The Seraphite island is the game's most sustained horror sequence — not because of the infected, which are navigated with the practiced efficiency of people who have been managing them for years, but because of the human beings who have built a society on the island that is internally coherent and externally terrifying. The theology works for them. The cruelty emerges from the theology naturally, the way cruelty always emerges from systems that have decided some people are outside the definition of person.

Abby and Lev moving through Seraphite territory is the game at its most uncomfortable. The infected are predictable. The Seraphites are not, because they have reasons, because they believe they are right, because the thing that makes them dangerous is exactly the thing that makes them human.