As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.
- Lynn and all the stuff that happens to her is quite hard and painful to watch, especially as she dies in excruciating pain.
- Blake's primal, raw, heartbreaking cries when Lynn dies after giving birth to their daughter. He just...alternates between screaming for her, sobbing uncontrollably, and trying to shake her limp body awake. Even worse when you consider the baby might not even be REAL but Blake at this point is too broken and immersed in the hallucinations to realize it.
- Ethan's entire reason for helping Blake.Ethan: Didn't say squat when my wife got scalled, had to get cast out. Didn't complain when Knoth... pressed himself on my Anna Lee. And she not but fifteen. But when he said my grandson. The baby he'd put in her, was might be the anti-Christ and I had to slit her belly and kill the child.
- When Ethan asks if his daughter's alright, Blake lies and says she's fine. The relief on Ethan's face is heartbreaking when you realize Blake lied only to not wound Ethan any further.
- Finally, Marta finds Ethan. It ends with Ethan Impaled with Extreme Prejudice on Marta's pick-axe.
Blake: I hope you found your daughter. - A lot of the notes in this game are extremely sad, as many of them are handwritten from the inhabitants as they slowly go insane with many of them desperately trying to convince themselves that what they're doing is right despite being forced to murder their own children en-masse. The mind-control signals probably helped, but still.
- One of the most memorable notes is a desperate plea from a child to her mother, who is horrified to learn that she will be killed by her schoolteacher. The note ends on a heartbreaking statement, which just serves to drive home how horrible the situation in Temple Gate really is, especially for the children.
Juliana: ...[sic]so plees do not let them kil me. I love you and I love Daddy. - Val's letters. They show her slow descent into madness, as although she followed Knoth for a time, she was extremely conflicted and disgusted with the things the cult was doing. She played father to several children whose parents were sent off to the Scalled camp, only to have to kill them later, and she has an inner turmoil at the fact that of all the voices she hears calling for blood, God's isn't one of them. The crisis of faith doesn't last, as her mind eventually breaks under the microwaves from across the lake, later than the others but much more brutally, turning her into a barely-human rapist who fantasizes about the same crimes she used to detest.
- The downright disturbing amount of child death, both implied and the aftermath being shown to the player is just tragic, and the kind of terror these kids must have went through on a daily basis once they learned they were going to be killed is incredibly sad.
- The scene of finding the dead children in the pit is worse in the demo, as Blake's voice is clearly shaking in disbelief and horror.
- Jessica and Blake's story is so sad that it still bothers Blake well into his adult life. They were good friends at a Catholic school, and Jessica even helped out with Blake and Lynn becoming close. Upon staying after school to mess about, they're caught by Father Loutermilch, a priest who staffs the school. He threatens to call Blake's parents and tell them he was staying after school, before trying to take Jessica away. Blake gets a dose of Bystander Syndrome and lets Jessica be taken away, only to double back upon hearing her screams. He finds her dead or heavily injured at the bottom of a stairwell, and her body is later set up by Loutermilch to make it look like she hung herself.
- The fact that this affects Blake into adulthood as it is shown that he still feels guilty for being unable to protect her.
- Everyone in the entire game except for Blake dies at the end. Knoth slits his throat, Marta is Impaled with Extreme Prejudice, Lynn suffers Death by Childbirth, everyone in the town commits suicide, and, as the Murkoff building apparently exploded, everyone in there is dead, too. The only survivor in the game is Blake, and the poor man's been rendered to a catatonic mess.
- There's also Blake's final recording where he is presumably talking about Jessica. The fact that it is titled "She Will Never Die" is also incredibly sad, since for Blake, her memory and her death never left him.
Blake: She's going to be okay. You have her. She'll get to grow up. She'll do everything she was born to do.- It should be mentioned at this point that Blake is holding what may or may not be his daughter in his arms. It's heavily implied that he sees in his newborn child (if she's real) the chance for him to atone for failing to protect Jessica all those years ago.
- Just everything about Jessica. She was apparently getting beaten by her father, he didn't allow her anything to the point where she forged his signature in hopes of being allowed to participate in school activities. She got sexually molested multiple times by her pedophile teacher, might have been jealous of Blake and Lynn kissing in the drama, then get scared by her teacher wanting to "pray" with her. Blake leaves her alone with him despite her pleading and when she runs away, she falls down the stairs (or gets pushed). Depending on interpretation, she dies in the arms of Blake or when the teacher tries to hide his vile acts as he makes her death look like suicide by hanging. And no one but Blake apparently ever found out. And to make it even worse, the teacher got away with it all.
- During the school sequences, Blake can occasionally find unfinished games of hangman like Jessica and Lynn used to play. One spells out "unforgiveable," which Blake ruefully notes that he knows very well. The poor guy wasn't even 13 when Jessica died and has been beating himself up about it for decades.
- Disgusting and cruel though he was, Knoth's final moments count as this. He realizes that despite doing everything that his visions told him to do, despite all that he's sacrificed, despite believing and obeying so completely that he murdered all of his own children, he still wasn't able to prevent the end of the world. All the evil was for nothing, and what's more the god he followed has abandoned him. In the end his only recourse is to kill himself.
- The final area is littered with bodies of the cultists who have apparently committed suicide due to having failed to prevent what they see as the birth of the antichrist. If you inspect these bodies closely, you will see little details that make it heartbreaking, even in spite of everything the cultists have done. Couples and friends died holding each other for comfort, and two couples died beside photographs of their children. It shows that, much like Knoth himself, even though the cultists crazy, they sincerely did have deep sorrow and remorse at killing their own children, whom by all accounts they sincerely loved even if they honestly thought they had to kill them in order to save the world.
- On that same note, Knoth's own death takes on an more tragic note than already stated above when you consider that the rest of the cultists seem to have committed suicide by some means that allowed them to die peacefully, looking as if they've fallen asleep. Presumably they've poisoned themselves or something, like the Jonestown Cult in real life. Knoth, on the other hand, commits suicide by slashing his own throat, and spasms and writhes in a way showing it's very painful. The Fridge Brilliance of the moment suggests that Knoth fully and genuinely accepts greater responsibility than his followers, as the leader of the cult, for everything being in vain, and therefore thinks he deserves a more painful death than he presumably commanded the others to inflict on themselves.
- At one point in the game, just before entering the second corn field, you enter a small house where a woman is singing a religious lullaby while cradling a child's mummified corpse. Although the scene is disturbing, the genuine pain and sadness in the woman's voice is heartbreaking, and she's clearly broken and grieved by the cult's child killing, even if she sees it as a necessary evil.
- To make it even sadder, if you listen closely to the lyrics of the song, they aren't all that twisted or malicious, in contrast with the rest of the cult's literary output: They are genuinely mournful and, while they mention a few morbid things like birds picking out a corpse's eyes or the four horsemen of the apocalypse, these things are all mentioned in a pained and mournful way, not with the signature hateful edge that often characterizes the cult. It's a song that, if you close your eyes as you listen, you could almost legitimately expect a perfectly sweet old Christian grandmother from the Southern USA to sing it in mourning.
