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Subjective
NightmareFuel: Video Games
alt title(s): Nightmare Fuel Video Games
I see you!!!

Some computer and video games are supposed to be scary, but that's okay because we as player characters have the power to destroy The Legions Of Hell. These examples, however, leave us wondering what the hell the script writers were thinking.

This can often occur while braving Big Boos Haunt during the Night Of The Living Mooks. Also, while not quite the same thing, many Demonic Spiders can lead to nightmares.

Before editing this page, know that Nightmare Fuel is ONLY for games intended for children. If you've got a horror story about a game for adults or teens, go to High Octane Nightmare Fuel.
Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Kirby Games 

    Final Fantasy Games 

    Psychonauts 

    Earthbound (Mother) 

    Pikmin 

    Sonic The Hedgehog 

    Donkey Kong Series 

The rest...
  • Black And White is an immensely fun game. You can be good, evil, neutral...but if you or your critter are constantly killing off the villagers, I suggest turning off the sound. Unless you enjoy the whispers of "Deeeeeeeaaaaath...." every time a peasant kicks it. Brr.
  • Endless Ocean is a relaxing, slow-paced game family-friendly of scuba-diving. With one notable exception. In one level it is possible to dive into a deep sea trench. This pitch black abyss is filled with enormous horrific creatures with big pointy teeth.
  • Jesus, this troper is mentally traumatized by Pink Panther: Pasport to Peril, a point-and-click adventure game from the late 90's. The plot of the game took place at a summer camp, where the Pink Panther has been sent as an detective to investigate the unusual behavior of the campers. You spend several hours becoming aquainted with the various campers, visiting their home countries and such. Toward the end you find the reason for their odd behavior. (Not bothering with spoiler tags since its 10 years old, was played by 8-year-olds, and noone seems to have heard of it) They were all robots. After you return to the camp, it has been replaced by a nightmarish version of itself, complete with disembodied robot parts of the various campers. People's faces are falling off, arms coming loose, etc. Here's a clip. About 4:20 in.

  • Space Quest 4; Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers. This Troper remembers playing Sierra adventure games with her parental unit. And most of the time we had fun. However one day the parental unit bought SQ4 (I was 8 at the time). In first screens you're allowed to have control on the character, you could run into a zombie. We smacked right into one and we were treated to a close up of a bald, snarling, humanoid with his eyes forced open like in A Clockwork Orange. Then the zombie raised its hand and screamed at us. This troper recalls screaming and tearing from the computer room faster than light speed and refused to play a Space Quest game ever again.
    • This Troper never ran into the zombie way back as a child, fortunately. It was the slime in the sewer that melts the flesh off your bones that got to him.
      • Ding! You have to click on the 'screenshots' link to see it. (Unlike damned Uboa up there.) In the olden days, you'd be viewing that fullscreen rather than in a tiny window.
    • This troper was around six and watching his dad play Space Quest 5, and was greatly disturbed by most of the ending sequence where Quirk is absorbed by the massive blob which comes alive as a result, getting the Eureka to suck up the blob and come very close to tearing itself apart under the strain, and ultimately escaping on the Goliath as the Eureka explodes. Oddly enough, it was the Eureka exploding which haunted him afterwards. This troper has since replayed the game and wondered why he thought the whole affair was scary at the time...
    • Space Quest II was very disturbing to me as a kid, especially the many ways to die.
  • The video game Drakken: The Ancient Gates has a quite a few disturbing things in it, this troper finds certain bosses to be the most disturbing- especially the Inquistior who is a grim reaper like entity with supernatural magic powers, there's also a whole dungeon level which features skeletons in it .
    • Let us not forget the boss of that level, who trails you around constantly, a Creepy Critter that has an endless supply of beautiful virgins shipped to him... so that he can skin them and wear their skins as clothing.
  • PC kids' game Nightmare Ned uses Nightmare Fuel as a plot point and is extremely disturbing, namely one level in where Ned in some sort of hospital about to have his organs taken out by beaver-like monsters.
  • You'd think that a game like Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts would be more than devoid of this stuff. But you'd be wrong. The seemingly innocent Banjoland level takes your childhood memories and stick them through a blender. Clanker the robot shark/whale thing has been torn apart, with his teeth set in the wall, his tail thrown haphazardly out into the floor of the desert area and his head hooked up to the central heating, the snowman from Freezeezy Peak has melted into an unrecognizable blob and the hat converted into a snow machine, the Jolly Rodger from Treasure Trove Cove stripped from its beached position and deposited casually in a pool, the giant tree from Click Clock Wood dissected and bolted to a wall - the list goes on. And the "employees" don't care, despite being recurring characters pretending to be museum curators and so on.
    • And then you realize Clanker is by most rights a living thing, and that his eyes are watching you when you get close
    • These listings are perfectly understandable. [3], if one stops to truly think about the world he or she is exploring, is filled wall-to-wall with Nightmare Fuel, ranging from the enemies (and a few friends), to the premise (never mind that the main villain isn't seeking anyone's death , at least not in the first game), to some of the environments themselves. Also, Gruntilda herself, when she's in her skeletal-but-alive form.
  • The first trip to the Quiphloth in Tales Of The Abyss is certainly Nightmare Fuel. Even though it's entirely a good example of Nice Job Breaking It Hero, when the ground gives way under Akzeriuth and the entire place falls into a realm of creepy dark purple and red colors, caused by a poison gas, it can be quite a disturbing thing.
    • Not to mention John, a little child, dying an agonizing death as he was swallowed by poisonous mud from the planet's core shortly after.
    • The explanation behind Guy's gynophobia is literally Nightmare Fuel for him, but also for this troper: when his family was massacred, he was buried under the corpses of his female relatives and servants for several days. DAYS.
  • In Tales Of The Abyss Jade Curtiss liked to use his fonic artes to torture and kill even the most harmless of monsters. For fun. Please bear in mind that this is also the guy who never stops smiling.
    • The whole replication of Gelda Nebilim flashback scene is also very creepy.
  • Another point from the Tales series that can be quite disturbing, is Soulless Colette from Tales Of Symphonia. Her red eyes were creepy enough, but the fact that she had become a monstrous killing machine adds to the effect.
    • Actually, Tales Of Symphonia is pretty much full of it, but it's all covered up by fun, cute and bright graphics. Examples:
    • The Desians, a Nazi-like enemy organization. Seriously, many of the things that they do are Nightmarish.
    • Exbelua. These horrific monsters were once human. Now think about that.
    • The Desians BREED HUMANS. Imagine being born into a torture of the caliber that the Desians put people through.
    • Or worse, imagine being a little kid trapped in Rodyle's undersea Human Ranch.
    • Of note, the main bad guys, the Cruxis, also do this. But their method is a tad less cruel. They arrange marriages to create people with certain qualities. So that the result can be sacrificed to bring the sister of the organization's leader back to life. This is how Colette, the female lead of the game came to be, Zelos, her male counterpart found later in the game is involved in a scandal surrounding this and his mother states that he should never have been born.
    • Anyone absorbed by an Exsphere faces the fate of And I Must Scream. Even happens to Colette. (As it was stated that she knew what was going on when she was "soulless").
    • This troper, while also being slightly disturbed by Soulless Colette's inhuman red eyes, found her normal self's shriek of terror when Yuan attacked her at Palmacosta after going to the inn to be a scary thing. A very scary thing.
    • The first visit to Presea's house. The house looks completely unlived in and Presea, who is obviously brainwashed, is mindlessly wandering around in there and occasionally doting on the sixteen year old corpse of her father that's still lying rotting in the very bed he died in.
    • You probably don't want to read the manga adaptation then. The reader actually gets a full view of Presea's dead father after she regains her soul, and it's none too pleasant.
    • The Devil Noise Glitch creates a horrific sound at the end of a battle that easily can be called Nightmare Fuel, oh, and it can freeze your game. Worse, no one knows exactly what causes it.
      • Speaking of And I Must Scream, when Mithos briefly succeeds in putting Martel's soul into Colette's body, it's made clear that she's been aware this entire time of what Mithos has been doing, watching her younger brother and friends fall gradually into deeper madness and torture the entire world in her name. For FOUR THOUSAND YEARS.
    • The first encounters with the Zerom soldiers in Tales Of Hearts. Zerom are ugly little bastards that eat Spiria, essentially souls, causing a wasting disease caused Despir Sickness. The villain generates them, captures them, and fuses them to humans. From that moment, the remainder of the stage begins crawling with dark-colored, red-eyed, inhumanly growling armored soldiers. This is the state in which you fight them, all but foaming at the mouth, and they're worthy foes to boot, using soldiers' moves and some new ones as they growl for your blood. Oh, and the first time you see them, the soldiers stagger out from basically magitech coffins. *shiver*
    • Tales Of Hearts starts with Nightmare Fuel. Kohak gets shot with a beam of negative energy that causes her soul to splinter into a thousand pieces, each one severely affecting the town where they land in some way...
  • The heart blastias in Tales Of Vesperia. Not to mention the fact that Raven uses the energy from his to attack during his Mystic Arte, and then mutters "I thought I was dead..." Schwann's Badass Creed lampshades this, since he says "Burn this life to punish my enemies!" They are using their own life energy as a weapon.
    • Possibly less nightmarish, but still very creepy is the fact that there is a sidequest where you can find all of Raven's... erm... "female fans" The man is practically a zombie. The girls are all quite young and, if their dialogue is to be believed, willing. You do the math.
    • Also, cute little Estelle screaming in pain after Alexei hooks her up to the apatheia device. And then she becomes Brainwashed And Crazy.
    • Plus, another Complete Monster, Cumore bites the dust when Yuri drowns him in quicksand. Sand filling your mouth, nose, ears, lungs... It is not a pretty thought.
  • Heart of Darkness features the young male protagonist trapped in a world populated largely by hostile creatures varying from merely disturbing to outright horrifying, that can kill him in a variety of ways that are remarkably grotesque for the game's total lack of genuine gore... in a game rated E. To be fair, this editor suspects the game wasn't actually intended for children, despite its cartoony art style and goofy sense of humor during the lighter moments... but this was apparently lost on the Media Watchdogs.
    • Some of Andy's death animations may actually drain the blood from your face. You get to watch as the young boy's body is stretched, crushed, bent, and broken in disturbingly unnatural-looking ways that it's clear the developers paid a lot of attention to getting just right wrong. Oh God, the rock worms. And as Heart of Darkness is Nintendo Hard, you'll get to see every animation many times. And hey, remember that time that totally exhausted Amigo dropped to the ground, and his shadow ran up his body like an infection, and he was mutilated, mind and body, into one of the shadow bones fliers that you've been blowing apart with your Power of Life for a while now without knowing where they come from? Heh heh heh. Good times. *sobs*
    • Thanks to the magic of the You-Tubes, a categorized montage of them all is just a click away.
  • The Jeljel level in the Puzzle Game Meteos features disturbingly melting-looking pieces, a heat shimmer in the background, and this spine-chilling, music-box-like tune. Clear the level, and a loud church bell rings. Lose... and you hear a volcano erupting as a woman screams in horror... Compared to how light-hearted many of the other worlds are, it's even more of a contrast.
  • For some reason, this editor can't get over the nightmares of any 3D game where progressing to another world meant entering what appeared to be a bottomless pit or tunnel. Then again, considering that, if it doesn't lead anywhere, such holes lead to death, it's understandable.
    • Similarly, this editor is also creeped out over any platformer where you can (and sometimes have to) get eaten by a fish or other aquatic animal. The Big Bass in Super Mario Bros 3 and especially Super Mario 64, which would snatch you right off the surface and swallow you whole in one gulp, is especially disturbing.
      • Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure has a particularly bad version, where the last level of episode 1 (after the Final Boss!) is a big funnel, with a giant mouth at the bottom. All you can do is grab the walls, slowing your descent. You'll still slide down slowly, closer and closer to the waiting jaws (The beginning of the second episode takes place in the stomach of the monster).
      • This troper is very tolerant of Womb Levels, but Clanker from Banjo-Kazooie freaked her the bejeezus out. That "rust" looked waaaaay too much like a mass of bloody scabs and boils. Ew ew ewwww x.o
  • The Zombiebots in Metal Arms: Glitch in the System scared the crap out of this editor: they are extremely fast and powerful, have to be killed twice, and the most effective weapon against them could only be used at close-range. Also, their distorted metallic screams are just awful.
    • This troper was about eleven when he played the game, and cried when Hosed and Screwed, your tutorial buddies, were unceremoniously blown to bits at the start of the second level. Imagine his pants-wetting reaction to the Zombiebots, and his relief at finding you could rescue two of them and have them help you. Plus, he found the nappy-wearing Zombiebot King Nightmare Retardant.
    • The intro to the wastelands. after killing the first enemy batch, you see two grunt corpses, heads and arms ripped off, with a huge bloodstain under them, slowly dripping... and if you shoot them they sway. Then, there is the three-fourths point in the wastelands, when there are two Zombiebots and you're high above them... I grenaded the area, and jumped down. Guess what? FIVE FEET AWAY FROM ME ARE TWO ZOMBIEBOTS.
  • The "Generator Room" level in the first Crash Bandicoot game is particularly Nightmare Fuel-laden. Imagine an enormous, black space with exhaust pipes pumping what appeared to be black gas into the room, metallic platforms hanging over what appeared to be an infinite, dark void, and video screens brandishing a dead-eyed version of Doctor Neo Cortex's face throughout the area.
    • Lots of things in the game are Nightmare Fuel. What freaked me out were the Lab Assistant characters. It's explained in the third game that they're really artificial robots with real flesh - that's Nightmare Fuel itself, but they look human by Crash standards in the first game. Their only means of attack (apart from standing there) in one level is to run at Crash with arms outstretched, occasionally generating electricity between their hands. It doesn't help that they return in the sequel, some assimilated into Borg-like space warriors, and the only way to beat them is to push them into a fire shield - and their standard cry is eerily cut off as they evaporate.
    • The Mount Grimly theme in Crash: Mind over Mutant is extremely dark compared to the rest of the otherwise cheery and upbeat soundtrack.
  • Dark Passage in the original Spyro The Dragon involved enemies that remained tame and mostly harmless in the light, but turned into vicious demonic versions of themselves in the dark. The transformation is just so sudden and ghastly (not to mention makes the enemies much more dangerous), this editor guarantees you'll be freaking out the first few times you play it.
    • "Spyro: Enter The Dragonfly" has a rather spooky glitch in which every goes all Slow motion-like.
      • A lot of the bad guys you face in The Legend of Spyro series are seriously Nightmare Fuel-ish.
    • In fact, the whole Dream Weavers' world was creepy - it didn't help that the world's (thankfully optional if you're not going for the 100% completion) boss was a Jack-in-the-box... except he wasn't in a box.... What really creeped me out was Haunted Towers. That gave me nightmares when I was a kid. A large section of the enemy population are animated suits of armour which float and attack by whacking Spyro with their own helmets. Not to mention the level being the site of an infamously difficult puzzle (easy when you know how) to reach the last dragon. Not scary itself, but due to a clipping glitch (or perhaps a subtle clue) it's possible to see part of the trapped dragon... struggling to escape the crystal. Through the ceiling.
    • In Spyro: Year of the Dragon, the Evening Lake world Frozen Altars has a lot of giant snowmen that Spyro must defeat with lasers- get too close to one and they grab Spyro, shake him and throw him away. That's not scary. What is scary? Their goddamn freaking smiles.
    • Malefor from The Legend of Spyro trilogy is rather terrifying, along with being a Complete Monster. The fact that he's played by Mark Hamill dosen't help much either.
    • This troper is not arachnophobic, so the giant spiders in Spyro: A Hero's Tail didn't bother me much. That is, until one jumped out at me from a seemingly solid wall. Having that happen enough times could turn anyone arachnophobic.
  • The music that plays (appropriately) during most of the nightmare levels in Alundra gave this editor nightmares. It's difficult to describe, but it keeps shifting between various themes and instruments, with a heart beat-like bass drum in the background, occasional cuts to music-box style music, and some screams thrown in for good measure. Part of it makes me picture melting angels. Of course, the creepiness was probably intentional here, but not to that extent.
    • For that matter, some of the nightmare levels were damn creepy.
    • This song to be exact.
  • This troper always had a problem with any Womb Level in a video game, or any realistic portrayal of anatomy and being inside someone's body, in any medium. Worst of all was Joe and Mac. Joe and Mac is a cartoony game involving cavemen and dinosaurs, with bright colorful graphics and much silliness, so the last thing this troper expected was a level which takes place inside the body of a T-rex. The level features moving villi, large red blood cells visible in the background, and worst of all, a giant beating heart. A realistic beating heart, not a cartoony one! Which led him to wonder, "What were they thinking?"
    • Another SNES caveman game (gosh, how many did we need?), Congo's Caper, goes on this exact same trope, with the added fun of swimming through the T-Rex's digestive juices. Sickly. Yellow. Digestive juices. Totally submerged in. Joe and Mac was also memorable to this troper for having bosses that actively decayed as you hit them. Some just looked cartoonishly pained, but some were nightmarish. The Mammoth, for instance, lost its tusks, then its ''trunk'', leaving a horrible gaping hole ''while it was still alive and bellowing''.◊ It's really no wonder this troper has a morbid phobia of elephants in her adulthood.
    • Another such level exists in Jet Force Gemini where you travel through a giant alien insect larva... thing... it's sort of sad when someone can feel relieved when coming out of an anus. Unfortunately, immediately after doing so you are assaulted by the level boss, Twin Cyborg Tailed Praying Mantises who, aside from being That One Duel Boss, are accompanied by orange rocky landscape, lava rivers, and an orange sky where the clouds travel by quickly, giving an apocalyptic atmosphere to the already nightmarishly hard fight.
      • Also, one of the spaceship parts is on top of the giant worms brain! How did it get there? Why do you have to walk on its brain to get ti? What the hell where the developers thinking?
    • Also featured in Ocarina of Time, but to a lesser extent. (See Zelda.)
  • Quest For Glory IV has literal Nightmare Fuel in the form of a Cask of Amon Tillado, a wine that gives the drinker dark visions of the Evil Overlord rising to destroy the world.
    • Also noteworthy are the nightmares you have when you sleep in Erana's garden or under her staff.
    • Completing the Paladin's quest in "Shadows of Darkness", the one involving the ghost chick in the river, quickly turned into nightmare fuel.... After killing the ghost of her murderer, you must wade into the river and kiss her. Only, by this time, she is no longer an, uh, alluring figure. She is, in fact a rotting corpse. Squick
    • This troper could probably write a whole page full of Quest For Glory examples..., heck, Sierra examples in general! Quest for Glory IV in paticular had alot of creepy things, although the snarky narrator helped lighten the mood a bit.
    • Then there's Tanya, the little vampire girl who lives in Castle Borgov, and has eerily blank, glowing gold eyes and white skin, and just misses her mommy and daddy. God, is she creepy.
      • In the first game, the music in the magic shop. This editor could not stay in that place for very long, even as a Magic User, due to the music. Also, Night Gaunts can be a bit of a surprise the first time you try to sleep in the wilderness at night. The fact that you never see them somehow makes it so much more disturbing.
    • Not just the Quest for Glory series - this editor (who is twenty) had to sleep with a light on for weeks after dying in the unlit room in the Catacombs in King's Quest 6. All you see the whole time are the dots of your character's eyes...and that makes it worse.
      • Legend of Kyrandia has one of these—-this video—-but its not the protagonist's eyes you can see.
      • Catacombs? Heck, how about the Realm of the Dead? Creepy music, check. Nighttime, check. Body Horror, check. A sequence describing how the Lord of the Dead slowly turned from a human being into a death lord numb to all pain and misery for all eternity, check.
    • The point and click Sierra game Torin's Passage has a tragic Anti Villain with an oddly creepy yet touching story.
  • Kingdom Of Loathing has plenty, ironically enough.
    • The Big Creepy Spider, whose description informs you that "he promises not to kill you, but you're not sure you believe him."
    • Spookyraven Manor in its entirety. Especially the part with the animal skeletons.
    • That line about how your familiar "gets creative with the fish scaler" is extremely creepy, even if it's hurting your enemy.

  • Rayman: Raving Rabbids is creepy enough in concept: Rayman and his friends the Globoxes are kidnapped by deranged, screaming, mutant bunnies (the titular Rabbids), and Rayman must win his freedom by competing in various minigames, most of which involve abusing said Rabbids in various slapstick ways (blowing them up, shooting them with plungers, etc.). "Bunnies are Slow to React" is especially creepy, as it involves playing a marble labyrinth game inside a Rabbid's brain while creepy Muzak plays in the background, including a snippet of Rabbids singing "Ode to Joy".
    • Arguably worse is the mini-game where you have to pull grinning worms out of festering cavities in the Rabbid's teeth to a backdrop of a screeching dentist's drill. Fail to grab them before they go back in, and the tooth will go brown, then explode, leaving wiggling root endings hanging out of the screamsonicing Rabbid's gums. Oh, and since it only ends when you lose, seeing this is inevitable. Even worse is the harder difficulty, in which the Rabbid constantly exhales bad breath at you, making the screen wobble like a 70's sitcom flashback effect. This troper is a natural pro for some reason, so when friends are over for a game, she's always tossed the controller on this level and forced to play through while listening to everyone else squirm and squeam. It was a hell of a way to really appreciate the Wii's graphics update for the first time. In-game footage is not for the weak of stomach.
    • How about the minigame in which you have to force a Rabbid to hit himself with a mace or screaming by touching his brain on particular locations ? Oh, and did I mention said Rabbid had to go through a trepanation for this to occur ?
  • Rayman 2: The Great Escape/Rayman Revolution has The Cave of Bad Dreams and Tomb of the Ancients. The Cave of Bad Dreams is over-the-top scary until you reach the part where the cyclopic monster that guards the treasure chases you with his teeth framing the screen. The Tomb of the Ancients has giant spiders, cackling ghosts that float out of the sewage that ambush you while you're floating on a barrel, and intense music that makes good use of the Scare Chord.
    • The Canopy level is nightmare fuel for arachnophobes. The very beginning of the level has Rayman ambushed by a giant spider that's almost impossible to kill without the powerup you receive later in the level, and the spider even gets its own scary music.
    • The Zombie Chickens. The name sounds silly until you actually meet them in person.◊ The worst part is when you're trying to raft down a certain section in The Tomb of the Ancients and they come after you in swarms...
  • This editor remembers from this old Daffy Duck game on Game Boy, when this giant bat would come out of nowhere on certain stages and the music would turn really creepy.
  • Non-conventional computer game example: In the "Save the Dinosaurs" game that came with 3D Dinosaur Adventure, if you failed to save all of the dinosaurs in time, the meteorite would hit the Earth, the dinosaurs would cry out in fear and pain, and the guy who gave you the mission would tell you it's all your fault before pulling you back to the present. It was quite creepy.
    • Another scary part of the game was that eventually, you would find your way to the various Mesozoic periods barred by giant arthropods, including mosquitoes, scorpions, fleas, and pill millipedes. If you approached one, an eerie sound that the creepy crawlie's real-world equivalent makes would fill the air. It was rather creepy, considering that most people don't like mosquitoes as it is.
    • For me, what did it was the museum. Completely empty (which is absolutely unnerving) save for the theater area where you get to be chased by a T-Rex in first-person.
      • And they suck away your time when they do so. But at least you can zap them by clicking on them. Nice "laser gun" noise. BYEEOW! BYEEOW!
    • This troper was more scared of the Dromaeosaurs that he would encounter if he went the wrong way down the time tunnels. At least the giant arthropods can be see before you run into them, and always block the way to the direction you're supposed to go. So they help, if unintentionally.
    • Another creepy part of that game was a section where the player could view videos, with realistic simulations of dinosaurs. One video featured a Deinonychus killing another dinosaur in a bloody fashion. Another featured a Struthiomimus crushing another dinosaur's eggs and eating what was inside.
      • This troper remembers those videos from her childhood dinosaur-obsessed days. The one with the pack of Deinonychus killing the Struthiomimus was indeed rather disturbing. The part that really got to me was the Struthiomimus' BLOODCURDLING SCREAMS. *shudders*
      • You mean this documentary here?
  • Another non-conventional computer game example: When this troper was younger, I played this game who's name escapes me at the moment (it was one of those kids' CD-ROM games that's made up mostly of mini-games and rarely, if ever, has an overall storyline). One of the games consisted of putting together puzzle pieces to reveal a short but funny black-&-white movie. This particular one, however, was anything but. The completed puzzle revealed a picture of a girl holding her pet cat. Pretty normal (even though, if I recall, the girl was wearing shiny black opera gloves that looked suspiciously like they were made from the skin of a crocodile). At one point, some eerie background music played, and the girl gained the eyes, ears, and whiskers of a cat, along with a sinister smile. Naturally, the pet cat freaked out and said "Oooh! Heh heh, nice kitty" and then purred nervously. Not only was this movie scary, this is probably the only unattractive Cat Girl in the Universe.
    • That would be Math Workshop, brought to you by the folks behind Myst and Prince of Persia. No, really.
    • Also the folks behind The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis, if I remember correctly, which, in case you've forgotten, present you with the scenario of tiny refugees escaping a dystopia in an educational kid's game! Now, that premise wasn't so bad in the first place (...though this troper has friends who say it's just him), but then there's... that puzzle. You know. The one with the beehive. The one where you can make no more than three mistakes before a swarm of angry bees starts chasing your Zoombinis off the screen with giant scissors, syringes, and other LARGE POINTY OBJECTS.
  • The children's educational game Sim Ant was creepy enough for featuring colonies of ants. The victory condition was eating the opposing colony's queen. This is further exacerbated by potential deaths such as being squished flat, being eaten by a Giant Spider, or mowed down by a lawnmower (it helps that the first time this one happens, the most that'll be going through your head is "What IS that loud whirring noise?").
    • Think that's scary? Play Sim Copter. It's a good enough game, with great music and fun gamplay, until you see the graphics close up. From people whose poorly rendered faces that wrap all the way around, to animals who are actually skeleton like wireframes that only appear to be normal from a distance, This Troper never went to the ground level if he could avoid it, preferring to do everything from the air.
  • The Play Station game Gex: Enter the Gecko had the titular character exploring levels based on movie genres. The series of levels based on horror movies contained blood-soaked walls and floors, eerie ghosts that could hurt you unless you stood under a dim lantern, and quiet, creepy music. It only got worse as the game progressed. This editor played it when she was younger, and very much preferred the kung-fu movie levels.
    • This troper agrees wholeheartedly, even though he played the N64 version. (In fact, thanks to this, he wants to go boot up his emulator— because he always rented the game). In addition, the level based on Titanic surprisingly managed to avoid causing panic attacks due to his fear of water... but swimming to the very top of the level and having Gex's head above the water, there being only a (if I remember) stark blue abyss, scared the ever-loving shit out of him.
  • Aside from being the king of Family Unfriendly Death, Metal Slug has another nightmarish little element. Normally, you have a gun and grenades. When your character is turned into a zombie, however, that changes to a gun and vomiting blood. In a wide, long stream.
    • This troper always saw that as being Cursed With Awesome. Also, the character select screens in most of the games, especially 2,X, and 3 are pretty freaky.
  • Andross in Star Fox 64. Seriously that... thing. He's a huge face and hands, that has an attack that involves him eating your Arwing. Yes. He eats it.
    • This troper thought it was terrifying when you fight the fake Andross: once you deal enough damage to him, his face just falls off, revealing a freakish mechanical structure that only somewhat resembles Andross. And then it charges straight at the screen, just to freak you out.
      • Do you know what's even more terrifying? Fighting the final form of the real Andross. His face melts away, leaving behind a brain, a pair of eyes, and these... tentacle... things... hanging out from under the brain. He'd actually stalk your Arwing all over the arena, catching you in his tentacles if you get too close. Of course, this troper is Squicked out by the sight of brains, but still... brr...
      • Surprisingly, the beginning was the most horrifying part for this troper. When he got to the end, he saw nothing but a shadowy thing...then out pops this grotesque monstrosity of a disembodied head. He was so thrown off he lost the first round with him.
      • What about Sector X? You're supposed to be attacking an enemy base to destroy a secret weapon. When you reach the base, however, it's already destroyed. Debris is floating everywhere and eventually robotic arms float past you, with Falco commenting "What the heck is THAT?!" The creepy music of the level just adds to the suspense. At the end of the level, Falco screams "FOX! LOOK OUT BEHIND YOU!" and the secret weapon itself, who was the one that destroyed the base and to who the various floating robotic arms belonged to, appears, speaking in a creepy robotic voice: "Destroy....Destroy..." Eeeeeeeeesh!
    • Pigma: "Daddy screamed REAL good before he died!"
    • For this troper, it was in Starfox Assault. The team is tracking Pigma around the system and ends up in an abandonned station in an asteroid belt. The boss of the stage? It's Pigma, who got assimilated and mutated by the Aparoid artifact,now fused with a large ship that grows tentacles and his face is the core, always screaming creepy assimilation stuff. This troper stopped playing for a few days before being able to continue the game.
    • Oh no...Pigma and Andross pale in comparison to the true horror that lies within Star Fox Adventures. No, it's not General scales, no it's not Andross...it's that shopkeeper. S/he seriously creeps me the hell out. That voice has given this troper the name "Evil Gypsy Shopkeeper" to it because seriously...that shopkeeper is evil!! Somewhere in the galaxy, s/he is lurking. Waiting. Waiting for the perfect moment to attack the federation and say "You pay THIS much!" and if it's too low, she'll just say "How about a little gaaaaaaaaaaame and trap them into an eternal field of torture and pain and High Octane Nightmare Fuel. It is this that is pretty much the tropenamer for the evil shopkeeper...
  • The Awesome Black Hole, the music... Also, according to one of the comments, you can see a ship, somebody speculates that's Fox's Dad's ship.
  • This is concept art from a steampunk-style Disney game that Warren Spector is apparently working on. The twisted, blasted landscapes and run-down Disneyland landmarks are one thing, but THIS◊ is quite another. Note the elephant-bot (which looks like it came right out of 'Pink elephants on parade') with hooks for hands, soulless dead eyes and a skeletal, spindly torso which barely even resembles an elephant, and the equally horrifying no-eyed-one-armed Goofy-bot on the right. Good night, children.
    • This thing which seems to be a mix of Disney characters◊ is pretty damn creepy, look at the Crocodile, its got an Aliens thing going on.
    • This troper really likes the idea of a steampunk-type Disney game, but seeing the artwork of a post-apocalyptic Disneyworld nevertheless gives her the heebie-jeebies.
    • This is Disney in Hell. The game is only known so far as "Epic Mickey", something about older characters attempting to kill our favorite mouse, but this is far more extreme than I ever expected to see from a Disney franchise. The half-mechanized monstrosities are horrific enough, but somehow adding Mousketeer ears pushes this into a different dimension altogether. This Troper spent the first five minutes of looking at the photos in horrified silence, not at the fact that the game is being made, but that anything like this could happen to Disneyland/Disney World. It's not supposed to exist. I'm scared witless - but I'll have to play it. (This is even more traumatic considering this Troper just got home from an eight-month-long stint in Walt Disney World, so seeing the broken, rotted Epcot geosphere is like having a piece of her heart ripped out.)
    • This troper's thought process on clicking the Goofy link went something like this: "Oh, it's a Disney game, and not Kingdom Hearts, how bad can it b—AUGH! Those things shouldn't be! For a moment the "Sea Transport" one actually seemed funny, as it looks like a reject from "Waterworld", until I realized: if I'm not mistaken, that's Monstro from Pinocchio, terrifying in his own right. Only as a decaying automaton big enough to carry all of Disney World, with a giant horn for good measure.
    • This troper has a severe elephant phobia, partially thanks to Disney and its pink elephants/elephant graveyard. Literally. Can't. Stop. Shaking.
    • Well, this is the latest artwork◊ from the cover of Game Informer. It is a bit different from that earlier art, but somehow, I'm not sure this is much better.
      • Oh, trust me, the Phantom Blot can be made much scarier, just look at this◊
    • Also, they're going to put the song "It's a Small World" in it... Played backwards.
    • And if all of this makes you think it belongs on High Octane Nightmare Fuel instead... well maybe there's some truth to that. But while the game's going to be freaky to players of all ages, Warren Spector has made it quite clear that he wants this game to be played by, and scare the crap out of, kids.
    Warren Spector: I really want to scare kids. I want to go to Disneyland and see a 10 year old kid crying: "Oh mommy, the clock tower's going to come to life and eat me!" That's my fondest dream. Disney scared the pants off me when I was a little kid. Disney needs to scare kids!
  • The Old Sorceress's Mansion in Lost Odyssey was pretty damn creepy, not necessarily even because of the creatures you wind up fighting or the old, run-down look of the place, not even because every door you open lets out a ghoulish face or a dark tendril. No, it's because of the profound solitude of the place when you're not in a fight (a theme heavily emphasized by this game), the ghost of the main character's dead child running around laughing, and the extremely creepy piano music that induces yet more of the feeling of being all alone in the world, that makes the entire experience quite nightmarish. This editor shudders whenever he hears that particular piece of piano music.
  • This troper's best friend has a fear of bananas thanks to the banana bomb weapon from Worms.

  • This troper, oddly enough, was frightened while playing what should have been a harmless game of Super Black Bass on SNES. While slowly reeling the line back in, searching for fish, out of nowhere a fish the size of a whale appeared. Coupled with the water surrounding it appearing dirtier than anywhere else...
  • One thing notable about the first Banjo Kazooie game is that it made you feel really, really crummy for losing by actually showing the cutscene of Gruntilda succeeding and Banjo's sister Tooty being turned into a Frankensteins Monster. Worse is her line: "Banjo, your sister wants as word with you......NOW! Even worse? You get this cutscene even if you use the "Save and Quit" feature.
    • Worse than that, is in the Xbox Live Arcade version of the game, where at the very end of the epilogue, after Grunty swears revenge, it inexplicably says GAME OVER instead of the original THE END. Let's hope that's not also the case with Banjo-Tooie... and if that had a game over scene, it'd be even more depressing. Grunty and sisters would fully drain the whole island with Grunty restoring her body, leaving the island with a zombie apocalypse.
    • This troper's younger sister fully blames her paralyzing fear of sharks on Snacker, the almost-invicincble baddie who stalks the waters of Treasure Trove Cove. Even if you smack him senseless with eggs, he's one of the few enemies in the original game that periodically respawns, meaning you always have to watch your back... And keep your ears open for strains of The Jimmy Heart Version of the Jaws theme...
      • Rooreelooo's Lets Play of the game turns it into Nightmare Fuel Squared by playing the aforementioned Sonic drowning music when he shows up.
    • This troper can't be the only one that's scared to death of Rusty Bucket Bay in the first game. The troper being the one up there in the Mario folder who became quite literally traumatized by the eel in Super Mario 64, the level is not a happy place for him (but oddly, Clanker's Cavern does nothin' for him, nor Jolly Roger's Bay in the next game, so... it's odd I guess). Even trying to get into the damn place, what with the tall flooded chamber, is HORROR INCARNATE to him. To say nothing of the water in the actual level, which depletes your air at normal rate even when your head is above the water and doubly fast when it's under... and the return of that fucking shark, even in a small area, DOES NOT HELP.
      • Any task in the game that required you to spend quite a bit of time underwater, in flooded caverns, etc didn't go over well with this troper. Luckily there isn't too much of this in Tooie (except for the flooded caverns in Glitter Gulch Mine). However, Rusty Bucket Bay and Mad Monster Mansion required you to spend a long time in flooded areas just to open the door for the damn level. Not fun.
      • Those things that hide in the walls and pop out trying to eat you (their design varies from level to level) don't go over well with this troper.
    • From Banjo-Tooie, the huge dinosaur foot that keeps coming down to stomp you, letting out a huge roar each time.
      • Jolly Roger's Lagoon. Anenomes and octopi and fucking EELS! And don't get me started on the living algae and that fragging fish in that one area. Or Lord Foo Wak Wak.
    • The "Here Comes Trouble..." music is the stuff nightmares are made from.
    • Let's not forget the trash compactor in Grunty Industries. That thing had me afraid of trash compactors. For years.
  • Ivor Beggar's transformation into Ivor Bargain in Viva Pinata. He turns his head upside down, using a different mouth and nose that were formerly his hat.
  • Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney has the infamous stare of Damon Gant, which can make many gamers uneasy when they see it. Not to mention that Gant's stare isn't nearly as creepy the first time you see it. The problem is, every time he does it, the stare goes on for even longer, and there's NO MUSIC PLAYING. By the time you sneak into his office and he caatches you, he stares at you for so long in utter silence that it feels like HE'S LOOKING DIRECTLY AT YOU! In Case 5 of Trials and Tribulations, we witness Dahlia getting exorcised out of Maya's body, letting out a scream, and in her final on-screen moments takes the form of a very creepy ghost before turning into a flame and vanishing, while flashbacks to her crimes go off. And then in Apollo Justice, perceiving Kristoph Gavin is scary enough, but when you see his nervous habit—namely, his hand tensing and a combination of his finger bones and the scar on his hand forming a demonic face, you will shit bricks.
    • Also, his black Psyche-Locks. Just what the FUCK is he hiding that warrants not only five Psyche-Locks, but BLACK ones instead of the usual red ones?!
    • In case you wanted to see it, here it is [4]. Took me a while to find it.
    • This troper is terrified of perceiving in general. The creepy slower-than-usual music, the swirling background and the flickering eyeball at the bottom is usually enough to scare her off playing the game entirely.
    • Two words: Jean Armstrong.
    • Depending on how sensitive you are to Nightmare Fuel, many witnesses can start to become this as they get more and more upset.
    • Shelly de Killer deserves a mention. With his Leitmotif playing in the background, a red aura surrounding his person...you will have nightmares for weeks.
  • pop'n music has the "Chara-Pop" option, which replaces the standard note skin with that of your character. Sometimes the notes will change to something not-nightmarish (i.e. powerup icons for Vic Viper), but sometimes they'll change to things like your character's head. This troper was doing a battle match with a friend, and he could see on his friend's screen a bunch of his character's heads scrolling down, which was part of an attack that he inflicted on his friend's screen. It had a rather creepy effect, and it doesn't help that they explode when you hit them (which you are supposed to do).
  • Little Big Planet's third world (The Wedding) seems rife with Nightmare Fuel...if you aren't just impressed by the exellent Day of the Dead decor. Your Mileage May Vary. The most nightmarish bit would have to be Skulldozer, where you get chased by an enormous bull skull on bicycle wheels that continuously screams, is surrounded by red fog, and is being piloted by an insane zombie bride who thinks she's been jilted and is running down the entirety of her wedding reception. Trust me, it makes more sense in context.
  • Nothing about Breath Of Fire 2 yet? The English translation is a bit weird, but at times it just adds to the Uncanny Valley horror.
    • The initial scene where young Ryu and Bow follow a spiked tail through a shadowy cave, leading to a monster that may/may not have torn them to pieces.
    • THE GODDAMN FACE HUGGERS IN THE WELL.
    • The monster hunters who casually tell you that if they ever find the beautiful woman in the forest, they'd "sell her, of course."
      • It gets even worse when said beautiful woman actually shows up...and reveals her true colors as That One Boss. Now you know why the house with the monster hunters was suddenly empty. She murdered them in cold blood.
    • The whole surreal sidequest with the cat chefs. If they decide you're weak, they'll slowly cook you alive on a giant grill.
    • Nimufu. Just Nimufu. She collects cute boys and turns them to stone. And then there's her line when she meets the main character and learns he doesn't want to "play" with her: "...then I'll kill you first, then play with you!"
      • That being said, after you defeat her in the boss fight following that line, she becomes The Woobie. Yes, really.
    • Evrai. That is all. It is a city that is believed by the majority of the world to be paradise, but in reality, it is a city that sucks out your soul and feeds it to an evil god. And you can never leave.
      • That place creeped out this troper to no end. One minute everyone is happy and smiling, but once you try to leave, go talk to everyone in town again. Everyone will either laugh evilly or tell you that "it's so cold...". And perhaps worst of all, the standard town music is still playing the entire time, as if absolutely nothing is wrong, which somehow makes things even creepier.
  • The old-school arcade skateboarding game 720 Degrees: When the timer runs out and a booming voice says "SKATE OR DIE!!!", then a swarm of killer bees starts chasing you, gradually becoming faster until they are unavoidable, while also changing their formation to the shape of a hammer, a pair of scissors, a syringe, etc. Fuels nightmares of being chased, you know, where your pursuer keeps getting faster and faster.
  • Has any other editor in this fallen off of a building in a Mirror's Edge? If just being in first person wasn't enough, there's the snapping sound. Uuuugggh...
  • The old, Lovecraft-inspired graphic adventure game Shadow of the Comet is remarkably creepy, especially if one played it as a 14 year old boy, like this troper did.
  • The Haunted Grounds level in Gauntlet Dark Legacy. The level has an overall ominous atmosphere, combined with eerie music and the random laughter of children, which at one point, for no reason, becomes an unsettling scream. Plus it has statues of the four classic Gauntlet character classes, meeting gruesome fates. The next level, the Haunted House, is probably a bit of a relief, what with its abundance of ghost story cliches.
    • God, yes. You'd think playing as a Jester who hurls cartoon bombs, hits things with a tiny stick, drops two ton weights and occasionally pulls a baseball bat out of hammerspace would do something to assuage this - in fact, you'd expect that was the entire damn point of being so tongue-in-cheek in the first place. But if you sat and listened and looked for 30 seconds at anything through roughly half of the areas in the game, it rapidly became clear that it didn't work.
    • Ditto on the bloodcurdling roars of the monsters with explosive or acidic barrels stuck to their backs. If there's anyone on this earth who doesn't spontaneously completely panic when that sound happens, I haven't met them.
  • Oregon Trail II produced quite a bit of Nightmare Fuel for this troper back in 3rd grade...the DUN DUN!!!! that played whenever a bad event happened STILL scares the hell out of this troper...so much he refuses to play it with the sound on.
    • This troper had actual nightmares about the rattlesnake attack and, at 17, still jumps every time the Scare Chord comes on. (The Guidebook did help a lot, though. and yes, this troper was enough of a geek to have the Oregon Trail II guidebook and use it.)
  • The PC game Abuse can be summed up as a platform version of Doom (Abuse was made by ex-id Software members). Dark corners, creepy mutants, though not a lot violence to boot. If the atmosphere doesn't get to you, then the scream of the mutants and seeing a horde of them coming at you will. Fans of Tim And Eric Awesome Show: Great Job can hear this from their Bougar sketch.

    • This troper saw a graphical glitch while opening the door where his character's hair keeps dissapearing and returning. Also, the next time he went into the Door, he found himself falling into an endless pit that came out of nowhere.

  • The Witch Doctor in the original Adventure Island, aka the NES clone of Wonder Boy. Everytime you defeated him, his head fell off and he would get a new, more grotesque Head Swap, some of these, such as the cyclops form, were downright terrifying, especially when this troper was a kid.
  • Several of the bosses in the Turbografx Shoot Em Up Monster Lair were downright nightmare fuel-errific, for example the skull with a circle of mini-grim reapers, the fish whose skin came off to form smaller fishes, the wasp hive and queen, the baby vampire/frankenstein hybrid, the cactus jack-o-lantern(nasty buzzing noise when it snaked across the screen), and to top it off, the Final Boss's One Winged Angel / Clipped Wing Angel form. The game's Nintendo Hard-ness could be nightmarish too.
  • Guitar Hero: Aerosmith. Yes, fucking GUITAR HERO AEROSMITH. The second level's encore animation features lightning, and several creepy images of stuffed rabbits and such, and then a freaking jack-in-the-box with an outright demonic face pops up. Why they decided this would be a good idea, I'm not sure at all.
You know the poster for the Kentucky level? It's got two utterly demonic looking sheep ever! Then there's those skelletons from Guitar Hero Metallica but at least that's understandable.

  • Chibi Robo had the Spydorz. Those things are seriously creepy.
  • Super Robot Wars Alpha 3: "End of the Galaxy". Enjoy it—or not—here.
  • Although NIGHTS: Journey of Dreams is a fairly bright, happy, game, there are a couple of bosses who deserve to mentioned here. First up is Donbalon, who's literally a patchwork/clown/balloon-thing, with a freaking creepy smile. Next is Cerberus, who is bad enough on it's own (being a couple of dogs with spiked balls for bodies), but combine it with the creepy cage-dome/desolate background, and the music, then Cerberus becomes a lot worse.
    • Also in Journey of Dreams, Hellen's Nightmare Sequence is really frightening. At first it seems like it's just a sad cutscene, but after seeing something that reminds her of her mom, her mother's image appears faintly in a store window. She looks at her sadly, this suddenly turns into empty red eyes and a hideous snarl. The glass shatters, and shadow-creatures come out of it and chase Hellen.
  • Chrono Trigger is pretty notable for doing some horrible things with the SNES sound hardware, such as the infamous Lavos cry, the genuinely startling noise many monsters make when they attack you, and the music in Magus' castle, which has a disturbing laughing/weeping noise playing throughout. To say nothing of some of the game's set pieces, like the cathedral or the People Jars aboard the Black Omen.
    • "But...the future refused to change..." The apocalyptic imagery from the bad ending was enough to give a lot of players the heebie-jeebies.
    • This troper was particularly freaked out by a certain room in the Geno dome. There's a conveyer belt with people on it. The belt brings the people into a box, where you hear a scream (Very terrifying sounding considering the SNES's sound limitations), and the people don't come out. You only see the side of conveyer belt, so you can only see the outside of the box, leaving you only able to imagine what could have happened to those people.
  • In Nightmare Before Christmas: Oogie's Revenge, one of the first boss battles opens with a cutscene of Jack arriving in a seemingly abandoned building. He sees a dark shadow on the floor, which slowly starts to grow and lift itself off the ground. No big deal, right? Well, a few seconds later it morphs into a pitch-black shadow of Oogie Boogie, with glowing yellow holes for his eyes and mouth. And as if that's not enough... "Jaaaaaack!" This troper just about had a heart attack!
  • The classic Playstation gem known as Medievil and its sequel Medievil 2 are well known for being Nightmare Fuel. It it wasn't the violence, demonic themes and dark setting, then it would be the terrifying awesome music. As a kid, this troper wasn't afraid of anything in the game but that music. That haunting music that perfectly created an atmosphere that made your skin break into goose flesh and your hairs to stand on end, your spine chilled and teeth chatter. Yep, those game had it all (but no Killer Rabbit unfortunately).
  • The NES classic Monster Party was released in 1989, back when there were no age ratings for video games back then, and the gory visuals and general weirdness of the monsters was primo Nightmare Fuel for many a kid back in the day, from the sudden change of scenery in level one to the absolutely creepy ending.
  • The modification for Marathon, Marathon: Evil had the Devlins, a spinney, yellow eyed, hard to see menace that liked dark places. Having one jump out at you for the first time is not calming.
  • The Water Dragon in Okami. Blood. Augh.
    • Explanation: At one point in the level, you have to remove an orb which is the device that turned the Sea King into the Water Dragon from the dragon's stomach webbing. To do so, you must sever the individual threads of flesh using the dragon's stomach acid. The worst part is that the stomach acid looks exactly like blood. Later on in the same level, you release a flood of bloody "acid" from a vent in the body and must make it through the next part of the level on rapidly disintegrating water lilies. Ugh.
    • Just about everything in the Haunted Ship level, from the creepy dolls to the ghastly ghost versions of several of the earlier bosses to the hideous seaweed monster with the horrible seaweedy arms of doom.
      • To the point where the Sunken Ship was recently featured in a 'Top Ten Scariest Moments' section in the UK Official Nintendo Magazine. Said list also contained examples from Resident Evil 4, Eternal Darkness, and Dementium: The Ward.
      • At one point early in the level, before you've probably really come to terms with how demented it is, you go through a door... and the spectral head of an onryo with the Spider Queen's Eyeless Face flies straight at the camera.
      • The hand. Sweet mother of potatoes, the hand. At least you can kill that abomination later.
      • Then Fridge Horror occurs, this is kind of a mixture of the Water Temple and Shadow Temple, only this is underwater, in a sunken ship, if Amaterasu's powers weren't accessable, and it became day time, you'd very likely drown, and there's no guarentee of not dying alone considering that Rao is Kyubi, the enemy, who'd very likely leave Amaterase for dead.
    • The final boss, Yami. That thing looks scary in his final form. Though he's still kind of creepy before, he becomes Nightmare Retardent for a few seconds... then he starts pulling out high-tech weaponry that wasn't available during the game's era, since he's the creator of technology. Put yourself back a hundred years mentally and imagine he won, and imagine the suffering he could have caused.
  • That One Boss in Skies of Arcadia— a huge, bloblike creature with a translucent belly— in which you can see human skulls swimming around in green digestive fluid. YUCK. Its entire lair is covered in blood and human skeletons, and one of its most devastating attacks involves the thing THROWING UP ON YOU (and said attack can poison your entire party). It's incredibly difficult to beat, especially on your first run though the game, as it loves to poison you with said throwing-up move. And beating it is no relief; right after you climb the ladder it was guarding, you get to fight another boss battle, followed shortly by a mini boss of sorts...
    • From the same dungon, we have the "Mind Stealers", which appear to be giant beetles that are parasitizing emaciated humans by apparently taking over their nervous system.
    • Hell, the ENTIRITY of the Valuan Catacombs is terrible experience: Let's see, it's a Scrappy Level of the Absurdly Spacious Sewer type, there's Goddamn Bats everywhere, and you have to experience the most disturbing sound effect in the game...
    • On the subject of that sound effect (the sound of Lightning out of battle- it's worse than it "sounds") it's also heard going into the Vortex, which is the SCARIEST dungeon this troper has ever encountered in an RPG.
  • In Tony Hawk's Underground 2, play as The Jester that you unlock in New Orleans. Build up his special and activate "Focus Mode" (press L3). Now jump and do his special manual trick (the one where he juggles with coloured balls). Because in Focus Mode everything slows down and the music is mute, instead of his happy laugh, you get his Evil Laugh. It makes him a Monster Clown! Wise tropers can use this trick to scare young kids out of the room.
  • Digimon World for the Play Station has a creepy boss. Getting your prosperity too high will make you face a overpowered greymon. Note that it stalks you until you kill it and was following you home. It doesn't help that it wants your street sign and makes you train like crazy. Beat him but he can be Paranoia Fuel.
    • Want to know what's behind Monzaemon's zipper. It's disturbing squick that is found out through a cheat. There's a Numemon. Yes I repete a Numemon, the ugly slugish crap eater is inside the happy teddy bear. To get him in the same game, bring a Numemon to the teddy bear costume and it will evolve. Worse part, your character doesn't seem to notice something's not right.
  • I'm surprised no one has mentioned Zork: Nemesis yet. This Troper had played all the previous games in the Zork series, and was expecting a continuation of the familiar jovial tone. Zork: Nemesis is much darker, and while all levels have a somewhat sinister atmosphere, its most nightmare-inducing aspect is a level inside an abandoned asylum set in remote snow-covered mountains. The ambient soundtrack, featuring muffled screaming and clanging metal, is par for the course when there's the Bedlam House trope being played up. But to max out on Nightmare Fuel, there is also a batshit insane electroconvulsive therapy technician and a morgue, where you must find a naked corpse in a metal drawer (which, of course, ups the volume on the Psycho Strings), decapitate it, place the severed head onto a machine to reanimate it and make it say the combination to the lock a safe. So much unnecessary squick. Similarly, you must alsoretrieve an amputated arm and hand mounted in a display case to open an electrified keypad lock without risking yet another Zork-style death. I first played this when I was 16 years old; even now it's kinda nightmare inducing if played at night.
    • Completely agreed. The whole game is nightmare-inducing, and the total emptiness (but with screaming in the background) of almost every area doesn't help. At least the torture chamber is optional, though there's a whole sequence in that same zone where you have to run around with a highly radioactive item, and there's a very short time limit before you die horribly.
  • The Trauma Center series. Forget the various strains of GUILT/Stigma, forget the Squick inherent in half the operations (particularly to more squeamish tropers)— what's more terrifying than anything is the scene in Under the Knife 2 where Adel Tulba goes completely batshit Brainwashed And Ax Crazy right in front of you, before screaming in agony and collapsing.
    Adel: Dr. Stiiiiles... Do you know what else the "Healing" Touch is good for...? It's also good for... KILLING!
    • That reminds me of Summon Night Swordcraft Story's Tear Expy Ureksa which also Brainwashed And Crazy and shows the same look.
    • You can't honestly say that the image of the lifeless palette-swapped blood-splashed body of a particularly endearing Ill Boy wasn't burned into your brain for at least a little while after GUILT Returns. Plus this troper bawled once a little of the shock wore off.
    • I can top that. The WHOLE FREAKIN' GAME BY ITSELF gave me nightmares! Imagine being a 12-year-old strolling confidently into the room, putting in Trauma Center into the Wii...and upon her first operation, sees the damage FIRST-HAND. Then goes into the bones...and has. To. Pluck. Out. Little. Shrapnels. Of. Bone. The latter part's the worst: she doesn't know where the freaking heck the shrapnels go, and so has to watch the patient's vitals slowly wind down. Cue her screaming and ejecting the disc immediately. That girl? ME.
  • Super Puzzle Bobble / Super Bust-A-Move's American boxarts, SBAM1 for the PS2 and SBAM2 for the Sega Saturn replace Bub and other characters with Nightmare Fuel inducing images: a baby wearing sunglasses that show the gameplay screen while having a red bubble on his mouth, and a guy who has shoved matchsticks on his eyes to keep them open. Look if you dare.
  • The bad ending to Bubble Bobble (arcade, NES/Virtual Console). Listen to the music here... if you dare...
    • It's reused in Rainbow Islands. Now you have to free eleven random Cursed people from The Alcatraz.
  • X-COM has inspired a fair few nightmares in its time. The Chryssalids are known to reach High Octane levels as well as being Demonic Spiders, but this particular troper is more freaked out by the original Sectoids... mainly because they're who you first fight when you're new to the game and dealing with an unforgiving kind of tactical combat, though probably mostly because this troper finds all of The Greys to be Nightmare Fuel. (by contrast, by the time I finally met the Chryssalids, they went down so easy that I wondered what all the fuss was about)
    • When this troper was first playing X-COM I had the radio on in the background. The first time I ran into a Chryssalid was very early on, my first terror mission I had reached in time, and the song playing was the Wall of Voodoo cover of Ring of Fire. An awesome, but at the time scarey combination.
    • It gets even worse in the sequel with Tentaculats. Oh God, the Tentaculats. Think even creepier-looking Chryssalids with three-dimensional movement. Those things made this troper equip every soldier with a grenade / sonic pulsar primed for immediate detonation in hand lest they wander about as zombies.
    • And then there's the Deep Ones. Humans implanted with mind control devices and turned into living incubators for alien fetuses, while fully aware of what is being done to them, yet unable to control their own body. Made even worse by researching the Alien Implanter, whose description explicitly states that the subject remains conscious during surgery.
    • In third game, the chryssalids are now changed to brainsuckers who do exactly what its name says. It sucks the brain out of the agent and replace it with an alien organism. It doesn't spread anymore but some of the aliens have gun shooting brainsucker eggs. Take too long for a mission and you can find a colony of them. The hyperworms are quite disturbing too.
  • Bio-Hazard Battle is made of this trope. Creepiness is guaranteed given that the player ship and all of the enemies are organic, but there is a memorable boss who is a giant maggot poking out the neck of a giant decaying human/insectoid corpse.
    • It gets creepy enough when the first level is a ruined futuristic city overrun with monsters, but the final level starts out as an industrial-scientific area, possibly hinting at the origin of the... things you have to exterminate.
  • If you think Bio-Hazard Battle is creepy, try X-Multiply. It's an arcade game by the developers of R-Type where you control a microscopic fighter injected into a human infected by alien virus. The title screen itself...
  • Although not as bad as the movie, the Coraline game for the Nintendo Wii has its moments. Example? In one mini-game, Coraline must race after Wybie (who is running scared) through a dark forest with only fireflies for light. Afterwards, when she finally catches up wit him, she sees him curled up on the ground, hiding his face. Coraline asks if he's okay, to which Wybie replies with "I-I-I don't...know..." and lifts his face. We then see that he now has button-eyes, and then the Other Mother's arm stretches like rubber out of the well, grabs him, and pulls him, screaming, down the well. Thankfully, it's only a nightmare.
  • The Tetris clone Lockjaw has Rhythm 20G mode, a mode in which pieces drop instantly and lock to the beat of an eerie rendition of Korobeiniki (the Game Boy Tetris A-Type theme). The music gradually increases in tempo, and at about 3 minutes and 14 seconds (if you can survive for that long), the music is suddenly interrupted by a voice saying, "You're better than I am, you don't really need this music anyway," and then the music suddenly turns into a creepier, dying monotone. If you haven't died yet at this point from speeds reminiscent of Tetris TGM2's Death mode, you sure will now.
  • Return Fire is supposedly a military-themed vehicular combat game, where the player commandeers helicopter, tank, an APC, or a jeep. But if your vehicle destroyed, you'll be treated of an image of a SKULL. LAUGHING. AT. YOU. FULLSCREEN.
    • This troper was personally scared shitless by the submarine that attacks you when you fly out too far on the Helicopter. Doesn't help that not only is it indestructible, but it fires a homing missile that kills you instantly.
  • BEWARE, I LIVE. I HUNGER. RUN, COWARD!
    • RRRAAAAAAWRR!!!
    • I... am... SINISTAR!!!
  • Seven Minutes. If the whole "Only seven minutes left to live" thing doesn't freak you out, then the giant three eyed head taunting you (and turning into a skull at points), the seizuretastic lighting, and the layout of the game will.
  • Ecco The Dolphin. The game starts with everything normal and happy and peaceful in your little ocean world, but doing a high jump out of the water triggers a horrific transformation— the screen flashes red and then black, the music is replaced with unearthly alien screeching, and all your dolphin friends and everything else in the ocean except you is sucked up into the sky. This troper had to brace herself for this sequence every time she started a new game— it's worse because sometimes it takes a few jumps to trigger it, so you can never quite predict when it's coming.
    • There's more. The final boss, where you fight that thing responsible for sucking up all the sealife. A twenty-meter-high, disembodied alien head which you are required to gradually mutilate to pieces in order to win.
    • The whole gameplay could be considered Nightmare Fuel, with the tiny, minimalist background music and mile after mile of bleak, cold ocean which poor Ecco is required to quest through. The sense of crushing loneliness that starts to set in after a while is bad enough on its own... but then it gets broken in the worst possible way, by bouts of heart-busting terror as killer sharks or giant trilobites blitz onto the screen from nowhere and devour you in one bite. *shudder*
    • The Mega Drive music of Welcome to the Machine.
    • Music like Sea of Darkness doesn't help either. The crushing loneliness described above? The soundtrack nails it in nonstop, overwhelming, cold, bleak music. Do NOT listen to this track when you're alone in your house at night.
  • Some of the item placements in Katamari Damacy are just unsettling. It gets worse with every game. By the fourth game, there are giant whales carrying continents,a giant octopus attacking an oil tanker, and skeleton-men lighting stuff on fire. Yikes.
  • This troper personally finds glitchy games, as the result of the game being dirty, as his own personal Nightmare Fuel. And he does take good care of his carts.
  • Pilotwings 64: Normally a cheerful flight simulator with lots of options and bird names for all the pilots. Well, enter two levels in which you face a large creature made of stone, with red eyes, who attacks by hurling boulders. Freaked ThisTroper out every time.
    • That would be Mecha Hawk, and This Troper found his goofy scream when you score a hit on him to be Nightmare Retardant. On the other hand, he always found the music for the rocket belt stages strangely unsettling, as well as the fact that, like Myst, the whole friggin world (especially the Little States Island stage) is completely empty save for the sounds of the hustle and bustle of apaarently invisible city folk and a pair of apparently ghostly airplanes that circle the island.
  • Black White has a ghostly voice that says "deaaaaath" every time a villager dies. Creepy. But if you register your game with your name, and you happen to have a common name that's programmed into the game, the same creepy voice says your first name in the middle of the night.
    • The voice must have gotten the publisher/developer some complaints, because the first patch has the death voice's removal as a listed feature.
  • Tetris: The Grand Master's backgrounds are mostly biology-themed. Level 0-99 are what appear to be blood cells, which aren't too bad. Level 200-299 are what appear to be blood vessels or tentacles. From level 500 onwards though, the backgrounds start going downhill: 500-599 is a bunch of what appear to be neurons, 600-699 are spiked balls of doom, 800-899 is a brain, and 900-999 is a fetus. Some of these images are a little discomforting.
    • Tetris: The Grand Master 3's level 700-799 section has a close-up of the sun as its background. As if being 93 million miles 150 million kilometers from the sun wasn't bad enough (depending on what season and place), imagine being within roughly 10 million kilometers of it.
  • The Reaper in Kid Icarus freaked out this troper. To the uninformed, when Pit gets near the reaper, its eyes suddenly bug out and it starts running back and forth while an extended version of the game over theme plays as smaller reapers descend from the sky.
  • Although they didn't look very scary, the Vorticons from Commander Keen freaked this troper out years ago. In the original game, not only did they have ninja-like jumping skills (better than Keen's, even), they also took four shots to kill. Screwing up and having to start over was a big possibility when fighting one of these guys.
    • Oh, and the Arachnut, a crablike creature with two mouths and a ton of eyes that ran back and fourth trying to get a meal. You could stun him, but not kill him.
  • This Troper personally thought they were cool but most of his friends thought the Eight Phases of Morganna and the area you fight them in on the first four .hack games were pretty creepy. Understandable since the first of the eight more or less crucifies you as one of his attacks.
    • The fact that even Aura feared them didn't help either.
    • This troper found Skeith to be pretty frightening... the whole game built up to, and dramatized that battle, and the background music was full of dissonant percussion and wailing...
    • Tarvos freaked this troper out in both the first four .hack games and G.U. In the first four games, Tarvos is a stone figure coiled around a wooden stake that is driven through its head... It has to remove this stake (screaming while it does so) to unleash Data Drain. In G.U., the stake is driven through its chest, and it holds a crown of thorns above its head... Just... weird...
  • Billy Hatcher And The Giant Egg is rife with this, ladies and gentlemen. You fight an army of crows powered by darkness, and some of the bosses are quite creepy.
  • Command And Conquer Renegade had the Visceroid. Now, anyone who played the RTS version is probably going "How is that scary?" Simple. YOU CAN'T SEE MULTIPLE MOUTHS AND EYES FLOATING IN A MUTANT TIBERIUM BLOB! Of the same type, the Initiate and Acolyte enemies are also quite freaky to look at, when you realize the former lives in constant, never ending pain, the latter has an exposed brain and various bionic augmentations, and all are horribly experimented on.
  • Spore's cell stage is quite creepy once you see the other cells in the background at first. This troper thought that they were Border Patrol and will come up and eat you if you go to far. and if you find a huge cell, than God help you.
    • If you go online, you might found some guys with twisted ideas creates "twisted" creatures... not to mention the Creepy and Cute parts pack...
    • The Galactic Adventures mission "It Came From the Sky" is pretty disturbing. An alien spacecraft crashes outside a research base, and you walk around for a while interviewing all the personnell, where you discover that almost everybody is dead from an infection released by the ship. It gets worse. You travel to a graveyard inside the base, and hiding beside it is the alien and a little girl. You have to escort the little girl to safety, while you have to fight THE INFECTED, RE-ANIMATED BASE WORKERS. They have fungus and spines coming out of them at all angles, saying things like "Don't leave us here!"... why is this in an E10+ game?
  • Final Boss of Phantasy Star IV, that is all.
    • The zombies you find on Dezolis have perhaps the creepiest animation I have seen in any game. The fact that you first find them in an abondoned town, complete with ominous music playing in the background does not help matters.
    • Phantasy Star IV's Garuberk Tower, a living pillar of organs and flesh growing up out of the earth, which has two eyes randomly spaced within its breathing, pulsating walls that must be ambiguously interacted with to open new doors, which are actually fleshy membrane-valves covering tubelike orifices, and the whole thing is crawling with Eldritch Horrors because it's an extension of Dark Force's body and a literal Womb Level, constantly pregnant with foul beings forgotten by the good people of Algo!?
    • Or Seth's transformation. It's implied that he has no idea what's happening.
      • This has been posted all over TV Tropes. And it may not be true at all. I went back and checked that scene - Seth is very clearly played to be a bit sinister and/or secretive, uses dark magic skills, and screams in pain because he was hit with a semi-holy magical ray. It's viewer's interpretation as to whether he was simply manipulating you and didn't realize how vulnerable he was, or was actually ignorant.
  • Elebits is a funny, cute game from Konami where you have to catch cute miniature critters hidden everywhere in your house or your town. Then you get to the Amusement Park. Oh, nothing scary at all... Except that the park's mascot is none other than Robbie the Rabbit. Considering in what game we already met him, it can be quite... Disturbing to wander around those statues...
  • EarthwormJim. Almost all enemies. And the hero himself. That creepy snot parachute. And the falling puppies minigame. I can't believe someone could find those horrors funny.
    • Bonus points for a level completely in the dark called Who Turned Out The Lights? And at the end? Giant Eyeballs of Doom. Invincible, natch. Only way to win is to run away and take another exit.
  • Mega Man Star Force: Namely the second game. Towards the end, the bad guys raise Mu into the sky, and EM bodies have been sent out to terrorize everyone. The music that plays on the Overworld is the typical "danger" music played for every other scenario like this. Beat the game, return to Echo Ridge in preparation for the second quest, and... the people are still being terrorized by the EM bodies and Mu still floats ominously overhead, but the music is the cheery Echo Ridge tune now. On an unrelated note, those Grabbity viruses look familiar...
    • Even above that is the Bonus Dungeon. It's a parallel-world version of the various locations in the game, except there are no people. You're seeing what would have happened if the Big Bad succeeded.
  • You wouldn't expect an 8-bit game to have nightmare fuel in it. But This troper got a tad freaked out in Lode Runner. If you fall into one of the holes you make, it eventually fills up and you get BUILT INTO THE WALL!
    • Anyone who doubts the power of 8-bit nightmare fuel obviously never played Shadowgate. This troper was so traumatized by the game's horrifying death descriptions and (in retrospect, wonderfully) creepy music that I went from a pretty fearless kid to being terrified of the dark.
    • If mention can be made of Shadowgate, mention must also be made of Uninvited. Seriously, that game is made of nightmare fuel. You wake up after a car crash and find that your sister has vanished, with the only residence in sight a gigantic mansion that turns out to be haunted. To begin with, there's a lady dressed like Scarlett O'Hara who turns out to have a horrifying skull for a face. Which you will see, a lot, because killing her takes a lot of trial and error. It doesn't end there, though; you can also be killed by zombies (accompanied by a closeup of its decaying face with a lot of skull visible), the ghost of a servant who dissolves your flesh by turning himself into acid, and by rabid dogs (who bear a suspicious resemblance to bears) in front of a church, which didn't really help a lot of people who were afraid of being attacked by dogs in the first place. The music accompanying each of these deaths is also about as terrifying as you can get on the NES hardware.
  • Baten Kaitos and its prequel haven't been mentioned yet? Really? Well, I'll take care of it, then. Both games have beautifully rendered elaborate graphics... Which makes certain dungeons (Nekton, Ancient Library, Capella, and Zaurak, to name a few) absolutely terrifying, especially when coupled with their music. The track "Deterioration" gives this Troper the chills every time it pops up in her mp3 player's shuffle list... And then there are some of the monsters and bosses. Some of the monsters have quite creepy designs, but then there's the bosses... Some of which are humans mutated into extremely grotesque and monsterous things.
    • Also, from the original game, the island of Mira in general. And with "Castle in the Sand" as its overworld music... *shudder*
      • Duhr was quite creepy, too.
    • The ghost towns you visit in the "flashbacks" in the prequal were really creepy for This Troper. And then there's Wiseman. Oh sure, he's not scary to look at, but I found his voice, lines, and battle music are all terrifying. Oh, and not to mention he's responsible for said ghost towns, is something of The Heartless , and is one of the root causes for just about EVERYTHING and I do mean EVERYTHING bad that happens in both games. He's evil, and really, REALLY creepy.
  • Vambies, from Legend of Musashi. They are a mix of zombies and vampires, which basically mean they are zombies who can't survive at daylight, but if you ever went into the town while it was vambie infested at night, be prepared. Couple the creepyness with the fact this troper knew little to no english at the time, and as such wasn't even aware they would appear due to not understanding the villagers warnings.
  • The logo of Bone Daddy Entertainment scared this troper to no end as a kid. One game they made (if not the only game), called Rapid Fire, had the logo between the gun holsters, and occasionally it appeared on the screen during attract mode. From what I remember, it was a skull with eyes and a mohawk. Can't find it on Google for the life of me, though.
  • Seiken Densetsu 3 - a little-known, but fantastic SNES RPG. The ghost ship sequence. Narm at first, but the sound limitations on the screams make it about a thousand times worse. The "Ghoul" enemies, which you see for the first time here, appear to be attacking you by distending their ribs and scratching you with them. Then there's the "captain's log", which you open only to find "Die Die Die Die Die Die Die Die Die Die Die Die Die..." followed by a shriek. Ick.
  • In the german-made flight sim Dark Star One, every sector of space you fly in is actually very small, and no matter how long you fly towards a distant-looking planetoid, you can never reach it. However, there's one sector of space (where the final battle takes place) in which the far-distant asteriod belt can be flown to, mined, etc. For reasons I simply don't understand, this long-distance, uneventful trip from this asteriod belt to the space's exit point scares the crap out of me, to the point where I refuse to make that trip ever again.
  • In the flight sim Freelancer, the space for each of the system's sectors is portrayed with simple starfields and nebulae. However, one of the hidden / easter egg sectors has a vastly different design: the sector is essentially within a giant cylinder. I've had actual nightmares about this, because it's so different and alien than anything else in the game.
  • A little known educational game called "Jump Start Adventures: 4th grade" put the player on a first-person view of a Stock Halloween island...except two things were guaranteed to scare young players. For one, Repsack would appear out of NOWHERE and then say "Boo", and would give you a riddle that you had to answer or else you would lose health points. The second, Mrs. Grunkle was the witch villain who had turned your classmates into monsters and was deciding to screw with you and have a little fun before you joined them.
    • And if you played a game while not on a mission...Madame Pomretta's eyes appeared and said "COME TO POMRETTA'S TO ACCEPT YOUR CHALLENGE!"
  • I have absolutely no clue why, but Dracula actually scared me in the underrated FMV game Dracula Unleashed. It took a little while before I figured out you were supposed to enter holding the cross and all I could do was watch as Dracula would rip my dude's heart out and then throw it on the floor, taking the Damsel In Distress as his undead bride. Or what about a few of those random deaths? Some involve a wolf running up to the player character as the screen fades black, another is when a man yells "I'm Sane I tell you! SANE! SAAAAAANE!" and then the screen goes black. Or when the maniac strangled Hellsing?
    • If you wait too long to fight Dracula, you can go find your friends murdered.
  • Four words: Lemming. Tomato. Ketchup. Facility. Featuring lemmings being systematically squished into blood. That evidently becomes ketchup. And unless you solve the puzzle you can't stop it. *shudder*
    • One of the types of Level Goal looks like the head of an enormous horned demon shooting flames from its nostrils and eye sockets. You have to guide the lemmings into its mouth.
    • The "Menacing!" level. Composed of blood, guts, and bones. The music is quite menacing, too.
  • The SNES game Porky Pig's Haunted Holiday is pretty scary thank to the combination of his graphic and atrocious primitive voice over to his cartonny's horror theme. Like we said in Quebec: we don't want to know it, we want to see it if you want to see it off course, muahaha
    • And while in the subject of looney tunes's game on the super nintendo, Speedy Gonzales Los Gatos Bandidos's game over screen is quite......unforgiving....saying the least.yet again a video worth a thousand word and yet see why i never played this game more than three time shall we **evil grin**.
  • The Snow Bros. 2 character select screen.◊
  • Descent bosses, their engine hums and ability to teleport.
    • The second boss of Descent II (scary ticking sound), and the final boss of I(big freaky Cyber Cyclops).
  • The fifth boss in Rocket Knight Adventures; a Humongous Mecha piloted by the Evil Counterpart... You are on foot. All you can do is run like hell, hearing its footsteps close behind (if you see it after the opening, you're probably already dead) and having its movements shake the whole screen, if it touches you, you die. The first time This troper played this level he was young and it utterly terrified him (even knowing from a walkthrough that you get to turn the tables later), to the point where he simply couldn't play the game anymore after various attempts and sold it off despite it being So Cool Its Awesome. He regretted it and got it back a few years later and got revenge, So Yeah... But even now hearing the mecha close behind as you frantically flee is sort of creepy.
  • This Troper found the Puppet Master as he appears in Castlevania:Dawn of Sorrow, to be rather disturbing. You attack a giant, deformed, puppet head, with hideous yellow eyes and a twisted mouth full of sharp teeth. It's attack consists of using one of its four spindly arms to move a life sized voodoo doll of the main character and place it into the corresponding bloodstained Iron Maiden, where it switches places with your character, dealing massive damage.
  • In Dance ManiaX 2nd Mix, if your Life Meter runs low, the background will flash a picture of a skeleton reaching his arms at you with the word "DANGER" at the top and bottom of the screen. Talk about incentive to not fail...
  • In the original Spyro the Dragon, Beastmasters and Dream Casters were Nightmare Fuel... no... WORLDS of Nightmare Fuel! The worst offenders are Dark Passage, which gave me Nyctophobia, that one marsh where the little plants EAT YOU, and then there is Jacques, with monsters that all look like things half way between Starfish Alien and Eldritch Abomination. What gets special mention is Metalhead. You are trapped in a room alone with a boss who is absolutely delighted to rip you apart by throwing enemies at you. He puts disregard for allied life at whole new low levels.
  • TMNT: Smash Up already seems to have this even though the game hasn't come out! You do know a Foot Soldier is in the game, right? Can't possibly be scary, right? Wrong. Look here, just look at those inhuman looking eyes, the body looks somewhat strange too, and the head looks creepy because there are usually things that represent it, like a realistic looking chin, but this thing just doesn't have one, it looks more like a Shadow Creature than a Foot Ninja! Strangely though, I found myself making the art my desktop background, I guess the Utrominator is slightly scarier...
    • ...Which I will now elaborate upon. Basically, an Utrom usually wears armor to blend in with Humanity, this is what happens when you let an Utrom suddenly become very trigger happy and badass, the suit looks just plain creepy, but it's mainly just the head, and, in the trailers, the Utrom pops out and screams... And it's an ATTACK! Though he is obviously in control, it makes it seem like the machine is trying to hurt the Utrom and the opponent.
      • Something I just found out, the Utrominator is based on a scrapped design for the 2003 series, right here, what's so scary? I read the page, and it says "an enhaced and enslaved Exo suit with an zombie Oot, a version from an alternate era where the Shredder reigns supreme." That makes it slightly more unsettling, because, even though it's not a zombie you're playing as, it's still very, very creepy, imagine playing as it in this form.
    • This troper would like to take the opportunity to say that whoever the original poster was is soft. Seriously, it's frickin' awesome! The anatomy is perfectly fine, if a little skinny in places. And its face reminds me of Voldemort. 'Sides, it's about time the Foot Ninja Took A Level In Badass.
  • One of the kids this troper's sister babysits will probably be traumatized by one of the game overs in Nancy Drew: Secret of Shadow Ranch. Near the end of the game, the player is placed inside a maze and the criminal of the game shows up, and the object is to trap him. Unfortunately she didn't escape from him in time, so he walked up and said "heeeeeeeeeeeeeere's SHORTY!" in a fashion similar to "Heeeeeeeeeeere's JOHNNY!" and then the player got a game over screen.
  • Capcom's Darkstalkers series is a somewhat humorous take on fighting games, though there are some instances that are unsettling and creepy. One particular instance that is burned into this troper's mind is the last stage in Jedah's story, called "Fetus of God," which has the two fighters fighting alongside a giant fetus floating in its background. What's worse is that, when you win, Jedah's ending involves his monologue while showing pictures of the waking fetus. Apparently, it's been vampirized as well, as the fetus opens its glaring red eyes and bares fangs.
  • Groove On Fight's resident Mad Scientist M.A.D. has his own personal stage, a drab laboratory with a giant breathing baby-like head hooked up to wires right in the center. It periodically makes a horrifying face and screams.
  • The cutscenes in the CDi Zelda games are horrifying. Everyone is sadistic,and they look disturbed. It's horrifying.
    • Of course, they walk the line between this and massive Narm.
  • Is This Troper the only one who found Mr. Resetti from Animal Crossing remotely creepy? I mean, he jumps out at you with a pickaxe, and he screams at you for resetting. Especially in the first game, where if you reset enough times he gives you an extreme close-up of his face. He even threatens to tunnel through your house.
    • Speaking of Animal Crossing, the music that plays when you delete your town can really send shivers up your spine.
    • Not to mention that the animal that is with you during the main menu pretty much BEGS you not to delete your town. Justified as it will ERASE him/her and everything else from existince.
  • Fighting Typhon towards the end of Rygar the Legendary Adventure: A multi-headed hydra... Did I mention they are fire-breathing baby heads. Wailing at the top of their/its/whatever's lungs. For the entire fight. Gah.
  • In Lunar Silver Star Story, there's a cutscene where Lunar cries out "Alex!" a few times, then the screen fades to red, and her cries become distorted. The scary distorted cries then echo, as the screen goes completely red.
  • King Drool, the Big Bad of the Bonk series. In all three Final Boss fights, he takes up about half the screen, amazing for the hardware of the time. I bet this guy gave a lot of young Turbo Graf X players nightmares.
  • One of the night stages in Plants Vs Zombies takes place during a thunderstorm. The screen is pitch black, illuminated only by the occasional flash of lightning, which manages to give the normally goofy game a very creepy atmosphere.
    • Some of the enemies are quite creepy as well, like the Jack-in-the-Box zombies, who look like zombified insane asylum escapees (complete with manic grin and straitjacket) carrying jack-in-the-boxes. Which are rigged to explode. There's something just not right about zombie suicide bombers, especially the zombie's shocked expression right before he gets killed by his own explosion. And then there's the gigantic Gargantuar zombies. If you don't shit bricks when you see this guy coming, you will when it stomps your plants flat in a single blow.
    • And then there's the Game Over sequence, which comes into play if a zombie gets past your defenses: the zombie walks into your house while a creepy musical sting plays, and there's a Big No punctuated by a horrid "crunch" while the words "The Zombies Ate Your Brain!" appear on the screen in a creepy "horror" font. It manages to be funny and disturbing at the same time.
  • The turn-limit death in some certain roguelikes. The one that really frightened me was Mr. Doom (the Grim Reaper thing) from Chocobo Dungeon 2, I recall freezing and reaching for the reset button as the warning message popped up. The sinister piano music didn't help, either. Much later, no longer a kid, I still get chills when "Something's stirring..." in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games, since it functionally imitates what Mr. Doom did back then.
    • Turn limit death? How about a bell ringing making people forget almost everything about themselves and their lives? Cid's reaction to having his memories wiped and the creepy people in town who are happy to not remember are both unnerving. especially the people.
  • The original Dune game by Cryo. Upon dying you're treated to am animation of Paul Atreides decaying in the desert, his face staring back at you. Reloading your game shows this animation in reverse.
  • Missile Command has the infamous Game Over THE END screen. The developers suffered nightmares about the game.
  • Star Control 2 - anything involving the Dynarri. What they did to the Ur-Quan. How the Ur-Quan were able to resist them. What the Ur-Quan did to them, and what would happen if it was ever undone.
    JOKE. YES. HERE. IS. A. JOKE.
    WHEN. IS. A. SLAVE. NOT. A. SLAVE. WHEN. IT. IS. A. SLAVE. MASTER.
    HA. HA. HA.
  • Don't forget the Abominable Snow Monster from Ski Free...this Troper never, ever will.
  • Then there's Miss World '96 Nude, in which, while solving puzzles to uncover the pictures underneath, the image will at completely random moments switch to some sort of zombie demon...thing...accompanied by a little girl's head shouting "TURNING!" before transforming into a vampire of some sort. Or So I Heard.
  • Lunar, Eternal Blue. Zophar did sort of intimidate me, but there was this one part right before you fight him that haunted this troper's dreams for a little while...
    Lucia: AAAAH! HIRO! Run away! RUN AWAY!!!!
  • Tyler Glaiel's game, Closure. Beat the game, start again, realise the storyline, and then proceed to be terrified of a) the dark and b) thinking about Closure. This actually was Nightmare Fuel for this troper. I dreamed I was in a very dark place, with only a dim torch, and I had to proceed down floors. If my conscious mind was working at the time I would have literally shat myself.
  • The implacable mummy in Scarab Of Ra. Somehow, this first-person game being (a) turn-based, (b) black and white, and (c) largely silent only made his appearance as you rounded a corner all the more jolting.
  • King's Quest VII. The ooga booga man will come out of NOWHERE.
  • If you're a young kid playing Goosebumps: Escape From Horrorland, don't ever enter the trash cans. Holy. Crap. You're placed in a Doom-like labyrinth crawling with crab-slug hybrids that will kill you with one touch. You have no defense against them: the best you can do is lure them into hallways and trap them behind gates... if you're lucky. These things will pursue you too, and you'll often find yourself caught in a dead end as one approaches you gnashing its two pairs of jaws. To top it all off, the music that plays in these sections is genuinely disturbing, punctuated by the cries of the beasts. Considering the rest of the game is a dark comedy, the Mood Whiplash of these labyrinths serves to increase the Nightmare Fuel.
  • The final stage of the original Contra is an entire level that looks like it's ripped straight out of the human digestive system. What makes it even worse is that in the Japanese version, the stage pulsates.
  • In the Human campaign of Warcraft III there is a quest where you have to save a little kid named Timmy who has the creepiest looking face ever. This was the unintentional result of low polygon models but I was suspicious of that boy being a demonspawn waiting to betray me throughout the entire campaign.
  • The Pac Man ghosts from Wolfenstein 3 D. As cartoony as they are, they're huge, unkillable horrors, that never stop moving to you. You don't want to open a door and be instantly crunched by one. It happens in downloaded maps.
  • Spider Man: Web of Shadows is based on an invasion of Venom Symbiotes in New York, so it's almost natural that sooner or later some other heroes and villains will be infected by them. See what happens to Black Cat◊ and Wolverine◊. For an added dose of Squick, infected Electro and Vulture spawn "electrolings" and "vulturelings".
  • Children's adventure game Gahan Wilson's The Ultimate Haunted House, despite its cartoony style, has quite a bit of this. One element of the game is 'curses', which make the game temporarily act strange in several ways, including replacing all the audio with screams. The way these curses are cast are even scarier than the curses themselves, as they can be not only be cast by some rather freaky looking monsters, but also by the 'good' characters if you displease them. When they curse you, they grow fangs and claws, their eyes bulge and they yell things like ' Now I've got you! Ha ha ha ha!' Even an otherwise normal child character (who has been trapped in the house against his will) is capable of performing this act. Also, if you lose, your character is forced to remain in the haunted house forever.
  • Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box: Finding out the secret of the Elysian Box. It's not that it kills whoever is foolish enough to open it, the box is filled with a hallucinogenic gas, causing whoever opened the box and breathed in the gas to "see whatever it is they expected to see" - which is to say, die. However, the gas doesn't go so far as to kill, just send the opener into a deep coma that APPEARS to be death. Which isn't so bad: until you realise that every other person who's previously opened the box must have been presumed dead and then buried alive. Or perhaps even cremated alive.
  • World Of Warcraft has numerous enemies that look like they were rejected from Nausicaa...because they were too scary. It's just a Mind Fuck.
    • The murlocs: Land-walking, carnivorous fish, who act rather like a hive, or a nest of ants... they can apparently see everywhere at once, thanks to their eyes being on opposite sides of their heads... and the gods damned guttural "Argle-argle-argle!" as they run full tilt at you, and are apparently fond of making camp near towns, just to be close to their food. *shudder*
  • RayStorm's Stage 6 and 7 bosses have, for their theme music, this song.
  • The old Play Station game known as Future Cop LAPD had a single-player version of it's versus mode, in which you were pitted against a robotic aircraft called the "Sky Captain" which looked kind of like Jetstorm from Beast Machines. It wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for his dark ominous voice echoing over the level every now and then, saying things like,"Wheeeere aaaaare yoooou?" "...Come out, come out, where-ever you are..." and "Your tiiiime is running oouuut...."
  • The Social Bunny in The Sims 2. Holy good god. It's not bad enough that it drops suddenly from the sky out of nowhere. No, it also has to be Sim-sized, have its bunny suit stained with lord only knows what, and be missing a goddamn eye. Worse yet? It won't go away until you spend some time interacting with it, nicely, in order to improve your Sim's social meter. When it finally leaves, it leaps into the air once more and vanishes, presumably back to the depths of Hell. Beating it up is mildly satisfying, but what I really wanted to do was Kill It With Fire.
  • Let's talk for a moment about an old Sierra adventure game, The Adventures of Willy Beamish. A game starring a nine year old kid starts out as a fairly acceptable mock of both Dennis the Menace and Bart Simpson. Your biggest threat is a Karma Meter that will send you to Military School if you're too much of a rebellious jerk. Fair enough. But then the Nightmare Fuel starts:
    • Most kids will give up and leave the room after the first taste, involving a babysitter who is actually a giant green bat. Lose (and you probably will at least once, as it's also a Guide Dang It moment), and you get a sudden view of the bat coming toward the screen with a Scare Chord, followed by the bat carrying poor Willy down the street to who knows where.
      • Even if you win that confrontation, future scenarios involve Soylent Green and, according to That Other Wiki, another scenario's loss results in your arms broken. G'night, kids!
  • Castlevania: SOTN has this one area with the green caverns. Its that creepy ass music that plays while you trek through a cavern like area that gets this troper.
    • Or perhaps that woman in the confession booth in the chapel area who attacks you with weapons for some reason.
  • Mega Man X 4 during the first two parts of the Sigma battle. The Background used.......is pretty scary looking. Doesn't help that the music is equally disturbing.
  • No mention of Myst yet? Particularly the alter on Channelwood, and of course, Achenar's bedroom cache on Mechanical...
  • (FOOTSTEPS APPROACHING)
  • The Virgin logo that appeared in games like Toonstruck and Resident Evil 1, in the form of a giant eye. Always gave this troper a fucking heart attack.

  • Super Bomberman 5 has a set of levels where your enemies are a bunch of wind-up dolls and clocks. It's all a lot of gaudy pink and gold and has a seemingly cheerful soundtrack, which then sort of becomes perverse as you're chased around by twirling wind-up dolls who are hell-bent on running you down, and then blowing up the music box they keep spawning out of. Worse yet, the music comes to a sort of clunky, slow halt as it winds down (much like a real music box), then prompting a scratching winding sound in it to keep it going. It makes sense, but it is fantastically unnerving as you blow up the generator and watch the doll on top of it grind to a twitchy halt.
  • F-Zero X, the electronical voice that counts down on the start of every race. And the screams of the drivers when they fall down.
  • Super Street Fighter II. Zangief's "defeated" portrait; specifically the uncensored, "bloody" version.◊ It looks less like he's been beaten in a fight and more like he's just gone insane with rage and chewed someone to death. Not only that, but at first glance, he appears to be MISSING AN EYE.
  • In Tokyo Xtreme Racer 3 / Shutokou Battle 01, challenging a certain opponent in the rain would turn the rain into blood.
  • The bad ending of Thunder Force V, which you get if you take too long to defeat the final boss. The Guardian implores Cenes to selfdestruct her ship, or else it will cause the same destruction and chaos that Vasteel caused. But she can't, because her ship is running out of power, so not only will history repeat itself, but she is trapped in her ship, doomed to eventually die of oxygen loss.
  • Practically every skull-headed enemy in Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure makes an eerie moan for a battle cry, some quite frequently. It was completely unexpected when it first appeared, and at least mildly disturbed this troper a bit upon first hearing it.
  • Spectre VR in general had a much Darker And Edgier atmosphere than its predecessors, and weird, spooky, Cyber Punk type background music. It quite creeped this troper out at age 12. Not to mention the Slicers from most of the games in the series, which made a creepy sonar ping sound that got louder and faster as they approached.
  • Spelunky's music change-down when you're running out of time on the level. The ghost itself is laughable; the panic to finish up before it comes to one-hit kill you, less so.
    • Don't forget the giant piranha, or "Jaws". Jaws is a boss that you'll find in rushing water levels. I certainly wish I had read about what rushing water levels are, because I simply thought that there would be treasure at the bottom of the water, which I was already scared of going into, due to the large amount of piranha. Turns out to get the treasure, you must first defeat a giant freaking fish that appears out of nowhere. I was so scared upon first seeing it that I jumped and raced to the exit even though there was still some stuff I wanted to get. Oh, and if you do decide to fight the thing, it will slowly decay as it takes damage, revealing blood and bones, while it's still alive.
  • Bookworm Adventures 2 has a stage called Temple Haunt. The third enemy of the stage is called the "Strangling Ghost." She's a StringyHairedGhostGirl, an UndeadChild, her face is never visable, she appears to be covered in bloodstains, and she carries a very eerie teddy bear. Her attacks include strangling you (which somehow inflicts the bleed status on you) and materializing an image of her teddy in front of you. Finally, she repeatedly comments through the battle about her hatred of light, her desire for eternal night, and the fact that she doesn't mean you harm, it's just that "Teddy wants hugging." Need I say more?
  • Lego Island 2 has Ogel Island, which, thanks to the eerie music and the Body Horror of the locals, ensured that this troper had a hard time sleeping. Closely related is the racecar course of the first Lego Island game, which doubles as a Big Lipped Alligator Moment and a Lego Acid Sequence thanks to the bizarreness of the track in contrast to the more normal looking rest of the game. (Giant pizza-throwing octopi, anybody?)
  • Battle Garegga's Stage 7 music, "Marginal Consciousness", is the only music in the game that doesn't necessarily loop; it just keeps going higher in pitch. And higher. And higher. It starts to get creepy after several increases. This troper used a utility for listening to music tracks from arcade ROMs; even after about 5-7 minutes, it never resets in pitch.
    • In the actual game, you only hear it increase two or three whole tones, as the stage only lasts about 2-3 minutes before cutting to the boss battle. In the saturn version, which uses CD music, it fades out after about 2:15.

  • The demons in Exit Fate, especially the Hand of Fate. It's bad enough that a possessed person goes from normal to an Ax Crazy Person Of Mass Destruction that takes thousands of people just to inconvenience, but when one of the most powerful ones is possessing The Messiah? And acting as a Superpowered Evil Side? And controlling his actions with Laser Guided Amnesia? You gots yourself some prime-quality Nightmare Fuel right there.
  • Beatles Rock Band - the background animations during "I Am the Walrus" sent chills up this troper's spine. When all four of the Beatles are wearing sea mammal masks, and the creepy laughing plays, he usually ends up missing a few notes.
  • The old isometric 3D Pac Man clone 3-Demon. Uh oh, ghost is near on radar, CHOMP!, giant jaws fill the screen.
  • Impossible Mission II. In particular, the horrifying scream when you fall down a Bottomless Pit, and when time runs out, the protagonist suddenly keels over and disintegrates, as if being vaporized by a nuclear bomb. This was during the Cold War, you know.
  • Hostile Waters gives us the Disassembler, nanomachines reprogramed to rip a target apart from the atomic level. Your normal Grey Goo scenario just makes more nanomachines. This one leaves behind a blood-red puddle of goo and a quite literally melted landscape. Just watch.
  • The death screen in The Lion King for Genesis and SNES.
  • Weird Dreams is chock full of this.
  • In Jak & Daxter, the giant fish that eats you if you stay in the deep water for too long, combined with the scary heart beat sounds that go faster and faster the closer it gets to you.
  • In ((Super Mario 64)), Big Boo would say "Ghosts...don't...die! Can you get out of here ALIVE?". Thank you for haunting-a my dreams.
  • Zombies Ate My Neighbors has very stylized graphics that looks like it's straight out of a comic book, so it wouldn't scare most kids. However, the final battle with Dr. Tongue in his second form is quite chilling. After you beat his first form, a giant spider, he drinks another potion and turns into a giant floating head. This is not scary until you start damaging him. As his health drains away, his face and skin begin to melt, showing his insides. Instead of blood and a brain, Dr. Tongue's head looks like a cross between a demon and a robot as the insides glow and his eyes give a chilling look. Brrr...
  • Imagine, if you will, a fierce Korean woman knocking you to the ground, slamming her big Pointy Stick into your groin for all she was worth, while going "bye bye" like she knew exactly what she was doing.
    • More examples from Soul Calibur:
    • The appropriately named Nightmare, especially in the third and fourth games. The guy's a living suit of armor controlled by a living sword with gaping mouths and fleshy bits everywhere. Not to mention Soul Edge itself, which has a healthy proportion of writhing fleshy parts in its own right, including a huge eye.
    • Astaroth, whose heart is on the outside of his body. In addition, his biographies state that a being/spirit named Ker is found "within" him - this has been subject to several interpretations, some of which have been more nightmarish than others.
    • Nightmare's servant Tira, who has two completely different personalities that talk to each other. Although this convention isn't too uncommon, in the Japanese version of the game the personalities sound like two completely different people. Even worse is if you play the game with English voices; her English Jolly Side voice sounds very strained and unnatural and can be either interpreted as annoying or creepy, the latter being aided by her having several Uncanny Valley-ish in-game facial animations.
  • We can't forget about Resistance Fall Of Man. You know, with the Chimera and all that?
  • A while ago, me and my brother used to play the N64 game Star Wars: Shadows Of The Empire. There was a level called Ord Mantell Junkyard. At the end of this level, you must fight IG-88 (the assassin droid), and DANG, is he creepy. He seems to come out of nowhere and shoot you to to death, and his creepy voice doesn't help.
  • The Mimics of Dark Cloud. This troper shrieked and shot half a foot in the air the first time an innocent treasure box jumped up to bite her, and nearly dropped the controller in her haste to run halfway through the dungeon before stopping to look back. As a very newbie gamer, to say she was unprepared for Chest Monsters is an understatement. And to make it worse, the whole thing was repeated when she encountered a King Mimic, which is about five times bigger and in the first dungeon can eat you in one chomp! Eight years later, she still gets nervous when approaching any chests in that game.
  • After destroying the Central Reactor in the NES game Air Fortress, the lights go out, eerie music begins to play, and the screen starts to shake violently. If you don't get out quickly, the fortress explodes. Very atmosphric for an NES game.
  • Magical Starsign is a rather fun, innocent game, until about a 3/4rds of the way in. Within two sequences, the following happen: A side character swiftly sacrifices herself for your cause, becoming a Cosmic Keystone for you. Talking to villagers from the town she's from reveals she was suicidally depressed for various reasons. One of your teammates says she would have made the sacrifice if she didn't. You find out every robot INCLUDING your Robot Buddy is powered by battery cores that use human as the main ingredient. You find what's LEFT of said Human Resources, including one that's STILL ALIVE and begging for death. The only one of these that is handled reletively realistically is your friend being suicidal herself.
  • Croc was, although a generally lighthearted game, had a few... unnerving examples.
    • In the original, there were Dungeon Wormds/Dragons. They popped out of wells and looked like the worms from Rayman. They lunge at you and try to eat your head off. Do not underestimate their range. In the first major boss fight, there is a hidden land where there are TEN of the monsters lined up. You need to jump on their jelly-like underbellies to get hearts.
      • Less glaring examples include the FIRST enemy in the game, the giant bee, the rats that scurry in dungeons, the ghost you must chase in each desert bonus zone (oOOOoooOOOOOoooooh!!!!) and Baron Dante himself. Not to mention when his giant crystilain corpse rises up in the very last level.
    • Croc 2 has more realistic giant bees, a boss that EATS your friends and will re-eat them if you don't rescue them in time, an Uncanny Valley fish that is enormous, Roger Red Ant's death scene, Croc's falling scream (even worse in this game than in the last) and the first fight against Baron Dante, in which he is disproportionately huge and even more Uncanny Valley than normal. Plus some of the evil laughs in the game. Heck, this game has a lot of them.
  • Theme Hospital has the auto-autopsy machine. To research new diseases, patients go inside the machine but never get out...
  • Not a game per se, but this troper would like to make mention of the Game Boy Camera. It's fun to play with, but those error message pictures are... unnerving, let's say. The music that plays when they pop up doesn't help matters, either. See for yourself.
  • Mass Effect has several creepy moments. For instance, there's more than one instance of research teams that have been driven mad by possible Reaper indoctrination, which causes them to commit suicide by putting themselves on Dragon's teeth (a great big spike that replaces all of your organs with circuitry). There's also the Reaper fleet itself. Picture it. A massive fleet of hundreds or even thousands of enormous ships. Sitting beyond the edge of the galaxy. Waiting. Waiting.

TV TropesNightmare FuelThe Legend Of Zelda
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