Just like Ratchet & Clank, Jak and Daxter has moments which can be disturbing for many avid fans of the series - new and old.
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In general
- The Metal Heads. Imagine an army with thousands, possibly even millions of bloodthirsty warlike creatures completely unhinged from any possible means of containment, ready to genocide humanity. They've already wiped out the Precursors eons earlier, and nothing's stopping them from doing the same with Haven and the rest of humanity.
- Not to mention, they vary in size and shape - from tinier bugs which infiltrate and sap electrical systems as a form of sabotage to massive, hunkering creatures which can turn a city to dust. The Metal Heads Jak encounters in the third game are nothing compared to the types seen in the first game, giving the notion that there could be bigger ones out there...
- Dark Eco (and most forms of Eco in general) acts more like radioactive sludge than any of the other types of Eco found, and is considered to be extremely volatile and cancerous in terms of what it has done to the planet. Almost all games have creatures which have been exposed - and it's not pretty. Imagine nuclear waste taken up to eleven, where humans can go completely insane, creatures turning into feral monsters which kill on sight.
- Daxter, on the other hand, fell into a tub of that stuff...and only got turned into an Ottsel. Daxter was the lucky one.
- Worse, the experiments conducted by the Praxis Regime pretty much signify that the survival rate for using the stuff on Humans is pretty-much non-existent, with Jak surviving the process only through his already inherent Eco-channeling skills. Anyone else would most likely be dead, or insane.
- Which makes the fate of the Aeropans all the more worse; their program succeeded, but due to this they were heavily corrupted and turned into a genocidal super-state. How long was it until there was nobody sane within that city?
- The entire world up from Jak 2, is pretty much a Crapsack World entirely. A world-wide war between Humanity and the Metal Heads has mostly rendered the planet uninhabitable, with mankind living within despotic nation-states or crime-ridden cities run by vicious gangs. Cities like Spargus, entirely populated by Haven Dissidents, are filled with war-weary survivors who will shoot on sight if you show the slightest resistance to them. In Haven, slavery is well legal, and anyone who isn't human (the lurkers) are used for menial labor.
Jak 3
- The Kraken tentacle seen swimming among the oceans.
- We finally meet some of the dreaded "Wasteland Metal Heads" and they do not disappoint. First of all, all of them are huge and since they're uninhibited by Haven City's walls or small areas, they can take whatever bizarre fits them. The nest the player is tasked to clear out in the Wasteland is full of all kinds of horrible things that you wouldn't want to be within 100 miles of. The gameplay of these sections changes radically to illustrate this as you're immediately given the biggest vehicle Spargus has and go in guns blazing on a heavy turret.
- Erol becoming a cyborg after the final race in the second game clearly took a toll on his sanity as he now sides with the Dark Makers to destroy the world.
- It's implied that Errol's communing with the Dark Makers wasn't entirely consensual. Once his conversion to cyborg was complete, he was pretty much bombarded with cryptic messages from omnicidal alien invaders.
- In Spargus "everything is either useful or dead weight" meaning that the milisecond the wastelanders decide you aren't worth keeping around, they'll cast you back into the desert.
- The Dark Makers, a mostly unseen spacefaring race of destroyers form the bulk of the creepy content in the game. They were once Precursors themselves, but exposure to Dark Eco turned them into monsters. They are thoroughly unlike any other organism ever seen in the games, even managing to out-weird the Metal Heads. Our first interactions with their kind is through some ominous early-game foreshadowing, which includes a freaky, bio-mechanical satellite that seems to be oozing Dark Eco. Even Count Veger, who in the first act is still considered the Big Bad of the game seems to be afraid of them and what they will do. Once they enter the plot proper and become a regular enemy, it's become very clear that the situation is bad even by Jak's standards.
Jak and Daxter: The Lost Frontier
- Dark Daxter, contrary to earlier impressions, doesn't talk like the Hulk and seems to be of his usual intelligence. What makes this fit the trope is that Daxter is genocidal and bloodthirsty while dark, but everything he says sounds frighteningly in character.Aww, I broke this one. Still hungry—time for more meat-snacks!
- The abandoned research rig from TLF with it's very unsettling soundtrack and rather disturbing atmosphere.
- There's also signs of an apparent struggle between now dead mutants and staff - what really happened there?
