Bendy and the Ink Machine/Nightmare Fuel

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Aaaaaaaand HOW!?

  • As of the Chapter 3 update, hacking or glitching into certain areas where you're not supposed to go (or going to these areas prematurely) will reveal a Bendy cutout holding a sign that reads "WANDERING IS A TERRIBLE SIN."◊ Unlike the other Bendy cutouts scattered throughout the studio, this one is smudged, has realistic eyes that make him all the creepier, and appears to be bleeding ink from his eyes and mouth. ** Apparently theMeatly put it into the game to discourage hacking, and boy is it a deterrent.
  • The entire first chapter exercises Nothing Is Scarier at almost every given moment. The animation studio is utterly bereft of life, but the claustraphobic corridors, occasional creepy sound, unexplained off-screen changes, and clear evidence that something very wrong happened before you showed up keep the nerve-wracking atmosphere constantly high.
    • The studio is cluttered with cardboard cutouts of Bendy. There seems to be no end to them as you explore the corridors at first, running into a new one in every intersection... until you backtrack and find the room you last visited missing its cutout. The Bendys are fewer than you initially thought, and don't seem that inanimate anymore...
      • As of the Chapter Three update, you can open the door to the left of Wally Frank's recording. A Bendy cutout is in there and it peeks out at you as you open it. Like a girl, you will scream and your heart will perform maneuvers worthy of acrobatics. And the door will be locked if you try again. And it's still staring at you...
  • The exit door is locked. Who locked it?!
  • As of the September 28 update, you can hear music coming from a locked room that's lit up. The light shuts off loudly as you pass it after collecting at least two objects, and that's when you can open it. But nobody's inside and the music has stopped playing...
  • Not long after you step into the game, you'll turn a corner and find your first major clue that something is amiss - Bendy's old co-star, * Boris the wolf, dead on a table with his torso cut open, his ribs pried apart, and all his insides removed. The horror here is twofold: ** 1. The explicit shock of "Holy crap, a vivisection of an adorable cartoon character", and...
    • 2. the more implicit horror when you realize that this is supposed to be the real world and, even in-universe, Boris is supposed to be fictional. And yet here he is, very much in the flesh, having been dissected like a rat. It's made all the worse by him being an Expy of Goofy, of all things.

Henry: Oh my god... Joey, what were you doing?

      • Even more horrific is that we find out in Chapter Three the supposedly innocent Alice Angel, one of two of Boris's cartoon colleagues, did it. Not Joey, though he may have had a hand in it...
  • Though there are minor startles littered throughout, the first chapter only has one real Jump Scare, and boy are the developers going for quality over quantity.
  • In the update that came with Chapter 3, once you've pressed the Flow button in the theater room, a pipe will burst and ink starts gushing out, flooding the room.
    • As you head back to the break room, you hear something clanging around in the pipes, as if something became unclogged...
  • After the tension-filled process of repairing the ink machine is finally over, you pull the final lever and go back down the hall to where the machine sits, ready to find out what this thing Joey worked so hard on actually does. Curiously, the doorway is now boarded up from the outside, and there's nothing of interest to see from a distance, so you move closer. You peer hard through the wooden boards. The machine is further back in the room, now humming away... and then, up from below, something pops up into your field of view. It resembles Bendy in a loose sense of the word, but unlike the cardboard cutout that had been stalking you the entire game, this thing is a fully animated 3-D model, and actually looks like a proper Eldritch Abomination. It has no visible eyes, a painted-on grin, and is made almost entirely of oozing, unstable ink. Perhaps most disturbing, it looks far more human-like than anything else you've encountered in the game, with a proportionately-sized head atop a clear neck and shoulders, plunging it deep into the Uncanny Valley.
    • The update that came with Chapter 2 made it worse, as he now reaches out to grab you from behind the boards.
  • Upon being jumpscared by Bendy, ink immediately begins pouring down from the ceiling and walls around you, flooding the studio in a matter of seconds. In the update that came with Chapter 3, everything gets dark as ink rains down inside the whole studio, threatening to drown you as you run for the exit.
    • All paths to every other section of the studio are closed, and as still true to the first time, you fall through a trap door that wasn't there before...
  • There's a new recording by Thomas Connor. He states that the noise the Ink Machine makes sounds like a dying dog on its last legs and he recognizes the abnormality of it all. But "dying dog"... sounds similar to good ol' Boris, doesn't it?
  • Also, now you have to drain all the ink that flooded into the "basement" as you work your way down. And you see how high it is. It seems up to your waist. We truly see, in one way, just how the workers were struggling.
  • The end with all the flashing images. Made even scarier with the update, as it includes the inky webbing and a Scare Chord.
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