Nightmare Fuel / BoxxyQuest: The Gathering Storm

Uh... guys? You alright down there?

BoxxyQuest is mostly a lighthearted story about venturing through the Internet, with plenty of satirical humor. But even this game has some genuine horrors.

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WARNING: All spoilers on this page are unmarked, as per wiki policy.

/x/

Chapter 5 is mainly set in /x/, the birthplace of CreepyPasta, so it’s no surprise that nightmares abound.

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• The house nearest to the village entrance is empty, with nothing strange going on inside except for a handful of black stains near a clock on the back wall. But if you inspect the clock, you'll find that you can go through it… and end up in a secret room with more of the black stuff coating the walls, and what seems to be a shriveled, mummified corpse in the corner. There's also this warped, ambient clock noise that can be quite chilling the first time you hear it.
• The local inn is staffed by a group of people... all of whom have bloody wounds on their body. They do not seem to notice this at all, and simply tell you not to investigate any sounds that appear at night, but there is clearly something off about them- one of them is even sobbing. At night, a distorted woman's voice is heard- if you investigate, you are attacked by a wraith. Lose to the wraith outside the inn, and it runs at Catie with a scythe and mutilates her while she screams, and we cut to black… and then Catie wakes up in bed, mutilated with a missing eye and arm, surrounded by the other undead guests, who promise to take care of her. The narration then tells us she remains trapped there for eternity, and that this is what happened to the others. Cue Non-Standard Game Over. If you beat the wraith and return to the hotel, the guests disappear completely, having been Dead All Along.
• The basement with the doll is one big, terrifying Mind Screw. There's a house in the village owned by a woman who acts just a little too nice for such a grim place. In her basement, there's an old doll hidden behind some boxes. If you pick it up, the screen fades while you hear the echo of a conversation between a mother and child. It ends with something entering the basement and ripping the child apart, complete with nauseating screams and squelching sounds. When the screen fades back in, the room is covered in blood and a new doorway has appeared in the upper wall. Go inside… and you end up back upstairs, having just walked in through the front door. Things get much weirder from there, with multiple looping basements, one of which holds faceless copies of your friends; a spiraling tunnel filled with echoing ghostly wails; a rope bridge that extends as you cross it; a flickering necropolis in the background; and the house owner melting out of the wall in a really grotesque way, while saying that neither of you will make it out alive.
• Taking a nap at the cabin in the woods and waking up to find the owner, who looks like Uboa, standing beside the bed. It turns out the entity is friendly, thankfully.
• The "Eternally Lost" area inside The Woods:
  • The "Eternally Lost" are a type of enemy found only on one screen in the deepest part of the forest. There are a few different kinds, but they're all severely mutilated and rotten women. Their wiki text calls them tormented souls who were "lured into the forest by a strange voice". Something is preying on women who get lost in these woods, and the end result is terrifying. The worst part? You're playing as a woman who gets lost in those woods.
  • Wendigrief is heavily implied to be the "strange voice" luring girls to their doom. It speaks to you on a long-forgotten path, while the background music slowly fades out, leaving you with just the ambient sounds of the forest. It says it wants to keep the wilderness wild and mysterious, and tries to coax you into killing yourself so that your despair can feed the trees. At the end of the path, you find a lonely grave marker, where Wendigrief appears in the form of Catie herself. The fake Catie taunts you, decomposing further with each line of text before finally attacking. And when you beat it? It just laughs and fades back into the trees. Whatever this thing is, it's still out there, and you did nothing to stop it.
    Wendigrief: Every day, the trees fill up with memories... The lingering stench of life. I can't stop the humans from killing this place, but I can slow them down. All it takes is a few wayward souls... Their loneliness... Their desire to disappear. People like you exist to be forgotten, to feed the darkness beneath these trees. Will you stay with me in the shadows?
• The freaky ambient noises inside the windmill, and the boss you fight in the basement. Something Awful is a hollow pile of slime around a dark void filled with yellow lights that might be eyes, and covered in twisted, bony, reaching arms. And it can inflict your party members with viruses that can't be cured with the game's normal antidote item. Worst of all, no one even seems to know what it is or why it's down there.
• The Bonus Dungeon, the schoolhouse, available after completing Chapter 5, is disturbing as well:
  • There are several fixed enemy spawns. They’re mostly not scary, just childlike drawings and toys come to life. But then you pass through a hidden cellar, pitch black save for the dim glow of a swinging lantern, and that's where you meet the Follymocker… this bloated, white worm thing with a dopey smile and blood pouring from its empty eye sockets. It uses a move called "Whispers" which is said to be it "telling you all the secrets you never wanted to hear". It also scales to the party's level, which happens with no other enemy in the entire game. Just what the hell is this thing, and why is it inside a school? To make it worse, a patch updated the music that plays during the Follymocker fight. Before, it was just a fairly generic "creepy" tune, but now it's barely even music at all, and sounds more like audio of someone suffocating to death through a crackling radio.
  • Another schoolhouse foe, Malady, initially just seems like a standard Cute Ghost Girl… until you read her enemy description:
    "Have you ever felt a wistful sadness while watching the rain? If so, that was Malady hovering just behind you, waiting..."
  • At the back of the school, there’s a staircase. If you go down it, it just keeps going down… and down… and down. Every landing is exactly the same as all the others… except one. At some point you’ll emerge into a huge room, filled with mummified bodies hanging upside-down from ropes that extend into the darkness. And when you go down the next set of stairs… it’s just another normal landing, like it never happened. Even worse, one of the hanging bodies – just one of them – is twitching. And the boss at the end is a pale-white-skinned monster with multiple heads.
• Thought after Chapter 5 and the schoolhouse, you would be done with /x/? Well, the Epilogue has you pay one last visit and has one last nasty surprise to throw at you. The Sky Tear, needed to access the Sky Abyss, is kept in a colorful, dreamlike grove in The Woods inhabited by cute, friendly fairies. But when you take the Tear, the enchantment fades - the grove turns back into murky forest, the music turns dark and depressing, and the fairies become Faded Fairies, mindless enemies with empty eyes, covered in dust or mold. Before she fades, one of them tries to assure you that it's worth it, but you can tell she's really trying to convince herself.

Deep Web

This Bonus Dungeon is a vast patchwork of Nightmare Fuel, and has something special for just about everyone.

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• You know you're getting in over your head when the entryway is a Paris catacombs-style hallway made of skulls. Things just get worse from there.
• The "blank" enemy encounter. At one point, after pulling a switch in an empty room, there's a Fight Woosh and the battle screen appears… but the battle music isn't playing and there's no one there. Eventually, this twisted little ghost fades into view while a garbled female voice starts endlessly repeating the phrase "I love you." The thing feebly tries to attack you a few times, and then the battle ends. No, it doesn't flee, or die, or anything like that, the fight just… stops. In the middle of a turn. You’re suddenly back in the cave, and this event is never mentioned again.
• One part of the labyrinth is an old mineshaft crawling with poisonous, zombie-like husks. To make it worse, try using your Enemy Scan on one of them: they used to be the miners, until they died in some kind of mysterious gas leak.
• Upon arriving in the lower halls, the very first thing you hear is an unholy shriek/moan coming from the other side of a chasm. That's where you need to go, but in order to make a bridge, you need to get the keys from five branching side paths, all of which are horrifying in different ways.
• One path is a lengthy, winding system of tunnels and waterways filled with nothing but giant spiders. Goddesses help the arachnophobes trying to complete this dungeon.
  • Further along the same path, there's a hallway styled like a burial crypt, where you'll find a Unique Enemy called the Vigil Keeper. His bio says that he keeps watch over the forsaken tomb, and hasn't aged a day since first touching the Lantern Stave. The same stave that he randomly drops, and which you might have just picked up.
  • The path ends at the entrance to an abandoned, eerily monochrome inn. The real fright comes when you enter an upstairs closet, and find it full of broken sex dolls, who seem to be dimly alive. They're all just drooling, staring vacantly, or pressing their faces into the wall, but when you grab the key and turn to leave, they all surround you and attack.
  • Their bio text has some very squicky implications. "It's unknown which of these dolls was the original, or which of the others her late owner became..."
  • If you lose the fight, they forcibly transform Catie into one of them.
• The Sukima Glitch, an enemy in the lower halls, is said to live in the gaps between polygons and feed on speedrunners who try to slip through them. It has a rather creepy Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl design as well.
• Another path leads to a lunar wasteland and the ruins of a small village. This is the home of the Trapped, miserable shambling corpses who say things like, "It hurts to move… but I can’t stop… or else… it will see where I am..." And when you pick up the key inside one of the houses, they all stop dead in their tracks, as still as statues, and no longer speak. You can’t help but feel like you just did something very, very wrong.
  • As you leave town, a message pops up telling you that "It suddenly feels like you're being hunted..." A few steps later, you're suddenly attacked by the area's miniboss, Trahald Prime, which can only be described as a gigantic mantis made of skeletons, with a battle theme that sounds like the auditory embodiment of blind panic. It's no pushover, either: it uses a move that can and will one-shot your whole party if you're not careful.
• The Passage of the Hateful Reliquary. It’s a long, long, long, perfectly straight hallway ending in a room full of broken statues. The statues plead with you to turn back and flee before "it" awakens and sees you. Behind them is a massive treasure chest sitting on an altar. As expected, it turns out to be a Chest Monster, but not just the usual kind. When it wakes up, the Hateful Reliquary grows hideous spider legs and chases you, relentlessly pursuing you all the way back down that very long hallway. And if it catches you, a Hopeless Boss Fight ensues. The only way to kill it is to lead it onto the collapsing Rope Bridge at the tunnel’s entrance and let gravity do the work.
  • Special mention goes to the "music" in this area. The tunnel has a low, unbroken Drone of Dread mixed with some kind of machine-like whirring. In the Reliquary's room, the music starts with ominous chanting before fading into a cacophony of frantic whispering, ethereal wails, and the distorted laughter of a baby. The thing's actual battle theme if it catches you? Pure, formless, oppressive noise.
• The kids' village is very unlike the rest of the Deep Web:
  • It's bright, sunny, perfectly safe, and your only challenge is a game of hide-and-seek. It's not scary at all! That is, until you start hearing what the kids themselves have to say. It seems they're trapped in the village, or at least scared to leave. They want to know if "she's" listening. There’s a building that no one enters, except when the "grown-ups" come. The innkeeper watches while you sleep, and some of the kids show signs of PTSD. Oh, and there's a hanged boy in one of the trees by the river. It’s just a background detail, not used for shock value or anything, but the fact it's there at all is unbelievably dark. Something is up in this town, and it’s very, very not okay.
  • You finally go in the forbidden house, and it just confirms your worst fears. There’s nothing in there but shackles, beds… and cameras. Thank God the ending confirms that the kids make it to safety when you beat the rest of the dungeon.
  • As you leave the village, key in hand, you meet something unexpected in the woods. It's Pale Luna, a spirit with the surreally frightening appearance of a giant floating head unraveling into eyes. She's almost certainly the "her" the children were referring to, and she’ll put up one hell of a fight to keep you from leaving. But the true gut punch happens if you go back to town after beating her, say to heal or something. The kids hate you now, and refuse to look you in the eye. Because Luna was one of them. She escaped in search of a power that would let her save everyone else, and you killed her. Because of you, the kids are now trapped in that awful place forever. ^note She's not really dead, and the kids do escape, but the guilt you feel in that moment is real.
• The hallways just before the Deep Web's final boss are unnervingly dark and scary, even though there are no enemies to fight. Also, the fact that you get down there by falling through the floor in the level above.

Other Horrors

• After Chapter 2, a white toadstool sprouts near the DeviantART train station. Touching it takes you to a code room, like the one in 4chan. A nice little Easter Egg, right? Well, there's a door in there, and it leads somewhere else - an eerie subway platform, haunted by forlorn shades waiting for a train that never comes.
  Shade: Is the train... ever coming...?
  Shade: We've... been waiting here... since... since...
  • If you revisit later with a certain item, you can find a Rare NES Game here, but the area itself is never even slightly explained.
• The Tower of Plot is a rather sinister area:
  • Lady Ny'agai, an Optional Boss found inside the Tower, simply because of how out of place she is compared to everything else in the game. Most of the enemies fit with the virtual reality setting, but Lady Ny'agai seems like a figure pulled straight from a Grimms' fairy tale.
    • She first appears in an in-game short story called "The Grey Promise." It tells of a boy who runs to find help after bandits attack his home. He gets lost in the woods, and finds a seemingly endless cobblestone path shrouded in mist. A veiled lady approaches him, twitching like a corpse and smelling of the grave. She kneels down and promises to protect the child… and then the little girl is no longer afraid. ^note This was likely her transforming the boy into a Ny'agai, who are all female, which she can do in the battle against you.She takes her "mother's" hand, and together they vanish into the fog.
    • You can find this path in the Tower of Plot's secret area. It's populated by Ny'agai – little girls in gothic dresses with twisted, eldritch faces. The grey lady herself waits at the end, and if you fight her, she'll use attacks that turn your party members into more Ny'agai. Afterwards, if you win, she just walks away into the mist without saying a word…
  • In the Tower of Plot, you first have to help out a village full of people getting ready for a harvest. Seems innocent... until they decide to blame all their problems on a witch and force you to pick who to condem to a burning. Then they all turn into skeletons and chase you, with frantic music in the background.
  • Then you get a look at one skeleton in particular. It's the girl from earlier who denied knowing what happened to her missing friend. She’s got two skulls, and what looks like a second ribcage partially fused into the first one. If you go back and pay attention to her dialogue, the first letters of each sentence spell out "HELP ME." The implications are unsettling, to say the least.
  • Remember the cute thief girl? The one you can either expose or let go? Her skeleton comes sprinting at you in the last area, at least twice as fast as any of the others.
• The Astral Error, a secret area in the 4chan code room, which can only be accessed if you got the k ey (not a typo, the item is actually spelled k ey with a gap in between the k and e) from the only time you visit Twitch and waited until after Chapter 6 to do the sidequest involving the fourth sibling. You enter a secret room from the 4chan code room, finding yourself in a glitchy area where Catie's sprite first begins walking backwards, then slowly decomposes. At the very end, you meet not_intended, a Humanoid Abomination who speaks in bizarre glitch text and attacks Catie, before turning into Nihilerror, an entity that has a creepy design with black-eyed faces sticking out like a chariot. Once you beat her, she is never mentioned again (though it is implied she is an angel of Virtua).
• At first, Amelie just seems like a name that pops up in a few weird places. But if you find a secret key (bet Lady's Breath at the arena), and take it to an even more secret door (in the forest near the great bridge to Wikipedia), you'll unlock an area that's all her own. It's an old cathedral, with the inside set up for a funeral. There’s a letter next to the casket, written by Amelie to someone she loved. It's implied that someone is you. Read it here◊, if you dare.
  • In the church's graveyard, there's a path leading off into the woods. It goes to a small, dead-end area with a Heartbeat Soundtrack, and then… THIS◊. Some kind of grinning, serpent-like thing, surrounded by… what even are those? Statues? Corpses wrapped in tentacles? Whatever they are, they can't be interacted with in any way. As far as anyone can tell, this place serves no purpose except freaking the player the hell out.
  • It's strongly implied by Esoteraphim that Lady Ny'agai has some connection with Amelie, or may actually be Amelie herself.
• When you leave Tumblr, and finally see just what has become of the Internet during your absence. There’s nothing left but a sea of endless nothingness, swarming with Overtaken. And then you see one of the few remaining islands get erased before your very eyes.
  • The Overtaken in general. Mindless hulking slabs of ash and corrupted code that used to be people just like you. And when they’re defeated, they seem to melt (and in some cases bleed) before returning to normal.
• Her World has an enemy called "What Could Have Been", which looks like two female figures looped into a ring. Here’s what Wiki It has to say about them:
  "The likenesses of Catie and Arianna, twisted together in endless pain. The gap in the middle shows fleeting glimpses of futures that never came to pass.
  • What exactly would have happened if Catie had joined Arianna like she wanted?
• Watching Arianna get corrupted by the First Internet code. She tries her best to fight it, but it's no use, and she's left weakly begging for help just before her final transformation.
• The eBuy Holiday Sale quest sits in this odd line between funny and disturbing. It starts innocently enough- there is a Holiday Sale at the eBuy store near YouTube, and you go to celebrate. Then, a little after you get there, everyone dissapears and all the lights go off. You cannot leave until you go to the top, where you meet the Spirit of CTH'RISTMAS an entity that is a giant monster shaped like a Santa hat- it's more threatening than it sounds, not at all helped by how totally random it is.
• Stratum 4 of the Sky Abyss, the Plagued Garden, has a very uneasy and alien feel to it, with black clouds, a bizarre technicolor sky, and somber music, complete with egg-like structures that erupt into previous bosses in the game. It certainly doesn't help that you have an echo encounter with Wendigrief there, and the encounters with Legion and Virtua send Anonymous and Catie, respectively, into panic.
• The PC Ending is one of the most disturbing things in the game. After beating the Plagued Garden and going to the Bell Cave, you can enter a secret area that is similar to the doll house basement necropolis, with eerie fog, hanging lights, and unsettling music. While walking there, the party members beg you to turn back because they have a very bad feeling, with Tyalie outright Addressing the Player to get them to turn back. Once you get to the bottom, you reach a save statue that does not have any more tears to cry if you decline to save. Then a headless statue makes you answer questions related to the various things in the game while tense music plays. If you get the questions wrong, the game just closes- get them right, and you are transported to a dark grey city landscape implied to be the player's own reality. Then Esoteraphim, a sinister and mysterious Mechanical Abomination, gives a speech about art, tells a story about buttercups and a boy who loved to play with Amelie, and attacks the party- the resulting battle is the hardest in the game. Once the entity is beaten, you are transported to a house where you are a butterfly reading notes about unseen people, then shut down a PC, and end up in a field with buttercups where what is heavily implied to be Amelie greets you. Then the game ends. The entire thing is disturbing mostly because of how little sense anything makes.
• Legion, the Greater-Scope Villain. The whole game hypes him up as an utterly terrifying presence as a giant Draconic Abomination who was responsible for turning the First Internet into a Death World, then broke apart into a Hive Mind that terrorized the people of the Internet, and when he finally arrives at the very end, he does not disappoint. His few minutes of screentime and subsequent battle, wherein he speaks to Catie about his desire to Kill All Humans and tries to forcibly merge with her, are far darker and more intense than anything else in the game.

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There you are...