Though as Arthur said earlier, people need to eat...
• When you reach the bridge out of Wellington Wells, you have two choices: take Joy and forget, or don't. If you choose to keep your memory, you get a heartwarming end. If you choose to take the Joy, it cuts to Arthur playing on some sort of moped-rocking horse hybrid in a park, making noises like an engine and seemingly even more insane than when you started.

Sally's Story

• Fear of losing a child is bad enough, but Sally's surrounded by metaphorical wolves on all sides. The beginning of her story has a violent Wellie addicted to blackberry Joy ransacking her house and discovering the baby before Sally manages to knock him out, and General Byng is clearly trying to swindle Sally out of her child.
• Sally has to raise a child in Wellington Wells, and since there aren't any other children in town the Doctors would probably take her and her child to be experimented on to solve the issue. Or, going by the fact that any suggestion of children, even just seeing pregnant women triggers the Wellies to the point of homicidal madness, they wouldn't. It's probably for the best we don't think too hard about that one.
• Rat Holm is a terrifying place. The island is completely disconnected from the rest of Wellington Wells, meaning you can only reach it through the railway tunnels. The air is constantly filled with a green mist that makes it hard to see, and all sunlight gets blocked out, meaning it's pitch dark even during the day. The only structures present are the shacks containing the hatches leading to the underground shelters, and the research lab. Oh, and the place is entirely populated by Plague Wastrels, who move around in giant hordes and attack on sight.
  • In the abandoned lab, you can find an audio tape of a Doctor trying to infect a Downer with plague, just to see what happens. The poor woman is obviously terrified, crying and furiously shouting at the Doctor. However, she wasn't as defenseless as she seemed, because when the Doctor tries to feed her a liquid filled with the plague-virus, she leaps off of the table, gets her hands on the vial, and pours the whole thing down the Doctor's throat. Not that he didn't have it coming, but still freaky as hell.
• General Byng continually showing stronger stalker tendencies to Sally, to the point where he even "offers" for her to stay in his highly secure, secret safehouse of which there is only one exit that only he has the key to. However, to someone like Sally, Byng's safehouse seems more like a dungeon...
• Sally's notes about her encounter with Arthur, hinting at the fact that she might have been coerced into sleeping with his father. She says she 'didn't have a choice' and writes that it wouldn't have gone well over with Arthur's dad if she'd reminded him that she was his [[Squick sixteen year-old step-daughter]].

Ollie's Story

• Not being able to trust your neighbors when you're hiding something out of moral from a cruel regime.
• Ollie's situation in general. He's been living in the wild by himself fending off wastrels just to survive for decades and has developed diabetes in a harsh and dangerous environment that has little to no medications to help control his blood levels. Not to mention, this, along with his experience with the German invasion, has taken a serious toll on his mind; he has serious memory problems, is implied to have PTSD, and has been hallucinating his daughter Margaret, who was in fact the daughter of Uncle Jack that Ollie turned in to the Germans - something that left him with tremendous guilt and likely what caused to mentally deteriorate in the first place.
• Apple Holm has been infected by plague after Arthur's story.

They Came From Below

• The idea that Wellington Wells is actually under attack by alien robots sounds ridiculous... but it's played genuinely straight. Even the launch trailer manages to be creepy at times, despite being played for campy 60s goofiness.
• The Reveal that these alien robots actually came to Earth to help the Wellies... but the Joy-addled Doctor F basically ruined everything, leading directly to the events of the game.

Lightbearer

• Nick’s initial situation has high shades of this. He wakes up in his hotel room covered in blood with no memory from the night before. The story is centered around him trying to find out what he did but as the story goes on he gets more and more worried that he did something he doesn’t want to remember! It gets worse when he finds Virgil’s corpse and starts to remember. By the end of the game Nick is almost fully convinced that he is the serial killer Foggy Jack! Thankfully averted at the end when revealed Nick wasn’t the murderer but a witness. But Nick still has to deal with the real Foggy Jack who killed his fans, bystanders, and Virgil for the notoriety.
• The “Purples” drug sequence. The entire thing is literally like living through a bad dream! No wonder Nick swears of purples forever afterwards!
• While its not confirmed outright, it is heavily implied that Foggy Jack is in fact Uncle Jack himself, transformed into a deranged serial killer following his psychotic break in his final show.

We All Fall Down

• The basic premise of this DLC? Wellington Wells is finally breaking down completely due to the effect of years of everyone in a position of power to do anything being stoned out of their minds on Joy. Starvation is everywhere because nobody is growing any food, and all shipments to Wellington Wells have stopped; a plague is running rampant; people are dying in droves, the entire infrastructure is collapsing, and all anyone cares about is continuing to ride the Joy high and shun reality, even as it kills them. The resultant decay has gotten so bad that Victoria Byng, who was shown in the main game to be one of the most loyal of the government's enforcers who genuinely believed in their cause, has gone off of her Joy permanently, ultimately resolving that it's time to abandon this sinking ship.
• The launch trailer truly emphasizes just how bad things have gotten for Wellington Wells.
• When crossing the jerry-rigged walkway under the bridge, Victoria can find a note imploring workers to close and lock all the doors due to a bad case of the "sniffles". Cue three Plague Wastrels waiting in the next area.
• The Fall of Wellington Wells itself, at the end of the DLC: after Victoria destroys Haworth Labs to stop Joy production once and for all, coincided with Uncle Jack's final broadcast being played, all hell breaks loose. As predicted, many Wellies went mad from their bad memories returning and either killed themselves or slaughtered each other on the streets, with any authorities trying to stop them being overwhelmed and killed off for their trouble, and the entire city went up in flames and anarchy. By the time Victoria returned to consciousness, the city is more or less destroyed, and she wandered through the empty ruins to find burning buildings, piles of rubble and stacks of abandoned masks - And corpses. Corpses EVERYWHERE, lying where the they were killed, including a wonderful sight of a dead Bobby hanging from a lamppost where he was lynched. When Victoria is confronted by those who remained at the end of the DLC, it's implied that VERY few people survived their withdrawal and the subsequent carnage, and even fewer of them are happy about it.
  • And if Arthur chooses to return to Wellington Wells as a proper Wellie, he may be caught up in the rabble as well.

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