Nightmare Fuel / X-COM: UFO Defense

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• Marching into the game with no knowledge of what you're up against for the first time. Given X-COM's lack of a tutorial, the player needs to already know that a fair bit of micro-managing is in order to get your troops ready for their first battles... so anybody that just cranks up the timewarp until they shoot down a UFO will rapidly find themselves underequipped, with a small squad of rookie troops.. and God help them if they landed at night. Even lowly Sectoids can be nightmarish enemies, especially if the player is introduced to them by a plasma bolt killing a trooper out of nowhere.
• Chryssalids are super-fast, heavily armoured aliens (looking very much like a Xenomorph) who sprint across the battlefield at an impossible rate, and in the earlier parts of the game can take the concentrated firepower of an eight-strong squad to bring down (sometimes even that barely hurts them). If they attack one of your team, they will kill them. Then the fun starts. Anyone "killed" by a Chryssalid becomes a CPU-controlled zombie enemy. They hit hard, but they're slow, and easy to kill. Except... when you kill them, a brand-new, fully-grown Chryssalid bursts out of the corpse. If you're still using the starting weaponry, you might not have even killed the first one when it happens. Some players will go as far as have their troops carry primed grenades in their off-hands when going into a terror site with Chryssalids — if they get zombified, they'll drop the grenade and kill themselves, and maybe soften up the Chryssalid. And if you're playing at Superhuman, you know that anyone below Captain runs with a zero-primed high-explosive. If you're doing alien base missions, then you have it doubled, or an alien grenade or two.
• In between turns, you can hear the pitter-patter and slithering of aliens walking around, the occasional weapon blasts, the screams of dying civilians, the opening and closing of doors, the fear that if the game switches to the main view then you will watch a Chryssalid or other enemy suddenly jump out and kill your troopers, the creepy music, and sometimes, total silence. And it doesn't help that the "Alien Turn" image is of a wounded soldier in a picture that is mostly black-and-white except for the red of his blood. Right behind him is what looks like a Muton about to tear him apart with his bare hands.
• Discovering the effectiveness of alien grenades and blaster bombs. The hard way. And then trying to organize some kind of retreat with at least half of your whole squad dead in one turn.
• Aliens with psionic control, with a squad of troops who have low psi-strength.
• Night missions, before you figure out effective night fighting tactics. Your troops get sniped from dark corners, and when you have your troops approach them, they just get cut down by reaction fire.
• To make matters worse, in the original game all of the above takes place to the pulsing, unsettling Battlescape theme; the DOS version of the track makes every mission a nightmare. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i72Q1jXnhOQ
• If you lose the game, the monthly report will instead say that the funding nations will try to cooperate with the aliens and come to terms. However, it then says the aliens appear to have other plans... and they don't leave it there. The slides will detail how Earth was crushed, its air and water poisoned, and made part of an alien empire while survivors are mutated horribly and sent to slave camps, with the slide showing city ruins and an orange sky with black clouds. The next slide shows the mutated humans, who have extra limbs, no hair, an ape-like face shape, and clumps covering the entire body, with the text "The knowledge gained through the X-COM Project has been lost forever. You have failed to save the Earth."
  • The bad ending of the PS1 version is similarly chilling, which consists of the leaders of human civilization surrendering to the alien invaders, shortly before a Muton blows his head open, with a splash of blood getting on both the alien representative and a single drop on the peace treaty. To think this game got a K-A (Kids-to-adults, later replaced with the E for Everyone) rating...

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