Nightmare Fuel / Myst III: Exile

• Just about everything Saavedro does is creepy to the max. Being played by Brad Dourif makes every moment he faces the screen and speaks to the player directly a nightmarish moment, as he portrays a murderous psychopath so convincingly.
• Saavedro's entire life. Imagine the terror you'd feel after being stranded on J'nanin when Sirrus and Achenar burnt your linking book home. But there's a ray of hope, when you realise the function of the Age you're on! You figure out Atrus' lessons, listen to his messages spoken with fatherly warmth towards the two monsters who came to destroy your civilisation, making your way through each age in turn. And after all that, when you finally get back to Narayan... you find the way home blocked by a force-field you cannot circumvent. Now imagine spending twenty years confined by yourself, to all those ages, with your home just out of reach? No wonder he went insane...
• That painting in Amateria. Not helped that the individuals portrayed in said painting are the already frightening Sirrus and Achenar.
• If you watch Saavedro pace in the tower before you enter, you can see him messing with the telescope puzzle things. Now, if you can easily see half of J'nanin through those things, especially the areas you've already been in... what makes you think that Saavedro couldn't see you walking around down there?
  • The pacing in general is massively creepy on it's own, as you're never sure if he will stop, turn and look at you.
• One of the endings: Imagine a person trapped on a balcony maybe 6 paces long in between two completely impenetrable walls, behind one wall is the system used to control the wall, behind the other is this person's home civilization and family, both of which he had been convinced for years were destroyed by two people he had trusted. There is absolutely no way for him to pass either wall despite him being literally feet away from a gondola that would take him home. Worse of all, he had to watch a person, who could have released him by switching two levers, teleport himself away to another world despite him begging and pleading on his knees, and knowing that there is no possible way for anyone else to ever find him because the book that makes up part of the only path to the world where he is has been burned. Now consider that you are not the trapped person, but the person who left him there and that you know he is a man who believed everyone he ever knew and loved had been murdered by the two selfish sons of his friend, and that the only places he could go for literally years were four islands that made up a puzzle for young children with nobody in them but himself.
  • The impact is significantly reduced by the simple fact that if you accidentally let him back into the area you are in, he'll brutally murder you with a hammer immediately without a second thought, despite clearly knowing by this point that he cannot cycle the shields alone- and this while knowing you are an innocent third party caught in the middle of his feud with Atrus.
    • But then you have to consider that maybe he's been driven so mad in his isolation that, in moments like this, he does not think clearly, does not take into consideration that he cannot cycle the shields alone, and does not care that you're an innocent third party. All that is on his mind at this point is the rage he's feeling.
• The backstory, wherein Sirrus and Achenar turned what was once a peaceful Age to chaos for their profit, and didn't give two fucks about the destruction and deaths they caused.
• The lava chamber is frightening, especially since full-blooded Tellurians like the Stranger would not be able to last long in the Sammath Nauresque conditions of the chamber with the lava let in. Doubles as an Awesome Moment that the Stranger is able to solve the puzzle fast enough to get back to safety with body and brain still in good condition.