Nightmare Fuel / Half-Life

"FREEEEEEEEEEEMAAAAAAAAAAAANNNNNN....."

Valve Software's attempt at an FPS narrative, namely replacing the generic A Space Marine Is You (battling for the fate of the universe, natch) with a Badass Bookworm who seemed to be stuck in the middle of a bad situation, made players much more sensitive to the atmosphere than before. And with each release, Valve has been making atmosphere an increasingly bigger part of the experience.

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Subpages:

• Opposing Force
• Half-Life 2
• Alyx

Other examples:

Series-wide

• All headcrabs count as a form of unleaded Paranoia Fuel, due to their tendency to show up absolutely anywhere. Hiding in alleyways, skulking in storerooms, lurking in air vents, clinging to the underside of your chair as you surf the Internet...
  • This is prevalent enough that it's actually lampshaded in Half-Life 2's second chapter; when Barney turns the lights on in the HEV Suit room, he's immediately ambushed by Lamarr, Dr. Kleiner's pet headcrab.
• Barnacles... You suddenly find yourself being lifted into the air and looking up to see that red, bloody maw. Just seeing their "tongues" hanging around is Paranoia Fuel. It becomes Nightmare Retardant if you're feeling sadistic by feeding the said monstrosity with a poor and defenseless scientist.
  • One of the things that Valve is well aware of and comments on in their dev commentaries and interviews is "Gamers don't look up." One had to wonder how many Valve fans have been broken of that particular quirk.
  • There's the scene in Half-Life 1 where the silhouette of a scientist in a darkened room gets dragged up by the neck and then gibbed with a wet crunching noise. You will not hear the sound of a dog panting the same way since.
• G-Man. There is just something unsettling about him... Basically, he looks and sounds like a creature doing an unconvincing job at pretending to be human.
  • It's the pauses. "Rise and... shine, Mr. Freeman. Rise... and-shine."
  • What's really interesting is how G-Man's pauses make it sound like he's stuttering sometimes... but it's never a scared stutter. G-Man is never scared, and is always in control. The stutter further shows how inhuman he is.
  • G-Man's ability to suspend Freeman's freedom adds to his eerieness. He can pull you out of the world and hide you away in pitch darkness too. It wasn't until the Vortigaunts intervened to oppose him that his grip on you was restricted; however, G-Man was/is able to whisk you away if the Vorts are heavily occupied.
  • Also, in the first game and its expansions, if you use noclip to reach the areas he appears in and try to attack him, not only does he not respond, but if you hit him with the crowbar he produces a metallic sound effect in response. Seriously, is he a freaking T-800 or something?
• The further the series goes along, the more it becomes a Cosmic Horror Story as a science-fiction romp. Gordon Freeman, Barney Calhoun, Adrian Shephard, Alyx Vance — all of them and more are unwitting pawns furthering the agenda of unknown entities far beyond our comprehension, and those entities are manipulating the Combine and those who would be tied to them as well. Keep in mind the Combine are an inter-dimensional empire, who themselves are a nightmarish and brutal faction of oppressors that the Xen inhabitants were fleeing from. Everything you do and can do has seemingly been predicted and predicated well in advance, and even Wild Card variables like the Vortigaunts that can change it up are not all-knowing nor in much of an active position to do much about it. As the ex-writer, Marc Laidlaw, had emphasized in his non-canon Epistle 3, even with the Combine being a Dyson Sphere-capable force, it was still just another piece on the board, and Earth was merely incidental enough to it all to be left well alone in the long-term. Someone like Wallace Breen had tried to describe the Combine Homeworld only to realize the human vocabulary can't even hope to fulfill such a task, and even he seems to not realize the greater scale of what's beyond the Combine despite his knowledge of the G-Man.

Half-Life

• Even before the resonance cascade, you find yourself alone in the test chamber with the anti-mass spectrometer. There's something...unsettling about it's persistent humming, made more so by the fact you're never told exactly what it's supposed to do. Obviously, what happens well...wasn't supposed to happen, but really, what else could you expect from such an enigmatic contraption?
• As one scientist puts it, the government's idea of dealing with the aftermath of the Resonance Cascade is containment, aka kill every researcher in the facility associated with the project. They straight up send the Hazardous Environment Combat Unit (H.E.C.U.) in to murder everyone and take over the facility, as if someone higher-up was waiting for the excuse to take over Black Mesa in its entirety, and it isn't a token force, either; tanks, aircraft, bombing runs, a full assortment of explosives and munitions, and even assassins, all baying for blood and relentlessly killing everyone. And then they're not enough for the full brunt of the alien invasion.
  • It gets worse in Opposing Force, because Adrian Shephard gets knocked out in the initial raid and wakes up Late to the Tragedy as his unit is already pulling out. At first it seems like you're just A Lighter Shade of Black because you're not involved with killing any staff (story-wise at least) — and then your own higher-ups send in the Black Ops that shoot you on sight. Black Mesa is such an absolute clusterfuck of an operation gone horribly wrong that the U.S Government sends assassins to kill their assassins, plant a tactical warhead and attempts just totally and utterly kill everyone before anyone escapes or the alien invasion spreads. And we all know they wish it was that easy.
• Imagine yourself in Gordon's shoes, or even that of a normal Black Mesa employee, as you're hunted down by horrific alien monstrosities or by merciless Marines. It makes the game a little more unsettling when you think about that.
• After the Resonance Cascade, you wander for a bit, find a dying guard and a zombie. You naturally take the guard's gun and proceed. Avid fans of the game will remember this, but upon progressing to the next room and making a few right turns, you'll see a scientist in a vent screaming and being dragged into a vent. Then gibs. However, the noises proceeding the gibs are that of a headcrab. These tiny creatures couldn't rip a person apart, must be an oversight, you may think. But, headcrabs turn people into zombies. Zombies have their chests ripped open. No one really knows how that happens—do the bodies decompose? Do the victims rip themselves open under the parasite's control? It's all speculation. All that's known is that it happens ultimately when a headcrab catches your head. Well, it's clear the headcrab that was definitely in that vent couldn't gib the scientist himself, so you're left to wonder...what is happening in there?
  • Not just alive, but aware. Someone extracted the sounds the zombies made..."Oh god, help me.."
  • If you're playing with the original, non-HD models, take a closer look at the zombies when you get the chance, particularly at the headcrab over their head. The former human's skull is visible through the headcrab's body. And what's even more grotesque? The Gonome, Opposing Force's showcase of what the next stage of zombification looks like, have their skulls even more deformed.
  • Early on in "Unforseen Consequences" you can find a room where the lights have gone out apart from dim red emergency lighting, and over in the corner there's a headcrab zombie seated in a chair in front of a strobing black-and-white monitor, just sitting there spasming violently as the light flickers over it. It doesn't even react if you come up behind it and beat it to death with the crowbar; it also dies if you destroy the monitor instead. It's just a small, easily-missable scene, but it's like something out of Jacob's Ladder or Silent Hill.
• There's also a section where you ride a slow-moving platform to one of the lower levels. As the platform descends, headcrabs begin to leap towards you en masse. Granted, this might be Nightmare Retardant for some given that several of them bounce off the platform out of reach. However, they can hit you if you aren't careful, and even the ones that miss can come too close for comfort. There's also their persistent screeching accompanying you all the way down. It's, quite frankly, nerve-racking.
• Don't forget about the Ichthyosaurs from the first game. These underwater dinosaurs would swim at rapid speeds towards you. Not to mention that, in a particularly annoying bit of realism, most of your guns don't work when submerged.
  • It depends on the power of the computer you're running it on, but they seem to move... jerkily and there is a glitch where you can make them jump out of the water... and they still chase you. Sleep tight.
• The underwater sections of Half-Life; low visibility, the potential yield of the average Xen monstrosity lurking in it...
• Residue Processing and Questionable Ethics are a back-to-back Wham Episode that really contextualizes why the military probably wants to ice every researcher in the facility. The former is absolute metric tons of constant radiation and toxic waste everywhere, followed by a nightmare labyrinth of the titular processing plant — as it rains and seems to be processing human gibs in the waste waters. No, the game never answers why any of this is happening. It's then followed by the latter chapter, where you find a proper research facility— filled to the brim with Xen subjects galore for all sorts of violent and gratuitous experimentation, including the Alien Grunts. The massive Alien Invasion is not only far from the first contact, your blowing them to bits is preferable to this fate.
• Nihilanth. The fact that he's basically a humongous floating fetus with a head four times the size of his body, plus his scream of "FREEEEEEEEEEEMAAAAAAAAAAAN!" when you finally reach him...
  • Then there's all that creepy shit he says to you telepathically throughout the entire time you're on Xen (can be seen here).
• Its level design isn't looked on kindly, but, good lord, Xen. Once you're through that teleporter, there's no going home - and you're in an incredibly hostile alien world that's a prime source of Nightmare Fuel - it consists of small islands suspended in a great void of complete emptiness. The Alien Sky doesn't help. And inside, it became even more freaky, with Alien Geometries. The level design may not have been great for gameplay, but it does have atmosphere.
  • The trees. Good God, the TREES.
  • There's also that ambient sound in the background going on in the alien Grunt factory and just before meeting the Nihilanth. It sounds like a mixture of alien growls and high-pitched screams. Topping that off is where you can hear it the clearest: In a red-violet-lit room at the top of the factory, with a spiraling path over one bottomless pit, and dead scientist with their ammo remain next to the stored grunts. Is that Hell enough for you?
• That one final red teleporter just before meeting the Nihilanth is pretty damn scary as well. It appears in the one area of Xen where the skybox is entirely black, it has what look like alien torches around it, and you can hear a reprise of the people you met back in Sector C talking to you, as if Gordon's having a flashback of the incident just before going in.
  • However, you could treat it as Nightmare Retardant if you pretend it's just the cover to a metal album.
  • It becomes Nightmare Fuel again, though, when you hear the line "Take him out of there. Shut down the equipment and someone get him out." You never hear that once in the game until you get near the portal, bringing into question just what the hell is going on.
• Blast Pit. You hear the banging noise before you get to see what's causing it, and that echoing metallic sound is with you throughout the whole level. And how about those moans? Or the "death sound" that comes after you successfully ignite the rocket engine.
• The section with all the conveyor belts and large vats of questionable substances. Not very scary... until you notice that there are other things besides you being flung onto the conveyor belts. They're body parts.
• The Gargantua is pretty damn scary; it's huge, has a glowing red eye, is surprisingly fast, and will incinerate you on first contact. While the aged graphics make it less horrifying, its sheer presence makes the player want to rethink their path. Not to mention when they're chasing you. Who here didn't look back when in the garage in Surface Tension, when they knew there was a huge, heavily armored and quick monster chasing them...?
• On A Rail. Throughout the level, you occasionally hear distant sounds that are best described as the screams of the damned. The music doesn't help either, giving the level an undertone that suggests that all of your allies have already been rounded up and murdered, their killers (both Xen and the HECU) know you have eluded capture and death, and they are hunting for you.
• "They're waiting for you Gordon... In the Test Chamber..."
• Imagine this: You're a scientist working at Black Mesa, during which the resonance cascade happens during your shift and you're stuck in an isolated area with a small team of scientists. You wait for the military to arrive, but they don't come for a long time. Then, the door opens, and a man in an armored suit is standing in the doorway. Your hopes soar, thinking that you might make it out and live to see another day... before the man turns his gun on your fellow scientists and kills everyone without hesitation. But it wasn't a military soldier that killed you, it was Gordon Freeman. ^explanation The original Half-Life, even the Source version and the fan remake Black Mesa, allows friendly NPCs to be killed as long as they aren't necessary in some way. You can slaughter almost every single scientist and security guard in the game from the moment you pick up a weapon and you'll never be punished.
• As if the normal Valve Vanity Plate of a man with a valve in his eye or the back of his head wasn't creepy enough, the game was originally going to use a vanity plate of a man in a factory, willingly inserting a valve into the side of his head. Said logo animation was done entirely in the GoldSrc engine, as a way of testing the engine's capabilities, and its files can still be found within the game.
• There is a variable that dictates if a human is gibbed, there's a 5% chance their skull will fly directly at your face. If Gordon wasn't already traumatized by the incident itself and the grotesque maiming of his co-workers, getting hit in the face with the skull of a man he potentially just blew up in self defense oughta do it.

Mods

• Black Mesa, the Fan Remake of the original Half-Life, has its own page.
• Cry of Fear and its precursor Afraid of Monsters, standalone horror modifications of the original Half-Life, are riddled with this in every corner you'll encounter.
• The Hidden: Source, a Half-Life multiplayer mod. All but one of the players are part of a SWAT-ish team hunting down an knife-wielding escaped fugitive. Unfortunately, some questionable experiments have given Subject 617 superhuman speed, strength, and senses, along with the ability to cling to walls, leap down hallways, see people's auras through solid matter, and feed on human flesh. Oh, and he's invisible. There's nothing like wandering alone through a derelict apartment building at night, rounding a corner to find the rest of your squad hanging from the ceiling like slaughtered cattle, before a voice directly behind you hisses "Turn around..." Whoever's playing as The Hidden is given in-game voice taunts purely to scare the beejesus out of the opposing team, to the extent that some players will snap and start firing wildly at the slightest hint of noise or movement...or else crawl into a corner and hide.
• Half-Life: Echoes is a rather well made fan mod of the original game that takes the GoldSrc engine to it's absolute limit and focuses on the G-Man with the UI text playing out as if it was an observation by him or whoever his employers are.
  • There's a certain part where you'll encounter a scientist spazzing out, screaming "Get it off me! Get it off, GET IT OFF!" before being shredded by a horde of Snarks coming out of his body in a gruesome detail just like if it was in Alien.
  • The HECU introduction is rather darker than in the original game. You do get to see them move over to the facility and get hints of their presence, but their live entrance has them nonchalantly kill off both of your companions, one of which is the HEV-suited guard who had been holding out very well, right in front of you, while you are unable to do anything behind the glass. All because they thought one of them was Gordon Freeman. Oh, and then the Gargantua plows through the wall and causes further mayhem.
  • The end of the game is rather chilling. After a section of the facility collapses with Candidate #12 crawling through a portal, he arrives at dormitory building well away from the main facility that shows the G-Man stopping the Kingpin from abducting Alyx before saving her himself and leaving Candidate #12 for the "unforeseen consequences". The sound of several Castle Castings air raid sirens going off along with Alyx's crying is rather chilling the first time as it's very obvious what happens next.
• The Citizen Returns features a part where you have to traverse through an abandoned casino. The very first hint that the place isn't as safe as it appears is the fact that once you head inside, there is a radio hanging by its power cord, playing back the scientific log of what sounds like a reanimated corpse. Right away, you'll be expecting zombies to show up at any second...but they never do. You wander around the big atrium, finding a way to get a door to open up so you can continue on your mission, all while you hear footsteps behind you, shapes running around and knocking things over. The whole atmosphere of that casino makes sure to keep you on your toes and watch every corner, even after the headcrab zombies finally do show up.

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