Fable (video game series)/Nightmare Fuel

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • From the first game, when you find out about Lady Grey's origins. In order to come to power as Bowerstone's mayor, she trapped her sister in the basement of her mansion and left her to die.
  • Mourningwood isn't a particulary nice place either, filled the the souls and bodies of apparantly hundreds of soldiers, and Logan sends anyone he doesn't like there because he doesn't expect them to survive.
  • Silverpines is also pretty bad, dark, forbidding, suspiscious, filled with balverines, sound familiar at all?
  • The Perfect World.
    • For regular Nightmare Fuel try Homestead/Serenity Farm. It's all nice and cosy until you look up at the sky... (also the rather creepy glitch that occurs if you look up and to the left of the windmill)
  • Try lingering in Terry Cotter's Army. It's bad enough on its own but after reading his final journal...
    • Knocking down all the suits of armour makes you feel a lot better.
    • It might even be a example of Nothing Is Scarier or Paranoia Fuel: "Any minute now, these statues will come alive and kill us."
      • The stupid dog kept growling at them...
    • And it gets worse in the See the Future DLC. You stumble across a cave filled with the suits of armor, including a skeleton with a journal surrounded by them, all apparently looking at the body. The journal's creepy enough...but a few of the suits explode and are revealed to house the blue shadow creatures.
  • Most of the See the Future DLC has some manner of Nightmare Fuel in it, especially the cursed snowglobe. When you start off, it's just sorta-weird naked guys who look like they're painted funny colors and drain the color for everyone/everything. No one seems to be dead, or even in danger, just annoyed. But later, you find a schoolhouse, and you can read the teacher's book...that says she found one of her students in such horrible condition that she only describes the amount of blood splattered everywhere, while her classmates stood grinning around her. Then she decided it must have been an accident.
  • In the same section of the DLC, one of the lengthy key puzzles leads you to find an invitation from 'Chesty.' You find the house with the 'by invite only' sign, and go inside. Immediately, there's a long table with long-dead skeletons sitting in the seats, and coat racks with similar skeletons. There's a note from Chesty saying how happy he was to spend time with his super best friends, and something about a mirror...enter the floating mirror upstairs, and you find a fog enshrouded area with a bottle of red dye...underneath a suspended skeleton, contorted by almost Hellraiser-like chains that extend into the fog.
  • The first Hobbe cave in Fable II. You help a man there terrified of going in to rescue his son, who has been kidnapped by hobbes. He mentions then that he had always heard stories that hobbes were all once small children who were captured by hobbes and turned into them. This is the start of a variation of Apocolypse Log that is heard from afar as the player runs around another path to get to the man's son. The sounds and the fate of both the boy and his father are enough to make anyone feel like they want to throw up... Not to mention there is no way to stop it from happening, even if you fry his son with willfire
  • The first encounter with the Crawler and its spawn is quite well done for a non-horror game. It starts with a fight with the glowy-eyed shadow creatures, then every moment you look around, you feel it's onto you. Except it isn't. It is only when it has lulled you into a false sense of security that it attacks again, harder this time.
    • And it does that TWO times, creating a very strong paranoia fuel for the player. Very unnerving to play when it's the middle of the night.
    • It's lines don't help much, especially not "You are tainted..." and the infinitely echoing hiss "He is ours. He is ours." And as for what it does to Walter, and the shop windows during the climax, words can't describe.
    • It's the way Walter starts freaking out the longer you spend in the Crawler's temple when you reach Aurora. At first he tries to be brave and shrug off the general scariness of the temple. Then he starts to get more and more unnerved the farther in you go as you're exposed to horror after horror. By the time you reach the end he's SCREAMING TO GET OUT OF THE DARKNESS.
    • The Crawler infects the world with Darkness that appears to eat away at the world, he even manages to do it to the sanctuary, which pretty much means, NOWHERE IS SAFE!
      • Go through game. Reach final battle. Need to pause for whatever reason. Scream.
    • Are you blind yet? ARE YOU BLIND YET?
      • He is ours.
  • Fable II: During the third chapter, "The Hero of Skill," there's a subquest that involves buying Brightwood Tower, and spending a night there. This troper, being somewhat Genre Savvy, expected a nightmare sequence or Black Bug Room...but what actually happens chilled even him to his core. Curious? You enter a Dream World ruled by a living treasure chest called "Chesty," who puts his 'Super Best Friend' through a gauntlet of "little children," (hobbes), his other Super Best Friends (Hollow Men), and doggies (balverines) before finally sending you home with the horribly depressing message 'we'll be so lonely without you. And die.' Not scary enough yet? OK, how about the fact that it's a Psychopathic Manchild chest?! Every time it shows up, it tells a delightful story about games it likes to play...like shooting the legs off an adventurer and letting him crawl to what he thinks is safety but is actually a swamp infested with flesh-eating insects? Quote: "That's one of my favorites. Maybe we can play it sometime!" * SHUDDER* . You can even do it twice.
    • Likewise, the Sunset House optional quest in the third game has you finding a ruined mansion in a remote location. At night, though, the beautiful ghost of the mansion reappears, and you might manage to return it to the real world. THIS IS A BAD IDEA. The house is home to a creature of terrible evil, that drove the old owner to suicide by burning down the house in an effort to stop it. His skeleton is dangling from the ceiling as you enter. The bedroom is worse. DON'T GO TO SLEEP. CHESTY IS WAITING FOR YOU. It wants to play chess on a giant chessboard with living statues, but decides to just kill you instead when it gets bored of that. Then it gives you the house. Except it's probably still there, lurking in the unseen corners.
    • One of the areas behind a Demon Door from the second game, the Winter Lodge, is, at first, a rather pretty, snowy landscape. At the end of a short road is a rather idyllic-looking lodge, nice and normal. You walk in the front door, and cue Scare Chord, and you're suddenly in the burned-out husk of the same building, with skeletons and mummies lying around. And the path outside is suddenly lined with cages hanging from trees.. Worse, there is absolutely NO point to this, not even a single enemy shows up and there's no stated reason for it.
      • There is another Demon Door in Fable II, Memory Lane with a chest at the end of a small, grassy road... lined with tombs, gnarled trees, and other junk. Off to the side is a wooden cabin you can't go into. If you look in the window, you see that the cabin is stuffed with white statue-like versions of characters from the game staring out at you. It doesn't help that the area is totally silent.
      • The golden gates in Fable III. Look at them closely for long enough and you will notice something... uncanny.
      • The Terry Cotter's Demon Door is part paranoia fuel as well. After you walk in you're treated to a nice house. And then you find Terry's bedroom... and then you have to go to the cave at the back to find the treasure and OHGODNO.
    • The first appearance of the 'new, improved' Balverines is quite unnerving, too. And Hollow Men in general. And finding out what Hobbes really are: transformed children. And Lady Grey's tomb, with the beetles under the sand. And then there's the banshees, who attack by sending shadowy Creepy Children after you, taunting you in their spooky voices all the while. For a relatively silly game, it sure doesn't skimp on the Nightmare Fuel.
      • The Banshees. God. They whisper to you about things your character has done in the past.
    • Wraithmarsh. Period.
      • The fact that the theme is essentially a Nightmare Fuel version of the original Oakvale theme doesn't help...especially as you look out into the ruins of the village itself and realize that one of the best towns in the first game is nothing but a haunted ruin...
    • Hollow Men are particularly bad as you can hear the wisps entering the ground but you can't see where they are.
      • Especially when you wander near a Gargoyle. You know they can't hurt you, but sweet mother of God they don't help.
      • "Oh, what are ye gonna do? Shoot me? Oooh! I'm so scared! Ooooh!" Grrrrrrrrrr...
  • In the late game of Fable III - Treasury Value: 0/6,500,000. Projected Civillian Casualties: 6,500,000.
    • It gets worse when you go into minus figures while trying to be a good guy.
      • You think that's bad? Try going into the final battle when you're in minus figures and walk the streets of the towns afterward. No shops are open, there's nobody walking the streets.. Why? Because you tried to be a good person and almost everyone died for it.
  • In Fable I, beyond the demon door outside the rose cottage (the one you have give a romantic token to), is a cave furnished with a four poster bed draped in ribbons and such.... ...and a rack, cage, head vice, and chains attached to a wall. Even worse, this is outside the house of the woman whose grandson you save from the hobbe cave, whom the kid implies abuses him.
  • The ending to the quest Darkness Incarnate. After rescuing Walter, as you lead him out of the tomb, you are pursued towards the light by the Crawler hissing after you.
  • In Fable III, the Crawler's 'Children'. Play Minecraft for a little bit, meet up with some Endermen and you'll see what I mean...

The Crawler: Darkness shall spread across the world...

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