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Video Games/Nightmare Fuel

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Think you can handle all the terror listed below?

Notice that some games in the list are not entirely targeted to grownups, but the fear factor is bad enough to scare grownups.

Note: Spoilers can be quite abundant in this section, so reader beware!

Sub-pages:[]


City of Heroes[]

  • The "Dark Astoria" zone in City of Heroes: Permanently twilit and fog-enshrouded, with the sounds of muted bells and wind in the background, and populated by ghostly pedestrians who are visible only from a distance and vanish if you get too close to them — except for the items they're carrying. (It also doesn't help that Astoria's neighborhoods and landmarks are named for horror movie directors.) Compared to the environment, the walking dead, evil shamans and malevolent spirits inhabiting Dark Astoria are something of a welcome relief.
  • Not running into the gigantic zombie outta nowhere though.
  • The Croatoa zone itself isn't that frightening (it's rather beautiful, for a pixellated environment). Some of the instanced missions within the zone are another story. Mainly the ones involving the ghosts, which look like floating, green-glowing, slightly zombified people who as their attack shoot several black, glowing skulls at you. And especially instances with the "spectral chill" fog, that you can't see through, and which lowers your combat capabilities.
  • For a real nightmare moment, turn up your sound enough to hear the death sounds for the Croatoa Ghosts. When they snuff it they make bloodcurdling screams of dying agony.


Clive Barker's Undying[]

  • Clive Barker's Undying has a fair few scenes that are not safe for sanity, especially when using the Scrying spell that allows the player to glimpse into the past or see things that you can't see in the normal world. The freakiest bit for this player was scrying in an innocent-looking tiny room filled with crates, only for to be revealed that in the vision the room's walls are full of blood, creepy texts written in said blood and really creepy sound effects.
    • The family portrait was also pretty horrific, and then there's the individual characters' diaries. "How could I have saved my father from a painful, lingering death? I could have hit him harder."
    • The invisible monks in the chapel.
    • Oh god. Those goddamn poltergeist children in the kitchen. You can hear the children giggle before the carving knives leap off the table and try to skewer you.
    • Aaron. Just fucking Aaron. Eaten alive by rats so he's nothing left but a chewed corpse with his jaw removed so he can't scream. You see his ghost in the mansion, switching from his human-looking form to his horribly rotted one, jumping out and generally screwing with you. Then after you return to the mansion after a bit, his attacks actually hurt. And you can't kill him. And he pops out everywhere. It's only until you find Bethany's personal dungeon do you find his strung-up real body. Bethany's glee of finally being victorious in their little sibling feud is even worse.
    • In Oneiros, you find a statue in the middle of a fountain of blood. When you scrye, you see the statue peel its chest open to reveal its hearts and begs for you to kill it.
    • Aaron's studio. Oh, Aaron's painting something big on the wall. So he's painting Patrick, the guy you're controlling? Okay ... now he's painting something to the sides of him ... kinda look like claws ... and now he's painting above him, some really big monster that looks like it's looming right over Patrick's head... * Skylight smashes* AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHOHGODGIANTMONSTER!! * frantic shooting*
  • There's a spell in this game that can force living enemies to slit their own throats. They're aware of what's happening, but they clearly have no idea why their arms are suddenly disobeying them, and they are scared shitless in the moments before death.


Dead Island[]

  • Some of the zombies are rather disturbing.Specifically the Butcher, who has had his entire forearm sawed into a sharp blade made out of his arm bone. Nice
    • But whats possibly even scarier then any zombie is the people caught in between. There's murders, sociopaths, and deprived people in general all over the island.
  • The sewers. Tight hallways and murky water lurking with zombies just waiting to pounce on you. There are also zombies there that just happen to shoot acid at you.
  • Morseby in general.


The Darkness[]

  • The Darkness. Some highlights:
    • The first time you hear The Darkness unexpectedly start talking to you in what, up to that point, seemed for all intents and purposes like a mob shooter game.
    • The one love of your life getting her head splattered onto the floor in front of you while The Darkness holds you helpless at the window to watch.
      • "Aw... what did they do, Jackie? What did they do to Jenny?" evil giggle
    • The patchwork WWI soldiers in the Hell levels. The sad, stoic way most of them stood around, seeming to understand and accept their fates — except for the few who had gone completely mad muttering insanities to themselves and you. It got even worse for me when I thought about how you'd probably need three or four soldiers from the actual war to have enough pieces left over to make just one of these guys...
    • The German ...things ...in the Hell levels. Not quite human, not quite animal, not quite demon, just...not right.
    • Everything about the Hell levels is intended to be twisted only just far enough from normal, into Nightmare Fuel territory, to crawl right up your spine and into your hindbrain and sit there waiting for you to recognize something familiar, only to realize there is something horribly wrong with it.
      • The Hills section of the Hell levels in particular... among other things, you have to deal with shots coming from seemingly nowhere, the seemingly endless advance of the German things... Oh, and the random flashes of lightning that randomly displace you, usually with three or four of the Germans right behind you. Add to this the endless mist that obscures everything beyond five yards or so... * shivers*
      • All of the Hell levels were pretty bad, but the image of the starving horse as Famine is one of the worst.
    • Mike Patton voicing The Darkness being Crazy Awesome and Nightmare Fuel at the same time. The fact that he did the performance without any post-processing makes it all the more eerie to imagine a person could actually sound like that.
      • "Stay away, Jackie..." "REMEMBER! PAST! Present. future"
      • His voice varies from a demonic claws-on-blackboard screech to satanic rumbling to a raspy whisper to thick tarlike bubbling, usually transitioning between one word and another in the same sentence and nothing he says isn't creepy in some way...


Demon's Souls[]

  • The Tower of Latria is terrifying.
    • The Prison of Hope is guarded by eerie, octopus-headed people ringing bells. They kill you by first stunning you, then leisurely pacing over to you and sucking out your brains while you get to watch. The inmates are all insane - at best, they gibber annoyingly and get in the way, at worst, they try to kill you if you let them out. One careless step can send you into the abyss. Oh, and there's a ball of mashed-together corpses on the first floor.
    • The Tower City is almost worse - first, you walk in constant fear of falling off the crumbling towers into the blackness below, but if you keep your eyes on where you put your feet, you won't spot the black gargoyles against the black-green spiderwebbed sky as they swoop down towards you. The enormous, beating heart in the central tower doesn't help the ambience at all. Then, you find a cage-lift to the ground, and you'd celebrate except you're now knee-deep in a swamp of blood with enormous tentacles reaching out of it and it's full of giant, poison-spewing centipedes that try to kill you. Giant poison-spewing centipedes with several screaming human faces each, naturally.
  • The Valley of Defilement's first boss, the Leechmonger, has a ranged attack. What is it you ask? A bunch of leeches being thrown at you! Even after the attack, you get to see your character covered in them! Gross.
  • The entire premise and backstory of Demon's Souls could count. Fighting off extremely powerful demons that devour people's souls, leaving them as insane husks? The fact that there is no god, and hence, if you die, your soul is left behind, laying there until either the PC picks it up, or a demon eats it? How about how Boletaria (the setting's kingdom) is being devoured by a colorless fog that continues to slowly and inexorably spread until it covers the world, filling it with demons? Hell, even some of the AREAS are HONF. Case in point...
    • The Valley of Defilement. A plague swamp filled to the brim with trash, filth, and aborted fucking fetuses that swarm you whenever you go into the water. People used to live here. These were the lost and the luckless souls. Take a guess why. As it stands, when the demons arrive there, courtesy of Maiden Astraea, conditions actually improve, because someone finally gives a damn about the soulless within.
    • Stonefang Tunnel/Mine. Your average mine, right? Wrong. Demons are here, too. They've eaten the souls of the workers inside; however, because none of them no a life beyond mining and smelting, they continue to do their jobs unless either you or one of them decides to pick a fight. Even being in the area for a long period of time seems to have altered them: they're growing scales, for chrissakes. The reason for the plentiful ore here is because the bones of dragons rest here, including the Dragon God, who they worshiped but apparently expected to come back to life, given they created a sword and a pair of ballista to pin the bastard down. The beginning level of this place will make arachnophobes squeamish; the first boss is a literal Demonic Spider.
    • The Tower of Latria was mentioned above, but not it's backstory. Apparently, the tower used to be a place of learning, lead by a king and a queen. The queen exiled her husband, who later returned as the Old Monk, and filled the place with demons, likely killing his wife. The new leader, the Old Monk, lies to the prisoners by offering them a false idol to worship. Said idol is a demon. Apparently, the Old Monk has also become an Eldritch Abomination, because his feaking heart can be seen clinging to the tower.
  • In short: Thank you for sleepless nights in abundance, From Software.


Gears of War[]

  • Berserkers. A 12 foot armour plated killing machine that makes a high pitched scream as it charges? And its totally blind so it has to smegging sniff you out? And sometimes you have to lure it towards you by shooting it, and watching the bullets bounce off, only for it to shriek towards you once more, and then diving just out of the way so she (yes, she) smashes a door down or something. Then you have to run past her through a tiny gap, while she flails wildly in all directions.
    • You think the NORMAL Berserkers are bad, wait until you see the Lambent Berserker in Gears of War 3. Picture it, you just saved Anya and Sam from being overrun by Lambent Locusts. As you make your way back to the fort, you see a rather large Lambent stalk appear in front of you. Then, it pops out screaming and instantly killing the COG in front of it before tossing the jeep in your direction. Surely the Hammer of Dawn can kill this thing right? So you make your way back inside the fort and watch it get nuked via satellite... only to find out that IT SURVIVED AND IS VERY PISSED OFF. Oh Crap indeed.
  • The Kryll. Don't leave the light.
  • Gears 2 has the New Hope Outpost. It can be...jarring, to say the least, to be playing Gears of War and suddenly walk right into something out of Resident Evil. The old, decaying research facility is creepy enough, but then you reach the basement, and there are things in giant stasis tubes, and when you throw a lever to access the facility's computer, it trips some sort of failsafe on the tubes, and they start waking up...
Cquote1

Niles: "I would begin exiting the facility if I were you."

Cquote2
  • The first time you meet Lambent Humans in Gears of War 3. Marcus and Anya are in the sewers under the town of Mercy, and they spot a woman huddling in a corner, crying for some reason. They get closer, and Marcus asks if the woman's okay, and every viewer knows damn well what's about to happen, but somehow it's still chilling. Marcus reaches out to touch her, and the woman whips around to face him, and in that instant we see that not only is her flesh practically liquefying, but that horrible lambent light is shining out of her mouth and the gaping holes where her eyes should be. And she screams as she rushes at you. Anya shouts that the woman isn't human anymore and that Marcus should just open fire, but most players won't need any encouragement to gun that thing down.
    • The entire lead-up to that moment is more and more unnerving. Marcus, Dom and Company are clueless about what's going on, but to most every viewer, the signs of the Zombie Apocalypse will be all too clear: the seemingly abandoned town, the crazed survivor shouting about some kind of disease, the locked doors with giant red X's painted on them, and the fact that those doors are barricaded from the outside...
  • Leviathans, and not just the Lambent ones either. Imagine the shark from Jaws, but 3 times bigger with massive teeth.
    • Leviathans also have pretty creepy eyes, either the pure blue Vampyroteuthis eyes, or the Lambent Leviathan's Glowing Eyes of Doom.
  • The final boss of Gears of War 2.A Brumak gets overdosed on Imulsion and when it mutates its head violently deforms, with a second head bursting from its mouth, which is followed by the creature going berserk and growing tentacles from its body.


God Of War[]

  • You'd think that running around as pretty much gaming's ultimate badass, who stumbles upon CMOA's with every step, and hacked his way out of hell three times, would excuse one from this. You'd be dead wrong. Ares decides to mindrape Kratos by having him fall to the same church where he slaughtered his family....with them still alive in it, and pale(r) copies of Kratos emerging from holes in the ground to do them in. Fighting against these true monsters as they seem to spawn endlessly, your family screaming in terror, the numbers overwhelming you as the church begins to break apart in the void.....until the end, when after you have defended them to your last, your chains are ripped from your body, and used to kill them anyway.
  • The hydra's roar in the first game. Jesus Christ.
  • Clotho - the Fate who spins the threads of life - from God Of War II is creepy. For one thing, her lair is dark and ominous, as opposed to the rest of the Temple of the Fates, which is bright and majestic. Plus, her lair is strewn about with threads in a way that is reminiscent of cobwebs. As for Clotho herself, she's so massive she even makes Jabba the Hutt look like Calista Flockheart, and her skin is a sickly dark gray and zombie-like. To top it all off, she has multiple breasts and spindly little arms sticking out of her body. And last but not least, there's that little speech she makes when you first see her: "It is through my threads that all life is born. You must not tamper with destiny, Kratos. You will destroy everything!" Kratos may not be afraid of anything, but we're not so lucky.
    • Hell, let's talk about the first God Of War - in order to proceed, Kratos must "escort" a trapped, live, innocent soldier to a room, where he is sacrificed (i.e. crushed between spiked plates) to open a door, which is bad enough, in and of itself.
      • Squashed? You must have got the censored version. We yanks got to burn him alive.
  • Kratos himself. That this single petulant, Psychopathic Manchild is willing to essentially destroy reality itself purely in a fit of pique is bad enough. The cruelties he inflicts on innocents and monsters alike are the stuff of nightmares. That you have to play him is worse.
  • Ghost Of Sparta give us Scylla: Let's see: a giant part-shark part-squid part-narwhal part-crab monster which lurks in the water and has a penchant for sneak attacks and will chase Kratos even in an active volcano to kill him. The part where you fall into the water and the first thing you see is this giant monster rushing towards you with gaping maws open is quite scary.
  • Hades. Both the character in GOW 3 and the place itself in the first game: navigate through platforms made of flesh, bones and blood....


R-Type[]

  • In R-Type Final, one ending features the player's ship being posessed and turned into a hideous organic blob by the Bydo. You proceed to fight your former comrades, with the final words of the game stating your pilot never even realised what had happened. "Why are the seabirds the only ones happy to see me on this beautiful summer night?" - Recovered Voice Recorder
    • Funny thing about that: When you start the first stage, that weird thing that goes zooming past you? That's your future self mentioned above.
  • R-Type Delta's final stage: the background is a constantly shifting mirage of all of humanity's accomplishments, fading away as though they are nothing. The enemies include giant sperm, blue-skinned, red-eyed babies encased in crystals (complete with a baby-like cry when they appear on screen * shudder* ), and giant regenerating strands of DNA. All with a very creepy vocal track. And if you're playing as the R-13? You get stuck in this nightmarish dimension and are forcibly transformed into a Bydo! Only to be killed later in Stage 3.5 of R-Type Final. Somehow the stage manages to be worse than the actual nightmare the pilot has earlier (Stage 5).
  • Part of that stage is copied from the final scenes of Akira. This is not a good sign.
  • For that matter, the origin of the Bydo: the games' story makes it clear that future humanity made them, which is bad enough, but if you examine the supplementary material, it reveals that the Bydo are human! More specifically, they are what humanity would become if reduced to its most base and evil instincts and left alone to fester and evolve for millenia. They are actually physically incapable of feeling any kind of positive emotion. Future humanity engineered them that way deliberately!


Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri[]

  • Try Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. What can be scary with a Civilization-style 4X strategy game, you ask? Watch the cinematics for, say, Self-Aware Colony or Dream Twister Secret Projects.
  • And, though in a slightly different vein, The Cloning Vats. An almost cheerful description of how society will profit from thousands of clones of people who are the best at what they do - combined with video footage of chick sexers at work, ending in a shot showing several cute little baby chickens going down something that resembles a drain. Yeesh.
  • Also, Clinical Immortality. It's a Brain In a Jar, but with a spine and eyes, all to a Bible quote.
  • Not to mention all the graphic descriptions of what mind worms do to people.
    • My personal favorite.
    • ?"Richard Baxton piloted his Recon Rover into a fungal vortex and held off four waves of mind worms, saving an entire colony. We immediately purchased his identity manifests and repackaged him into the Recon Rover Rick character with a multi-tiered media campaign: televids, touchbooks, holos, psi-tours—the works. People need heroes. They don't need to know how he died clawing his eyes out, screaming for mercy. The real story would just hurt sales, and dampen the spirits of our customers." Mythology for Profit, Morgan Stellartots Keynote Speech
  • We must dissent...


Starcraft[]

  • Everyone agrees that the Zerg were pretty messed-up. But the Infested Kerrigan may have been pushing it, especially in her introductory cutscene. Similarly, a few cutscenes of Terran characters being killed by the Zerg were like something out of a B-Movie, only scary. Complete with Southern accents.
  • "I love you, Sarge!"
  • Or the way the ghost is right before he blows up the Amerigo. And Infested Kerrigan? How about the regular infested terrans? There's almost nothing left of their humanity, and the do enough damage to kill any unit with their suicide attack. Specifically the point in the campaign where a marine asks, "Do you hear that?" and then one pops up right in front of you.
  • It gets worse in the sequel. Better graphics mean more opportunities to give the Zerg stuff like sacs and pustules and tentacles and so forth. There's even a series of missions involving helping a group of colonists from a Zerg assault and infestation. The second mission alternates, every five minutes or so, between day and night. During the day, you run around blowing up creepy-looking but inert infested structures. At night, the former colonists come out and try their level best to eat you and your troops. Worse, if you choose the "bad ending" mission, the colonial leader succumbs to an infestation and tries to kill Raynor, in a lovingly-rendered cutscene. Thank you, Blizzard, for that charming image...
  • The Dark Voice and his Hybrids, and what will happen if Kerrigan is killed. Even the Overmind was scared of this thing.
  • The Hydralisks, in-story. Sure, the main heroes tear through them like nothing, but imagine being a regular marine - or worse, a non-armored person, dealing with these guys. Armed with blades/claws (depending on which game) that are driven by huge shoulder muscles and can punch through heavy armor, and also possessing armor-piercing projectile spikes and a wicked set of jaws. They're ambush predators, so you never know when one is gonna pop up from literally underneath you and rip you apart. And according to official data, Hydralisks are not only smart (by Zerg standards), they're sadistic. StarCraft II cinematics give three more reasons to fear them. First, those projectile spikes can punch through 2 centimeters of reinforced steel and are tipped with a powerful venom; one guy got spiked in the arm, and had to have the arm amputated to survive. Second, they hunt in packs, meaning that where there's one, there's generally at least two more. Lastly, they're huge; at full "height", they stand about 3 meters (around 10 feet) tall. Imagine one of these guys towering over you, ready to ram its claws through your chest and/or skull after it's done toying with you.
    • To add some Body Horror or fuel to this, the backstory says that Hydralisks were originally peaceful herbivores before the Zerg Swarm conquered their home planet.


Twisted Metal[]

  • Though everyone in this series will end as Nightmare Fuel eventually, in Black the following people are true high octane:
    • Needles Kane, No Face, Bloody Mary, Cage, Charlie Kane, Billy Ray
      • Of the list, debatably the creepiest is Cage. The man's ambition? To be the greatest killer the world has ever known. But what does he want from Calypso? Brain surgery to remove that part of him that feels sad whenever he kills. Calypso's feeling generous, so he throws in something extra for a man with a butchered brain - his hands replaced with metal razors and blades.
      • Some thoughts about Charlie Kane: First of all, he's a reanimated corpse. No, not a zombie; he's very much dead, but his body is being controlled by his savant son. This is disturbing enough on its own, but then the game presents you with very Uncanny Valley-laden close-ups of Charlie's corpse when you look at his character info, as well as in every single loading screen. It's all incredibly unsettling.
  • Calypso in the 2012 version of the game. In other games, he gets his powers from a demon. In this one, he's the DEVIL. That painting in his office is utterly chilling.


Wax Works[]

  • Wax Works. Fucking Wax Works. It's a first-person point and click adventure game (that's almost identical to the Elvira Games, which also deserve a place here) that has you traveling back in time to different levels such as an Egyptian pyramid, Jack the Ripper-era London, a zombie-filled graveyard, and perhaps the worst, a mineshaft filled with plant mutants. What makes the game so scary? The death scenes, which are sterling examples of The Many Deaths of You and Have a Nice Death. It's strongly advised that you don't watch this video while you're eating. Just look at one of the zombie deaths, which sees you disemboweled Romero-style, or the "tongue mutant" death in the mines, which covers your face with disgusting boils. Or the vampire, who probably eats Cullens for breakfast.
      • And now for some irony: this was the last game made by Horrorsoft, which later became known as... Adventure Soft. That's right, the same guys who made Simon the Sorcerer!
      • But seriously, under no circumstances should you ever click this link and buy your own DRM-free copy of Wax Works for the low, low price of only $5.99 USD. Seriously, never do that.
  • This can happen in pretty much any shooter, but is especially prevalent in horror/survival First Person Shooters. My HONF is when you find yourself in a situation where you are required to go down a long series of rooms and corridors to grab the Macguffin or flip the magic switch, and then have to go back the way you came. Suddenly, the entire area you just spent making safe for yourself has become a giant mousetrap, ready to spring on you at any time, from any direction!
  • Sledge's Safehouse in Borderlands is extremely disturbing the first time around. "THEY GOT ME" written in blood on the walls, presumably written by the victims in their own blood at the command of their captors, bodies chained up all over an strung up like chandeliers leaking pools of blood, huge blood splatter everywhere (but not so much that it becomes Narm, sadly) bodies stuck to the walls and ceilings via steel rods jammed through their eyes, a room with an armless body along with several dismembered appendages and a body stuck up on the ceiling, a small 'colosseum' where victims were presumably forced to fight the cannibalistic 'Psychos' for sport, and on and on. In many cases, fresh blood still drips down from strung up bodies.
    • Another area near Patricia Tannis's place has a body held out over the edge of a cliff by two rods. He's tied by his neck to the top and by his feet to the bottom, plenty of rope between his body and the rods, and with a brace on his neck so he doesn't actually suffocate. When you go up there, you find three bodies impaled on steel pipes to a wall, with dart boards visible behind them, and barrels under them to collect the blood. One barrel is on fire. So you go to the strung up man, and as you do, a flock of Rakks attack you. So apparently the man was put there to be fed on alive.
    • In Crom's Canyon, you will occasionally see natural bridges of earth connecting the two sides of the canyon. Several people can be seen hanging by their necks from them, hands bound behind their backs. One of them was on fire.
  • Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions brings us the Vulture. And not the usual gree-bird suit Vulture, his cannibalistic Noir counterpart. He ate an old man!
  • In almost every single Contra game. Cities being blown up, Womb Levels, and more.
  • The arcade Shoot'Em Up Chiller was released by Exidy in 1986, but it's still hellishly disturbing even by contemporary standards. Most of your "enemies" consist of helpless people chained to walls and various torture devices, and you're expected to messily shoot the flesh off their bones and activate the devices they're trapped in before you can proceed. What's more, there's no established plot, and the few enemies who actually are appropriately ghoulish don't do anything to hurt you; you're just there to massacre stuff. The most disturbing part of all is that a quick overview of Exidy's other titles shows them to be fairly innocuous and bloodless light gun shooters following different themes such as medieval, western, military and police (a Klansman does show up in the game Crackshot, but it's not all that objectionable since he's a target). Evidently, a boss at Exidy asked his staff to make a Horror-themed game to add to the lineup, and THIS is what they came back with.
    • Can you believe someone actually ported that to NES of all places, too? Total funny aneurysm moment right there. The only other game that might scare someone would be Dr. Chaos, which is a heck of a mindscrew, gameplay wise. Friday the 13th is mostly startle-scare, but Chaos has the atmosphere of a mad scientist film going for it too!
    • Dr. Chaos is no slouch when it comes to jump scares, either; it's quite startling to have a freakish monstrosity pop out at you during a 1st-person segment and then chase you out into the halls.
  • The worst ending of Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories. The fact that you don't see what is going on arguably makes it all that much worse.
  • The legendary Demon Path of Soul Nomad. The Demon Path starts with murdering everyone in your home village, including a young mother and her husband, though Danette and Lady Lanya survive. After every battle, a not-being-redeemed-in-the-slightest Gig possesses your body for some multiple of eleven days, likely increasing the bloodshed. As the story progresses, everyone you forcibly conscript into your army goes bats**t insane, with the chivalrous Thorndyke becoming a Blood Knight considered one of the saddest changes. When you finally meet Trish, she's a Broken Bird, implied to be because Hawthorne already raped her by then. And she dies a few chapters later, breaking her sister's spirit completely. When you get the two angels on your team, the chapter ends with killing the young one before his grandmother's eyes, and then murdering the granny. You can get Laharl a tad miffed if you consider having the same title that he does. By the end of it all, Lobo of all people refuses to work for you any longer, every other Complete Monster in the game has joined forces with the surviving protagonists to take you down, and winning the final battle leads to you devouring Gig's soul and completely annihilating both Haephnes and Drazil. And Revya's motivation for doing all this? Probably the same reason the player picked this path: because it seemed fun.
  • A sequence a little under halfway into the otherwise-amusing BloodRayne, when the zombie body-possessing monsters are about to be introduced. You've spent all this time fighting through a Nazi stronghold, and suddenly there is nobody. Anywhere. Nobody shooting. All there is is a freakish, disembodied voice mocking you. Even Rayne gets a little creeped out. And then you find corpses...that start rising. And then their heads pop off. (It didn't help that the enemies were pains in the backside to actually kill...)
  • Most of the Reservoir Dogs game is Nightmare Fuel of some kind... if it isn't the cops begging you not to kill them, it's the grim inevitability of 5 out of 6 main characters' deaths, or your ability to cut off hostages' fingers. However, what really qualifies for Nightmare Fuel is Mr Brown's driving level. There's something about playing out what you know to be the last few minutes of life of a man who's just been shot in the head, and add that to the fact that the screen keeps getting splattered with blood, your vision is going, and the wonderful actor playing Brown launching into a 'So, Like a Virgin'-esque speech with a voice that obviously knows what's coming, and you get something that may or not be more disturbing than any of the violence in the movie.
  • Gauntlet (1985 video game): Dark Legacy runs on this. Special mention goes to the Lich.
  • The monsters from the original Shadow Hearts. Extremely disturbing - instead of the usual "giant whatever, robots and ninjas" trifecta of japanese RPGs, the Shadow Hearts' ones were usually made up of human body parts re-arranged in a variety of unpleasant ways, and/or moving in very jarring ways... The following games were lighter in that regard (although the giant spider with fingers for legs from SH2 still Squicks the hell out of me). Shadow Hearts 2 however had a spell that caused a cockroach tsunami, in first person view, that culminated in bugs seemingly crawling on the TV's actual screen, underside facing the player. If you suffer from insectophobia, you'll likely throw the controller down and roll into a ball the first time it's used on you out of the blue.
    • The bad ending of Shadow Hearts From the New World (don't max out all of Shania's fetishes, inculding the optional fusion), nuff said.
  • The mission 'Powder Keg' in Ace Combat 5 The Unsung War. The vast majority of spoken dialogue is from the mission's target, a massive underground weapon storage facility, and makes no attempt whatsoever to play down just how horrible it is for the fire crews inside. While you're playing the guy bombing it.
    • Meanwhile, most of the rest of the spoken dialog is from the other members of your squadron, who by this point seem to be suffering from varying degrees of battle fatigue. You get the feeling that if they live they'll wind up as Shell Shocked Seniors, although as of the final mission they're still perfectly combat capable.
    • In Ace Combat Zero, Mission 12 seems like just another bomber intercept mission, albeit this time the bombers are carrying nuclear ordnance. At first success looks like success, all bombers shot down without any nuclear devices initiating... but then there's a flash in the distance, the screen goes white...
    • The story scene that would follow that mission depicted an act of malevolence that would break any hardened gamer's psyche.
      • If you played Ace Combat 5 and happen to remember the dates of the seven nuclear detonations, loading the mission and seeing "June 6th, 1995" will send a chill down your spine.
      • Mission 11 (also known as Operation Cannibal), where you are helping Allied forces destroy/secure a Belkan Industrial center via providing escort for bombers that pretty much carpet bombing the entire place. Keeping in mind that you are literally HELPING cause the deaths of untold military personnel and civilians, the first time I played that mission I gradually went from a "kill'em all" attitude to a "Dear God, what am I doing?" to finally having nightmares about being on the receiving end of said mission.
    • Also in Ace Combat 5, there are the missions where you encounter the Scinfaxi. First, it manages to destroy two aircraft carriers and most of the Osean fleet. Then, you fight it again during the invasion of Sand Island. You kill it there, but hearing Kei screaming over the radio "Climb you Nuggets! Climb!" and the rest of your wingmen screaming in much the same way, then hearing the screams of terror and anguish as the nuggets fail to do so...
  • Don't let any of your HERCs die in Mission Force Cyber Storm, or you're going to be treated to a closeup of the hapless BioDerm (artificially created human) pilot's face melting away until only a charred husk of a skull is left, accompanied by a tortured scream of pure agony. Fortunately, you can turn both features off in the options.
    • The same thing happens if you die in Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri. Not a pretty sight.
    • Firsthand horror of your bioderms dying and in Cyberstorm, there are robots you can use as pilots eventually to migitate the nightmare fuel, but given that they are nothing more than elaborate brain in a jar still pose problems
    • T-Mek, an arena tank combat game, has similar nightmare fuel moments. When you destroy an enemy tank, the minimap is replaced with an in cockpit view of your opponent's pilot getting chunks of flesh blasted off, leaving a charred, meaty skeleton.
  • Quite a few of the monsters in The Witcher qualify, especially the godawful Arachno-like Kikimores, and not only the big ones and the Queen (which is understood), but even the little ones, springing from underneath the ground and sneaking upon you with that nasty hissing sound in the deserted streets of Vizima by night. They can make you dread the moment you have to come back to the swamps. And then there was their lair...
  • The XIII game shows a bunch of mooks building a snowman in one level. I dispatched the mooks and walked over to the snowman for a closer look, to discover he could use the "action button" on it's head. With a terrifying musical sting, it reveals the corpse of an innocent backpacker with a final look of anguish frozen on his face.
  • No More Heroes: The cutscene and fight for the #2 assassin, Bad Girl. Of course, most of the game's schtick is switching between lighthearted parody and Nightmare Fuel moments.
    • There's also the time that the #4 assassin Gets his eye sliced off, cries because he's scared of the dark, and his "assistants" tie him to a crucifix and cut him in half with a giant circular saw blade. And everyone starts applauding, despite the fact that no one is in there.
    • The Sequel ramps it up about 13 notches. Matt Helms... A distorted Uncanny Valley baby face mask stuck in the most horrifying innocent smile on top of a fat as shit body carrying a FLAMETHROWER BATTLEAXE and the most chilling childlike laugh. Like Pyramid Head dressed up as Hello Kitty. That laughter will forever haunt my dreams. Not to mention the entire stage building up to his battle slowly gets darker until you're at Camp Crystal Lake: Silent Hill branch.
    • The housing complex where you fight Alice can be a little creepy if you look at it certain ways. It's basically a New York-looking apartment complex, but there's no music for most of it just a creepy wind. Then you enter the dark, run-down apartment building with broken down hallways and eerie inaccessible areas that trail off into pitch blackness. Then the last leg has an unusually serene, lost-sounding music.
      • And when you finally get to fight Alice, there's the battle theme (starts at 4:19), where a good chunk of the piece is accompanied by an ominous sounding synthesizer.
  • The "Freak Show" level in the light-gun arcade game Carn Evil. The whole game is supposed to be NSFW, taking place in a Circus of Fear, but this particular level features as enemies flies and maggots with human faces, twin brothers attached at the waist that laugh when shot to death, severely tortured and possibly brainwashed sadomasochists, and the rotting corpse of a "bearded woman" (which is infested with said human-faced maggots). There's also set pieces like a "fly trap" whose floor collapses to reveal lumps of rotting flesh under it, and a torture hall with some machinery smashing corpses to goo and putting them in giant cereal bowls. This doesn't compare though to the horrific boss fight with Junior, a gigantic Frankenstein's Monster baby that chases you around a huge baby cage/arena, complete with giant toys, while a very eerie version of "Pop Goes the Weasel" plays. The only way to kill him is to electrify him and reduce him to a huge pile of ashes. Check out by yourself, if you dare. Hell, Midway eventually released a version that added the option to replace Junior with a slightly less scary teddy bear monster named Deaddy.
    • Less scary? He's a giant teddy bear, but he still has Junior's baby sounds, instead of something that actually fits him.
    • And even the mooks are drop-dead horrifying, continuing to smile their frozen, goofy grins even after you've blown half their heads off and severed their limbs. The flying clown head spouting gory rhymes doesn't help either.
  • Phantasmagoria. Adrianne Delaney and her husband Don move into an ancient mansion previously owned by a famous magician, and Don ends up possessed by a demon that drove the previous owner to murder his wives in various grotesque ways. The Game Over scene shows Adrianne getting strapped to a chair and gruesomely cut in half by a bladed pendulum.
    • Regina's death is decidedly the most visceral. The godawful acting doesn't detract much from the mental image of having your throat literally filled with rotting meat until you strangle on it.
    • Phantasmagoria 2 also deserves a mention. Though the sex and violence is about as much as you'd expect to see on a late night Skinemax horror (and as much bad acting,) it did have some hella creepy moments. Even the good endings were pretty chilling.
  • Fahrenheit (2005 video game), known to our American friends as Indigo Prophecy, might not be a game for children, but it has a few instances of nightmare fuel. The opening sequence, for one, is a character murdering someone for no reason because of a dark ritual and having to hide the body and escape the scene without being caught. The most nightmareiffic part, though, involves a claustrophobic police officer having to go to an insane asylum to interrogate a madman. Not only does he reside in a room with arcane symbols scribbled all over the place, he reveals some of the creepier parts of the plot. And then... a power outage. So, being claustrophobic, you must navigate from the deep part of the asylum back to the lobby. In almost total darkness. While regulating your breathing. And dodging the madmen who were released by the outage. if you fail to regulate your breathing or run into one of those deranged inmates... Well, I'll just leave it to your imagination what happens to the lovely female police officer.
    • The best part of the entire game falls under this. The police have finally tracked down Lucas, and following a tense build-up they break into his apartment. And then, for the first time since you began playing the game, the thought crosses your mind that the hero, the main character that you've been helping evade the police and prove his innocence, might actually be crazy... because his apartment- normal up to this point- is like a scene from a Lovecraftian nightmare. (Of course, later you find out it was all a set-up. But hey, had you going for a moment there, huh? Huh?)
  • The entire game I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. The title should give you some idea.
  • For that matter, although The 11th Hour was overall disappointing, it had some fuelish moments in its own right.
    • The Marie ending.
    • "How about...a Chuck roast?" (The capitalization there is not a typo).
    • How about a freaking tiger advancing on Robin during a cutscene?
    • How about a flashback wherein Marie's mother, Eileen, is running away from Stauf's mansion, gets her hand stuck between the bars of the locked gate...and she screams bloody murder while the gate eats her hand clean off? I am dead fucking serious.
      • Or slightly later in that video where Eileen is at the doctors screaming, and raises her arm, you can see the ragged stump, with twitching bits of sinew/muscle and blood running out the artery. After the first time, I always had to turn away during that part.
  • The Hidden: Source, a Half Life multiplayer mod. All but one of the players are part of a SWAT-ish team hunting down an knife-wielding escaped fugitive. Unfortunately, some questionable experiments have given Subject 617 superhuman speed, strength, and senses, along with the ability to cling to walls, leap down hallways, see people's auras through solid matter, and feed on human flesh. Oh, and he's practically invisible. There's nothing like wandering alone through a derelict apartment building at night, rounding a corner to find the rest of your squad hanging from the ceiling like slaughtered cattle, before a voice directly behind you hisses "Turn around..." Whoever's playing as The Hidden is given in-game voice taunts purely to scare the beejesus out of the opposing team, to the extent that some players will snap and start firing wildly at the slightest hint of noise or movement...or else crawl into a corner and hide.
  • Grand Theft Auto IV has the abandoned Sprunk Factory; a moan heard occasionally when you fire your gun gave rise to rumors of the place being inhabited by a ghost. Even though the moan is most likely one of the hobos inhabiting the place, I am still afraid to go in there at night.
    • The building across the street from the Bohan safehouse has to be one of the creepier places in Liberty City. It may be the weird writing on the walls, or the distinct lack of human life in there (since pretty much every other apartment in the game has people hanging around in the halls), or that you can even enter the building in the first place when there's seemingly no purpose for it. Whatever the reason, the deeper you explore into the building, the more you feel like you'd be safer with your assault rifle/shotgun/RPG out. Even though the building is completely vaccant, you may find yourself fearing that something is in there... and that your military-grade arsenel won't protect you this time. That's right, this building is the physical embodyment of Empty Room Psych.
    • There are a few other locations like this. The tall + shaped apartment block near where Elizabeta lives is many floors of empty corridors, and eventually the stairs are blocked off (there is another way up from this point, however.) Once you reach a certain floor you will be running for the roof, which luckily you can escape onto.
    • There's also a small bit of horror which might have been put in deliberately. Across the hallway from Dwayne's apartment there is another apartment you can go into if you have killed him. The walls are brown and cracked like in some of the drug dens, but what makes this one particularly creepy is if you go back into the bedroom, lying on the bed there is a framed photo of a police officer. The frame is cracked and this immediately makes you think not only was this police officer killed but they came after his family, who deserted their apartment...or worse.
    • Eddie Low, despite being easily killed (He's going up against a former soldier now "problem solver" who is likely already packing more than enough to handle a knife wielding maniac) was funny at some points (Such as when he's describing his fetishes, and he has a LOT of those, or his Hilariously Abusive Childhood) And absolutley horrifying at other points, such as when he has Niko take him to a place to drop off what is not so subtley implied to be the head of one of his victims, or when he decides he wants to hear some Algonquin screams tonight now that he's heard enough Alderney screams. The peak of the fear is reached when he's losing his temper just before he attacks Niko.
Cquote1

Eddie: Not COOL!? You say Eddie's not cool? I don't fit in with the "In-Crowd?" Well Mrs. Smith, Eddie's taken your star son, your prized little quarterback, and FUCKED HIM IN THE ASS, and then tied him up, strangled him into knots, and your daughter? Your pretty little daughter Mrs. Abrahams? Eddie's ripped out her intestines just to see if he could feel anything, and you know what? He couldn't! H-he couldn't!
Niko: ....You should get laid or something.

Eddie: Oh I just did, a little jogger down by the water. But you know what handsome? I've got a hunger tonight that can't be sated. COME HERE!

Cquote2
    • Time for a field trip to the Statue Of Happiness.
    • And then there is Jeff. At first it's pretty funny. Jeff's a man who thinks his wife is having an affair. Seems legit, until you actually follow her to her destination. Turns out, she just wants to talk to this guy about her husband, who wants to install a tracking chip at the base of her skull which may paralyze her. 'Course, the guy is only half listening and does want an affair. So, you take a picture, he rants and raves, job done and a couple of hundred dollars. Then Jeff calls you again. He's murdered her. Stabbed her "fifty fucking times" and is so crazed he nearly shoots her corpse. Then reveals that she and him have a son. It's hard not to feel like you had a hand in murdering this truly innocent woman.
  • Then we have Square Enix's recent venture, Nanashi no Game, with the exact premise of The Ring--except we have an NES-style RPG instead of videotape. And the game is played in first-person. And it's the first DS game with true 3D sound. (Read: you can hear shit happening behind you.) Oh, and Square recommends playing it with headphones, just to make the 3D sound even more realistic. Yeah, hell no. Not when the game's website is terrifying in and of itself. Not when that NES-style RPG asks you how pathetic you are for even trying to avoid your fate.
    • Then we have the sequel, Nanashi no Game Me. This clip is fairly innocuous, the scenery notwithstanding. Except the player fellow doesn't quite make that last jump. SPLAT.
  • The (sadly unfinished) Ghostbusters Doom Game Mod for Doom, which recreates scenes from the movie, fulfills this trope with its first level - the haunted library. After wandering around the dark, labirynthine, completely empty library you suddenly come across the ghost, who is standing motionlessly, with its back turned to you. But when you use your equipment on it... OH NO IT INSTANTLY TURNS INTO A SCREAMING TWITCHING THING AND A HEART ATTACK ENSUES Watch it here, if you dare.
    • And then three levels later, you have to investigate a haunted mansion, in the rain, with creepy music, and corpses everywhere, and holy crap the corpses are standing back up. And they take way too much punishment just to shoot off one of their arms - you have to deal just as much damage a second time to get one to stay dead.
  • Xenogears, also a Teen rated game, seemed to warrant a Mature rating; it gave plenty of warning to persons who caught the reference to the movie Film/Soylent Green (which would likely be lost on the T rating demographic), nevertheless, one scene in particular occurred in a green factory with a conveyor belt that had dead mutated people dropped on it that then went through giant grinders resembling sink garbage disposals that always frightened the editor, which spewed blood everywhere, then the gory bits that came out got smashed and sawed in more bloody ways until the next room where the bloody carnage came out as cans of food...this editor was right there with the main character freaking out and not sleeping that night despite being well above the age of 13! That the machinery was green to contrast sharply with the blood made it all the more grotesque. Several other details of the game relating to the mutated people were also quite frightening.
    • The first scene where we see the mysterious red mech in action Later revealed as being as Weltall-Id, to say that the sheer power and Hopeless Boss Fight at said time is terrifying is an understatement.
  • Cooking Breakfast 2, a Game Maker "game", which claims to be an "all time family classic" which is supposed to "learn [you] in seven steps to create your very own breakfast". The true nature of the "game" is something a bit different; to quote two reviewers, "Once you start the game this freaky-looking spinning evil face appears in front of a annoying black-white flashing background," "making a sound that sounds like a a chalkboard being scrapped by a grinder". And it has no exit feature; you have to turn it off via the task manager. If we are to believe the reviews, some people got seizures from this. It is suspected that this game is actually the author's revenge against people who gave his previous games bad reviews.
  • Terranigma for the SNES, especially the Castle in Spain, and its boss, "Bloody Mary". The creepy background music and the subverted nursery rhymes creeped the heck out of me. Not to mention that that boss is probably one of the hardest in the game, considering the relative strength the main character has when fighting her. The battle goes on interminably. Thinking about it, the truth about the main character and what happens to him after the game is beat...
  • In Guild Wars, the Madness Titans that make the sounds of pigs or babies squealing as they tear you and your party apart. That and the Dreadspawn Maw found in the Domain of Anguish, which looks like a giant vagina surrounded by teeth and claws that continually moves in and out.
    • Then there's the fact that your commanding officer/mentor-friend in Nightfall, Kormir, HAS HER EYES EATEN OUT by a demon fittingly named the Hunger. The same demon who, if you believe local rumors, has been devouring army recruits and hapless villagers left and right. Then there's the Realm of Torment in its entirety. Covered in fleshy walls, random teeth, and at one point you have to cross a bridge made by what seems to be the underbelly of a giant dead centipede. Most of the time, its deathly silent, only making the clicking noise of a giant Torment Claw bursting up behind you twice as terrifying. And the things the spirits trapped down there say...
      • "There's a song in the center of the earth, my friend, and it sounds like razors through flesh..."
  • Most of the scares in Elvira 2: Jaws of Cerberus are rather cheap. Some aren't.
    • The dining room in the haunted house. What's the main course? A head of a young woman. Which opens its eyes and smiles at you as blood oozes out from her mouth.
    • A bedroom where you're compelled to fall asleep after you enter. You then have a dream about a sexy woman... when you wake up, she's still there, only now she's a Nightmare Face-d monster (like a lamprey) who promptly kills you.
    • The deeper levels of the catacombs. They have traps which paralyze you, at which point you're helpless against the unending hordes of blue ghosts that suddenly fly out of the darkness and into the screen.
  • Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway for the Xbox 360 has an example of this, in the middle of the game, your character, Matt Baker will start to break down from the stress of war and begin to see things, this makes for very tense, atmospheric moments when you are searching the adandoned hospital for Franky
  • Cube's Scenario in Live a Live had the Behemoth (Even touching it is game over) the lights being turned down and the screeching of the Behemoth doesn't help much. Not to mention the ship will have a hand in trying to kill you, yes the very same ship that you are on has become sentient and is killing off the crew members.
    • That was creepy, but c'mon, the creepiest? No. That would be Akira's scenario. Let's just say it combines the most disturbing plot elements of Ghost in the Shell, Akira, and friggin' End of Evangelion. It's about as disturbing as 32-bit can get.
  • Duke Nukem 3D features naked women trapped in alien plant matter throughout the game, who mutter "Kill me" in a desperate tone when talked to; it's a bit creepy, but soon you get used to it.
    • The Assault Commander. "Suck it down!" "Boom!", Duke gets reduced to Ludicrous Gibs. An even scarier Demonic Spider is the Protector Drone. Horrific appearance and sound, moves like grease lightning and attacks with shrink rays.
    • Another Demonic Spider: the Protozoid Slimer. A Personal Space Invader which jumps at your face, blocking the screen and munching Duke's face. Add the fact that the first level they appear lack much lighting...
      • ^^^THIS x1000! Seriously, I have to look away every time a Slimer jumps on Duke's face; if I enter a level and see the eggs, I bust out the shotgun and get to sprayin' lead just so I don't have to see those damn slimers.
  • Samurai Shodown has some. The fatalities that can be performed can be truly horrific, such as Rasetsumaru's (he rips their heart out with his bare hands, then crushes it!!), Kusaregedo's (he drags them offscreen and then eats them while you hear screaming), Enja's (he dissolves them in a pillar of flame) and Jubei's (he quadrasects them!). The biggest one, however, would be Suija's: He knocks them down, then uses his telekinetic powers to lift them to a point above him. Then you see him close his hand into a fist, and hear a scream. As if it wasn't bad enough, he then leans back as blood rains all over him.
    • Suija's the worst? The aforementioned Kusageredo's one is pure Nausea Fuel. This tropette almost threw up upon seeing it the first time.
      • You ain't the only one. Dreams of an appropriate fatality on this...thing with the one ripped off arm wouldn't be surprising.
    • Some other gems include breaking a foe's arms, legs, and ribs before piledriving him skull-first into the pavement (Hanzou), burning a foe alive (Kyoushiro), and who could forget Basara, pulling the foe with them into a pit where we see blood and eventually the defeated foe's HEAD fly up from, cackling madly the entire time...
  • The Terrible Secret of Animal Crossing, the Let's Play of Animal Crossing. With such fun things as statues that slowly turn you into animals, and a woman luring kids to an abbandoned island so that she can take away their body parts and put them on her own body.
  • The white chamber. I stopped playing directly after your character faces the monster on the station rotation control. I came back for the second time, passed that part, but then was scared like hell with the eyeball in the extended hallway to the cradle. I stopped playing after that and convinced myself that I was NOT going to touch horror games anymore. Mind you, the duration between the 2 playthroughs was around a year or more.
    • Thankfully, there's only four actual ways to die (the mandatory one doesn't count), and all of them can only be done if you choose to get said endings, or if you're impossibly stupid.
    • The worst ending. As with the standard failure ending, you find yourself back in the coffin. Then disembodied hands reach out of the darkness towards you. The ending being still images instead of animated does not help.
  • Clive Barker's Jericho. Name an enemy. ANY enemy. Dear Jesus, I was only watching my friend play and was horrified at the level where you had to fight the ghosts of little children forced to march in a Crusade, only to be slaughtered horribly. Doesn't help the Nightmare Fuel level that there are no less than 5 of them attacking at once; likely around 10.
    • The WW 2 era was no better. For starters there's the Machinegunners, gigantic hulking zombies with a ghoulified face on their chest along with a skull(lower jaw offset by about a foot) and various glowing pustules, whih when you die to them(And you will, alot) resemble a huge skull through the blurry filter the game puts on before the game over screen. Furthermore, they have a gatling cannon instead of a left hand and their spine ends with a drum magazine where their head should have been, are smart enough to take cover and intelligently use their teleportation powers to flank and ambush you. Even worse are the flamethrowers, which are everything the machinegunners are but alot more pale and when their petrol tanks start leaking at catch fire, they charge at you. The worst part? There's petrol/oil leaking out of their empty eyesockets. All four of them.
  • Near the very end of Assassin's Creed when :you're out of the animus and you suddenly gain Altair's Eagle Vision, it is surprisingly disturbing when playing for the first time, and everything goes film negative, with glowing red symbols and cryptic passages scrawled all over the walls and floor. Especially when you realize what some of those symbols are.... This gets even more chilling, however, when you go into the bedroom and find phrases in quite readable English saying things like "I have entered the Abyss and never returned." Of course, this entire time these things have been written ABOVE YOUR BED, where you have been SLEEPING FOR THE LAST SEVERAL DAYS. Few things are scarier, in my opinion, than the sudden ability to see invisible things that were right next to you all along.
    • And then there are the implications that all the unusual writings are from the previous 'subject', who wrote them with his blood.
      • It gets worse once you figure out what the seemingly-random letters in the main room say. Specifically, the triangle: "THEY DRAINED MY SOUL AND MADE IT THEIRS I DRAINED MY BODY TO SHOW YOU WHERE I SAW IT"? GAH.
    • Even before that, when you go to confront Al Mualim. Hundreds—-HUNDREDS-—of brainwashed people telling you how wonderful Al Mualim is, all the while walking straight towards you. They don't attack you, they don't even chase you, they just... follow you. So subtle, so harmless, and yet so very, very creepy.
      • Which can also double a Fridge Brilliance, since what Al Mualim did with Masyaf is exactly what Abstergo plans to do with the whole planet. What better way to motivate the player to defeat the Templars than to give the player a taste of what to expect if the Templars win?
    • All of Altair's targets: powerhungry, ruthless and completly amorally people who are ready to take over the Holy Lands with any means possible. All of their first appearences have them Kick the Dog both brutally and terrifying, such as Garnier orders his guards to break a escaped "patient's" legs just to make sure he doesn't run away again, Abu'l poisoning his guests with poisoned wine and then lets his archers have their ways, Jubair burns one of his own followers to death because he criticed his bookburning. And then comes Majd Addin, a sadistic regent lord who personally executes "enemies of the state" for fun, Sibrand, a guy who has gone so insane with fear of death that he'll not just kill scholars on the open street but also tries to shoot birds because he thinks they're assassins as he's too insane to see the differences, Garnier's "hospital" and the "patients" inside, Talal's underground headquarter which's filled with kidnapped people begging you for help from their cages and you can't do nothing to help them. The actually scary part? They think they're doing good. They think they make a better world through their ways. They're too fanatical into their beliefs that they simply refuses to see that they actually make things worse than they are. Even when dying in Altair's arms they continues to claim they've done nothing wrong but dying too early to make any actual "difference".
    • The first thing you see in the game is a group of beautiful woman, following you very closely. They don't have faces. and neither does anyone in the marketplace that you are suddenly teleported to.
    • The Pieces of Eden often have horrific effects on their users. The Codex written by Altaïr vaguely hints at this by his flip-flopping between succumbing to the Apple's temptations and gifts of knowledge, and a reluctance to ever touch it again for fear of what it could do. The Shroud heals wounds... if it doesn't inflict Mind Rape or Body Horror on you (but both is more likely).
  • Assassin's Creed: Revelations: We finally get to see what did the First Civilization in. And while its visually awesome, seeing the explosion slowly engulfing a terrified mother and her baby alive will haunt you for weeks.
    • Also, the game introduces Templar stalkers who will mug and try to backstab you when you least expect it. Yeesh.
  • Legend of Mana first appears to be a bright and relatively pleasent game. And it is, for the most part. However, if you pay attention, the story and history of the world itself can be downright disturbing. One of the particularly bad parts is The Junkyard. It is littered in broken toys, some of which can speak. Either reading the books in your library or just guessing from their snippets of dialogue, these toys were given life ages ago to fight in a war. They now lie, broken and inanimate, but still alive. Then there is that the three main storylines deal with 1) Being enslaved by a damned dragon emporer to return him to life, 2) Dealing with a group of adventurers who lost a friend who did a horrific Face Heel Turn into a demon (with a dungeon in a colossal dragon skeleton), and 3) Tracking down a serial killing jewel thief (she steals the 'hearts' of Jumis, the most valued gems in existence. This kills the Jumis). Last but not least there is the implication that your need to rebuild the world is a side effect of some horrible cataclysam that brought the world as it was known to an end. That alot of this devastation lies alongside what is otherwise a pleasent and light game, only serves to enhance just how disturbing these moments are.
    • Let's not forget the Transformation Trauma that's defined the series since the first World of Mana game turned a girl into the World Tree. Whether it's being turned to stone for crying for the wrong person, being transformed into a mindless and violent monster for visiting the wrong snowy hills, or the slow drive into violent insanity and physical transformation of one partial demon, Legend of Mana meets your daily dose of vitamin Agggggggghhh!
  • Manhunt series. Even the somewhat-censored (to avoid an AO rating) second game.
    • Let's be specific. I found a small detail that creeped me out. In the mall, where you get to see TV with your famliy memebers there is a toilet. A mook jumps out at you from behind a door. But when I walked in I saw a man sitting on the toilet. He didn't move, and when i walked closer i realised that his head had a large hole in it, from a gunshot, probably.
  • The Bright in The Screen is a 2D flash game composed entirely of crudely drawn stick figures. It is also quite possibly one of the scariest games I have ever played, mostly because of the mysterious... entity... communicating with you through the screens. You can trust me. I'm a good person.
    • THIS SCREEN IS USELESS. BUT YOU WILL WATCH IT ANYWAYS. AND YOU WILL LIKE IT.
    • THESE ARE RED FREAKS. THEY CAN HARM YOU. You have to click to turn the red background white, in order to see the 'warning' and the 'freak,' which is shaking like a crack-addict and bashing its little stick-figure head against the wall.
  • SWAT 4, somewhat surprisingly, has two levels that manage to be insanely creepy despite the fact that you and your three squad mates are all armed to the teeth (but you are not supposedly shooting bad guys except at the easy difficulty). One is where you infiltrate a serial killer's house to rescue a hostage (who builds a dungeon to hold his hostages); the other is set in an apartment building that's been taken over by a doomsday cult. The latter is worse (even your teammates start getting freaked out) but the former hits a lot harder due to being so unexpected- it's the second level.
    • During the Let's Play by The Spoony One, he himself was so disgusted by what he found he contemplates just executing the arrestees. In the epilogue of the Doomsday Cult level, it's stated that after Commander Spoony stumbled upon some explosives, the building itself "Accidentally" blew up after the officers were evacuated.
  • The Interactive Fiction game Shade starts out innocuously enough: you're in your one-room apartment, getting ready for a trip. After a few routine tasks, however, the true horror begins creeping in. The All Just a Dream implication? Only a cruel Hope Spot. Upon replaying, it becomes even worse: you know what's going to happen, but you can't do anything to stop it.
    • Well, it doesn't help that the room I just played that in, this room, is almost exactly like that room. Complete with all of the items in it. Thanks a lot...
  • Considered the true father of the Survival Horror genre is Sweet Home, an RPG made by Capcom. It was only released in Japan (but thanks to the internet it's now available, translated), and there was a movie of the same name and plot released around the same time as it, making it hard to determine which came first. Aside from its history, it's one of the only RPGs where the death of any character is permanent, and for some reason the horror genre seems amplified on an 8-bit system.
    • The atmosphere doesn't get any better as the game goes along. For one thing, healing is limited in the game. Despite Random Encounters and most other RPG conventions, there are no inns to rest, and no healing items dropped by random creatures. Skeletons and eternally dying victims (torn in half) will talk (or, more accurately, scream) to you.
    • There is one moment of true horror that stands out. Just mention the incinerator in the basement to anybody who has played the game. You learn through the frescoes in the house that the matron of the mansion went insane after her baby died in the incinerator. She started killing other children to give her child a playmate. After making it through the basement where you find the skeletons of the children, you come to the room with the incinerator where it all started. Walking closer to it, you hear the child burning to death, screaming for mother.
    • Then there's Yamamura, the mysterious groundskeeper and your only other ally. When you approach Mamiya's room, you're repulsed by a barrier, and Yamamura steps in to help... and his skin melts off. Graphically.
  • Quake IV: Two words: Stroggification sequence. Wanna see?
  • Perhaps some of the most visually shocking terror comes from the game Parasite Eve. In this game, normal animals transform into ravenous beasts of war, usually by way of forcing their bodies out of their skin and splitting their skulls open. Add to this the fact that the enemy is actually a networked intelligence that has been dormant inside our own cells for millenia adds a second, far more cerebral type of horror to a game that's already likely to keep you awake for days.
    • No mention of the Ultimate Being? I mean good god.
    • The cutscene at the opera where everyone spontaneously combusts. That freaked me out, imagining being in that theatre.
    • Parasite Eve 2 took everything freaky in Parasite Eve and made it even worse. Let's start with the ANMC's You only catch a glimpse of the first one, in a room where an entire S.W.A.T team was ripped apart. When you finally run into your first one, it's in the final steps of murdering a S.W.A.T officer, who has had his arm ripped off and eye torn out. The thing attacking him looks like it has a human-like face twisted into a vaguely bird-like shape. Then you find out they can make themselves look like people. These S.W.A.T officers thought they were saving a group of terrified civilians, only for them to ambush them by transforming into monsters. The first time you see one do this little trick, you get the pleasure of seeing it in a lovingly detailed cinematic. From there, it just gets better.
  • The fountain in the Zack and Wiki level Bell Tower of Requim. It has a creepy girl's face, and when you ring the bell, its eyes spin open, its jaw drops, and it emits a horrible screech. Then a blood-like fluid pours out of the eyes and fills the fountain.
  • In the Drakan series, the Giant Spiders apparently take lessons in unnvering people from the Skulltullas in Oo T. Especially the part about the game being over-the-shoulder 3D so it being a good idea to blot out the screen with their ass with a sudden drop.
  • Survival Crisis Z starts off as a standard Zombie Apocalypse scenario in a Wide Open Sandbox Survival Horror game. Somehow, the more you progress the game, the worst thing you'll see...
    • Some of the noteworthy parts of the game include: demon children who attack you at randomly in the game (and whose mother you eventually have to kill) all the while the world flashes and becomes an asylum covered in messages from dying children written in blood. Evil forces that pull corpses together to make abominations. Banshees that can only be killed by destroying the corpses that tie their souls into the world (which are usually hidden far away from the banshees). Mysterious telephones suddenly appearing that drag you down to hell (think Silent Hill's otherworld) while the Big Bad tries to talk you into becoming a zombie. Sweet dreams!
  • The zombie levels in the Time Splitters series are making a good job in being scary... The third installment certainly top this by having not one, but two "regular" zombie levels which are already by far the most chilling the series ever had, but also by adding a "mutant outbreak" in a later stage. Oh, and the zombies have the annoying tendency of being silent when they creep at you in every installment.
    • While there are a couple sections in the Notre Dame Cathedral stage of the second game where flaming zombies rush you while your climbing a spiral staircase, the true terrors of that level are the changelings. You are rescuing beautiful young maidens when all of a sudden one attacks you, revealing a hideous face similar to that of a Spitter.
    • While we're on the subject of Time Splitters, in Time Splitters 3, the Haunted Mansion level scared the CRAP out of me and my friend. Both of us are semi Genre Savvy and as we were walking around one of the upper levels checking the rooms, I opened a door and said "We're not going in here", friend asked "why?" and I replied "Child's room." No more needed to be said.
      • Interestingly enough, this section is after a good 20 minutes of the level being genuinely terrifying to a degree. The section mentioned there? It's part of a very, very small section deliberately designed to invoke, what else, Nothing Is Scarier. You go into it expecting zombies to surprise you, cautiously search through a few rooms (finding a LOT of horror references), get confident that you're not in a dangerous area, so you go around opening cupboards and closest looking for health and ammo (there's quite a bit here).
      • At the end of that hallway, a zombie randomly bursts out of a cabinet for no apparent reason. Why was there a zombie hiding in that cabinet? Because there was.
    • The carrion carcass enemies. Mutilated cow zombies that look like they jumped off the hooks in a meat factory. In other words, they have no heads, and are sliced open vertically all the way down, with their innards removed. Made even worse in that one challenge has you facing an endless horde of them.
    • The Deerhaunter, a mounted deer head that breaks out of the wall on a skinless body with hooks for hands and starts attacking you.
    • There's nobody alive anywhere in the building. Made even worse in that one of your goals there is to find a specific corpse, and then use a machine apparently designed for the purpose to chop its head off. You then stick the head on a machine so you can ask it questions...
  • Penumbra: Overture drops you into an abandoned lead mine in Greenland with no weapons, no map, and nowhere to go but further underground. There are sounds coming from the darkness — insectile skittering, low growls, and occasionally, just at the edge of your hearing, human whispers — and your options for light are a glowstick, which never runs out but illuminates only a few feet ahead, or a flashlight that casts further but consumes batteries at an alarming rate. Even the game mechanics work against you: the combat system is so clumsy it's barely better than useless, and while it's not hard to hide from whatever might be stalking you, looking directly at it from under cover sends your character into a very conspicious panic attack. The sequel, Black Plague, solves the problem of awkward combat by removing it entirely, and adds heaping helpings of Body Horror and Enemy Within. Play with the lights on.
  • The medium sized spiders in Sacred. I usually love spiders, but something about them made me just stop playing the game. Right then.
  • Scratches pretty much runs on this.
  • Choking Hands from Blood. Scariest. Monster. Ever. Full stop. The buggers are little enough to be immune to bullet spam, appear suddenly from unexpected places, and when they choke you, you cannot do anything to them except try to pull them off (with your vision darkening, sounds of gasping and your health quickly going down). If you can fight them without getting the heebie-jeebies, you have nerves of steel. If you can kill one with a single pitchfork blow, you are utterly fearless (and really masterful in this game).
    • There's also the Bone Leech in the sequel, which is to this game what the facehugger is to Aliens Versus Predator. It gets worse when you see the Soul Drudges, Drudge Lords and Drudge Priests are the results of what happen to the victims.
    • Hell, there are several noises, visions and general stuff that manage to make the game pretty damn scary. Of note is the apparition on the window at the end of Rest For The Wicked, a ton of the shit in The Haunting (an eerily large, quiet and dark mansion with several vent holes of which both Spiders and Hands crawl out of, a hedgemaze way creepier than the one in The Shining, and secret passageways filled with Phantasms, and that's not to mention the slaughterhouse - the first building you find in the level and only access much later; it's full of hanging mutilated bodies, disturbingly well-placed blood, and Hands - and the goddamn basement). That, and the sense of foreboding you get in any silent level. Caleb is a wisecracking, cackling, Badass Villain Protagonist, but that doesn't really seep enough into some people to make these parts very tolerable.
  • Saya no Uta -This game features literal wall to wall guro the majority of the time, a tentacle monster that rather graphically kills and eats people, your protagonist can either go from wistful madman in an asylum (sad ending), heartbroken madman on a transformed earth where all humans have changed into tentacle monsters (sad ending), or killed in a horrifically graphic manner that just gets worse with the "censor filter" off (sad ending. Noticing a theme?). Oh yeah, did I also mention it's an H game with a loli-ish girl who can literally Mind Screw people? She's the tentacle monster.
    • And there's a couple songs from the soundtrack that stand out as Nightmare Fuel material. The first is "Scream", a loud, dissonant track. The second, "Scare Shadow", is only 16 seconds long, but easily instills a feeling of uneasiness in the listener.
    • You forgot about "Saya's Song", which is unnervingly eerie deep beneath its soundingly beautiful tongue - an ugly monster in the guise of a beauty, which is what Saya is.
  • UFO Aftermath. It opens with an image of people in a cinema...until it's abruptly revealed they're decaying corpses. Then you get to see some of the transgenant horrors in close-up (except the Car Crab, which is kinda cool). Then you get to play base attacks where you open a door and a balloon fish nukes your party, standard missions which feature horrific bloated Deathbellows monsters firing a Bee-Bee Gun with much the same result, and (should you be having bad luck with the storyline missions) the sight of a horrific carpet of abominable doom scouring your bases from existence as it coats the planet in gunge. Yeah...
  • Hunter: The Reckoning is all about running around killing zombies. Not so bad, right? And eventually, you get used to all the dead bodies lying in the street, yes? And oh, look! Now you've got a mission to get a cute little girl with a teddy bear through a cemetery and into a church where her parents are waiting. Aww, look at her run to hug them! Pshh. The little girl drops the bear, which proceeds to get possessed by...something, grows to a huge size, gains fangs and claws, and then kills the parents with one swipe of its claw. If that was wasn't bad enough, the little girl got to see it, and of course she screams in terror. Not. Fun.
  • Super Troll Island's last area is basically comprised of this. If you thought the trolls themselves staring at YOU was bad enough... wait till you get to the clown area.
  • Why does Tsukihime not have an entry here? The scenes with Chaos in the hotel are a good example.
    • All of Kohaku's backstory, but especially the diary. "Help me" indeed. (The poem at the end does not help at all).
    • There's also the dream where Akiha and Kohaku apparently rape Shiki.
  • The Ghoul's Forest, a Game Mod for Doom. You're in a big, dark forest. The only other monster is a deadly huge floating monstrous deadly head. Have "fun". Ghoul's Forest 2 is even scarier...
  • Oddworld does this quite a lot, but by far the most disturbing moment is the bad ending of Munch's Oddysee. It goes from 'disturbing' to 'nightmarish'.
  • Even in games where the player is completely safe from dying, things can turn rather freaky. Endless Ocean on the Wii comes to mind, with its abyssal trench, appropriately named "The Abyss". It's pitch black down there, with only a LITTLE bit of light coming from your flashlight in the area right in front of you; the music that is introduced in that area, Hayley Westenra's "Benedictus", is initially very quiet and tranquil, and then BLASTS out in a loud crescendo of brass, drums and vocals without warning; and two very large animals — the Sperm Whale and the Giant Squid — make their homes down there, and somehow love to appear in front of you when that crescendo hits! AHHHHH! Needless to say, I never allow that song to play in the Abyss. Never ever ever.
  • The first appearance of Yomiel in Ghost Trick. Cabenela shoots him, his corpse goes rolling back on the stepstool cart...and then the cart comes rolling back and he slowly stands up again. The fact that he's wearing what Sissel believes to be his own face makes it even scarier.
    • In the same scene, if you get noticed by Yomiel, he stops time and looks right at you, telling you that there's nothing you can do to stop him.
    • Possessed Kamilla. It's worse if you know that the original plan was for her to shoot her own father.
  • The original video game nightmare fuel comes from Rescue On Fractalus, an old, Choplifter-esque pseudo-3D game where you flew around rescuing downed pilots from aliens. Sometimes an alien would disguise itself as a human pilot, and jump up on your ship when you landed for a rescue. It would hammer on your windscreen until either it broke through and killed you, or you turned on your shield and fried it — all this accompanied by very scary sound effects. It doesn't sound like much by today's standards, but I had never seen anything like it, at the time, and literally jumped halfway across the room the first time it happened.
  • Darkseed. You have an alien embryo implanted in your head and three days to stop the aliens from taking over the world, plus backgrounds inspired by H. R. Giger.
  • SimAnt...Just SimAnt. You play as a single ant trying to build a colony. The overworld is covered with hazards like puddles, large bugs, and most importantly, spiders. Run your ant too close to a spider. I dare you. If the description of your death ("As the spider's venom courses through your veins, you feel like you have been set on fire," or something like that)doesn't scare the shit out of you, the accompanying head-on view of the spider, gnashing its fangs will. The game is rated E.
    • Just be thankful that despite looking like a Wolf Spider on the playing field, the face you see when you die is really that of a Jumping Spider. As a Google Images search will efficiently tell you, the face of a Wolf is a lot freakier than that of a Jumper.
      • Perhaps that's what the Clown button was put there for? Said the spider: "I'm so cool, I can hardly believe it!"
      • Jumping spiders? SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
  • Chrono Trigger. That noise that Lavos makes. It's like the audible equivalent of the spelling of "Cthulhu" - if it were real, it would be a Sound That Man Was Not Meant To Hear, and you should be glad this is the best your TV/Nintendo DS speakers can do to replicate it.
    • You mean like the "Marx Scream". That thing is on par.
    • Listen to the "Slow Down", then listen to Lavos's scream. Coincidence?
    • However, that link goes from Hell Is That Noise straight to Crowning Music of Awesome.
    • The Geno Dome has a conveyor belt where a person enters a machine, screams, and nothing comes out.
      • Even worse in the Japanese version, where it's called the Genosidome, an obvious portmanteau of Genoside and Dome, implying that the machine was specifically built for that purpose.
    • Magus's Lair in 600 AD. Let's start with the background music, a creepy chord that never lets up, and the laughter every couple of seconds. Add some monsters who look like people you know, whom you know shouldn't be there. They say some relatively innocuous things the first time you see them... then again later,only to add a sinister second phrase before revealing their true forms. Then you find out that the bat that's been following you and flies away just before they change is actually...
      • Also: Those skeleton Mooks you've fought at various points in this era? At one point in Magus's castle a group of them attacks you while begging you to kill them to free them from the spell controlling them.
    • The Day of Lavos. Chrono Trigger was originally released in 1995. Back then, a video game showing The End of the World as We Know It happening in 1999 was a very scary thing.
  • Homeworld: Cataclysm was well scripted, well plotted, and had a doozy of an enemy. Having your lower decks scream at you to cut them loose as they get recycled into a fleshy mess is bad enough, but the level where you have to escort a series of refugee ships and you cannot avoid them being hit and all the howling civilians packed inside being devoured and reformed is enough to make you exit the game whilst whimpering "Ohgodohgodohgod". For added fun, play a skirmish and zoom right in on a squadron of fighters as they get hit by a Beast conversion beam, enough to hear the sounds.
    • The worst part is the distress calls from impacted refugee ships. "Help us! HELP US!!!!"
    • Hell, just the voice of the Beast is creepy enough. And then of course, the mind wanders into imagining what the transformation must feel like...
  • The original Homeworld had elements of nightmare fuel as well, namely in the complete annihilation of Kharak and the various instances of ship capturing (which was certainly an instance of Fridge Horror when contemplating the fates of captured ship crews, especially with the ominous line "The subject did not survive interrogation").
  • Some of the captures in Battle Chess. Rooks eat Queens, Queens incinerate most pieces, Pawns send Bishops down deep holes in the ground that close up right away, etc.
  • Despite usually being a ridiculous parody of the Survival Horror genre, Illbleed had a couple legitimate freakish moments. For example, the final boss of the first level is the first level's boss grown giant-sized, and he is unkillable. Your only hope is to hop across annoying stones to get to shore and enter a cabin...where you find out he's just a robot being controlled by an operator. The only way to make the guy stop is thwack him in the head, whereupon his head explodes in a shower of sparks and fake (we hope) blood, revealing HIM to be a robot as well. Asimov never told me about this one!
  • The Sub Machine. It plays games with space-time and drills glory holes through the fourth wall.
  • Ghostbusters: The Video Game has part of what made the original film so great, and what the sequel lacked: A combination of great comedy with a truly freaky movie/game. In no level is this more apparent than "Return to the Sedgewick", which is only merely spooky until you go up to the top floors with Egon. This editor pities any Ghostbusters fans playing the game who happen to be arachnophobic, and the Spider Witch, from her backstory to her appearance when you fight her, is just disturbing. This editer swears that he saw Glasgow scars (you know, like a certain MonsterClown) when he got a good look at her face after beating her.
    • And then there's the earlier Library level in which you must go through the children's reading room with Ray. It's dark, the sounds of children laughing and crying fill the air, and if you look through your PKE meter goggles, you can see ghostly little handprints and children's drawings on the walls. And when you leave the room, suddenly a boy's voice shouts "BYE!". You've got that right, scooter.
Cquote1

Peter: [audibly shaken] You'd think I'd be USED to that by now!

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    • I can handle seeing Ray getting possessed, and while an elevated heartrate may result from certain boss battles, most of the game can be taken in stride. But I had the wits scared out of me by an offhand remark made by Ray in the Xbox version of the videogame, as he and Rookie investigate the library. As Rookie opens a door into a closet in the Juvenile section of the library, Ray adopts a sing-song-tone to say, "come out come out, wherever you are..."
  • As much as it is a funny, over the top game, Penny Arcade Adventures: On The Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness has some genuinely scary moments.
    • From Episode One: The Mimes. Dear god in heaven, the mimes. Let alone their dark god... And the Fruit-fuckers jumping out of thing like dead seagull corpses haunt my dreams.
  • In Famous has Sasha and her mindrape powers. Not to mention a creepy stalker lust she has for Cole.
  • Scarface the World Is Yours, adhering as it does mostly to real life, is normally not very scary. It takes some guts to not panic after the first time a chainsaw-user soaks up your firepower (unless you've somehow got the SAW already) and closes in to One-Hit Kill Tony. Subsequent encounters usually leave one desperately looking around as that revving noise shows up, hoping to kill him quick, especially when found in the middle of a long mission.
  • Redrum: Dead Diary may to some be just another hidden object game, but the visuals, music, and did I mention the visuals?
    • The sequel, Redrum: Time Lies is twice as horrifying. I had nightmares from playing it during daytime.
  • In Black Shades, it's possible to blow yourself up (usually accidentally) with a grenade in level 5. Sometimes, your head survives after being separated from your body by the blast. Some players have flown through the air, looking at scattered body parts in a pool of blood, before the screen goes black.
  • On first installing Black and White, the game asks for your name. Innocent enough, thought I, until, late at and playing in a darkened room, I heard a barely-audible whisper; "Simon". And then again. Lionhead, it seemed, had included a soundbank of common names, which it would match to the one given during install and randomly play during the game. Suffice to say, this occurance put an end to the late night gaming session.
  • Dark Fall: The Journal is pretty much nightmare fuel in its entirety. The game is set in an abandoned hotel in Campbell Country, and tasks the player with discovering the fate of his brother - one of a team of paranormal investigators who disappeared while investigating the disappearance of the hotel's denizens 60 years prior. Little "screamer" bits are thrown in here and there, including whispers, ball lightning flicking across the screen, and visions of apparitions, but one experience in particular stands out. Suffice to say, one hopes that after the player climbs to the third floor of the hotel the first time, he'd better hope he brought a change of pants along.
  • It's a wonder that neither Return to Castle Wolfenstein or its sequel, Wolfenstein, has been mentioned on this list yet, considering the amount of horrifying imagery in both. The second game alone has invisible Nazi assassins that stalk you through the dark and taunt you in the creepiest voices imaginable, deformed mutant monsters from another dimension that look like giant trolls covered in tumours, creeping cyborg beasts that jump up in your face and try to claw your eyes out, and undead, flaming Nazi skeletons that shamble about and toss green fireballs at you.
  • A good bit into Infinite Undiscovery, players will encounter a phenomenon known as Lunar Rain. This bright, shiny rain will cause wings to grow on your party members as they stand in it, giving them significant stat boosts. Stay in it longer, their wings will grow bigger, and they'll begin to regenerate health. Sounds good, right? Stay in it even longer and they'll begin to take their own actions, ignoring your commands. It's best to run to the nearest town at this point, because shortly, all hell will break loose. The afflicted character suddenly turn pitch black, while their eyes glow red. They'll repeatedly scream out random phrases and screams of agony which range from humorous to downright disturbing. Oh, and they'll attack you and your non-affected party members. If you don't put them out of their misery fast enough, they'll turn invisible.
    • Did we mention that the first time it happens, you get stuck in a boss fight against Vermified Edward in which you have a time limit before he completely transforms and the game ends? Now, try to imagine why the game would end after that... I betted on a complete Heroic BSOD for the entire team after being forced to Mercy Kill him, and that was one of the nicest options I thought up.
  • Irisu Syndrome. Who knew a Puzzle Game could be so creepy?
    • Take a nice stare at Irisu's face when you die with at least 40,000 points. Watch both endings. Read the text files that you get as you play. And finally, pause the game...but you might get lucky and have nothing happen. Might.
    • Simply mentioning the name is not enough to convey how scary this game is. See the game's main page for details.
  • The old EA game Labyrinth Of Time. A charming Myst-style game; creepy music, a persistent feeling of being watched, and generally disturbing settings through which you can traverse. Oh, and the entrance into a circus-type maze which is, you guessed it, a smiling clown with a nice, deep and evil laugh that loops forever. While the creepy music is playing.
  • The Thing takes place shortly after John Carpenter's movie ends. You're dropped first into the US base in Antartica, then relocated to the Norwegian base, and it isn't long before you discover how horribly things went wrong. You're isolated at the bottom of the world with people who may or may not be who you think they are, it's dark and inhospitable, and you never really know what's around the next corner. You know that some thing could be lurking anywhere, and when you find one, it ain't pretty.
    • Due to the scripted nature of some "thing-outs", you may take a person's blood test only for them to explode into a monster a few moments later. It's a bug, sure, but it can also lead to a different conclusion; The Thing is learning to dodge the blood test.
  • This video from Valkyrie Profile Lenneth. A young girl getting overwhelmed by a demon and forced to watch as she murders someone? Yeeeeah... not good.
    • Made into a slight Nightmare Retardant with the idiot soldiers who just stand there while their friend is getting killed.
  • Rule of Rose. Not the monsters, for the most part. The plot, the little creepy bits here and there, the near lack of adult authority figures, the creepy man that keeps showing up with hand drawn picture books calling the main character (female) "Joshua." I still can't play this for more than a few hours at a time.
    • Monsters aren't scary? Not even the part where they take one of the only two adults around, stuff a bag over her head, beat her with sticks and then drag her down a staircase? While you stand there and watch? You find the bag in one of the later chapters. Her legs are still moving. Even worse? It is implied that what really happened is that the children of the orphanage killed her.
    • And the enemies wearing severed pig heads. And the "Mermaid" boss. And the Onion Bag and the Rat Stick, especially when it's Jennifer's turn and she realizes the rat is very much rotted by now. And the scene with the ropes and the crayon gag and the storybooks AND the last two gifts...You know what, just put down everything about this game that didn't make you cry. And even some of THAT.
    • "A bright red crayon just for you. A bright red crayon just for you. A bright red crayon just for you. A bright red crayon just for you. A bright red crayon just for you. A bright red crayon just for you. A bright red crayon just for you. A bright red crayon just for you. A bright red crayon just for you."
  • Bloodwings: Pumpkinhead's Revenge contains a very effective Jump Scare, where an FMV is suddenly interrupted by the titular monster appearing out of nowhere and attacking the player, instantly killing him. Can be watched here (at 8:43).
  • La-Mulana brings us the wonderful Confusion Gate. As if the music isn't bad enough, we have the miniboss Shu, whose HP constantly regenerates. How? Through blood dripped down onto him. And where does the blood come from? Virgins who sacrifice themselves to him by jumping into a pit of spikes.
  • Second Sight, maintains a steady background level of creepiness, but it starts getting truly scary during the Enigma Endings: in the event that you fail a mission during the past, John Vattic will wake up in a mirrored room, heavily drugged and being interrogated by the Big Bad. Quite apart from the fact that Vattic is being shown photographs of the bullet-ridden corpses of his friends and allies, the aforementioned Big Bad chooses to project his digitally distorted voice from behind one of the mirrors- making it look as though Vattic is being tortured by his own reflection.
    • Penfold Asylum. Regardless of wether you find this crumbling gothic hellhole spooky or not, it does when you enter the high-security wing. After a whole floor of amusing lunatics, having the living shit kicked out of you by a raving psychopath in a muzzle and restraints is pretty jarring.
    • The final level, "Redemption." By now, you're all alone in the Zener Project facility... which is slowly being shut down around your ears: previously accessible entrances have been sealed shut, trapping you underground. The only way to escape is by entering the lower levels, inhabited by shock troops and the deformed Zener Children. As if this wasn't bad enough, you keep flashing back to even grimmer scenarios in the future. Oh, and just in case you were calming down at any point during the level, here's the level's music.
    • Don't forget that all throughout that level, the Zener children are topping that music with "I am the shadows" appearances and disappearances, and at the end of the level, the Big Bad is swarmed by dozens of them, knocked down, and EATEN ALIVE. Worse when you consider that they have no Body Horror to speak of, so it would be like being eaten by a whorde of (physically) normal fifth graders.
  • Grandia II had a number of deranged moments, but the one that stood out to me was one of the late-game bosses, a creature I dubbed, in a fitful panic, "Pineapple Jesus"...
  • In Saints Row 2, in a cutscene that is a mix of Nightmare Fuel, Crowning Moment of Awesome, and a light Tear Jerker, Johnny Gat delivers a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown on Shogo Akuji, for ordering the decapitation of his girlfriend, Aisha. After beating him up, and punching him head first through a fucking cement tombstone, he tosses him into a casket and burys him alive, all to the sound of Akujis cries for mercy. Lesson: Don't mess with Gat.
  • Abyss from Soul Calibur 3. He's Zasalamel with skin and muscle stripped off, a tail...thing...hanging down, and an organic-looking version of his legendary weapon. Not to mention the intro movie's ending when he transforms INTO Abyss. Plus, Night Terror.
  • Wild ARMs. One word: Mother. Anyone that possesses people by devouring them more than qualifies.
  • You wouldn't think Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura would fit this trope, but allow me to explain. Arronax spends nigh-on two thousand years in a magical cage in the bloody VOID. Completely alone, barring the rare occasions when the psycho who put him there comes to gloat about how he's going to use his identity to carry out a massive Xanatos Gambit that will let him literally wipe out the entire planet. There's four walls to look at, a door which he can't even get near, and just enough room in the magical shell to stand up if he's feeling punchy, he won't age there and he won't ever die unless someone breaks into the shell and kills him... And you can choose to LEAVE HIM THERE FOR ALL ETERNITY.
  • I have recently played an in-development Zelda mod for Doom. It was absolutely terrifying. For one, you know the creepiest bits of music from Ocarina of Time? That was pretty much the entire soundtrack to the mod. Even worse was the way the mod handled ReDeads: shambling zombiemen with unnerving faces, the paralyzing scream, twice as many hitpoints as the Cyberdemon, and a gun that takes off 70% of your health from any range. The only ways I found to effectively take them on were either light arrows from behind cover, or run in with Din's Fire and hope it didn't shoot more than once (or worse, that there weren't more than one of them around that corner) before the spell activates - and even then, there was a higher chance it'd just toss them to another corner of the map rather than kill them. What amplified how bad they were is that they replaced the pinky demon.
  • Game 3, Case 1 of the Ace Attorney series. The obligatory Villainous Breakdown is a creepy death glare.
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Dahlia: "Do. You. Think. You've. Won? Well? Do you!?"

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  • The little-known game Siege of Avalon is not generally very scary, but there are multiple occasions where the player is attacked by giant spiders. They don't do much damage, but they look creepy as all get out. Then there are the various caves you have to explore during the game, which are generally filled with stone golems, lizard people (which are cannibals), animated skeletons, or all of the above. The Cave Lurkers are a textbook case, being humans that worshiped an ancient goddess, who protected them, until a sacred object was stolen from her temple. Then the magic that protected them backfired, twisting them all into hideous mockeries of the people they once were, and on top of that made them effectively immortal...in their warped bodies, with their minds slowly decaying, never seeing the light of day for hundreds of years. And the lich, which can only be destroyed by one of the people you befriended earlier in the game using a magic that destroys the lich's Soul Jar, but kills him in the process. While you "protect" him from the lich's magical attacks and undead allies. And someone clearly worked very hard on making the underground music as creepy as possible. You know what? I retract my first statement. It's a creepy game.
  • Time Fcuk is a bit off-putting at best--you're hearing radio messages from your past and future selves, and some of them seem to have diverged from you a bit. One's teleported into a wall and is screaming for help. One has found a room with hundreds of dead bodies, all of which look like you. Several seem to have gone mad. What's even more disturbing, though, is approaching the end and hearing the messages from your early self, who's completely unaware of what's going to happen to him. Also, I ought to mention the message, delivered out of nowhere, "Don't trust Steven! He's lying to us!" Not scaring you, is it? Well, your name probably isn't Steven. Mind you, it gets even worse when you find out what Steven actually is. He starts as a tumor with eyes, growing out of your head, then grows ("His feet tickle my brain!") into a sort of living backpack, before splitting off and trying to Kill and Replace you.
    • The intro and the ending. The intro fully lets you know what kind of a fucked up reality you have been thrown into. And the ending shows what kind of a fucked up reality you have unleashed upon the world.
  • Once you get past the bright and cheery super-deformed graphics, Tales of Symphonia has a significantly large amount of this. The worst offendor is undoubtedly expheres and the Exbeula creatures, which are humans that have been horribly mutated as a side-effect of producing expheres. These people, despite being giant throbbing masses of green flesh, are also fully concious and are in ridiculous amounts of pain from the mutation. It's possible to reverse this transformation, but only one mutated character is lucky enough to survive, and only through a sidequest. Now Expheres, if you use them correctly, they enhance your combat abilities (meaning that if all the heroes and villains and various adventurers didn't use them, they would probably be killed very quickly). However, their original intended purpose is to slowly turn a person into a soulless shell that does not age, cannot eat, sleep, or speak, and cannot feel, taste, or smell anything. Eventually, the conciousness is completely absorbed. And as the game points out more than a couple times, just because your conciousness is absorbed into an exphere doesn't mean it stops working.
    • And then there are the Desians and their human ranches, where humans are treated like cattle in order to produce these things. And the rest of the world's humans don't particularly care, as long as their city isn't being attacked.
      • Oh, just to point out something that is often missed: the Desians actually breed humans for the sole purpose of making more Exspheres.
  • Tales of Graces is certainly one of the more terrifying Tales Of games. And it certainly does explain alot with Lambda rather creepy possession of Richard, turning one of Absel's most peaceful allies into a blood-thirsty maniac. His first "big" scene involves him RISING FROM THE DEAD (his head thumping like crazy before slowly rising up) to rapidly slash at his attacker viciously. What makes it more disturbing is that Richard moves like he is being controlled, not keeping his legs straight, and slumping with a sly devilish look. Not to mention those eyes and evil laugh... Videos are better than words.
  • Normally, Guy Cecil's gynophobia is funny. Then you find out what caused this fear. When he was a child, Duke Fabre attempted to commit genocide against his family. His older sister and the maids of the house sacrificed themselves to protect him. He wound up buried under their bodies for days on end.
    • The death of the little boy after the destruction of Akzeriuth. Neither the player nor the party can save him.
    • The pivotal point of Jade's backstory: his experiments with fonic artes as a child caused an accident that left his mentor on the verge of death. He tried to use fomicry, a technology he created himself, to bring her back to life as a "clone". She came back...but as a murderous, bloodthirsty monster. Since replicas are always born as blank slates, she has no recollection of her previous life except looking exactly like the deceased.
    • Grand Maestro Mohs is turned into a freakish monster because of inability to control Seventh Fonons, causing sanity degeneration. Upon defeating him, he melts into goo and disintegrates.
  • Uninvited's Ghost Lady. On top of a freaky death description, her horrendous face was drawn so well in the NES graphics (so well to scare the shit outta you) and the music accompanying it is freaky as hell. The game's setting isn't even helping the situation.
  • Planescape: Torment - the entire thing, from beginning to the end.
  • Dantes Inferno has plenty of this, and really, it'd be disappointing otherwise, since...you know...it's in Hell.
  • Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. For the first four hours of play, you're trying to sneak through Innsmouth, with hybrid fish-men tracking you. They have guns and axes - and you're totally unarmed. You don't even get the knife/gun that other FPS games give you. And then there's the navy battleship that gets attacked by Deep Ones, and the Marsh Refinery, and the insane asylum flashbacks.
  • Diablo. Sure the creepy dark seems pretty dungeoncrawler standard fare, and all that, but when you start reading into the lore of the world, and asking about some of the quests...yeep.
    • Special mention goes to "The Butcher", a huge, fat demon who makes his residence in Tristram's church. In a room completely filled wall-to-wall with corpses. On level TWO. (It can vary, but that just means he's on the third or fourth floor instead, but the point still stands.) He killed a fairly large regiment of soldiers by himself, and he'll probably kill you without a problem, too. The only possible Nightmare Retardant is if the floor happens to have a grate to shoot arrows through, leaving the Butcher unable to fight back, and even so, you still have a giant demon snarling "AHH, FRESH MEAT" pacing back and forth in front of you for what will probably amount to hours, just looking for a way to add your corpse to the pile in his room.
      • This also applies to King Leoric (The Skeleton King), especially if your character is low-level or generally weak in melee combat. While he's definitely a problem on his own, the fact that he runs around endlessly resurrecting the hordes of skeletal minions that you've probably just taken out just adds to the situation. Not only is he also much faster than you, allowing him to chase you into a corner where he'll hack your head off in seconds, but will be found only THREE levels into the game.
    • Of course there's the ending too, although in particular when you defeat Diablo as a Rogue. Her scream in the final FMV sequence is nothing short of genuinely chilling.
  • Kimi ga Nozomu Eien, a Visual Novel/H-game, had one ending where your love interest, a doctor, kidnaps you, gives you a sex change, urinates on you, and anally rapes you with a sex toy. So horrendous was it that it was cut out of future reissues of the game and replaced with a less nightmarish scene where she gets pregnant instead.
  • Ever played Unreal II the Awakening? The second planet you go to is called Hell. Not just a clever name if you are arachnophobic. Whether it's a bunch of tiny spiders that creep up to you, or a big spider that leaps across the room at you, it'll freak you out.
  • The Macintosh shareware game Fred Rogers, Terrorist'. When you are playing in the Neighborhood of Make Believe (where you must KILL most if not all the puppet characters) and knock on X the Owl's door, you are met with a squawking vulture creature (aka "Mutated X") that fills the entire playing field.
    • To make matters worse, one time there was a glitch in the game where you defeat X, but without warning ANOTHER X popped up on the screen. Beat him, then... ANOTHER ONE. And so forth and so on.
  • The Indie Game series Iron Gaia is loaded with this, especially in Where Angels Fear to Tread.
  • Bullet Hell shooters, particularly their True Final Bosses, which go from Nintendo Hard to "are you fucking kidding me?". Look up "Hibachi" and "Futari Ultra" on YouTube if you're feeling brave.
    • And in Imperishable Night, the bullet patterns are so fast and complex, your brain stops interpreting data on parts on the screen.
      • Even then, Imperishable Night is one of the easier games in the series. Subterranian Animism is even worse...
  • The dream sequences in Baldur's Gate 2, in which Irenicus gives you increasingly dark and morbid Hannibal Lectures. It becomes even worse when you find out the Irenicus that talks to you in your dreams isn't Irenicus at all. Its Bhaal himself, trying to goad you to The Dark Side.
    • If you visit the Temple District at night, you'll run into a Shadow Theif. He won't attack, but he will start babbling a deranged "song" when you speak to him. It sounds like the typical ravings of a madman at first...then the song describes how an innocent man was forced to watch his friends and family be butchered because he refused to get involved in the current guild war. The song suddenly becomes much more chilling when you realise who the song is describing.
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"You can't hide! War will find! YOU CAN'T HIDE! WAR WILL FIND! AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAA!!!"

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    • Your second visit to Candlekeep in the first game when everyone's been replaced by dopplegangers.
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"DIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIE MEAT!"

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      • Even better, even better, when you get to the end of the catacombs, Gorion shows up and tries to convince you that none of the dopplegangers were real, and instead you just murdered all of your old childhood friends in a bout of insanity. Of course, he turns out to be a doppleganger, too, but it can really mess with your head for a brief moment.
      • For a mixture of Nightmare Fuel and Tear Jerker, find Captain Barge and right click on him to hear a mixture of insane laughter and broken sobbing.
      • Take a closer look at that bandit camp. Apparently they decided to decorate their camp with rotting corpses.
  • Jade Empire starts out (and ends) as a fairly cool, enjoyable martial-arts romp with all the right Bioware features. Then you get to the Pilgrim's Rest Inn. Suddenly the misty, ethereal and mysterious atmosphere of the game turns really, really creepy. Not to mention what happens at the Lotus Assassin Fortress...or what you can do to Death's Hand...
    • Also worth a mention is the source of Dirge's defilement. The natural order has been so corrupted and twisted that something from... outside... entered. It commands legions of demons and forsaken spirits, and it manifests only as an orb of energy and ethereal copies of the player character. Being from outside creation, the gods have no authority over it, and even after you fight it, it still traps the souls of countless people in an endless cycle of hatred and warfare...
  • The last level of Perfect Dark. The Skedar were pretty damn freaky looking. They also had a roar that indicated that they noticed you. In the level before the final, you're usually capable of seeing them before they attack. In the final level, though, most of them are invisible. It could be very unnerving to be wandering the temple and suddenly hear a roar without knowing where it came from, and then have a Skedar warrior bearing down on you.
  • The Path. Full stop. Nothing Is Scarier taken to an artform. And that's without touching the ending...
  • The final mission of The Saboteur. Some backstory: the game is set during WWII in occupied France. You follow your most hated enemy, who ruined your life and killed your friends and comrades, to the top of The Eiffel Tower. Approaching, you hear screams and pleads for help from German soldiers, who are being slaughtered and thrown off the tower by Dierker, who, if it isn't obvious, is a high-ranking German officer himself. Taking the elevator up, a distraught soldier screams "He's killing everyone!" You're met with bodies strewn everywhere, soldiers hung from the stairwell, an officer who shoots a woman and then himself, a soldier playing Russian Roulette with himself with no bullets, while, the entire time, a general plays a tear-jerking rendition of Feeling Good on the piano. When you finally get to the top, your foe makes a saddened speech about how he and all of his comrades have failed and there is nothing left for them. If you take too long to kill him, he jumps off the Tower himself. For a game that's mostly been reasonably light-hearted, this is a real punch to the gut. Ladies and gentlemen, war is hell. Even creepier, if you've seen the film Downfall, you know exactly what these people are thinking, and for the most part, the ones who died here were lucky.
    • Seconding this. I was a quality assurance tester on the project, and there were several points in the game that fit this trope. That final mission was just one of them. Another was in the interrogation scene in the prologue, where Dierker gives Sean the fatal ultimatum. The Nightmare Fuel for me is when Sean utters his famous "Go fuck yourself!"; the color draining from the scene and the way the look on Dierker's face (in close-up no less!) visibly morphs from indignant shock to rage to something I can only describe as "Ax Crazy Glee" right before he puts about ten bullets through Jules' skull. There were testers on my team who had played through Dead Space without batting an eyelash, and we all just kinda watched the scene in slack-jawed horror.
  • I'm certain this was in the Nightmare Fuel page, but I think that Zero Two from Kirby 64 qualifies as Nightmare Fuel. Sure, I don't think HAL meant for him to be that scary, but they wanted him to be freaky, darnit!
    • This one may need explanation, as a friend of mine found this to be not that scary. For one, Zero Two is the spirit of Zero, the final boss of the prequel (debatably scarier). He spits blood out of his own eye at you, and you can see him crying tears of blood throughout the battle. He can never be permanently destroyed, and literally commands Dark Matter. His wings are covered in blood, and he has a Halo. That's the basic jist of it.
    • The aforementioned Marx Soul death scream.
  • If this entry tried to list all of the Nightmare Fuel in Singularity, it would be essentially a long-winded description of the game. The worst, though, is the fact that the game was advertised as an ordinary First-Person Shooter/Puzzle Game.
    • A few minutes after the start of the game, you're happily exploring old Soviet ruins. There are some old audio files around, that'll compel you to turn up the volume. As you walk down a hallway, without warning, a nearby voice screams "MOTHER OF GOD, LET ME OUT!" It goes downhill from there.
  • There is something very graphical about how the swordfights in Prince of Persia: The Sands Of Time are choreographed, in slow motion and by generally having the main character jump on enemies and stab them hard on their backs while down, every one of them, to trully dispose of them. Ironically, the Darker and Edgier Warrior Within is less effective on inducing high octane nightmares, because the fights get streamlined, and the prince more of a Badass to expect such feats from him.
  • The escape-the-room (or, in this case, escape-the-house) game Diversity lets you be "good" or "bad". If you follow the "good" route, the rooms remain perfectly bright and cheerful and you'll completely avoid this trope. If you follow the "bad" route, however, you're in for a steadily worsening nightmare as the rooms become darker, furniture becomes tipped over and trashed, plants die, etc. The nursery in particular becomes a dark, trashed room with "Quarantine" written on the blackboard. And the bathroom...well, if you've just been kind of bad, it'll be dark and dirty, and you'll find the corpse of a cat in the washing machine (which, incidentally, is the same cat that you find alive and well if you take the "good" route instead). If you've been completely rotten to the core, you don't just get dirty water in the toilet and bathtub; you get blood. And a man's head in the washing machine. The comedic-ish ending picture alleviates the horror somewhat, but the sights plus the music (which can become downright sinister in the nursery and cut off entirely in the bathroom) can fit this trope. Heck, just the implication that you are entirely responsible for turning what would otherwise have been a normal house into a desolate ruin (or maybe that the house is reflective of your mind/mood, and if you spiral down into insanity/sociopathy, * everything* in the house soon follows) is pretty scary in itself.
  • The Museum of Broken Memories. Not only is it a major Tear Jerker in many places, but many of the rooms can really get under your skin. Like the Dark Room, where you literally can't see anything and have to blindly grope your way around for keys and doors. Or the Door Room where you try, try, try to get out of a room before the door opens - the fact that you don't even know what the protagonist in that story is running away from just makes it even worse. The Fever Room, however, took the cake for me: you're meant to explore a maze of rooms for several keys. All the while, the protagonist babbles something about "water... rising..." and "drowning", and the more flashbacks you trigger for him/her, the more tilted and water-filled the rooms become, as if the entire place really is sinking, to the point where you can't even open some of the doors anymore. I got so freaked out by the feeling of being gradually hemmed in by the rising waters, of really being in danger of drowning, that I became increasingly agitated when I couldn't find the last set of keys and eventually turned off the game because I just couldn't go through that maze of too-black-and-white and ever-so-slowly tilting rooms accompanied by the narrative of a half-mad person one more time.
  • Drakan: The Ancient Gates gives us Yutaji the Flesh Mage, whose idea of a fun afternoon is to brainwash innocent women into marrying him, and then spend the first night of their 'honeymoon' skinning them alive. The fact that he's already a Body Horror on his own is made even worse when you first realize that he's already wearing their skins like a robe by the time you meet him.
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Yutaji: Come, my sweet wife. Come and embrace your loving husband.

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  • Deadly Premonition at first seems like an absurdly over the top Camp crime dramedy, but it quickly becomes apparent that it's a true horror game, in various ways.
    • First the obvious one, the Other World. Imagin the Other World from Silent Hill, only instead of blood and rust, it has blood and fleshy, pulsating vines, tumors and other growths. And instead of crimes against humanity as enemies, you have "shadows" that are heavily implied to have once been normal people, whose dialogue alternate between vicious threats and begging you to kill them.
    • I swear to God, that sometimes, when you kill them, they mutter, in that slow, droning tone of theirs, "Don't want to diiiiie..." Perhaps a Tear Jerker.
    • The murders themselves become increasingly disturbing. The first is a standard "stab to death" murder, but the second one has the victim flayed, her tongue bitten off so she can't speak, and the killer arranged her body in a wire contraption that is made to look like cutting the wires will free her, when in actuallity it causes the vitcim to be strangled to death with blood soaked rags. As for the third murder... oy. The victim is severely beaten and hung by the hands by a very flimsy rope right above a spikey sculpture. When York and co save her, she suddenly stands up as if nothing happens, and with a calm and serene tone, gives a very unsettling description of the sculpture. Oh, and when the sculpture is accidently knocked over during the stuggle with the suspect and is about to crush the victim. She resists all attempts to move her out of the way, and her last act to grasp Emily's hand with a deranged grin as she's crushed to death.
      • I unexpectedly caused all hell to break loose early on in the game when I had York smoke a cig to speed up time. Next thing I know, the ingame clock hits midnight and I'm booted out of the menu screen... to find myself in the Other World on the streets of Greenvale! I wound up behind some random building, turning the corner to find at least three of those zombies in my face. No problem, I just run past them, and get back in my car. I heard dogs howling, which didn't help my panic at all. Then It Got Worse when one of the dogs FELL FROM THE SKY ONTO THE HOOD OF MY CAR while I was driving. This is probably a good time to mention the fact that the driving sequences are first person in this game. Then, when I initiated a racing event (this game is kind of weird, after all), I got another Jump Scare when I ran over one of those goddamned zombies.
    • Absolutely everything about Forest Kaysen post-reveal. Every. Fucking. Thing.
  • Limbo, an Xbox Live Arcade title. Heavy on the Minimalism and Scenery Porn, this game is basically LittleBigPlanet, perhaps injected with a little dose of Ico, and then served up with a heaping dish of Nightmare Fuel. Just a fifteen minute preview revealed bear traps that decapitate your character, and huge spiders that kill you or even wad you up into a ball of web that must wiggle and jump it's way away from death.
    • The Limbo spider. I'm not an arachnophobe, but I have never encountered a video game enemy I hated and feared more in a long time. It is made worse by the fact you are defenceless against it; all you can do is run from it and hope you can finally leave it behind. But every time you think you have, that you can safely put it out of mind, the soundtrack fades to a crackle and its long legs appear again at the left side of your screen, methodically working their way towards you. This is a creature who will stop at nothing to exact its revenge upon you- you know it is not driven by natural urges because you witness it flicking natives off its talons, casually demolishing a village in its pursuit of you, and you alone. Finally, finally it inadvertently damages itself so badly it only has one leg left, and is left pathetically twitching in the dirt. The game insists that you approach it. Does it try to plead for mercy? Does it try feebly to get away? No: Its very, very last action, what it uses its final vestige of energy upon, is to try to stab you and take you with it. A true horror of a creature.
  • LSD Dream Emulator has the Violence District. A place where crazy people wander the streets, dismembered corpses can be found in garbage cans, and the corpses of women dangle from the street lamps. Some of these corpses will fall off the lights, then proceed to get back up and slowly move towards you. There is also a crazy guy wandering the streets who will shoot you if he sees you. Oh, and the Grey Man, who has been stalking you all over the damn place? He can be found here quite often.
  • Truth be told, rarely would a free-to-play-on-the-Internet flash game (from NEWGROUNDS, of all places) be considered Nightmare Fuel, but... my god, I have found many, whether it's The Insanity about the mad vivisecting doctor, Heist and Heist 2 - A Thief's Nightmare (you'd think a thief wandering a dark rainy house wouldn't be that bad, right? HA.), or, may we all be saved, anything by Ben Leffler. Now, if Goliath and the Soothsayer wasn't bad enough, with the haunted house based on a Mars Volta album, his mini-game MADE for Halloween, Purgatorium, is much worse. Detailing the gruesome murders of a baby and woman at the hands of the father himself, (the man having bricked himself up in the baby's room and committing suicide by setting the house on fire), however you soon find out that, the reason you're in this haunted room is because YOU ARE THE FATHER AND ARE RELIVING THE DEATHS. But nothing, and I mean nothing, compares to the Exmortis series. Imagine the worst haunted house story you can, and being trapped in it. Now make it worse with particularly nasty graphics. Now include demons. Now toss on the cultist and apocalyptic end of all life as we know it by the hands of these unstoppable demons (to the point where nuclear warheads don't even work). To this day, I cannot walk down the hallway of my house at night or look out the window outside because the setting IS TOO DAMN CLOSE TO THE ONE OF THE GAME, and I still get a chill imagining the demon overlord from the game chuckling in my ear. So, living out in the woods in the hitherto spooky "room at the end of the hall"? All thanks to one little flash web game.
  • Sin and Punishment 2's Stage 6. Near the end of the stage, the Infant Keeper captures your partner via a crane and starts to lower him or her into the lava. You have to keep it from lowering your partner into the lava, while at the same time raising the platform it's on because the lava is rising. If your partner is lowered too far down, you are treated to a cutscene of your partner BEING DUMPED INTO A FIERY DEATH. And the worst part is, you'll most likely have to redo this segment several times!
  • Ao Oni is, like Yume Nikki, a japaneese RPG made by a non-professional. It's an horror game where the hero, Hiroshi and three of his friends gets into an abandoned manor, only to be hunted down by the monster who lives here. With the classical horror-game scenario and the amateurish look of the game, it may sounds and looks not so creepy. That's what I thought until I saw the Jikkyou Play (a japaneese equivalent of the Let's Play). With this game, you learn to lock the door every time you enter in a room because the monster (or "Blue Giant" as the title says) can enter in and well... Game Over screen. But the worst fact for me that made me unable to sleep the night I saw the ending was that at the end of the Jikkyou, Hiroshi runs successfully out of the house... AND IT STILL FOLLOWS YOU OUTSIDE TO GET YOU.
  • Freedom Force isn't really the place for nightmare fuel, but one level stands out. It starts out with a standard "capture all the robbers and bring their leader to justice!" objective, but the robbers go down quickly, leaving you to track their leader across the city. The standard "people screaming" sound effects play, but they're quieter, supported by strangely ominous music, and it's not entirely clear what's prompting them. Then you find an ordinary-looking civilian, who calls out "Help us!" in a reverberating voice, and mousing over her reveals that she's described not as "Everyday inhabitant of Patriot City" but as "Unusual inhabitant of Patriot City." It's not even surprising that, as you get closer, her face distorts and she attacks you, but damn if it isn't scary. The evil policemen are even worse, if only for the initial shock when they start levitating ("I'm above the law!")
    • Same series of levels, but a few levels later: You've finally rescued your kidnapped leader, and he thinks he knows where to find the villain. Your party fails to notice the reverberation in his voice. They catch on pretty quickly, but it's quite unnerving before they do.
  • Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge: LeChuck's Revenge does a great job mixing uh... creepy creepyness with familliar and funny creepyness. Still, almost everything that happens on the graveyard on Scabb Island happens to be nightmare fuel.
    • Also Guybrush does one of the most creepy and brutal things in the series himself: He rips off LeChuck's leg
  • Gauntlet (1985 video game): Dark Legacy's stage music for Carnival of the Lost is composed of multiple parts, filled with circus-themed screams of death for your (un)delight. By simply listening, you can at least infer that an elephant goes berserk and mauls its trainer, a rollercoaster derails and sends the occupants crashing to their death (a derailed, burning cart is seen during this part of the level,) but the major offender is the last part, which plays at the end while you pass a performing stage. It starts out all happy-like... but then you hear a demonic laugh and the music goes very low and ominous. Then you get to listen as a guy screams as he is sawn in half, then a woman scream as her body is impaled multiple times. The worst part? The audience cheers this on.
  • Inversing music. In any game. Ever. Example: [1]
  • Heart of Darkness. The deaths in this game are enough to drive someone to nightmares, not to mention some of the monsters on here, plus what happens when one of Amigo's clan when he touches the ground of the Big Bad.
    • Here is a video with all of the potential deaths in the game. The Cliff Worms... *ugh*shiver*
  • The Breach is billed as your standard Zombie Survival game, but that's kinda selling it short. Your standard mooks are Zombies, yes, but quickly diversifies to hideously mutated creatures created by "The Yellow," not to mention the hallucinations your hero receives, it takes it to pretty disturbing levels, pretty quickly. Add the Apocalyptic Log consoles you find littered about, and the fact that rather than dying, you get partially mutated into one of the moth things littered about...yeah...The hallucinations get pretty freaky too, particularly the one that shows what will happen to the world if the yellow things ever get out--a man with a flayed skull and a tumor growing out of the back of his head, a hunchback with glassy eyes who constantly vomited blood, and a woman appeared to have tumors for breasts and a head growing out of her groin, all of them with horribly jaundiced skin. The ending's the worst of it all: you've destroyed the monsters and gotten back to Earth, but you're locked in an insane asylum, desperately trying to convince a psychiatrist that no, you haven't gone crazy, and yes, if the experiments continue horrible, horrible things will happen. Then you turn into a monster and apparently eat the psychiatrist.
  • Starship Titanic. The weird robots, the massive emptiness of the ship, the weird monkey-gas mask suc-u-bus (and how easy it seemed to be to lose essential items in them), the giant mother suc-u-bus that vomits out a corpse, the dead body in the restaurant, being forced to puree the starlings and weirdly enough, drastically altering Marsinta's personality. Always felt like Mind Rape.
  • Sam and Max: Season 3: The Penal Zone gives the viewer just a taste of what goes on in Max's brain when he teleports through psychic powers.
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Burning Skeletal Max: Enjoying the ride, Sam? (demonic laughter)

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    • During the boss battle in Beyond the Alley of the Dolls, trying to read Sam's future gives a black screen. Then a sudden white flash. Then a red-pink blur on blackness. Then white. Then a flash of long, needlelike teeth along the top and bottom edges of the screen (outside of the boundary of the vision). Then white. All accompanied by silence.
    • In the same game, a puzzle involves sending Sam to dark dimensions populated with elder gods and creatures beyond comprehension. He returns incoherent and mad and plagued by horrific visions, but soon recovers, saying it was only because he pushed everything he saw to the darkest suppressed corners of his mind. As he says this, the camera zooms into his eyeball and we see Sam falling into blackness, terrified and alone. This has to be done multiple times, because the puzzle is a trial and error puzzle.
  • Myth 2: Soulblighter. The undead are bad enough, but how about an undead that shambles up to your troops and explodes, paralyzing your troops or blasting them halfway across the screen. Oh yeah, and they scream while doing it. Well... it sounds like this. There is also the Myrkridia, a race of half-man half-wolf things. They attack with bare claws and the sound effect is them ripping off parts of your soldiers' flesh. Their attack is so fast that it paralyzes a soldier from shock and before he can react, he's hit by another until he dies. Right before they die, they howl and go berserk attacking anything in their path. The first level you see them in, they rip apart a group of troops about the size of yours in 30 seconds, and then nearly a hundred of these things howl in unison. I saved and quit and waited a while before I took them on. There are also the trow, which are giants of about 14 ft. tall. You can hear them before you see them, but it doesn't help; they walk faster then you can run. They can take out your toughest units in two kicks which break them apart.
  • Go and play Peter Jackson's King Kong for 12 straight hours, and then close your eyes. I guarantee you that you well see megapedes and carnivorous spiders in all your thoughts and dreams. Have fun.
  • The arcade version of Battletoads is Darker and Edgier than its previous installments. One of the major contributions is the second boss, a giant serpent (or snake, your call) whose only attack is to lunge himself on your playable character like he is coming at the screen to chomp on him. When said attack is successful, not only will a chunk of the PC's (playable character) health be depleted, but they will also be screaming in a agonizing way with blood squirting out of him (unless the player wriggles free). When the PC's health is gone, he will finish eating him. When the serpent/snake is defeated, though, his head will be ripped out with blood gushing out while his head wriggles uncontrollably.
  • The Asylum level of Painkiller. It's like Shalebridge Cradle lite, which is severe Mood Whiplash compared to pretty much all the rest of the game. It does not help that the ghosts there are invulnerable to Daniel's arsenal. Also, the pained grunt and blurred vision that occurs every time Daniel gets hit can be disturbing.
    • The expansion pack's first level is the Orphanage. There are only two enemies in this level that aren't EVIL KILLER CHILDREN!! Made creepier by the fact that this is one of the few minor stages with a story to it: this game takes place in Purgatory, and Children Are Innocent and must go to Purgatory when they die. This orphanage just happened to get demon possessed. Oh, and it's pitch black without your torch. Scary level props, too, such as a huge teddy bear with entrails coming out of a rip in its belly, and a bloody room full of cages with skeletons in them.
    • The Prison level in the original has a corpse on an examining table that disappears if you hit it too much, as well as a... thing writhing in an electric chair that also disappears once you find the switch to cut the current flow.
  • Even Civilization IV can be made scary, or at least really freaking ominous, as shown in the intro to the Beyond the Sword Expansion Pack. It's pretty much a history of warfare and communications, and the last part concerns recent times. JFK looks at a photo of a Russian plant stolen by a spy, sighs heavily, and picks up the red phone. Fade to an alarm going off at a nuclear missile silo, where the missile is lifted up and the silo doors slide open...
  • Dark Sector scared the crap out of me. The first two levels of the game made it out to be a third person shooter with some interesting weaponry. Cue much shouting of "fuck! fuck! shit! arrrgh!" when you first meet the Infected. In a sewer. Where the lights go out. And you are in complete darkness. And all you see is faces and hands reaching out to you with each muzzle flash from your pistol. And the horrifying click when you run out of ammo.
    • More subtly disturbing is the quality of the voice acting for the Lasrian troopers. If they see the Glaive coming towards them, their final words will be a desperate, pitiful scream along the lines of 'Someone help me!'
  • Drakensang II: The River of Time has the level in the Bosparanian ruins: Let's see, you must search an antidote for a friend of yours, and you have to look in this creepy dungeon full of skeletons, Big Creepy-Crawlies and mad amazons. Oh, and this mad druid informs you that a fierce demon dwells this ruins. It can be really frustrating the first time..
    • Also the Anphibian Kraken, the Water Dragon and Torlosh. Also The Temple of Efferd is quite scary...
  • Guillermo del Toro's new game Insane... for the love of God someone hold me!
  • Team Fortress 2: You see that nice, shiny sword the Demoman has? You may not realize it, but it's talking to him. And it wants heads.
    • Going hand in hand with Fridge Horror, consider the phrases some of the characters say "I'm back!" and "killing you is full-time job" These guys know they're continuously dying and coming back to life... exploding into pieces, all the screams of agony... just for your entertainment and for a mysterious lady/voice...
  • The sound effects of the Loputousu and Naga Spells in Fire Emblem 4 are creepy as hell... and can't be properly done on an emulator... The result of which is worse.
  • Neverwinter Nights. Hell, if you're going through the single player campaign, it's late at night, and you're near Charwood, save and quit. Even before you get into the castle, you've got a town where everyone appears to have cotton wool for brains (which is a lot creepier than it sounds), mildly deranged cultists, and oh yeah, a lunatic has gibbered something scary at you while you stand among the impaled corpses of human beings, then disappeared in a puff of blood-coloured smoke. Oh yeah, and there's a bodak waiting for you inside the castle, which is pretty bad news if you don't have good Fort saves.
    • The soundset in some parts of Charwood was creepy Lots of unintelligible screaming and muttering, with the only recognizable phrase being a high "Wake up. Please wake up?"
  • The online flash game KOLM starts off as a cutesy, if slightly melancholy platformer where you play a young robot trying to rebuild himself to please his unseen mother. As the game progresses, however, it gradually becomes apparent that something is very, very wrong as your mother's tone and words start becoming more and more harsh, and near the end flat out states that she intends to rule the world. Then you pick up the last plot item, and the lair the game takes place in starts to self destruct. Your mother has been leading you to your death this entire time. She's not even your mother. Your mother is dead. She's a computer program, and you used to be a human. Once you realize this, "Mother" has this to say.
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You're right. I hate you. You killed me. You killed me. YOU KILLED ME. YOUKILLEDMEYOUKILLEDMEYOUKILLEDMEYOUKILLEDMEYOUKILLEDMEYOUKILLEDMEYOUKILLEDME

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  • Both parts of Still Life are pretty creepy, the game dealing with serial killers and all. In the first game we get a Jack the Ripoff Mad Artist who guts women as inspiration for his paintings. We get to compare the dream-like visions in the paintings to the actual crime scenes. And then we get another murderer who pays homage to the first one, repeating his murders several decades later. In the second game, the murderer is a control freak obsessed with movies. He kidnaps women and keeps them in a cellar full of traps, forcing them to reenact his 'scenarios' in their futile attempts to get away. We get to experience it first-hand as one of the characters gets kidnapped early in the game.
    • It gets worse later. After a part of the game, the perspective switches to our other character, an FBI agent who investigates the house. We find a lot of 'souvenirs' from the previous victims but no clue as to where the kidnapped woman is (the previous part ended abruptly, leaving us guessing about her fate). Then we start finding blood stains that match her DNA. More and more of them...
      • One of the most chilling moments is a very subtle one. While searching the cellar, we encounter a door that looks like an exit but opens to a brick wall, a nasty surprise for any victim who had managed to get through all the rooms. Upon closer inspection we find small traces of some substance on the bricks. A quick examination with a field lab kit identifies it as nail polish. Think about it for a moment and enjoy the mental picture.
  • Space Funeral is a goofy horror-themed rpg that rushes up and down the Sliding Scale of Comedy and Horror like crazy and is lighthearted enough to be funny most of the time; however, reaching the Blood Cavern and hearing Ruth White read ominously the poem Spleen from Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil while all you can see is colored red and black... is anguishing, to say the least.
  • The Meat King's level from Hitman: Contracts. I really can't describe how many nightmares this will give you. Just look up a Let's Play of the game and you'll see the horror.
  • Echo Bazaar is a Twitter-powered, largely text based game with clever storylines and and interesting steampunk-ish atmosphere. Some of the descriptions, however, are pure nightmare fuel:
    • What are the Sorrow Spiders? The story goes that spiders drink from your eyes while you sleep. Sorrow-spiders bite off a whole eye. They get their name from the tears that flow from the remaining eye.
    • If your Nightmare quality reaches five, you will get this event: In the street, you pass a tall, cheerful man with a brisk manner, a stovepipe hat and a row of bright brass buttons down the front of his coat. He winks familiarly as you pass and spreads his hands: eight fingers. You've seen him before. Of course you have. He was beside your bed when you woke this morning. Or were you still asleep?
  • A lot of the Erebus levels in Age of Mythology were pretty cheesy, or else standard Fire and Brimstone Hell, but some parts are genuinely scary. For example, if you look at the ground, you can see that it's actually made of thousands of skeletons...
    • And the fact that you're used to attacking targets with massive, well-supplied and tactically balanced armies that have siege weapons and heavy myth units to blow the crap out of anything that bothers you is not helpful. In this level, you get your four heroes, a few one-use myth units, and a couple human soldiers. Yeah, they're enough, but that doesn't shake a sort of extreme nervousness and vulnerability that will keep you up at night.
  • Mission Force: Cyberstorm. Oh, I lost a unit? Shame, but no sweat off my ba- WHAT THE FUCK WHY IS THIS HAPPENING.
  • Oichi in Sengoku Basara 3: She looks like a pale, emotionless ghost woman that drifts around the battlefield like a broken puppet singing creepy lullabies. Her weapon? Huge hands made of utter darkness (sometimes with huge, shadowy nails driven through them) that can claw, crush and grab enemy soldiers, smashing them into the ground or dragging them down to hell itself. And her strongest attack summons a shadow being that carries her around sucking the life out of anyone in its path. Dulcis in fundo, her victory pose consists in her lying on the ground and playing with said demonic arms before they engulf her in blackness.
    • "COME TOGETHER AND WITNESS MY DREAM!"
    • On the other end of the spectrum there's the eerie sobbing noises she sometimes makes for no reason, or the way every time an attack misses her she'll suddenly whisper "Kill me!"
    • Mitsunari Ishida's constant death threats and vows of vengance against Ieyasu Tokugawa are very intimidating and unnerving. There is also the scene when Mitsunari discovers that Kanbe Kuroda has taken over Hideyoshi Toyotomi's castle. Yes, the castle of Mitsunari's lord. When Mitsunari finally encounters Kanbe, he gives Kanbe such a scathing diatribe that his pupils dilate and turn red. There are also his move "Reverence" where Mitsunari is overtaken by rage and dark energy, and his fighting style changes from quick and graceful to violent and bestial.
    • The Incident at Honnoji stage, where you fight a demonic Oda Nobunaga, is extremely unnerving the first time you go through it. Starts normally, with you running forth, fighting enemies, and trying to unlock a door by defeating a camp commander...only to be interrupted when all the enemies collapse in pain, dissolve in red energy, and vanish. Then you run around to five other camps, trying to keep this from happening, because as your officers note, Nobunaga is eating the souls of his soldiers. And if you're too late to beat a camp commander, the entire area erupts and kills all the enemies. And the kicker? Every time that happens, that's one more time you have to kill Nobunaga.
  • School Days has already been mentioned in the Anime section, but the TV series has NOTHING on some of the bad endings of the original game and/or its updated releases. Special mentions go to:
  • No one mentioned Do Don Pachi yet? Hell! One of the craziest scrolling shooters known to exist in the video game history, its trademark True Final Boss, Hibachi, will always give you nightmares and endless frustration, especially in DaiOuJou and DaiFukkatsu! Just listening to the music is enough to creep you out, too!!
  • Some of the iPod Touch/iPhone/iPad games are quite effective, including:
    • Hysteria Project. I confess that I haven't gotten far enough to even get a good grasp on the plot. You begin by being thrown in a room, arms and legs bound with duct tape (bear in mind that this is all in live action footage). You struggle out of the tape and through the door, and begin your escape through a misty woods. Pretty soon, you notice that you're being pursued by a figure in a hoodie, wielding an ax- which is a hell of a lot freakier than it might sound. When the figure catches up with you, you get schizo mindfuck hallucinations where he seems to be right next to you only to disappear. Then I was caught, which consists of your pursuer rushing at you, striking you with the ax, and a game over screen. Oh, did I mention that along the way you find your arm has a symbol cut into it (with a very realistic-looking wound)? Between this experience and an atmosphere Silent Hill 2 would be proud of, I haven't gotten up the courage to try again yet.
    • Dirt. You are a skeleton kitty named Dirt who finds himself (herself?) underground with no explanation. You tunnel down, finding jewels to collect and odd remnants of life, such as your water and food bowls, tents, camp fires, odd towers and missiles buried away, bottles, eyeballs, doors, drawings and messages to you. There're also the eyeballs with tentacles that do nothing, and the large centipede/worm creatures that don't attack you, but always watch you and talk about how much pain they're in, or ask you what eases your pain, or other such pleasant topics.
    • The Nightjar. You are the only remaining passenger onboard the titular dying spacecraft, and the only way to reach safety is through your sense of hearing alone - the game comes equipped with 3D sound and can only be played while wearing headphones - with your only guide being the crew member of another ship. Then it turns out the ship has been invaded by carnivorous aliens, and you were left behind as bait to allow the surviving crew members to escape. Now you spend the rest of the game tiptoeing through the ship's lightless corridors, trying to avoid the sounds of the guests finishing their meal.
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"There's something in here. It's eating what I think is the first mate of the Nightjar."

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  • Creature Shock wasn't able to make up its mind whether it was going to be a fairly straightforward Rail Shooter or a Boss Game. But it did have the spider...worm...things in the latter segment. If you hadn't figured out how to use your shields by the time you first encountered them, they would reduce you to a single hit point, and then scuttle up to the impossibly high ceiling. Once you tried to leave the room, they would descend, grab you, lift you UP to said ceiling, and you got a nice first person view of the dozens of them, just before the one that got you reared up and swallowed you whole. Did I mention that the entire time you're fighting these things, they make a chittering sound that sounds like nothing so much as a demented giggle?
  • The big ass spiders from Icewind Dale and Baldur's Gate, particularly the Phase Spiders which teleport randomly and the Sword Spiders which are incredibly fast and can slice and dice your party in a heartbeat. For added horror, Right-click on a sword spider. That sound is not natural.
    • The Temple of Ilmater in Lower Dorn's Deep. Hordes of the the most hideous and powerful undead and brainwashed priests inhabit the place, controlled by an idol of Poquelin. Not to mention Poquelin himself, when you meet him. Plus, you've got the music that plays, which complements the evil atmosphere.
  • Rayman has several, notably most of them in the second game.
    • The first is The Cave of Bad Dreams, to start off, the cave itself is made from nightmarishly grotesque faces, for most of the level, you're riding on skulls across what's pretty much the river styx. Next you have these wooden claw-like things that sweep out at intervals on the wall, if you get caught by one, it slams rayman around before dragging him into its hole, where he loses some health and respawns. Next up, we get the mini-guardians, these things aren't much of a threat on their own, but if they get close enough to Rayman, they'll swallow him whole and alive for hp loss and a respawn. At the very end of the cave, the Guardian arrives and attempts to eat rayman, the camera switches to Shaky POV Cam of his mouth as you attempt to escape him on a slide.
    • Next up, we have the tomb of the ancients, this place is...how do you describe it? Absolutely scarring for an eight year old, naturally, there are skeletons everywhere, the wall design is very similair to the cave of bad dreams, and has another river styx boat ride, this time you have to fend off zombie chickens on a very small barrel, once you get to the end of that area, you find a pitfall, once you get down there, the tempo of the music changes to Psycho Strings in a temp played to simulate something skittering towards you from the darkness, right before a Giant Spider attacks you, the most terrifying part of this level is, perhaps, The music.
    • Now just wait 'till its all in 3D...
    • Most of The Desert Of The Knaaren from the third game.
  • Anyone who is afraid of spiders should definetly stay away from Deadly Creatures.
  • The fourth stage of Amagon, especially the mind-raping high-pitched music. And unlike other stages, it doesn't change when you power up or fight the boss. The bosses are really creepy too, especially the two-faced Lion Head, the Devil Tree, the Hippo Demon, and the Alien, along with the music that accompanies them.
  • Gemcraft Labyrinth has some pants-soilingly terrifying features that emphasize just how much of a bad idea going into the aformentioned labyrinth is. After Field A12, the first time you encounter a Demon's tomb, random levels will flicker in and out of view, along with a dark border with long black streaks reaching into the main field of vision of your UI. Sometimes it heralds the arrival of an Abomination, an Elite Mook you can kill for bonus XP. It all comes to a head after the second Gemcrafting Pylon, J10. Around wave 14, the flickering starts up, making your heart beat faster out of nervousness. As more waves pass, the flickering becomes more frequent. On wave 19, an ominous bell tone rings out as your screen is almost entirely consumed by blackness, and a gigantic black something slowly trails under the water...
  • The voices on the Xbox Dashboard, anyone? You can't hear the quiet voices unless you turn the volume up, but it's too bad the same can't be said for the loud voices.
  • Ever 17 gives us this wonderful description of what happens when your character tries to Set Right What Once Went Wrong only to run into a Temporal Paradox in a bad way
  • In Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare; you are walking along hoping that you don't get attacked by another dog, when all of a sudden you hear a scream and when you walk toward the scream, you hear a splash and then the game turns quiet for a second.
    • And the music.
  • In Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box, a fairly lighthearted game about solving puzzles, we get this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixTc8Z-Tel I. Just watch it until the end. It starts out as a dance scene, and then it turns into some sort of vampire movie scene. It turns out that this was just a nightmare caused by hallucinogenic gas, and that Anton isn't really going to eat them, but still, it was pretty unexpected for an E10+ game, especially during such as light scene as that one.
  • The "Amongst the Dead" level in Medal of Honor: Underground. Narrow and dark corridors? Check. Walls of skulls and bones? Check. Creepy music? Check.
  • The Stationary Boss battle theme in Iron Tank is much creepier than the normal boss theme, mainly because of its use of the Locrian mode scale.
  • The entire final act of Police Quest: Open Season, especially the Dream Sequence with the Lady in Red and the creepy music, and the many Nothing Is Scarier moments.
  • The Ugly. To talk about the HONF present in this game would be to spoil the game, but there's a serial killer hiding in your house. He's already decapitated your father, leaving his gouged-out eye in the bathroom sink and his head in the toilet, and has locked himself in your parents' bedroom while he rapes your mother's corpse. And the key to the bedroom, which you must find to defeat the killer, is in your father's mouth. Did I mention that there are also far too many ways to alert the killer to your presence, all of which will result in you being killed in a variety of horrible ways? This game is not for the squeamish... or for anybody, really.
  • The Lovecraftian Interactive Fiction Anchorhead starts out with a yuppie and her new husband moving to a beautiful rambling mansion in a sleepy New England town. The first day of the story plays like a simple mystery story, only mildly creepy, about the origins of the house. Things ... go downhill, especially after you reach the basement.
  • Afflicted. Just ... Afflicted. You're a health inspector checking out a seedy bar in a horrible neighborhood. Just the health violations you find are seriously squicky, but then you start finding body parts. Worst of all is where you find the second hand.
  • Game Boy Camera, may God have mercy on the poor souls who have ran into those freaking error message faces. The fact that it is so Off-Model due to the primitiveness of the Gameboy just makes it worse. Oh, and did I mention that they can pop up at any time? If you REALLY want to see them, just check out some of the suggested videos from this link or the #2 entry in this Cracked article if you prefer. Said article contains more scary video game stuff if you want some extra nightmares.
  • The original 1997 release of JumpStart 4th Grade is a good example of Nightmare Fuel because the substitute teacher (a witch) turns children into scary, though goofy-looking, monsters.
  • The Original Quake had Rotfish, these nasty things rarely appear (once in Episode 2 and 3, a few times in 4 and in the path to the final boss.) They appear as.... well, rotting fish, yet still live, and make this horrible rattling noise like a snake...
  • Luca Blight from Suikoden II. Just his intro alone is enough to scare someone, and from there, he gets worse as he slaughters anyone he can get his hands on.
  • In Space Siege, Cyborg enemies call dibs on your body parts.
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Male Cyber: "I want his arm!"
Female Cyber: "I get his eyes!"

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  • 98% of the Acclaim PC/Dreamcast/N64/PSX game Shadow Man was pretty much nightmare fuel, which you'd expect from a game centering around voodoo lore, a chilling, dismasl afterlife and a doomsday prophecy led by a terror from the Bible itself. However, the Playrooms no doubt freaked out anyone and everyone who played the game as it combined innocent infant bedrooms with blood-stained killing rooms while the laughing and crying of babies mixed in with the combo soundtrack of a music box and horror sounds. The Playrooms area was pure psychosis in video game form. The lairs of the Five weren' tmuch better, including a derelict, abandoned New York apartment building full of corpses and an attic full of enough blood to form literal pools and waterfalls. The underground London subways in which Jack The Ripper, I repeat, JACK THE RIPPER lives. And perhaps worse, a Texas prison where all the guards and most inmates have been killed and reanimated as headless zombies where a disco-obsessed nutball, a Vietnam war veteran and an insane doctor reside. Even the more mundane areas usually have some creepy factor to them. I forgot the final villain, who just happens to be the very same "Legion" that Jesus encountered in the Bible. He's a lot scarier here than he was back then.
    • The sequel, however, seemed less so, as it felt more akin to typical video game dungeons. BUT the main hero was now an emaciated skeleton ghoul rather than a muscle man with a mask in his chest.
  • Endless Ocean Blue World's Abyss level. Up until this point, it's been a game all about the excitement of exploration and the wonder of the oceans. Then it takes a deep curve into a pitch black underwater hell. It's a literal abyss full of alien creatures, many of them very large. Giant squids, sperm whales, megamouth sharks, all of these animals the size of cars or buses can suddenly creep out of the dark to scare the hell out of you. But the worst part is when you first arrive as part of the main story. You are literally clinging to the bottom of the ocean, in the pitch black, desperately searching for the next air station, as the intense pressure is causing your air to just about speed out of your air tanks. When you find the cave you have to evict it's current owner, a giant squid. And then, you find what you are looking for... The wreckage of a submersible, where the father of one of your dive partners died. Inside, you find an artifact and a letter. The father apparently spent his last moments in a cramped, non-functioning submersible writing a letter to his daughter, telling her that he loved her, among other heart-breaking things. It then mentions how he, when he is done writing the letter, will open the hatches to the sub and try to swim to the surface. From over a thousand feet down, where the water pressure will crush an unprotected human body into a fine paste. The game also takes plenty of time to pull you aside and explain with bright eyed enthusiasm how anything that dies in the ocean will float down here, to be picked apart by pill bugs the size of German Shepherds.
  • Covetous flash game, which can be found at Newgrounds. Seriously...what the f**k is THIS???? Basically, you can understand that is about a stillborn who resides inside his twin brother's body. The game is about you making your twin get more and more sick, as the stillborn sucks his life and eat up his life force, growing like a parasite inside his body. Each level of the game is more deranged, the twin alive getting visibly affected by the stillborn, who gets more and more agressive, and speaks more and more disturbing things. It DOES NOT help the fact that the graphics are pretty precarious. Oh, and since you play as the parasite stillborn, you get a good and a bad ending. Guess what happens in the good ending.....
  • Cave Story has plenty of nightmarish moments despite it's initially kid-friendly appearance. The True Final Boss Ballos, on the other hand, is where the game sheds any illusion that the game is at all kid-friendly and has you fighting a wizard (who's backstory is already Nightmare Fuel in and of itself) on top of a mountain of corpses, where every ground pound attack kicks up a shower of bones. Once you beat him, he jumps up into the ceiling and comes back down as a gigantic ball with a very creepy face, which you spend the rest of the fight pummeling until the face explodes, revealing a morass of screaming red faces underneath as it spawns hordes upon hordes of demons dressed up as angels while every surface of the arena (not counting the spinning platforms that orbit the boss now) is covered in bloody spikes. Is this seriously the same game with the adorable rabbit people that had you fighting a giant sentient toaster as a recurring boss?
  • Brink of Consciousness: Dorian Gray Syndrome features a madman who likes to kill people and then arrange their bodies as "artwork" in these big glass tubes at strategic points in his mansion. Two of the more "interesting" pieces are his girlfriend, who he stuffed into a giant orchid up to about mid-torso and an anonymous young man who he dressed up like Icarus and hung on the ceiling.
  • The otherwise saccharine Crystal's Pony Tale pits you against a disproportionately intimidating figure in the form of the Witch. The opening sequence featuring her is unrelentingly ominous, which is amplified by the chilling soundtrack, and the lack of motivation for the Witch's actions only adds to the unsettling sense of mystery surrounding her. You could look up any playthrough of the game on YouTube and it's a guarantee that around half of the commentators will bring up how badly the Witch scared them as a kid.
  • Surprisingly, Sonic Generations of all games has an instance of this (and yes, this does count since it seems Sega was meaning for it to be creepy). As Sonic's friends got turned into statues, their souls were left floating in a dark, endless void, and they're even aware that their bodies were frozen and turned into statues. Tails himself even says that he's going to have nightmares from it.
  • Many of the Bad Endings of the BlazBlue games are like this - mental crashes, abuse and unwilling transformations are pretty much the norm - but Makoto's bad ending takes the cake for one of the worst. After losing her way, she runs headlong into Relius and puts up a brave front, but ultimately winds up restrained by Ignis. The stage is now set for what may yet be one of Relius' harshest crossings of the Moral Event Horizon. He proceeds to filter through her mind and soul like sweeping through a library, ignoring her fondest memories and dredging out her most miserable moments. Relius has always been obsessed with souls, but that sick desire of his is taken to unprecedented levels when he comes across a soul he describes as "focused, yet pointing in multiple directions" - something capable of "leaping through time and space so adroitly". By the time he gets to the animal instincts at her core and is prepared to topple and rebuild her soul anew, the sheer force of trauma has left her completely paralyzed. Makoto can literally do nothing as Relius destroys her very being and uses her lifeless body for his own purposes. Only scale differentiates this from the aforementioned Demon Path - a sheer grotesquerie of human nature written all too well.
    • There's a particularly chilling portion of this ending where all we hear is Makoto sobbing, pleading with Relius to stop, and a few times mentions what he's doing is hurting her, while he ingnores this and says he will go on. What makes that even worse is that their character portraits aren't shown at this time, amplifying the effect of us hearing a rape in progress.
    • Even the Help me Professor Kokonoe segment is chilling due to Makoto still begging for mercy even after she's entered Kokonoe's lab.
    • Want more? Use his Astral Heat (Puppeteer's Altar). The opponent is trapped in one of Relius' labs and restrained in some way. If you'll notice, the walls are smeared with the blood of past subjects...who are hanging above on swinging crosses, the shadows of which can be seen. Relius then nonchalantly alludes to what he's going to do to him/her and the doors slam. All you can hear over the announcer is the death cry of the victim. For even more horror, some of the "experiments" are particularly gruesome. While Hazama is dying of boredom ("Not like I don't deserve a hundred times worse...") and Tsubaki's appears humane (despite her facing the wrong way due to blindness, and more about Relius being savvy enough that Tsubaki's utter loyalty assures that she's not going to rebel), those swords for Platinum's are going into her barrel, Bang's knees are pressed under stone blocks with more on the way, Arakune is being boiled alive, and before you even think to laugh at the hamster ball, read the spoiler block above to know exactly where that's going. Yeah, he's that kinda person.
    • What about Ragna's Bad Ending, where he unwittingly transforms into the Black Beast, and can do nothing as he ravages across the world, complete with the horrifying screams of the people he devours?
    • Some say that nightmares can begin with a sense of safeness. In that very case, the combination of Litchi and Arakune's Bad Ends count. We were lured into a sense of happiness and heartwarming that we saw Arakune still has enough heart and care about Litchi's welfare, trying his best to remove her from his curse, and she is able to live on her life normally without any memory of him... in which we later learn that the corruption within Litchi is similar to Alzheimer's disease. Without a cure, it will continue to rot her until she dies, and all Arakune took was memories of him, and without his memory, Litchi becomes unmotivated to find the cure and blissfully unaware of it, awaiting the day she withers and die with her memories being jumbled here and there, or at worst, become the next Arakune and then start eating everyone nearby until someone kills her. Can she just join NOL so she can have a shot in surviving and have a Heel Realization to make amends instead? Please??
  • Cry of Fear is a mod for Half Life 1, and boy does it have some messed up enemies. The most twisted example is what can be described as an emeciated women in a white dress strung up like a scarecrow. It slowly inches along, but can force your character to commit suicide at the sight of it. If you're cocky and decide to knife it, a baby bursts from her stomach and assaults you with its knife.
  • Hatoful Boyfriend, the "pigeon dating game"? Pretty much anything involving Dr. Shuu takes a syringe of Nightmare Fuel and injects it in the worst places possible, then takes meticulous notes on your agonized writhing.
    • Let's start with the rumors that students in his infirmary frequently vanish, never to be seen again-- and yakitori is inevitably on the menu the next week, and shiny new quill pens show up in the school store. You find plenty of evidence that these rumors are true, but no authorities ever investigate because the entire school is run by the Hawk Party specifically for Shuu's... "research".
    • If you are actually on the doctor's romance route, you accidentally condemn Yuuya to this fate, and in gratitude the doctor sends you a lovely Christmas dinner months later. Then, on Valentine's Day, he allows you to find the remains of yet another student, only to reveal that You Have Outlived Your Usefulness... your usefulness living, that is. He then describes in loving detail how he plans to dissect you, preserve your head as a gesture of affection, and examine your insides most... intimately.
    • The "Bad Boys Love" route in the paid game starts with the heroine's death, then lovingly sandwiches layers of this trope with breaking every cutie in the game, and the player as well. Mostly courtesy of Shuu. Highlights include Ryouta crossing the Despair Event Horizon and consenting to being modified by Shuu into a bioweapon for use against the rest of humanity when they attempt to slaughter everybirdy left in the school, a graphic (described) flashback to the heroine's death by suffocation via The Virus that Ryouta is now a host for, an even more heartbreaking flashback to the previous host of said virus, Nageki, being Driven to Suicide and setting himself on fire so that nothing will remain of himself to spread the virus (which fails), Kazuaki aka Hitori flipping out and trying to vivisect Ryouta, untrained, to remove Nageki's transplanted organs and keep what's left of Nageki for himself, and the horrifying, bloody, sickle-clawed robot Labor-9 lurching after Ryouta and the other birds until they short-circuit it with a taser... and are then informed that Labor-9 was actually a cyborg with the heroine's missing brain and they just murdered the heroine again.
    • Did I mention that failing to complete a romance route or begin the "Bad Boys Love" route gets humanity condemned to extinction, with the heroine being surprised and murdered in her own home, followed by a Game Over screen with a surprisingly creepy pigeon-Grim-Reaper? Or that this presumably happens in the post-game after finishing Nageki's route, since the Hawk Party cannot see you wooing a ghost?
  • SCP-087-B brings closed spaces, anxiety, and sheer darkness to the table. You just keep walking down stairs endlessly, with the sounds of heavy breathing keeping you company. That is until the game spawns you a playmate: a completely darkened humanoid with a white mask. This guy will either jump in to scare you, or chase you down the halls. The best part? IT COMPLETELY RANDOMIZES WHEN HE SHOWS UP.
    • And to anyone who has played the game, this just adds to it; "Don't look at me". Don't. Listen.
  • Eternal Champions and its set of scenery kills reached a level of violence and gratuituous cruelty that you rarely see even in more modern games. Pick your "favorite": getting torn apart/eaten by wildlife/supernatural beings, messily squashed by boulders, thrown into giant fanblades, burned or boiled alive, split in half by lightning, painfully dissolving into acid goop, falling into a trapdoor filled with multiple sets of giant buzzsaws, letting mysterious machines mess with your body...
  • Journey took everyone by surprise with its Nightmare Fuel. That game starts out peacefully, with the players exploring desert ruins, meeting companions and flying with the cute rag creatures...until you land in a dark cavern with some gigiantic flying stone serpents, each with a single glowing eye, who will attack you on sight. You will spend the rest of the level hiding in alcoves and praying they don't see you as they pass.
  • Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn have Feral Ones, which are Laguz (a race capable of transforming into hawks, tigers, giant cats and other animals) that have been locked into their transformed state with the use of a potion that makes them lose all sense of reason and also drastically shortens their life span. It can also be given to Beorc (humans) for the same effect, sans transformation. Bertram/Renning, a Beorc, is seen starting to go through this transformation, and he becomes a Death Seeker.
Cquote1

Bertram: Kill...me... ...KILL...M-ME...

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  • The opening cinematic for Supreme Commander, once you understand a few things. The Infinite War has claimed billions of lives. It's a war, and this is the future. Not that bad, right? The only military personell are so elite, there probabally aren't more than a few thousand at any given moment. The discrepancy? Civilians caught in the crossfire.
  • Dark Cloud:The Dark Genie's stated goal before the boss fight, especially given its As Long As There is Hate speech. A being that exists outside of time will spread its influence across all ages, a "utopia of evil". Now if you've ever thought about eternity as being infinite linear time...actually it works even if eternity is the complete absence of time. To make matters even worse, It will have always been going to have succeeded.
  • Guild Wars 2 features this dark and surreal vision in the Heart of Thorns campaign. Zojja's and Traherne's distorted faces are probably the creepiest parts.

Other Games/Boxarts[]

  • Puzzle Bobble / Bust-A-Move's American boxarts, SBAM1 for the PlayStation 2 and BAM2 for the Sega Saturn replaces Bub and other characters with a screaming man with matchsticks keeping his eyes open and a baby from the pits of the Uncanny Valley blowing blood-red bubbles. What does that have to do anything with cutesy dragons solving puzzles!?
  • One game for the Sega Genesis was Beast Wrestler, which involved genetically engineered monsters slaughtering each other for the sake of entertainment. Even then, the game's cover art was pretty gruesome.
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