The third coverage of the weirdos of Scarlet Nexus, the 2021 video game! We're in deep in the weirder monsters now!
Barrista Santa
The 'Ruts' from the previous page looked weird, but they're weird in a way that video game monsters sometimes look weird. I mean, sure, the Ruts wouldn't exist in any real, conceivable way, but these guys? The 'Santa', which have nothing to do with Santa Claus, hopefully? They're easily the single weirdest enemy type in the game entirely. The description calls the Santa as 'two dolls fused together by their faces', noting that each of them have their own consciousness. It hides in that metallic 'body', and throws objects at you.
...but is it really two figures, fused together by the faces? No, as I try to imagine it as 'two figures' and starting to see the two hands with palms joined together (those white parts with stitch linings), the Barrista Santa looks more like two figures facing each other, joined together from the stomach down. And, of course, there's without mentioning that both figures are octopi. Octopuses? Whichever is the right way to call an octopus, anyway. The right-side head has the very distinctive head shape of an octopus, except it's got bizarre speakers dotting around the cephalopod's giant cephal. The left-side head, meanwhile, has the octopus flesh moulded into something resembling the side profile of a person, but a person with a long, elongated head like those Twi'lek aliens from Star Wars. And sure, this could be an octopus whose body is stretched out to look like two people's bodies, but then we get those disturbing octopus eyes dotting down the length of the tentacle, taking the place of suckers. What!
And, again, remember that this thing was once a single (hopefully a single) human, transformed by whatever strange phenomenon that transforms humans into Others. These monster designs look so whimsical and otherworldly that I'm genuinely impressed by just how... how fucked-up they look for something that's just supposed to be a relatively simple monster that throws rocks at you.
Saliva Santa
Visually, the 'saliva' (ew!) Santa isn't too much different from its (their?) cousin, the Barrista Santa, though the angle here gives us a better look at how this couple is connected together. Yeah, the shape of the lower body makes the whole 'conjoined at the stomach' vibes a lot more explicit, and is it meant to be sexual, at that? There's a mass of yellow fruit hanging on its side, which might be meant to represent octopus eggs? And this one's tentacle is tipped with a metal syringe-thing.
The profile notes that this thing uses its saliva to soak its prey (ew!) and then throws electrified objects to shock them, which... yeah, not what I expected from a creature named 'Saliva Santa'. I don't know what I expected, but drenching someone with spit and then throwing electrocuted items at them certainly isn't it. Both Santas can do that octopus thing where they squish their entire body into a small box, and this is highlighted in Saliva Santa's profile. The Saliva Santa will still shoot out all its saliva even when it's a box, so the profile notes certain usages of invisibility or electrokinesis to murder it.
Auger Sabbat
Presumably drawing its name from 'Sabbath', the Sabbat family are all weird-ass ungulates! Demon horses, but made from the same nightmarish 'let's stick a bunch of random junk together to make an abstract creature whose silhouette resembles a familiar animal'... and it's not quite as confusing as the Yawns or Pendus or Chinery, but the Sabbats are still pretty cool. Augers are drills that make drills in wood, which is that spinning thing that extends from the metal mask that this thing has. Which, in typical video game enemy fashion, you can break and expose the weak spot inside. The mass is a clump of flesh with misshapen, mismatched eyes, but the profile itself notes that they are just 'ocular patterns' since the Auger Sabbat lacks a sense of vision, and, hell, with that mask on, it can't see anyway, right?
The Sabbat can also excrete a menacing liquid from its hind legs... which is explicitly identified as its... drool? The design is almost normal, honestly, looking like a goat or a horse or something, at least its hind legs. There are some metal grafted onto it, but it looks almost normal compared to the rest of the game's bestiary. The front end, though, looks so much more weird, with growths of plant matter covering parts of its skin, a bunch of metal bands around its stomach, and a bunch of material that look like bone or rocks forming its front legs. It's weird, of course, just not as weird as the others in the game.
Booger Sabbat
Our second Sabbat looks a lot more creepy. Its entire head has been replaced with a mass of wood -- a whole damn tree trunk whose branches call to mind the shape of a deer. Growing out of its 'chin' or 'snout' are a mass of flowers that the profile call as 'mushroom-like growths' that it flings as spore attacks that confuse the enemy. It's also got a bunch of colourful quilt-like growths on its stomach? Again, like the Auger Sabbat, this thing actually feels almost mundane that you could see it as an enemy in like a D&D sourcebook or a Witcher game as a mutant plant spirit or something.
The profile does note that the Booger Sabbat's spores are more effective on brains with high amounts of psionic hormones, which are all the OSF combatants. Did this Sabbat evolve (or can these species even evolve?) to combat the OSF psionic mutants?
Wither Sabbat
The Wither Sabbat has a lot of the same anatomy as the rest, but it has exposed muscles on the front end of its body, and it's got a typical dead ram skull for a head. It might be the most 'mundane' fantasy monster, and I wouldn't be remiss to see this in like, a Witcher or Dark Souls game or something. There is still something rather weird about the goat skull, since the eyes are covered in metallic vents, but it does look surprisingly mundane as a fantasy monster. Anything with a goat skull is still cool, though!
The Wither Sabbat is described in its profile as charging everything around it, and will headbutt especially hard when it rears itself up on its hind legs as pictured in this picture. The 'back shell' is its weak point. One of these Wither Sabbats serves as a boss fight early on, before being treated just as a tough enemy.
Winery Chinery
I can't find out what 'chinery' means, and all Google search refers to me to a surname in European countries. It does sound like 'chicanery'. And... the Chineries are also four-legged creatures, but they look so much more mismatched and horrifying compared to the Sabbats! Sorry, Sabbats. The Winery Chinery has the same 'plants forming the shape of antlers' that the Booger Sabbat has, but the plants are a bit more wild, and they grow out of seemingly a mass of metal that forms this being's... head? Torso? There is a mass of red vine-hair thing that sprout out of the tree's "roots" All the Chineries have those red valve holders that I kinda read as a 'mouth' of sorts? The Winery Chinery also has two very human-looking arms jutting out of metallic ball joints, as well as a hollow torso made by metal rings and an organic-looking bony spine whose effect is undoubtedly meant to resemble an empty ribcage. This all terminates in a diseased green bull's butt, all pockmarked with disease and a tail that has metal segments on it. Okay! That's more like it, Scarlet Nexus! I particularly love the red valve holder mouths, which the game also uses for a couple of the bosses, and I felt like it looked so unsettling.
Almost adorably, the Winery Chinery's profile highlights that it is actually a bit of a cleanliness freak, 'cleaning its nails' and 'walking on tiptoes to it doesn't get wet'. The "bulb-like organ", which I am going to assume is the little valve, is able to cause the Chinery to unleash its bodily fluid that can shoot out electrical projectiles. The back end is 'brittle' and vulnerable, which... yeah, you can tell that the diseased cow ass far less impressive than the metal ribcage, the creepy human arms, or the headless tree. Very creepy!
Slippy Chinery
A bit simpler than the Winery Chinery, the 'Slippy' Chinery's 'organ' is more like a withered tree, looking more like the Booger Sabbat. We can see the anatomy a bit better here with how the Chinery can use those arms to manipulate the valves. There's also a hole on top of the valve, which is, I think, the 'mouth' that it shoots out water from. The Slippy Chinery's body is a bit more better matched, with the rear and front ends all having this same, consistent, quasi-metallic sheen to it with holes on it. The more doll-like arms are a bit less creepy than the out-of-place human arms on Winery, but still creepy!
And then you read the profile, and the Slippy Chinery is noted to be 'confirmed excreting [oil] from holes on its limbs'. The Slippy Chinery can change this oil's colour to camouflage with its surroundings, which... okay, I'm not even going to ask. And apparently people have observed the Slippy Chinery long enough to realize that it gets nervous and stops secreting oil when it hasn't eaten for an extended period... again, there's something almost like a living being's behaviour in some of these Others, particularly the descriptions of the Pendu, but then you look at the images and they look so much more fucked-up than real animals or even, hell, Pokemon or something.
Jutty Chinery
And our last 'regular' enemy is the Jutty Chinery. The Jutty has a much more emaciated set of tree-horns compared to its two brethren, and highlighted very well on this pose is the fact that its spine is upside-down, with the spine running on the bottom/stomach side of the being instead of the top. We get the return of the Winery's human-looking arms, and now with the addition of extra 'bulb' organs on its butt and inside the inverted ribcage, and another one that it's holding on its arms. The profile calls them 'organs that look like fruits', which... okay? The Jutty Chinery will wash these fruits at watering holes, and these form the weak points that cause the Jutty Chinery to fall prone if the 'fruits' are broken, despite not being killed. 'The theory is that it believes it has been killed', which is such a neat way to have that 'knock the weak part to stun the enemy and cause it to not move' trope from video games.
Also worth noting that the 'Chinery' monster design, albeit a bit larger and with what I think are the wings from the Pendu used as its 'tree', would be used to represent one of the characters that got transformed into an Other. Again, no spoilers here!
...and that's it for our monsters this time around. I was following the rough order that these things show up in the in-game database, and these Others at the end do all kind feel a bit more samey. But honestly, after the Santas, Pounds and Ruts, it's really hard for these enemies to match up to it, yeah?
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