Mods with their own subpages:
- Less so with the original Doom, but the Aliens custom mod is certainly scary. When you're holding a Pulse Rifle, and there's a dark corridor lit only by a sporadically blinking light, and you hear strange sounds coming from potential corridors in that darkness, willing yourself to press the "forward" key is an exercise in futility.
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is a video of a grown man screaming like a little girl while playing the Doom 2 mod Ghoul's Forest 3. Ghoul's Forest 2 and 3 are quite possibly the most terrifying mods for Doom 2, for that matter. The entire concept is that you're hunted through a dark forest by giant floating super-fast monstrous heads who pop up unexpectedly and kill you in seconds.- The backstories of the ghouls are creepy: the Big Bad Yurei is the ghost of a pissed-off girl who was abandoned in the Forbidden Forest. The Creeper is the spirit of a baby, Sjas was a psychotic jester who was executed by the king's order for assaulting people because they didn't laugh at his new joke, the Jitterskull was a Giant warrior, Choke was his demented brother who killed himself (which means that, yes, their heads really were that huge). Frostbite (who only appears in the multiplayer mod Ghouls vs. Humans) died of frostbite, so now he can breathe ice and swallow people whole like the Jitterskull.
- The Jitterskull is probably one of the scariest monsters in that he moves via teleportation, in erratic directions while continuously staring at you with glowing dots in his sockets. That and he has almost no sound cues compared to the others.
- This doesn't make Sjas any less horrifying with his sound cue: continuous screaming. He might as well be the hardest to face just because he comes at you so fast while this fades into your ears:
AAAUGHAAAUGHAAAUGHAAAUGH- The Yurei is an interesting villain, in that she attacks you by making disturbing images pop up and take the entire screen, with predictable results for the player. Yes, that's right, a boss who directly assaults the player.
- The mod is made worse with Icy's addon, which adds a clown; a skull that makes the Jitterskull look like a joke; and a Sjas-like mist cloud that is absolutely relentless. These new ghouls use the terrifying creeper scream. There's also a chance that, instead of the Yurei, the final boss will be the entire cadre of ghouls at once.
- The Skulltag Armageddon 2 multiplayer map pack is infamous for the "By Day, By Night" level. It's a map that alternates between day and night. By day? Cheerful demon massacring, upbeat music. By night? The entire map goes dark, the music turns into a creepy Drone of Dread, and the monsters are... different. And the Eyesores appear. Eyesores are ghouls, just like the ones in The Ghoul's Forest. Imagine a demented, deformed face on spidery legs which runs around like it's on crack, makes weird "kekeke" sounds (which were confirmed to have been recorded by the author himself) and can kill you in seconds. And there's an entire crowd of them attacking you all at once.
- The final boss of the map: Clowny. An invisible face which flies around the entire (big and open) final area and pops up suddenly in front of a player for an instant-kill and a Jump Scare. And sometimes it somehow ends up inside the mazelike building you've been in before, forcing the players to brave its silent corridors, expecting the bastard to jump out from behind every corner... And there will be Eyesores accompanying it.
- In fact, the Eyesores appeared in the first Armageddon wad, fittingly named Ghoul's Forest, attacking the player during night time sections. Their comeback in the sequel is not pretty, either.
- The Happy Time Circus series is the very definition of horror, especially the second one. Wandering through an abandoned ghost town with lots of silence and empty moments, only to have an area completely enveloped by Monster Clowns that you may or may not be able to handle? Oh, Crap!...
- The areas that take you through Clown Hell (which is also slowly encroaching on the town itself) are no less horrific. Bright, cheerful, flashing colors in extremely low light conditions produces a highly unsettling effect, and the heavily distorted circus music sometimes heard in these places doesn't help one little bit. And as you might have feared, Pennywise Itself makes several appearances throughout both mods, along with It being a boss-level monster in the first one and the boss in the second.
- In the midst of all this, you'll also need to escort "Fluffy" back to Clown Hell. You won't like Fluffy, and Fluffy doesn't like you; Fluffy is a fast-moving, unkillable severed rabbit head that can phase through walls to chew off your face, and you have to outrun him through a narrow passageway in a dense thicket where the tiniest misstep will allow Fluffy to gain on you. Good luck, and keep some extra underpants; you will most certainly need both.
- The Equinox mod, at first, is your typical Doom run-and-gun affair, where the only surprise is that something as well-made as this is from the same guy that made such infamous mods as "nuts.wad" (the overly-large map with more enemies than Doom can even handle without source ports, much less than you could reasonably kill) and "Doom 2:2 - The Time Travel Saga" (a mod that presents itself as a total conversion but instead simply adds a second number 2 to the title on the menu screen). Then you end the ninth map by reaching an alien spaceship before it takes off, and spend the entirety of the tenth level within it. Suddenly, the lights are dimmed, the quarters are much more cramped, and the music is much less bombastic (a remix of one of the dungeon themes from The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall). You turn to the left of the starting point, find a door, and it leads to a dead end with nothing but a broken door and several zombie and marine corpses. Head the other way, and soon you find the level's real gimmick - there is nothing but Archviles for you to fight here, and the level is perfectly designed to make you hate and fear them. It's bad enough with one of the level's centerpieces, a long hallway you have to hit switches to open side doors to, with long sightlines granted by open windows - no good cover if you decide to kill them right away, and no way to avoid alerting them to your presence before you're ready, leaving you little to do but continue on, hearing them move about while they wait for you to return. Then add on vent crawls that drop you down onto an elevator without warning, greeting you with another Archvile when it gets to the bottom, tight turns around corners that lead to a slightly more open area with an Archvile or two in them, or cramped hallways with circular extensions jutting out of the walls that open up to reveal more Archviles after you've hit a switch and are coming back. And the finale? Better hope you can move fast to grab the invulnerability sphere before several dozen of them teleport in and barbecue you.
- The rest of the levels aren't much better. The starting level brings you to the front door of the eponymous company, and everything looks how you imagine it should - bright, shiny, futuristic. But as you go along, things get more twisted from the demons' influence, and the mod's attempt at emulating a Hub Level makes this particularly apparent. You go to a teleporter hub, clear it out of basic zombies and imps, and teleport to the "genome labs". From there you're already seeing signs of things that shouldn't be - breaks and holes in the architecture, particularly a giant lava-filled chasm splitting the first half of the labs in two. After you've destroyed that, you come back - now there's a break in the wall leading through solid rock, and stronger demons have repopulated the area. From there, you teleport to the storage facility, and more demonic influence is taking hold - more pathways through rock faces that the company itself hasn't touched, dirty water and lava in more places. Once you've taken care of that, you're back once more - now there are broken holes in the floor and ceiling, and even stronger demons await you. Lastly, you go to the hangar, which isn't nearly as damaged as the other areas - but there is that alien spaceship parked on the runway you need to take care of. Once that's dealt with, you're back one more time, and now one entire wall has broken down to reveal a new pathway along cliff faces and tunnels for you to travel through. After a quick detour through a mountainous area with very little of the original company's look, you finally make it back to the front door to find it totally twisted and warped into an evil version of itself. The bright, shiny white and silver walls and the earthy-green floors give way to harsh, jagged blacks and reds, and the door you originally left the first level through now opens up into a giant chasm, centered around a large tower jutting out of the water below and filled to the brim with absolutely every enemy type the game can possibly throw at you - a world you once knew, now completely unrecognizable and intensely hostile. And possibly the worst thing? The last thing you have to destroy is that tower itself - while you're in it, and as several more enemies teleport in to try to stop you. This time, you're on a one-way trip.
- While more known for being a widely-beloved and incredibly-difficult mod in general, Erik Alm's classic Scythe 2 is known for a light inclusion of custom enemies, as most infamously-used in MAP16, "Mr. X," which is a sparse, empty and dark Bleak Level where you hear unseen monsters being killed by... something. If the level's choice in music, a MIDI rendition of "SA-X Arrival" from Metroid Fusion, didn't tip you off, you're being hunted down by some sort of Super-Persistent Predator who you can only hear killing demons in places you can't see, but you'll definitely notice the litany of its prey's corpses scattering the level's floors. Eventually, you will run into the titular enemy, a custom "Evil Marine" enemy; a Lightning Bruiser who zips around impossibly-fast gunning straight for you and blasts you with plasma rifle shots. The fact that you can only barely escape him because his immense speed makes for some Paranoia Fuel-inducing chases across the level's small spaces, made worse not just by several barrels which can blow up in your face, but also because if you exited MAP15 by normal means, all your weapons are gone, forcing you to take what you can get for even a chance of fighting back and escaping. And in the co-op mode, you will have to deal with four of Evil Marines at once.
- Unloved is the mod that you always wanted to play but hoped no one would ever make: it's a high-res megawad that borrows much of its atmosphere from the Silent Hill series and it's exactly as terrifying as that description would suggest — while preserving the run n' gun gameplay of classic DOOM. If you ever wanted to prove people wrong who insist that horror games should be weaponless, this .wad is it. note Highlights include a dank, extremely gory prison/torture cellar decorated with grotesquely mutilated bodies and bloody faces stretched over frames like canvas, a gloomy series of corridors and cageways suspended over a black void that could have come straight out of Silent Hill 3, and a stage called "The Living Room", which is precisely what it sounds like (combining this mod with Brutal Doom greatly enhances the effect here, as the fleshy, intestinal-looking walls will now endlessly squirm and writhe). Finally, there's an area cryptically named "Lost Childhood", which features a haunting and somewhat sad BGM track ("Jynweythek Ylow" by Aphex Twin) and strings together various eerie, but familiar settings like an infant's playpen, classrooms, a public restroom/shower, the hallways and sanctuaries of a church, et al; together, these details seem to tell an unsettling story of their own, but any specifics are left to the player's imagination.
- Even better (or worse), UNLOVED has now been spun off into its own game (by the creator of the original mod) rendered in Unreal Engine 4, with completely new and grotesque monstrosities to replace the old Doom sprite monsters and a procedural level system ensuring you'll never feel safe and comfortable. Those of you who found the atmosphere and design of the original mod disturbing but just couldn't get past the dated mid-90s sprite graphics, rejoice... or despair.
- While the first The City of the Damned map is plenty spooky and atmospheric enough, the second installment "Apocalypse" is more horrifying in every possible direction. Imagine the game Blood with all elements of Black Comedy stripped out, now add in chilling Apocalyptic Logs scattered about that tell the story of what happened to the town and several scripted events like the ominous sirens that sound off now and then. The soundtrack to Resident Evil 3: Nemesis is also put to very good use throughout the mod.
- Remember the emissions or blowouts from S.T.A.L.K.E.R.? The mod itself introduces a similar feature where, after a point, an ominous siren will sound every eight minutes or so. Thankfully, the first alarm is a freebie where you'll be automatically teleported to a "moon shelter", waking up with one of the only other living people you'll see in the city (who promptly gets gutted by a zombie when you try to leave). After that point, however, whenever you hear the siren, stop what you're doing right now and go to a nearby shelter in time, or else you'll be greeted by an army of invisible monsters that will easily mow you down.
- The (sadly unfinished) Ghostbusters Doom Game Mod, which recreates scenes from the movie, fulfills this trope with its first level - the haunted library. While the original film scene was quite amusing, its recreation in the mod is much creepier.
- And then three levels later, you have to investigate a haunted mansion, in the rain, with creepy music, and corpses everywhere, which start standing back up, moaning about their hunger as they shamble towards you. And they take way too much punishment just to shoot off one of their arms — you have to deal just as much damage a second time to get one to stay dead.
- Eternal's Epic2 wad is a collection of Egyptian themed levels, city levels and spaceship levels. One of the spaceship levels, level 13, takes place in this very eerie, dark, grey and white spaceship made of what seems to be rotting tissue. The soundtrack for this level is definitely creepy, very different from the others. The battles are exclusively with arch-viles (arguably the creepiest enemies in vanilla Doom), most of them used through teleport-traps. Health pickups? Aside from a secret soulsphere, the only health pickups are accessed through computer panels marked with a scarab, restoring 20 health each.
- Pirate Doom is a light-hearted and very fun Total Conversion most of the time, and when it goes for spookiness it's usually in a tone closer to The Haunted Mansion than Silent Hill. That is, until you get to the mist-shrouded Lost City and tangle with the masked warrior tribesmen lurking within. The tribesmen are very weak enemies, but because they're small, fast, numerous, and relatively quiet, you'll often turn around and see their huge, grinning, bug-eyed mask right in your face. They're also animated to giggle before shooting at you, so you'll frequently turn around to see one right behind you, just standing there giggling. It's creepy. Oh, and the Arch-Viles that have hitherto been absent from the game? They've been converted into the tribe's shamans.
- The Unhinged mod. What you'd immediately expect from a Doom mod is the classic rip and tear, but for a good portion of the map, there's nothing there. The actual twist of the level has you fighting literal Nightmare Faces in a surreal hell filled with disturbing (but also hilarious) faces strewn about. If you have a thing against Slasher Smiles, this is not the mod for you.
- Solace Dreams, another mod that seems to be inspired by Silent Hill, among other things, although with a lot more originality and lack of Dual-World Gameplay (instead the game takes entirely in a Dark World and you start in a Hub Level in form of a classroom where the stages are memorabilia of your late former classmates). The most horrific parts are the fact that the picture of your character (now photorealistic) has its skin flayed, and eventually changes into a grinning skull as you take damage, most of the game's in almost total darkness even in places like a nightclub or the recreation of The Matrix Revolutions' subway station, one section where you seem to enter a literal Womb Level and fight a Fetus Terrible seemingly remade from the author's former creepypasta wad (Rootpain, which got them banned from Zdoom's forums for awhile due to its immensely disturbing content), and the ending where your character is implied to be Dead All Along, her friends had undergone Cessation of Existence, and your character is trapped alone in the Dark World for seemingly the rest of eternity.
- And to top things off, it has been revamped entirely using GZDoom into a full blown horror game straight out of the PS1 era.
- The most direct Silent Hill homage yet comes from the custom WAD "The Restless Dream". The opening perfectly mimics both James' initial trek into the town and Harry's memorable first encounter with the series' Dark World, before sending you into a labyrinth that resembles the hellish nightmare versions of the Midwich school and Alchemilla hospital. When it seems you've finally escaped into what looks like a normal parking garage, the town's familiar siren kicks on yet again and you get to see the environment decay into the Otherworld once more in real-time for a huge battle with numerous powerful enemies. Things go off the rails after that, though, with a Dual Boss straight out of Dark Souls followed by an incredibly weird and incongruous appearance by a sexy fox-woman who makes rambling meta observations,note but up until then, it is a top-notch translation of Silent Hill's terrifying setting into the world of DOOM.
- TNT Revilution, a Fan Sequel to TNT Evilution, isn't that scary for the most part. Then you get to MAP12, "Transduction", and are greeted with a foreboding droning soundtrack with music box notes sprinkled in. At one point, you go through a teleporter and land in a place where the walls and floor are coated in blood.
- Antonak's 2017 Cacoward-winning level pack lilith is this in spades. The entire WAD is horribly glitched beyond recognition in every single aspect; The title is a loud, sudden, and fast jumble of nonsense, the "music" that plays in the levels are horribly-corrupted 'covers' of official Doom songs, and the whole world explored in the WAD is a garbled, colorful, broken, flickering, patchworked mess that's littered with hall-of-mirror effects. Keep in mind, that all of these glitches are made on purpose for this WAD, and it gives such a deep Uncanny Valley effect to a game that, normally never seen in such a state like this for a few seconds before crashing fully, can bring a chill down the spines of veteran players and modders.
- The music is slowed down or played backwards to sound disturbing, though there are a few tracks that go an extra mile. The corrupted remix of "Adrian's Asleep" sounds like it's repeatedly going backward and forward, "Opening to Hell" has the entire game played as an audio file, screeching and gibbering in the backdrop...and the "Waiting for Romero to Play" one can be best summed up as a musical embodiment of pure concentrated evil. Another track, "Running From Evil", is ominously titled "D_RUNNNN", and not only does it sound ever so slightly off, but the track just never starts. It just loops the first two beats, infinitely...
- For the intermissions in lilith, the text reads out like the game is failing to load files, and corrupting itself in the process...
502 Bad Gateway: Non-system disk or disk error. Replace and press any key to continue.Refraction Error: MISSING DATA FILE ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;:;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;,;;;;;;;;;CRC Failed: You have entered deeply into the infested starport. But something is wrong. But something is wrong. But something is wrong. But something is wrong. But something is wrong. You penetrate into the haunted heart, but something is wrong.Guru Meditation: W_GETNUMFORNAME: Help not found!- The ending, albeit abrupt, has a very unsettling implication that the protagonist has gotten his mind broken due to the whole madness throughout the entire mod.
- Another disturbing design choice is that, unlike how 'glitchy' mods that are meant to be like Creepypastas, there is no final scare that the mod effectively builds up. The whole game gives the feeling as if there was one final trick up its sleeve before ending, but it turns out that there is absolutely nothing to wait for. The closest that the game gets to this is a split-second blue screen of death that pops up as you advance towards the final level's exit, but nothing else.
- One detail for the final level, Fatal Exception, is that one area disconnected from the rest of the map that you must traverse through is a colossal, dark chamber that has absolutely nothing in it apart from a large teleporter on the other side of a pillar. You would expect there to be a surprise of monsters teleporting in, but nope.
- Towards the end you will encounter a glitchy erratic Archvile, in a corrupted chamber that frequently screams his pain sound. And just continuing even as he attacks, and even after he's dead.
- One level has you going down a narrow path of demons, and at the end awaits an army of unmoving, hideously warped green mounds, blocking your way. Once you shoot and kill them, you'll find out that, through their death sound, they are other Doomguys.
- The story behind the mod is, in summary, that the uploader accidentally left their copy of Doom sitting on a magnet for too long, and uploaded the results. This, combined with the various issues and seeming bouts of self-awareness imply that lilith is alive in some sense, but in a non-traditional way. Instead of merely being possessed by a spirit, it's either attained sapience, or has always had it, and is now begging for help because of the half-dead state it exists in.
- Similarly to lilith, The Thing you can't Defeat takes place in levels from Knee Deep in the Dead, the first Doom episode, that devolve into a glitchy mess, and it was made like that on purpose.
- The description flat out states that Doomguy has dementia, and it is portrayed in a sad yet realistic light, with the main protagonist seemingly having gaps in memory. Even the first level has things that just do not look right, such as the exit switch's position being changed and one secret room having a strange gray wall that sticks out like a sore thumb. Even the soundtrack is not safe - the otherwise upbeat "At the Doom's Gate" ends with a small intro excerpt from "An Imp's Song" from the very next map.
- It gets worse - with each level, their corresponding music tracks become distorted more and more until they are barely recognizable, some switches appear to be either broken or having already been activated, monsters become scarcer and scarcer and the grey space slowly takes over everything. Starting from E1M4, the level numeration goes off the rails when halfway through Command Control you warp straight halfway through Phobos Lab which is full of corpses, garbled textures and has only a small bunch of enemies for you to fight.
- E1M5 goes even further, not only taking place on E1M6, but also featuring a reversed and garbled mess of a soundtrack. The level iself is almost fully devoid of enemies and corridors have claustrophobia factor amped up greatly. The ending tricks you with an exit door, but will force you to go from one end of the room to another until you are boxed in a grey space altogether, and then finally takes you to the next map. Speaking of which...
- The penultimate level has no enemies whatsoever, many textures are just mashed together on the walls and floor and there is very little of the original Computer Station present; even the music sounds very alien and plainly wrong. The rooms become more distorted as you travel through, and at one point you come through one zigzagged hallway full of Doomguy's corpses, but you still do not encounter anything even as the hallways become more and more devoid of standard Doom textures and turn into one long grey-colored wormhole.
- The final level features only one starting segment of E1M8, a barely recognizable one due to grey monotone textures all around the room. Then, after traveling down the gray hallways that get thinner and thinner, you appear back on E1M1, except monsters are still missing and a somber and still off-key rendition of "Sign of Evil" starts playing. The room behind the exit door is a black void, and you have to go through it - and as one final surprise, the E1M8 map refuses to load and ends the game right there. The implications are not pretty - especially considering that suffering dementia in real life will most likely result in your grasp on reality becoming more and more distorted until you succumb to it completely, and there's little chance of recovering from that. Yeah.
Console error: no start for player 1 found. - 1993.wad is a ZDoom based mod which completely changes the gameplay from "kill monsters, get the keys (if any) and then get to the exit" to simply "try to survive and finish the levels as soon as possible". You are only given a puny knife to defend yourself, while all other weapons, most enemies, and several decorations are completely absent and all MIDI tracks are replaced with total silence (at least for Doom 2 and its iwads, the first Doom keeps the mostly upbeat soundtrack intact). To make matters worse, it features a grayish palette with gray textures all over the place, complete with static fuzz partially obscuring the screen, making the whole scenery look very unsettling. Finally, you are not completely alone, since there are ghosts that will either give you spooks, kill you in one hit or both.
- Speaking of gameplay altering mods, The Lasting Light also changes the levels you are playing on - except instead of painting them monochrome, it makes the entire map completely dark, and you can't even defend yourself - all you have is a lantern (which runs on limited oil) and a bunch of pebbles to activate switches that need to be hit from the distance. And this time, you are being stalked by three monsters instead of one:
- The Screecher - a tall tan-colored monster that sends horrific images at you if you look at him for too long. On normal difficulty, the player can take only five screeches from him before dying, but this amount resets each time the player enters a new level. On the harder difficulty however the player can survive ten jumpscares instead, except they do not reset at all. Add the Screecher being the most common enemy you will encounter through the game, and you will get quite a That One Boss.
- The Creeper - a dark shape with red eyes which only reacts to light. You will have to turn your lamp off, else he will end your run quickly, no matter how far you are from him. Fortunately, you do get some audio cues and brief image pop-ups to learn of his presence... except turning the lantern off might leave you vulnerable to all other things that lurk in the darkness.
- The Stalker - an aging woman with a knife which runs fast as hell. She does not kill you the first time she catches you either, leaving a fading image of skulls and a giggle as a warning - the next time she gets you, you are dead, end of story. What's worse, most of the time evading her is a real problem since you may find yourself in a dead end or be unable to outrun her. The tense music and "Psycho" Strings that accompany her presence does not help either.
- Thanks to all enemies and items being gone, the final maps of the classic Doom games (with the exception of E4M8 of Thy Flesh Consumed which does have an exit) along with MAP07 of Doom 2 and Plutonia Experiment are made unwinnable - leaving you at the mercy of the monsters who will eventually get you no matter what.
- Back to Saturn X Episode 3 features the map "A Visit to the Creep Doctor". It starts with a short walk through a forest leading to an old mansion, then a hidden passage leading to the forest again, repeating several times. The first iteration is devoid of monsters but generally harmless. In the second one, the mansion is dull grey, the portraits inside it have become faceless, and there are piles of flesh on the kitchen tables and in random boxes. Further iterations become increasingly more disturbing and detached from reality, with portraits suffering Facial Horror and the house gradually devolving into a Meat Moss, right as the final iteration becomes completely alien in design and lacks enemies right until the final confrontation.
- Sign of Torment is a megawad for Doom 2 which focuses on metaphorical descent into despair. As if the cryptic messages left for the player to find weren't disturbing enough, the situation gradually deteriorates with each subsequent episode: whereas the first episode, enveloping the "red" color, takes place in hell and mostly consists of straight up battles with some elements of Mind Screw thrown in, the "white" levels starting from MAP12 become a bit more subtle in horror, taking place on another world which was overrun by demons leaving no survivors. Things get even more terrifying with the "black" episode starting from MAP21, where the player visits empty, pitch-black locations full of demon corpses and downright abstract places; the mostly upbeat music from the past levels is replaced by a persistent Drone of Dread and the messages begin telling the player to kill themselves and sending more obscenities to their way. However, the true kicker comes in the final level, where it's revealed that the protagonist was an Unwitting Pawn and that the whole thing was a "test" by a strange force residing within the realm; those he had slain along the way were fellow humans and not the demons of Hell. After finally going back to the UAC facility, the protagonist becomes so corrupted by the darkness he willingly spreads the black void alongside the base and massacres everyone inside, having embraced his inner demons and willingly going to destroy the world.
