The Dentist
Eight feet tall, ghostly, and completely invisible to the gas station's ID verification computer. He is not a doppelganger and he is not a problem you solve at the counter. There is no weapon, trap or barricade that deals with him.
Last verified 28 July 2026 · game version: launch build (22 July 2026)
Every piece of correct guidance about the Dentist is about running. No weapon, trap or barricade is described as effective against him. If your instinct when something comes through the door is to reach for the arsenal, this is the entity that punishes it.
He does not appear on the computer
This is the detail that makes the Dentist genuinely dangerous rather than merely difficult. Your ID verification computer is the tool you have been trained by the whole game to trust — it tells you whether a document is authentic, and you build your entire threat model around what it reports.
The Dentist is not in that system at all. He does not scan as a fake ID. He does not scan as anything. A player running the standard mental loop — check ID, act on result — gets no signal whatsoever, because the loop has nothing to act on.
Pair that with Norbert, who does scan as a fake ID and is completely harmless, and you have the game's central lesson stated twice from opposite directions: the scanner reports on documents, not on danger.
He is a separate threat, not a customer
The Dentist is not a doppelganger. Doppelgangers are the identification puzzle — entities mimicking humans, which you sort at the counter. The Dentist arrives on top of the job you are already doing. Your quota does not pause, the shelves do not stock themselves, and the customers keep coming.
In practice that means he is a shift-disruptor. The correct response is not to abandon the store permanently but to break contact, let the encounter pass, and get back to work — while accepting that the shift's numbers are going to suffer.
Break line of sight and keep moving. An eight-foot ghostly figure inside a gas station is dealing with the same aisles and doorways you are, so the store layout is your only real asset. Knowing where the loops are — which aisles connect, which corners are dead ends — is the difference between putting distance between you and getting cornered in the stockroom. This is the one entity where map knowledge outranks equipment.
In co-op
Three players give you something a solo player does not have: the ability to know where he is when you cannot see him. With proximity chat, a teammate's voice getting suddenly urgent from across the store is positional information. Call his location, keep the store between you, and do not converge — three people running into the same aisle is three people cornered instead of one.