Eldritch Location / Video Games

"August 4th, 1964: we discovered the Oldest House while investigating a suspected Altered World Event case in the New York City subway tunnels. The agents found their way up into the building. Once we became aware of it, it was there."

Eldritch Locations in video games.

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A

• In the Alan Wake games, Cauldron Lake is home to a Reality Warper Eldritch Abomination called the Dark Presence, that desires to enter into our world fully as a Monster from Beyond the Veil. In service of its goal, proximity to the lake grants creative humans the power of Rewriting Reality, though the beneficiaries of this power, protagonist included, tend to exploit it to defy the Presence's will once they glean its malign nature. Cauldron Lake itself is far more deep and vast than it appears, as a deep sea fishing trawler has somehow found a way to its suspiciously oceanic depths.
• The titular planet in Albion looks like some alien world with primitive civilizations at first. Until it is revealed that it operates under completely different laws the Earth does. The fact that it's actually a sentient (benevolent) being, has something to do with it.
• AMID EVIL has The Void. It consists largely of abstract shapes, often unnaturally warped and often with animated textures that give the illusion of movement where there is none. Paths assemble themselves and tilt at seemingly impossible angles or loop back on themselves. What light there is has no source and usually does more to disorient and conceal than actually illuminate. Some places give views into what looks like outer space or alien skies as if the Void were an entire universe in its own right, all Made of Evil.
• ANNO: Mutationem: Limen is a mysterious crater that lies somewhere on the planet. The crater lies surrounded by Creepy Crosses and has been stated to have existed for centuries with scholars believing it was caused by a Magic Meteor but its true origin is unknown. Limen brought about dangerous phenomena that spread out into the world, one being the Mechanika Virus and creating a gateway to another eldritch world; Hinterland. The Consortium goes to great measures to contain and eradicate whatever is created by Limen with their main objective to destroy the crater.
• Naraka in Asura's Wrath. A vast brown abyss with no visible bottom, punctuated with ludicrously tall towers. Also, The Event Horizon is weird.

B

• Bendy and the Ink Machine: Joey Drew Studios seems to be turning into this. Not only is the basement impossibly big for the tiny building above it, it also has things that just don't make sense for an animation studio to have, like giant open rooms with nothing in them, a department for producing plush toys of the characters, and several long hallways that serve no purpose but to have random projectors placed in them at random. Henry points out that he doesn't remember these rooms, but it's not clear if it's a result of the Ink Machine and Joey's experimentation, or if they were just built during the thirty years between his retirement and the game. There is also a bottomless pit in the middle of level S, and an entire haunted house ride.
• The Binding of Isaac:
  • A couple of late-game stages could count, but none more than the stage accessed after killing Isaac's Mom: The Womb. Despite the title giving you an idea of where you are, it's best not to think about it too much beyond that, as it's accessed through a fleshy hole in the floor after beating Mom, is a giant labyrinth of enemy-filled rooms (including Mom's sentient, severed hands in Rebirth,) and the final stage boss is Mom's heart. Not to mention that there's a literal doorway to Hell (well, Sheol, but still) in there. And then there's the Scarred Womb in Afterbirth, a variation of the previous dungeon that looks like someone took a chainsaw to the inside.
  • The "I AM ERROR Room," a deeply-hidden area that can only be reached by either random teleportation or, as of Afterbirth, causing a paradox^{As in...}Using a Blank Card (an activated item that replicates the card held by the player) on a ? Card (a card that replicates the activated item held by the player) or using Teleport 2.0 (teleports to the next unexplored room) after exploring every possible room in the map. It has a glitchy floor along a black void, an equally-glitchy shopkeeper with a word balloon reading "I AM ERROR," a direct way to the next floor, and a number of rather random possible items, pickups, or other objects. It cannot be escaped by anything other than teleportation and has little to no real in-story reason for its existence.
  • The Very Definitely Final Dungeon in Afterbirth +: the Void. The entrance appears at random after major boss fights (always after one particular boss), and appears to be a twisted black portal similar to those that have been spawning enemies. The floor itself is made up of a random assortment of rooms from all other floors, and occasionally is subject to bursts of static that alter the landscape entirely. It's also the only floor in the game to have multiple boss rooms, as many as eight, and only one of them contains the actual boss. Which one it is is entirely random. The Void and its boss Delirium are a representation of Isaac's mind breaking down as he suffocates to death. If he dies here, the game over screen refers to dying "In some dying memory".
• BlazBlue: The Boundary can be classified as this — a nexus for all timelines, and so chock-full of nastiness and Mind Rape that mere entry can destroy you in some shape or form. Precisely eight beings are known to have traveled through the Boundary, either for Time Travel or some other reason.
  • Ragna the Bloodedge: Involuntarily dumped into the Cauldron at Kagutsuchi by Nu-13. Not much is known happens to him at this point, though it's assumed that his soul was either ripped apart by the Boundary or became a new Black Beast, smelted in the cauldron and later released. He later does it again in Chrono Phantasma, this time in a controlled scenario with Rachel's assistance, and emerges 100 years in the past and eventually becomes Bloodedge.
  • Nu-13: Tosses herself into the Cauldron at Kagutsuchi together with Ragna after impaling them both with her Calamity Sword. It's never revealed what happens to her at this point, though it's assumed that she either was torn apart by the Boundary or was smelted into a new Black Beast before the Reset Button was pushed.
  • Lotte Carmine: Willfully entered the Boundary For Science! Goes insane due to exposure to forbidden knowledge, loses his body soon thereafter and becomes Arakune.
  • Litchi Faye-Ling: Momentarily enters the Boundary to gain the knowledge and power to save Lotte above. Gains telekinesis and the ability to tap into the power of the Boundrary, but is slowly developing memory loss symptoms and is in danger of turning into another Arakune.
  • Hakumen/Jin Kisaragi: Jumps into the Cauldron after Ragna and Nu-13. Goes back 100 years in time, succumbs to injuries sustained prior to dive, but otherwise emerges unharmed - all mental damages relate to transfer to the Susano'o Unit shortly thereafter. Also engages Yuuki Terumi in a duel as a diversion so Jubei and Claudius Alucard can banish Terumi to the Boundary, in the process sealing away Hakumen as well. Emerges 90 years later at 20% power, but has remained physically and mentally sound due to sheer force of will.
  • Yuuki Terumi: Banished to the Boundary during engagement with Hakumen. Lost the artificial body he was possessing at the time. Effects on mental state indeterminate due to prior batshit insanity.
  • Relius Clover: Enters the Cauldron for reasons unknown. Emerges 80 years later, physically unharmed; memories are jumbled during transfer, but are quickly reset to pre-jump state.
  • Makoto Nanaya: Loses her consciousness in proximity to Cauldron at Ibukido due to Prime Field Device activity and emerges in the Wheel of Fortune timeline. Travels back to Continuum Shift timeline with aid of Rachel Alucard. Zero physical and mental degradation in both transfers.
• Bloodborne: It's never quite clear where the normal places end and the stranger places begin, considering some of the weird stuff your character starts to find once you start acquiring Insight, but a few places stand out:
  • Byrgenwerth College's Lecture Building, and the college in general, which seems to have been dragged off screaming into the Nightmare realm, and while it still more or less looks normal, its warped inhabitants (which include its old students turned into slime monstrosities) will quickly tell you otherwise. Oh, and it somehow hid an entire, endless lake of shimmering white in the moon's reflection in a small pool. And killing the entity you find there will quickly drag the whole town into madness.
  • Yahar'Gul, a town within a town. Somehow, the entities in charge of the whole Mind Screw managed to hide a large, nightmarish citadel that resembles an earthbound R'lyeh, within the small city of Yharnam. Most specifically, in one of the cathedrals.
  • And, of course, the Nightmare Frontier, the Great Ones' actual realm, crawling with stuff that will destroy your sanity in seconds, and housing the nightmares of several important players in the whole scheme, in particular one that acts as a freaking Eldritch Abomination nursery.
  • In a way, the Hunter's Dream and possibly every single thing after the blood transfusion at the start of the game counts. It's simultaneously All Just a Dream and a real, actual place you can go to. And sometimes, for extra Mind Screw, you can access the dream part and the real part separately, leading to oddities such as finding the long-dead corpses of people you met minutes ago. And while they seemingly don't affect each other, as the game goes, you learn that it most definitely does.
  • There's also the Nightmare of Mensis, what is essentially a giant castle in the middle of a mental dreamscape that houses multiple Eldritch Abomination s and appears to be the headquarters of the School of Mensis, a faction of the game's Corrupt Church that wishes to contact the other Eldritch Abominations.
  • The Old Hunters introduces the Hunter's Nightmare, a twisted version of Yharnam (which is already twisted as it is) populated by Ax-Crazy Hunters who have been damned to this realm. There's so much carnage to be found, that a river of blood cuts through the city from thousands of mutilated corpses that turn out to be Not Quite Dead once you come close to them. That's the least crazy part. Then you get to the Research Hall and the Astral Clocktower which dominates the sky, and once you navigate the maze of stairways to reach the top and fight its boss, the giant clock behind her will open up and you can step ouut into a new layer of the nightmare that was apparently above the sky all along; A small fishing hamlet full of mutated townsfolk who hate hunters because of the atrocities Byrgenwerth perpetuated on them because of their connection to the Great One Kos.
• BoxxyQuest: The Gathering Storm has the Deep Web, a labyrinthine Bonus Dungeon hidden within the catacombs underneath a small village, and containing a patchwork of environments that shouldn’t possibly be able to exist there. Vast snow-covered forests, ancient crypts, sewers and cisterns, lunar wastelands, temples inhabited by lost tribes of shapeshifters, a sunny village where children play… And when you finally make it to the end of the maze… you emerge in the basement of the local inn, about thirty feet away from where you started. Worst of all, no one in town seems to realize that this paradox hell-cave is even down there.
• Subverted with Season 19 of Brawl Stars: Enchanted Woods, where the Twitter Post before the Brawl Talk's premiere made the environment seem red, hellish and like something out of Stranger Things. However, the actual location is anything but hellish and is like every other Enchanted Forest.
• The Breach starts off on an ordinary spaceship, but towards the end things start to shift into a mountainous region filled with yellow mist and glowing glyphs.
• Bug Fables has the Giant's Lair, which is just an ordinary, albeit abandoned human house, but thanks to the main cast being bugs and the Dead Landers, it stands out as one of, if not, THE most horrifying place in the game. It's oppressively dark, a strange fog permeates the air, the walls and floor are a dark red for some reason, Venus can't send her buds any further past the entrance, the aforementioned Dead Landers are horrific monsters unlike anything bugkind has ever seen, and the fridge and stove translate into a sudden icy mountain and a burning plateau respectively, that both serve as jarring contrast to the rest of the Lair. Even when it's not observed from the lens of a bug, there's something unnervingly off about the whole place.
• Bugsnax has Snaktooth Island. At first, it looks like your typical island apart from its patchwork layout. However, beneath the surface lies a hellish landscape made of food born from those that ate the Bugsnax.

C

• Castlevania:
  • It's an Eldritch Location and houses several Eldritch Abominations to boot. The discrepancy that crops up between the games is lampshaded and handwaved with a comment that the castle is "a creature of chaos." The castle can take many shapes and forms, picking and choosing when and if it wants to follow the laws of physics.
  • In Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, the whole castle has an inverted duplicate revealed halfway through. You and the monsters fall towards and walk around on the ceiling. All the furniture is still on the floor. It is never explained why a second castle just appears out of the clouds, nor why it's upside down. And then there's the two mirrored split castles in Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance, which are somehow both the extension of Maxim's will.
  • Dracula's demon castle continues to follow tradition in the Lords of Shadow subseries, with that twist that an entire city gets built onto the ruins at one point. While being on top of the castle usually isn't a problem, it does mean that someone can occasionally walk right outside of their office and wind up right in the seat of Dracula's power.
  • In Castlevania: Bloodlines, the Leaning Tower of Pisa becomes this: when the stage begins, the tower and adjoining building in the background look pretty much like they do in real life, but then you enter a heavily tilted segment, which leads to a vertical segment which constantly rocks back and forth with rapidly moving clouds, then you go through a palace segment, and finally hop platforms distantly floating around a much taller tower which also rocks back and forth, and fight a boss on the perfectly level top.
• The eponymous Celeste Mountain has the strange ability to manifest a person's inner issues to serve as obstacles for the climb. Oddly enough, it's considered to be a place of healing in-universe, suggesting that the intent of this effect (if "intent" is even the right word) is to help people overcome their problems rather than to serve as a deterrent.
• Chicory: A Colorful Tale: Inside the black tree is a dungeon formed from insecurities and corruption. At the end of the game, the one atop Luncheon Tower first takes the form of a Bigger on the Inside grove. When you're kicked out and re-enter, it recreates the houses of four of its past wielders: yourself, Chicory, Blackberry, and Cardamom.
• The Dead Sea from Chrono Cross. It's the site of a massive Time Crash, where the canceled Bad Future from Chrono Trigger tried to reassert itself over Chronopolis. Waves of water, forever frozen in time, wash over the wreckage of the city, and at the heart is the Tower of Geddon, a conglomeration of locations from said canceled timeline haphazardly mashed together. Much later, you also go to the Darkness Beyond Time, where cancelled timelines are sent and where the Time Devourer lurks.
• Its predecessor Chrono Trigger already had the End of Time, the place where all possible time lines meet. As far as eldritch locations go, it's actually fairly harmless. The Updated Re-release added a few more such as the Dimensional Vortexes, areas where time and space are essentially broken. The Darkness Beyond Time also makes an appearance.
• Chzo is both this and an Eldritch Abomination, a pain elemental who satiates himself with tortured victims trapped inside his labyrinthine corridors for all eternity.
• Control takes place an enormous building called The Oldest House, where the Federal Bureau of Control set up their base. For starters, it occupies a city block in New York (and due to its windowless design and harsh Brutalist architecture, makes it stick out like a sore thumb), but it evades attention and only appears to those deliberately searching for it. The interior is much deeper and more expansive than it has any right to be, and as you can see on the page picture, its rooms constantly shift and require rituals to navigate, and that's not even getting into the supernatural artifacts of doom, the gateways to various Pocket Dimensions, and the paranatural entities that pervade it. It's like if the SCP Foundation made the House of Leaves into their headquarters.
• Corpse Party features Heavenly Host Elementary School. It's a haunted, sentient, multi-layered dimension that consists of just the rundown school (it was originally in the real world, but after a series of murders it was torn down) and a never-ending expanse of trees with ceaseless rainfall. Anyone who is unfortunate to be caught in it can and most likely will die from either hunger or starvation, vengeful spirits, or any number of creative traps the school will lure the player into, all if the person doesn't commit suicide. Even worse, a person can succumb to the darkening the school exerts, become insane and contribute to the problem by killing their fellow members. Let's not forget that anyone who dies in the school not only experiences the pain and agony of their death forever, but is also erased from existence in the real world.
  • Made even worse with the reveal of the "Groundhog Day" Loop and time travel. Just as space and planes of existence are warped in this dimension, so is the concept of time and parallel timelines. It's told that even if you tried to save someone who died before, they will just die a far more gruesome death. Sachiko has mentioned that Yoshiki has died a few times in other timelines, which leads to the realization that every possible timeline was exhausted and Yui, Morishige, Mayu, and Seiko always ended up dying in the school so it was impossible to ever save them.
• The Mansus, home of the Hours, in Cultist Simulator.
  The Wood grows around the walls of the Mansus. As any student of the Histories knows, the Mansus has no walls.

D

• Darkest Dungeon:
  • The titular dungeon is a combination of Womb Level and Alien Geometries. Being in it is so stressful that heroes who go in there once will refuse to return.
  • The Farmstead from the Color of Madness update was struck by a mysterious comet, causing some very odd effects in the region. Crystals spread everywhere, infesting living things like parasites, twisting then into monsters. The exploded remains of the central windmill simply float in place, unaffected by gravity. Trying to trek to the comet's crash site will lead to heroes being teleported around randomly, sometimes to other parts of the farm, sometimes to brightly-colored voids with bits of scenery from other parts of the game. People that die there don't stay dead, emerging alive a few weeks later. And worst of all, the entire place is trapped in a time loop - even if a group of heroes manages to fight their way through the hordes of corrupted monsters and destroy the comet, they'll just find themselves warped back to when they first entered the farm, doing it all over again.
• The Dark Souls franchise has quite a few:
  • The most important is the Abyss, a location that reoccurs across all three games.
    • In New Londo. It's black. No light. No landscape. No horizon. No ground. Just black in every direction, going on forever. You can only survive in the place by wearing a particular magic ring; if you don't, you just fall. Forever. It was born out of concentrated human essence. That's right, apparently the source of this empty nothingness is humanity itself.
    • In the Artorias of the Abyss DLC, it's manifested in a kingdom called Oolacile. From the outside it resembles a pitch black void that consumes part of the town, and on the inside it appears as an utterly lightless cavern filled with bizarre pitch-black ghosts that look like concentrated Humanity. The worst part is it's now spreading outward, as strange blue-black ichor covers the surrounding landscape, getting more prevalent the closer to the Abyss one gets.
    • In Dark Souls II, it's called the Dark Chasm of Old. Another pitch black cavern that can can only be entered as a spirit, contains spirits of other warriors endlessly wandering its cave-like halls killing anything they see, alongside these weird tree-sorcerer things. And the boss of the area is a creepy angelic being called the Darklurker, which absolutely nothing is known about.
  • The Crystal Cavern. It's a huge cave that is home to bizarre monsters and invisible platforms. The sheer wrongness of the place seems to reflect the madness of the being who made the cave his sanctuary, Seath the Scaleless.
  • Ash Lake. It's a small remnant of what the world looked like before the Fire and before the Lords defeated the Everlasting Dragons. It's a seemingly endless expanse of grey water, with gigantic, utterly massive trees extending up beyond the clouds that blanket the sky. All you find down here are a scarce few enemies, and even the small beach you explore is huge compared to most other areas in the game. The sheer scale, uniformity, and silence of the place, combined with the mournful music, just creates a feeling of emptiness.
  • The Old Chaos in Crown of the Ivory King. Beneath the frozen land of Eleum Loyce lies a giant inferno with tree roots branching all over the place yet not burning, and the battle takes place on an inexplicably floating stone platform far above an endless sea of flame, with doorways that contain fiery portals that spawn corrupted knights. The roots and branches are meant to evoke Lost Izalith from the first game, where the Bed of Chaos was fought. It seems to be hinted that the Old Chaos is the Bed in a new form.
  • The entirety of Dark Souls II. Unlike the first and third games, where the world maps are cohesive and could be almost entirely laid out without any interruptions, the world design of II is...weird. In Heide's Tower of Flame, you can enter a slowly flooding level of the crumbling Tower, take an elevator down, and proceed horizontally to find yourself in an underground harbour that, since logically it should also be under the ocean that is doing the flooding up above, does not fit at all with how water works; later, in Earthen Peak, you can take an elevator up from the top of the mountain to find the bottom of a giant city that is slowly sinking into an ocean of magma that is absolutely not visible from anywhere below it. If you check the collected world map, the Shaded Ruins, Aldia's Keep and Drangleic Castle are all in the same place◊.
  • The above is not even getting into the complete mindfuck that is the Things Betwixt. All travelers have to go through it to reach Drangleic, and it serves as the tutorial level of the game. An endless cave with only a small bit of land surrounded by an underwater lake stretching out in every direction, with pillars of stone reaching into the darkness. If the intro cinematic is to be taken literally, you have to drop down a whirlpool to reach it, but there is no sign of that whirlpool when you wake up. As if that wasn't enough, there's also the tiny detail that the you exit through is not big enough to contain all of Things Betwixt.
  • The Untended Graves in the third game are a near-exact replica of the tutorial area and Firelink Shrine... except crawling with much more powerful Undead, Black Knights, and covered in pitch darkness. One character's dialogue implies that the place is a look into an Alternate Universe where the Fire has finally died and the Age of Dark has come. Since Firelink Shrine can only be accessed via bonfire-warping, while the Untended Graves can be reached on foot from the rest of the game, this has disturbing implications.
  • The entire realm of Lothric is implied to be one in Dark Souls III, as it's an amalgamation of different lands once ruled over by their respective Lords of Cinder, summoned across time. Even more so in the Kiln of the First Flame, an illogical jumble of buildings and architecture haphazardly piled on top of one another across an endless plain of ash and half-melted spires of rock.
  • The entirety of Dark Souls III's second DLC, the Ringed City, is set in one. The first area, the Dreg Heap, is another jumble of buildings from entirely separate times periods slowly sliding down the side of a cliff that rings the DLC's eponymous location, the Ringed City. Which is itself eventually revealed to exist inside the dream of a slumbering goddess; one she's woken up the entire city is replaced by an endless desert filled with ruins of all the areas from the base game with a black sun hovering in the sky, implied to be the universe's Natural End of Time having been terribly distorted by the Gods's interference.
  • Also in III, Archdragon Peak. It's not connected to any part of the map except by bonfires, and you reach it by doing the right gesture in a specific location. Since this gesture is only available in the late-game, you will generally be at a stage where the sun is trapped in a perpetual Darksign eclipse and the sky looks like dying embers...and yet when you reach Archdragon Peak, not only will that not be happening, the sky above Archdragon Peak is possibly the clearest, most beautiful blue you'll see in the entire game.
• Deepwoken:
  • Just about anything related to the Void, as they draw living beings closer to the Depths. Notable examples include:
    • The Voidsea is an Eldritch Ocean Abyss, filled with monsters such as Brainsuckers, Lionfish and most dangerous of all, the Dread Serpent. Islands that drift into it have their locations stuck in time and are referred to as Driftlands, with Boatman's Watch being one example.
    • Voidzones involve reduced healing effectiveness, campfires only last 6 seconds, among other various hazards.
    • The Voidheart, while not exactly able to draw its inhabitants to the Depths, is described as a dream within another dimension, with its' interior varying based on the appearance of the Voidmother.
  • The Depths acts as a purgatory to all the souls and home to various monsters, which is separated into multiple layers:
    • The First Layer, Scyphozia, is home to the once prosperous Merchant City Celtor, but was sunk into the Depths by being offered to the Drowned God Yun'Shul, with its remaining inhabitants either gone mad, losing their sense of self, and various monsters roaming around, with the most notorious being the Nautilodaunt, a Cthulhumanoid capable of mimicking combat techniques and rarely Thundercall. Staying around too long will harm your sanity unless you have taken precautions, and while those who died above the waters have their souls sent to here, those deemed to have been too good at escaping the Depths will be sent to the next layer.
    • The Second Layer, The Eternal Gale, consists of two floors, the first being the Ethironal Shrine, which described as a resting place of the Drowned God Ethiron, and there exists an unyielding wind capable of blowing off various things. The snow that it brings isn't snow, but actually deadly parasites that turns its host into husks if not treated, and if the husks live long enough, they mutate into Carbuncles. The second floor, New Kyrsa, The Sleeping City, is an Advanced Ancient Acropolis with a now nonfunctional railway system and a modern sewer system. However, because its inhabitants, the Kyrsgarde failed an ritual that would lull Ethiron to sleep, most of its citizens were brainwashed, and a mist that brainwashes other inhabitants if they stay there too long, and to make matters worse, the city is locked into a Time Loop Trap — once a brave group of Drowned defeats the Scion of Ethrion, spacetime causes the entire city to collapse, and according to Klaris, it's "torn to eternity".
    • The Third Layer, The Vents, while almost no information is available so far, some info describes it as the closest equivalent to Hell, being a lava-covered and brimstone landscape, and the flowers growing over there are actually a part of the Drowned God, Korilfiend. When Amorus Pleeksty consumed one of its flowers, he managed to become the first person to learn Flamecharm, and spread it to other people as well.
• Deltarune has many examples linked to the mysterious Dark Worlds:
  • First, the school closet. Once Kris and Susie open it, darkness starts to spread around the corridor, and when they enter inside, it's completely black, except for some paper sheets on the floor. When they try to go further, it seems to go forever, then when they try to get out, the door suddenly shuts on them. Then, the paper sheets start to fall and our two protagonists with them. When they wake up, they have changed appearance, and Kris' cellphone only makes horrible noises.
    • The place where they fall isn't better: it's a dead valley with black fluds coming out of eye-shaped holes, some "wobbly things" who start moving as you approch them, and some kind of moss-like creatures.
  • The Dark Worlds themselves: a mysterious entity can suddenly decide to give life to a room which becomes a micro-world, where all the items become characters with a story, and where the furniture becomes complex structures. It even applies to electronic devices whose software becomes a part of this world.
    • Inside Cyber World, one place takes the cake: Queen's mansion's basement. While the rest of the place is wacky and has a dynamic music, the basement constrasts heavily, as it's a dark place whose soundtrack is only a drone, where treasure chests only have mayflies inside them, and where lamps suddenly attack you. The west room is the worst: you enter it, you go to the west, only to see nothing. You go back, but the door disappeared. You return where you came from, and if you pay attention, you can see the big smile of an unknown creature watching you from the shadows. Then a teacup arrives, and when you go down without any problem, you are suddenly attacked when you try to get up. The east room is not bad either, as you have a trackage which goes nowhere, a small, empty room, and a corridor with a broken machine inside. The basement is a particular case as the sudden changes may also be due to Spamton's influence.
• On the final floor of D/Generation, what once looked like an ordinary office building (albeit with hyperactive security measures) suddenly turns into a bizarre surreal nightmare thanks to the title entity. There's also a headless guy.
• Detention has the school. Originally, it's a fairly normal building, but soon enough it gets twisted around, is haunted by ghosts, movement through levels makes little sense, and strange puzzles based on Taiwanese mythology are everywhere. It's actually the protagonist Ray's purgatory. She killed herself in regret after selling out her classmates to the government, and now she's cursed to wander there forever until she comes to terms with her guilt (which she does in the good ending, but in the bad ending she just resets the loop). The actual school building (which you see when controlling Wei) is just a normal school.
• Devil May Cry series:
  • The various parts of the Underworld (a.k.a. the Demon World) visited in the classic continuity games all find different ways of representing this:
    • In the first game, the Underworld is a series of fleshy caves with the occasional pit of lava that pulsates and beats like a heart.
    • In Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening, the Underworld's depiction is the most varied in the series thus far, with the majority being a vast white expanse of floating stone, shattered temples, and oddly-structured stairs (as a reference to M.C. Escher's Relativity stairways) where gravity is whatever the geography needs it to be, there are parts where time repeats itself, a dark room resembling an enormous chessboard to simulate a game of Human Chess, and an endless sea of blood with ruins and statues of angels. However in most areas, you can see a swirling vortex of darkness and lightning that resembles an eye watching over demon kind.
    • In Devil May Cry 5, the Qliphoth, while not the Demon World itself, acts as a bridge between the two realities, and its interior is a mixture of roots made of bone, vines made of veins, sacs of harvested blood, an unnecessary amount of Spikes of Villainy, fleshy structures, and the power to create illusions (the latter of which can then look like a Crack in the Sky and shatter like glass).
  • Also in Devil May Cry 1, the castle's layout changes when Dante revisits it after acquiring the Wheel of Destiny. The entire building is so dark, some doors disappear (which Dante points out), the giant statue in the hall disappears, new paths open up, and more dangerous demons lurk around compared to your first visit.
  • DmC: Devil May Cry has Limbo City, which is actually full of demons and can transform and warp into completely new or distorted environments as it attempts to trap its victims into the Dark World.
• Diablo's Tristram Cathedral definitely qualifies. It begins with mere demon infested crypts, and only gets worse from there. It's revealed that Diablo's mere presence is warping the lower floors into Hell.
• Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth's Digital Shifts are places where the Eaters have punched through the Thin Dimensional Barrier between Cyberspace and the real world. The Digital Shifts more resemble Witches' labyrinths than the places they emerged in, with data forming windows onto a void full of low-resolution copies of objects normally found in the area, which can even break through to block existing passages. At the center of each Digital Shift, the void becomes the "sky" over a flat plane of some unidentified liquid that the player can walk on, with the only landmark in sight being a looming, hand-like formation made of objects appropriate to the location.
• Dishonored has the aptly named Void, which consists of a series of islands floating in space, depicting fragments of real world buildings and characters frozen in time. It's the home of the Outsider, who will quite effortlessly and arbitrarily drag people there to mess with them or grant them magical powers or both, and it seems to bend to his whims.
• Dragon Age:
  • The Fade, the place people (except dwarves) go when they dream, full of spirits and demons and doubling as Heaven, Hell and everything in between. Characters are trapped in their own "mini-Hells" (reflecting their own lives), the sky is full of floating mountains (heavily implied to be other, infinitely large hells) and the Black City is visible wherever you go.
  • And in the DLC Witch Hunt, Morrigan implies that beyond the Fade there are places that are even stranger where she's keeping her Demon Baby safe from her evil mom. You visit one of them a few times in the third game, a half-real realm known as the Crossroads the ancient Elven empire carved out within the Fade where their traveling mirrors connect. It's a colorful and cheerful world full of blooming trees for elves, but a grey waste that causes headaches to other races.
  • Interestingly, the real world is just as eldritch to the residents of the Fade as the Fade is to residents of the real world. The reason spirits so frequently take on monstrous forms and turn into demons when pulled through the Veil is that the physical world is so alien to them that they have no idea what to make of it.
  • Amgarrak Thaig, the titular location of Golems of Amgarrak is definitely one, protected from the outside by a maze of shifting mist and having Lyrium Wells that were designed to phase-shift people into alternate versions of the Thaig in order to better safeguard its secrets.
  • The sequel has Kirkwall. Yes, that's right: the main setting. It's subtle, though; you can go through the whole game just thinking the whole place is a Crapsack City-State, but certain notes you find indicate that not only is the Veil unnaturally thin over the entire area, entire neighborhoods are constructed in the shapes of blood magic sigils, there are likely lakes of blood beneath the streets that still haven't dried, but demons are actively drawn to the place like flies to the point where they occasionally hunt non-mages because there's too much competition. And that's before you factor in Corypheus' corrupting presence from his Grey Warden Prison in the nearby Vimmark Mountains. It - or very nearby - is actually where the magisters entered the Black City (sacrificing hundreds of slaves in a blood ritual in the process) and were transformed, like Corypheus, into darkspawn, causing the Blights.
  • The Primeval Thaig is definitely one, built by prehistoric Dwarves that worshipped a pantheon of deities, constructed using magic thus giving it some degree of Alien Geometry, possessing a unique form of Red Lyrium running throughout the structure itself and inhabited by creatures like the Profane that Varric claims were supposed to be myth. It was also the location where Hawke and company first encountered the Lyrium Idol.
• Drool of the Killer features the Tammy water park, which apparently absorbs other buildings within proximity (such as offices) and beckons people to come in and enjoy its waters. Once the protagonist, BB, enters the building, she feels compelled to swim in the pools and endlessly praise Tammy. It’s only when she gets to a floor far enough away from the water that’s she’s able to question why she’s still there and that she can’t remember how long she’s been inside.
• Dwarf Fortress:
  • The Adamantine Spire, a.k.a. the Adamantine Space Elevator. The weirdest part is that even when other people tried to recreate it using the same worldgen seed, it didn't show up. Current theories are that it's due to interference from old save data.
  • Fridge Horror: Considering what adamantine veins like the spire usually contain, it looks like whatever counts as Heaven in the Dorf 'verse is in for some serious Fun.
  • Some of the more convoluted succession forts such as Battlefailed become this. Battlefields had the temporally locked dwarves in the arena, Headshoots had the room outside of space, etc.
  • And then there's the evil biomes. Rains of blood and Fog of Doom that causes any living thing exposed to it a horribly painful death if they're lucky or turns them into a thrall if they're not, eyeballs and tentacles growing out of the ground, a 50/50 chance of anything that dies there spontaneously reaminating into a zombie if the body isn't thoroughly destroyed and native wildlife that would make Doomguy feel right at home.
  • The community game Headshoots had the Room Outside Of Space. It could not be located on the map by any player unless by zooming to a dwarf who happened to go there autonomously, no player could remember building it, and most mobs, including the demonic skeletons modded in to finally destroy the fortress, were also seemingly unable to travel there.

E

• The Elder Scrolls:
  • The series' universe itself. Starting with the Alien Sky itself, the sun and stars are not typical balls of burning gas but holes punctured in reality by escaping spirits during the creation of Mundus, the mortal plane, and magic flows through them into Mundus which is visible in the night sky as nebulae. The two moons of Nirn (the planet within Mundus that all of the action to date in the series' has taken place on) are said to be the rotting and sundered "flesh divinity" of Lorkhan (also known by other names), the creator god of Mundus who was "killed" by the other spirits who aided in creation, now known as the Aedra. The planets visible from Nirn are not typical planets, but are the planes and "flesh divinity" of the eight most significant of these Aedra. It is said that these forms all appear as they do because it is the only way for a mortal's mind to comprehend it. That said, this information primarily comes from subjective in-universe sources who often conflict with each other, as the series is well-known for its intentionally contradictory lore. Just like many discredited beliefs in the real world, the "true nature" of the TES universe could very much be as "normal"/conventional as our real universe is, or it could be something else entirely.
  • The various planes of Oblivion, the "infinite void" surrounding Mundus, may be the physical forms of the Daedric Princes they are associated with. They are not bound to any of the laws of nature and physics that bind Mundus, and are subject to change on the whim of the associated Prince. Even time does not flow normally within Oblivion, though the exact details often vary. For example, when Emperor Uriel Septim VII was imprisoned there by his Evil Chancellor Court Mage Jagar Tharn for 10 Nirn years, he did not age a day.
  • The Deadlands, the realm of the Daedric lord Mehrunes Dagon, is very much like a Fire and Brimstone Hell: it's an inhospitable nightmare land of lava and molten rock where Dagon's minions slave away in obsidian towers. The Shivering Isles, realm of the Mad God Sheogorath, is an archipelago split straight down the middle between two halves; the southern half represents Dementia and is a bleak land of bogs and dark forests, while the Northern half is Mania, featuring vast forests of giant colourful mushrooms and trees (make no mistake, Mania is just as dangerous if not even moreso as Dementia). All of the native fauna are unbelievably bizarre, including skinless wild dogs, constructs of bone with no correlation between them, and amphibian goblin-like creatures.
  • Coldharbour, the realm of the malevolent Molag Bal, Prince of Domination and Corruption and the "King of Rape", is a twisted and defiled parody of Nirn where the earth is a slurry of mud and faeces, the sky is constantly aflame and the air is beyond freezing. Charnel houses and slave pens holding the wretched souls of mortals dot the landscape, and there's even a ruined version of the Imperial Palace where the walls are smeared in blood and festooned with flayed corpses like macabre decorations. No mortals ever willingly come to this waking nightmare world except in grave error.
  • The island of Artaeum combines this with Bizarrchitecture and Alien Geometries. Artaeum is the home of the Psijic Order, a powerful Magical Society and the oldest monastic order in Tamriel. Artaeum shifts continuously either at random or by decree of the Psijiic Council. It can also be made to disappear entirely from Mundus.
  • Skyrim
    • In the Dawnguard DLC, you visit the Soul Cairn, a realm of Oblivion created by the Ideal Masters, a group of immortal beings who were once powerful mortal sorcerers. The Ideal Masters have a Horror Hunger for souls, especially the "Black" souls of sapient beings, and they are always seeking to claim more. The Ideal Masters prefer forms of pure energy, as they find physical forms to be "too limiting". However, they will take the form of giant crystalline soul gems within the Soul Cairn, and can drain the souls of mortals who venture too close. Other Soul Cairn inhabitants include the captured souls doomed to spend eternity there, grotesque undead monstrosities that randomly appear from the ground, and a Dracolich zombie dragon necromancer.
    • In the Dragonborn DLC, you visit Apocrypha, the realm of Hermaeus Mora, the Daedric Prince of Knowledge (with a particular specialty in Things Man Was Not Meant To Know). Reading one of Mora's "Black Books" causes you to be ensnared by a tentacle that formed from letters which float off the pages, pulling you inside. The realm itself is a place Cthulhu would find comfy. All the walls are made of books, the water is slime and sprouts tentacles to attack you if you get too close, there are invisible monsters roaming the halls and sea mutants in the slime, certain areas have darkness that can kill you, and the architecture isn't necessarily static. On a more meta note, it also does not help that the area is notoriously glitchy so that when the when the layout of certain tunnels shifts, the Dovahkiin tends to clip and fall through the floors and walls into the deadly slime. But if you brave these horrors, the Black Books will grant you amazing powers.
• El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron has the Tower, where the majority of the game takes place. Each floor of the tower is ruled by a fallen angel and is essentially its own pocket universe where that angel and its followers live. Locations range from a burned-out wasteland to a cutesy cartoon-like world of colorful blocks and balloons to a futuristic TRON-like cityscape (complete with cycle combat!) to an underwater world. There's also the Darkness, a location that corrupts everything that falls into it and is where the souls of the angels' followers end up instead of Heaven.
• The Evil Within: The entire setting. What starts out as an odyssey into a zombie-infested county gives way to Schizo Tech, frequently shifting landscapes, and a slew of Eldritch Abominations. It's revealed two-thirds into the story that Sebastian is inside a hive-mind controlled by an extremely deranged sociopath. Which explains the monsters and why he's able to upgrade himself and his weapons by injecting himself with brain fluid - the monsters are the manifested nightmares of the various minds inside a simulation, and injecting himself with the defeated brains represents taking control of the simulation.

F

• In Fade to Silence, an Eldritch Abomination has turned the world into a frozen wasteland, both the trees and animals are infected with Meat Moss that reduce their ability to burn and nutritional value respectively in order to finish off any surviving humans, there are more blobs of Meat Moss on the ground that need to be cleared out and locations where you can make outpsts have multiple blobs and towers covered in tentacles to destroy, finally theres what lools like an upside down piece of city floating over the game world the sky which rains blobs of Meat Moss and cars when you walk under it and looking straight up reveals that the "ground" the buildings are supposed to be standing on/ hanging down from is just bright light.
• In both games in the Fairune, the Secret File, a room based around either a desktop file system, an old RPG or a roguelike populated by unkillable Space Invader-styled bit monsters, is this. In 1, these seem to bleed into the final dungeon, and in 2, this could count for both Ashen World and its underground, Sky Land.
• Fallen London:
  • The Neath from the first game and its spinoff Sunless Sea. There is a theory that the giant cavern is the skull of a dead god. It is very difficult to die there because it's downstream of Hell. Finding one's way around it can be literally maddening. An unnerving number of the places you visit are probably alive. You might accidentally walk into someone else's memories. People there keep tigers as pets, make wine out of mushrooms, and play a boyish game based upon stabbing other people. The islands far beyond London keep swapping places when you aren't looking, making maps useless after enough time. You can become used to much of the Neath, but there are a couple places in it that are... different.
  • In Polythreme, inanimate objects come alive. A Clay Man explains, "IN POLYTHREME THE BED I SLEPT ON WAS A SLAVE. THE ROOM WHERE I SLEPT WAS HACKED FROM SCREAMING STONE. THE WATER I DRANK BEGGED ME TO STOP. THEY PAID ME IN COIN THAT PLOTTED MY DOWNFALL. THE MEMORIES ARE TROUBLING. THIS PLACE IS BETTER."
  • The Iron Republic is a place of true freedom - not even the tyranny of nature rules there. Everything is in a constant state of flux, and the straightforwards interface becomes deranged ramblings. Writing a report on it will net you something either completely blank or explosive, and the punctuation's practically guaranteed to try to eat you. Gather enough protesters and you can literally protest something into existence, or make it disappear completely. The laws of mathematics change every Thursday, which makes accounting just plain intolerable. And even then, what Thursday is probably also changes constantly. And, since it's in both Fallen London and Sunless Sea, you can even buy items for the wrong game^*It's been documented you can buy Supplies and Fuel, vital for Sunless Sea but absolutely useless in Fallen London, for no reason at all beyond the fact it's the Iron Republic. The only law is, there is no law.
  • The Cave of the Nadir. Lost to history for quite a while, a pain to find even with an enormous archaeological team, everyone has an interest in knowing its location, and once there you might wish you never found it. Why? The entire cave is Irrigo, a mysterious and horribly dangerous color resembling a deep, intense violet. It soaks into you, and stays with you like an insidious radiation, eating away at your memories, your thoughts, and eventually your mind itself. The cavern is full of individuals of all kinds and species that have completely lost themselves, and are completely unable to remember anything, or think clearly. Prolonged exposure will cause your skull to grow bone over your eye sockets in a futile effort to stop it. Forgotten memories bounce around the place with no rhyme or reason, and make you remember things you never experienced before departing just as quickly as they came. And if you forget your own name, you can never, ever leave. And there are theories this color is what makes the entire Neath an Eldritch Location in itself.
  • Irem was strange. Irem is strange. Irem will be strange. It's basically what happens when you sail straight to the edge of dreams (coming in from an actual physical place), and found a city in the border. Or what happens when you will do that in the future. Either way, it hasn't been founded yet, but you can visit it, and have a jolly good time over there, and come back with not much trouble. You'll have been there when the time comes. And yes, in case you haven't noticed Time-Travel Tense Trouble is a huge problem when writing port reports. Visiting it during Fallen London is an ordeal in itself, but it does let you "visit" your own futures, as bundles of fate's strings your senses interpret as places and times are explored like one explores dreams. A few of these futures qualify by themselves, like the Discordant Future (which is No Future at all because everything other than an already nonexistent location stopped existing) and the Altered Future (where you can only navigate and sense through painful memories, as the "place" is composed from all those severed threads of fate that came from mundane, often ignominious and anticlimactic ends).
  • The Twin Castles of Frostfound, up North where the ice and cold reign. These two are very, very deeply linked to the Gods of the Zee, and entering them will piss them off, with no seeming reason given. Entering any of the two will start eating away at your mind, particularly your memories and stories, until there's nothing left of you. And a little less unnervingly (which shows by what standards we're playing by now), space inside the castles just doesn't seem to work right. Bringing a certain crewmate inside will lead to you spotting him disappearing through the wall never to be seen again, for example. And if you want to enter, there's no doors. You have to close your eyes and go forward, and you'll just... be there, in a series of chambers that will eat at your mind and/or possessions.
  • The Avid Horizon, the northernmost place in the Neath. And we mean northernmost: if you travel north for long enough, no matter where you start from or how many detours or turns you make, you will end up here. The Horizon is an enormous, unbreachable gate with an odd rubbery texture, guarded by two statues, all of a deep Gant colour (Gant being what remains when all other colors have been eaten). Everyone, even your fungal cargo, is unnerved when approaching the place. The fake stars above start flickering like they're going out as you approach. The strangest part? The gate isn't a thing, but a law. And sometimes, when the guardians aren't aware... the law can be breached. And somehow, somehow, it leads to outer space.
  • Kingeater Castle. Nobody has any idea what the hell is up with the place. People can willingly give up their sanity, and even their past and future. The sense of a great impending mistake pervades the air as you approach. Praying to the most mysterious of the three local deity-like beings can occasionally send you there for no given reason. Something about the place just conducts you towards the most horrible decisions. And a terrible hunger seems to reign all throughout it. It's quite remarkable that even in a place like the Neath, where the strangest of all things get explanations and are considered normal, this is one place that is still feared and unexplained.
  • And in this literal ocean of madness, there manages to be an inversion to this trope in the form of Aestival. A simple, quiet island of sand and rocks and some vegetation. Nothing more to it, because the Sun shines from outside and into it through a hole in the Neath, and the Neath's local variety of weirdness tends to react very badly to it. Shame this also includes people who've lived in the Neath for any significant length of time.
  • The zeefloor proves itself just as strange with the Zubmariner expansion. It rearranges itself much more often than the surface does, the wildlife goes from merely being worse versions of surface creatures to making absolutely no biological sense, it occasionally grows bubbles of impossible colors with terrifying effects, random clouds of pure darkness can appear from out of nowhere, it occasionally has a gigantic eye that can be sailed into and contains Mind Screw incarnate and the shadow is so intense things can slither out of it every now and then. And then there's the various Abysses, where the Lady in Black can be found... Ironically enough, the underwater ports are all relatively normal in comparison to some of the above. The strangest of them by our standards (the Gant Pole, Anthe, Nook and Aigul) are just par for the course by the time you can submerge, and the strangest for the Neathers (Hideaway, a city atop a Giant Enemy Crab) is outright normal.
  • Not only does the Neath contain several of these locations, it's the only place where the usual pathways to yet another, much bigger Eldritch Location will work as such. The place is Parabola, and the pathways are dreams, Prisoner's Honey, and mirrors. Yes, normal mirrors, and any sort of dream you have will take you to Parabola for a brief time. And people that are going entirely insane and having the most horrible nightmares have been known to just... stumble into the place by accident with no way out for a long time. Its outer borders, the Mirror-Marches, look like an endless jungle with oddly familiar ruins of the previous four cities, Earthen fauna that acts a little too strangely, and with framed mirrors partially embedded into the ground everywhere. These mirrors are the other side of regular mirrors back in the Neath, and you can peer back into reality through them. The laws of reality are just a bit more tenuous here, and you can pull off certain tricks that even the Neath's lax rules don't allow. It's also stated that deeper into Parabola, things get much stranger, including things like a marsh where the light of every snuffed candle comes alive. The rulers here are known as the Fingerkings, who are tiny, flying snakes with Reality Warper powers within Parabola and who like to snatch up dreamers' bodies to check out reality, and also make deals with people to give them strange powers, being particularly fond of stage magicians. Cats love the place, however (though they despise the Fingerkings), probably because they get to decide their forms in here and enjoy being big, badass cats.
  • The Moulin Wasteland has a little bit of it all, for it was where London first tried to fight Hell and lost miserably, and where Hellish ordnance (which not even the devils are entirely sure what it might do) has turned the whole place into something like the Somme's riverbanks except with the fabric of reality becoming another casualty. Craters with tangled, knotty space that will snap your bones if crossed improperly abound, trenches full of tentacles can be found here and there, incomprehensible weapons and wreckage lie about haphazardly, and you can find ruins from everywhere in the Neath and even outside it, with scraps of just about every major location in the cavern found scattered for no discernible reason. There are also things beneath the mud that will try to drag you in, places where the water flows uphill and Sorrow-Spiders absolutely everywhere. Except it wasn't just Hellish ordnance. Someone also put an absolutely gigantic mirror downstream of the Waswood in Parabola, where the present becomes past and the past washes out into oblivion, and put the other side somewhere deep within Moulin, so that their archeology could always be fed by the bits and pieces of past that'd wash out; naturally, such an overlap in addition to Infernal scars don't do the place too well.
  • Take the Correspondence, reality-warping and incendiary as it is towards everything it's written on. Now take both effects, and take them all the way to the other side; reality warping in the opposite direction, and radiating such bitter cold even just the one scrawl can chill a massive area, and speaking it will flash-freeze the entire room and both mangle and mutate everyone present. Now imagine Stonehenge's stones were scrawled upon with this horrid language, and plop them down where reality can grow even thinner than it already is in the Neath, and the whole place can freeze so deeply even candleflames are chilled in place, and even the hardiest of men can die of frostbite before they've even made it to the corner. You now have the Hurlers, one of the last train stops on the way to Hell. And then there's the frozen lake. So mirrorsome you can see your reflection, which bodes ill considering Parabola. And if you make it through, after working extensively with the Hurlers... you enter a castle that straight-up just doesn't exist. And from that moment forwards, things just stop making sense, and it becomes extensively difficult to tell what happened, didn't happen, or didn't happen and thus happened because the place still doesn't exist. It's the most confusing place in a game already full of confusing places.
• The Fallout franchise is mostly post-apocalyptic, retro sci-fi, more about atomic mutants than magic or witchcraft. Then there's the Dunwich Building in Fallout 3, a ruin sitting by itself in a lonely stretch of the Capital Wasteland. To start with, when you face the front door, you're looking south. When you go through the door into the ruin, you're suddenly facing north. As you progress through the maze of collapsed walls and floors, you'll find tons of Ghouls and skeletons, but also see sudden, brief flashbacks of how the building looked two hundred years ago, before the bombs fell. At the end of the dungeon crawl, you reach the "Virulent Underchambers," a cave system containing an eerie monolith associated with a Tome of Eldritch Lore called the Krivbeknih, which is expanded upon in the Point Lookout DLC.
• Fallout 4 has the Dunwich Borers dig site outside Boston, and yes, the same pre-war company is involved. The whole mine is constantly shaking and seems on the verge of collapse, and is packed full of Ghouls that a local Raider gang tried to contain behind a barricade. Once again, you'll occasionally see flashbacks of the mine in its prime as you explore it, culminating in a vision of some sort of mass Human Sacrifice around a water-filled pit at the bottom of the mine. If you actually dive into the water, you'll find both the unique knife "Kremvh's Tooth" on a submerged altar, and the mostly-buried head of an enormous statue staring up at you from the bottom.
• In Far Cry 3, it's implied that there is something subtly but fundamentally wrong with the Rook Islands. The extremely hostile animal life, the gradual madness that consumes anyone who goes into the jungle, the strange and mystical relics, the drugs giving accurate prophetic visions, the ink demon, and so on. It's not obvious, but the islands are doing things to the people who spend time there. However, due to the game's Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane nature, it's left unanswered whether there is actually something wrong with the place, or if it's just the player character losing his mind to drugs and trauma.
• From Fate/Grand Order, there's Lostbelt 6, Avalon le Fey. While it is essentially Great Britain but with fairies, there's quite a few differences that just get more Eldritch the further they are examined. For starters, the sky is perpetually orange/yellow. Next, the majority of the inhabitants are fairies, who operate under Blue-and-Orange Morality. Parts of Britain just don't exist, and Britain is in fact the only landmass on this version of Earth. Finally, whatever happened in this timeline's past was enough to cause it to actively reject human history as we know it. All of this sets up The Reveal of this timeline's Point of Divergence^note The Lostbelts all represent alternate timelines that were pruned from existence to save energy for other timelines to continue, with the main deciding factor being if mankind can advance itself further. - in this timeline, Excalibur was never forged. As Excalibur is the only weapon that could defeat the White Titan Sefar, this allowed the latter to complete its mission of cleansing Earth. The Lostbelt's Difference Depth, the measure of how divergent it is from Proper Human History, is ranked EX because history as we know it never happened here. This resulted in the British Lostbelt becoming a Lostworld, and opened up the possibility of people in it being able to leave said world, if it weren't for the fact that almost everyone within is an irredeemably repugnant asshole who can't put others above themselves.
• The GBA and PSP remakes of Final Fantasy have the four special dungeons that change floor permutation with every visit. Furthermore, some of these floors have environments that should not be able to exist in a subterranean environment, such as overworlds, Floating Continents, and thriving towns that look just like the ones on the surface, complete with shops and inns.
• Final Fantasy V has the Interdimensional Rift, which is a patchwork of areas earlier swallowed up in the Void and home to many Eldritch Abominations including the game's two Nintendo Hard Superbosses. The Updated Re-release added the Sealed Temple, home to even more Superbosses, including the Humanoid Abomination who the legendary weapons were crafted specifically to fight.
• In Final Fantasy IX:
  • Terra, a parasitic other planet, actually inserted itself into Gaia long ago and is feeding off the planet from the inside. Creepy.
  • Another present in the same game is Memoria, a world formed from the collective memory of the entire planet.
  • The Hill of Despair where the party fights Necron which is apparently the Afterlife.
• Final Fantasy X: Sin. Once you enter it, instead of Womb Level you probably expected you find yourself on ethereal bridges marked by glyphs and runes and suspended over water flowing in unnatural directions and with unlimited horizon despite being inside a what is essentially a giant flying whale. The second part is a "city" of rotting stone blocks under a frozen aurora, which is followed by a cystalized landmass perpetually hurtling through a tunnel of lights. After that is Dream Zanarkand, which makes sense though considering it is a perpertual summoning of said city.
• Final Fantasy XI has a few that qualify, and they all tend to follow the "islands floating in nothingness" style:
  • The Promyvion areas appear to be corrupted, shadowy versions of other existing areas, topped off with haunting music and freakish looking monsters.
  • The Walk of Echoes is an area of disconnected structures floating in nothingness. It exists outside of time, and Atomos himself can be seen in the sky at all times.
  • The added Provenance areas, which are described as being the place where the source of all life comes from.
• Orphan's Cradle in Final Fantasy XIII is a surreal dimension said to be between reality and dreams where data processed by Eden manifests in physical form, forming flying blocks, rotating machinery, and floating platforms that can be used to traverse the area. A sunset sky can be seen outside the rotating panels that form its boundaries. Somehow, despite this being Eden's Mental World, it also acts as a shell around the ever-sleeping Orphan.
• Although featuring fewer locations than one might expect, Final Fantasy XIV still features some notable examples, especially those found in the Heavensward expansion. Perhaps the most obviously eldritch is the Aery, Nidhogg's lair, which is a ruined Avalonian city held together in a storm of aetheric energy fueled by the dragon's blinding rage.
  • The strangest location has to be the Palace Of the Dead (making a cameo from Tactics Ogre); accessible only through a strange portal in the Black Shroud, the Palace of the Dead is an ever shifting maze filled with monsters, traps, and strange magical items that only seem to function within. The entire palace is filled with a gloom that saps the strength of anyone who enters, reducing them to Level 1 and rendering their equipment useless. Only by condensing one's life force into weapons and armor made of magic can one hope to survive. What's even stranger is how, while decending in the palace, players will rapidly gain levels to the point of exceeding their job level back in the 'real world'. Prior to Stormblood, this even meant learning spells and abilities meant for max level characters while still being low leveled in the "real world". The deeper you go in the Palace, the stranger things become; eventually falling apart into a series of pathways in a misty white void. The 200th floor features a tranquil looking bench underlooking a tree, in a place completely devoid of enemies. Some players have joked that this is the Palace inviting you to be it's latest denizen. Thankfully it doesn't object if you refuse.
  • The endgame of Stormblood features an Interdimensional Rift that is the domain of recurring Superboss Omega, an alien machine that is capable of small-scale Reality Warping. Upon entry into the Rift, Omega renders the environment around the player as a dark blue-and-violet space with floating cyan hexagons to stand on, and a massive floating robot eye that houses Omega's body at the center. The various arenas the player fights the raid bosses in throughout Omega's questline are molded into locations that befit the battle at hand, including (but not limited to) the Tower of Gods when fighting Kefka, or Chaos's chamber.
  • The endgame of Endwalker features Ultima Thule, a place at the edge of the universe dominated by a chaotic form of magic called Dynamis that alters reality in response to emotions. Due to the despair of the place's only inhabitants, the Meteia, it resembles the shattered remains of all the dying worlds they visited in their travels and is populated by Living Memories of said worlds' inhabitants. The emotional nature of Dynamis is also what allows the Scions to create a path through Ultima Thule using their own hope even as the Meteia try to kill them.
• Fire Emblem: Three Houses has, late into some of its storylines, Shambala, the headquarters of "those who slither in the dark". While relatively mundane compared to other examples, the player's party consider it to be very eldritch due to the architecture made out of obsidian black stone with Tron Lines, and the presence of Magitek Mini-Mecha.
• Flight Rising has the Starfall Isles, the homeland of the Arcane Flight. The first sentence of its encyclopedia page describes it as "the twisted, broken islands of the Arcanist and his scholars" and it only gets creepier from there. Every part of the region, including the wildlife, is being mutated by the magical energy flowing through the area, from the mountains which have curved inwards, the shoreline that is now a glowing forest, and the formerly-low island which keeps growing higher. There's also the eight-eyed hummingbirds, levitating pill bugs, and owlets that turn pink when they hatch at the Observatory...
• That Freelancer takes some liberties with the scale of space, stars, planets and distances is well known. Maybe this is what makes the appearance of the Dyson Sphere near the end of the game so impossibly huge, disorienting and alien.
• From Next Door: There's something off about the house next door; it looks similar to the other houses in the neighborhood, but there are no windows save for one on the side, directly facing the window of the house beside it. No one is ever seen coming in and out, leading some people to assume the house is empty, although Namie sees lights inside. In one ending, when Omura knocks on the door it swings open to reveal a blank wall. It's implied the building is just supposed to look like a normal house enough to blend in and avoid suspicion, though it's still visibly uncanny.

G

• Bacterian, the Big Bad of the Gradius series qualifies: He is a Genius Loci Hive Mind that uses psychic powers to control his fleets. Every time he's defeated, the pieces of him regenerate to form new Bacterians. Gofer, Venom, Zelos, and some other large Bacterians also qualify.
• Grim Dawn has the Tomb of the Heretic Bonus Dungeon. When the Korvaan magus Morgoneth started worshipping Yugol, a primorial entity of darkness and hunger, whatever he and his followers did tainted the area so badly it had to be sealed off. Beyond the seal the deeper regions are shrouded in perpetual darkness, there are big rents in the ground that a starry sky can be seen through, and other gaps have writhing tentacles poking through.
• Guilty Gear has the Backyard, a parallel world teeming with information which also serves as the source of magical energy for the world. Entry for most people into the Backyard is dangerous: without "tuning" to the Backyard's frequency, they risk being destroyed by the information inside it.

H

• Xen, the "border-world" from Half-Life. It seems to consist of a bunch of small rocky islands floating in the middle of a greenish void, and yet apparently has gravity independent of those islands and a breathable atmosphere. It's also inhabited, although the fluff indicates that the current inhabitants are not native to the dimension, and came from someplace else.
  • Fan Remake Black Mesa extensively reworks Xen, resulting in somewhere that's superficially less surreal and but still incredibly alien: The small rocky islands are now much bigger, with a greater variety of plant and animal life, with strange crystals embedded in the surface that radiate energy that can recharge your suit or power the strange machinery that apparently belongs to those aforementioned inhabitants. The sky looks rather more elaborate, with nebula-like clouds in various shades... and a huge, strange and twisted-looking structure in the far distance that contains the Final Boss. The occasional evidence of human activity and exploration would be reassuringly familiar if most of it wasn't thoroughly trashed and its occupants dead or ominously missing, testifying to the fact that Gordon is Late to the Tragedy despite having fought his way through what he thought was its early stages.
• Halo:
  • Slipstream space is a set of eleven non-visible and highly radioactive "nondimensions" that has markedly different laws of physics and "topology" from normal space, with FTL travel requiring you to enter it. It was known for making some people disappear without a trace when it was first put to use, and for the longest time it was nearly impossible for the UNSC to accurately plot courses within it at distances smaller than a planetary system, though the Covenant and Forerunners had already mastered that part. These effects worsen as jumps are made further inside a gravity well.
  • Additionally, slipspace travel inherently causes all sorts of chronological and causal paradoxes which the universe then has to "reconcile"; if too much FTL travel is happening at once, than slipspace will automatically slow down or halt all traffic within it until reality has finished reconciling itself, with the strange part being that this "reconciliation" affects events both forwards and backwards in time. Due to humanity's inferior understanding of this phenomenon, two of their ships traveling through slipspace together to the same place will often either exit slipspace at different times or, if they do exit at the same time, experience time with slipspace differently (to the point where one ship's clock might be an entire week ahead of the other's).
  • The dimension encountered in Halo: First Strike when the ship containing the main characters enters slipspace using a Forerunner crystal takes the weirdness a step further. Energy Projectiles would randomly teleport or follow random trajectories while kinetic weapons were unaffected, with the crystal itself emitting massive amounts of radiation, causing some... contradictions in the recorded timelines, and allowing ships to travel much greater distances across space than usual.
  • According to The Forerunner Saga, Forerunners discovered a large variety of strange alternate realms, including one composed solely of photons.
  • The Domain appears to be depicted in such a way in Halo 5: Guardians, though no physics defying effects occurred. This makes sense, given that it was created by the Precursors, who themselves were Eldritch Abominations.
• Hello Neighbor: The Neighbor's house, which becomes even more twisted and nonsensical with every update. As of Alpha 4, making it far enough into the house reveals rooms leading to nowhere, a fully-operating train supported by nothing, winding hallways, and all sorts of additional physics-defying hazards.

I

• The interaction of Hyperspace and Pathspace in Immortal Defense produces one of these. From Pathspace, Hyperspace looks like a twisty path across a 2D plane, and from Hyperspace, Pathspace is the home of vindictive demigods who rain psychic death upon unwary travelers. The protagonist is one of these demigods.

K

• Kerbal Space Program has Jool, which at first just looks like a green Jupiter. And then you get anywhere remotely close to it, and physics start getting more than a little odd, and only get nastier as your ship gets close, culminating in it spontaneously exploding while you're still several hundred miles from the surface. And then your poor astronauts fall in, and their limbs flail in impossible ways before they simply die. And that's the best case scenario; there's the occasional tale of ships that survive entry getting flung out of the galaxy at FTL speeds. Of course, it's not actually meant to be that way - it's just glitchy as hell - but the fans have latched on to the first interpretation to match with a certain Good Bad Bug being blamed on an Eldritch Abomination. Funnily enough, it's this exact same weirdness that makes it completely immune to any and all attempts to (further) glitch it out, and not from lack of trying. And since many of those glitches tend to destroy entire planets...
• Kentucky Route Zero features two locations, where the larger portion of the game is set. One is the titular highway — a single endlessly-looping giant cavern, whose structure, landmarks, and available locations change when you switch directions at certain landmarks. The other is the Echo River, which also exists in a cavern and has similar properties to the Zero.
• The Labyrinth of Deceit in Kid Icarus: Uprising is a maze full of fake walls, holographic asteroid belts, gravity inversion switches, and disappearing paths. And even when you're not caught up in an illusion, the walls, ceilings, and floors are decorated... odd. And did we mention it's found inside a Space Rift?
  • And then Chapter 21 has the Chaos Vortex, which is basically the Labyrinth of Deceit taken up to eleven. It contains replicas of every enemy from all four factions, living shadows that attack, eye-shaped portals that spring up out of nowhere, pieces of buildings that randomly move about, floating islands. It's just weird.
• Killer7 has a few. Assuming they even exist, Harman's Room and the Vinculum Gate appear to be able to manifest behind any door in the world, if the right people open them. Stranger still is Garcian's trailer. It may be connected to rooms in two different places on opposite sides of the country, and it has a basement. Again: it's a trailer.
• Kingdom Hearts:
  • Both final levels of Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts II. The one from the first game, appropriately titled The End Of The World, is basically the remains of any and every world destroyed by The Heartless, and the one from the second game, The World That Never Was is a dark city overrun by Heartless overlooked by the warped castle that is the headquarters of Organization XIII, and its moon is the heart of reality itself, Kingdom Hearts (or at least, a functional replica). In Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance], the latter's shown to be utterly ruined since the final battle in II.
  • In fact, the concept of the worlds makes them Eldritch Locations: they are apparently separated, but are described as sharing the same skies. All the worlds used to be one large world, but it was shattered in the Keyblade War, leaving only shards behind, forever separated by metaphysical barriers that few can traverse.
  • The Realm of Darkness is its own twisted version of reality. As the name suggests, it's pretty dark, much of it seemingly made up of gray rocks with cracks out of which ghostly blue light faintly shines. There is no sky, no horizon, just pure blackness. Seemingly no living things other than the Heartless (if they count as such). But the most disturbing thing about it is that time doesn't flow in the Realm of Darkness. Characters who are trapped there do not age and do not sleep, and have no way of marking the passage of time. Aqua is surprised to hear that she's been trapped in there for over ten years from the perspective of everyone else. And the worlds that fall to darkness? They get trapped in the Realm as well, transformed into twisted caricatures of themselves floating in a void that only barely obey the laws of physics.
  • Scala ad Caelum, the final world in Kingdom Hearts III at first looks beautiful beyond words: Consisting of endless mountain towns suspended over a serene ocean and illuminated by a permanently sunny sky. Even the towns themselves are a sight, consisting of white and gold gleaming buildings, multitudes of windmills, and gorgeous citadels at the peak of each town. Then you notice for a paradise, it's completely abandoned... Then you go underwater and quickly take note of the ruins of Daybreak Town suspended upside-down, beneath each town. Whatever destroyed Daybreak Town and built Scala ad Caelum on top of it not only annihilated and flooded it, it basically played topsy-turvy with the laws of physics themselves.
  • Quadratum, the large city that looks exactly like Shibuya, Tokyo, seems like the most normal, realistic lifelike city in the series - except that it's perhaps the weirdest after Timeless River. It is a world that exists on the opposite side of reality itself: Unreality, or simply fiction, it is the location equivalent of an imaginary number. It's one thing when a world plays topsy-turvy with the laws of physics like Scala ad Caelum, it's another thing completely to take a book with all of the laws, then burn it.
• Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards has Dark Star, a planet made of Dark Matter and the Very Definitely Final Dungeon. Not much time is spent inside of it, but its red skies, ribbons of darkness and crystalline hexagonal tiles give it this vibe and make it significantly more alien than any of the planets visited in the game.
  • Kirby: Canvas Curse somehow manages to one-up this with World of Drawcia, a distorted painting world, there are no enemies, only sentient paintings that reveal disturbing looking smiles and chuckle maliciously when Kirby approaches them.

L

• Legacy of the Wizard: The underground ruins are very reminiscent of a cyclopean city, especially when there are one eyed, squid creatures flying everywhere.
• The Legend of Spyro has Convexity, a gateway between the main world and the Dark Realms, occupied by the Dark Master. It's the location of the final boss battle, featuring floating platforms and strange whale-like creatures with tentacles.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The various incarnations of The Lost Woods in the Zelda games: they either turn off your minimap, making navigation extremely difficult, or in Oracle of Seasons, one place is even completely off the map, plus the place where Like-Likes fall from the sky. In Ocarina of Time it's implied that anyone who isn't of The Fair Folk would tend to become hopelessly lost, eventually turning into skeletal imps doomed to haunt the forest forever.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks has the final area, the Dark Realm. Accessed through a dark portal that can only be found with a magic compass, it basically looks like Van Gogh's Starry Night in a black hole. Beneath the train tracks is some kind of strange, smoky/watery "ground" that gives way to a completely different landscape right beneath it.
  • The setting of The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask is a pseudo alternate dimension called Termina, with several oddities (like the physics of Stone Tower Temple, as well as the Surreal Horror elements involving the Moon and the distinct regions) that violate many logics. The fact that the game's titular villain is a reality warping, psychopathic Eldritch Abomination contributes to this as well.
  • Hyrule Warriors: The Temple of Souls is a twisted palace existing in another dimension. It is a reflection of Cia's own corrupted mind what with it being a large Stalker Shrine as it is littered throughout with various statues of Link. One room in particular is plastered to the brim with pictures of him.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild:
    • The Korok Forest is surrounded by thick fog that cannot be accessed by any other way but a specific route, lest creepy laughter and a teleport later, the traveler finds themselves back where they started.
    • The Thyphlo Ruins are covered in pitch darkness at all times; in fact, a dome of darkness can be seen covering the area from the outside. While you can use a torch within, there is nothing the player can do to bring sunlight into the place, even if they solve its puzzles. Nothing is ever explained what these ruins are, who lived here before or who cursed the area to be covered in darkness constantly. By Tears of the Kingdom, the dome of darkness is gone and the area is normal.
• The entire world of Limbo (2010). It's dark (as in pitch-black save for the rare spot of light), silent, and literally everything is after your blood — or your brains.
• Little Nightmares takes place in a place only known as the Maw, filled with giant monsters and seems to be a cross between a hotel and a steampunk nightmare.
• Littlewood: The Endless Forest gets its name from the fact that while it's possible to walk around it, going inside and leaving it requires retracing one's steps. Attempting any other way out results in the place seemingly going on forever and is a great way to just plain disappear as far as the rest of the world is concerned.

M

• In MapleStory, there is Ludibrium. On the surface, it's a toy world Built with LEGO, but as you dive deep into its towers, the LEGO walls grow thin, eventually giving you view of some outer-space vista which shouldn't have been possible. It doesn't help that that deep in the towers, you'll see lots of ghosts.
• The NES game The Magic of Scheherazade has the Eldritch Abomination Goragora trapped in ancient times in the "Dark World" (not to be confused with a Dark World), and the villain threatening to release it once more. He eventually learns the hard way that Evil Is Not a Toy, and begs the heroes to enter the Dark World and keep it from escaping. Beyond the gate and past the Point of No Return, the Very Definitely Final Dungeon looks like a starswept black abyss with walls and columns made out of transparent bubbles.
• The Pfhor ship of Marathon seems to be mostly organic, with green liquid all over the place. The gravity is low, too. The creepy music doesn't help either. Marathon's game engine actually encourages non-Euclidean level design because of the way it implements overpasses. Several levels have passageways that pass through each other as an intentional Mind Screw, and some third-party mapmakers have taken it to a very confusing extreme.
• Mass Effect 2 has the derelict Reaper, which can still indoctrinate despite being dead for 37 million years, a not-so-derelict Collector vessel and finally the Collector Base, an immense space station located in the accretion disc at the heart of the galaxy, which serves as The Very Definitely Final Dungeon. The vessel is even creepier than the base itself since in the latter, you are almost continuously under attack, while in the former, about the first two thirds of the mission consist of exploration without enemy contact - which, in this environment, only makes it worse.
• Mega Man X5 has Zero Space, an area where the Zero Virus has somehow caused Cyberspace to bleed into the real world, creating a black void filled with abstract shapes and flashing lights that looks like a completely different dimension.
• The Messenger (2018) has the Corrupted Future, a place where everything is as horrific and nightmarish as you'd expect from a world that looks like it wasn't dominated by demons, but rather cosmic abominations. How bad it actually is? The ground seems to be alive, eyes on walls follow you, a shattered moon looms on the back and gigantic tentacles wriggles on the background while what seems to be humans fall to their apparent deaths. As it wasn't enough, it's also the home of an Eldritch Abomination who can transcend the time travel mechanic.
• In Metro 2033 and Metro: Last Light, the nuclear war that wiped out human civilization on the surface also broke the barrier between heaven, hell, and reality. Throughout the series, there's a number of locations where they all blend together, some of which are benevolent, and others that are antagonist either through malice or their own isolated misery:
  • In 2033, you can find the ghost of a subway train that endlessly moves across the tunnel before being crushed in a tunnel collapse. On the actual wreckage, ghosts sit on their morning commute.
  • In Last Light, the passenger plane that crashed into Moscow is haunted, and those that enter the cockpit see the plane's last moments as the disables plane plows into an apartment block being blown apart in nuclear fire.
  • In Last Light, there is a tunnel on the surface haunted by the corpses of the untold millions that died. Their ghostly arms try to grab anyone stepping through because they are lonely and afraid.
  • The weirdest is The River of Fate in Last Light, a Genius Loci where the dead can place phone calls, skeletons stare you down as you pass by, oh and you can view the past with your buddies.
• The Metroid Prime Trilogy features a few planets that are more than a little twisted because of Phazon exposure.
  • In Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, Aether was split into two when it got hit by a Phazon meteor (which, in Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, is revealed to be a Leviathan from planet Phaaze): the light world had some catastrophic global changes, such as plains becoming barren or a woodland jungle flooding but the serious issue was the creation of Dark Aether which has an atmosphere so toxic it kills any non-native in seconds (eating through almost any armor/shielding), truly sinister landscapes and the locals are always chaotic evil and really doesn't like light.
  • Phaaze, the Phazon planet, by virtue of being a sentient being that is trying to spread and corrupt other planets. It also has some very organic looking natural structures. Lore surrounding the planet suggests that it's an Eldritch Abomination existing in a higher dimension, with the planet merely being its form in our Universe. Phaaze is the source of all Phazon, which seems connected no matter how far apart its fragments are. Leviathans are birthed inside its crust, and Phazon versions of the Ing from the previous game appear as common enemies.
• The Otherworld, the final location and lair to the Final Boss from Miitopia. It is a strange, allegedly cursed place in which, according to the Ex-Dark Lord, no regular human could survive. It is a psychedelic and eerie place populated by sentient rocks and aliens, with weird undulating lines dancing in front of a deep purple void and the floor is in blurry colors with occastional star patterns racing through it. Its most distinctive feature though is the countless luminescent stolen Mii facial features seen floating in the background and the occasional purple bubble floating in the foreground. It is also unclear whever the Otherworld is set in space or in another dimension.
• Minecraft has a couple of these:
  • The Nether is a deliberate example. Once you finish the mining tech tree and craft a diamond pickaxe, you can build an obsidian Hell Gate and enter a skyless world filled with steep cliffs, lava lakes, and giant jellyfish that spit fireballs at you while flying out of reach of your arrows. Not only will your compass spin around aimlessly, so will your watch. However, any distance traveled inside the Nether is multiplied by eight once you return to the normal world, so it can be used to travel long distances relatively quickly, once you finish digging tunnels and building bridges. After 1.16, the Nether became incresingly more strange and alien, with new biomes that don't fit with the world.
  • Special points to the Warped Forest, a bizarre biome by the standards of the Nether. It is filled with large Warped fungus at uneven canopy levels. covered with a myriad of dark royal blue particles and a dark pueple-blue fog. Its ambient sounds are the most disturbing, full of glitchy record-scratch-like noises, reversed audio, creepy ringing, very loud creaking in the ground, and rarely, distorted shrieking. Strangely enough, there is little life in these turquoise woodlands, save for Endermen
  • The End, a single barren island floating in an infinite void. It's home to the Endermen, and can only be accessed by portals deep in underground ruins... and can only be exited by defeating the Ender Dragon. After the final boss, you can travel to the outer End Islands, where you encounter a bizarre variety of flora and fauna, like Shulkers and Chorus Fruits.
  • An unintentional version of this is the Far Lands. In the pre-release versions of Minecraft, travelling roughly 12 million meters in any one direction makes the game generate areas like this, in addition to huge amounts of lag and "stuttery" movement. Travel even farther, and around 32 million meters, physics and lighting just stop working altogether. The Far Lands were acknowledged by the creators, who planned to keep them in the game, but changes to the way terrain is generated effectively removed them before release.
  • Another unintentional version were abandoned mineshafts, which originally would continually generate as you walked through them in every chunk. Even if you were in a chuck that was certainly empty before.
  • Thaumcraft, a popular Game Mod, contains a more traditional example, called the Outer Lands. You get there by performing a ritual called "Opening the Eye" on a floating Eldritch Obelisk. When you arrive, you'll find a dark maze filled with Eldritch Abominations, with a boss at the end.
  • Dimension mods in general frequently create these, from the high-fantasy-themed Blue Skies mod to more surreal landscapes like the alien Meetle and lovecraft-inpired Abyssalcraft mods.
• Minecraft: Story Mode: The Farlands. Unlike Minecraft, where it was simply a glitch, here it's basically the literal edge of the world and an area of chaos incarnate.
• Mogeko Castle has Mogeko Castle, with an interior that shifts from normal rooms to outside areas to heaven like realms to completely eldritch realms without may indicators of change. Defect Mogeko tells Yonaka to think of the castle having infinite space, and is always expanding and contracting.
• Monster Girl Quest! Paradox RPG:
  • The Tartarus are seven massive pits that appeared around the world during the Great Disaster. These contain bizarre and often conflicting environments, like forests and high-tech buildings, and are populated by the hostile Apoptosis. They turn out to be passages between parallel worlds.
  • Hades is a strange floating landmass (with some resemblance to certain sections of the Tartarus) that appears to be the afterlife. Luka arrives here whenever he's killed or by going through a strange door in Ilias Temple (this door, and the key to it, can't be seen by other people). The main inhabitant of this place is the enigmatic Reaper, who resurrects Luka whenever he diess.
• Mortal Kombat:
  • The Netherrealm, which is home to the demonic Oni and is generally about the most depressing place you can be. Of course, it is the MK universe's equivalent of Hell.
  • There's also the Chaosrealm, where, as the name would imply, nothing makes any sense whatsoever. The prevailing theme of the realm and all of its inhabitants is that they adamantly refuse to conform to any set of rules (especially the laws of physics). It is even implied at one point in Deception's Konquest mode that natives of other realms who stay there long enough will inevitably be driven insane as their mind struggles to make sense of the place.
• Mother
  • In MOTHER: Cognitive Dissonance, you are sent into one of these by Niiue to distract Giygas, where everything is red, there's chaotic forces of PSI, and the alien himself waiting in the center of it all with the Devil's Machine.
  • In EarthBound (1994), once the Devil's Machine is turned off, it's implied that Giygas might just be huge and dimension-warping enough to be not just an Eldritch Abomination, but one of these in his own right. And before that, Ness and Jeff get to visit Moonside, which also qualifies.
  • Mother 3 has the Empire Pork Building, which is an unusual sort of eldritch location. Every floor you visit seems normal in its own right, at least as far as the Mother series goes. A lake full of hippos, a hall full of bathrooms, a construction site, etc. But they're all so disconnected and irrelevant to each other, and supposedly each one is the 100th floor.
• Myst Series:
  • Before it became commonplace in the series, the Island of Myst could be considered one. Disparate landmarks that made no sense; a rocketship, a clocktower, a set of giant metal gears, a library with odd paintings, two books that in themselves lead to Eldritch Locations, among others!
  • Catherine's ages. We are treated to one in the Book of Atrus novel. It's essentially a torus-shaped planet, with "kitten-like" flowers, shapeshifting lizard creatures, and a whirlpool that acts both as a drain/waterfall, where on the other side, it becomes a monstrous geyser, spewing the water into the air, where it collects, floating back to the whirlpool, and the cycle repeats.
  • Again, the Trap Books, both from Myst and Riven. In all versions of Myst, they lead to dark voids, where the only view is that of the library, and should any pages be torn out, you are greeted with a colored static. Made even worse in MYST (2020 VR), where the entire void is made up of this static. In Riven, though, the concept is even worse. There is NOTHING in the book that you are given to trap Gehn. Not even the static. In any of the endings where you have trapped Gehn before, and then released him, you are treated to him gloating at you through that tiny window, and then literally shutting the cover on you, to be trapped in a dark void for all eternity...
  • The Star Fissure, written accidentally into Riven by Catherine, before Atrus trapped Gehn. It's a non-hostile space-like realm filled with millions of stars, implied to be the space between the infinite ages existing in the multiverse.
  • The Dream World of Myst IV: Revelation. A void as well, but is able to be traversed with a spirit guide, which you find in Serenia. Sirrus meets his end here because he is not powerful enough to keep his essence together without one. He's crushed and obliterated by the entropy of the realm.
  • The age of Ahnonay, written by Guildmaster Kadish. Seemingly, he had mastered the power of time travel, which would give him the praise of being "The Grower", a prophesied individual with great power and knowledge who would one day bring D'ni to its former glory. The age, however, is even weirder when you find that barriers and obstacles have been put in place, to prevent you from swimming out to the "cities" on the horizon, and find they are instead literal backdrops (using the trope of the skybox to the game's advantage). More so, the various stages of the "age" is fake; large globular environments approx. 1 1/2 miles across, housing climates based on the effect that Kadish wanted to accomplish. Even more weird is that you are required to leave the colossal machine holding these globes, and find that the age outside is not what one would consider a "normal" realm. It's a titanic ring, at least 10 miles across, where an equally-massive waterfall goes around the entire surface of the world in a loop, and there is no solid ground (Only a blank white void, as blank as the "sky" above the top" of the waterfall loop.) underneath the complex that holds the machine and the laboratory connected to it. eep.
  • The Bahro Caves that you encounter on your journey. Somehow, the blue-shaded caves are floating above the Star Fissure! Another one, in Uru: Complete Chronicles, has a split-level cave with a time warp hole connecting the two. The bottom cave is 15 minutes behind the top; meaning that you can visit the top cave, drop the pellet you are required to make, and then arrive at the bottom cave 15 minutes before you dropped the pellet. In short, if you would be able to look down into the bottom (You can't), you would see yourself before you ever entered the bottom cavern.
  • Implied to be part of Minkata, a desert age, part of Myst Online: Uru Live (again), where you can see a galaxy rotating. (A galaxy takes 250 million years to make one rotation.)
  • Part of the Takes (the slate bubbles) and the Keep (the singular bubble holding the Golden Bahro Tablet) in Myst V: End of Ages. They exist in more than one place at any one time, with the Keep existing in FOUR places at once!

O

• The Room in OFF. The rest of the game is bizarre, but internally consistent and stable, if undergoing some sudden changes after being purified. The Room is a small area that the Batter goes through multiple times spread across different "chapters" in reverse chronological order. The place changes in each iteration, there's one section where the camera inverts for no explainable reason (and remains upside-down until after solving a puzzle), a portion where you're taken to a mock-up of the main menu and pick three different "save files," a gigantic NPC that wants to play a game where you tell him numbers that appear in other sections, and it includes a segment that appears like a child's crayon drawings. It's implied that the whole thing is some sort of flashback from its guardian, a sickly boy seen briefly after beating the first two bosses.
• The Edgewood Home for Lost Children in Our Darker Purpose. Inanimate objects come to often-malevolent life, the architecture shifts unpredictably, and the plants are twisted if not actively vicious. It's hinted that the lands outside the gate are even worse.
• Nearly every planet in Outer Wilds, save for the reassuringly Earth-like Timber Hearth, has something profoundly weird at least, and physics-defying at worst, about it.
  • The Hourglass Twins are a double planet, Ember Twin and Ash Twin, orbiting each other close enough to exert extreme tidal gravity. This results in an enormous torrent of sand draining from the latter onto the former, filling Ember Twin's caves and canyons as time goes on, while exposing alien structures buried beneath Ash Twin. Astronauts note that eventually this process will reverse, and Ash Twin will get buried in sand again.
  • Brittle Hollow is, well, hollow. The alien ruins beneath its surface are built on ledges in the side of inverted mountains, suspended from the ceiling, or use anti-gravity technology to allow passage. It also has a black hole for a core. And it's also brittle, being bombarded by meteors spat out by its moon Hollow's Lantern, which causes whole chunks of the planet to fall into the singularity below.
  • Giant's Deep is a mostly-ocean world wracked by storms, where the waterspouts are strong enough to briefly fling its floating islands out of the atmosphere before the landforms come crashing back below. Its "core" is a semi-permeable black sphere that crackles with electricity, surrounding a weird coral growth.
  • Dark Bramble is not a planet. It's the remains of an ice world that fell victim to some Alien Kudzu, incredibly thick, gnarled, thorny growths that extend out from huge knots with holes that shine with light. Entering one of those holes puts you in a foggy, softly-glowing interior that is Bigger on the Inside, with no reference points but the lights of other holes that take you an impossible distance deeper into the Dark Bramble... as well as the glowing lures of anglerfish large enough to eat your spaceship. The whole place breaks physics, so that if you shoot a probe into a glowing knothole, you'll receive two signals from it from different locations, at different distances. What's also disturbing is that seeds from the Dark Bramble can be found on other bodies in the solar system, suggesting it might someday expand to destroy other worlds.
  • The Interloper is a frozen comet in an exaggerated eliptical orbit, which would be a standard snowball save for what's inside it - some of its tunnels and caverns are filled with "Ghost Matter," a substance invisible to the naked eye but detectable by camera, and which quickly burns organic life, leaving behind telltale crystals. It's actually the source of all the Ghost Matter in your solar system, as attested to by the exploded core in the center of the comet, which is what wiped out the Nomai 281,042 years ago.
  • And then there's the Quantum Moon, which can appear orbiting any planet in the solar system, but will change location as soon as you stop looking at it, or so much as blink. If you figure out how to reach its surface, you'll find that it mimics the terrain of whatever it's orbiting, but its features can similarly change as soon as you look elsewhere.
  • The doozy is the Eye of the Universe, a spatial anomaly that once emitted a signal older than the current universe. Its northern hemisphere is trapped in endless night, while the southern hemisphere is covered in a massive maelstrom, each flash of lightning changing the locations of the rocks and trees that can be found there. Above the south pole is a vortex in the clouds leading to... well, it could lead to anywhere, but only an active observer will know for sure.

P

• Paranoiascape dumps you into one such location right at the start, where the skies are made of eyeballs. You're regularly assaulted by floating arms and legs from out of nowhere, walk over floors carpeted with mouths, and randomly teleport into a Womb Level without any provocation.
• The Path has both the forest and Grandma's House, the only locations in the game. The forest when you're on or near the titular path acts normally, but stray too far and it turns into an Unnaturally Looping Location with no way back to the path except to let the Girl in White help you. The characters acknowledge in promotional materials that the locations in the forest change around between visits. Grandma's House also seems normal if you go there directly, but that counts as a failure. Unlocking the special rooms reroutes you through impossible hallways to a surreal sort of Ironic Hell based on each girl's fears/learning experiences (such as an Endless Corridor of lockers, a bedroom with growing and shrinking furniture, and an open grave).
• One of the stages in the second PAGUI, a haunted corridor that's floating in the middle of an ethereal void, constantly rotating causing objects to fall all over the place, with gigantic demon-hands smashing through windows trying to grab you and the floors constantly breaking away to drops... that leads to nothingness. Your only hope is to keep running ahead until the corridor stops at a dead end, but then your mentor Huo shows up in spirit-form and drags you back to the world of living.
• Palworld has the Palpagos Islands, an archipelago hosting the World Tree whose existence (as well as that of its mons) is completely unknown to the outside world. In his Apocalyptic Logs, The Castaway noticed a particular area was "empty" after looking at the globe's geological features and islands. Something should be there, and he was surprised no one else saw an apparent absence in that place. When he visited the islands by boat, he (like the Player Character) was attacked by something that wanted to keep the place hidden and stranded him there.
• The Polyhedron in Pathologic, a massive, physically impossible structure constructed partially out of its own blueprints.
• The tunnels under Pathways into Darkness's pyramid are actually the nightmares of a catatonic Eldritch Abomination made real.
• In the original Phantasy Star series, the very Algol star system it takes place in is an enormous lock for a dreadful Sealed Evil in a Can. And the lock isn't exactly completely intact.
• Pikmin series: Sequels build up PNF-404, the planet of the Pikmin, as this. Geography can change at a whim^note It is stated in-game that most of the maps of Pikmin 2 are the same locations seen in Pikmin (2001), which have changed in structure despite the time that passed between both games being relatively short, caves have magnetic fields that can slow down or stop time while inside them, almost every spaceship that flies near it crashlands, it carries some sort of parasitic infection that makes creatures infected with it become sick if they try to leave, and its local population includes strange ghost-like beings such as Wraiths, Honeywisps, and Glow Pikmin. Various comments imply that most of the universe in the setting is relatively "normal" and most other planets are similar to one-another, making PNF-404 and its mysteries stand out more.
• Pokémon:
  • The Distortion World from Pokémon Platinum falls under this. Floating masses of land in a giant vortex, giant plants that sprout randomly out of nowhere upside-down, disappearing platforms, and waterfalls that float up are just a few features to be found. And that the only thing living in there is the Eldritch Abomination known as Giratina. There's also the immense Gravity Screw of the Distortion World. The waterfall isn't the only thing that goes the wrong way there; the Distortion World is the only place in the whole main series where you navigate by jumping onto those floating platforms and walking sideways. It's also impossible to ride your bike there.
  • Ultra Space, the home dimension of the Ultra Beasts from Pokémon Sun and Moon. We don't see too much of it, just a multicolored barren cavern (later named Ultra Deep Sea in the Ultra games), lit up despite the absence of any apparent light source, filled with various Nihilego (read: toxic parasitic jellyfish made of shapeshifting glass) floating around and occasionally phasing in and out of existence. The characters comment that the air feels strange and it's hard to breathe properly. The Rotom Pokedex, which is otherwise always chatty and displays a map of the area, is completely silent and its screen is filled with static, completely inoperable.
  • In Pokémon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon, you see more Ultra Spaces and can even fight the Ultra Beasts on their home turf. Among the more outlandish Ultra Spaces are Ultra Plant (a dark, rocky place filled with lightning and Xurkitree of varying sizes), Ultra Crater (a smoggy, machine-growing planet that houses the starship-like Celesteela), and Ultra Ruin, a ruined city heavily implied to be Hau'oli City in a universe where a nuclear catastrophe ravaged the Pokémon world. The warp tunnel you use to access these Ultra Spaces also qualify, as the wormhole gates are always in different location every time you enter the tunnel, and traveling in it is measured in lightyears, and despite that, when you return home, the time acts as if you only went to another city in the same island.
• The eponymous dungeons from the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon are explained in-universe as locations that can rearrange their layouts each time they are visited. In Explorers, they're said to be the result of temporal and spatial distortions. This gets even weirder in Gates to Infinity, where special mystery dungeons exist in pocket dimensions that are accessed through portals, and the main characters use them as a form of fast travel.
  • Super Mystery Dungeon has the Voidlands, a dark dimension where Pokemon are sent after being turned to stone. They are a mishmash of different alien environments and seem to be covered in a perpetual twilight. They are also inhabited by creatures called Void Shadows, who can presumably take on the physical form of anything and anyone.
• The Aperture Science Enrichment Center from the Portal saga seems at first like a fairly normal, if deserted, underground testing laboratory, but the more you play the game, the more you'll start to question how the physics even work in this building. It isn't until later on you'll realize that the facility is impossibly massive, to where you'll wonder how it even got built in the first place. You can also see the outside from one chamber only to be lifted up several floors right afterwards. It also seems like whatever AI runs it is able to create new testing chambers out of the blue, and even though it's shown that they can control and rearrange the architecture, it's still a mystery on where exactly these new rooms are coming from, since of course, it's still a building that's fixed underground.

Q

• The World of Mammon in Quest 64. The environment drastically changes with each transition, doors never lead to the same place twice, the sky is always the wrong the color, and the music is creepy as heck. The inhabitants are just as unnerving: among them are Living Statues that have more than a passing resemblance to the Weeping Angels. Of course, the entire place is the prison/domain of a demonic Eldritch Abomination.

R

• Rift features the Planes of Water and Death. The first of these 2 Planes the Plane of Death appeared in the raid: Endless Eclipse and was not only a combination of bones and flesh yet most bizzarely the sky has an sun in an eclipse surrounded by Eldritch symbols.
  • The Plane of Water is going to make it's debut in an upcoming expansion and it's first zone Goboro Reef is a sea with spaces of Water carved out of the zone due to the zone's creator waking up(the Plane of Water is actually a Dream Land) leaving walls of water rippling vertically around those waterless spaces.
  • The Plane of Water's second zone Draumheim is a city with an ocean suspended over it(due to the inside of the city being effected by the aforementioned water being carved out of the Plane of Water) filled with every creature from everyone's dreams with the southern portion being a desert containing a forest and a bigger and nastier copy of Port Scion ruled by the Lord of Nightmares himself.
  • The Plane of Water's third zone Tarkin Glacier is less of an Eldritch Location than the other two due to being a Slippy-Slidey Ice World with the mountain at the end being filled with minature Air rifts with it's peaks being floating rocks which are the only Eldritch things about the zone despite the developers' claims of a heavy Lovecraftian influence.
• Every time you fly through Bydo Dimension in R-Type, especially the Mind Screw territory of the final stages of Delta and, well, Final. To put in specific terms, the Bydo Dimension in Delta, which is depicted in the picture above, looks like a twisted version of our world with babies encased in crystals, upside-down buildings, huge strands of DNA, and a weird forest of Bydo Trees. The Bydo Dimension in Final is an abyss full of fluid inhabited by eyeballs and the creature implied to be the real source of the Bydo. The Bydo Tree forest bit also appears in Final as a hidden stage. There is also a stage in Final that takes place in a weird dimension where there is only the player, a slug Bydo named Nomemayer, and particles of light that can turn anything and anyone into a Bydo. And there's Anti-Space, a dimension created by some Bydo guys named Gridlock.
• Rune Factory has the Forest of Beginnings, the realm from which monsters are born, and to which they return when defeated. The player actually must travel through the Forest of Beginnings late into the first act of Rune Factory 4, with the Forest appearing as a hodgepodge of previously visited locations bathed in an eerie white light. In addition, the Return spell does not work within the Forest, so running out of HP here boots you back to the title screen.

S

• The Secret World features several:
  • One of the more benevolent examples arrives in the form of Agartha, a hollow Earth filled with branching trees, giant robotic caretakers, and a lot of bees, perpetually lit by sourceless golden light. It's actually a divine biocomputer and font of anima (i.e. magic), and it also functions as a weird Portal Network usable only by those touched by Agartha's bees (it "precipitates a messy discord" in the flesh of the uninitiated).
  • On the other side of the metaphysical spectrum, places severely impacted by the Filth begin to corrode reality, opening starry portals to distant and lifeless space. One of the worst areas is "The Breach," an excavation site in Transylvania that's been converted into a massive wellspring of the Filth by the Orochi Group and the Vampire Army. We see another such location during the prologue, where Ground Zero for the Filth bomb detonated in the Tokyo subway has all but completely lost contact with reality. For the player, such locations are also a doorway to...
  • ...the Dreaming Prison. A semi-metaphysical landscape of glittering black-sanded beaches under a midnight sky with a broken moon and blocks of white ice drifting overhead, dotted with massive cuboid shapes of an unknown material called the Gaia Engines. These things literally keep the world running, though Freddy Beaumont implies they can be used for "other things." For good measure, it's also a prison for the monstrous beings that produce the Filth, kept dormant by the Engines, and it's up to you to either reinforce the prison or help the inmates escape.
  • The City of the Sun God. Built by Pharaoh Akhenaten in Egypt as an act of devotion to the Aten, it's on another Filth wellspring, and the results have turned into into a gathering point for just about any malevolent force in the area. The portals to Hell open in two corners of the valley don't help, but they're not the most eldritch things in the area. The centerpiece of the alley is the Black Pyramid, Akehnaten's resting place. Thanks to a combination of arcane magic and the Filth's reality-warping influence, massive chambers and hallways fit inside despite clearly being too large for the structure. One of these rooms is a literally bottomless pit - above which the dormant Akhenaten slumbers.
  • In the update "The Vanishing of Tyler Freeborn", the Mist surrounding Solomon Island is revealed to be hiding one of these. Specifically, the Red Sargassum Dream, a twisted recreation of the town of Kingsmouth under a perpetual midnight sky, inhabited only by Filth-infected versions of the locals.
  • The Hell Dimensions are a Fire and Brimstone Hell that's almost completely starved of anima. The creatures inhabiting the place, identified in human folklore as demons, frequently try to steal anima from Earth, occasionally through demonic invasions but more commonly by tempting humans into signing over their souls. The environment in Hell is toxic to humans and capable of turning blood to metal, such that only those touched by Agartha's bees can survive down there. Theodore Wicker, a human mage interested in Hell, had to perform heavy magical alterations on his body (including tearing his heart out) in order to adapt to Hell's conditions, such that life on Earth became uncomfortable for him; he wound up leading a rebellion against Eblis.
• Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew: The Below is an otherworldly realm that can be accessed by the Cursed. When seen, it manifests as a chaotic blend of ship decks and bulkheads floating in space. Descending into the lower decks of the Red Marley is one way to reach the Below, but it is apparently much more vast than what is shown. The crew of the Red Marley use the Below as an Extradimensional Shortcut to return to the ship from land.
• In Shadow Warrior 2, the in-game justification for the game's Procedural Generation is that Earth's landscape is constantly in flux.
• Shin Megami Tensei:
  • Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne mostly takes place within the Vortex World, a chaotic, demon infested realm which the Earth and the universe get compressed into to when it comes time for its rebirth. Naturally, it's up to you to shape it as you see fit. For bonus points, it's a truly literal form of Tokyo Is the Center of the Universe. Within the Vortex World is the Amala Network, corridors of Magatsuhi that serve as the paths through which the player travels when using Terminals (and in which they can be trapped).
  • Digital Devil Saga 2 has the E.G.G Facility after Heat takes over. It turns into some semi-organic teleportation level. Then there is the sun. It serves as the afterlife, the god of the setting, and a supercomputer all at once. Is it any wonder it's The Very Definitely Final Dungeon?
  • Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey has the Schwarzwelt. It is effectively a void over Antarctica where demons appear, overwriting Earth with their own reality. The Investigation Team's mission is to analyze and nullify the Schwarzwelt before it can consume the entire world. The game over screen shows what happens if your character dies...it ain't pretty. The fun part is that the UN sent cameras into the Schwarzwelt during the planning stages...and nobody believed the results (one of them was a shopping mall). Turns out they were all accurate (but you don't want to eat the food in the shopping mall...).
  • In Shin Megami Tensei IV, we have the final dungeons for Law and Chaos, respectively: Purgatorium and Lucifer Palace. The Monochrome Forest also counts, as well as the various Demon Domains littered around Tokyo.
  • Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse has The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: God's realm is nothing but shiny blocks made of galaxies, surrounded by galaxies, with extremely eerie music. Before that there's the Cosmic Egg, which is made from the souls of most living human beings, has teleportation portals and is awfully reminiscent of a Womb Level.
  • The Persona series in general has the Collective Consciousness (or Sea of Hearts, or Sea of Souls), which acts as the central source of supernatural force in the franchise. One of its most recurring manifestations is the benevolent, but still bizarre Velvet Room, a room covered ceiling-to-floor in blue velvet outside of regular space-time ("between dream and reality, mind and matter"), which changes appearances with each game and doesn't even always manifest as a room (in 3 it's an ever-ascending elevator car, in 4 it's a limousine traveling through space, and in 5, it was a prison). All of its denizens - Igor the master, the pianist and singer in the first two games, the painter in 2, Elizabeth and Theodore in 3, Margaret in 4, Caroline and Justine in 5 - are all Ambiguously Human.
  • The original Persona has a slew of them, courtesy of most of the game being set in a realm formed from the thoughts of Delicate and Sickly Maki Sonomura, courtesy of a device called the DEVA System. The most prominent in the game would be Avidya World, the embodiment of Maki's darkest thoughts and the Very Definitely Final Dungeon. Your own high school can also get turned into one if you partake the optional Snow Queen Quest instead: if you find a mask inside the school's gymnasium, the spirit inheriting it turns it into a frozen ice palace surrounded by three arcane towers, and you have to trek all three and collect twelve mirror shards in order to break the spell.
  • While most of the dungeons in the Persona 2 duology are set in the real world, the ever-omnipresent ability to make rumors into reality add an extra layer of strangeness to them all. The most straightforward example is Monado Mandala, Nyarlathotep's domain, which you only get to explore in the second half of the duology (Eternal Punishment): it exists in a space-like area, with pathways and mandalas of light serving as its sole building bricks.
  • Persona 3 has Tartarus (pictured on the main page), an ever-changing tower which only exists during the Dark Hour, and acts as an Alternate Dimension in which humanity's Shadows can physically manifest. FES adds the Abyss of Time as its inverted twin.
  • Persona 4 has rather the creepy TV World, which once again, is the Collective Unconsciousness being forced to manifest via the "mind" of mass media. Subverted in the True Ending, where lifting the final veil of deceit from mankind's heart turns the Collective Unconsciousness itself into the Ghibli Hills.
  • Persona 5 has the Metaverse, a region inside the Collective Unconsciousness that can create mirrors of reality called Palaces based on the warped desires of humans, and you can only get there with a mysterious phone app. The underground maze of Mementos serves as the Palace for most of the people of Tokyo, but those with especially potent, twisted desires can create their own palaces that reflect their state of mind, much like the dungeons of the Midnight Channel in Persona 4. The creators of the more unique palaces serve as the major bosses for the game.
• The Shore has the Void dimension, a dark, inky black, Giger-esque plane dominated by colossal Shoggoths, servitors of Eldritch Abomination's, dark temples and corridors and avatars of a few Cthulhu Mythos deities.
• Silent Hill features a weird variation of this trope through the eponymous town, which may cross over with, unusually, Eldritch Abomination and Genius Loci. Though its exact nature is very much up for debate, it appears to be abandoned and shrouded in fog, day and night come randomly, and a nightmarish "otherworld" version of the town lurks beneath the surface and can overtake you at any moment. The otherworld draws its form from people's minds, sometimes the protagonists and sometimes another character entirely; quite a few epileptic forests have grown from trying to explain it all. It's worth pointing out that DJ Bobby Ricks, one character in Silent Hill: Downpour has pointed out that the town has 'rules,' and it is not keen on people disobeying it. If the town wants you to stay inside, if it wants you to learn something, you will. Possibly for eternity, as one character has been stuck there, delivering mail to parties unknown (possibly from the town itself) for 200 years. Even the apparent deity or demon worshiped by the town's resident cult, The Order, might just be the town acting upon the cult members' beliefs and desires.
• The Dark Rift from Skies of Arcadia, a high-pressure storm system that can't be crossed the way regular rifts can even with a fully-upgraded ship and remains even after the other rifts have calmed. Inside it is an alien landscape full of corridors that connect in odd ways, strangely-oriented landmasses, and plants and creatures very much unlike the ones seen anywhere else in the game. At its heart is a moon stone that doesn't match any of Arcadia's 6 moons.
• Skullgirls:
  • Gehenna, a Womb Level set before a lake of blood whose background features several eyes imbedded into the level that follow the characters as they fight. Yes, that's screaming you can hear in the soundtrack.
  • Nightmare Crest is a twisted version of the familiar Maplecrest stage that acts as a setting for the game's Battle in the Center of the Mind stages - the surroundings are muted and greyscale, the people that are normally bright and colourful on Maplecrest are formless shades with glowing white eyes and while the black leaves are frozen in mid-fall, the sky above is a rapidly-swirling red and purple storm.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • The special stages where the Chaos Emeralds can usually be found in the 2d games were officially stated to be set in a distortion in space called Subspace. Western adaptations went with names like "Special Zone" or "Warp of Confusion", which themselves were names given to the special stages (although not necessarily the place itself) by localizations.
  • Hang Castle in Sonic Heroes, but especially its interior, Mystic Mansion. In the daytime, it's a normal abandoned castle, albeit an exceptionally large one. At night, the exteriors seemingly extend endlessly in all directions, and gravity doesn't always point downwards. Once inside, rooms suddenly change topography (sometimes when Sonic and the others are in it), things pop in and out from impossible places, there seems to be a physical upside-down version of the mansion underneath the normal one, dumbwaiter tracks twist and contort while zooming off at high speeds, Eggman's robots pop up out of thin air (presumably intentionally), and what is supposed to be a well is full of weird vaguely water-like texture in all directions with a few small brick platforms suspended in it.
  • White Space in Sonic Generations is a white void serving as the game's Hub Level from where the various stages can be accessed.
  • The Egg Reverie Zone in Sonic Mania. It's the result of the Chaos Emeralds reacting to the Phantom Ruby in some strange way, creating an alternate dimension that consists of a part-metal, part-ruby platform with stage lights floating in the middle of a purple void. Time is so screwed up in this place that the interface timer just switches around random values. Once Super Sonic beats both Eggman and the Heavy/Phantom King, the Phantom Ruby reacts again to send him in to the world of Sonic Forces.
  • Null Space in Sonic Forces, another (?) dimension created by the Phantom Ruby's power that looks like a similar purple void, which Eggman used to banish Sonic. Fortunately he was able to escape it with the help of the Avatar (and possibly the Phantom Ruby prototype this one was carrying).
• Astral Chaos in the Soul Series is a timeless alternate dimension from which the Soul Swords originate, and is filled with lost souls and an Eldritch Abomination or two.
• In Splatoon 2, the Deepsea Metro does not follow the normal rules of reality as is established everywhere else. It seems to be underground or at the bottom of the ocean, but except for some faint sounds from one set of stairs, it cannot be detected. When on the train, there appears to be an inverted ocean comprising the ceiling, and bizarre floating structures are everywhere. The train will travel endlessly in a straight line until called on to stop at a station, upon which it will get there almost instantly, and it never has to turn around. Passengers will slowly lose their memories as they visit stations (with the exception of Agent 8, who can harness Mem Cakes to remember; and Cap'n Cuttlefish, who doesn't leave the train at all). The stations themselves are suspended over an endless void in all directions with gargantuan replicas of common Earth objects floating around ranging from wire coat hangers to Bubble Tape. Some of the stations are perfect replicas of locations on the surface, minus the inhabitants, with no explanation on their creation. Marina suspects that there is an electromagnetic field so powerful coming from somewhere in the Deepsea Metro that it has been able to bend reality itself.
• Spec Ops: The Line takes place in a version of Dubai that is subtly this trope. The city looks mostly normal enough, putting aside the battle damage and corpses scattered everywhere, or Walker's hallucinations where the sky catches fire and hellspawn claw out of the ground. But it's also surrounded by an impossible, continuous sandstorm cutting it off from the outside world, and riven with great unexplained chasms. More important is the fact that a level usually starts with Walker and his team repelling or zip-lining down from one skyscraper to another, descending deeper into the war-torn city... and then when the next stage starts, they're back in a high place, and have to go down once more.
• You've got your Shadow Lairs in Spiral Knights, but after the boss(es) are defeated, your team is whisked away to a frighteningly empty monochrome (especially compared to the colorful gameworld) tunnel called the Unknown Passage. Some really creepy ambience plays in the background as you prepare for a wave of enemies, and when they arrive, you'll fight The Swarm.
• Spirits of Anglerwood Forest: The nightmare world in Chapter 10. A strange Deliberately Monochrome amalgamation of someone's house and a deforested area that doesn't actually seem to be real. It's full of surreal portals to Ezra's memories, has Creepy Jazz Music on loop and puts Edgar into some kind of trance.
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is set in the Zone of Exclusion surrounding the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant after its infamous meltdown. Referred to simply as "the Zone", said location has become a place when only the most heavily-armed and foolhardy ever set foot due to massive amounts of both leftover nuclear radiation and incredibly weird shit. Aside from all the "normal" stuff - wild dogs, mutants, bandits, military troops, radiation pockets, and hostile factions - you have the anomalies: getting too close to what looks like a patch of empty air can reduce you to bloody chunks; that lightning-looking ball hovering over the ground can electrocute you; that patch of air that looks like it's shimmering in the sun can spit out a jet of fire that will burn you alive instantly if you're not protected enough. And those are just the obvious hazards. At one point, you encounter an endlessly looping room. At another, you find a lake that is also a hill, and that lake flows several yards into the air. If you're caught improperly sheltered during a blowout, you'll find it's even more bizarre and even more dangerous than ever. Briefly. If you understand Russian, the other stalkers have some... interesting stories to tell by the campfires, too. And lastly, the artifacts, your main source of income and stat boosts for the games, are formed by the previously mentioned anomalies, so they're found exclusively around these areas.
• Star Fox has the stage "Out of This Dimension", which is accessible via stage 3-2 by finding and ramming into an origami crane (It Makes Just As Much Sense In Context). It is a bizarre region of space filled with creepy faces in the distance, hostile paper airplanes, and a slot machine as a boss. On top of all that, once you enter this stage, you're never leaving: you're stuck here until you either lose all of your lives or reset the game.
• Star Wars: The Old Republic has the Voss Nightmare Lands, filled with barren soil, twisted trees, mutated wildlife, and a pervasive corruption field that reduces the weak of mind (read: everyone but the player characters) into violent psychopaths or blubbering vegetables. As an added bonus, there are no less than 5 quests available to deal with Eldritch Abominations.
• String Tyrant takes place at a mansion that is in it's pocket dimension, and seems to exist outside of time. It has lured in victims from across several centuries and all around the world. It's also full of inanimate monsters and traps that seek to transform anyone unlucky enough to wind up there.
• Sundered takes place in a series of impossibly vast caverns deep beneath the earth, whose layout and architecture change every time the protagonist dies. The environments within the caverns start out relatively mundane, but become progressively more bizarre and disturbing the further down you go:
  • The Valkyrie Encampment seems fairly normal at first, being a lush, jungle-like region with strange rock formations and seemingly endless waterfalls in the background. Then you realize that the only living things in this area are strange metallic plants that can grow through metal, and hideous man-sized arthropods with electrical powers that throw themselves at the player character in suicidal swarms. And the robots that guard the abandoned Valkyrie military base have tumorous organic growths coming out of them…
  • The Holy City of the Eschaton is located in a rocky cavern where the walls are covered in carvings of bones and alien eyes, geysers of purple energy erupt from the ceiling, stone stairways float in midair, dark tentacles occasionally form within the shadows (sometimes forming walls to block your passage), and towering structures and statues loom in the background. And that’s not getting into the masked, robed, shrieking monstrosities that call this place home…
  • The Cathedral is a gargantuan edifice where Alien Geometries are in full effect: pieces of the structure float in an endless void, giant fists made of tentacles will lash out at the player from patches of dark fog (which can appear out of nowhere), and glowing fungi will spew clouds of poisonous spores if you get too close.
• Sunless Skies goes with the Neath setting seen under Fallen London and ramps it all up, since the stars that give any semblance of normalcy to the universe are being shot dead one by one, so the laws of reality are growing thin in most places. Some more than others, of course, which still lets some genuine Eldritch Locations exist.
  • Avid Horizon is still as strange as ever, complete with sigils everywhere. The only difference is, this time it's now open wide, and the zee is pouring out into the void with many decommissioned ships floating in the watery mass. It's apparently much bigger on the Void side than on the Neath side, too.
  • The Clockwork Sun, a Mechanical Abomination you can actually board and interact with. Time is entirely screwy around the area, the whims of the Clockwork Sun are made reality, and its radiation will slowly turn your flesh into jagged glass if not shielded properly. And what's worse than a giant artificial mechanical god controlled by an imperialistic queen? The same thing in the middle of malfunctioning, which causes time to fall apart at the seams.
  • Wefts in Time are spots where the fabric of time and space, especially time, has frayed heavily. They're places where time gets messy enough that you can experience past and future along with the present, you can do accidental Time Travel, see several of your own possible futures and occasionally displace body and mind in a way that even bring the dead back to life by putting their minds right back into their old, rotted bodies. Just getting close starts screwing with everyone's minds, drives clocks insane, and makes the dates in your logbooks writhe.
  • Piranesi, a prison that went to reality-defying lengths to be utterly inescapable. Even on arrival you can tell the geometries are completely off, and that the laws of distance have thrown the towel and vacated the premises. The place being bigger on the inside is noted as the least surprising thing about it all. And once inside, the only way to actually move through the prison is to move on as a person; you simply cannot leave, and will loop right to where you physically are, if you remain the same as you always were. Only the wardens can move around more freely, which lets them escort you around, but even then they can have their share of problems with the whole place.
  • Eleutheria as a whole. The bit about the stars setting normalcy? Eleutheria is a segment of space where the locals decided they ain't having none of that, and are shutting down every last light they come across. The terrible things that starlight usually eradicates, since they're so utterly wrong and against the law of the universe no star wished them around, are congregating in the area, including those that came from places where there was never any light to begin with. There are veeeeery few laws of reality still working in the place, like overburdened, groaning pillars holding up existence and preventing it from caving in and collapsing into raw entropy. The "star" system even has an inversion in the form of the Eagle's Empyrean, the last stronghold of the New Khanate where things work more or less normally, and that's because they are serious enough about keeping things illuminated and sane they made a whole artificial moon for themselves. Most of its surface is high-powered lightbulbs, and even then it's not 100% effective. As it turns out, there is a local Judgement, the Halved, but it actually wants things to be this way to keep it as a place where those who hate the other Judgements can congregate. And it also turns out mere darkness would not be enough to keep things this eerie; Darkness is not the opposite of Light, it's the mere absence of it. The Halved is irradiating everything in Eleutheria with Anti-light to actively eradicate Law within its domain.
  • In Albion you can find Skyhenge, which is a stonehenge-esque rock formation where time has decided it's going to stop working properly. It snows there, but the snow stays perfectly still, people sometimes just disappear there, and sharing a story with the stones has a chance of summoning one of the missing people who have no recollection of being gone. If you have a barrel of hours you can enter the henge, where you find yourself in a field with several slender humanoids that you can give the hours to in exchange for a much more valuable cask of navaratine gemstones.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • The level Matter Splatter Galaxy in Super Mario Galaxy, due to the unusual physics of the solid objects and grounds that only appear when a particular field of matter gets close enough. The green-colored background of the level is even more surreal.
  • Compared to the rest of the Dream Land, Dream's Deep from Mario & Luigi: Dream Team counts. While most of the other dream locations are more-or-less surreal versions of the area Luigi sleeps in, this place is implied to take on the appearance of the sleeper's subconcious. In this case, it's a large purple space with floating neon Luigi faces and holograms, with quotes representing his thoughts flying around. There are places where going off on one end of the screen takes you to another location of another, and even how this works doesn't have to be constant. On the first visit, (the dreamed version of) Luigi goes missing until the boss fight, yet if you leave before said boss, he's back and claims that he was right behind Mario the entire time. And finally, the only "natural" inhabitants are Dark Blocks, which are animated in actual 3D in contrast to game's "pseudo 3D" sprites seen in the normal battle mode.
  • The whole Violet Sector of Paper Mario: Color Splash. We have a sentient ocean, a whirlpool that never goes away, an area of the ocean that is pitch black in broad daylight, and smoke coming from out of nowhere. It also happens to be linked to a Dark World that ends up being the cause of most of these phenomena.
  • The Mansion from Luigi's Mansion is... weird. The mirrors can transport Luigi, there are mouse holes (and later a dog house) that can suck up Luigi and put him in a different room, one room is upside-down, the door on the right of the Astral Hall loops back to the left door, and then there's the observatory which may or may not transport Luigi to space. Oh, and it's filled with ghosts. Justified, as it's an illusion made by the Boos.
  • Soda Jungle in New Super Mario Bros. U and New Super Luigi U has a section in the middle largely populated by Boos, and bizarrely, one of the levels in that section is almost entirely (except for the enemies, your character, and some features like the poison water) in the style of Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night. Complete with a giant picture of a white-eyed Bowser in the background. If the overworld map is any indication, this "drawn" area exists on the three-dimensional plane, and it's not simply Mario and company trapped inside a painting.
  • The Super Mario 64 fangame B3313 makes a giant Eldritch maze out of the already eerie Peach's Castle. For starters, the main hub has four variants (and each one of them has its own levels and exits), and you find yourself warping into castles within castles within castles. The connection between all this hubs has a form of logic, but even with a walkthrough, intuiting your way through the castle is an amazingly disorienting experience.
• Super Smash Bros.
  • Super Smash Bros. Brawl: In Subspace Emissary, Subspace is a dark dimension that shines in black and purple. The Greater-Scope Villain lives there, and his wish is to drag the World of Trophies into Subspace. Over the course of the game, his minions steal several levels, and while his initial plot fails, he uses those locations to create the Great Maze. Subspace also serves as the setting for the final battle.
  • Super Smash Bros. for Wii U: Master Core turns into one of these, named 'Master Fortress', one it's in the brink of defeat when Classic Mode is played with Intensity 8.0 or higher.
  • Super Smash Bros. Ultimate: In World of Light, the Dark Realm, home to Galeem's counterpart, Dharkon, is a mashed-up mess of multiple dimensions with chaotic architecture over a dark, purple void. The most mind-screwing part of it would be the Mysterious Dimension, which has a map that looks like an M.C. Escher painting. It's saying something when Dracula's Castle is the most stable part of the world.

T

• The Tales Series has had its great shares of bizarre locations over the course of its many games:
  • Tales of Vesperia: the parallel dimension where the Adephagos is imprisoned, a planet-sized squid that sucks aer dry. There's also Tarqaron, a massive floating city that was converted into a weapon to counter the Adephagos. The inside has warped pathways and structures built in every which way, and the party debates on just "what the hell were the ancients thinking when they built this?"
  • Tales of Zestiria has Artorius' Throne, the final dungeon. It's a sealed section of Glenwood that contains a massive palace suspended over an empty void, with collapsed and broken pathways surrounding it leading in every which way. The sky is blood red and the sun is black, and the entire area is engulfed in malevolence. Makes sense, since a hellonized Maotelus was sealed in there.
  • Tales of Graces gives us Fodra. This is a world that is long After the End - a much much larger planet in which the player world was a moon of. It looks a lot like Mars, yet is mysteriously inhabited by animals and the landscape shows signs of combat. The only people left is are robots and a Human Popsicle named Emeraude. Also the Little Queens and the Fodra Queen - who caused the destruction of Fodra by killing all humans. Gaia's Vengeance indeed.
  • Tales of Arise gives us Rena itself. After landscapes and architecture that, while impossible in real life are at least plausible, we get to finally see the homeworld of Renans themselves. Turns out? Rena is a parasitic Shattered World that looks more like an eggshell than an actual planet. All that the party sees upon landing is a seemingly endless ocean. Which as it turns out? Are all hollowed people, plants, and animals - devoid of any astral energy. The player had already seen puddles and a lake of hollowed people... not an entire ocean. It defies all known laws of physics and gives a truly eerie feel. This is even after following Lenegis whose layout changes on a whim.
• Terraria has the Corruption, Crimson, and Hallow. Respectively, they are dark, flesh, and light-themed biomes that actively spread through the ground and could even infect an entire map if the player does not take proper quarantine measures. The Corruption houses worm-like enemies and a boss variation called the Eater of Worlds, while the Crimson has meaty monsters and Cthulhu's brain as a boss. Both of them spread much faster after killing a giant mass of flesh summoned by burning a voodoo doll in the Underworld. Meanwhile, the Hallow is not present on the map at all until after killing the aformentioned flesh-boss, (or by just converting patches by using resources taken from another world where the boss was already killed) and holds fairy tale-esque creatures that are almost as kill-happy as their dark/meat counterparts.
• The Tomb Raider series has had a few of these, but two that stand out are the Atlantean Temple in the first game and Tomb Raider: Anniversary, and Tomb Raider II's Floating Islands level. In the first example, the deeper into the complex you go, the more organic the architecture gets, until the walls are made of pulsing muscles. The Floating Islands are...well, Exactly What It Says on the Tin, a series of floating islands inside of a Chinese tomb.
• Total Distortion takes place almost entirely in the satanic Distortion Dimension, since you've spent your million-dollar fortune to get there and videotape it to create music videos to sell back to Earth. Along the way you have to fight robotic Guitar Warriors, and solve various minigames to delve deeper into the dimension, all while maintaining enough supplies to stay healthy enough to survive. Halfway through you even have to pass through a maze made of TV channels, each of which has very trippy backgrounds throughout.

U

• The Ethereal Void in the Ultima series, in particular in Ultima Underworld II. Among other things, it features winding multilevel paths, invisible areas, a pyramid out of Q-Bert, and a section that looks like Akalabeth. The automap stops working, as well.
• The Hollow Night in Under Night In-Birth. Every full moon, a part of the real world is merged with another dimension. If you're caught inside, you have no way to contact the outside world, and you can't leave until day breaks again. Inside of this Night are monsters that normal humans cannot see, and a single bite from them can either (If you're lucky) turn you an In-Birth and gain access to powerful and potentially even godlike abilities or (If you're unlucky) make you go completely insane from this energy and mutate into a Void.

V

• Vanish: The underground water/generator maintenance tunnels. They are filled with monsters, the walls constantly shift, and there are whispers all around. The notes imply it used to be a normal area where maintenance workers regularly worked before the monsters showed up and the tunnels started shifting.
• Viewfinder lets you create these by turning pictures and photographs into three dimensional locations.

W

• Several places in the Warcraft universe qualify.
  • Chief among them is Outland. It was formed when the planet Draenor was torn apart by multiple interdimensional gateways being opened on the surface. It's now a continent with several different ecosystems, some of which are healthy and normal, or at least, as normal as the rest of this universe. However, the continent is surrounded by, rather than an ocean, an edge, and if you walk off it you fall into nothingness. It also has an Alien Sky, which is sunless but otherwise mysteriously normal in some zones, but looks like energy cascading through space in other places. In several places there are Floating Islands, some of which have water perpetually falling off them with no source.
  • The Netherstorm. Not only is it even more surreal than the rest of Outland, being just a collection of massive floating rocks instead of a single land mass, no one knows where it came from. Every other zone has a clear analogue on Draenor but the Netherstorm doesn't.
  • The Maelstrom. A eternal whirlpool full of unstable energies surrounded by an eternal hurricane that was formed when the Well of Eternity was destroyed. The black dragon Deathwing used it as a portal back to Azeroth, almost causing the world to blow up. The constant attention of several powerful shamans is required to keep the world from falling apart through it.
  • Deepholm. It can be reached by flying into the Maelstrom. It is the home of earth elementals and other creatures native to the elemental plane, so it's not supposed to be comfortable to flesh-and-blood creatures like playable races. It is a massive cave with a rock-based ecosystem, rock pillars that float in the air, and spires that regularly explode and reform. Most of the elemental planes are odd like this, but with another element in the place of rock.
  • Karazhan is a large black tower in the mostly empty Deadwind Pass. It was once home to Medivh, The Last Guardian, and sits atop a point where every ley line (think veins, but instead of blood it's magic) in the entire world intersects. Time itself gets lost within Karazhan, allowing visions of past, future and other worlds to pop in and out unexpectedly. One of Medivh's theories is that the Deadwind Pass was formed because someone would eventually build a tower there, rather than the tower being built where the Pass was. Also, there is an inverted Karazhan under the main one, and the main one exists in at least two parallel universes at once. There's also the odder features inside and around the tower.
  • Ny'alotha is the capitol of the Black Empire ruled by the Old Gods. It exists in a nightmare realm overlaying reality, reflecting a future where the Old Gods have conquered Azeroth. Mortals who enter the dimension are quickly driven insane by the visions unless they have some form of protection.
• Warframe:
  • The Void, a dimension that can only be accessed through special keys. The area appears as a vast expanse of space and pure energy, with only the occasional abandoned Orokin tower or the moon floating in its space. It is the source of all energy that the Tenno use, and it has close ties to the lost god-like race of the Orokin. It does not obey conventional physics; for instance, argon gas, which is normally inert, can crystallize there. Occasionally fissures in space leak void energy and allow the Orokin towers to use their mind controlling power to extend their reach. General Vor was even able to become a pure godlike being of energy with the use of a special void key. Oh, and by the way, it's apparently sentient and thinks nothing of driving people insane.
  • The Kingdom of Duviri, which also lies within the void, is the most prime example in the game: Originally the setting of an in-universe storybook, Duviri takes the form of various floating islands populated by strange metallic puppet-people and mechanical animals that still behave like biological creatures; all of Duviri is at the whims of Dominus Thrax, whose very emotions will change the very landscape - for example being calm and serene when he's joyful, or fire-red and peppered by fire falling from the sky when he's furious, and all his subjects can really do nothing against him. Also, Thrax's close courtiers can turn into gigantic serpentine mechanical dragons when the emotion they embody goes out of control. Little of Duviri makes logical sense, because it was accidentally created by the Drifter after the Zariman Ten Zero incident, and its essentially a manifestation of their trauma. The reason why Thrax, the residents of Duviri and its animals look like they do is because they're essentially toys that the Drifter's void powers granted life.

X

• Xenoblade Chronicles
  • The planet Mira in Xenoblade Chronicles X is an unusual planet which is acknowledged by the Earthlings that crash land on it. It features a lot of different climates in close proximity to each other and is crawling incredibly hostile Eldritch Abominations, and those are the normal parts. The weird parts are the how the planet does not appear on any star map, the way it draws different alien species to it and prevents them from leaving, the way it acts as a Universal Translator for the aliens, and how it can keep sentient androids running without a power source.
  • Xenoblade Chronicles 3
    • Aionios is a world that consists primarily of mashed-together sections of the Bionis and Mechonis' world and the world of Alrest. Beyond that, it is prone to cataclysmic Annihilation Events, where large buildups of energy result in land-destroying explosions that disrupt the very fabric of the world. It is revealed that after the events of the first two games, the two worlds were on a collision course that would've otherwise destroyed both of them and their people, which necessitated of a giant supercomputer called Origin that would've rebooted both world after the collision took place by containing the data of both worlds inside of it, including the data for each person on each world. However, the collective fears of the consciousness stored within Origin manifested as Z, who hijacked Origin and ended up creating Aionios as an unstable merged world when the two previous ones collided.
    • Origin itself, for that matter, can also be counted as an example of this. While its basic nature is explained in 3, how it operates and functions mostly remains a mystery, not to mention that its physical appearance has an otherworldly feel to it and that the metal it is made of possesses powers and abilities beyond what Z and the Moebius are capable of. Xenoblade Chronicles 3: Future Redeemed sheds light on why Origin exists the way it does; at the very foundation of Origin lies the core of Ontos, one of the three cores in the Trinity Processor that came from the world which predated the worlds of the first two games, AKA Earth. Ontos was initially awakened as Alvis in the world of the Bionis, and is the source of Alvis' power that Shulk, Zanza, and Meyneth drew from in the first game. However, when the Conduit that powered the Trinity Processor disappeared in 2 as a result of Shulk killing Zanza (and by extension, his Literal Split Personality in Alrest as the Architect), Alvis returned to the Ontos core shortly after Shulk reformed the world of the Bionis to become a world with "no Gods", with the Ontos core being found by Shulk sometime afterwards. Years later, the Ontos core was then put to use as the foundation of Origin, thus explaining why Origin functions the way it does. This ends up having disastrous consequences in Future Redeemed, as due to Z and the Moebius hijacking Origin, creating Aionios, and enacting a Forever War between the people of the two worlds for them to feed off of, Ontos reawakens as Alpha, who sees the destruction wrought by Aionios and decides that it needs to be destroyed and is beyond saving, with only the people of the City being planned to be saved from his wrath by Alpha transporting them to another world.
• In Xenogears
  • Deus, already an Eldritch Abomination, becomes an enormous Eldritch Location in its own right. After the heroes destroy its fortress Merkava, its massive body bursts forth in a somewhat disturbing FMV cutscene. The final dungeon, complete with technicolor lights, transparent enemies, segments with no apparent floor, and several parts of Merkava that it absorbed, takes place entirely within its body. The room where it is fought takes this up to eleven, as the walls are simply a swirling mass of lights, you float on an invisible, heavily sloped and weirdly shaped floor above the lights, and the fights with its flunkies seem to take place in an entirely different dimension. The true final boss fight is against the core of Deus, which is fortunately not an Eldritch Abomination, just a giant mech (which is still extremely powerful and should not be taken lightly).
  • The spaceship which is literally called the Eldridge, which Deus was originally being transported on before it crashed on the planet Xenogears takes place on.
  • The post-final boss scenes that take place around the fight with Ouroboros/Urobolus. After Fei and the Xenogears are absorbed by Deus’s corpse, they are transported to a location where a nude Fei finds Elly, who is unconscious within a sphere of light, before Krelian speaks to him, as a distorted apparition that resembles a skull. The two debate about philosophy for the next 5 minutes, before Krelian summons Miang’s final form (the Ouroboros) and the Xenogears as a final test for Fei to prove that humanity is worth saving. What makes this an Eldritch Location is not what happens in it, but the location itself. It has a foot-depth layer of water, with indiscernable walls and a general gloom, and after Fei kills Ouroboros, it begins to collapse before Krelian has a last-minute change of heart and saves Fei and Elly.

Y

• In Yuppie Psycho, Sintracorp has been slowly morphed into one of these over the years. While it looks perfectly normal on the outside, on the inside it's been rotted away and corrupted. For starters:
  • Once you use the Witch paper for anything, and keep in mind these things are everywhere, your soul becomes bound to the company and keeps you inside the building forever. One of the first things Brian does as part of his initiation is use Witch paper to bind his soul to the building, thus trapping him there until he's legally let go. Which, considering there's no bosses AND no CEO, is never. Unless he completes his contract...
  • The first three floors are somewhat normal. The canteen on the first floor is normal, and the second floor residences are okay as well, but poorly-lit, packed with wandering workers, has a a strange initiation ceremony to be promoted, and contains a massive pool of poisonous gas. Floor three is security and I.T, which are both normal.
  • Floors four through six are where it gets weird. Floor four is the Hive, the basic work area for normal employees, but the place has completely deteriorated and is rotting. The lights are off, the workers have become feral husks of their former selves, Human Resources is literally staffed by monsters and there's a roaming monstrous printer called the Dot Matrix that kills anything that moves. Most of the floor is also covered in a toxic gas coming from the pool in the second floor. The fifth floor is a normal office space for higher-up employees and serves as your Hub Level, but contains a coworker who went mad and locked himself in Office D, where he went crazy and killed everyone. Floor six is off-limits.
  • Floor seven through ten are incredibly strange. Floor seven is a library and archive room, replete with massive shelves of books. Floor eight is a garden in-doors, being a park-like area that also contains the bodies of the Sintra family. Floor nine is the "Executive Suite", locked to all lower class employees. This is because it's a downright horrific art gallery of extremely disturbing works of art by real-life surreal-horror artist Suguru Tanaka. It's staffed by two monstrous Receptionists with no faces, and contains the severed head of the first Sintra android. Mr. Spader spends most of his time there, but he's an okay guy. Floor ten is the CEO's office, which has been vacant for years.

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