Video Games/Nightmare Fuel

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MOD: The examples listed here need to be moved - not copied - to Nightmare Fuel subpages of the matching works, and the category Category:Video Games/Nightmare Fuel needs to be confirmed to be present on all of those subpages. Once that is finished, then this page can be redirected to that category. Fully remove any example that states that a game is full of Nightmare Fuel but provides zero context to add to those subpages.


See Category:Video Games/Nightmare Fuel for this page's description and subpage list

No more examples here, please - instead, cut out the middleman and add them directly to the relevant work's Nightmare Fuel subpage.

Examples of Nightmare Fuel in Video Games that are not confirmed to be on their source works' Nightmare Fuel subpages include:


  • The arcade Shoot'Em Up Chiller was released by Exidy in 1986, but it's still hellishly disturbing even by contemporary standards. Most of your "enemies" consist of helpless people chained to walls and various torture devices, and you're expected to messily shoot the flesh off their bones and activate the devices they're trapped in before you can proceed. What's more, there's no established plot, and the few enemies who actually are appropriately ghoulish don't do anything to hurt you; you're just there to massacre stuff. The most disturbing part of all is that a quick overview of Exidy's other titles shows them to be fairly innocuous and bloodless light gun shooters following different themes such as medieval, western, military and police (a Klansman does show up in the game Crackshot, but it's not all that objectionable since he's a target). Evidently, a boss at Exidy asked his staff to make a Horror-themed game to add to the lineup, and THIS is what they came back with.
    • Can you believe someone actually ported that to NES of all places, too? Total funny aneurysm moment right there. The only other game that might scare someone would be Dr. Chaos, which is a heck of a mindscrew, gameplay wise. Friday the 13th is mostly startle-scare, but Chaos has the atmosphere of a mad scientist film going for it too!
  • A sequence a little under halfway into the otherwise-amusing BloodRayne, when the zombie body-possessing monsters are about to be introduced. You've spent all this time fighting through a Nazi stronghold, and suddenly there is nobody. Anywhere. Nobody shooting. All there is is a freakish, disembodied voice mocking you. Even Rayne gets a little creeped out. And then you find corpses...that start rising. And then their heads pop off. (It didn't help that the enemies were pains in the backside to actually kill...)
  • Don't let any of your HERCs die in Mission Force Cyber Storm, or you're going to be treated to a closeup of the hapless BioDerm (artificially created human) pilot's face melting away until only a charred husk of a skull is left, accompanied by a tortured scream of pure agony. Fortunately, you can turn both features off in the options.
    • The same thing happens if you die in Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri. Not a pretty sight.
    • Firsthand horror of your bioderms dying and in Cyberstorm, there are robots you can use as pilots eventually to migitate the nightmare fuel, but given that they are nothing more than elaborate brain in a jar still pose problems
    • T-Mek, an arena tank combat game, has similar nightmare fuel moments. When you destroy an enemy tank, the minimap is replaced with an in cockpit view of your opponent's pilot getting chunks of flesh blasted off, leaving a charred, meaty skeleton.
  • No More Heroes: The cutscene and fight for the #2 assassin, Bad Girl. Of course, most of the game's schtick is switching between lighthearted parody and Nightmare Fuel moments.
    • There's also the time that the #4 assassin Gets his eye sliced off, cries because he's scared of the dark, and his "assistants" tie him to a crucifix and cut him in half with a giant circular saw blade. And everyone starts applauding, despite the fact that no one is in there.
    • The Sequel ramps it up about 13 notches. Matt Helms... A distorted Uncanny Valley baby face mask stuck in the most horrifying innocent smile on top of a fat as shit body carrying a FLAMETHROWER BATTLEAXE and the most chilling childlike laugh. Like Pyramid Head dressed up as Hello Kitty. That laughter will forever haunt my dreams. Not to mention the entire stage building up to his battle slowly gets darker until you're at Camp Crystal Lake: Silent Hill branch.
    • The housing complex where you fight Alice can be a little creepy if you look at it certain ways. It's basically a New York-looking apartment complex, but there's no music for most of it just a creepy wind. Then you enter the dark, run-down apartment building with broken down hallways and eerie inaccessible areas that trail off into pitch blackness. Then the last leg has an unusually serene, lost-sounding music.
      • And when you finally get to fight Alice, there's the battle theme (starts at 4:19), where a good chunk of the piece is accompanied by an ominous sounding synthesizer.
  • For that matter, although The 11th Hour was overall disappointing, it had some fuelish moments in its own right.
    • The Marie ending.
    • "How about...a Chuck roast?" (The capitalization there is not a typo).
    • How about a freaking tiger advancing on Robin during a cutscene?
    • How about a flashback wherein Marie's mother, Eileen, is running away from Stauf's mansion, gets her hand stuck between the bars of the locked gate...and she screams bloody murder while the gate eats her hand clean off? I am dead fucking serious.
      • Or slightly later in that video where Eileen is at the doctors screaming, and raises her arm, you can see the ragged stump, with twitching bits of sinew/muscle and blood running out the artery. After the first time, I always had to turn away during that part.
  • Then we have Square Enix's recent venture, Nanashi no Game, with the exact premise of The Ring—except we have an NES-style RPG instead of videotape. And the game is played in first-person. And it's the first DS game with true 3D sound. (Read: you can hear shit happening behind you.) Oh, and Square recommends playing it with headphones, just to make the 3D sound even more realistic. Yeah, hell no. Not when the game's website is terrifying in and of itself. Not when that NES-style RPG asks you how pathetic you are for even trying to avoid your fate.
    • Then we have the sequel, Nanashi no Game Me. This clip is fairly innocuous, the scenery notwithstanding. Except the player fellow doesn't quite make that last jump. SPLAT.
  • Cooking Breakfast 2, a Game Maker "game", which claims to be an "all time family classic" which is supposed to "learn [you] in seven steps to create your very own breakfast". The true nature of the "game" is something a bit different; to quote two reviewers, "Once you start the game this freaky-looking spinning evil face appears in front of a annoying black-white flashing background," "making a sound that sounds like a a chalkboard being scrapped by a grinder". And it has no exit feature; you have to turn it off via the task manager. If we are to believe the reviews, some people got seizures from this. It is suspected that this game is actually the author's revenge against people who gave his previous games bad reviews.
  • In Guild Wars, the Madness Titans that make the sounds of pigs or babies squealing as they tear you and your party apart. That and the Dreadspawn Maw found in the Domain of Anguish, which looks like a giant vagina surrounded by teeth and claws that continually moves in and out.
    • Then there's the fact that your commanding officer/mentor-friend in Nightfall, Kormir, HAS HER EYES EATEN OUT by a demon fittingly named the Hunger. The same demon who, if you believe local rumors, has been devouring army recruits and hapless villagers left and right. Then there's the Realm of Torment in its entirety. Covered in fleshy walls, random teeth, and at one point you have to cross a bridge made by what seems to be the underbelly of a giant dead centipede. Most of the time, its deathly silent, only making the clicking noise of a giant Torment Claw bursting up behind you twice as terrifying. And the things the spirits trapped down there say...
      • "There's a song in the center of the earth, my friend, and it sounds like razors through flesh..."
  • Most of the scares in Elvira 2: Jaws of Cerberus are rather cheap. Some aren't.
    • The dining room in the haunted house. What's the main course? A head of a young woman. Which opens its eyes and smiles at you as blood oozes out from her mouth.
    • A bedroom where you're compelled to fall asleep after you enter. You then have a dream about a sexy woman... when you wake up, she's still there, only now she's a Nightmare Face-d monster (like a lamprey) who promptly kills you.
    • The deeper levels of the catacombs. They have traps which paralyze you, at which point you're helpless against the unending hordes of blue ghosts that suddenly fly out of the darkness and into the screen.
  • Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway for the Xbox 360 has an example of this, in the middle of the game, your character, Matt Baker will start to break down from the stress of war and begin to see things, this makes for very tense, atmospheric moments when you are searching the adandoned hospital for Franky
  • The white chamber. I stopped playing directly after your character faces the monster on the station rotation control. I came back for the second time, passed that part, but then was scared like hell with the eyeball in the extended hallway to the cradle. I stopped playing after that and convinced myself that I was NOT going to touch horror games anymore. Mind you, the duration between the 2 playthroughs was around a year or more.
    • Thankfully, there's only four actual ways to die (the mandatory one doesn't count), and all of them can only be done if you choose to get said endings, or if you're impossibly stupid.
    • The worst ending. As with the standard failure ending, you find yourself back in the coffin. Then disembodied hands reach out of the darkness towards you. The ending being still images instead of animated does not help.
  • Legend of Mana first appears to be a bright and relatively pleasant game. And it is, for the most part. However, if you pay attention, the story and history of the world itself can be downright disturbing. One of the particularly bad parts is The Junkyard. It is littered in broken toys, some of which can speak. Either reading the books in your library or just guessing from their snippets of dialogue, these toys were given life ages ago to fight in a war. They now lie, broken and inanimate, but still alive. Then there is that the three main storylines deal with 1) Being enslaved by a damned dragon emperor to return him to life, 2) Dealing with a group of adventurers who lost a friend who did a horrific Face Heel Turn into a demon (with a dungeon in a colossal dragon skeleton), and 3) Tracking down a serial killing jewel thief (she steals the 'hearts' of Jumis, the most valued gems in existence. This kills the Jumis). Last but not least there is the implication that your need to rebuild the world is a side effect of some horrible cataclysm that brought the world as it was known to an end. That alot of this devastation lies alongside what is otherwise a pleasant and light game, only serves to enhance just how disturbing these moments are.
    • Let's not forget the Transformation Trauma that's defined the series since the first World of Mana game turned a girl into the World Tree. Whether it's being turned to stone for crying for the wrong person, being transformed into a mindless and violent monster for visiting the wrong snowy hills, or the slow drive into violent insanity and physical transformation of one partial demon, Legend of Mana meets your daily dose of vitamin Agggggggghhh!
  • Manhunt series. Even the somewhat-censored (to avoid an AO rating) second game.
    • Let's be specific. I found a small detail that creeped me out. In the mall, where you get to see TV with your famliy memebers there is a toilet. A mook jumps out at you from behind a door. But when I walked in I saw a man sitting on the toilet. He didn't move, and when i walked closer i realised that his head had a large hole in it, from a gunshot, probably.
  • The Bright in The Screen is a 2D flash game composed entirely of crudely drawn stick figures. It is also quite possibly one of the scariest games I have ever played, mostly because of the mysterious... entity... communicating with you through the screens. You can trust me. I'm a good person.
    • THIS SCREEN IS USELESS. BUT YOU WILL WATCH IT ANYWAYS. AND YOU WILL LIKE IT.
    • THESE ARE RED FREAKS. THEY CAN HARM YOU. You have to click to turn the red background white, in order to see the 'warning' and the 'freak,' which is shaking like a crack-addict and bashing its little stick-figure head against the wall.
  • The Interactive Fiction game Shade starts out innocuously enough: you're in your one-room apartment, getting ready for a trip. After a few routine tasks, however, the true horror begins creeping in. The All Just a Dream implication? Only a cruel Hope Spot. Upon replaying, it becomes even worse: you know what's going to happen, but you can't do anything to stop it.
    • Well, it doesn't help that the room I just played that in, this room, is almost exactly like that room. Complete with all of the items in it. Thanks a lot...
  • Perhaps some of the most visually shocking terror comes from the game Parasite Eve. In this game, normal animals transform into ravenous beasts of war, usually by way of forcing their bodies out of their skin and splitting their skulls open. Add to this the fact that the enemy is actually a networked intelligence that has been dormant inside our own cells for millenia adds a second, far more cerebral type of horror to a game that's already likely to keep you awake for days.
    • No mention of the Ultimate Being? I mean good god.
    • The cutscene at the opera where everyone spontaneously combusts. That freaked me out, imagining being in that theatre.
    • Parasite Eve 2 took everything freaky in Parasite Eve and made it even worse. Let's start with the ANMC's You only catch a glimpse of the first one, in a room where an entire S.W.A.T team was ripped apart. When you finally run into your first one, it's in the final steps of murdering a S.W.A.T officer, who has had his arm ripped off and eye torn out. The thing attacking him looks like it has a human-like face twisted into a vaguely bird-like shape. Then you find out they can make themselves look like people. These S.W.A.T officers thought they were saving a group of terrified civilians, only for them to ambush them by transforming into monsters. The first time you see one do this little trick, you get the pleasure of seeing it in a lovingly detailed cinematic. From there, it just gets better.
  • The fountain in the Zack and Wiki level Bell Tower of Requim. It has a creepy girl's face, and when you ring the bell, its eyes spin open, its jaw drops, and it emits a horrible screech. Then a blood-like fluid pours out of the eyes and fills the fountain.
  • Penumbra: Overture drops you into an abandoned lead mine in Greenland with no weapons, no map, and nowhere to go but further underground. There are sounds coming from the darkness—insectile skittering, low growls, and occasionally, just at the edge of your hearing, human whispers—and your options for light are a glowstick, which never runs out but illuminates only a few feet ahead, or a flashlight that casts further but consumes batteries at an alarming rate. Even the game mechanics work against you: the combat system is so clumsy it's barely better than useless, and while it's not hard to hide from whatever might be stalking you, looking directly at it from under cover sends your character into a very conspicious panic attack. The sequel, Black Plague, solves the problem of awkward combat by removing it entirely, and adds heaping helpings of Body Horror and Enemy Within. Play with the lights on.
  • The medium sized spiders in Sacred. I usually love spiders, but something about them made me just stop playing the game. Right then.
  • Choking Hands from Blood. Scariest. Monster. Ever. Full stop. The buggers are little enough to be immune to bullet spam, appear suddenly from unexpected places, and when they choke you, you cannot do anything to them except try to pull them off (with your vision darkening, sounds of gasping and your health quickly going down). If you can fight them without getting the heebie-jeebies, you have nerves of steel. If you can kill one with a single pitchfork blow, you are utterly fearless (and really masterful in this game).
    • There's also the Bone Leech in the sequel, which is to this game what the facehugger is to Aliens Versus Predator. It gets worse when you see the Soul Drudges, Drudge Lords and Drudge Priests are the results of what happen to the victims.
    • Hell, there are several noises, visions and general stuff that manage to make the game pretty damn scary. Of note is the apparition on the window at the end of Rest For The Wicked, a ton of the shit in The Haunting (an eerily large, quiet and dark mansion with several vent holes of which both Spiders and Hands crawl out of, a hedgemaze way creepier than the one in The Shining, and secret passageways filled with Phantasms, and that's not to mention the slaughterhouse - the first building you find in the level and only access much later; it's full of hanging mutilated bodies, disturbingly well-placed blood, and Hands - and the goddamn basement). That, and the sense of foreboding you get in any silent level. Caleb is a wisecracking, cackling, Badass Villain Protagonist, but that doesn't really seep enough into some people to make these parts very tolerable.
  • Hunter: The Reckoning is all about running around killing zombies. Not so bad, right? And eventually, you get used to all the dead bodies lying in the street, yes? And oh, look! Now you've got a mission to get a cute little girl with a teddy bear through a cemetery and into a church where her parents are waiting. Aww, look at her run to hug them! Pshh. The little girl drops the bear, which proceeds to get possessed by...something, grows to a huge size, gains fangs and claws, and then kills the parents with one swipe of its claw. If that was wasn't bad enough, the little girl got to see it, and of course she screams in terror. Not. Fun.
  • Why does Tsukihime not have an entry here? The scenes with Chaos in the hotel are a good example.
    • All of Kohaku's backstory, but especially the diary. "Help me" indeed. (The poem at the end does not help at all).
    • There's also the dream where Akiha and Kohaku apparently rape Shiki.
  • The Ghoul's Forest, a Game Mod for Doom. You're in a big, dark forest. The only other monster is a deadly huge floating monstrous deadly head. Have "fun". Ghoul's Forest 2 is even scarier...
  • Oddworld does this quite a lot, but by far the most disturbing moment is the bad ending of Munch's Oddysee. It goes from 'disturbing' to 'nightmarish'.
  • Even in games where the player is completely safe from dying, things can turn rather freaky. Endless Ocean on the Wii comes to mind, with its abyssal trench, appropriately named "The Abyss". It's pitch black down there, with only a LITTLE bit of light coming from your flashlight in the area right in front of you; the music that is introduced in that area, Hayley Westenra's "Benedictus", is initially very quiet and tranquil, and then BLASTS out in a loud crescendo of brass, drums and vocals without warning; and two very large animals—the Sperm Whale and the Giant Squid—make their homes down there, and somehow love to appear in front of you when that crescendo hits! AHHHHH! Needless to say, I never allow that song to play in the Abyss. Never ever ever.
  • The original video game nightmare fuel comes from Rescue On Fractalus, an old, Choplifter-esque pseudo-3D game where you flew around rescuing downed pilots from aliens. Sometimes an alien would disguise itself as a human pilot, and jump up on your ship when you landed for a rescue. It would hammer on your windscreen until either it broke through and killed you, or you turned on your shield and fried it—all this accompanied by very scary sound effects. It doesn't sound like much by today's standards, but I had never seen anything like it, at the time, and literally jumped halfway across the room the first time it happened.
  • Homeworld: Cataclysm was well scripted, well plotted, and had a doozy of an enemy. Having your lower decks scream at you to cut them loose as they get recycled into a fleshy mess is bad enough, but the level where you have to escort a series of refugee ships and you cannot avoid them being hit and all the howling civilians packed inside being devoured and reformed is enough to make you exit the game whilst whimpering "Ohgodohgodohgod". For added fun, play a skirmish and zoom right in on a squadron of fighters as they get hit by a Beast conversion beam, enough to hear the sounds.
    • The worst part is the distress calls from impacted refugee ships. "Help us! HELP US!!!!"
    • Hell, just the voice of the Beast is creepy enough. And then of course, the mind wanders into imagining what the transformation must feel like...
  • The original Homeworld had elements of nightmare fuel as well, namely in the complete annihilation of Kharak and the various instances of ship capturing (which was certainly an instance of Fridge Horror when contemplating the fates of captured ship crews, especially with the ominous line "The subject did not survive interrogation").
  • Despite usually being a ridiculous parody of the Survival Horror genre, Illbleed had a couple legitimate freakish moments. For example, the final boss of the first level is the first level's boss grown giant-sized, and he is unkillable. Your only hope is to hop across annoying stones to get to shore and enter a cabin...where you find out he's just a robot being controlled by an operator. The only way to make the guy stop is thwack him in the head, whereupon his head explodes in a shower of sparks and fake (we hope) blood, revealing HIM to be a robot as well. Asimov never told me about this one!
  • As much as it is a funny, over the top game, Penny Arcade Adventures: On The Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness has some genuinely scary moments.
    • From Episode One: The Mimes. Dear god in heaven, the mimes. Let alone their dark god... And the Fruit-fuckers jumping out of thing like dead seagull corpses haunt my dreams.
  • In Famous has Sasha and her mindrape powers. Not to mention a creepy stalker lust she has for Cole.
  • In Black Shades, it's possible to blow yourself up (usually accidentally) with a grenade in level 5. Sometimes, your head survives after being separated from your body by the blast. Some players have flown through the air, looking at scattered body parts in a pool of blood, before the screen goes black.
  • On first installing Black and White, the game asks for your name. Innocent enough, thought I, until, late at and playing in a darkened room, I heard a barely-audible whisper; "Simon". And then again. Lionhead, it seemed, had included a soundbank of common names, which it would match to the one given during install and randomly play during the game. Suffice to say, this occurance put an end to the late night gaming session.
  • It's a wonder that neither Return to Castle Wolfenstein or its sequel, Wolfenstein, has been mentioned on this list yet, considering the amount of horrifying imagery in both. The second game alone has invisible Nazi assassins that stalk you through the dark and taunt you in the creepiest voices imaginable, deformed mutant monsters from another dimension that look like giant trolls covered in tumours, creeping cyborg beasts that jump up in your face and try to claw your eyes out, and undead, flaming Nazi skeletons that shamble about and toss green fireballs at you.
  • A good bit into Infinite Undiscovery, players will encounter a phenomenon known as Lunar Rain. This bright, shiny rain will cause wings to grow on your party members as they stand in it, giving them significant stat boosts. Stay in it longer, their wings will grow bigger, and they'll begin to regenerate health. Sounds good, right? Stay in it even longer and they'll begin to take their own actions, ignoring your commands. It's best to run to the nearest town at this point, because shortly, all hell will break loose. The afflicted character suddenly turn pitch black, while their eyes glow red. They'll repeatedly scream out random phrases and screams of agony which range from humorous to downright disturbing. Oh, and they'll attack you and your non-affected party members. If you don't put them out of their misery fast enough, they'll turn invisible.
    • Did we mention that the first time it happens, you get stuck in a boss fight against Vermified Edward in which you have a time limit before he completely transforms and the game ends? Now, try to imagine why the game would end after that... I betted on a complete Heroic BSOD for the entire team after being forced to Mercy Kill him, and that was one of the nicest options I thought up.
  • Irisu Syndrome. Who knew a Puzzle Game could be so creepy?
    • Take a nice stare at Irisu's face when you die with at least 40,000 points. Watch both endings. Read the text files that you get as you play. And finally, pause the game...but you might get lucky and have nothing happen. Might.
    • Simply mentioning the name is not enough to convey how scary this game is. See the game's main page for details.
  • The old EA game Labyrinth Of Time. A charming Myst-style game; creepy music, a persistent feeling of being watched, and generally disturbing settings through which you can traverse. Oh, and the entrance into a circus-type maze which is, you guessed it, a smiling clown with a nice, deep and evil laugh that loops forever. While the creepy music is playing.
  • The Thing takes place shortly after John Carpenter's movie ends. You're dropped first into the US base in Antartica, then relocated to the Norwegian base, and it isn't long before you discover how horribly things went wrong. You're isolated at the bottom of the world with people who may or may not be who you think they are, it's dark and inhospitable, and you never really know what's around the next corner. You know that some thing could be lurking anywhere, and when you find one, it ain't pretty.
    • Due to the scripted nature of some "thing-outs", you may take a person's blood test only for them to explode into a monster a few moments later. It's a bug, sure, but it can also lead to a different conclusion; The Thing is learning to dodge the blood test.
  • This video from Valkyrie Profile Lenneth. A young girl getting overwhelmed by a demon and forced to watch as she murders someone? Yeeeeah... not good.
    • Made into a slight Nightmare Retardant with the idiot soldiers who just stand there while their friend is getting killed.
  • La-Mulana brings us the wonderful Confusion Gate. As if the music isn't bad enough, we have the miniboss Shu, whose HP constantly regenerates. How? Through blood dripped down onto him. And where does the blood come from? Virgins who sacrifice themselves to him by jumping into a pit of spikes.
  • Grandia II had a number of deranged moments, but the one that stood out to me was one of the late-game bosses, a creature I dubbed, in a fitful panic, "Pineapple Jesus"...
  • In Saints Row 2, in a cutscene that is a mix of Nightmare Fuel, Crowning Moment of Awesome, and a light Tear Jerker, Johnny Gat delivers a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown on Shogo Akuji, for ordering the decapitation of his girlfriend, Aisha. After beating him up, and punching him head first through a fucking cement tombstone, he tosses him into a casket and burys him alive, all to the sound of Akujis cries for mercy. Lesson: Don't mess with Gat.
  • Abyss from Soul Calibur 3. He's Zasalamel with skin and muscle stripped off, a tail...thing...hanging down, and an organic-looking version of his legendary weapon. Not to mention the intro movie's ending when he transforms INTO Abyss. Plus, Night Terror.
  • You wouldn't think Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura would fit this trope, but allow me to explain. Arronax spends nigh-on two thousand years in a magical cage in the bloody VOID. Completely alone, barring the rare occasions when the psycho who put him there comes to gloat about how he's going to use his identity to carry out a massive Xanatos Gambit that will let him literally wipe out the entire planet. There's four walls to look at, a door which he can't even get near, and just enough room in the magical shell to stand up if he's feeling punchy, he won't age there and he won't ever die unless someone breaks into the shell and kills him... And you can choose to LEAVE HIM THERE FOR ALL ETERNITY.
  • Game 3, Case 1 of the Ace Attorney series. The obligatory Villainous Breakdown is a creepy death glare.

Dahlia: "Do. You. Think. You've. Won? Well? Do you!?"

  • Time Fcuk is a bit off-putting at best—you're hearing radio messages from your past and future selves, and some of them seem to have diverged from you a bit. One's teleported into a wall and is screaming for help. One has found a room with hundreds of dead bodies, all of which look like you. Several seem to have gone mad. What's even more disturbing, though, is approaching the end and hearing the messages from your early self, who's completely unaware of what's going to happen to him. Also, I ought to mention the message, delivered out of nowhere, "Don't trust Steven! He's lying to us!" Not scaring you, is it? Well, your name probably isn't Steven. Mind you, it gets even worse when you find out what Steven actually is. He starts as a tumor with eyes, growing out of your head, then grows ("His feet tickle my brain!") into a sort of living backpack, before splitting off and trying to Kill and Replace you.
    • The intro and the ending. The intro fully lets you know what kind of a fucked up reality you have been thrown into. And the ending shows what kind of a fucked up reality you have unleashed upon the world.
  • Once you get past the bright and cheery super-deformed graphics, Tales of Symphonia has a significantly large amount of this. The worst offendor is undoubtedly expheres and the Exbeula creatures, which are humans that have been horribly mutated as a side-effect of producing expheres. These people, despite being giant throbbing masses of green flesh, are also fully concious and are in ridiculous amounts of pain from the mutation. It's possible to reverse this transformation, but only one mutated character is lucky enough to survive, and only through a sidequest. Now Expheres, if you use them correctly, they enhance your combat abilities (meaning that if all the heroes and villains and various adventurers didn't use them, they would probably be killed very quickly). However, their original intended purpose is to slowly turn a person into a soulless shell that does not age, cannot eat, sleep, or speak, and cannot feel, taste, or smell anything. Eventually, the conciousness is completely absorbed. And as the game points out more than a couple times, just because your conciousness is absorbed into an exphere doesn't mean it stops working.
    • And then there are the Desians and their human ranches, where humans are treated like cattle in order to produce these things. And the rest of the world's humans don't particularly care, as long as their city isn't being attacked.
      • Oh, just to point out something that is often missed: the Desians actually breed humans for the sole purpose of making more Exspheres.
  • Tales of Graces is certainly one of the more terrifying Tales Of games. And it certainly does explain alot with Lambda rather creepy possession of Richard, turning one of Absel's most peaceful allies into a blood-thirsty maniac. His first "big" scene involves him RISING FROM THE DEAD (his head thumping like crazy before slowly rising up) to rapidly slash at his attacker viciously. What makes it more disturbing is that Richard moves like he is being controlled, not keeping his legs straight, and slumping with a sly devilish look. Not to mention those eyes and evil laugh... Videos are better than words.
  • Uninvited's Ghost Lady. On top of a freaky death description, her horrendous face was drawn so well in the NES graphics (so well to scare the shit outta you) and the music accompanying it is freaky as hell. The game's setting isn't even helping the situation.
  • Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. For the first four hours of play, you're trying to sneak through Innsmouth, with hybrid fish-men tracking you. They have guns and axes - and you're totally unarmed. You don't even get the knife/gun that other FPS games give you. And then there's the navy battleship that gets attacked by Deep Ones, and the Marsh Refinery, and the insane asylum flashbacks.
  • Kimi ga Nozomu Eien, a Visual Novel/H-game, had one ending where your love interest, a doctor, kidnaps you, gives you a sex change, urinates on you, and anally rapes you with a sex toy. So horrendous was it that it was cut out of future reissues of the game and replaced with a less nightmarish scene where she gets pregnant instead.
  • The Macintosh shareware game Fred Rogers, Terrorist'. When you are playing in the Neighborhood of Make Believe (where you must KILL most if not all the puppet characters) and knock on X the Owl's door, you are met with a squawking vulture creature (aka "Mutated X") that fills the entire playing field.
    • To make matters worse, one time there was a glitch in the game where you defeat X, but without warning ANOTHER X popped up on the screen. Beat him, then... ANOTHER ONE. And so forth and so on.
  • Bullet Hell shooters, particularly their True Final Bosses, which go from Nintendo Hard to "are you fucking kidding me?". Look up "Hibachi" and "Futari Ultra" on YouTube if you're feeling brave.
    • And in Imperishable Night, the bullet patterns are so fast and complex, your brain stops interpreting data on parts on the screen.
      • Even then, Imperishable Night is one of the easier games in the series. Subterranian Animism is even worse...
  • The dream sequences in Baldur's Gate 2, in which Irenicus gives you increasingly dark and morbid Hannibal Lectures. It becomes even worse when you find out the Irenicus that talks to you in your dreams isn't Irenicus at all. Its Bhaal himself, trying to goad you to The Dark Side.
    • If you visit the Temple District at night, you'll run into a Shadow Theif. He won't attack, but he will start babbling a deranged "song" when you speak to him. It sounds like the typical ravings of a madman at first...then the song describes how an innocent man was forced to watch his friends and family be butchered because he refused to get involved in the current guild war. The song suddenly becomes much more chilling when you realise who the song is describing.

"You can't hide! War will find! YOU CAN'T HIDE! WAR WILL FIND! AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAA!!!"

    • Your second visit to Candlekeep in the first game when everyone's been replaced by dopplegangers.

"DIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIE MEAT!"

      • Even better, even better, when you get to the end of the catacombs, Gorion shows up and tries to convince you that none of the dopplegangers were real, and instead you just murdered all of your old childhood friends in a bout of insanity. Of course, he turns out to be a doppleganger, too, but it can really mess with your head for a brief moment.
      • For a mixture of Nightmare Fuel and Tear Jerker, find Captain Barge and right click on him to hear a mixture of insane laughter and broken sobbing.
      • Take a closer look at that bandit camp. Apparently they decided to decorate their camp with rotting corpses.
  • The final mission of The Saboteur. Some backstory: the game is set during WWII in occupied France. You follow your most hated enemy, who ruined your life and killed your friends and comrades, to the top of The Eiffel Tower. Approaching, you hear screams and pleads for help from German soldiers, who are being slaughtered and thrown off the tower by Dierker, who, if it isn't obvious, is a high-ranking German officer himself. Taking the elevator up, a distraught soldier screams "He's killing everyone!" You're met with bodies strewn everywhere, soldiers hung from the stairwell, an officer who shoots a woman and then himself, a soldier playing Russian Roulette with himself with no bullets, while, the entire time, a general plays a tear-jerking rendition of Feeling Good on the piano. When you finally get to the top, your foe makes a saddened speech about how he and all of his comrades have failed and there is nothing left for them. If you take too long to kill him, he jumps off the Tower himself. For a game that's mostly been reasonably light-hearted, this is a real punch to the gut. Ladies and gentlemen, war is hell. Even creepier, if you've seen the film Downfall, you know exactly what these people are thinking, and for the most part, the ones who died here were lucky.
    • Seconding this. I was a quality assurance tester on the project, and there were several points in the game that fit this trope. That final mission was just one of them. Another was in the interrogation scene in the prologue, where Dierker gives Sean the fatal ultimatum. The Nightmare Fuel for me is when Sean utters his famous "Go fuck yourself!"; the color draining from the scene and the way the look on Dierker's face (in close-up no less!) visibly morphs from indignant shock to rage to something I can only describe as "Ax Crazy Glee" right before he puts about ten bullets through Jules' skull. There were testers on my team who had played through Dead Space without batting an eyelash, and we all just kinda watched the scene in slack-jawed horror.
  • I'm certain this was in the Nightmare Fuel page,[please verify] but I think that Zero Two from Kirby 64 qualifies as Nightmare Fuel. Sure, I don't think HAL meant for him to be that scary, but they wanted him to be freaky, darnit!
    • This one may need explanation, as a friend of mine found this to be not that scary. For one, Zero Two is the spirit of Zero, the final boss of the prequel (debatably scarier). He spits blood out of his own eye at you, and you can see him crying tears of blood throughout the battle. He can never be permanently destroyed, and literally commands Dark Matter. His wings are covered in blood, and he has a Halo. That's the basic jist of it.
    • The aforementioned Marx Soul death scream.
  • If this entry tried to list all of the Nightmare Fuel in Singularity, it would be essentially a long-winded description of the game. The worst, though, is the fact that the game was advertised as an ordinary First-Person Shooter/Puzzle Game.
    • A few minutes after the start of the game, you're happily exploring old Soviet ruins. There are some old audio files around, that'll compel you to turn up the volume. As you walk down a hallway, without warning, a nearby voice screams "MOTHER OF GOD, LET ME OUT!" It goes downhill from there.
  • There is something very graphical about how the swordfights in Prince of Persia: The Sands Of Time are choreographed, in slow motion and by generally having the main character jump on enemies and stab them hard on their backs while down, every one of them, to trully dispose of them. Ironically, the Darker and Edgier Warrior Within is less effective on inducing high octane nightmares, because the fights get streamlined, and the prince more of a Badass to expect such feats from him.
  • The escape-the-room (or, in this case, escape-the-house) game Diversity lets you be "good" or "bad". If you follow the "good" route, the rooms remain perfectly bright and cheerful and you'll completely avoid this trope. If you follow the "bad" route, however, you're in for a steadily worsening nightmare as the rooms become darker, furniture becomes tipped over and trashed, plants die, etc. The nursery in particular becomes a dark, trashed room with "Quarantine" written on the blackboard. And the bathroom...well, if you've just been kind of bad, it'll be dark and dirty, and you'll find the corpse of a cat in the washing machine (which, incidentally, is the same cat that you find alive and well if you take the "good" route instead). If you've been completely rotten to the core, you don't just get dirty water in the toilet and bathtub; you get blood. And a man's head in the washing machine. The comedic-ish ending picture alleviates the horror somewhat, but the sights plus the music (which can become downright sinister in the nursery and cut off entirely in the bathroom) can fit this trope. Heck, just the implication that you are entirely responsible for turning what would otherwise have been a normal house into a desolate ruin (or maybe that the house is reflective of your mind/mood, and if you spiral down into insanity/sociopathy, * everything* in the house soon follows) is pretty scary in itself.
  • The Museum of Broken Memories. Not only is it a major Tear Jerker in many places, but many of the rooms can really get under your skin. Like the Dark Room, where you literally can't see anything and have to blindly grope your way around for keys and doors. Or the Door Room where you try, try, try to get out of a room before the door opens - the fact that you don't even know what the protagonist in that story is running away from just makes it even worse. The Fever Room, however, took the cake for me: you're meant to explore a maze of rooms for several keys. All the while, the protagonist babbles something about "water... rising..." and "drowning", and the more flashbacks you trigger for him/her, the more tilted and water-filled the rooms become, as if the entire place really is sinking, to the point where you can't even open some of the doors anymore. I got so freaked out by the feeling of being gradually hemmed in by the rising waters, of really being in danger of drowning, that I became increasingly agitated when I couldn't find the last set of keys and eventually turned off the game because I just couldn't go through that maze of too-black-and-white and ever-so-slowly tilting rooms accompanied by the narrative of a half-mad person one more time.
  • Drakan: The Ancient Gates gives us Yutaji the Flesh Mage, whose idea of a fun afternoon is to brainwash innocent women into marrying him, and then spend the first night of their 'honeymoon' skinning them alive. The fact that he's already a Body Horror on his own is made even worse when you first realize that he's already wearing their skins like a robe by the time you meet him.

Yutaji: Come, my sweet wife. Come and embrace your loving husband.

  • Limbo, an Xbox Live Arcade title. Heavy on the Minimalism and Scenery Porn, this game is basically LittleBigPlanet, perhaps injected with a little dose of Ico, and then served up with a heaping dish of Nightmare Fuel. Just a fifteen minute preview revealed bear traps that decapitate your character, and huge spiders that kill you or even wad you up into a ball of web that must wiggle and jump it's way away from death.
    • The Limbo spider. I'm not an arachnophobe, but I have never encountered a video game enemy I hated and feared more in a long time. It is made worse by the fact you are defenceless against it; all you can do is run from it and hope you can finally leave it behind. But every time you think you have, that you can safely put it out of mind, the soundtrack fades to a crackle and its long legs appear again at the left side of your screen, methodically working their way towards you. This is a creature who will stop at nothing to exact its revenge upon you- you know it is not driven by natural urges because you witness it flicking natives off its talons, casually demolishing a village in its pursuit of you, and you alone. Finally, finally it inadvertently damages itself so badly it only has one leg left, and is left pathetically twitching in the dirt. The game insists that you approach it. Does it try to plead for mercy? Does it try feebly to get away? No: Its very, very last action, what it uses its final vestige of energy upon, is to try to stab you and take you with it. A true horror of a creature.
  • LSD Dream Emulator has the Violence District. A place where crazy people wander the streets, dismembered corpses can be found in garbage cans, and the corpses of women dangle from the street lamps. Some of these corpses will fall off the lights, then proceed to get back up and slowly move towards you. There is also a crazy guy wandering the streets who will shoot you if he sees you. Oh, and the Grey Man, who has been stalking you all over the damn place? He can be found here quite often.
  • Truth be told, rarely would a free-to-play-on-the-Internet flash game (from NEWGROUNDS, of all places) be considered Nightmare Fuel, but... my god, I have found many, whether it's The Insanity about the mad vivisecting doctor, Heist and Heist 2 - A Thief's Nightmare (you'd think a thief wandering a dark rainy house wouldn't be that bad, right? HA.), or, may we all be saved, anything by Ben Leffler. Now, if Goliath and the Soothsayer wasn't bad enough, with the haunted house based on a Mars Volta album, his mini-game MADE for Halloween, Purgatorium, is much worse. Detailing the gruesome murders of a baby and woman at the hands of the father himself, (the man having bricked himself up in the baby's room and committing suicide by setting the house on fire), however you soon find out that, the reason you're in this haunted room is because YOU ARE THE FATHER AND ARE RELIVING THE DEATHS. But nothing, and I mean nothing, compares to the Exmortis series. Imagine the worst haunted house story you can, and being trapped in it. Now make it worse with particularly nasty graphics. Now include demons. Now toss on the cultist and apocalyptic end of all life as we know it by the hands of these unstoppable demons (to the point where nuclear warheads don't even work). To this day, I cannot walk down the hallway of my house at night or look out the window outside because the setting IS TOO DAMN CLOSE TO THE ONE OF THE GAME, and I still get a chill imagining the demon overlord from the game chuckling in my ear. So, living out in the woods in the hitherto spooky "room at the end of the hall"? All thanks to one little flash web game.
  • Gauntlet (1985 video game): Dark Legacy's stage music for Carnival of the Lost is composed of multiple parts, filled with circus-themed screams of death for your (un)delight. By simply listening, you can at least infer that an elephant goes berserk and mauls its trainer, a rollercoaster derails and sends the occupants crashing to their death (a derailed, burning cart is seen during this part of the level,) but the major offender is the last part, which plays at the end while you pass a performing stage. It starts out all happy-like... but then you hear a demonic laugh and the music goes very low and ominous. Then you get to listen as a guy screams as he is sawn in half, then a woman scream as her body is impaled multiple times. The worst part? The audience cheers this on.
  • Inversing music. In any game. Ever. Example: [1]
  • Heart of Darkness. The deaths in this game are enough to drive someone to nightmares, not to mention some of the monsters on here, plus what happens when one of Amigo's clan when he touches the ground of the Big Bad.
    • Here is a video with all of the potential deaths in the game. The Cliff Worms... *ugh*shiver*
  • The Breach is billed as your standard Zombie Survival game, but that's kinda selling it short. Your standard mooks are Zombies, yes, but quickly diversifies to hideously mutated creatures created by "The Yellow," not to mention the hallucinations your hero receives, it takes it to pretty disturbing levels, pretty quickly. Add the Apocalyptic Log consoles you find littered about, and the fact that rather than dying, you get partially mutated into one of the moth things littered about...yeah...The hallucinations get pretty freaky too, particularly the one that shows what will happen to the world if the yellow things ever get out—a man with a flayed skull and a tumor growing out of the back of his head, a hunchback with glassy eyes who constantly vomited blood, and a woman appeared to have tumors for breasts and a head growing out of her groin, all of them with horribly jaundiced skin. The ending's the worst of it all: you've destroyed the monsters and gotten back to Earth, but you're locked in an insane asylum, desperately trying to convince a psychiatrist that no, you haven't gone crazy, and yes, if the experiments continue horrible, horrible things will happen. Then you turn into a monster and apparently eat the psychiatrist.
  • Sam and Max: Season 3: The Penal Zone gives the viewer just a taste of what goes on in Max's brain when he teleports through psychic powers.

Burning Skeletal Max: Enjoying the ride, Sam? (demonic laughter)

    • During the boss battle in Beyond the Alley of the Dolls, trying to read Sam's future gives a black screen. Then a sudden white flash. Then a red-pink blur on blackness. Then white. Then a flash of long, needlelike teeth along the top and bottom edges of the screen (outside of the boundary of the vision). Then white. All accompanied by silence.
    • In the same game, a puzzle involves sending Sam to dark dimensions populated with elder gods and creatures beyond comprehension. He returns incoherent and mad and plagued by horrific visions, but soon recovers, saying it was only because he pushed everything he saw to the darkest suppressed corners of his mind. As he says this, the camera zooms into his eyeball and we see Sam falling into blackness, terrified and alone. This has to be done multiple times, because the puzzle is a trial and error puzzle.
  • Myth 2: Soulblighter. The undead are bad enough, but how about an undead that shambles up to your troops and explodes, paralyzing your troops or blasting them halfway across the screen. Oh yeah, and they scream while doing it. Well... it sounds like this. There is also the Myrkridia, a race of half-man half-wolf things. They attack with bare claws and the sound effect is them ripping off parts of your soldiers' flesh. Their attack is so fast that it paralyzes a soldier from shock and before he can react, he's hit by another until he dies. Right before they die, they howl and go berserk attacking anything in their path. The first level you see them in, they rip apart a group of troops about the size of yours in 30 seconds, and then nearly a hundred of these things howl in unison. I saved and quit and waited a while before I took them on. There are also the trow, which are giants of about 14 ft. tall. You can hear them before you see them, but it doesn't help; they walk faster then you can run. They can take out your toughest units in two kicks which break them apart.
  • The Asylum level of Painkiller. It's like Shalebridge Cradle lite, which is severe Mood Whiplash compared to pretty much all the rest of the game. It does not help that the ghosts there are invulnerable to Daniel's arsenal. Also, the pained grunt and blurred vision that occurs every time Daniel gets hit can be disturbing.
    • The expansion pack's first level is the Orphanage. There are only two enemies in this level that aren't EVIL KILLER CHILDREN!! Made creepier by the fact that this is one of the few minor stages with a story to it: this game takes place in Purgatory, and Children Are Innocent and must go to Purgatory when they die. This orphanage just happened to get demon possessed. Oh, and it's pitch black without your torch. Scary level props, too, such as a huge teddy bear with entrails coming out of a rip in its belly, and a bloody room full of cages with skeletons in them.
    • The Prison level in the original has a corpse on an examining table that disappears if you hit it too much, as well as a... thing writhing in an electric chair that also disappears once you find the switch to cut the current flow.
  • Even Civilization IV can be made scary, or at least really freaking ominous, as shown in the intro to the Beyond the Sword Expansion Pack. It's pretty much a history of warfare and communications, and the last part concerns recent times. JFK looks at a photo of a Russian plant stolen by a spy, sighs heavily, and picks up the red phone. Fade to an alarm going off at a nuclear missile silo, where the missile is lifted up and the silo doors slide open...
  • Drakensang II: The River of Time has the level in the Bosparanian ruins: Let's see, you must search an antidote for a friend of yours, and you have to look in this creepy dungeon full of skeletons, Big Creepy-Crawlies and mad amazons. Oh, and this mad druid informs you that a fierce demon dwells this ruins. It can be really frustrating the first time..
    • Also the Anphibian Kraken, the Water Dragon and Torlosh. Also The Temple of Efferd is quite scary...
  • Team Fortress 2: You see that nice, shiny sword the Demoman has? You may not realize it, but it's talking to him. And it wants heads.
    • Going hand in hand with Fridge Horror, consider the phrases some of the characters say "I'm back!" and "killing you is full-time job" These guys know they're continuously dying and coming back to life... exploding into pieces, all the screams of agony... just for your entertainment and for a mysterious lady/voice...
  • The sound effects of the Loputousu and Naga Spells in Fire Emblem 4 are creepy as hell... and can't be properly done on an emulator... The result of which is worse.
  • Neverwinter Nights. Hell, if you're going through the single player campaign, it's late at night, and you're near Charwood, save and quit. Even before you get into the castle, you've got a town where everyone appears to have cotton wool for brains (which is a lot creepier than it sounds), mildly deranged cultists, and oh yeah, a lunatic has gibbered something scary at you while you stand among the impaled corpses of human beings, then disappeared in a puff of blood-coloured smoke. Oh yeah, and there's a bodak waiting for you inside the castle, which is pretty bad news if you don't have good Fort saves.
    • The soundset in some parts of Charwood was creepy Lots of unintelligible screaming and muttering, with the only recognizable phrase being a high "Wake up. Please wake up?"
  • The online flash game KOLM starts off as a cutesy, if slightly melancholy platformer where you play a young robot trying to rebuild himself to please his unseen mother. As the game progresses, however, it gradually becomes apparent that something is very, very wrong as your mother's tone and words start becoming more and more harsh, and near the end flat out states that she intends to rule the world. Then you pick up the last plot item, and the lair the game takes place in starts to self destruct. Your mother has been leading you to your death this entire time. She's not even your mother. Your mother is dead. She's a computer program, and you used to be a human. Once you realize this, "Mother" has this to say.

You're right. I hate you. You killed me. You killed me. YOU KILLED ME. YOUKILLEDMEYOUKILLEDMEYOUKILLEDMEYOUKILLEDMEYOUKILLEDMEYOUKILLEDMEYOUKILLEDME

  • Space Funeral is a goofy horror-themed rpg that rushes up and down the Sliding Scale of Comedy and Horror like crazy and is lighthearted enough to be funny most of the time; however, reaching the Blood Cavern and hearing Ruth White read ominously the poem Spleen from Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil while all you can see is colored red and black... is anguishing, to say the least.
  • The Meat King's level from Hitman: Contracts. I really can't describe how many nightmares this will give you. Just look up a Let's Play of the game and you'll see the horror.
  • Echo Bazaar is a Twitter-powered, largely text based game with clever storylines and and interesting steampunk-ish atmosphere. Some of the descriptions, however, are pure nightmare fuel:
    • What are the Sorrow Spiders? The story goes that spiders drink from your eyes while you sleep. Sorrow-spiders bite off a whole eye. They get their name from the tears that flow from the remaining eye.
    • If your Nightmare quality reaches five, you will get this event: In the street, you pass a tall, cheerful man with a brisk manner, a stovepipe hat and a row of bright brass buttons down the front of his coat. He winks familiarly as you pass and spreads his hands: eight fingers. You've seen him before. Of course you have. He was beside your bed when you woke this morning. Or were you still asleep?
  • A lot of the Erebus levels in Age of Mythology were pretty cheesy, or else standard Fire and Brimstone Hell, but some parts are genuinely scary. For example, if you look at the ground, you can see that it's actually made of thousands of skeletons...
    • And the fact that you're used to attacking targets with massive, well-supplied and tactically balanced armies that have siege weapons and heavy myth units to blow the crap out of anything that bothers you is not helpful. In this level, you get your four heroes, a few one-use myth units, and a couple human soldiers. Yeah, they're enough, but that doesn't shake a sort of extreme nervousness and vulnerability that will keep you up at night.
  • Mission Force: Cyberstorm. Oh, I lost a unit? Shame, but no sweat off my ba- WHAT THE FUCK WHY IS THIS HAPPENING.
  • Oichi in Sengoku Basara 3: She looks like a pale, emotionless ghost woman that drifts around the battlefield like a broken puppet singing creepy lullabies. Her weapon? Huge hands made of utter darkness (sometimes with huge, shadowy nails driven through them) that can claw, crush and grab enemy soldiers, smashing them into the ground or dragging them down to hell itself. And her strongest attack summons a shadow being that carries her around sucking the life out of anyone in its path. Dulcis in fundo, her victory pose consists in her lying on the ground and playing with said demonic arms before they engulf her in blackness.
    • "COME TOGETHER AND WITNESS MY DREAM!"
    • On the other end of the spectrum there's the eerie sobbing noises she sometimes makes for no reason, or the way every time an attack misses her she'll suddenly whisper "Kill me!"
    • Mitsunari Ishida's constant death threats and vows of vengance against Ieyasu Tokugawa are very intimidating and unnerving. There is also the scene when Mitsunari discovers that Kanbe Kuroda has taken over Hideyoshi Toyotomi's castle. Yes, the castle of Mitsunari's lord. When Mitsunari finally encounters Kanbe, he gives Kanbe such a scathing diatribe that his pupils dilate and turn red. There are also his move "Reverence" where Mitsunari is overtaken by rage and dark energy, and his fighting style changes from quick and graceful to violent and bestial.
    • The Incident at Honnoji stage, where you fight a demonic Oda Nobunaga, is extremely unnerving the first time you go through it. Starts normally, with you running forth, fighting enemies, and trying to unlock a door by defeating a camp commander...only to be interrupted when all the enemies collapse in pain, dissolve in red energy, and vanish. Then you run around to five other camps, trying to keep this from happening, because as your officers note, Nobunaga is eating the souls of his soldiers. And if you're too late to beat a camp commander, the entire area erupts and kills all the enemies. And the kicker? Every time that happens, that's one more time you have to kill Nobunaga.
  • School Days has already been mentioned in the Anime section, but the TV series has NOTHING on some of the bad endings of the original game and/or its updated releases. Special mentions go to:
  • No one mentioned Do Don Pachi yet? Hell! One of the craziest scrolling shooters known to exist in the video game history, its trademark True Final Boss, Hibachi, will always give you nightmares and endless frustration, especially in DaiOuJou and DaiFukkatsu! Just listening to the music is enough to creep you out, too!!
  • Some of the iPod Touch/iPhone/iPad games are quite effective, including:
    • Hysteria Project. I confess that I haven't gotten far enough to even get a good grasp on the plot. You begin by being thrown in a room, arms and legs bound with duct tape (bear in mind that this is all in live action footage). You struggle out of the tape and through the door, and begin your escape through a misty woods. Pretty soon, you notice that you're being pursued by a figure in a hoodie, wielding an ax- which is a hell of a lot freakier than it might sound. When the figure catches up with you, you get schizo mindfuck hallucinations where he seems to be right next to you only to disappear. Then I was caught, which consists of your pursuer rushing at you, striking you with the ax, and a game over screen. Oh, did I mention that along the way you find your arm has a symbol cut into it (with a very realistic-looking wound)? Between this experience and an atmosphere Silent Hill 2 would be proud of, I haven't gotten up the courage to try again yet.
    • Dirt. You are a skeleton kitty named Dirt who finds himself (herself?) underground with no explanation. You tunnel down, finding jewels to collect and odd remnants of life, such as your water and food bowls, tents, camp fires, odd towers and missiles buried away, bottles, eyeballs, doors, drawings and messages to you. There're also the eyeballs with tentacles that do nothing, and the large centipede/worm creatures that don't attack you, but always watch you and talk about how much pain they're in, or ask you what eases your pain, or other such pleasant topics.
    • The Nightjar. You are the only remaining passenger onboard the titular dying spacecraft, and the only way to reach safety is through your sense of hearing alone - the game comes equipped with 3D sound and can only be played while wearing headphones - with your only guide being the crew member of another ship. Then it turns out the ship has been invaded by carnivorous aliens, and you were left behind as bait to allow the surviving crew members to escape. Now you spend the rest of the game tiptoeing through the ship's lightless corridors, trying to avoid the sounds of the guests finishing their meal.

"There's something in here. It's eating what I think is the first mate of the Nightjar."

  • Creature Shock wasn't able to make up its mind whether it was going to be a fairly straightforward Rail Shooter or a Boss Game. But it did have the spider...worm...things in the latter segment. If you hadn't figured out how to use your shields by the time you first encountered them, they would reduce you to a single hit point, and then scuttle up to the impossibly high ceiling. Once you tried to leave the room, they would descend, grab you, lift you UP to said ceiling, and you got a nice first person view of the dozens of them, just before the one that got you reared up and swallowed you whole. Did I mention that the entire time you're fighting these things, they make a chittering sound that sounds like nothing so much as a demented giggle?
  • The big ass spiders from Icewind Dale and Baldur's Gate, particularly the Phase Spiders which teleport randomly and the Sword Spiders which are incredibly fast and can slice and dice your party in a heartbeat. For added horror, Right-click on a sword spider. That sound is not natural.
    • The Temple of Ilmater in Lower Dorn's Deep. Hordes of the the most hideous and powerful undead and brainwashed priests inhabit the place, controlled by an idol of Poquelin. Not to mention Poquelin himself, when you meet him. Plus, you've got the music that plays, which complements the evil atmosphere.
  • Rayman has several, notably most of them in the second game.
    • The first is The Cave of Bad Dreams, to start off, the cave itself is made from nightmarishly grotesque faces, for most of the level, you're riding on skulls across what's pretty much the river styx. Next you have these wooden claw-like things that sweep out at intervals on the wall, if you get caught by one, it slams rayman around before dragging him into its hole, where he loses some health and respawns. Next up, we get the mini-guardians, these things aren't much of a threat on their own, but if they get close enough to Rayman, they'll swallow him whole and alive for hp loss and a respawn. At the very end of the cave, the Guardian arrives and attempts to eat rayman, the camera switches to Shaky POV Cam of his mouth as you attempt to escape him on a slide.
    • Next up, we have the tomb of the ancients, this place is...how do you describe it? Absolutely scarring for an eight year old, naturally, there are skeletons everywhere, the wall design is very similair to the cave of bad dreams, and has another river styx boat ride, this time you have to fend off zombie chickens on a very small barrel, once you get to the end of that area, you find a pitfall, once you get down there, the tempo of the music changes to Psycho Strings in a temp played to simulate something skittering towards you from the darkness, right before a Giant Spider attacks you, the most terrifying part of this level is, perhaps, The music.
    • Most of The Desert Of The Knaaren from the third game.
  • The fourth stage of Amagon, especially the mind-raping high-pitched music. And unlike other stages, it doesn't change when you power up or fight the boss. The bosses are really creepy too, especially the two-faced Lion Head, the Devil Tree, the Hippo Demon, and the Alien, along with the music that accompanies them.
  • Gemcraft Labyrinth has some pants-soilingly terrifying features that emphasize just how much of a bad idea going into the aformentioned labyrinth is. After Field A12, the first time you encounter a Demon's tomb, random levels will flicker in and out of view, along with a dark border with long black streaks reaching into the main field of vision of your UI. Sometimes it heralds the arrival of an Abomination, an Elite Mook you can kill for bonus XP. It all comes to a head after the second Gemcrafting Pylon, J10. Around wave 14, the flickering starts up, making your heart beat faster out of nervousness. As more waves pass, the flickering becomes more frequent. On wave 19, an ominous bell tone rings out as your screen is almost entirely consumed by blackness, and a gigantic black something slowly trails under the water...
  • Ever 17 gives us this wonderful description of what happens when your character tries to Set Right What Once Went Wrong only to run into a Temporal Paradox in a bad way
  • In Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare; you are walking along hoping that you don't get attacked by another dog, when all of a sudden you hear a scream and when you walk toward the scream, you hear a splash and then the game turns quiet for a second.
    • And the music.
  • The "Amongst the Dead" level in Medal of Honor: Underground. Narrow and dark corridors? Check. Walls of skulls and bones? Check. Creepy music? Check.
  • The Stationary Boss battle theme in Iron Tank is much creepier than the normal boss theme, mainly because of its use of the Locrian mode scale.
  • The entire final act of Police Quest: Open Season, especially the Dream Sequence with the Lady in Red and the creepy music, and the many Nothing Is Scarier moments.
  • The Ugly. To talk about the HONF present in this game would be to spoil the game, but there's a serial killer hiding in your house. He's already decapitated your father, leaving his gouged-out eye in the bathroom sink and his head in the toilet, and has locked himself in your parents' bedroom while he rapes your mother's corpse. And the key to the bedroom, which you must find to defeat the killer, is in your father's mouth. Did I mention that there are also far too many ways to alert the killer to your presence, all of which will result in you being killed in a variety of horrible ways? This game is not for the squeamish... or for anybody, really.
  • The Lovecraftian Interactive Fiction Anchorhead starts out with a yuppie and her new husband moving to a beautiful rambling mansion in a sleepy New England town. The first day of the story plays like a simple mystery story, only mildly creepy, about the origins of the house. Things ... go downhill, especially after you reach the basement.
  • Afflicted. Just ... Afflicted. You're a health inspector checking out a seedy bar in a horrible neighborhood. Just the health violations you find are seriously squicky, but then you start finding body parts. Worst of all is where you find the second hand.
  • The original 1997 release of JumpStart 4th Grade is a good example of Nightmare Fuel because the substitute teacher (a witch) turns children into scary, though goofy-looking, monsters.
  • The Original Quake had Rotfish, these nasty things rarely appear (once in Episode 2 and 3, a few times in 4 and in the path to the final boss.) They appear as.... well, rotting fish, yet still live, and make this horrible rattling noise like a snake...
  • In Space Siege, Cyborg enemies call dibs on your body parts.

Male Cyber: "I want his arm!"
Female Cyber: "I get his eyes!"

  • 98% of the Acclaim PC/Dreamcast/N64/PSX game Shadow Man was pretty much nightmare fuel, which you'd expect from a game centering around voodoo lore, a chilling, dismasl afterlife and a doomsday prophecy led by a terror from the Bible itself. However, the Playrooms no doubt freaked out anyone and everyone who played the game as it combined innocent infant bedrooms with blood-stained killing rooms while the laughing and crying of babies mixed in with the combo soundtrack of a music box and horror sounds. The Playrooms area was pure psychosis in video game form. The lairs of the Five weren' tmuch better, including a derelict, abandoned New York apartment building full of corpses and an attic full of enough blood to form literal pools and waterfalls. The underground London subways in which Jack The Ripper, I repeat, JACK THE RIPPER lives. And perhaps worse, a Texas prison where all the guards and most inmates have been killed and reanimated as headless zombies where a disco-obsessed nutball, a Vietnam war veteran and an insane doctor reside. Even the more mundane areas usually have some creepy factor to them. I forgot the final villain, who just happens to be the very same "Legion" that Jesus encountered in the Bible. He's a lot scarier here than he was back then.
    • The sequel, however, seemed less so, as it felt more akin to typical video game dungeons. BUT the main hero was now an emaciated skeleton ghoul rather than a muscle man with a mask in his chest.
  • Endless Ocean Blue World's Abyss level. Up until this point, it's been a game all about the excitement of exploration and the wonder of the oceans. Then it takes a deep curve into a pitch black underwater hell. It's a literal abyss full of alien creatures, many of them very large. Giant squids, sperm whales, megamouth sharks, all of these animals the size of cars or buses can suddenly creep out of the dark to scare the hell out of you. But the worst part is when you first arrive as part of the main story. You are literally clinging to the bottom of the ocean, in the pitch black, desperately searching for the next air station, as the intense pressure is causing your air to just about speed out of your air tanks. When you find the cave you have to evict it's current owner, a giant squid. And then, you find what you are looking for... The wreckage of a submersible, where the father of one of your dive partners died. Inside, you find an artifact and a letter. The father apparently spent his last moments in a cramped, non-functioning submersible writing a letter to his daughter, telling her that he loved her, among other heart-breaking things. It then mentions how he, when he is done writing the letter, will open the hatches to the sub and try to swim to the surface. From over a thousand feet down, where the water pressure will crush an unprotected human body into a fine paste. The game also takes plenty of time to pull you aside and explain with bright eyed enthusiasm how anything that dies in the ocean will float down here, to be picked apart by pill bugs the size of German Shepherds.
  • Covetous flash game, which can be found at Newgrounds. Seriously...what the f**k is THIS???? Basically, you can understand that is about a stillborn who resides inside his twin brother's body. The game is about you making your twin get more and more sick, as the stillborn sucks his life and eat up his life force, growing like a parasite inside his body. Each level of the game is more deranged, the twin alive getting visibly affected by the stillborn, who gets more and more agressive, and speaks more and more disturbing things. It DOES NOT help the fact that the graphics are pretty precarious. Oh, and since you play as the parasite stillborn, you get a good and a bad ending. Guess what happens in the good ending.....
  • Cave Story has plenty of nightmarish moments despite it's initially kid-friendly appearance. The True Final Boss Ballos, on the other hand, is where the game sheds any illusion that the game is at all kid-friendly and has you fighting a wizard (who's backstory is already Nightmare Fuel in and of itself) on top of a mountain of corpses, where every ground pound attack kicks up a shower of bones. Once you beat him, he jumps up into the ceiling and comes back down as a gigantic ball with a very creepy face, which you spend the rest of the fight pummeling until the face explodes, revealing a morass of screaming red faces underneath as it spawns hordes upon hordes of demons dressed up as angels while every surface of the arena (not counting the spinning platforms that orbit the boss now) is covered in bloody spikes. Is this seriously the same game with the adorable rabbit people that had you fighting a giant sentient toaster as a recurring boss?
  • Brink of Consciousness: Dorian Gray Syndrome features a madman who likes to kill people and then arrange their bodies as "artwork" in these big glass tubes at strategic points in his mansion. Two of the more "interesting" pieces are his girlfriend, who he stuffed into a giant orchid up to about mid-torso and an anonymous young man who he dressed up like Icarus and hung on the ceiling.
  • The otherwise saccharine Crystal's Pony Tale pits you against a disproportionately intimidating figure in the form of the Witch. The opening sequence featuring her is unrelentingly ominous, which is amplified by the chilling soundtrack, and the lack of motivation for the Witch's actions only adds to the unsettling sense of mystery surrounding her. You could look up any playthrough of the game on YouTube and it's a guarantee that around half of the commentators will bring up how badly the Witch scared them as a kid.
  • Surprisingly, Sonic Generations of all games has an instance of this (and yes, this does count since it seems Sega was meaning for it to be creepy). As Sonic's friends got turned into statues, their souls were left floating in a dark, endless void, and they're even aware that their bodies were frozen and turned into statues. Tails himself even says that he's going to have nightmares from it.
  • Cry of Fear is a mod for Half Life 1, and boy does it have some messed up enemies. The most twisted example is what can be described as an emeciated women in a white dress strung up like a scarecrow. It slowly inches along, but can force your character to commit suicide at the sight of it. If you're cocky and decide to knife it, a baby bursts from her stomach and assaults you with its knife.
  • SCP-087-B brings closed spaces, anxiety, and sheer darkness to the table. You just keep walking down stairs endlessly, with the sounds of heavy breathing keeping you company. That is until the game spawns you a playmate: a completely darkened humanoid with a white mask. This guy will either jump in to scare you, or chase you down the halls. The best part? IT COMPLETELY RANDOMIZES WHEN HE SHOWS UP.
    • And to anyone who has played the game, this just adds to it; "Don't look at me". Don't. Listen.
  • Eternal Champions and its set of scenery kills reached a level of violence and gratuituous cruelty that you rarely see even in more modern games. Pick your "favorite": getting torn apart/eaten by wildlife/supernatural beings, messily squashed by boulders, thrown into giant fanblades, burned or boiled alive, split in half by lightning, painfully dissolving into acid goop, falling into a trapdoor filled with multiple sets of giant buzzsaws, letting mysterious machines mess with your body...
  • Journey took everyone by surprise with its Nightmare Fuel. That game starts out peacefully, with the players exploring desert ruins, meeting companions and flying with the cute rag creatures...until you land in a dark cavern with some gigiantic flying stone serpents, each with a single glowing eye, who will attack you on sight. You will spend the rest of the level hiding in alcoves and praying they don't see you as they pass.
  • Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn have Feral Ones, which are Laguz (a race capable of transforming into hawks, tigers, giant cats and other animals) that have been locked into their transformed state with the use of a potion that makes them lose all sense of reason and also drastically shortens their life span. It can also be given to Beorc (humans) for the same effect, sans transformation. Bertram/Renning, a Beorc, is seen starting to go through this transformation, and he becomes a Death Seeker.

Bertram: Kill...me... ...KILL...M-ME...

  • The opening cinematic for Supreme Commander, once you understand a few things. The Infinite War has claimed billions of lives. It's a war, and this is the future. Not that bad, right? The only military personell are so elite, there probabally aren't more than a few thousand at any given moment. The discrepancy? Civilians caught in the crossfire.
  • Dark Cloud:The Dark Genie's stated goal before the boss fight, especially given its As Long As There is Hate speech. A being that exists outside of time will spread its influence across all ages, a "utopia of evil". Now if you've ever thought about eternity as being infinite linear time...actually it works even if eternity is the complete absence of time. To make matters even worse, It will have always been going to have succeeded.


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