Nightmare Fuel / Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag

You're gonna need a bigger boat...

As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

• We find out what happens to Desmond after Assassin's Creed III. Abstergo uses his DNA to research his lineage (Sample 17). How exactly do they do that? They take his blood and saliva from his dead body. Generous donor, indeed. It just goes to show that Desmond can't escape Abstergo even in death.
  • They also talk about material extraction, which presumably means they took things like organs (or at least tissue) during the autopsy as well. Nice thing to do to the guy who died saving the world...
  • By extension, it's shown what touching that artifact did to Desmond: it burned his skin black, and fused the bones together in his right arm. "It will be painless..." Yeah, NO.
• The Subject Zero tapes as well, which deal with an early experiment in Animus technology from the eighties which does Arc Welding in explaining how you can relive the past without being a direct relative. What is scary is when researcher Aileen Bock decides to start testing it on herself and her growing (yet justified) paranoia that that asshole Dr. Vidic is stealing her research. Pretty creepy.
• Adéwalé explaining life as a slave on a sugar plantation to Edward and how he was forced to handle boiling sugar during his time there, either getting to witness firsthand the pain it caused to him or someone else.
  Adéwalé: And let me tell you something, Breddah. Boiling sugar is near the hottest thing on this Earth. Just a touch on the skin will stick like birdlime and burn on, leaving a terrible scar.
  Edward: Jaysus.
  • Truth in Television: any chef will tell you the thing they fear most is molten sugar. Knives will stop. Pots will bounce, and water will splash off. Sugar will cling to you and burn to the bone.
• Blackbeard intentionally evokes this, of course. Since this particular version of the legendary captain isn’t very fond of using violence to get what he wants (though he’s more than willing to when push comes to shove), he’s cultivated an image to make it seem as though he’s the devil himself, here to haunt the seven seas. When he first dons his iconic ‘flaming hat’ to show off to Edward, it’s Played for Laughs at Steve Bonnet’s expense. However, when he’s terrorizing the Charles-Towne citizens he captured before Edward arrives, we see exactly how Edward Thatch built up such an impression that it still lasts centuries later.
  • The buildup during that mission only makes it worse. First, you find Hornigold repairing his ship, apparently after a fierce battle started by Blackbeard. After that, you sneak through a heavily-guarded patch of water, having to track down Blackbeard by following a path of wrecked navy ships and survivors. Even worse, it's foggy and you can't see what's in store ahead of you...
• The Mushroom Samba of Edward Drowning My Sorrows has a lot of unsettling images, but the scariest is Edward swimming underwater to the surface, covered with dead bodies and sharks feasting on them. Woodes Rogers telling the story of "The Eagle and The Jackdaw" is particularly unsettling, and the whole thing has a weird Far Cry or BioShock Mind Screw vibe.
  • The "Eagle and Jackdaw" fable is told at what seems to be a party, where three targets show up in distorted Eagle Vision color. The moment you assassinate them, there's a flash, and they turn from soldiers to normal civilians/Assassins while the other guests just surreally point at you. And a detail easily missed is the hanging corpses on the right side... some of whom look suspiciously like Edward's friends, including Caroline.
• Black Bart is himself highly frightening, especially when he gives his Rousing Speech to his crew; despite comporting himself like a pirate, he's more comfortable and less funny and odd looking than the other pirates, mostly because of his Dissonant Serenity, even in his death. It's mostly the coldness in his eyes though and his nihilistic views that allow him to betray his allies and kill with flippant glee. He's every bit the scary, Satanic pirate that people imagine them to be, complete with Dark Messiah appeal.
• Most, if not all of the creatures that inhabit the water.
  • Diving for shipwrecks? Everything tries to kill you. But the worst are sharks, especially the great white that makes a flooded mineshaft its lair; the game makes a point of telling you to avoid that particular one, as you won't be able to escape if it spots you. This one is especially unnerving as it's encountered in a smugglers' cove, and by that point in the game most players only think to expect sharks when exploring shipwrecks.
    • Almost worse are the moray eels that hide in holes and suddenly grab you...
    • The environment alone is terrifying: You're swimming along the ocean floor and most of the time the only air you have is what you can hold in your lungs. And several times you have to navigate underwear tunnels and caves, a terrifying idea for anyone even mildly claustrophobic or thalassophobic.
  • Harpooning? Be prepared for sharks to jump right at Edward, or whales to nearly fall on you.
  • One mission has you sneaking through a swamp at night, and one conversation mentions how crocodiles roam the waters. If you miss this and decide to take a shortcut through the water, you'll easily miss them sneaking up on you, and suddenly you're being attacked, barely able to see what's going on.
    • One poor NPC isn't even safe on land in this mission. As you move through trees and rafters to keep up with a group of soldiers rowing in a boat, one comments that he's certain there's something in the water following them. They approach an outpost and another soldier walks up to them for a moment to confirm their status. Suddenly, a crocodile explodes from the water and grabs him, dragging the poor guy under before anyone can even try to do anything. You're probably just as scared as the other soldiers at this.
      "It took him! It took him! I told you!"
      "Just row, for godsakes! Row!"
      "I told you there was something! Didn't I tell you? Oh God..."
  • Hunting big cats can easily turn in you being the hunted. Especially when you think you are safe in a tree, only to realize that they can climb trees too, and a lot faster at that.
• The mission from Sequence 2: A Man They Call Sage, gives you a good taste of how scary it can be to be on the receiving end of an Assassin attack. You start the mission escorting your Templar allies as they take the sage to the governor's castillo. The thing is, if you listen carefully you can hear the trademark sounds of Assassins shanking nearby guards and, if you look above/behind you at the right times, you can see them darting in and out of cover as they close in. Suddenly, you have a lot more sympathy for the guards you slaughter mercilessly on a regular basis, because you're essentially playing one of those escorting guards!
• In the modern-day segment of the game, what John / Roberts / Aita had planned for R-L. And it would have succeeded if Juno inexplicably decided not to do so.
  • From that same scene, Juno's face.
  • The moment when you wake up after having been drugged by John and find that you are Alone with the Psycho. Never before have you been more relieved to see Abstergo guards coming in with guns drawn.
  • Not to mention the creepy, creepy sticky notes left all over the place.
    • And what message do the sticky notes carry? Nothing less than the Manifesto of the Instruments of the First Will, a newly minted cult that aims for nothing less than the total enslavement of humankind to the First Civilization survivor Juno. Voluntarily. "We Surrender", indeed. Even if it's implied that it was partly his doing, the thought remains creepy nonetheless...
• Consider that every time you ignore a person to be rescued at sea while sailing about looting chests and doing missions, you're condemning a man to die by exposure or sunstroke on the open sea, when all you had to do was sail their way and press a button.
• The final mission at the Observatory is this. When Edward arrives, the Spanish soldiers led by Torres have been busy, murdering the local Taino people. The way through the jungle, the pools, the streams is filled with corpses, burning huts, settlements and soldiers about to execute captives. All of a sudden Torres is not so Affably Evil anymore.
  • Then there's the Observatory's 'defenses'. They look like normal rows of light until you step into them, whereupon you're essentially burned alive instantly. Anyone who gets thrown into that light are completely disintegrated with only a faint red mist left. And for true Videogame Cruelty Potential, the optional objectives (which via Animus mechanics, we know the real Edward actually did) involves throwing no less than four guards into them.
  • Furthermore, during this mission, one Spanish soldier who has been injured is lying off to the side before you even enter the room. Though Edward may not be able to understand him speaking in Spanish, he's clearly terrified, pleading along the lines of "Please, I don't want to die!"
• The Templar practice of manipulating and hiding events throughout history is taken to new heights in the fourth title. The Animus allows a level of propaganda to reach the general public unlike anything before.
  • Their monopoly on Animus technology allows them to edit and alter existing real life footage to give the impression they desire. Namely vilifying the Assassins and portraying themselves as champions of order. It's one thing for a historian to say this is how history went down, it's still only an opinion, but genetic memory changes that. Any Templar backed account of history will be seen as indisputable fact.
  • They have begun the character assassination of the Creed's heroes, the evil bastards they stopped being lauded as heroic martyrs and are using their very memories against them. It feels a lot like the villains have already won.
• Charles Vane's Sanity Slippage. It was funny at first, seeing him babble and become totally incapable of hunting anything, but then he gets guns and grenades and starts hunting YOU. And then he starts singing "Down Among the Dead Men" as he laughs.
• The Legendary Ships have a somewhat sinister air about them. Because you're not allowed to board them, you never see or encounter their crew, making it almost seem as it the ships themselves are alive and out for your blood. Especially El Impoluto whose main tactic is to chase you down and ram you into submission.
• The DEFY trailer has a whole bunch of nightmare fuel in it as you get to go up through the decks of a Spanish ship that's under attack by pirates. We get to see the bottom deck rapidly filling up with water, while sailors who are trying to escape are trapped underneath by a Spanish officer who's slashing at other crewmen with his sword and even shoots one, while on the top deck the rest of the crew is rapidly overwhelmed, with one particularly unlucky crewman being trapped by other pirates and screaming in fear; the camera cuts away just before he puts his flintlock pistol in his mouth and pulls the trigger. Really shows how terrifying Edward's crew probably is to other ships.
• A bit of Fridge Horror, but after John asks you to hack the computer in Olivier's office, he distracts the secretary by saying something that makes her run in the side hallway - if you go back there afterward, she's nowhere to be found. Remember the unfinished part of the building where you had to ride the window washer platform to the office? Did she end up around there, possibly falling to her death via an 'accident'? We may never know for sure.

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