Dangerous creatures lurk in the deep. Don't stray too far from shore!
Spore is a game about evolving from a seemingly insignificant blob of primordial goo to a type III civilization. While this game is more about speculative evolution on alien worlds than being a horror one, Spore does tap into some of the more disturbing elements of evolution.
Cell Stage
- The menacing music that plays when chased by a Predator or Epic-sized Cell
on Normal or Hard mode as well as the droning that accompanies it. It can come across as an unexpected Mood Whiplash compared to the otherwise calm, yet eerie soundtrack of the Cell Stage.
Creature Stage
- Epic Creatures in general. They're bad enough if you're lucky enough to see them from afar, but it's surprisingly easy to not realize you're close to one until it's too late. "What was that roar? Why did a pack member vanish from the list?" You turn around and...
- It's even worse if you have the graphics set to high but have a graphics card that can't keep up; occasionally, a creature will take some time to fully render. As a result, you could wander into what looks like an empty field only for an Epic to literally appear out of nowhere in front of you.
- If you stray too far from shore into the ocean, a unique cutscene will play; the camera looms away from your creature in the middle of the sea, and a sinister Drone of Dread plays...and then a giant sea monster emerges from under the water and eats your creature alive!
- "UBD" note creations, which are some of the more... obscene creatures.
- If you ever manage to kill off most if not all of the species on your continent, walking around the landscape littered with nothing but empty nests, and only the sounds of natural ambience or your own footsteps, can come off as equal parts serene and paranoia-inducing.
- Getting visited by spaceships. Sure, you as the player know what's really going on when one shows up, especially once you've played the Space Stage and have experienced it from the ship's perspective, but as a creature on the ground who's completely helpless against whatever the ship might do, it's a great deal more worrying. Especially when the ship could abduct one of the creatures around you at any moment — it's no wonder why every other creature chooses to run when one shows up.
- On a similar vein, there's also the mass extinction event, especially on a first playthrough. At any moment while you're trying to kill or socialize with your next target, everyone begins to randomly run away. At first, you don't know what's happening, but seconds later, the sound of a Thunder Drum suddenly chime in as a blinding flash hits you. You look up in the sky and see something ominous. It's an asteroid and it just slammed into the planet. Hundreds of meteoroids then strike the land like burning hail as every animal in the land runs for cover.
Tribal Stage
- The tribe members' reaction to their hut being destroyed. They run around screaming like lunatics until they mysteriously die.
- If the tribe was stationed near water, they'll run into it and stay there, giving the impression that they drowned themselves.
- The tribe's species will most likely pop back up into the wild due to the game's generation. Which you can then domesticate.
Civilization Stage
- If you conquer a city through Military means, the subsequent cutscene might include what appear to be dead civilian bodies. If you're particularly unlucky, you might catch some citizens in their dying throes.
- Similarly, when a vehicle is destroyed, if you zoom in, you can actually see its crew spill out and eventually die.
- If you decide to use the Gadget Bomb, before target is locked, you will hear a radio static, while very tense music plays in the background, as if the game wants to signify that you are about to do something horrible Not to mention the Scare Chord that plays when you do lock the target.
- When you activate the ICBM, however...
Space Stage
- When you finally meet the Grox, you can fly right above one of their cities to listen to their anthem... if we can call it that, anyway, as it is comprised of nothing but a strange droning sound with static, bizarre guitar riffs and various random sounds before a disturbingly human-sounding off-key baritone singer makes his cue. Have a listen here.
- The sound that plays when entering a planet controlled by a hostile empire is ear-grating, sudden, and can be unnerving to a young player.
- The music for T0 planets is really eerie, it got reused in Galactic Adventures as "Echoes Underwater" (see below).
- The little ding that accompanies a planet's T-score dropping. Nearly always the result of your own actions too.
- There is a valid tactic to expand your empire without buying colonies, but it follows a rather gruesome type of Fattening the Victim on a species-wide scale, especially from the prey empire's POV like with so many examples before in Sci-Fi media. When you unlock the ability to create your own civilizations via monoliths, it's all too easy (especially if you're lucky to find a species in the tribal stage) to monolith a species to civilization, wait for them to reach the space stage and expand their empire to the desired size, then descend down to their homeworld and begin the feast. Now think about what's going on in the minds of those uplifted aliens while all of this is going down.
- Not only can you do this, if you really want to you can do it to multiple nearby star systems separately, and there's a decent chance they may develop into empires with conflicting alignments that drive them to the point of declaring war on each other. That's right, you can wage proxy wars for your species' twisted entertainment if you really want to. And then, if one empire wins out in the end there's nothing stopping you from swooping in and conquering the last empire standing before recycling what's left to expand your empire.
Galactic Adventures
- "It Came From The Sky." The mission is about a spaceship that crashed near a research base on a frozen planet. You see green lumps of skin on the ground from the creature that piloted the spaceship, and you talk to some of the researchers working at the base who tell you that most of the other researchers are either sick or dead. You then discover a trail of the green lumps leading to the sole surviving alien from the spaceship, who tells you that he accidentally made the researchers sick, but one of the researchers' daughters has an immunity to the disease. She follows you and then you discover that the researchers have turned into zombies when you see one of them attack and kill another one. You then have to defend the girl from the zombies as you lead her to an extraction point. The creepiest thing about this mission, however, is probably the music.
- It gets even worse when you realize this adventure is based on H. P. Lovecraft's The Colour Out of Space.
- "The Spirits Are Restless." You start out at a town that's been harassed by wild beasts. The mayor asks you to see a druid at the nearby forest. Said druid then tells you that the forest has been corrupted by an evil presence, causing the beasts to attack the village. He gives you a staff to go cleanse the shrine where the spirit has taken residence. The only thing standing between you and victory are packs of hostile animals and a creepy forest littered with fog, cobwebs and skeletons. All the while, a music track made of Scare Chords is playing. This adventure is NOT for the faint of heart. At the very least, the adventure has little, if any, actual fighting.
- Several GA music pieces would fit the bill:
- "Alien Abduction"
- "It's ALIVE!"
- "Echoes Underwater" is particularly eerie, and incorporates whale song in a way that makes whales sound like Eldritch Abominations.
- "Horror", unsurprisingly, is also terrifying.
- "Alien Abduction"
- While editing a mission, you can play two scores at once. It can get especially creepy if they tend to fit just right in a creepy way.
- "That's My Lunch" appears to be a harmless adventure about a little girl and her kittens, puppies, rabbits, chicks and...one-eyed lizard babies. You get an invitation to the girl's birthday party at "Hugs Valley". You have to escort the girl to the party, while secretly feeding the animals to these two hungry monsters. To do this, you have to distract the girl with things like a butterfly net. Then you have to lure one of the animals into the beast's lair with candy. Eventually, there's none left, and the girl finally reaches the party. She then looks at the player and says that you've just sold your soul to pay for the gifts. It isn't at all surprising the guys who made Robot Chicken made this.
- Many of their missions are like that; go play "Shenanigan's Funhouse". Monster Clown, death traps, and killer whoopie cushions.
- The Shaman's summon swarm attack can be frigtening or humorous when you first get hit by it.
- In Galactic Adventures, if the temperature of the planet is turned up high enough, the oceans will be replaced by molten lava. And, of course, touching the lava in any way* can be fatal for the player, or an NPC. A certain death animation for the Non Player Characters (and the player, too, but it is obscured by the "fail" page) may happen where they sink into the molten rock, hideously screaming as they burn. This would be bad enough, but there is a glitch that makes it worse. If there is a surface under the lava, the creature will sink, and their legs bend oddly, the kneecaps high in the air, the legs just above the lava, the rest of the body in a morbid position that looks as if it's been forcibly crushed. The glitch reaches its peak, because after several seconds, the NPC will without warning reappear, and the death animation will repeat, making them DIE TWICE.
