Nightmare Fuel / Cry of Fear

And yeah... It's from the very beginning of the game, though- WWAAAARRGHH!

To whoever is reading this - I HOPE my dead body will HAUNT you forever. Have FUN scraping my brains off the wall.

FUCK YOU.

-Simon's suicide note in Ending 1, if you choose to spare Carcass and keep the gun.

Despite using a game engine from the late 90's (GoldSource), it was created by the maker of the extremely terrifying Game Mod Afraid of Monsters, so expect a lot of scares, if not more.

As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

Base Game

• The first nightmare sequence right at the beginning. It starts off normally, with Simon walking around his room with a camera in hand. As soon as you step out of the room, you enter a black void with only white x marks around the map. Taking pictures of them may reveal doors or entrances, but more often than not they'll reveal images of either walls with nice messages either saying "I hate you" or "I can't take this anymore", or dead bodies, all of which only appear for a split second. Eventually, you'll be walking constantly to reach the next X. And keep walking. And then BAM, giant screaming face (which is the page image) jumps up right in front of you. Some people, such as Brad from 4pp, refused to play the game after that nightmare.
• It doesn't get any better with later nightmare sequences, either.
  • The second nightmare sequence, aptly titled You Will Die, also starts off normally, save for a split second change into a decrepit, blood-encrusted environment with a hole in the wall revealing a man riddled with Body Horror, but other than that, it's nothing. Until the soundtrack kicks in. Then the environment is replaced with the aforementioned environment, and you have to cross a hallway, all with similar encouraging messages on whiteboards such as "I NEVER WANTED THIS" and "I JUST WANT YOU TO DIE... JUST... DIE". Eventually, you'll reach a hallway with gated floors, when suddenly it's replaced with a floor made up of hands, that slowly drains your health the longer you stay there. So you better get out of there as quickly as you can, or else it's Game Over for you.
  • The third nightmare sequence is not as horrific as the others, but can still provide a nasty Jump Scare. It starts off with you descending a ladder out of a bloody, decrepit apartment room, and into a hallway. As you walk down the hallway, a voice that sounds like a less harsh version of the Doctor you've been encountering begins talking about a patient and how he had to increase their medication dose to deal with hallucinations (said patient is heavily implied to be Simon). That's the end of the calm part of the nightmare, as you are then thrown into an arena (with the screaming head from the very first nightmare sequence) fighting waves of Faceless before you can leave. But surprise... SAWRUNNER APPEARS NEAR THE DOOR. And just in case that wasn't enough, you fall down the hallway, and enter a black void where more Faceless in masks appear to attack you. Granted, the Faceless are easy to deal with, and Sawrunner is just for show, but goddamn does it give you a near heart attack.
  • The fourth nightmare sequence is not overtly horrific, but it's still tense. After you break down a brick wall with a sledgehammer, the subway terminal gets warped into a twisting platforming section in a black void, surrounded by cages filled with people either cutting themselves or slumped against the wall. Said platforming section is also very difficult to do, since one wrong jump can lead to your death. The soundtrack, which consists of a Drone of Dread and the wails/screams of mental patients, doesn't help the mood either. Once you do finish the platforming, the only thing you need to do is complete a puzzle that consists of going through doors with a gun, wheelchair, book, and car on it (it's implied that the puzzle represents what happened to Simon prior to the game). Which leads to...
  • The fifth nightmare sequence, which might take the prize for the most challenging and terrifying nightmare sequence in the game. After completing the puzzle, you enter a bloody maze being patrolled by monsters in straitjackets being hung from their legs, except their heads have been replaced with twitching worms. What's worse, they're One-Hit Kill monsters, and they don't stop moving either, which means that you'll have to be on the lookout for these things and evade them so that you don't start from the beginning. Once again, the soundtrack isn't much better. The metal clanging sounds like butcher's cleaver chopping a piglet - the sound alone cracks your skull open. You will breathe a sigh of relief once you manage to escape the maze.
• The pedophile in the apartments of the first chapter. He was not content with raping children and killing them, but also found a liking to eating them. He even rendered the building's elevator non-functional, so that the kids would have to take the stairs, where he would be waiting, and pull them into his apartment.
  • Once the player explores his apartment he discovers a room full of photographs of the victims killed, slaughtered in different ways on all the room's walls. Then the player gets locked in and the lights go out...
• The Sawrunner. He is almost unkillable and chases you at an insanely fast speed. If that isn't enough, he moves in a freakish way and has a terrible scream which will send a shiver down your spine. You'll be paranoid for the rest of the game, as he likes to suddenly appear and cause a chase sequence.
  • Migitated by the fact that, at least on Easy and Medium difficulties, you don't even have to sprint to avoid his One-Hit Kill attacks; he pauses each time he does a swing, allowing you to slog along at the normal pace as long as you don't stop at all. On Difficult and Nightmare, however...
• "Watch out For the Trees". Yes. You'd better...
• Since basic enemies can sneak up on the player without making a sound, jumpscares are abundant.
• The college. Initially, it is well lit and abandoned, lulling the player into a false sense of monster-free security. However, the shit hits the fan when you tinker with a fuse box in one of the rooms, with bloody monsters around every corner in the now darkened halls. The worse part: the college is like a maze in the dark, with desks cluttering the floor and multiple classrooms you can access.
  • The music takes it up a notch during this segment by being a frantic, distorted nightmare with voices of children in the background screaming. It only stops once you manage to unlock the fire exit.
• The worst ending, hearing how completely broken Simon is is intensely disturbing.
  • Worse still, the boss fight in that ending ends with you choking Simon's mental avatar to death with your bare hands, complete with death-struggles and gagging, pained gasping sounds. While this happens, your own health bar drains until it reaches zero.
    • Made even worse by the fact that Simon not only committed suicide, he also killed Sophie and Dr. Purnell, and would've killed even more people if he weren't disabled.
• Do you want to hear suicidal depression? Click here. Be sure to turn down your volume.
  • The track itself is literally titled "Kill Yourself". It's also heard in Co-Op Mode where Book Simon spawns while the screen goes black and white.
  • In addition to that, amidst the screaming and pounding sounds of metal upon metal, distortion, and pure audible anxiety, you can hear a very, very faint sound of sobbing. And at some points, screaming. And once in a while, you can hear these...
  Unknown Voice: (screaming) I'M SICK. I'M SICK. I'M SICK. KILL YOURSELF. KILL YOURSELF.
• The Drowned. An emaciated woman in a white dress is strung up like a scarecrow, which slowly inches along but forces Simon to put his gun up to his chin and shoot himself at the sight of it. If you're cocky and decide to knife it, a baby bursts from her stomach and assaults you with its knife.
• Another moment that catches new players unaware is when after you retrieve the fuse from Harbor College, you have to backtrack through the courtyards and back alleys where the Sawrunner chased you. While the idea of doing so in itself is terrifying, as it requires you to lift the gate that separated you two just a moment ago, you have no choice. You pull the lever, peek your head out. Not a sound. And then you step further and you hear the revving of a chainsaw and a now-familiar howl in the distance...
• While it's just a shout-out to the developer's first game, Afraid of Monsters, the secret level Heaven is very creepy. Bloody walls and disturbing "music" not enough for you? The level starts off in a group of hallways with white "drawings" on black walls. Oh, yeah, also the Twitcher from Afraid of Monsters return, and they haven't been updated for Cry of Fear's graphics engine, making the Body Horror even more apparent.
• The underground corridor with doors opening and slamming themselves. The sheer irrationality of it is enough to rob you of sleep. No monsters or gore required.
• Just the way so many issues dealing with depression and anxiety are shown throughout the game via the visuals and the sound design is masterfully done, and absolutely terrifying.
  • Suicide, being a major theme of the game, is shown in multiple ways. Most chillingly is possibly the instance in which you get the shotgun, which has you collecting it from a headless corpse with their head blown apart, a massive red stain on the wall, and chunks of the head on the floor. This corpse also serves as the screenshot for the content warning upon booting the game up.
• The snuff film of a man cutting someone's head off, then dragging their corpse away. The lack of sound, as well as the ambiguity of just who the hell that was and why they did that, serves to heighten the tension.
• The basic mooks you fight are mostly just standard humans, albeit insanely twitchy and jittery. They also become steadily more warped as the game continues.
• The Upper, which is possibly the rarest enemy in the game, comes out with a scream that is so loud and jarring that it will sear itself into your memories. Oh, and it also has even twitchier animations than other monsters due to it walking on its hands.
• Book Simon, the final boss of the best ending of the game. He is essentially the embodiment of Simon's self-hatred and desire to kill himself. He looks just like Simon, albeit bloody and beaten. Chillingly, the wounds he sports seem to resemble those of one who has shot themselves in the mouth.

Other

• Cry of Fear: Lost Tracks and Memories is an album composed by Andreas Rönnberg that, while not composed for use in Cry of Fear, it was composed with it in mind. As such, several tracks can fall into the Awesome Music category. These are not those tracks.
  • To start, we have Hopeless, a Drone of Dread that, while not overtly horrific, is still rather unnerving with how empty it sounds.
  • Breathe, a song that, while coherent and structured like an actual song, sounds incredibly primal and tense, with odd, alien sounds interspersed throughout.
  • Unsafe, another Drone of Dread. This one, however, has moments of ambient sounds like doors and clattering placed throughout, which lends to its atmosphere of unease.
  • Your Fucking, yet another Drone of Dread that has pounding, echoed drums amidst a bass-heavy electric hum that gives the track an industrial feeling.
  • Voice is a masterful example of escalating tension. It starts out with pounding and distorted metallic sounds, and then it just gets worse and more chaotic from there.
  • Crying Metal, an industrial hellscape of sound that sounds like a malfunctioning factory on steroids. Metal, pounding, ear-piercing frequencies, it's all here.
  • With Voices is three minutes of pure anxiety that steadily escalates into pure panic. The metallic sounds present throughout the album sound like something screaming, and the percussion (which is basically just someone slamming something into a piece of metal) gets progressively louder and louder to the point it peaks the audio.
  • Last, and possibly worst of all, we have Spin My Mind. TURN DOWN YOUR VOLUME BEFORE CLICKING THAT LINK. Spin My Mind is literally just a full minute of screaming. Endless, ear-piercing screaming with sounds of chainsaws. It is pure, audible terror.