You’re moving fast. In ULTRAKILL, that’s the whole point. You are a GoPro with guns fueled by blood, sliding through Hell at Mach speed, parrying your own shotgun pellets, and tossing coins into the air to split bullets. It is loud. It is frantic. It is vibrant. Then you hit 0-S. Suddenly, the music dies. The colors drain into a grainy, low-fidelity gray. The breakneck speed of Hakita’s retro-shooter vanishes, replaced by a suffocating silence and a flickering flashlight. This is Something Wicked This Way Comes ULTRAKILL, a secret level that shouldn't work in a high-octane movement shooter, yet it remains one of the most effective horror pivots in modern gaming.
Most people find it by accident. You’re poking around the Prelude, maybe looking for a secret orb, and you slip through a hidden vent. The game doesn't warn you. It just drops you into a pitch-black labyrinth. It’s a total tonal shift. Honestly, it’s kind of brilliant because it preys on the player’s overconfidence. By the time you reach 0-S, you think you’re the apex predator of Hell. You’ve killed Cerberus. You’ve decimated hordes of Strays. But in the dark, you’re just a target.
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The Mechanics of a Stick-Figure Nightmare
What is Something Wicked? Physically, it’s a spindly, hand-drawn stick figure. It looks like something a bored middle-schooler would doodle in the margins of a notebook. In any other context, it would be hilarious. Here, it’s terrifying. It doesn't have a complex AI routine. It doesn't have a health bar you can chip away at. It just follows you. It moves with a jittery, stop-motion animation style that feels "wrong" against the smooth 60+ FPS movement of the player character.
The level design is a masterclass in psychological tension. You are stuck in a maze of tight corridors. Your only tool is a flashlight that barely illuminates five feet in front of you. You can’t shoot your way out. Well, you can shoot, but it won’t do anything. The "Something Wicked" entity is invincible. If it touches you, you die. Instantly. No second chances, no health orbs, just a quick trip back to the start.
The sound design does the heavy lifting. You’ll hear it before you see it. A high-pitched, distorted screech that rings out through the halls. It’s directional, too. If you’re wearing headphones, you can hear that scratching sound getting closer behind you, or worse, around the next corner. It turns a game about empowerment into a game about pure, unadulterated vulnerability.
Why 0-S Works When Other Horror Levels Fail
Most shooters try to do a "horror level" and fail because they let the player keep their guns. If I have a rocket launcher, I'm not scared of the dark; I'm just annoyed that I can't see what I'm about to blow up. ULTRAKILL developer Arsi "Hakita" Patala understood this. By making the entity invincible, the player's primary verb—killing—is stripped away.
It’s a direct homage to 0451 style immersive sims and classic creepypasta tropes, but it fits the lore of Hell being an adaptive, sentient entity that wants to entertain itself by watching you suffer. There’s something deeply unsettling about the visual contrast. The rest of the game is a "New Retro" explosion of style. 0-S is a "PS1 survival horror" nightmare. It uses a restricted color palette and a heavy grain filter to hide the edges of the map, making the maze feel infinite even though it's actually quite small once you map it out in your head.
Players often compare it to Slender: The Eight Pages, but it’s actually more stressful. In Slender, you’re a defenseless human. In Something Wicked This Way Comes ULTRAKILL, you are a literal war machine designed to purge Hell, and you are still helpless. That power disparity is what sticks in your brain. It reminds you that no matter how many coins you can flick, there are things in the deep layers of the world that simply do not care about your skill floor.
Navigating the Darkness Without Losing Your Mind
If you’re trying to clear 0-S for the first time, you have to change your brain. Stop trying to "pro-play" it. You aren't going to slide-jump your way to the exit easily because the corridors are designed to catch your hitbox.
- Listen to the cues. The screeching isn't just flavor text. It’s a proximity sensor. If the sound is sharp and loud, Something Wicked is within striking distance. If you hear a faint breathing or scratching, it’s stalking you from an adjacent hallway.
- Abuse the blue skulls. The level requires you to find skulls to open the exit. These act as your only landmarks. Once you pick one up, your visibility actually drops because you’re carrying an object. It’s a trade-off.
- The "Boomerang" Strategy. You can actually "bait" the entity. If you know it’s coming from one direction, lead it into a wider room, circle around it, and dash past. It’s risky, but it’s the only way to make progress if you get cornered.
There is a weird trick, though. If you’re brave (or just tired of dying), you can actually "parry" Something Wicked. It doesn't kill it, and it doesn't stun it for long, but a perfectly timed feedbacker punch can give you a split second to breathe. It’s the ultimate "get off me" move, but miss it by a frame and you’re back to the title screen. This tiny window of interaction is the only thing that keeps the level from feeling "unfair." It maintains the ULTRAKILL philosophy: if you’re good enough, you can survive anything, even the impossible.
The Cultural Impact Within the Community
Something Wicked has become more than just a secret level. It’s a meme, a warning, and a rite of passage. New players are often told to "check out the secret in 0-1" by veteran players, who then wait in Discord chats to hear the inevitable scream when the stick figure appears.
It also set a precedent for how Hakita handles secret levels. Each one is a genre shift. 1-S is a puzzle game. 2-S is a dating sim. 4-S is a platformer. By starting with horror in 0-S, the game tells the player right away: "Expect the unexpected." It breaks the fourth wall without ever saying a word. It tells you that the game's engine is a playground, and the developers are more than happy to break their own rules to make you feel something—even if that something is pure, cold dread.
Interestingly, "Something Wicked" isn't just a one-off. The entity reappears in the 4-3 level "Shot in the Dark." Here, the game messes with you even more by putting the horror mechanic inside a "standard" level. You’re fighting normal enemies, then the lights go out, and that familiar screech returns. It’s a brilliant bit of recurring trauma. It forces you to manage a frantic firefight while keeping one ear open for the sound of the invincible stickman.
Mapping the Maze: A Survivalist Perspective
Actually finishing the level requires a bit of spatial awareness that most FPS players have evolved out of thanks to mini-maps. There is no map here. You have to memorize the turns.
- The Start: You begin in a room with a pedestal. This is your safe zone (relatively).
- The First Skull: Usually found after a series of left-hand turns. This is where the entity usually spawns for the first time.
- The Exit Door: Located at the far end of the labyrinth. You need the Blue Skull to trigger the final hallway.
The irony is that the level is actually very short. A speedrunner can blast through it in under a minute. But for a first-timer, that minute stretches into ten. Every shadow looks like a limb. Every ambient hum sounds like a scream. That’s the "Wicked" effect. It’s a psychological trick that uses the player’s own inputs against them. When you panic and dash, you make noise and lose control. When you move slowly, you feel like a sitting duck. There is no "right" way to feel, and that’s why it’s a masterpiece of level design.
Actionable Insights for Players
If you’re stuck or too scared to finish 0-S, here is how you actually beat it without smashing your keyboard:
- Turn your gamma up, but only a little. Cranking it to the max ruins the atmosphere and actually makes the grain filter harder to see through. Keep it low enough to see the walls but high enough to spot the white lines of the entity.
- Use the Whiplash (if you're returning later). If you come back to this level after getting the Whiplash arm from 4-4, you can actually use it to grapple onto certain points, but honestly, the classic dash-jump is still your best friend for raw speed.
- Don't look back. The entity in 0-S is faster than your walking speed but slower than your dash. If you hear it, don't turn around to confirm. Just dash forward. Turning around slows your momentum and usually leads to a death screen.
- The "Hugging the Wall" Trick. Standard maze logic applies. Keep your left hand on the wall and follow it consistently. You will eventually hit every room and the exit. It’s boring, but it works, and it keeps you from spiraling in circles while the entity hunts you.
Ultimately, Something Wicked This Way Comes ULTRAKILL stands as a reminder that the best secrets in gaming aren't just hidden items—they’re experiences that change how you feel about the game world. It transforms Hell from a shooting gallery into a place that is genuinely, deeply haunted. Once you finish it, you get the "Something Wicked" testament, a cryptic bit of text that adds to the mounting pile of lore suggesting that the world of ULTRAKILL is far more complex than a simple "robot kills demons" story.
You’ve got to respect a developer who builds a world-class movement system and then tells the player, "Now, stay perfectly still and listen." It’s bold. It’s terrifying. And it’s exactly why the game remains a titan of the indie scene. If you haven't gone back to the Prelude to face the stickman, you're missing out on the most stressful sixty seconds in FPS history. Go grab the skull. Just don't forget to look behind you.