Nightmare Fuel / The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall

"Don't like those eyes you got. There's a bad hunger to them."

• Dungeons in the first game were dark, dangerous, often large labyrinths populated with enemies that'd mopped the floor with ill-prepared adventurers. They're much the same in this game, only much larger and complex. You're completely lost. It's past the deadline for whatever quest you went there to do. You never did find that quest item you went there to find. All you want is to find something that looks familiar and hopefully get out this damn maze. Every single door you open creaks, and all you can hear are the screams of angry monsters echoing through the cavern. Somewhat sadistic on the developers part that, even if you clear the entire dungeon of monsters, you'll still hear them. If you step out into the void using bugs, you'll see why; even the smallest dungeons are actually part of bizarre non-euclidean horrors of twisted passages that go on forever in all directions. Smaller dungeons just aren't connected to the larger infinite superstructure.
  • Some of the dungeon layouts can be... strange. Be it where you walk into a room and see a bunch of candles with coffins all lined up on the walls. Or an empty room with a floating candle that teleports you into a room full of enemies. And then you have the dungeons with random viscera, like hanging skeletons or rotting corpses of prisoners. It begs the question what's actually going on inside such a massive area. The settings of the dungeons make little sense, (i.e, the ruins of a farmstead that just happen to have a massive labyrinth system beneath it) making it feel like you're exploring the base of a cult or something unnatural.
    • Speaking of unnatural viscera, some of the torture devices you'll find within the castle setpieces of a dungeon can make a medieval-era torturer shudder with fear, given that they look far worse than anything used in real life.
  • A large number of the dungeon tracks (depending on your sound card) sound very unnerving. Many of them range from paranoia inducing horror-movie tracks to sparse drum tracks which can get you on edge. Doesn't help that a large number of the unused tracks (Which you have a good chance of hearing if you're playing Daggerfall Unity) are quite ominous.
  • The water segments — good GOD, the water segments. Dark, stygian mazes of subterranean caverns home to Dreughs and Slaughterfish. Worst part? Swimming is a very class dependent feature, meaning only agile players could effectively work as good swimmers. Of course, it doesn't help that you'll find very difficult zombies which can kill low-level players easily.
• You can end up glitching through the void from a dungeon if you try too hard, which will make you plunge into a dark abyss with no chance but to reload your save.
• The undead in the capital. They weren't scary looking, but their color made them almost impossible to see at night, when they came out. So you would begin taking damage and not know what it was.
  "Vengeance!!!!" (You know it's coming, and boy is it creepy).
  • Not just that, but chances are if you fast travel to Daggerfall and arrive at night, the ghosts will stalk you outside of the gates. And you can't fast travel out of there, so your only chances are either running away out of range, or hoping the gates aren't closed so you can escape into an inn.
  • Daggerfall being the buggy game that it is, the ghosts won't necessarily wait until you're in the streets of Daggerfall to set upon you. As scary as they are when you're expecting them, they can approach Bring My Brown Pants territory if they show up when you aren't. Woe especially betide you if the game decides to unleash them while you're spending too long in the tutorial dungeon; depending on your starting kit, you may be completely incapable of defending yourself and get to watch the game flirt with Survival Horror as you sprint for the exit in a blind, desperate panic.
• A lot of the monster noises are very scary. Especially the undead ones and the ones you will recognize as Demonic Spiders. The Nymphs make a high-pitched female laugh which can be unexpected on your first encounter.
  • The noise the skeletons make; it's a high pitched screech. You get used to it over time to the point where it's not creepy at all, but hearing it for the first time? You'll crap your pants.
  • You know the Ancient Vampire noise, right? It's actually a well-used bobcat stock growl. Good luck ever hearing that sound without feeling even remotely unsettled.
  • And then of course, opening a random door within a dungeon only to get assaulted by an extremely loud bear or tiger, which just happens to be there. It gets worse when you find a zombie or an atronarch.
• A lot of the non-dungeon game music, especially the night tracks (Night Track #7) can be pretty unnerving.
• One of the Temple Quests you can get is exorcising a kid possessed by a demon. You're supposed to visit the kid in the house; he says very disturbing cryptic words about the demon. So you have to go back to the person who issued the quest and mention that. Then you get a lead about a man who knows about demons and will give you a ceremonial item that will draw the demon away from the kid and will appear somewhere in the house which you have to kill. If you get a wrong lead and don't get to the man fast enough, the kid's mother gets impatient and flees the town with her demonic hellchild. If you experienced that, it's a very heavy guilt that just 24 hours earlier you could have saved everyone.
  • A few of the temple quests where you have to investigate a potential prophet has your lead throughout the questline being murdered in a particularly gruesome way, with the prophet threatening to do the same to anyone who ends up crossing their path. It can also end up being a question of whether the temple you're working for is just looking to get rid of the prophet for being a heretic, or if they're hiding something...

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