Rainbow Six Extraction Sees You Go Up Against Spooky Hallucinations In New Crisis Event

Rainbow Six Extraction is getting a second post-launch Crisis Event. Called Nightmare Fog, the Crisis Event adds a new gameplay mode, Protean enemy, and Prestige feature to the game. Though the enemy and Prestige feature will remain in the game going forward, the new gameplay mode will only be available during the event.

Nightmare Fog introduces the titular vapor as the main gameplay gimmick in the new limited-time mode. Standing in the fog will increase your neurotoxin level–a brand-new threat you and your squadmates will have to manage. Upon reaching certain thresholds, the neurotoxin will have adverse effects that you’ll have to deal with.

At 30%, you’ll start hallucinating enemies. As hallucinations, these enemies can’t damage you but they look real enough to potentially trick you into wasting ammo or shooting something that causes enough noise that you attract the attention of actual enemies. These aren’t just silent apparitions either–they can make noise too, sometimes audibly popping into existence just within your peripheral to give you a nice jump-scare.

The effects get worse from there. At 65% neurotoxin level, your senses start to go, resulting in tunnel vision and spurts of motion blur. And then at 100%, your health just starts to gradually drain. Effects can stack too, so by the time your neurotoxin level is close to 100%, you’re not having a great time.

The only way to lower your neurotoxin level is to use a new piece of REACT tech called the nuerostim supply case (doing so lowers your neurotoxin level by 35%). To refill the case, you’ll have to find one of several nuerostim stations, which are located in safe areas where the fog can’t reach (such as the airlock between subzones).

Like in the standard mode, you’ll be completing objectives across three connected subzones, each separated by a safe area. The first subzone will feature one of five standard objectives: Specimen, Nest Tracking, Triangulation, Hunt, or Showdown. After that, things start to change up a bit.

In the second subzone, you will always encounter the Decontamination objective, though it’s slightly different from the one found in Extraction’s standard mode. The aberrant nests you need to destroy are further apart, meaning you and your team will have to significantly spread out–so you won’t be able to easily help one another–or move as a unit throughout the entire level.

In the third subzone, you’ll find a new objective type: Destroy the Toxic Tree. It plays out pretty much exactly like Rescue. However, instead of shooting the nodes of the tree in order to weaken it enough to save an MIA operator, you’ll instead be shooting the nodes of the tree in order to weaken it enough that it reveals its core, allowing you to kill it. Once you do, the fog disappears and you can extract.

Alongside this temporary mode, Nightmare Fog adds some permanent new content as well. Protean Vigil joins the roster of potential boss enemies you encounter in the main game during the Gateway objective, and a new Prestige feature unlocks more levels to grind.

With the new Prestige feature, you’ll be able to unlock an additional 10 Prestige levels on top of any operator you’ve maxed out to character level 10. This will not further your milestone progression at all, but it does open up the possibility to earn more icons, uniforms, and headgear for your operators.

Nightmare Fog is live in Rainbow Six Extraction from May 12 to June 2. If you’ve yet to pick up the game and are wondering what it’s like, read GameSpot’s Rainbow Six Extraction review.