History NightmareFuel / Fallout3

** But the most nightmarish of all is that the rule to keep Vault 101 sealed is part of the overarching self-sabotaging vault experiments, intentionally created to make them fail just to study said failure. The overseers actions to keep the vault sealed result in the death of too many adults and even youths and children either directly or indirectly. By the time you come back, the now rampant radroach infestation is left unchecked due to everyone focusing on the civil war, the vault is far past the point of self-sustained genetic viability for future generations if sealed and the now violently aggressive guards are planning to massacre anyone not on their side, which would leave them with only their own families and a few spare residents. With no one else left to turn their aggression on or produce offspring with, this has nightmarish implications for the future of the vault if it went down this path unchecked. However, given the nature of every vault, this was exactly the sort of outcome which was always intended. Vault 101 isn't an exception to the run down, horrifying and super-creep filled state of its sister vaults, we're just witnessing it on the precipice of becoming so and joining the legacy of the vaults.

** To put it in more detail, the Overseer is terrifying, one man decides to leave, and does. Causing the Overseer to throw a massive tantrum, kill a suspected accomplice, and alert the entire vault to turn against and murder the escapee's son or daughter, who literally had no knowledge of the escape. Even further he approves of torturing his own daughter to force out information that doesn't exist. Plus, the suspected accomplice is the only trained doctor LEFT in the facility. Because yeah.

** On a meta level, some players who've done "kill everything" runs in ''Fallout'' games may have a revelation: With your ability to save the game, and your freedom to kill almost anyone in the game you want and bring them back to life without anyone remembering by loading earlier saves, Braun's behavior really isn't so different from yours in the end...
*** Not exactly. It's outright stated by Dr. Braun himself that he can't be entertained from torturing AIs; he only has fun torturing actual living, breathing human beings. The people in video games you kill for fun would only be Artificial Intelligence, at best, not actual humans.

** not exactly. It's outright stated by Dr. Braun himself that he can't be entertained from torturing AIs; he only has fun torturing actual living, breathing human beings.

** They also don't...''move'' [[UncannyValley quite right]]. Their legs don't bend the right way at the knees, ''at all''.

** The closest thing to a Good Ending for this mission? A failsafe option that involves a ''squad of Chinese commandos'' rushing in and massacring everyone! Why is this even an option at all? Because this particular program is actually an addition from the ''Operation Anchorage'' virtual reality program, given to Braun by General Chase himself! This is the reason for why the people trapped in the simulation will die for real instead of just resetting as normal. That's right, the best thing you can do for Brauns victims is a MercyKill, by invoking the same exact fear they'd been dreading before going into the Vault!

** Vault 108 [[FromBadToWorse isn't anything better]]. Once you arrive the living quarters, you'll find a group of [[AlwaysChaoticEvil hostile]] [[CloningBlues clones]] known as "[[https://imgix.ranker.com/user_node_img/50048/1000955221/original/vault-108-gary-s-vault-photo-u1?w=650&q=50&fm=jpg&fit=crop&crop=faces Gary]]" ([[PokemonSpeak as they speak their name upon alert]]), which will attack anything on sight that isn't one of them. And not to mention that they're compared to Vault 106 dwellers, except ''even more freakier''!

--> '''Gary 23:''' "Gary?"\\

--> '''Jack:''' It's always "oh, how can you do this", or "you're such terrible people", or "please, not me, I have a kid in Rivet City". Well, [[LackOfEmpathy I have kids too!]]

--> [[ThatWasTheLastEntry "aw;'jf OrDe R p[fal al Hlep HeLp dme vMe, LosS mInd CANdofw stopthem gEt OUT m[pofmy HED"]]

-->SCRIBBLEDY BIBBLDEY HOODELLY HOO. WING WANG BRICKA BANG CHOO CHOO CHOO. UPSIDEUP POPSICLE TASTES LIKE BLUE. GHOSTS IN THE HALL GO BOO BOO BOO!

--> '''Gary clone:''' "[[EvilLaughter Hahaha]], Gaarryyyy!"

** Who's to say they'll only stop at the Capital Wasteland? Imagine if the modified FEV was taken to its logical extreme and wiped out anything that's mutated. Due to the Great War releasing the FEV in the atmosphere, virtually all life on Earth, right down to bacteria, would have been exposed to it. Think about [[GaiasLament how far this could go]] if the Enclave released their modified virus across the entire world. The Great War would be ''nothing'' compared to ''that''.

--> '''Daniel 7:7-8:''' "After that, in my vision at night I looked, and there before me was a fourth beast—terrifying and frightening and very powerful. It had large iron teeth; it crushed and devoured its victims and trampled underfoot whatever was left. It was different from all the former beasts, and it had ten horns. While I was thinking about the horns, there before me was another horn, a little one, which came up among them; and three of the first horns were uprooted before it. This horn had eyes like the eyes of a human being and a mouth that spoke boastfully".

** By this point in the game you've already seen every kind of Ghoul in every possible situation, yet this area will creep the hell out of you. I kept expecting them to get back up.
*** [[NothingIsScarier With mods they probably can]]

** Let's talk about the building itself. It stands alone in a small canyon, with no other ruins around it... almost as if it wants to be found and draw the idly curious in. The interior is very dimly lit, making it hard to see Ghouls that are a few feet in front of you. Due to decay, the building is near labyrinthine in structure, with staircases, floors and ceilings collapsed. It also gives a feel as if the space itself isn't right. You have to go up in order to reach [[spoiler:the pillar where you destroy the Krivbeknih and]] the exit.

---> [[spoiler: //liquid dripping// Ug-Qualtoth //unintelligible// Ug-Qualtoth. I came, I came. Back this time, deep-temple //unintelligible// screaming, twisting, //unintelligible// //impact sound// No light, no flesh //unintelligible// deep temple born deep temple died. Ug-Qualtoth again, //unintelligible// returned returned //unintelligible// retribution. NOTICE TO USER: [[ThatWasTheLastEntry Internal memory capacity reached.]] [=PagSoft=] LLC recommends [=PagMem=] LLC for all your data storage needs. Please contact your administrator for details.]]

* In Meresti Station, where the [[spoiler: vampires]] are, there can be a glitch where the head used in baby carriage traps falls from the ceiling or bounces around after the carriage trap is set off.
* In [[LotusEaterMachine Tranquility Lane]], activating certain items in an abandoned house reveals a computer console where a wall used to be. This is a lot creepier than it sounds. The items make an eerie tone when clicked, and a buzz when the order is wrong. Then it feels like [[spoiler: creepy Betty Braun]] will appear at any minute to stop you.

** You step into that clean, sterilized world, and look down at those pods, and all you know is something terribly wrong is going on here - and you're going to have to submit to whatever it is [[spoiler:if you want to get your father back]]. And then you actually get into a pod, the screen comes down, and a face flashes across it - just for a moment - before the needles sink into your head. That's the beginning. That's before you try looking at your [=Pipboy=], and realize just how helpless you are.
*** Just in case you were doubting how powerless you actually are, you might start to [[spoiler: think that Betty is a little bit evil, and you might think to try to [[TalkToTheFist punish her.]] If you do, she casually tells you that won't work, and that you have to pay for trying...then ''instantly kills you.'']] She does this even if you [[spoiler: activate the failsafe, likely due to an oversight.]] Regardless of whether you think [[spoiler: her ultimate fate is appropriate, you have NO say in the matter; try to do anything to her, and she casually obliterates you.]]

** Also in Tranquility Lane; [[spoiler:"Go make Timmy Neusbaum cry." Sure! "Go break up a marriage." Okay. "Go kill that lady in a funny way." ... Alright... "[[AxeCrazy I want you to take this knife and brutally murder everyone in this peaceful suburb in first person as they run screaming from you.]]" You will end up killing some of them as they hide crying behind their beds.]] It's just messed up! And somehow, the whole thing being in TV Land black and white just makes it worse.

*** [[FromBadToWorse It gets even better!]] If you're astute, you'll notice that when you [[spoiler: kill everyone, Timmy is missing.]] Wonder what [[spoiler: happened to him?]] Check the front of the Neusbaum house; there's a garden gnome there that wasn't before. When you look at it, [[spoiler: [[AndIMustScream its name is Timmy.]]]]

** When you get the good ending to the simulation, [[spoiler:Betty turns even creepier. How? By switching back and forth from her little girl voice to Braun's old, raspy German accent.]]

---> '''Jack:''' It's always "oh, how can you do this", or "you're such terrible people", or "please, not me, I have a kid in Rivet City". Well, [[LackOfEmpathy I have kids too!]]

---> 911 Dispatcher: 911, Do you have an emergency?
--->Woman: Please help me, I think there is someone outside, I heard a noise and it looks like someone is out there.
--->911 Dispatcher: Remain calm. I'm sending a squad car over, may i please have your name and address for confirmation
--->Woman: (sound of glass breaking) I think he's in the house now! Please send help oh my god.. I think I hear him!
--->911 Dispatcher: Ma'am I've dispatched a squad car it should arrive within minutes try (interrupted)
--->Woman: (sounds of a scuffle)
--->Man: Sorry for the scare, my wife just (muffled scream) forgot to take her pills this morning. Everything is ok. (long pause) No need for that squad car either. Have a nice day. (hangs up)

-->[[spoiler: SCRIBBLEDY BIBBLDEY HOODELLY HOO. WING WANG BRICKA BANG CHOO CHOO CHOO. UPSIDEUP POPSICLE TASTES LIKE BLUE. GHOSTS IN THE HALL GO BOO BOO BOO!]]

** [[spoiler: It gets worse down there in ''Operation: Anchorage'' DLC, where a certain DummiedOut holotape contains an interrogation log involving Gary 23 moments before he gets killed [[KickTheDog by having his arm cut off]] by an unnamed military interrogator in order to obtain the former's Pip-Boy. You can't help but feel bad for the poor bastard.]]
--> [[spoiler: '''Gary 23:''' "Gary?"]]
--> [[spoiler: '''Interrogator:''' "Listen, son, I know Morrill was rough on you. I'm sorry, I really am."]]
--> [[spoiler: '''Gary 23 (Confused):''' "Gary? G-Gary?!"]]
--> [[spoiler: '''Interrogator (Starts losing patience):''' "Right. You can drop the act, now. I'm not here to hurt you."]]
--> [[spoiler: '''Gary 23 (Scared):''' *Subtle breathing* "Gary?"]]
--> [[spoiler: '''Interrogator:''' *Sigh* "Look, just remove the Pip-Boy and we can part ways."]]
--> [[spoiler: '''Gary 23:''' "Gary? GARY!"]]
--> [[spoiler: '''Interrogator (Furious):''' "You know what? [[PrecisionFStrike FUCK THIS]]! Hand me that saw, and TURN off the recorder!"]]
--> [[spoiler: '''Gary 23 (Getting his arm sawed off):''' "Ga-[[KilledMidSentence AAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGGHHHH-]]"]]
--> [[spoiler: *Recording stops*]]

* The plot of one side quest is disturbing, to say at least, and involves stealing an occult tome from the swampfolk. To elaborate: you can give it to an old man in a ruined plantation. He promptly retires to his basement, filled nearly to the roof with corpses. Or, you can try to give it to some kind of missionary, only to find her dead, with the word "thief" scrawled in her blood on the wall. Her last words tell you to bring the tome back to the Dunwich Building, whose nightmares are already detailed above. At the conclusion to this quest, [[spoiler:the entire room catches on fire.]]

* [[spoiler:Tobar's brain room. Especially when you realize he had a scalpel, bonesaw, surgical tubing, and tweezers in his shop from the FIRST SECOND you meet him.]]

** Speaking of the dead Chinese spy, there's a side quest wherein you to follow said spy's footsteps and "complete" the mission his superiors gave him 200 years ago. Over the course of it, you learn bits and pieces of how life was in Pre-War China, which is ''even worse'' if the references to food lotteries and sparing relatives from persecution are any indication. By the time you reach the long-abandoned safehouse however, [[spoiler:the bunker it's in tries to kill you. That spy, it turned out was a dead man the moment he left China, and all for a mission that was ultimately pointless.]]

* The small army of inbred swampfolk that basically worship Cthulhu. ''[[Film/TheHillsHaveEyes2006 The Hills Have Eyes]]'', anyone? If you ever see one or two just looking in your direction and doing nothing else, pay attention. Two more are ''right behind you''.

* Point Lookout itself is almost STALKER meets VideoGame/ResidentEvil4 meets the Shivering Isles from ''Oblivion''.

* Try going back to the St. Aubin Medical Facility (Underground Lab) after the main ''Point Lookout'' quest. This is already after seeing dozens of abandoned mines, POW camps, and serial-killer crime scenes across the swamp.

* The Abominations. They're like Ghouls InSpace, but with a creepier shout (if that can be believed), and they charge at you with a look of glee on their somewhat human faces.

* Did everybody notice [[AdultFear those little skeletons at Springvale School, behind some iron gates?]]

* Everything about the Enclave is absolutely terrifying. Raiders, mercs, mutants? Sure, they're dangerous but you'll have your big iron handy when they come around because you KNOW they're a threat. The Enclave is different. It's easy to write Nathan Vargas off as a crazy old man for supporting the Enclave so strongly. But when you live in the CrapsackWorld that is the Capitol Wasteland, messages of peace and freedom can sound pretty enticing. Then they start promising everybody in the wasteland pure water which will actually wipe out the entire population in an act of genocide.

* In the Supply Plant, there's a closet with a couple of Ingots, a skeleton and a terminal. The terminal spells out a story written by a manager that had to replace his workers with machines (The ones you see walking around the plant). Naturally, the workers were unhappy with that, so they revolt. They try to kill the manager, so he locks himself in the closet. The robots arrive during the chaos. The workers decide to rough the robots up a bit, and that... [[BullyingADragon doesn't go well.]] The manager writes that all he heard through the night were the sounds of laser fires, screaming and workers begging to open the door. His last entry states that replacing man with machines is always a bad idea. When you log off the terminal, you hear the distant sound of metal clanging slowly approaching. A Protectatron walks by, looks in the closet and simply says '''MOVE ALONG, PLEASE.'''

* In case you weren't stressed enough, know that the whole place is also bloody NintendoHard. That right, even a level 30 ''perfect'' character with the Uber enclave Hellfire power armor and the A3-21 plasma rifle will suffer, as in will die a lot if not very careful. Swampfolk and tribals compete with each other for the title of Worst DemonicSpider, and to top it all, if you have also ''Broken Steel'', there will be Feral Ghoul ''Reavers''. You just can't feel safe in ''Point Lookout'', ever...

** On a meta level, some players who've done "kill everything" runs in ''Fallout'' games may have a revelation: With your ability to save the game, and your freedom to kill almost anyone in the game you want and bring them back to life without anyone remembering by loading earlier saves, [[NotSoDifferent Braun's behavior really isn't so different from yours in the end...]]

* The [[http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Dunwich_Building Dunwich Building]]. The name alone should be a tip off that this is ''not'' a good place--it's [[{{Homage}} borrowed]] straight out of a [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dunwich_Horror story]] by Creator/HPLovecraft.

* The hallucination in the sacred bog. They're even more freakish than the entire sum of all of ''VideoGame/EternalDarkness'' hallucinations.

** You step into that clean, sterilized world, and look down at those pods, and all you know is something terribly wrong is going on here - and you're going to have to submit to whatever it is [[spoiler:if you want to get your father back]]. And then you actually get into a pod, the screen comes down, and a face flashes across it - just for a moment - before the needles sink into your head. That's the beginning. That's before you try looking at your [=PipBoy=], and realize just how helpless you are.

** Braun's terminal gives you a glimpse at the other 'simulations' he's run before switching to Tranquility Lane, and a brief glimpse into his inner thoughts. It's... certainly not appealing to read how gleeful he is whenever one of the 'residents' suffers a horrific death (In 'Toucan Lagoon', some of his playthings wither away from scurvy, others are eaten by mako sharks. In 'Slalom Chalet' he records an incident where Dithers slipped and impaled herself on an iron fence). It hammers in the fact that Braun has done this for centuries without fail, and only ever got bored of the setting he committed his atrocities in.

*** Even that music is specially creepy. You might have noticed that it has something none of the other songs in the game have - a hard loop break. That is to say, unlike the other music, it doesn't just loop into itself, it ''restarts''. Really sells the "everything is fake" quality.

*** And your father is there -as a dog and probably conscious based on his "responses" to your comments and the fact that he mentions missing being upright or having opposable thumbs-, watching the ten year old version of his child go about doing evil things and slashing everyone in the neighborhood with a creepy mask on. He doesn't comment on it, probably because he doesn't blame you for it since you do end up saving him, but it must have been strongly unpleasant for sure.

*** And your father is there -as a dog and probably conscious based on his "responses" to your comments and the fact that he mentions missing being upright or having opposable thumbs-, watching the ten year old version of his daughter go about doing evil things and slashing everyone in the neighborhood with a creepy mask on. He doesn't comment on it, probably because he doesn't blame you for it since you do end up saving him, but it must have been strongly unpleasant for sure.

* Speaking of Andale, here's the full story. When travelling around the wasteland you see a chipper town with optimistic residents. They claim their town is constantly voted as the best in the USA, however, the community is small and one of the children states that he has to marry a girl named Jenny Wilson... [[KissingCousins who is his]] [[{{Squick}} first cousin]]. While wandering around the town you meet Old Man Harris; who frantically tells you leave and to check the basement and shed because the residents are stone cold killers. Considering [[DeathWorld the wasteland]], you don't think too much of the term "killers" but when you check the shed and basement anyway. [[CannibalLarder You find human remains; ranging from skeletons to fresh corpses, all of which confirm Harris' claims]]. When you leave the final location; you're suddenly ambushed by [[CannibalClan the town]] and Jack calmly asks you about your activities. There you have two options;

** There's also one other bit of lore that connects to Andale. In Rivet City; there is a boy named James Hargrave, whose father died and left James' mother an abusive, alcoholic mess. His father went out into the wasteland and died there. Jack actually references him as a former victim, as we find out the [[AFeteWorseThanDeath bloody truth of what actually happened to him.]]

* Speaking of Andale, here's the full story. When travelling around the wasteland you see a chipper town with optimistic residents. They claim their town is constantly voted as the best in the USA, however, the community is small and one of the children states that he has to marry a girl named Jenny Wilson... [[KissingCousins who is his]] [[{{Squick}} first cousin]]. While wandering around the town you meet Old Man Harris who frantically tells you leave and to check the basement and shed because the residents are stone cold killers. Considering [[DeathWorld the wasteland,]] you don't think too much of the term "killers" but when you check the shed and basement. [[CannibalLarder You find a lot of skeletons hung like skinned rabbits]], skeletons in cages, strange meat in the fridges and freezers and finally fresh corpses in the basement. When you leave the final place, you are suddenly ambushed by [[CannibalClan the town]] and Jack calmly asks you about your activities. There you have two options.
** If you call them out on their actions then [[FamilyValuesVillain Jack will tell you he needs to provide food for his family and that you have no right to judge him because of the number of people you've killed]], he ends the conversation by trying to [[YouKnowTooMuch kill you in order to keep their secret.]]
** Worst case scenario, if you have high enough charisma or have the cannibalism perk then you can join them or keep their secret. As a "''[[SarcasmMode bonus]]''" you can receive daily [[MysteryMeat "meat" pies]] from Linda as a reward.
** There's also one other bit of lore that connects to Andale. In Rivet City, there is a boy named James Hargrave whose father died and left James' mother an abusive, alcoholic mess. The father went out into the wasteland and died there. Jack actually references him as a former victim, as we find out the [[AFeteWorseThanDeath bloody truth of what actually happened to him.]]