Gosh Darn Monsters [spoilers]

[Airyll]

Alrighty then! So this is kind of a question thread, based on my own experiences, trends I notice within the game aaaaand watching people play through this ingenious and utterly terrifying piece of work. If this has already been answered somewhere, I do apologise in advance; I searched around and didn't exactly see the answers in the numerous threads I checked.

Onto the questions!

1. The monster in the archives, that beautiful pianist he is, never actually seems to do much aside from moan at you. If you're lucky enough to see him he wanders off down the corridor you have to leave through (which honestly panicked me quite a bit) but he's not actually there.

Spoiler below!

You can walk through the entire level seven times over after this and he never shows up again. Not visibly, anyway.
Is this guy a hallucination or what? Or do I just scare him more than he scares me?

2. The same thing for the monster in the wine cellar. He's there, and he's a bit more obvious than his counterpart in the archives because he happened to drive me batcrap insane and wouldn't leave for several minutes; I was tempted to just run into him and end it all because it wasn't like my sanity could drop any lower.

Spoiler below!

Once he's out of sight though, he too seems to be gone from the entire level. Hallucination? Does he ever appear again, patrolling? I don't actually know if this monster will attack you if you continue to stare at him and draw his attention, and I'm not exactly willing to test it out either.

3. Similar to the above two scenarios, but this is more about the spawning behaviour of monsters. Now all monsters after the entrance hall do actually seem to be capable of killing you and some seem more vigilant than others, but they all seem to share some behaviour regardless of who is playing the game or where exactly you are. Discounting the water monster, of course.

Spoiler below!

Monsters seem to spawn loudly. Like you can honestly hear them from a mile away and run and hide long before they see you. I also notice that if you wait until the music fades or don't follow the monster they seem to... disappear entirely. In fact you can even follow them, provided you let them get ahead and turn a corner, and they still just seem to vanish.

Are they programmed to despawn if they don't find you, or are they superhumanly fast and have the ability to ghost through walls? Because either explanation would explain why so many monsters seem to be haunting the corridors of places like the prison, but also vanish completely from your path if you hide from them and let them pass.

4. A final curious question. I heard that you can

Spoiler below!

glitch the servants by standing atop of tables or barrels, at which point the brutes seem to be full of infinite stupidity and just can't reach you. Now while I didn't play the game this way and don't really care to (because they themselves scare me and being trapped in a room with one would still have me crap enough bricks to build a house, safe or not) I did wonder if this was in any way related to the programming of the water monster?
After all, it makes sense to me given the fact that the water monster is programmed to be equally incapable if you are on raised ground.

Thank you in advance for any answers. =3 I'm really enjoying this game at the moment; it's one of the few games I can label a true horror and it's an absolute gem of a game in that it's the only one of it's kind that scares me so badly... I keep coming back to play further into the game and get scared more.

[xiphirx]

Yes to every question.

Spoiler below!

Yes to Hallucination.

[Airyll]

And that really does wrap that up. In one post.

I take my hat off to you. XD Thanks. ^^

[GraphicsKid]

The wait it works is when a monster is spawned, they are assigned a bunch of "patrol nodes," or spots they are told to walk to. Yea they'll deviate from those paths if they see you, but otherwise they'll walk from one node to the next, and when the reach the last one, if they're far enough away and off screen, they'll disappear.

[MPS626]

As far as standing on higher levels goes, and any other method of tricking the monsters out of being able to get to you, I've found that it works sometimes. Some people who've played the game swear by the methods (either the getting up on a higher level method or the hold a box/drawer in front of your face and pray method).

However, during gameplay, while I would usually run and hide in a corner like you're supposed to do (which is also, coincidentally, the most surefire way to get rid of the monster), before I figured that and the monster spawn sounds out I would usually run smack into them then try and find various ways to avoid them which usually involved getting stuck in an enclosed space with them. I did the following things on separate occasions with varying levels of success:
1. jumped up on a pile of permanent crates at one point–major fail, Mr. Face still got me (I think this was in storage)
2. held a box I found in one of the corridors of the prison in front of my face-surprising success, somehow I got it close enough to my face where it blocked almost my entire field of vision and only caught slivers of the monster when he walked within about a foot of me, and just moved the box to cover him from my eyes and he eventually wandered off
3. tried the box trick again, couldn't get it close enough to my face (or maybe the monster saw me pick up the box, not sure), failed miserably, monster slashed straight through it.
4. Tried to hop up onto the pillar in the choir when I was being chased by a brute, had a few minutes of you-can't-get-me-ha-ha then he seemed to walk away and came back on a higher level and 1HK'd me.
5. Also on a gameplay I was deliberately trying to cheat (after I'd beaten the game the right way, I was just fooling around), I was curious if the avoid-the-capture-scene cheat really worked (in the chancel when you have the orb pieces, a successful run is on youtube somewhere) and I hopped up on the pillar platforms but they still came and they definitely reached me up there... didn't try that again.

So, what I'd say is that while these tricks do occasionally work, especially if you know the limitations and how to use them, for the most part I've found the monsters still get you eventually no matter what method you're doing if you get the chase sound. Or maybe I just suck.

(tried it in Penumbra too because I figured the dog was even shorter than the Amnesia monsters and wouldn't be able to get at me, but the stupid thing climbed up on some barrels and ate my face off, it's very athletic apparently).