Nightmare Fuel / Ecco the Dolphin

A game series where you play as a dolphin couldn't possibly be dark, right? WRONG! The entire series is a claustrophobic, haunting experience. Do not let the fact that the protagonist is an adorable dolphin fool you. Seriously, there's a reason why this game is a mainstay on "Games that scared you as a kid" threads all over the internet...

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General

• A common NF element for the whole series: You spend 99% of the game underwater, and most of that time you do not have anything even remotely resembling Super Not-Drowning Skills. Simply getting momentarily distracted in these games can become fatal.
• Even the hero of the game dishes out some of this. In the Genesis games, Ecco lets out a bone-chilling scream whenever he takes damage... As if you needed more encouragement to not screw up.
• The story is inspired by the research of John C. Lilly, which doesn't involve real aliens. Right?

Ecco the Dolphin

• The whole game 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. Not to mention that the whole time you are under the constant threat of drowning.
  • Music like Sea of Darkness doesn't help either. The crushing loneliness described above? The soundtrack nails it in nonstop, overwhelming, cold, bleak music.
• The beginning of the game where at first it seems like a calm kid-friendly game about a dolphin. You talk to your friends about what controls to use in the game and one of them challenges you to jump very high so Ecco does a mega jump out of the sea and... BAM! Ecco spins around while his friends get sucked out from the sea with alien sounds! It's scary because it comes out from nowhere!
• Big Blue's appearance is pretty sudden and he takes up about three whole screens on account of being so huge (being a blue whale and all). He's a completely friendly character and won't hurt you at all, but at least a few young players were frightened of him back in the day.
• The Glyphs in the level "The Library" come off as creepy because some of them serve as an Apocalyptic Log of the people of Atlantis. The messages within these specific Glyphs is nothing but dread and doom.
  "We are losing a war with the Planet Vortex. Atlantis is in ruins after a beam struck from space. We have escaped into the past with our technology."
  "Vortex lifeforms: we suspect that Vortex is dying and can no longer produce food. Every 500 years, when the Earth and Vortex have a clear path, the Vortex feed upon the Earth. Each feeding increases in size. The Vortex are getting hungrier!"
• Welcome to the Machine. Not only does The Machine feature a pukish green background and some really unnerving music, but it's also pretty long, even for a level with automatic scrolling, and you're being accosted by chitinous beasts that lunge at you from inside walls where you can't even see them coming. Not to mention the fact that if you don't correctly keep up with the scrolling, The Machine will crush you, turning the entire screen red.
  • And thanks to a surely deliberate plant on the password screen, it's easy to be transported to it accidentally with no knowledge of what awaits you there. (In case you didn’t know, try entering NNNNNNNN on the password screen.)
  • Even better: the intro screen to a level is typically its title and password in gray text, on top of a water background. It's possible that the level's intro screen will instead be sickly gray-green text over a pitch-black screen. Even after accidentally ending up in that level via password shenanigans.
  • And why is the level autoscroll? Because the autoscroll is the The Machine trying to kill you. Every time the screen suddenly changes directions, speeds up or slows down, or makes you backtrack you are witnessing The Machine at work expressly working to confuse you the player to trap Ecco and crush him. Ecco is not moving of his own volition, but following the mechanisms of The Machine to try and get out with his life. And when you reach the end of The Machine the screen very quickly snaps to the right, as though The Machine tried to swiftly crush you before you can escape.
• The last boss, the Vortex Queen (pictured above). Imagine a giant H.R. Giger-esque alien head. Just the head. Now imagine it set against a black background, being fucking gigantic compared to the dolphin you were playing as, it could kill you by sucking you into its mouth and biting down on you, and if you were playing on the Sega CD, it looked way too good. And to top it all off, you are required to gradually mutilate it to pieces in order to win.
  • A glitch means that you could easily get sucked into the Vortex Queen's mouth, then have the screen turn red - like a screen full of blood - with Ecco as a black silhouette on it, able to move but not to progress the game or do anything. People who encountered this glitch by accident often speak of it in terms that resemble a Creepypasta.
    • Another glitch could occur if you were using the invincibility cheat. Because the Queen's bite attack is meant to be a One-Hit Kill, the game doesn't quite know how to deal with it and invincibility together, resulting in Ecco turning into a black silhouette, but this time just slowly drifting and turning, unable to be controlled. Ecco could even pass through the walls of the Queen's chamber if this happened.

Ecco: The Tides of Time

• The "Tube of Medusa" stage. You're suspended sky-high, floating in water tubes, and desperately trying to out-swim a gigantic jellyfish. You can't defeat it, only run away before it hits you and tries to knock you down to the previous level. The creepy music doesn't help matters.
• The final enemies in Tides of Time look scary, and are all 1-hit kills if (when) they draw you in. Not to mention the noise they made when they detected you, and when their eyes start glowing and they start chasing you...
• The Vortex Queen returns from the first game and is now a reddish creature with a prehensile, long tongue that chases you to eat you, and she retains More Teeth than the Osmond Family.
• "We are frightened. We feel the presence of the Vortex-kind".
  • As an added bonus, right before this, you're told that the Vortex Queen killed the Asterite.
• "Fish City" is a disturbing level because of the fact that the enemies you face in this level aren’t sharks or Vortex Drones — it’s other dolphins. Why are they attacking you? Because at the beginning of the level you need to use a metasphere to turn into a school of fish to navigate the level. A level swarming with your fellow dolphins who don’t know that you’re really a dolphin. They just see a group of fish and they are very hungry and determined to get their meal. And you cannot charge or fight back; all you can do is evade and get to the end of the level as fast as possible. The music for this level makes it even more disturbing for its deceptive calm.
• The Playable Epilogue involves Ecco chasing the Vortex Queen to the time machine before she can use it, but the queen is in an invincible larval form that will instantly kill you if you get too close—but you have to keep up with her as she's the only one that can open doors to progress further, making it an extremely stressful cat-and-mouse chase.

Ecco the Dolphin: Defender of the Future

• Now that you're in 3D, the horrors of the ocean can silently swim up behind you before lunging at you, oceans are deeper and darker than ever before and the threats are bigger. The second level has you face off against a shark when you have to claim an item from his mouth.
  • The great white shark miniboss is a particular monster of an animal. It's at least 10 times the size of Ecco and can devour him in one hit. It embodies pretty much everything terrifying about video game sharks and even seeing at a distance is nothing less than unnerving.
• Have a listen to the level BGM for Obscure Ways to Terminus. The top comment says it all: "This is the sound of a mind falling to pieces."
• The Womb Level that's the last boss. You have to destroy the Foe Queen's heart from the inside by freezing it with antibodies and ramming into it, making it beat faster and faster as a rising pool of blood threatens to drown you. There's also the levels it takes to get there; you begin by going into the Queen's hatchery area where she lays eggs, then get inside her body via the...egg-laying organ, then tear a hole in her body as you escape. Then you change into a small fish and burrow into her ribcage.
• In one level, you have to go past a huge octopus sitting in an almost completely blacked-out cave. In the following level, drowning suddenly becomes a much more immediate problem and a giant eel hides in the ceiling so that it can eat you if you forget where you're swimming. One or two tunnels lead to brightly-lit pools, and it can be very hard to bring yourself to leave them in order to beat the level.
• Even further into the game, you get ghostly white sharks with red eyes, strange aliens hiding in the dark roofs of caves, and in one level dolphin shadows that don't belong to any dolphins.
• As related in this article, an early demo build of DotF showed off several levels in varying stages of development. The very first one is nothing more than a vast, empty expanse of water, with the humpback whale and her baby from the intro stage and one lone, barely-visible shark. The whales are a comfort, but the vast nothingness of the ocean can be very unnerving.
  • Speaking of vast nothingness, there are various ways to glitch the game and break out of the normal play boundaries, a number of which can plunk you right down into vast expanses of featureless, open water if you swim far enough. The easiest to access is in the Gallery, from the menu screen. Simply do a fast turn or swim backwards as soon as the level loads and you'll be outside, looking at just the bare-bones internal structure (since you're not meant to be able to see the outside of the building).
• In the Man's Nightmare section, the first couple of levels are relatively open, taking place in bay-like areas sealed off from the rest of the ocean by massive glass walls. There is nothing beyond these walls. All you see if you look out is a little bit of the ocean floor, and that's it. No fish, no plants, no coral, not even any sharks or jellyfish, and the water's too murky to even see very far, on top of being a dull shade of green. It helps to hammer home the fact that the ocean is basically dead at this point, and these little refuges that the dolphins inhabit may be the only places where life can survive at all, just barely clinging on.
• Defender has a level called "Up and Down." It's not too bad overall, but it gets off to a scary start, in a dark cavern. You have to swim up into a long tunnel with a fierce current, and the water in this tunnel starts out so hot that if you fail to grab the extra health gem shortly after the current starts, you will not survive. The music isn't helpful in reducing the tension, either. It is alleviated, though, by the absolutely gorgeous area at the top of the geyser with much nicer music.
  • Although, there's one last little bit that can get a jump out of players. You have to get a giant stingray to move to get the power of invisibility glyph beneath it. Once you do so, it will slowly follow you around the area as long as you dawdle, until you either leave or it manages to sting you. If you're not paying attention, it can be really startling to suddenly see the big fellow right behind you ready to zap you.

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