Nightmare Fuel / Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth

• The Eaters. They are a race of Eldritch Abominations whose one and only purpose is to consume everything in their path, and they only manage to get worse as the game progresses. Turns out that they occasionally turn up in Eden and consume people's avatars, destroying their mental data and leaving their physical body in a (seemingly endless) coma, but they eventually start appearing in the real world as well, where they start feasting on the people of Tokyo in earnest. The feeding process is thankfully usually shown as them just kind of hitting people with their tentacles... except in two cases; namely, Yuuko and Yuugo getting attacked by them. The former gets an Eater sicced on her while bound and blinded, and the following boss battle is against an Eater with her partially merged into its body and the boss itself keeping her bound, blind, gagged and conscious the entire time, while the latter gets overtaken and consumed by an Eater at the tender age of eight-ish, right in front of his friends.
  • The Eater's forms are weird and disturbing to the extreme. All of them have very strange movements, and it often looks like they haven't been fully textured or there's a glitch in the model's code.
    • Its first form is an ordinary Eater, a strange squid thingy that very obviously moves in ways it shouldn't. Its eye is very twitchy and has a laser attack that eats at data.
    • Its second form vaguely resembles a human made of tendrils and eyes. It moves in a very strange way, like it has too many joints or something.
    • Its third form is called Eater Eve and is fused with Yuuko. In this form, it's a giant spider that has Yuuko restrained to it: arms and legs shackled, blindfolded, ballgagged and possibly worst of all: totally conscious and aware of what's happening. When it uses its special move, you can audibly hear her screaming in agony from behind the gag she's wearing and struggling furiously to get free to no avail. An early sketch◊ of Eater Eve shows that it could potentially have been even more disturbing, incorporating some vaguely insect-like features and a bloated abdomen filled with what appears to be literal demonspawn.
    • Its fourth and final form, Eater Adam, is actually Arata. It's a strangely humanoid figure with swirling patterns inside its almost Slenderman-esque body, with hair made of tendrils. It really doesn't help when it uses its special attack, where hundreds of spikes burst from the ground almost like the Dragon Teeth from Mass Effect.
  • When you free a victim from an Eater, you get transported to this strange black and white worldwith what looks like hundreds of swirling tendrils flying at the screen. It's very quietly disturbing.
• The end of Chapter 10: To the Promised Land, starting with The Reveal of Yuugo being Yuuko in disguise. Followed by the secondary reveal that Rie Kishibe can control the Digital Shifts and the Eaters. And then she forcibly logs Yuuko out, and shows the third reveal that Yuuko's been strapped to a huge terminal that allows Rie to read her memories to discover how to control the Eaters. And then when the Protagonist Connect Jumps in to save Yuuko, Rie unveils the fourth reveal that she already knew about the Connect Jump ability and then forces the player character to Connect Jump to Shibuya against their will sporting a terrifying facial expression for a moment while her true self, Crusadermon, flickers behind her for a moment. And to make matters worse she then begins painfully extracting Yuuko's memories, leaving us with a fade to black and Yuuko's bloodcurdling scream of agony.
• After the Digital and Real Worlds begin to merge everyone is saying it's dangerous outside, but it's always in a way that sounds like a wild rumor. Then Chapter 16 hits, and you go into Odaiba. Not only is it on fire, but it actually looks remarkably like a war zone. Its appearance hits REALLY hard, especially since the only hints that the Digital World is there is bits of floating glitchy data before now. And Examon is here. It's absolutely covered in holes, areas where Eaters have eaten away at it. Your first glimpse at its in game model shows that it's about the size of a skyscraper. You, the character, are about as big as one of its claws. When in a talking cutscene, its model takes up almost the entire screen. Its wingspan alone can almost entirely surround the rooftop you stand on. If you've been really grinding levels, by now you'll have a 70-90 level Digimon that can deal 2000 damage in a single hit, and that does almost NOTHING against this guy. FIVE ROYAL KNIGHTS show up to fight him, and barely land a scratch. Its full title? Examon the Dragon Emperor. Everyone who knows of it will basically state it's insanely strong. It is, without a doubt, the strongest of the Royal Knights.
  • Leopardmon's ultimate goal? Use the power of the Digital Shifts to create a hole big enough that he can digivolve to something BEYOND Examon's power. Kyoko basically states that if it were to happen, it's game over.
• A request during Chapter 16 takes place during the night in Nakano. Seeing the usually packed shopping center almost totally empty is more than a bit terrifying. If you try to walk past Kenji on the first floor, he mentions that it's a "Bad direction to head in at this hour" and gives no further explanation.
  • The legends you deal with are equally creepy. Sadly, the true culprit to all three is just an old man, but still...
    • The first involves a man who got broken up with and murdered his ex-girlfriend's new boyfriend and mailed bits of him back at a time. This didn't work, because the girl was raising him from the dead using black magic. So the man attaches the last leg to his own body and wanders with it attached to his body forever. The fact that this is the backstory of a line of dolls doesn't dull how disturbing this is.
    • The second is derived from Teke Teke, an apparition who lost her feet in a train accident. She can move up to 150 kph with her arms alone, laughing all the while. Kata Kata, the new name that Teke Teke has taken, is the sound of her teeth chattering from fear before she got hit by a train. She'll also steal your legs if you're not careful with your wording.
    • The third is called the Reaper Elevator. Supposedly, it's an elevator used by the Grim Reaper that travels from the basement to the top floor every night at 2AM.
• A recurring theme in later chapters is that your character is spacing out and forgetting things almost at random. This is because they're dying. Well, not dying exactly. More like their digital body is tearing itself apart at the seams and is getting ready to fade out of existence entirely. Why? Because, one, you keep Connect Jumping which is eroding your body from the inside out, especially considering the nastier things (like Eaters) that you keep jumping into, and two, your body is already on borrowed time since it's not supposed to exist according to the laws of physics anyways. Every time, it wears you down a little more, on top of the fact that it is eventually going to implode by itself even if you didn't use your Connect Jump abilities. It's essentially committing suicide over the course of weeks and months, and you don't even know it.
  • Which would be bad enough. Except that you've been using it to root around in a cosmic horror's digestive tract, exposing your unstable body directly to its corroding effects. After the first time, you're out of action for a week and start breaking out in static at odd times, then spend the next 8 chapters pretending that nothing is wrong.
• When somebody contracts EDEN Syndrome, it's because their mind has been destroyed and their body is now a comatose vegetable. The player survives this, and thus gets the oh-so-wonderful experience of seeing their own comatose body. Just imagine that, seeing your own body lying in a hospital bed in a ward that, given the lack of knowledge on EDEN Syndrome, may as well be a tomb.
  • Consider its history and the scenario gets worse. The first case took place during the Beta test - EDEN Syndrome has existed as long as EDEN itself has. And ever since then the company policy for how to deal with it has been to put their fingers in their ears and pretend it isn't happening, despite and because of how obvious it is what the problem is - that there exists something in their virtual world that can destroy uploaded minds, bypassing all of their safeguards.
• Upon defeating Crusadermon in Chapter 17, the Akihabara Digital Shift goes pitch black. You can only see a few feet in front of you, and you can only see the street in front of you. The buildings on either side of the road are completely gone in this sequence. There are also three whole screens of nothing before you get to a cutscene.
  • The entire place gets filled with an eerie whistling noise too. And it's not wind, that's obvious. There's a SUPER creepy thing going on with your character, too. In the cutscenes, they don't walk so much as shuffle along, almost as if they're limping. Finally, their dialogue choices here are all sort of... Creepy? It's like it's not actually a choice, just them stating the same thing three times in a row.
• Beginning of Eden. The whole place looks like a kid's playground, all bright colors and floating blocks. You even get to see a version of Galacta Park, which is completely fine and unbroken. Knowing that this is the original version just makes its future all the more depressing. Then you and the children see a Connect Jump spot. When it cuts back to the real world, all that's left are your goggles. You're gone.
• Almost all of Chapter 18, and The Reveal in all its glory. During the EDEN Beta, five children found a gateway into the Digital World. Suddenly, an Eater appears from thin air. One of the children decides to distract it, while the rest run away. The end result? One child became the first victim of EDEN Syndrome, and the other four become horribly traumatized, enough to get their memories wiped clean. These children? Yuugo, Yuuko, Nokia, Arata, and you. That's right, you personally are the reason the Eaters exist.
  • Yuugo's death at the hands of the first Eater. The children are horrified and traumatized. Arata is scarred so badly that, had he kept the memories, he could have required emergency counseling. Hell, even Aiba doesn't react well to the revelation; they break so badly that that their pluckiness that they exhibit throughout the game is absolutely nowhere to be seen, and they just give up completely and allow themselves to be assimilated into the simulation, repeating a Madness Mantra.
  Aiba: If only it could have stayed like this...If only it could have stayed like this...
• When you get to the Tokyo Metropolis Building, there's a Digital Shift that takes up half of the front of the building! And it's implied it can get even worse. On higher floors, there are hundreds of glowing tendrils floating through the holes that data has made in the walls, a hint that Eater Adam is there.
• The Digital World, when you arrive in Chapter 20, is no longer a bright green jungle paradise. It's now a blackened husk, with Eater tendrils sucking the life out of everything. Swirling patterns cover everything, with the only sign of life being floating red flower spores. It's shortly followed by a MASSIVE hole in the ground, one big enough for an Examon to sit inside comfortably. Which leads into...
• King Drasil's Core. The place is covered with Eater motifs, and outside of the tower is a weird swirling static mist sort of thing. There are pitch black digital glitches everywhere, some with what looks like black tar leaking out of them. And instead of tendrils, there seem to be ribbons of QR Codes floating around the place...
  • King Drasil/Mother Eater itself. Imagine a human, covered with eyes and tangled in what looks like their own skeleton. It bleeds red Eater essence into the Digital World, eternally creating a diseased land. Hundreds of fragments of code float inside it, wave after wave. It's an abomination.
• The Investigation of the Scramble Pentagram Urban Legend case has the ghost of a girl killed in a car accident three months ago trying to kill five people (the player included) by being hit by a truck. Kyoko reveals that not only did the truck driver not see them, but they were blind and deaf to everyone else trying to warn them to move. And the case ends with the ghost saying that she'll kill everyone to make herself be happy again.
  Girl: If I kill everyone, it'll make me lucky. And if everyone is killed, it'll make me happy!
  • The sequel, Hacker's Memory, closes her story by revealing she's an actual ghost who wants to make everyone learn how freeing death is compared to being alive, because Aiba and the Inoden team opened the gates to the afterlife. Even after she's defeated and seemingly talked out of leaving the door to the other world open, she scares the player one last time by warning them about something behind them while laughing evilly.
• The "Living Doll, Dead Person" case. You investigate the case of a salesman stealing female appearances and turning them into life-size dolls that he sells in Akihabara. Near the end of the case, you find out that the dolls mentally trap the young men in EDEN while they still think they're in the real world. The businessman then takes their unconscious bodies and supposedly sells them on the black market for parts. What's worse is that you meet a victim and he finds this out the hard way when he gets a logout error meaning he likely doesn't have a body to return to anymore.
  • The Infermon that gets the data necessary to make a doll is rather creepy too, and Arata's partner is Keramon and later Infermon. It's a different one, but the only Infermon seen prior to this game was trying to destroy everything, so sadly one being an ally isn't much consolation.
  Infermon: I GET THE DATA TO MAKE THE DOLLS THE DOLLS STEAL THE PEOPLE'S SOULS THE DOLLS ARE LIFELIKE THE PEOPLE ARE DEATHLIKE
• Once you get the ability, use High Security 3 in any area with enemy encounters. The lack of movement in the areas other than your own character is really subtly creepy.
• Aiba's predicament, overall. Unlike other victims of EDEN Syndrome, whose mental data was consumed and preserved by the Eaters, their mental data managed to escape, and manifested in the physical world as a half-cyber, half-physical entity. This might sound awesome at first, but consider that their state is a temporary one; eventually, their cyber/physical body will break down due to not being able to sustain itself, and they will collapse into scattered data, which essentially means they will cease to exist completely.
  • This somewhat happened in Digimon Frontier. Koichi fell into a coma and his spirit was in The Digital World without memories. He almost died in the real world, which would've probably left him wandering an unfamiliar land forever.