Silent Hill: Downpour/Nightmare Fuel

"Did you enjoy the ride, Murphy?"

• "Did you enjoy the ride, Murphy?"
  • Monocle Man's face in general.
• Anytime the Void manages to get a pretty good grip on Murphy. Time slows down, matter and reality itself warp, and Murphy's painful horrified screams echo through the distortions.
  • Actually, the Void in general. It's a sentient BLACK HOLE chasing after you! Even when you know the paths, it's impossible to avoid contact with it. And the only reason you actually get away from it? Because the town is letting you get away.
• Say you're walking along normally through a creepy environment, only thinking of how to solve the next puzzle...then suddenly, a Weeping Bat drops right in front of you, from the ceiling.
• The stone-still miners. Early on, you find three of them behind a fence, just staring at nothing. It's creepy enough on its own, but if you get too close, one falls over for NO reason.
  • And then the train part itself: During the ride, you stop right by an 'exhibit' of miners, all standing in various positions. Suddenly the lights go off...then when they come back up in a brief flash, the miners aren't in the same positions they were before. And they moved closer to YOU. The lighting repeats this off and brief flash pattern, and each time, the miners keep getting closer, until they're inside the train itself. Then the lights go back on permanently, and they're right back where they were at the start. Unnerving doesn't begin to cover that.
• One rather creepy moment when Murphy reaches Devil's Pit and is about to go down to the train in the caverns. You can put money in one of those binocular things. Look up at the train car, and suddenly a bloody hand reaches up and slaps the window before sliding down it. What makes this even worse is that there's no explanation for it, and there's no cutscene in the tram while Murphy is riding it to give any indication of what happened to randomly put someone or something in there.
  • Another creepy thing can be seen using the binoculars, specifically the ones on the level below after fighting the pair of Screamers. Looking at the lower deck where JP later commits suicide reveals the Wheelman, who rolls along, stares directly at Murphy for several seconds, and then vanishes.
• The introduction of the Doll enemy. You enter a pitch-black basement, and in the distance, behind a barred door, you hear someone sobbing hysterically. So eventually you get the door open...and the sobbing turns into an evil cackle.
  • Come to think of it, Dolls are definitely the worst monster Murphy has to face. Even ignoring the fact that they're Flunky Bosses In Mook Clothing, that they're evil mannequins, that their Shadows are nigh-invisible speed demons... it's that the Dolls are actual dummies. As in, they don't do anything other than laugh at you and summon shadows. At least, not while you're looking at them...
• In the Centennial Building, a chilling "Sequestered does not equal safe" shows up on the wall under UV light in the City Manager's room, next to a corpse where you have to get a Director's ID card for extra room access.
• The Wall Corpse, a mangled torso crucified to a metal halo, that attacks by squirting jets of blood and other bodily fluids at you.
  • Even worse, every single one spawned is designed to prolong your suffering when escaping the Otherworld. One badly-timed move though, and you could be knocked on your back, directly in front of The Void, and it's impossible to escape in time before you're ripped apart.
• The loading screen will occasionally have such gems as "They never really loved you," "you can't ignore it forever, "why are you lying?" and "We're all slowly dying."
  • Even worse, "They know you’re alone.", followed by "It's in the room with you. You just can't see it...".
• If you peek through a hole in a brick wall in the Centennial Building garage, you'll get a violent flash of the Bogeyman brutally bludgeoning/axing some poor pleading sap to death.
  • Gets a reprise in the Monastery. This time you get to pull the axe out of the still-warm corpse. Yay.
• In the apartment, there's a dead guy hanging from the ceiling fan, and a sidequest entails giving back items he stole from the other tenants and putting them back where they belong, thus appeasing the ghosts. If you leave the apartments and come back, he isn't there anymore. Just his clothes lying on the floor. You can wear those clothes as an alternate outfit.
• The X-ray puzzle. You have to reach into the stomach of a monster to search for a key. The monster is still alive and very much not pleased about this.
• The game indulges in a lovely bit of Fridge Horror; in the mirror sidequest you're made to play a game of Spot the Difference, adjusting the room so it matches its counterpart inside of the mirror. Should you get anything wrong, however, a monster will spawn, only visible in the mirror. While normally one would just finish such a task and be on your merry way, when you solve this one you'll acquire a therapist's notes on the apartment's former occupant. She had been driven utterly mad by the fact that if she failed to perform the same ritual of rearranging the room every day, "the monsters in the mirror will hurt me!".
• An early event in the prison level can pretty much be summed up as "Press this big glowing red button for the mother of all jump scares!"
  • Probably the jump scares in general: most of them come out of NOWHERE, and are erratically placed throughout the game, screwing with your expectations of when you think they'll appear. And even worse? Some can kill you if you don't react fast enough.
  • Special mention goes to the giggling unseen assailant in the Centennial building, dropping boxes and entire floors on you.
• The hanged body in the Monastery playground. The worst part is is that it changes from being a corpse to a tire swing whenever Murphy looks away, upping the Paranoia Fuel levels for the unwary players that think they just saw something change. Another hanged body can be found at Devil's Pit, using the binoculars to look below the lower deck. It just seems so out of place, until you realize it's probably hinting at JP's suicide on that very level.
  • If you look closely at the body in the playground you will notice it is Murphy's.
• The Hillside Apartments. One of the darkest, creepiest, most ambient areas in the entire game. Ironically, there are no enemies there.
• A few of the sidequests, mostly due to the sheer random levels of Body Horror and general Nightmare Fuel. Some gems include reuniting a man with his still-beating heart that has been ripped out of his chest that is found in a sewer, and summons hordes of howling monsters to pursue you through the maze-like area after it is picked up; attempting to put the spirits of a dead woman and her children to rest while avoiding the axe-wielding, enraged spirit of the husband, who murdered his family; entering a creepy, abandoned movie theater; and entering three horror films, which correspond to the events of Charlie's kidnapping, molestation and murder.
  • The telltale beating heart sidequest. It's bad enough that you're in a sewer level looking for a human heart, but the fact that you have to listen to the SPEED and VOLUME of the heartbeat to figure out where it is, and the moment that you pick up the heart all hell breaks loose.
• Shortly after leaving Devil's Pit and before moving towards Silent Hill, the large covered walkway Murphy is on is shake violently as something large and monstrous moves around the area, making grotesque animal sounds. Nowhere in the game is anything fitting this description ever fought.
• The first official introduction of the Bogeyman. Despite having a silly name and resembling the offspring of Nemesis and HUNK, he lifts a young boy into the air, and, as he gasps for breath, snaps the child's neck in front of Murphy. The fact that he is implied to be a memory of Murphy's son Charlie doesn't help. Infant Immortality? What's that?
• The Wheelman, full stop. While his appearance in the final boss fight can be underwhelming, his earlier appearances from afar definitely give him an aura of mystery and fear. He is first seen watching Murphy from a window of the Devil's Pitstop motel when he is talking to Blackwood, can be seen briefly at Devil's Pit using the binoculars, is seen moving through a newly unlocked gate on time-lapsed, grainy security camera footage in the Centennial Building parking lot, and finally, watches Murphy through the bars of his cells as he awakens in the Overlook Penitentiary building.
  • Gets worse if you search everywhere with the UV flashlight: in some places, there are wheelchair skid-marks. Meaning he's always one step ahead of you, no matter what you do...
• Pat Napier's fate. Your Mileage May Vary on whether he deserved it or not, but none can deny it was a brutal way to go. With full consent of a prison officer, Murphy beats Napier with a metal bar, breaking his jaw, slashes him with a knife and then buries it in his shoulder, then knocks him to the ground with a barrage of punches. And to make matters worse, if the player receives either of the 'good' endings, it is revealed by Sewell that he had to finish Napier off himself, showing that he was still alive after all that.
  • He at least partially deserved the beating. After all, this is the man who took and drowned Murphy's son, Charlie, likely raping him at some point. Murphy went and got himself jailed for a reason after all: to get close enough to Napier, for revenge.
• Thanks to the more advanced graphics, the Otherworld transtitions may count now. In previous games, you either were suddenly in the Otherworld after a pitch-black shift, or you see the area around you rust/blood over, but either way, you never saw much of the shift from 'normal' world to Alien Geometry type... but here, you see the world around you dissolve or outright melt away, like it never existed.
  • And who knows? Maybe the foggy town you wander into is just a fake... Silent Hill already twists its monsters to each individual, why not the entire town as well?