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Nightmare Fuel / Half-Life 2

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Moment pages are Spoilers Off, so all spoilers were removed. Proceed with caution. You Have Been Warned.

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/demonic_gman.png
Doctor Freeeemannnnnn...
The very premise of the game is an Earth overtaken by an Alien Invasion. As a result, there are lots of nightmarish moments across all of Half-Life 2.
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    Half-Life 2 
  • The opening is creepy! Not only does it feature the G-man (who was already discussed in the Series-wide folder on the Half Life 1 page), it also features flashbacks to the anti-mass spectrometer that caused the resonance cascade, complete with that ever-present humming noise.
  • Picking up a baby doll in a decrepit playground at the very beginning of the game will produce the sound of children screaming. Coupled with a near-by guy saying "I'm glad there are no kids around to see this" kinda gives you an "oh crap" moment of realization.
  • Narrowly avoiding a train to Nova Prospekt seems vague but dangerous, and the Metropolice seem to be bullies and assholes so far, but most of the horror up to the apartment is subtle. Then they raid the entire place to get you, beating down every single person simply for being present in their dogged pursuit of an unregistered citizen. What seals the deal for realizing how bad this truly is, however, is when one guy tries to bar a door to keep them off of you. Seconds later, gunshots are heard before they come up to the roof firing on-sight for daring to run more than they want to deal with. Welcome to the Combine's Earth, where mass arrest, beatings, and summary executions are a daily occurrence if you're so much as in the wrong place at the wrong time.
  • What might be a small bit of Fridge Horror, but the Combine soldiers have absolutely no idle animation unless scripted to, whatsoever; they're jarringly rigid in such a realistic-for-its-time game. Considering that they're all transhuman cyborgs, this could be far creepier than it first appears to be. Additionally, their glowing goggles and the Source AI's slight datedness (resulting in them often staring into walls when idle) just gives them a real Uncanny Valley.
  • Stalkers◊ are mutilated, forcefully cyborged vestiges of human beings, who are completely dependent on their mechanical limbs, and forced into service to alien rulers. Alyx prays that the stalkers don't remember who they were, and they are also implied to be immortal. They'll continue to live as long as they're refueled and properly maintained. Knowing how brutally efficient the Combine are, that's almost a guarantee. Most of the stalkers' internal organs have been removed, and they are dependent on some kind of saline solution provided by the Combine for survival. Other than that, however, they can work in just about any hazardous environment. In Episode One, if you kill one of them, the Stalkers will start attacking you with laser beams.
  • The long-legged "fast" headcrabs, which produce skeletal, inhumanly dexterous Personal Space Invader zombies which will stop at nothing to maul you, all the while slobbering like dogs. And the way they scream when they are jumping at your face from the building across the street. Oh, and there's the little fact that they are missing all of their skin, along with most of their organs and quite a bit of muscle, the head nothing but a skull. And then, near the end of "Anticitizen One", the game starts throwing Fast Zombies at you that are on fire.
    • And even before you come into their line of vision, Fast Zombies will hunt you down no matter how large the distance between the two of you is. They're essentially organic, zombified T-800s.
    • After Grigori gives Freeman a shotgun, he is immediately ambushed by half a dozen fast zombies, partially to inform the player that yes, they can leap at you from across buildings, partially to make them crap their pants. Soon after that the player must then wait for one of the series' Ridiculously Slow Elevators, at which point several more of them attack. If you're smart and close the door to the room, realizing they can't open it, the proceed to crash through the skylight.
    • The introductory vision of the Fast Zombies may be one of the scariest moments in Half-Life, ever: the salivating dog sound comes, followed by approaching thumps of the zombies' leaps and bounds. You look around and then you see the shadow of the Fast Zombies leaping across buildings with the full moon behind them. You just KNOW they are coming for you.
    • The encounter waiting for Grigori's cart ride to the church where Fast Zombies keep arriving and climbing up to your roof. Just hearing the sound of creaking drainpipes is enough to make your skin crawl. *K-TANG K-TANG K-TANG K-TANG K-TANG K-TANG* (Just as a footnote, anything in the Half-Life universe that makes a clanging noise can't be good. Ever.)
    • Another nasty encounter with a fast zombie is in the chapter "Sandtraps", when you have to go through a drainpipe to enter Nova Prospekt... only for a Fast Zombie to attack you and send you falling either back to the entrance, or into the leech-infested water. Oh, and for good measure, Valve designed that particular zombie as a Call-Back to a similar climbing sequence in Half Life 1 that has a normal headcrab waiting to jump out of a drainpipe and eat your face.
      • However, the scariness goes away if you dodge the leaping zombie and watch it plummet to its death.
  • Not to mention the original zombies now screaming and moaning in their human voice... along with the ability of the damn headcrabs to jump off of killed zombies... ugh. Oh, and when you set them on fire? Shudder.
    • If you listen to the "classic" zombies, their babble gives the very disturbing implication that the victim is still sufficiently aware of his predicament to scream things that sound like "Dear God, help me!" and "Why why why?" The headcrabs not only execute Grand Theft Me, but they leave enough of you intact for you to know what it's doing to you!
    • Headcrab zombies on fire make a disturbing "human dying in agony" sound, especially chilling if you are the one who set the zombie on fire, initiating the torture and death of the underlying innocent human. Apparently, for headcrab zombies, the human consciousness is gone but the part that feels pain remains. In fact, if you play a headcrab zombie's cries backwards, you can hear the human crying out in agony, begging somebody to kill him. A sample is here. With that in mind, their death grunts almost sound like sighs of relief. Eugh.
  • If the horrors brought on by the standard and Fast Headcrab/Zombie varieties didn't leave you perturbed, then the Poison Headcrabs certainly will. Looking like the result of a headcrab cross-bred with a funnel-web tarantula, a single bite from a Poison Headcrab temporarily reduces your health to 1 HP. They're thankfully easy to spot, with their black skin dotted with spare hairs, hissing/chittering vocalisations and a wailing shriek just as they're about to pounce.
    • The developer commentary points out that poison headcrabs are specifically their favorite ambushers, because though they were terrifying (to the point that play testers would waste ridiculous amounts of ammo in a manic attempt to kill them), they were physically incapable of killing the player. Understandable, since getting smacked by one and then having fast zombies bearing down on your ass is NOT a fun experience.
    • Those that fall victim to zombification courtesy of a poison headcrab are no better off than other varieties. Poison Zombies carry an additional three Poison Headcrabs on their back, causing the Zombie to walk with an especially hunched gait. Whether the additional headcrabs are resting or feeding from the poison zombie is unknown, though the skin having been flayed to the point of exposing the zombie's spine implies the latter. Its skin is purple and swollen, either due to the mutations brought on by zombification or the immense amount of toxins being pumped into its body by its host/passengers. Whatever mutations that did occur have made the poison zombie inhumanly durable, to the point of surviving a point-blank grenade blast.
    • While their claw swipe and lumbering walk doesn't make the poison zombie itself an active combatant, those additional headcrabs aren't just for show. If an enemy is in a poison zombie's line of sight, it will grab a headcrab its back and hurl it at the target at a considerable speed. These headcrabs will also occasionally detach and leap off themselves, without the benefit of a warning growl like the throw. And if you manage to kill a poison zombie fully-loaded with headcrabs, you get the not-terrifying task of quickly mopping up all its hanger-ons (plus the host's headcrab itself if it survives) before they scurry off to ambush the player somewhere else.
    • Poison Zombies have a more subtly creepy noise: If you have the sound high, or headphones in, and somehow manage to get close to one of those things without it detecting you, you'll discover that it makes a soft, wet, labored breathing sound when idle. Slightly off-putting at first, until you realize that, in spite of being a poison-bloated corpse covered in oversized rattlesnake-tarantula-parasite-things, with all of the flesh over its spine stripped off and presumably eaten, there is still something alive under there that has to breathe. Also, poison zombies laugh and moan when they die, presumably upon realizing their suffering is over.
    • The creepiness gets rapidly sucked out if you watched Aaahh!!! Real Monsters and quickly regonize the "Howie scream", used for the Poison Headcrab and the Fast Headcrab Zombies. Also, the Poison Headcrab Zombie's pain sound is actually a Horse noise from Ed, Edd n Eddy.
    • The poison headcrabs get worse in the modification Smod if you have Call of Duty style health enabled. Getting hit by a poison headcrab creates an absolute Interface Screw, leaving you even more vulnerable to any other enemies around.
    • Often times, a poison headcrab hits you and you are flung at high speed. Off a high rooftop or platform. *Crack!*
    • When you finally escape Ravenholm, exiting the tunnel, breathing that fresh, City 17 air, recovering that ammo from the crate... and then a Poison Headcrab appears.
    • In a spectacular troll move, in the creepy sewer area you go into an alcove and they see fit to dump about 4 Poison Headcrabs on your head with a screech... and they're all dead. Fuck you Valve.
  • Father Grigori may be helpful and overall act awesome, but the chapter ends on a bittersweet note. You get out barely alive, but are left to see Father Grigori fend off massive hordes of zombies in a fight that he'll ultimately lose against and be mauled to death—and join their mindless, screaming ranks. Then when you got out, you took a moment to yell a bit and take in some fresh air and DAYLIGHT. Just a moment... before some damned hellhole creature hurtles at you and kicks your health down to 1. Oh, and then there are the snipers...
    • If you stay around for a little while, to see what happens to Father Grigori, you will continue to see a wall of flames, and headcrab zombies struggling to it, while bullets fly through the fire and hit the headcrab zombies, who drop dead one by one. You expect the shooting to go on forever. It doesn't.
    • Even though you're fighting in a graveyard, you can't even give him a decent burial.
      • Just as a last footnote: Word of God is that Grigori's fate (alive, dead, in-between, etc.) is whatever you, the player, want it to be.
  • The mine, filled with an unholy amount of infinitely respawning headcrabs, with that horrible chattering the poison ones make and watching the fast ones sprint about on their gangly limbs. The solution? A Han Solo-esque sprint 'n' scream across the bridges and into the pool of water.
  • Arriving into the heart of Nova Prospekt has a particularly eerie and unsettling quality to it; If you don't get a chill down your spine from the uncomfortable silence that contrasts so sharply with the previous havoc you were wreaking outside with your Antlion army, then you certainly will when a particular realization dawns on you: None of the prison cells are occupied, at all. You might think little of it at first, but it begins to feel increasingly... off, particularly considering Nova Prospekt should purportedly be the Alcatraz of City 17. Alyx searching through the prisoner list for Eli very quickly clarifies why, though: The Combine have eschewed the typical holding cell in favor of the far lovelier method of locking prisoners into iron maiden-style cabinets that are lined up from wall to wall, like slabs of meat hanging in a butchery. With the later revelation that these prisoners are later sent down to the Citadel to be processed into Stalkers, it feels very apparent in hindsight that Nova Prospekt is less of a prison and more of a packaging plant. Alyx wasn't kidding when she said it had become something far worse after the Combine arrived.
  • As the player is trying to reach Barney (who is pinned down by snipers), the path goes down to the basement. It is flooded to knee-level. A Resistance soldier asks for help. The wounded soldier, when the player gets there, says, "We came down here looking for shelter. Little did we know the place was infested!" With sounds of splashes and moans coming from all around you, you suddenly become aware of the fact that you are surrounded by zombies.
  • If you try to wander into the ocean too far from land, you'll be immediately attacked by writhing, carnivorous leeches as they swarm around you, screeching and biting you to death. However, they're just an entity known as "trigger_waterydeath", which they're meant to prevent you from going into the water and bypassing the path where you're supposed to go and to make things worse, the leeches cannot be killed since they're not NPCs. And no, not even the "notarget" cheat will save you.
  • Half-Life 2 will bring back lovely memories for veterans - during the teleportation accident, Gordon is plunged into a random pool somewhere. An Ichthyosaur comes charging at him from the gloom, and opens its mouth, about to eat him, when he teleports away again. Its original role was to keep the player out of the water, but that was replaced by those leeches.
    • This is also one of the carryovers from the beta content, in which Xen wildlife beyond just Headcrabs, Barnacles and Vortigaunts would've been strewn across the world. Think about that for a second: beyond the leeches in the oceans, that means there's also probably more Ichthyosaurs, or even worse out in the ecosystem of Earth. All because of the Black Mesa Incident, even if the Combine were ever fought off entirely somehow the entire world is permanently damaged and filled with highly dangerous creatures that put any of our top predators to shame and wiped out entire platoons of the U.S. military in an isolated circumstance alone.
  • The Combine Advisors, giant alien slugs equipped with some bionic attachments. If that wasn't creepy enough, they also have Psychic Powers, which are used as an Interface Screw in Episode One and Episode Two.
  • Manhacks. Just the noise.
    • Even the sound aside, the very concept of Manhacks is chilling. Flying circular saws that come at you in swarms, spattered with blood from previous victims?
    • Original design documents called for the "Manhack Arcade" location. In other words, some of those Manhacks would be controlled by arcade machines being played by your fellow humans, who would have no idea they were actually killing people.
  • The zombies have nothing on Antlions. Guards in particular.
    • Via quirk of the Source engine, Antlion Guards can actually fling Striders with their ramming attack. Whether this is hilarious or even more disturbing is up for debate.
    • Then there's the part in Episode Two when you have to go into a Guardian's nest and run around its tunnels, with the Guardian possibly right behind you. It turns into a running game where you're terrified and rush to the nearest checkpoint as you hear the thundering of the Guardian's feet behind you.
  • Throughout Half-Life 2 the player finds several rotting bodies in various places. Not just dead people, but actually rotting corpses.Their flesh is a pallid blue, their clothes are degrading, and worst yet, their face looks like it's been burnt to a crisp. The eyeballs are gone, their hair has been torn off, and their teeth are chipped and barred. Think that's the worst? Many time you will also find bodies that have been completely immolated, leaving nothing but a charred crisp with burnt fat at the edges. And if that's not the worst... allegedly, the corpse01 model's face is based off that of the corpse of a real burn victim's face. The mod MINERVA: Metastasis even has a gas-chamber in one of its levels with the above-mentioned bodies strewn about with blood liberally splattered on the walls.
    • One particularly infested area in Ravenholm has a small, easy-to-miss passage containing a corpse and a pistol. Even worse, there's a mattress, implying the poor soul had been living there for quite some time, hearing everything.
    • Idling in Ravenholm for a period of time gives you a slight chance of hearing some indistinct noises that sound like they're from quite a distance away. If it's really quiet, or the volume is turned up enough, you'll be able to hear it clearer. It's screaming. Women, men, children, just screaming.
    • The zombie corpses are also disturbing, with their claw-like hands, their bent-back heads, and their mouths wide open in a frozen scream.
  • Speaking of burnt corpses, you may occasionally find one deep in the recesses of a sewer hole or in some obscure corner, only visible once you break an ammo crate only to see the body right there, which is its own kind of disturbing. But at one point in the coastal chapters, as the Combine keep trying to head you off on your way to Nova Prospekt, you come across a house with a smoldering dirt pile out front - and a couple soldiers overlooking more of those burnt corpses. They burned people alive almost down to the bone as a casual disposal method minutes before you arrived.
    • This is made worse when you realize that the model they use for the corpse is based on a real one (from a medical book, but still). Ever since the discovery, it was then widely speculated that the same thing is true for the aforementioned Headcrab Zombies, especially the Fast Zombie's texture from the leak closely resembling a barely fresh corpse. Thankfully this is not the case for the standard Zombie, as his face texture is just an edit of one of the citizens' faces.
  • And sometimes even when the corpses aren't burnt, sometimes you do occasionally come across the bodies of people with blood splatters behind them, and an gun by their side implying that they took death at their own hands, such as near the Petroleum Station in the Coast levels for one. It makes you wonder, just how many people are committing suicide regularly, in order to escape from this hellish world...? It does indeed put into perspective how life in the HL universe is truly horrible.
  • One of the Striders' attacks involve impaling an enemy with one of their legs and later shaking it off like something off a person's shoe.
  • The G-Man sighting in Half-Life 2's level "Anticitizen One", in which he appears on an unplugged television standing in a rowboat with a crow on his shoulder. It would be goofy if the music accompanying it didn't make it horrifying. Oh, and for good measure, it blows up if you stay near it or move it.
  • The sewer with the burnt corpses and the creepy music.
  • The toxic tunnels under City 17 in "Anticitizen One". You have to cross the radioactive waste by placing tires, crates etc. with your gravity gun and hopping from one flimsy platform to the next. This is nerve racking enough, without the fact that the zombies are apparently immune to radioactive waste. The first time you jump off down onto a tire, only to have a headcrab zombie rise up two feet away... terrifying enough that you normally leap backwards into the fatal green sludge. Even on the 3rd attempt the sudden moans of zombies behind you often causes a wild spraying in all directions with whatever gun is in hand.
    • What really sets up the ominous atmosphere of that area: the room is barely lit up only by fire and the headlights of a truck cab, then there's the music. It could easily match Ravenholm in terms of creepy atmosphere.
  • Those moving walls. Their gigantic, foreboding appearance, their tendency to begin moving with no warning except an unearthly groan (that sounds suspiciously like the Ravenholm motif), ready to crush you underneath them. Not to mention the implications that wherever the Combine place them, they will steadily move outwards, destroying everything in their wake until they transform the entire region into barren wastelands...
    • A section between the chapters Nova Prospekt and Entanglement had you escaping a room before the walls crushed you. It's especially creepy when you hear a droning track playing. Even better? They originally intended for that track to be looping ambiance near the walls.
  • The 50 second track that plays upon first entering the zombie-infested town of Ravenholm is enough to make even the most hardcore players soil their pants. The fact that the first thing you see when the track begins to play is a mutilated zombie corpse hanging from a tree doesn't make the whole thing any easier.
  • Looking into the beta leak of Half-Life 2 is pure nightmare fuel when you look at the circumstances. The world wouldn't have had the lakes and waters the player travels through for all we know, it would've been one giant desert wasteland with masks being a necessity for anyone out there. More horrific entities would've wandered the environments, including Xen wildlife becoming a part of Earth's ecosystem. The cities would've been darker, grittier, and more explicit displays of violence by the Combine would've occurred, such as the Manhack Arcade where 'entertainment' for the citizens is really controlling manhacks to murder dissidents. Even Breen was creepier, only known by the title of the 'Consul' and looking more like a man in charge of the world rather than a doctor in a formal suit.
    • And this isn't getting to things like children being forced to work in factories, more explicit Combine fusions of cybernetics and human, the Cremators (though it's vaguely implied via an easter egg and burned corpses around the game world that they may still exist), and Combine Assassins inexplicably frozen inside the Borealis.
    • Exploring the beta maps in general can be a pretty unnerving experience. Many of them are complete enough to look like actual places, but have werid, empty rooms, or are more devoid of life than they should be, leading to a sort of Uncanny Valley effect. Going into a dark hallway, you never know if an enemy is lurking, if there's simply nothing, or if you're going to fall out of the world.
  • If one stops long enough to think about it, the Combine themselves (or itself). From what few scraps of information we have about the Combine beyond their rule over the planet, all one can glean is that this is not your standard alien empire. Their control over portals, their mastery over the symbiosis between flesh and machine, and even the architecture of the Citadel paint a harrowing picture of an incomprehensible vastness beyond known dimensions, one that defies description for human minds. In the simplest possible terms, the Combine is what a H. P. Lovecraft being with imperialist intentions would be, and it's enough to give our limited intelligence's a sobering chill.
    • The Advisors, the slug-like creatures portrayed as the real overlords behind the Combine, are highly-implied to simply be host bodies for whatever beings are actually running the show. It may be that the hosts allow whatever incorporeal form their occupants have to live uninhibited by our atmosphere, environment, or even dimension. Worse still, it may be that the Advisors are simply the only forms the Combine can take that someone - say, Doctor Breen - can look upon without being driven completely insane.
    • Speaking of Doctor Breen, we manage to hear a crumb of information of the true origins, form or nature of the Combine - it's hard to tell which - as we interrupt a conversation between him and Eli. It does little to ease the mind.
      "Carbon stars with ancient satellites colonized by sentient fungi. Gas giants inhabited by vast meteorological intelligences. Worlds stretched thin across the membranes where [the] dimensions intersect... Impossible to describe with our limited vocabulary!"
    • The Combine managed to conquer the Earth in just seven hours.
    • There's also just the imagery of Earth itself after 20 years of Portal Storms and Combine rule. The environment is in absolute ruins, with Xen wildlife having killed off most native animals and toxic waste piling up in many areas. The oceans have not only dropped by several meters thanks to the Combine draining them, but they're practically barren aside from the Leeches. Even if there are a few pockets of wilderness still intact, most of the world is no doubt a huge wasteland. It's almost enough to make you wonder, even if the resistance drive the Combine off, what is there left for them on this dried up husk of a planet?
  • While this is more of a Fridge Horror example than usual, this video right here points out the more subtle aspects of the Combine's domination of Earth only alluded to in the game:
    • Citizens are shuffled endlessly from city to city, never allowed to be with their friends or family, kept isolated and confused to prevent them from rising up. Their personal belongings are confiscated and likely destroyed, and they're stripped of everything that they care about. The few who try to form family units during their brief life in any given city are not allowed to maintain them, and if they try or are lucky enough to be assigned to the same new city as their significant other, Overwatch detects it and "transfers" one partner to "another train".
    • The CP's will kill anyone even remotely near to a detected rebel and wantonly murder people for petty offences.
    • the AI Overwatch constantly observes everyone.
    • Citizens are dosed with amnesia-inducing drugs in the water to keep them even more confused and unable to remember exactly where they're from or what their past was.
    • The only way to be allowed see your family or to eat proper food is to join the CP's.
    • CP's are allotted time to see their families based on how well they do in the line of duty. If they succeed, they get to see them and possibly even have "simulated reproduction" (sex) with their spouse. If they fail, or if they die, the family dies too.
    • Even the people who join the CP's for improved rations will only get enough to barely keep them upright, including stimulants automatically injected when Overwatch detects they're passing out. The only way out from this state of being is to accept a voluntary "partial" mind wipe. The only people with remotely enough to eat to actually survive are little more than automatons, just like the Combine likes it.
    • The worst part? Most of these "civil confusion" tactics are effectively just slightly exaggerated versions of the tactics used either by colonial powers against subject colonies, or by the Soviet Union within gulags. These tactics are probably the most horrifying thing within the Half Life setting, but are by far the least alien.

    Half-Life 2: Episode One 
  • The Stalker Car sequence. Nothing quite like waking up to see a thrashing half-human face screaming and gurgling at you. And of course poor Alyx was pinned to the wall by one...◊
  • Episode One introduced the Zombine, a zombified Combine soldier, a tougher, slightly slower version of the standard zombie (although it did sprint occasionally) with zombie flesh bulging out from the seams of its combat armor. While its inclination towards pulling out a grenade and charging the player waving it above its head is unsettling, it is the deeper implications that really freak you out. Unlike other zombies, shooting the headcrab off does not reveal the grizzled, bloodied face of the human victim but instead only the soldier's lower jaw fused to the top of the spine. Despite having no remaining brain or even head beneath, the Zombine moans and cries have a distinct synthesizer edge to them. Listen closely and you can make out the disrupted, mutilated calls of the former solder. Groaning a muffled 'medic' when shot, informing allies of 'biotic' (Combine jargon for antlions) when milling around, and gurgling out 'grenade!' when they start their suicide run. All horrible, but consider that the transhuman nature of the soldiers means the Zombine likely automatically broadcasts these cries to any still non-zombified soldiers in the area. If the Overwatch soldiers are still human enough to still feel terror, one can imagine the terror of hearing the squad conversation over his comm channel slowly being replaced by a Zombine cacophony as the soldiers fleeing City 17 fall one by one to the headcrabs...
    • Listen to their audio clips here. It's made all the more creepy if you consider that it's either the headcrabs tying to talk through the body but can only repeat the last words said by the deceased, or the soldier is still alive and trying to contact his squadmates.
      • "In-fest-a...*groan* -tion..." "perimeter is...*shuddering breath* not secure" "Necro-tics... inbound" "they're inside" "over...run" "help...me"
      • "SHIT....MEDIC."
      • The last thing it'll say before pulling out a grenade and going kamikaze is "Bouncer". "Bouncer" is what Combine units will scream if they in any way see a live grenade. The Zombines are taking out a threat, and yet they're still conscious enough still warning the others.
      • Also, Zombines have no head. Boom goes the headcrab and it's just a mandible. One explanation (at least on a wiki page) is that their radio is actually where the vocal cords are, hence the above statement that the soldiers are always broadcasting what they're saying, no matter what.
    • An alternate interpretation as well can be that there is a computer controlling the Combine soldiers mostly and their brain is barely used for anything more than storage of information and the various sensory processing aspects of it.
    • It's very likely that the force of whatever knocks the headcrab off also tears off most of the soldier's head as well. Makes sense when you think about it, because a headcrab would have to apply extra force to get through the soldier's mask in order to properly latch onto his head, probably crushing their skull under all the force, which is even more disgusting if it's true.
  • The moment where it's revealed that the Vortigaunts are protecting you from the influence of G-Man, much to his visible dismay. You think you'd feel safe, but he is absolutely not happy about it. It's the only time he ever shows any sort of emotion outside of smug detachment, and it is absolutely frightening.
    (Death Glare) We'll see - about that.
  • The City 17 Underground in the "Lowlife" chapter of Episode One. Like Ravenholm before it, it serves absolutely no purpose other than having the player in tears, and it works. The majority of the level is in complete darkness (as in you literally can't see your hand in front of your face) without using Gordon's Ten-Second Flashlight, and the place is swarming with Headcrab Zombies, which will actually spawn faster if the flashlight isn't activated. As a small relief only a few zombies are encountered at any one time... until the last part that is, in which the player must wait for another of the series' notoriously slow elevators while an unending horde of zombies crawl out of the darkness. There are few things worse than a Fast Headcrab Zombie which was completely invisible a second ago leaping at you from nowhere and clawing at your face while a nearby Zombine decides to become a suicide bomber.
    • "Alyx, normally I love working with you, but goddamnit! Stop making zombie noises behind me when we're heading into headcrab territory!"
  • Immediately following the ending of the first game, where the Citadel's Dark Fusion reactor was destroyed, City 17 faces the lingering threat of a Dark Energy Flare. Throughout the game, the damaged citadel is surrounded by a red vortex of cloud. A constant reminder that the entire structure is going into meltdown and it's going to take the entire city with it. Keep moving, whatever you do. And even then, you just barely escape.
  • When Gordon enters the Citadel's core, the HEV suit's voice warns him, "hazardous radiation levels detected." Throughout the level, you can hear the Geiger counter clicking away like mad.
  • If you think escaping the city will make you safe, think again. As Gordon is about to finish rolling up the door between him and the getaway train, a familiar stomping can be heard, rapidly getting louder. Moments later, Gordon is attacked by a Strider, and this one is notable for how aggressive it is, seemingly hell-bent on preventing Freeman from escaping City 17. It shoots much faster than all other Striders previously encountered, and even uses its warp cannon to destroy the environment around where Freeman is hiding. In one segment, it'll even rapidly blast a cargo container Freeman is behind in an attempt to crush him. Reaching a rocket box is a relief, but the Strider goes down fighting, blasting you with as much as its pulse gun can handle.
  • As Gordon and Alyx ride the last train out of City 17, the Combine send out the transmission, and the Citadel produces a very eerie sound as beams of light shoot into the sky. The telephone poles began to ominously shake. Then, it finally explodes, and the train is pursued by an ever-increasing shockwave of blue light. As the shockwave gets closer, pieces of rock and wood, and even a car, fly at you. Then, the screen fades to white, and the last thing you hear is the twisting of metal and Alyx saying "Gordon..."

    Half-life 2: Episode Two 
  • You witness the Combine Advisors telekinetically hold someone in the air while sucking the guy's brains out.◊ Oh, and just to cap off the aforementioned sequence? It twists the rebel's corpse in half, and tosses it aside like an empty soda can.
    • Ugh. Not to mention that the appendage that they use to do the brain sucking is remarkably disturbing itself, they use it on Eli Vance! It's then that you realize just how deep into this mess Gordon has gotten himself.
  • In Episode Two near the end of the mine, there's a rotting corpse sitting in an armchair. With a shotgun lying next to him and a large splatter on the wall behind him. Give it a moment to sink in... It's easy to miss with all the weapons and corpses lying around and blood splatters being part of the scenery.
    Vortigaunt: A poignant scene. An eternity's repose. It brings peaceful thoughts, does it not?
  • Valve seem to have a game of oneupmanship going on in Half-Life 2 and the subsequent episodes, whereby they try to top whatever terrifying enemy they pitted you against last with something even worse. The Zombine was bad but, ladies and gentlemen... the Hunter. The manner in which it stalks you at the beginning of Episode Two - at one point you flick a switch, you turn around and it's there, staring in at you through the window before calmly shuffling off. Creepy, even before it shishkebabs Alyx and leaves both you and her to die by degrees. And then the game lets you forget all about it before about 5 of them attack you at once. They are horrible in a way the much bigger Striders aren't; they flush you out with flechettes, they get in your face and remind you how puny you are in comparison to the Combine's creations, with their gait and their horrible grating shrieks. As a cherry-topping on the cake, Hunters make a small sinister giggle whenever Gordon's health is low, implying that they're more than just cybernetic animals, they're Sadists.
    • They're kind of like the velociraptors in Jurassic Park. Compact, quick as lightning, and absolutely deadly. Making the comparison even worse are the parts in the game where you are ambushed by them, or moments where it is as simple as hearing them in the distance, mixed in with the background noise. You might not be able to see them, but they're around, somewhere...
    • The second (third?) time Hunters are encountered has them as support for a Combine ambush of Gordon and Alyx. As if what appears to be an entire platoon of Combine soldiers trapping you in a confined space and sending waves in after you while their comrades constantly fire at you from outside isn't bad enough, Hunters soon crash into said confined space and do everything in their power to turn you into Ludicrous Gibs (to quote Alyx: "Three at a time; it's too much!"). The next time they're encountered is after the game is "kind" enough to give you a false sense of security, having them storm into the previously-safe White Forest and re-introduce them brutally killing a pair of rebels right in front of you, and the area in which they're fought is specifically designed to ensure that no matter where the player goes, the Hunters can always find them.
    • A mention ought to go as well to the true first time you see them, which happens so fast it's easily missed by most players, even when they know it's happening. You exit the mines with Alyx, and you get to a small hillock, at which point you hear an animal-sounding noise, like a chirping hoot, but it's distorted and electronic. If the player is fast enough, they can actually see the Hunter that made the noise sitting on a roof, before crouching down and scuttling away. The animation itself could be called funny if we had any idea where it was going...
  • Throughout the majority (if not ALL) the outdoor areas, far away in the skybox is a MASSIVE tendril of energy getting sucked up in a portal where the Citadel (and City 17) once stood.◊ It's absolutely frightening and a constant reminder of of the consequences of your actions.
  • You are crawling under the gunfire of the Combine's wall mounted autogun when all of a sudden you hear the hideous screaming of the Fast Zombie. It is then you realize that these fast moving monstrosities don't need legs to keep up with you. Not too far from there you see one of these legless things get shot up by a Combine Soldier following slowly behind it. This happens a mere few feet away as its skinless corpse lies motionless. (And according to the commentary, this sequence was added as comic relief.) And you hear zombies on fire everywhere.
  • You are trying to get the car across the bridge, you encounter a dumpster that shakes and growls like a Fast Zombie. You throw in a grenade. Problem solved, right? He throws it back.
    • And in that same spot, at the beginning. Oh God. That poison zombie hacking and wheezing, and it's still a shock when you reach it. Not to mention that one hallway that has a couple zombies in it, not bad... And then the lights turn off.
    • Even worse with the fast zombie: throw in a second grenade and it won't throw that one out again... but it doesn't kill the zombie, instead it lights it on fire, at which point the flaming zombie launches shrieking out of the dumpster like a bat out of hell to attack Gordon!
  • You're in the car with Alyx being chased by the Combine. Amidst the chaos around you, you spot the form of a Fast Zombie running across an overpass. Odd. You speed toward a ramp and as you make the jump he makes his... onto your car. It blocks your view of the road. The headcrab starts to come off revealing its skeletal face. Alyx kicks the zombie off and you bank a hard right to avoid hitting a wall. You wish that Alyx had kicked the Damn thing off sooner...
  • That farmhouse on the road in "Under the Radar". Early in the chapter, you see smoke off in the distance. Getting closer, you see it's a crashed Advisor pod, mangled almost beyond recognition. Nearby, there's a farmhouse and a barn. When you get closer, all of a sudden the screen distorts weirdly. It's like the encounter in the Citadel in Episode One, but less hostile, more probing. You expect an Advisor to come cresting a hill or out of the hole in the roof of the barn, but nothing happens. You have to look for it yourself, and it's terrifying. Nothing Is Scarier, indeed.
    • Then you actually find the damn thing. The area itself is dimly lit and decaying, giving off a creepy atmosphere in and of itself. The body of the dead rebel doesn't help either. Alyx finds the life support energy ball, and you knock it away with the impression that you'll kill the Advisor in its sleep. Wrong. An alarm sounds, and you and Alyx are grabbed and suspended in mid air as the pod opens up. There's the Advisor, awake, alive, and pissed.
  • Doctor Freeeemannnnnn...
  • The G-Man programs Alyx with post-hypnotic suggestion to deliver a message to her father that nearly gives him (and the player if he's familiar with the first game) a heart attack. "Prepare for unforeseen consequences." We also learn that the G-Man provided the crystal that started the whole mess in the first place, which inspires the question of for how long and how much the G-Man has been controlling Alyx.
  • Recovering the nectar from the Antlion's nests. Freeman has to go through the caves entirely by himself, which means battling an abnormally large amount of antlions, stepping on their grubs (which are freaky and nasty by themselves) and topping it all off with the most nerve-wracking moment of Half Life history. Since you stepped on many Antlion larvae on your search for the nectar, you pissed off the Antlion Guardian, a stronger and deadlier variant of the Antlion Guard, which you cannot kill otherwise you fail your mission. This means you have to run from the Guardian across very narrow, claustrophobic tunnels while it is charging after you and right behind you at all times. The only way to save yourself from it is by hiding under small holes in the walls where you have to crawl through some more fugly grubs, come out, run down the claustrophobic and dark cave tunnels again with that thing after you, over and over again. The cherry on the top, though? The last time you have to do this, you have to bash your crowbar against wooden planks that are blocking your way to an elevator. This means you come out of your safe spot, run to the elevator, slowly whack the wooden planks with your crowbar and run back to your safe spot before you are hit by the very angry Antlion Guardian. It is absolutely terrifying.

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