YMMV / Lobotomy Corporation

• Anti-Climax Boss: The Claw, aka the White Midnight is surprisingly easy considering he's supposedly the Ordeal to end all Ordeals. While he can deal incredibly high damage with his basic attacks and has a versatile list of moves, he's very easy to kill if you understand how he works. His main mechanic is that he can inject himself with different Serums to power himself up and launch specific attacks, such as a Flash Step attack that targets multiple clerks and agents at once all throughout the facility. While he can be a handful if fought directly, he has a major weakness in his programming that is very easy to exploit. One attack, Serum W, causes him to charge forward at lightning speed until he reaches the other side of the floor he's on, and when he reaches the end, will be stunned for a brief moment. If he takes too much damage, the White Midnight will cancel whatever he's doing and inject a serum into himself- including injecting a different serum. By exploiting the downtime he has after injecting Serum W, you can dogpile him and end up forcing him to rapidly switch between serums, stunlocking him until he dies. Last but not least, unlike the Purple Midnight or Amber Midnight, this Ordeal will only spawn a single enemy object, ensuring you get to dogpile him without another potentially deadly enemy waiting to ambush your agents.
• Awesome Music: First, Second, and Third Warning, which sound during breaches. A slow and foreboding tune that escalates into panic and to despair that captures the feeling of losing control perfectly.
• Breather Boss:
  • Yesod's Meltdown is a lot easier than Malkuth's and Hod's, since it only involves your HUD being messed up through ridiculous amounts of Interface Screw. It's technically no different from a regular level and the only thing you need to do is to memorize the controls.
  • Netzach's suppression involves your people not healing outside of Qliphoth meltdowns. This is absolutely nothing in comparison to Hod, whom you have to beat to even suppress Netzach.
  • Tiphereth's Meltdown takes away the Qliphoth Immunity from previous branches, but the player should at this point be capable of handling it. Aside from that, all she does is mess with the background music. The real boss is the Midnight Ordeal rampaging once the end is in sight. Even then, you might luck out and get the easy Amber and Green Midnight Ordeals.
  • The Green Midnight Ordeal is the easiest of the four Midnights, considering that it is a sole immobile enemy and while it has more HP than anything else in the game and its sole attack is a One-Hit KO laser, it slowly rotates in a single direction and can be completely avoided using the elevators. Also unlike all other Ordeals that spawn in random locations, the Green Midnight always spawns in the Information department's main room, making it that much easier to predict and prepare for its arrival.
  • CENSORED is easily considered one of the weakest ALEPH Abnormalities due to its inability to drastically damage high level facilities or hamper progress unlike the rest. While a low level facility drafting it means absolute death because any agent that is not a Rank 5 who works on it will instantly panic and it uses the same Sacrifice mechanic as the Nameless Fetus, the damage it causes to a facility laden with elite agents is relatively minor for an ALEPH and it is not difficult to kill with the right weapons and SP bullets. The only potentially dangerous element of its breakout is the massive White damage penalty that an agent gets upon entering the room its currently inside, which stacks with the mini-Censoreds it creates. This means that you need to immediately kill off all the Clerks inside the hallway it spawns it or it will become impossible to kill, but this can be solved by pausing the game and moving everyone outside of the department while leaving one unit decked out in ALEPH gear to take it down.
• Breather Level: The last day of the game, Day 50, is this. After the utter hell of the four days preceding it, Day 50 comes with no Ordeals and no Meltdowns, not even Qliphoth Meltdowns, and minimal Interface Screw. Overall leading to essentially a triumphant victory lap as Ayin sets off the Seed of Light.
• Cheese Strategy: The Shelter from the 27th of March can be used to cheese the boss fight with The Red Mist. During this Meltdown, staff your facility with the bare minimum of Agents (preferably disposable newbies) and then send one of them into the Shelter to trigger Abnormality breaches. The Red Mist is hostile towards Abnormalities and will fight them whenever they cross paths, and since the latter will just keep re-breaching so long as the Agent stays in the Shelter, The Red Mist will slowly be taken down by them (with emphasis on slowly, though the process can be sped up if your facility has ALEPHs in it). Unfortunately, this strategy doesn't work against An Arbiter, as they aren't attacked by Abnormalities like The Red Mist is.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: If you are looking for playthroughs of this game, sooner or later you will notice every other late-game facility with the intent of confronting the harder levels has 2 specific ALEPHs — Blue Star and Nothing There, and it's for good reasons. First of all, they are ALEPHs, which means that they are going to provide lots of Energy to your quota and prevent you from dragging out on later levels, and give excellent buffs to your employees who work on them. Secondly, they offer some of the best E.G.O. the game has to offer. The third and most important aspect, however, is that while the consequences are unambiguously devastating if you let them get out of the box, unlike most ALEPHs and WAWs you actually have to try very hard to get these two to breach — their breaching requirements are strict enough that, unless you mess up with Qliphoth Meltdowns, they almost always stay in the box.
• Designated Hero: You. Yes, YOU as in X, A, or Ayin. Your goal is to reconcile with all of your fellow inner circle operatives and purify humanity's "illness"... aside that to do this, you will purposefully (and might have to) sacrifice and kill fellow human beings by heaps, brutally neglect and possibly murder people close to you (with one of these being a kid you picked out from the Outskirts!!), sacrifice your love interest to extract more Cogito and turn her into an omnipresent nightmare, and finally in Library of Ruina, it turns out you also driven your secretary AI Angela into despair by forcing her to see the deaths of employees, the Sephirah Meltdowns, to enable the Welfare Team incident... and among other things. It is not surprising when Angela began to act more and more like the past you in there.
• Difficulty Spike:
  • Accidentally choose an Abnormality that your facility has no hope of handling early on? Prepare for the difficulty to suddenly skyrocket or to restart the day.
  • The Sephirah Meltdowns can be considered ones as well, as they tend to completely throw off the player's strategies that they have been using throughout the game.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • In the Legacy version, Price of Silence is infamous for this because of its overly destructive effect that prevents pausing from working correctly even during subsequent runs 12 times, and at the 13th time the game is paused... expect mass havoc before the Abnormality resets itself. Thankfully, it's removed in the finalized version (unless one installs a mod with it).
  • Nameless Fetus. This is one of the most annoying and difficult to manage abnormalities in the game, and even late-game parties will have trouble against it even if it was a HE. It only has 1 Qliphoth Counter, which can be depleted very easily even with maximum Fortitude, and anything but instinct work will flat out not work on it. If the Qliphoth Counter drops to 0, it will slowly cause any nearby abnormalities to breach and deal huge amounts of white damage against your employees. Perhaps the worst however, is the Fetus can only be calmed down by randomly selecting an employee or clerk for the Fetus to eat. No matter how strong the employee is, they WILL die, and don't be surprised if the wheel sends your strongest employees to their death. It's a chore to deal with on its own, and GOD FORBID if this thing gets chosen during a Sephirah Meltdown or any other high risk scenario.
    • While CENSORED uses the same Sacrifice mechanic as the Fetus, it's nowhere near as annoying since it's a lot less fickle to manage and it doesn't pose that much of a threat to facilities loaded with Rank V agents.
  • Do not be fooled by Meat Lantern's cute and cuddly appearance and its status as a TETH, this is one of the most reviled Abnormalities that one should never run into during the endgame portions. It will automatically breach if the time worked on it is below 40 seconds, which means that any Agent that works on it must have Level 1 Temperance (the lowest level) to keep it contained. Any Agent whose Temperance is above that will cause the Abnormality to breach no matter what. Furthermore, once it breaches, its HP bar is not visible and it will just randomly spawn within random corridors, and it will kill almost anything that steps on it or gets close to it, so the only way to counter it is with long-ranged weaponry. It is also highly possible for it to spawn right outside of Containment Unit doors, meaning that any Agent that finishes work on another Abnormality may just end up being killed once they leave the unit.
  • Army In Black is a ZAYIN-class Abnormality, meaning you can get it as soon as day 2. However, when it breaches it is actually four ALEPH entities that deal nasty Black damage to anyone nearby and capable of dealing heavy white damage if it breaches and reaches the main room of a department, where it explodes dealing damage to everyone that works for said department. How heavy? Guaranteed to cause just about anyone with a Prudence level below three to go insane. Oh, and the worst part? If you still don't know what the aforementioned ALEPH designation means, that is the highest rank of all Abnormalities, meaning that your early-game employees will just outright panic just by seeing these things breaching, and any employees who panic because of it will always end up trying to kill each other. Its saving graces are its higher than average Qliphoth counter (3), the fact that its counter can go up if you suppress something else, and its ability to keep your people alive (assisting in said suppression), but there's so many ways to reduce the counter that it almost doesn't matter (including receiving said assistance), and assigning it to a low level employee automatically causes them to panic. Last but not least, it's treated as ZAYIN in containment, meaning that it gives around as much of a training boost as an actual ZAYIN and doesn't even help beefing up your agents. Absolutely not ideal for someone who is first interacting with the game despite being obtainable early on.
  • The Queen of Hatred is another Abnormality which causes frustration for many, mostly due to her gimmick regarding properly containing her. Queenie's Qliphoth Counter decreases if there hasn't been three employee deaths between each Meltdown, including clerks. You're generally safe if an Ordeal spawns, since it's almost a guarantee that at least a few of your clerks will die in this scenario, but once Queen of Hatred enters her "hysteric" state by failing to meet this objective, the only thing that can bring her back from the edge is a 16 or higher on her E-Box gain. If she gets any lower, she'll turn into a huge dragon-like creature that can fire a horizontal beam across the entire length of the screen, allowing her to decimate entire floors and multiple departments at once. Thankfully, Queenie can be suppressed fairly easily if she breaks out, as her mutated form has fairly low health for a breaching WAW, but her ability to teleport between laser blasts makes her a frustrating "Get Back Here!" Boss. Queen of Hatred also accepts employee death by Execution Bullet, meaning you can pop three clerks to keep her happy, but this requires tediously doing so for every single Meltdown that isn't an Ordeal. If you have an Abnormality that breaches on employee deaths like Mountain of Smiling Bodies or Big Bird, then Queenie will almost certainly breach them with a single laser blast, which can start a catastrophic chain reaction of breaches and force a restart. If it wasn't for her amazing gear, Queen of Hatred wouldn't be worth the hassle of managing her.
  • Alriune is another Abnormality that draws contempt from many players. She has a high chance of breaching upon obtaining a Good or Bad work result, so expect her to inevitably cause a few breaches and between. What makes this Abnormality so annoying however, is that when she breaches, she will teleport around the facility after each attack, forcing you on a wild goose chase all over the facility trying to land hits on her. If you also happen to have something that needs micromanagement (such as a WhiteNight in your facility or a Sephirah Meltdown), you can easily cost runs trying to chase and suppress it. Its sole attack also does heavy sums of WHITE damage, and if any employee loses their Sanity from this, they will instantly die instead of panic.
  • Schadenfreude can easily be gotten early game and easily turn into this. If the player doesn't know the gimmick behind it, it's only a matter of time until it breaks out and starts mowing through employees. Depending on how early game the player is, it can likely kill your current staff in only a few hits.
  • Melting Love isn't a particularly impressive Abnormality by herself as far as ALEPHs go, but it will literally cause chaos just by working on it. The employee who worked with her becomes a Patient Zero, and if you do not keep an eye on that employee and stave your main employees away from the hallway that employee was in or move that employee around the facility, there's a fat chance the whole facility will sink into chaos as anyone infected by that employee will become a slime creature. Doing Insight work with the employee that worked on it delays the infection, but it requires them to generate 24 PE Boxes or all the affected employees or clerks will instantly become Slime creatures, so it hardly matters in the long run. If you decide to work in this abnormality be prepared for an extensive plan to take it down if things go wrong, and please don't choose this if you plan on doing Sephirah Meltdowns on any 50-day cycle. The only saving grace is that Repression prevents her from causing a catastrophic infection. It's just asking for her to breach at that point and anyone without thick BLACK resistances will suffer from big sums of damage, but at least she has some leeway for that and you only need to deal with a single, non-infectious and relatively easy to suppress Abnormality if she ever breaches.
  • There are many Ordeals that pose a threat to your facility beyond what most abnormalities can do. In particular, anything Dusk and above tends to give players serious headaches, and these below happen to be the most annoying of them:
    • Green Dusk spawns factories all over the facility, which endlessly produce Green Dawn and Green Noon units. The Green Ordeal series are Mighty Glaciers, so having a unit that produces them in high volumes is bad news. If you can't focus down the factories evenly, your facility can be swarming with robots in no time at all, which will result in the death of most if not all of your clerks and a risky cleanup effort.
    • Indigo Noon can be a serious problem early on in the lifetime of your run. The Sweepers that spawn with the event will march around the facility, eating corpses and regenerating health as they kill everything in their path. If you have an assortment of WAW and ALEPH weaponry they're not much of a problem, but in a facility with only TETH and HE E.G.O. to pick from, you can get pretty easily overwhelmed as they run roughshod throughout the lab. Their powerful attacks and constant regeneration can allow them to outpace your Agents damage if you try and fight them one on one, especially if you lack any form of direct healing. Thankfully, they only appear from day 26 on, making them a sort of Beef Gate and incentivizing restarting your run. This can be a good thing, since day 26 marks one of the major Difficulty Spikes as the Core Suppressions get unlocked.
  • The White Ordeals are easily the toughest non-Midnight Ordeals in the game. Rather than be unique units per Ordeal level as every other Ordeal in the game is, the White Ordeals are four different heavily armored humanoid units called "Fixers", which spawn in different amounts per level of Ordeal^note  One for Dawn, two for Noon, and all four of them for Dusk. The problem is that even one of these Fixer units can wreck your facility if it's underprepared, and if they die, they will unleash a last-ditch devastating move. Ultimately, a huge portion of the final few days being so difficult are because of these guys showing up, especially on Day 47 where your weakened employees need to content with these jerks wrecking the place and on Day 49 where you have to kill these without pausing and potentially dealing with fake Binah/An Arbiter at the same time. Thankfully, the White Midnight (see Anti-Climax Boss above) is easy to suppress for a Midnight Ordeal, so if you can defeat the Fixers, you will have no problems against it.
    • The Red Fixer is a powerful melee combatant who does extremely high damage and can slice through long sections of your facility with his high-powered laser attack as his Taking You with Me move.
    • The Black Fixer isn't too dangerous, as he just performs slow but powerful Black attacks as he marches around, but on death will instantly induce a Qliphoth Meltdown in the department he dies in, and one of his attacks will cause nearby Abnormalities to instantly breach if it uses it in a hallway. Currently in a department with a bunch of dangerous Abnormalities? Better hope it's not standing next to the containment units of a particularly dangerous one.
    • The Pale Fixer, meanwhile, is relatively simple- he "merely" attacks with Pale damage in high quantities, meaning he's deadly against groups. The usual strategy is to take your strongest Agent and engage him in a duel, but that requires babysitting that unit and preventing them from dying, since the Pale Fixer's damage will far outclipse just about anything you can throw at him. Only a unit with incredibly strong regeneration can survive, and even then the Pale Fixer might just outdamage them anyways.
    • The worst of them all, however, is the White Fixer, an angelic woman who fires long-range White damage lasers that cover massive sections of your facility, leaving behind clouds of White-damaging mist that last for a few seconds. While she takes a while to gear up and actually retaliate if you attack her, her incredible tankiness and the absurd range of her attacks means that you must save her for last or risk having her finish your weakened agents off with one good swing of her weapon. She also has the nasty ability to momentarily go invulnerable and reflect all damage back at the sender, which can wipe an unprepared party and demands you pay attention to her at all times, lest your Agents end up killing themselves.
  • Agents who panic adopt different behaviors depending on what their highest stat is. Of these, the worst you can deal with is a panicking Attachment Agent. They will begin running all over the facility in a blind panic, dealing a not insignificant amount of white damage to any employees they encounter along the way, slaughtering Clerks in their path and almost certainly causing Abnormalities sensitive to employee deaths to breach. Bringing them back to their senses at this point is as difficult as it is risky, as they just will not stand still and are faster than almost all of your remaining sane Agents, making it almost impossible for employees with melee weapons to hit them while employees with ranged weapons can only get a few shots in before having to reposition. With all of this combined, just one employee who undergoes this panic behavior can easily set off Disaster Dominoes that can send the whole facility into chaos.
• Easy Level Trick: If you have Today's Shy Look, you can easily deal with the effect of Malkuth's Suppression, which scrambles all work types. This is because Today's Shy Look will not breach and it gives the same reaction no matter what work type is done with it, instead relying on its mood-swinging to determine whether it benefits you or not. Constantly sending in agents to work on Today's Shy Look when it's happy will let you ignore the work type scrambling, so long as you keep an eye on its mood. This trick can be similarly performed with Child of The Galaxy, whom also reacts to all work types equally.
• Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: While this game's excellent story has attracted praise, its over-the-place difficulty, Game-Breaking Bug (such as memory leaks, even on recommended specs), and decent but overly simple art has been more contentious. It's no wonder a growing sentiment has been to just skip to Library of Ruina and garner the story from there.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • A lot of people like Der Freischütz, Little Red Riding Hooded Mercenary, and Funeral of the Dead Butterflies for being badass gun-wielding Abnormalities.
  • Nothing There is arguably the most famous of all the Abnormalities, with fans either loving it for being a truly abominable horror, its odd sense of Ugly Cute, or both.
  • Laetitia is another popular Abnormality for a number of factors, such as being incredibly easy to work with for an HE-class, her strong E.G.O., general Woobie qualities, as well as fans just finding her unironically cute.
  • Myo was greeted with plenty of fanart and love upon her and the Rabbit Team's implementation. Helps that her personality is pretty laid back and comedic compared to everyone else while still retaining a sense of professionalism.
  • Punishing Bird, Big Bird and Judgement Bird are extremely popular due to being among the few Abnormalities with explicit links to each other and for joining up into the Apocalypse Bird. Punishing Bird in particular has a ton of fanart thanks to being a Ridiculously Cute Critter.
• Fan Nickname:
  • Agents are affectionately referred by fans as "Nuggets".
  • "Reddit" for All-Around Helper, due to its resemblance to their mascot Snoo.
  • Among Japanese fans, the Mountain of Smiling Bodies is given the nickname "Yamada" (山田). ^ExplanationIn Japanese, the phrase "It's the Mountain of Smiling Bodies!" would be rendered as 死体の山だ (Shitai no yama da). If one were to replace the "da" (だ) with 田, you'd get 死体の山田 (Shintai no yamada). Remove everything else, and you'd just be left with "Yamada" (山田).
• Game-Breaker: The most powerful defensive tool available to you is not the shield bullets or any of the assorted tools or other Abnormalities that can heal your agents, but rather the unassuming elevators that connect all of the floors together. Moving between them is instant, allowing employees inside to quickly dodge attacks that would be much more difficult for them to try and outrun, and agents who "teleport" in this fashion are completely invulnerable during it, and certain hostile entities such as the Amber Dusk or the King of Greed will totally ignore elevators, rendering anyone inside completely safe while you wait for an opportunity to suppress. It also bunches up every agent inside into one compact space so you can easily hit all of them at once with a single bullet. Learning how to take advantage of the elevators' properties is imperative to clearing most of the game's toughest encounters, as the benefits they offer you for playing around them are simply too good to ignore.
• Genius Bonus: A working knowledge of the Jewish Kabbalah will help you make sense of several of the references in the game.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • The Express Train to Hell forces you to spend time micromanaging it in particular, as its gimmick takes place every 2 real-life minutes, independent of Qliphoth Meltdowns. Ignoring it leads to a demonic train passing across your facility, probably killing a good chunk of people along the way.
  • Punishing Bird can be real annoying as if it escapes you just have to let it go around the facility delivering Scratch Damage to employees, which can lead to Cherry Tapping if said employee has taken a lot of health damage from another Abnormality or Ordeal.
• Goddamned Boss: The Silent Orchestra on its own isn't a difficult abnormality to deal with for an ALEPH, since it's a singular, stationary object that can simply be dogpiled to death with enough manpower. The problem comes from the fact that it will come closer to breaching as soon as you get a Good or Bad result, meaning that it will not stay in the box for long and will steal all your Energy quota if you're being caught off guard. It tells when a common strategy to farm its incredibly rare E.G.O. Gift is to have an agent work on the Orchestra and a bunch of agents, preferably with PALE weapons lurking right next to the Department elevators and pouncing on it as soon as it breaches and starts its performance.
• Good Bad Bugs: The hostile machines spawned by Green Noon ordeals do considerably less damage than they're supposed to. Given how dangerous they are as it is, that's probably for the best.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • Whenever an employee frozen by the Snow Queen is saved by one of your agents, both the formerly frozen employee and the agent will hold hands together with a gleeful smile.
  • In a strange sort of way, the employee's fate in the story included in The Opened Can of Wellcheers' encyclopedia entry. While it is true that he was drugged, kidnapped, and put on a fishing boat which in-game is treated as a bad thing (and is a bad thing in real life), he does form a genuine bond with the rest of the crew and is happy that he's making an honest living.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: User mochimikan made an animated video (spoilers!) of this game with Mili's song 'world.execute(me);'. It was a simple video, but very effective as the song's thematics fit the game (and more specifically, Angela) a lot, so much that people said it would be believable if it were to be made for the game itself. Later on, Mili announced that they would be making songs for the game's sequel, prompting many people to speculate that they must have seen the video.
• Jerkass Woobie: Netzach isn't quiet about how much distaste he has for you and abrasively shoves off your attempts at getting to know him, but it's all but stated to be a coping mechanism from enduring the Corporation and Angela's constant disregard of his employees. The Woobie comes from Giovanni trying to save his childhood friend, Carmen, who couldn't be revived in the first place, and then you outright lied to him and experimented him to death with your own hands.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • We don't talk about Hod Supression ^{Explanation (Spoilers!)} A meme many players repeat when referring to Hod's Sephirah Meltdown, considered by many to be the most difficult Meltdown of the upper layer and a big Difficulty Spike of the game.
  • Yesod doesn't know what a .jpeg is. And "HAALY SHIT DEEM GREEPICS!!" ^{Explanation (Spoilers!)} Refers to the gimmick of Yesod's Meltdown, which involves immense Interface Screw, most prominently by reducing the quality of the graphics to make a very blurry mess
  • GREAT. LOVE. FOR. US. ^ExplanationReferring to the Violet Noon Ordeal, currently called Grant Us Love but formerly known as Great Love For Us in the game's original "Blind Idiot" Translation. Its extremely Narmy name combined with the Wham Shot of the player's first experience with it (giant obelisks suddenly crushing half of your workforce to death out of nowhere) makes it extremely memorable. Expect to see it Punctuated! For! Emphasis!.
  • Ayin shoulder grip^ExplanationThree images depicting the artist's feelings over Ayin, one of them featuring a person tightly gripping the man in question's shoulders, soon exploded in use outside of fan circles as a general reaction image
    • "They don't know it's Ayin"^ExplanationIts sudden viral use has led to fans commenting this phrase or some adjusted version of it, such as if the user in question actually is familiar with its original context
• Narm: The game's original dodgy English translation led to some... odd abnormality names. While this worked out well for some abnormalities/ordeals which received unusual, poetic-sounding names like Great Love for Us (the Violet Noon Ordeal), others have names that are awkward, like Shy Look Today, for instance.
  • The pre-May 2020 English translation also affected all dialogue in the story and the exposition in the Abnormalities' dossiers. It was rather hit or miss; it led to either appropriately thematic dialogue as human employees try to describe the indescribable beings they're forced to interact with (as their minds break down under the strain) in an isolated environment, and give the impression that there's something subtly wrong with the A.I.'s running the place... or it came across as awkward and unnecessary Purple Prose that was confusing/hilarious for English speakers to read.
  • In May 2020, the game received a complete rehaul of its English translation, which made massive changes to basically every aspect of the game, including UI, story dialogue, and abnormality names.
  • On the other hand, there were some fans who enjoyed some of the awkward translations for the Abnormalities and Ordeals for their Narm Charm, which they felt added to their overall alien-ness, and were saddened when they were changed in the May 2020 re-translation.
• Paranoia Fuel: Plague Doctor, especially when you play blind. It looks like a friendly Abnormality who will grant you a good E.G.O. Gift via its Baptism and is very easy to work at...but as soon as it Baptizes someone, a very ominous and decrepit-looking antique clock marks the name of the employee working on it, followed by a line of ominous text (that is actually taken from The Bible). Even worse, the Doctor changes appearance gradually upon each work and it remembers every Baptism it gave out, until it assumes its true form, the facility-wiping abomination WhiteNight and all of the employees it blessed become monstrous Apostles killing everything in their way. It's extremely terrifying when you first see this happen and have absolutely no idea that you had invited a monstrosity you absolutely cannot handle, and it's even worse knowing how the Doctor exactly works and trying to avoid the inevitable, since the Doctor's work preferences ensure it gets to do what it wants to do.
• Popular with Furries: The Big and Will Be Bad Wolf has been one of the furry fandom's more obscure but still loved icons, thanks to his cartoonish non-breaching design and the sole fact getting a bad result had him eat one of your employees. Other major players include the Black Forest Birds(Punishing Bird, Big Bird and Judgement Bird), Queen of Hatreds breaching form, and hilariously enough, Nothing There.
• Recurring Fanon Character: BongBong is an Agent with long dark blue hair, a ^-shaped mouth and starry eyes, who was randomly generated in the playthrough of an anonymous 4chan user. Her distinct appearance and unusual name made her explode in popularity, leading to many pieces of fanart being made about her and for her to eventually start being recognized outside of 4chan's gaming boards.
• The Scrappy: Any Abnormality or Ordeal that is disproportionately lethal for their supposed threat level is bound to inspire hatred in the playerbase, but two in particular stand out:
  • Nameless Fetus is despised for being one of the most unforgiving Abnormalities you can possibly receive. Its Qliphoth Counter is only one, so if you set it off, you're doomed to lose one of your employees. Its incredibly grating crying once it's aggravated certainly doesn't endear it either.
  • Meat Lantern for being almost impossible to contain, easy to get killed by, and difficult to safely suppress. Once you complete Hod's Suppression, which allows all new hires to start at Level 3 in all of their stats, Meat Lantern begins forcing you to actively neuter your new recruits just so someone can work on it without it breaching, leading to complaints about it being far too high-maintenance for a TETH-level Abnormality.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Abnormalities who require a maximum or lower of a certain stat to operate as opposed to a minimum or higher tend to be very aggravating as agents naturally gain stats over time, forcing you to either keep low-level agents specifically to operate them during Qliphoth Meltdowns or flat out ignore them and deal with their resulting breaches. More devastating examples include Meat Lantern, the Singing Machine or the Warm-Hearted Woodsman, all of them which are capable of instant death of employees regardless of their strength. Basically the only welcomed Abnormalities from this group are the Funeral of the Dead Butterflies and the Scarecrow Searching for Wisdom, since both of these are simple breaching Abnormalities that don't pose much issues.
  • Clerks for some have been the source of much frustration depending on what abnormalities one chooses. Clerks cannot be directly controlled and die in a hit or two. Wouldn't be so bad if there weren't several different abnormalities whose abilities trigger to employee deaths, clerks included. And considering that Ordeals are a thing, clerk deaths are more or less inevitable. It says something that when someone makes a mod that removes them entirety.
  • There are some Abnormalities in the game that will inevitably cause a death or two without even trying, such as Nameless Fetus, Singing Machine or Warm-Hearted Woodsman. This is because despite how the narrative constantly tries to tell you that your employees are dispensable labor and such elements are laden in the gameplay, the fact that it actually takes time to train employees and build them up heavily contradicts this, and you should probably just try your best and keep them alive instead of sacrificing them in an instant.
  • Tool Abnormalities are generally regarded as one of the weaker aspects of the game. Though many tools theoretically offer helpful benefits, most of them have drawbacks that wind up severely limiting (if not outright negating) their usefulness. Overall, it is recommended to ignore most tools once you reach their maximum observation level.
• Spiritual Licensee: Some have likened the game to a Darker and Edgier role-reversed version of Monsters, Inc., where the humans are the ones harvesting monster energy.
  • It's basically SCP Foundation: The Game, but run as if it was a MegaCorp instead of a secret organization protecting humanity from eldritch abominations. Or alternately, SCP – Containment Breach, but seen from the perspective of management rather than that of a particularly unfortunate D-Class employee.
• That One Attack:
  • Nothing There's scythe "Goodbye" attack. While it is used less frequently than its other attacks and can be dodged more easily, it deals a whopping 300 RED damage to those it hits. While other Abnormalities can deal higher damage through specific and easier to avoid attacks, this attack has comparatively far less start-up time and can easily kill in two blows even the strongest of employees.
  • The scythes of the Apostles defending WhiteNight's room deal 280 or 240 PALE Damage depending if they were upward or downward swings. If you don't really understand what is wrong here, remember that PALE is not like any other damage, it's percentage-based on the target's maximum HP. Therefore the attacks actually do over 200% of your Employees Max HP, or in other words, the Apostle will just instantly kill anyone caught within its blades without fail. This makes running in circles to avoid the Apostle's instant-kills required to suppress WhiteNight, because they WILL kill the whole combat force otherwise.
  • The Red Mist's charging attack during its 4th phase, which basically has them charging directly to an employee from anywhere in the facility and inflicting an attack that like the above "Goodbye" attack, does an insane amount of damage, and can hit multiple employees at once. While they are winded for a while after this attack it still can be stressful to get your employees to safety in the split second before the boss attacks.
  • An Arbiter's pillar attack during their 3rd and final phase can quickly turn an already difficult battle into a disaster. Like their previous phases, the player needs to send their employees to solve specific Qliphoth Meltdowns in time. The problem is that not only is there a very tight window to clear all of them but the player can't pause at all during this. Fail to clear them and the boss shoots off their 8 pillars in the cardinal directions, not only doing massive damage of a certain type but also instantly triggering Meltdowns for every Abnormality in the way. Oh and they can do this multiple times.
• That One Boss:
  • On a more traditional level, WhiteNight is a huge source of frustration among completionists. While it doesn’t attack directly very often, its Twelve Apostles are demonic spiders in their own right, all of them hitting hard enough to kill or panic most employees in one or two hits. WhiteNight will also regularly resurrect and heal its Apostles, making trying to kill it a tedious ordeal (since otherwise the Apostles guarding it will decimate whole parties in one hit, mentioned in That One Attack). While the pulse it emits every once a while isn't too irksome by itself, it will heal all dead Apostles, making sure you can't just kill all the Apostles then kill it unimpeded. Even worse, because this Abnormality will kill 11 employees upon breach and potentially cause more deaths on its way, it will cause Abnormalities that react to large amounts of deaths in the same facility to breach, with some of them being highly lethal on their own. It will also interfere with inferface-based functions (especially pausing) just to make sure you have to face the deadly consequences. To put it simply, if you want that last E.G.O Weapon for your collection you’re going to have to beat a Combat Medic / Stone Wall of a God and its Mighty Glacier servants to the death, under crippling user-end handicaps and potentially dealing with other lethal Abnormalities that break out as well.
  • As far as Sephirah Meltdowns go, Hod's is considered to be one of the most difficult ones to deal with, as the stats of your employees will start with a 15 decrease that will eventually worsen to 25 and then to 35 as the event progresses, especially terrifying if you have an ALEPH while dealing with it. The dominant strategy is to set up the first 21 days with abnormalities that don't require much in the way of high stat investment to deal with and simply ride out the wave until the end, but this runs the risk of allowing Noon or Dusk ordeals to sneak into the facility and destroy your Agents without much effort. Having one or two WAWs is pretty much required to give enough Enekephalin to allow a victory condition, as otherwise the fight becomes Unwinnable by Design as your units get destroyed by breaching Abnormalities or invading Ordeals.
  • Gebura's Meltdown, aka The Red Mist is a pretty infamous fight. As unlike all the previous Meltdowns before this point, which was mostly just a regular work day with extra stipulations, The Red Mist manifests as a suppressible entity. Good luck though, as it has an immense 3000 HP which you have to deplete four times, changing up her weapons, tactics, and weaknesses with each depletion. The main difficulty comes from how insanely powerful her attacks are, and even a single hit can and will kill almost any employee 99% of the time. She's also extremely fast and difficult to track down. The only saving grace is that she takes double damage from Abnormalities, but that will likely mean you will need to purposefully release the most dangerous ones to even stand a chance, and it takes lots of patience for the Abnormalities to actually reach a room she's in. (there is an easy method for this involving Shelter of 27th of March and many breachable Abnormalities).
  • Binah's Meltdown, aka An Arbiter goes further beyond Gebura's Meltdown. Similarly to The Red Mist, An Arbiter appears as a suppressible entity, and while its HP is higher, the bar only needs to be depleted thrice in exchange. However, An Arbiter is initially highly resistant to every damage, and creates different type of Meltdowns: dealing with these are the only way to bring its resistances down to manageable levels. It can also charge up three different attacks with great amount of damage of all four elements, which are also only avoidable by clearing color-coded meltdowns (which works the same way as the aforementioned special meltdowns). Worse still, it causes regular Qliphoth Meltdowns in every hallway/area it passes through, and the same applies to all its ranged attacks as they cross the entire facility. And unlike The Red Mist, Abnormalities don't register to An Arbiter's presence, meaning the onslaught of Abnormalities caused by the meltdowns will only hinder the player's agents. On top of that, in its final phase it becomes immune to damage whenever it charges up an attack, while said attack now launches projectiles to 8 cardinal directions which can potentially cause more meltdowns than it already does. But arguably the worst part of its final phase is how pausing is disabled, which demands far more from the player than they might be used to as they must work on containments, suppressing Abnormalities, and An Arbiter itself. On the brighter side, it moves slowly and has a noticeable delay between responses, so swarms of employees could easily attack it from behind. The Rabbit Team can also be called in to suppress An Arbiter, as unlike The Red Mist, it will not leave areas under Rabbit Team purification. The Rabbit Team can defeat An Arbiter given time, but in the meantime you still have to deal with the immense amount of Meltdowns it causes from its gimmicks (and possible breaches from the locked-down facility). On a pinch, its meltdowns can be cleared instantly using the Backwards Clock, but it requires you to sacrifice a Level V employee and you can only use it once a day.
  • Hokma's Meltdown is a traditional management level, but it's also of no slouch compared to Binah's. The level is a Marathon Level that is functionally similar to Tiphereth's save for the player having a much larger facility with more Abnormalities and agents, meaning that you have to meet at least one Midnight Ordeal to pass the level. However, what makes this Core Suppression so difficult is that you cannot pause the game or change the game speed. The former is especially lethal since it will result in complications trying to micromanage such a massive facility, meaning breakouts are almost inevitable, and stronger Abnormalities become very difficult to suppress once they breach due to not being able to deploy against these threats in time. If your Midnight Ordeal is also a Purple Midnight (described below), you are going to have a very hard time.
  • As far as the Midnight Ordeals go, the one players consider the hardest is Purple Midnight, a.k.a. The God Delusion, because unlike the other two Midnight Ordeals, the player is forced to divide their team up into four different groups to take out the monoliths, all while dodging various attacks that can spawn on any point in the facility. Not only that, the BLACK horns and PALE eye attacks an entire hallway and the WHITE tentacle attack affect a whole quarter of the screen, so expect facility wide chaos as it appears. Especially annoying with the eye which doesn't even have a wind up like the other attacks, can continually follow your employees from room to room, and inflicts constant Pale damage.
• That One Level:
  • Should you complete all the Sephirah Core Suppressions, you will be able to do the last part of the game, that is Days 46 through 50. Unfortunately, Days 47 through 49 are Boss Rush levels, where Day 47 has you doing work while the effects of all Asiyah Sefirot are applied, meaning that not only you have to deal with Malkuth's mixed work effect again, but also Hod's stat lowering effect, now reducing your agents' stats by 50.
  • Day 48 is no slouch either, with the player having to suppress the Red Mist again. However, her HP is significantly decreased than her previous suppression, and fortunately, Chesed's suppression effect is not applied during your fight with The Red Mist.
  • Day 49 tops the previous two days with the player having to suppress An Arbiter again, now with Hokma's suppression effect being applied, as a tradeoff for her decreased amount of HP. That's right, you have to beat An Arbiter's first two phase without pausing this time, because trying to pause would only panic/kill an employee. The only solace is that Binah's third phase now allows you to pause, but doing so will incur Hokma's wrath. Either way, your facility is going to be outright decimated, and whether you choose to pause and solve the meltdowns or push your luck and try to solve the meltdowns in time, a huge amount of your employees will not see it to the end of the day. Good luck, and be prepared to lose some, if not most or even all of your employees this day.
    • Alternatively, players can reach Level 8 Meltdown to disable An Arbiter, but it's far harder to do than suppressing since you have to deal with White Ordeals and the Claw at the same time as clearing her meltdowns.
• That One Sidequest: Out of the Sephirah Missions, Gebura's second and third can be difficult to complete. In the former the player has to suppress 5 WAWs in a day, which can be very difficult depending on the set up of the Abnormalities. Even worse her third mission you have to suppress 3 different ALEPHs. Emphases on 'different', as in you cannot just suppress the same abnormality multiple times. There's an easy trick for this mission in properly suppressing Apocalypse Bird (since all three of the eggs it spawns count as ALEPHs), but that requires, well, suppressing Apocalypse Bird, which is easier said than done.
• The Woobie:
  • Hod and Chesed are the only two Sephirah who care about their employees, are nice to you, and mean well. Hod is also an Extreme Doormat who gets no respect from anyone in the facility, and Chesed spends his days trying to make sure the employees he cares so much about are as happy as possible before Angela inevitably sends them to their demise. Furthermore, Michelle killed herself and Daniel caused a massacre against his will because he just wanted to give people time to escape by following orders.
  • Hokma. He's easily the most polite of the Sephirah towards just about everyone, employees included, yet has arguably the most heartbreaking story as Benjamin, who was already killed by Angela upon an attempt to warn X about Angela being dishonest. He was killed on the spot and you have to kill him off for real by solidifying his fate to achieve the true ending of the game. Even worse, if Abel's words were to be true, you're the one who programmed Angela to kill him as a part of your playbook. Only for A's plans to be ruined anyway and Hokma brought back in the sequel, still having unerring loyalty towards his indirect killer who was his best friend.
  • As far as Abnormalities go, Laetitia is bound to make at least a few players feel sorry for her. She came from a faraway land to make friends with the people of the City, but was saddened that she had to leave her friends from her homeland behind. She boxed these friends in heart-shaped gifts that she'd give to her new friends as pranks, oblivious to the fact that these "pranks" are killing people and making those that know of her afraid of her. When L Corp finds her, she willfully submits to being contained by them, hoping to make friends with the staff, only to be placed inside a containment cell and treated like a biohazard. As of the sequel, she's been sealed away inside a book where she no longer has anybody but her spider friends, and when she gets out you have to send her back to the book. The ensuing fight involves you killing her friends one-by-one until she's reduced to mumbling sorrowfully to herself in a Troubled Fetal Position and not making any attempt to defend herself from the librarians. By the end, even Hod and her assistants feel sorry for her.