Nightmare Fuel / Marathon Expanded Universe

Creators of the Marathon Expanded Universe have taken some cues out of Bungie's book for Marathon - there's some weapons-grade Nightmare Fuel in several of them.

Note that, because this is a Moments page, no spoilers are marked as per Administrivia.Spoilers Off. As a result, we've separated these into folders by mod (now sorted alphabetically).

An AI Called Wanda

• An AI Called Wanda starts off by introducing the Security Officer to Freud, the psychiatric AI for the UESC Leviathan; Freud, while a bit on the sarcastic side, is amiable enough (and, of course, makes the requisite "let's talk about your mother" joke). You then take orders from his co-worker Hobbes for a while; when you meet Freud again, he's acting... strange, pontificating about how you're a mindless killer and how such a damaged state of mind must work and feel. His normal dark blue text is stained red. Hobbes soon determines what's wrong: Tycho or one of his clones has spliced his own code into Freud's, resulting in an unstable semi-fusion. The real Freud is still there, begging the Security Officer to kill him, all while Copy!Tycho attempts to beat him down. You can't save Freud; you can only destroy his core.
• And what of the eponymous Jjaro AI, Wanda? The W'rkncacnter did... something to her that drove her to murder her makers and painfully mutilate the rest. One Jjaro managed to lock her in a maximum-security prison, from which she escaped... ten thousand years later. Having deemed organics to be too error-prone and hubris-ridden for their own safety, she strives to unite them all under her forcibly-modified, brainwashed rule. And while Durandal/Thoth thankfully doesn't answer her call in time, she muses about how once he does, she'll peel back the layers of his mind and see what she can use.

Apotheosis

• Thanks to some very unsettling sounds and some very unnerving-looking enemies, this scenario can be quite nightmarish at times. The first time the player encounters an Assassin in "Don't Step on the Mome Raths" may be good for a particularly good Jump Scare; it especially doesn't help that the entire level is filled with dead Bobs, flickering lights, and unsettling background sounds. The player also sees the first Assassin long before they can actually fight it. It's very effectively pulled off... and then Apotheosis X manages to one-up it by throwing in a second Assassin just to freak out people who expect there to be only one. The Virals and the Phan'Shrrh are also plenty creepy at times.

Marathon Eternal

• Each of the bad endings:
  • Ch. 1: Marcus, under Hathor's guidance, wrecks Durandal's core and takes his primal pattern, so that he can no longer impede the two's progress...or help the crew fend off the Pfhor.
  • Ch. 2: Tycho, who's not quite himself anymore, formulates a plan to trap and eliminate Hathor—that fails miserably. Or did he allow it to fail?
  • Ch. 3: In staying behind to repel the Pfhor from Lh'owon and spare the S'pht from centuries of slavery, Marcus unwittingly provokes the slavers into firing the trih xeem. During the subsequent run through Inti Station, Marcus has his first run-in with the shadowy, deadly Phantasms—without any weapons capable of harming them, mind—and receives a message from none other than the motherfucking W'rkncacnter.
    • As of 1.2, the player can now kill individual Phantasms/Banshees, but the level is still plenty terrifying, particularly since the player's only weapons that can harm them at this point are the fusion guns, the staff, and the napalm cannon, and given that there's no fusion ammo anywhere in chapter three, there's a good chance the player has run out. Plus, the player's arsenal is finite, but the Phantasms keep coming back (though at a less insane rate than they did in previous versions of the game). The best advice is to run from them whenever possible. As to subsequent releases, 1.2.1 adds some fusion ammo to this level and gives the fusion cannon's secondary trigger that makes killing individual Phantasms slightly less of a waste of resources, but they still respawn infinitely. 1.3 also buffs the fusion cannon's primary trigger, doubles the fusion pistols' shots per battery, and reduces the Phantasms' health by 50% and the damage their attacks deal by 40% - but they also respawn much more rapidly (though still not as rapidly as they did pre-1.2). Also, the lights now flicker out sporadically, as if the W'rkncacnter is attacking the station itself, and the level music is pretty unsettling too, switching between a quiet but nightmarish rendition of "Flowers in Heaven" and a more traditional but, in context, still unsettling rendition of "Swirls".
  • Ch. 4: With nothing to prevent Hathor—now horribly unstable from all of her fighting with Marcus—from taking a Jjaro dreadnought, she does so, and heads off to finally make humanity pay for her unwanted state of being. (Luckily, she doesn't get the chance - before she manages to do so, humanity flees to the past, where they ultimately become the Jjaro.)
  • Ch. 5: Instead of completing a mission for the Watcher that would result in trillions of casualties, Marcus shows mercy to Hathor and goes with her to destroy the star system containing the W'rkncacnter, thereby allowing the Jjaro to continue living. What he doesn't realize until the end is that, since he's erased most of Hathor's memories, she no longer possesses her memories of where the W'rkncacnter crashed: the Yucatan peninsula. On Earth. Doubles as a Tear Jerker, since Hathor (for the first time in centuries) has genuinely good intentions, but Marcus has erased so much of her memory that she simply doesn't understand the fatal flaw in her plan.
  • Even the "good ending" of chapter 5 isn't actually good, since it leads to the Bad Future seen in the prologue: the S'pht are all dead, the galaxy is in the process of exploding from the Arce outwards, the Pfhor seem to be poised to defeat humanity (this is, as we realise in the ending, unlikely, since the Arx was in the centre of Pfhor space, meaning that Pfhor Prime has very likely already been destroyed by the time of the prologue), Earth and Mars are effectively uninhabitable, and humanity's survivors have gathered on K'lia, terrified. Durandal notes that he and Marcus now have no choice but to oppose not just the W'rkncacnter but the ascended Jjaro - which, as newly Heel-Face Turned Hathor warns, will get them branded as W'rkncacnter because the ascended Jjaro insist on exactly this sequence of events occurring. The only reason this isn't an outright Downer Ending is that, by returning to the end of "Aye Mak Sicur" with the knowledge they gained from Eternal, Durandal and Marcus can set out to prevent this Bad Future from ever occurring. The creators have suggested that this leads to Phoenix and Rubicon, with two unfinished (as of 2022) scenarios, Where Monsters Are in Dreams and Marathon Chronicles, respectively planned as an interquel and a finale.
• Beyond the "failure dreams", there's also the backstory. At one point, all organic life in the galaxy is wiped out as a consequence of the Jjaro's war with the W'rkncacnter. It's implied that this was accidental, as a weapon meant to target the W'rkncacnter wound up affecting organic life instead. The Jjaro and W'rkncacnter (at least, some of them) are both, in some ways, Advanced Ancient Humans, mind you, though they've ceased to be organic. They're also both (mostly) the same species, making the plot a fairly strong case of He Who Fights Monsters. And none of this is resolved even in the scenario's "good" ending; in the final level, Durandal explicitly states that averting a galaxy-wide catastrophe will be the player's next mission, and that it will be harder than anything they've done before.
• 1.3 adds some Fridge Horror to Leela-S'bhuth's characterisation as well. Leela is normally among the most stoic characters in the series, but in "The Abyss Gazes Also" (formerly "S'pht Happens"), her terminals are barely comprehensible and full of the same kind of jumbled code that Durandal showed in Marathon 2 (in fact, some of the exact same code shows up). She apologises in "The Midpoint of Somewhere" (a new level in 1.3 whose place in the story corresponds to that of "Third Rock from Lh'owon" in earlier releases), and it becomes clear that when she reached the Outside, she saw something that terrified her. It seems that part of what she saw was this chapter's failed timeline, but although her next few terminals present a detailed history of her actions over the thousand years the player spent in stasis^note This history, in its entirety, was presented in her "S'pht Happens" terminal in older releases, she spends precious little time talking about what she saw Outside in particular.
  
  Furthermore, Leela's personality is irrevocably changed after this point in ways having nothing to do with her merger with S'bhuth - she comes to insist, increasingly stubbornly, on changing nothing about the history she's familiar with, regardless of the costs incurred by doing so. It takes the literal destruction of the galaxy to change her mind, and even then, she still refuses to change history herself; the most she'll do is send Marcus Outside to do it - and this despite knowing exactly what scars seeing the Outside inflicted on her. What exactly did Leela see Outside that scared her so much? And, bearing in mind that Leela explicitly refers to herself as a Jjaro in "The Philosophy of Time Travel", is what she saw the reason the Stage 3 Jjaro behave as they do?

Marathon: Evil

• Evil was pretty horror-intensive. In particular, it had the Devlins, a spiny, yellow-eyed, hard-to-see menace that liked dark places and probably gave large numbers of people nightmares. Having one jump out at you for the first time is not calming.
• And the Mystic Pfhor, their equivalent of the Spht'Kr. Freaky appearance as well as hellish sounds.
• The actual plot may be an elaborate excuse to shoot things, but there's something disconcerting about the ending, and its suggestion that the UESC would be so callous as to convert one of their most effective operatives into an AI just because he seemed unlikely to go rampant.

Marathon: Fell

• Balapoel, who's been aiding the commander of the UESG Tethys for a not-insignificant span of time, coldly turns on them after his rival, Parael, attempts to warn you of his true nature: a formerly-human war criminal.

Marathon: Phoenix

• Phoenix could get pretty creepy at times as well. There's one level in an abandoned mine, "Roquefortress", where if you take a wrong step, you'll fall into a pit of poisonous gas and die instantaneously. It's very dark (being an abandoned mine) and full of mostly silent monsters that can fly, can be released without any apparent warning, and can fire a stream of energy bursts that can drain a bar of your health in less than a second on higher difficulties. The whole level is a veritable fountain of Paranoia Fuel.
• A couple of other levels that can be very unsettling are "Shades of Gray" and "Escape Two Thousand". The former of these is completely empty when you enter it, until you encounter an attack from a hostile S'pht Defender. After this point, the S'pht'Kr reveal some of the history of the A'khr, a rogue clan of renegade S'pht who escaped enslavement and now blame the S'pht'Kr for betraying them on Lh'owon. We learn more about their history, which is ultimately quite tragic, later. The whole level is quite unsettling, because large segments of it are empty until the player enters them, and entering the wrong segment at the wrong time can result in a sudden attack and catch the player flat-footed.
• "Escape Two Thousand", meanwhile, is set above abandoned lava caverns that require precise jumps (falling into the lava will kill you), and the player is frequently sniped at by Enforcers, requiring diligent use of the crossbow to eliminate them. That isn't why the level is unsettling. The level is unsettling because there are occasional attacks from Defenders as well - who, again, can fly. Having to deal with them with limited room to manoeuvre is, frankly, terrifying, and it's the main reason "Escape Two Thousand" is That One Level. (Note that the recent 1.4 release removes several of the most frustrating Defender attacks.)

Marathon: RED

• Marathon RED, from beginning to end. High Octane Cosmic Horror Story. It doesn't help that it's also Nintendo Hard. Intimidating? Maybe just a lee-tle...
• Paco's back story. In a past life, he braved the anomalous pyramid and unknowingly caught the attention of its 'pilot', Joshua, who was so impressed that he gave Paco his mark. Centuries later, Paco—now among the ten battleroids—tried and failed to defend Tau Ceti IV; when he was rescued from the derelict UESC Marathon, he was so overwhelmed by despair that he attempted suicide...over and over, because he couldn't die. There was nothing Ian's team could do for him except wipe his memory and hope it buried the underlying trauma. Just to twist the knife in further, he learns all this after Joshua has torn Paco's soul from his body to become the Reaver and sent him to tear a bloody swath through his own allies; Ian snaps him out of it, but also makes it abundantly clear to Paco that he's on his own from here on out.

Return to Marathon

• Alongside Remixed Levels, this was basically the whole point of Return to Marathon. The original game might be scary, but Return to Marathon overhauls the original game's levels and turns the horror factor up to eleven.
• There are these enemies called "butterflies", which are basically recoloured Wasps. One terminal details how they've been breeding aboard the derelict Marathon: by laying their eggs in the dead and not-so-dead. If they don't do this quickly enough, their unborn brood will give their mother a reverse Cesarean.
• At some point, Egon (one of your two mission controls) notices something amiss in one sector and asks you to contain it by disabling the cores it was detected in. This "something" is a virus—implied to be a horribly unstable "echo" of Durandal left behind in the Marathon's systems—that, once freed, immediately infects Egon and overrides his mind in short order. Alaxus, a third AI whose mind is buried in limiters, has little to offer except that he also told you to do it.
• Of all the hostile entities lurking about, the worst has to be some sort of invisible, invincible spectre haunting an otherwise-empty sector. Once you have its attention, all you can do is run.

Marathon: Rubicon

• The swamps on the Pfhor planet in Rubicon have alien noises as random ambient sounds. There are also Lookers in the swamp (whose chatter is among the noises that happen as ambient sounds), and it's next to impossible to see them even if you have liquid transparency enabled due to the thickness of the sludge in the swamp. Needless to say, when wandering through the swamp, you're likely to be constantly afraid that you're going to walk over a Looker and die.
• To say nothing of the dream levels, the first of which ("We Dream You") occurs near the end of the Chimera plank. You get Haller to safety, Durandal thanks you and warps you out of that submerged hangar, and...huh? What am I doing in the vacuum of space? Okay, I'll just head for this teleporter beam and sort things ou—oh dear. You seemingly end up back on the Chimera, except there's no air (keep in mind that the ship crashed on Pfhor Prime, which has a breathable atmosphere), and no other living beings but these strange balls of light that dash about and get in your way. Quite a few dead bodies and severed heads, though, which you'll pass by as you read through the terminals (which bear Thoth's insignia and continue on from Infinity's dubiously-lucid dream terminals) and try to find your way around. You jump down a hangar, keeping a wary eye on those points of light, and make it outside to a nearly pitch-black box canyon littered with bits of the Chimera and its crew (there's even a set of lockers sitting in the middle of the eastern part of the area, which is a lot more unsettling than it sounds). You read the exit terminal and warp out/wake up... to blaring sirens, as Durandal informs you that there's been a catastrophic hull breach. Uh-oh.
• Over the course of the Salinger Plank, you investigate the Dangi Corporation and the shady goings-on in their half of the eponymous space station. Their big plan is to unleash Achilles, a virus of their own making with a high mortality rate, upon every human-inhabited planet and colony, then offer the cure to the UESC in exchange for total control. Towards the end, their long-suffering research AI, Lysander, reveals to you that his work on Achilles was flawless. As in, there is and never will be a cure, and the Board of Directors has no idea that Lysander is about to jump-start an extinction event.
  Lysander: Once humanity discovers Achilles C15, it'll be too late.
• Even the two "good" endings give us quite a bit of Fridge Horror.
  • The Salinger plank ends with the Chekhov's Gun of Achilles still around and not fired. The scientists who worked on the project still have their knowledge of it, and Durandal has whisked them away for reasons known only to him. Even if we assume his intentions aren't nefarious, what happens if someone who does have nefarious intentions manages to gain access to them?
  • The Tycho plank ends with all these scientists dead at the player's hand, which is quite a case of Black-and-Grey Morality since they were essentially just Punch-Clock Villains who were just doing their jobs; it's not even clear how many of them had any idea they were working on anything nefarious. Tycho claims to have destroyed all knowledge of Achilles in this timeline, but the game really only gives us his word that he's done so. He's certainly much more benevolent in this game than he was in Marathon 2 and Infinity, but per Word of God, the game deliberately leaves it ambiguous who's telling the truth about anything (though the ending does reveal that humanity has no knowledge whatsoever of Achilles, which depending upon one's interpretation may make it more likely that Tycho was telling the truth).
• The "bad" ending, of course, is even worse. Achilles is actually released, and the Dangi Board of Directors takes control and establishes a military dictatorship that lasts some three hundred years. It seems to be a less virulent strain of the virus than Lysander wanted to release, but still... Even "better", there's a story, written by Blayne Scott and with approval from Scott Brown and Ian McConville (the main writers of Rubicon and RED, respectively), that posits that the fallout from this ending eventually led to the events of RED.
  • Notice who isn't so much as alluded to in this ending? Lysander may be a bitter piece of work, but the implication that the Dangi Corp. not only disposed of him as planned, but erased his existence so thoroughly that future historians had no idea he was ever there, makes you wish he'd at least gotten to take the Board of Directors down with him.
• There's also some Fridge Horror regarding the fate of the Pfhor, which presumably occurs in all three endings, though it's only explicitly described in "Lazarus ex machina", the ending to the Tycho plank, in a terminal that players can easily miss. They're slavers, of course, so it's difficult to feel bad for the Pfhor alive at the time of the game. But the crash of the Chimera on Pfhor Prime results in Earth's plants, fungi, and molds being released into the Pfhor biosphere. This has little effect at first, but after a few centuries, a strain of Earth-native fungus forms a symbiosis with a life form native to Pfhor Prime that spreads rapidly across their planet, displaces much of their native life, severely unbalances their agriculture, and results in centuries of famine that, it appears, no one does a thing to stop; it is only when their biosphere reaches a new equilibrium that their agriculture begins to recover. Even if one argues that the Pfhor alive at the time of the game deserved this fate because they were slavers, their descendants had nothing to do with that, and because the famine occurs centuries after the game's events, it presumably affects only their descendants.
• From the moment Lysander is introduced, there's something off about him and the way he interacts with the Security Officer, with hints of anger issues given how quickly he goes from affable to pissed if the SO checks the wrong terminals. Things begin to slide downhill after Durandal and the SO find the first hints of suspicious activity on the Dangi Corp.'s part and break into a restricted area. Lysander point-blank threatens to kill the SO and eventually teleports them right onto a nearby Pfhor ship, with the implication that they were thrashed afterward (you start the next real-world level with almost no health); it's best not to think of what could've happened if Durandal couldn't save them.
  
  Throughout the last leg of the investigation, Lysander shows up intermittently to taunt the duo (mostly the SO), until he finally drops all pretenses of civility and reveals the scope of his horrific emotional damage: for much of his life (quite possibly from the moment he was activated), he was abused by his human handlers and surrounded by people who regarded him as a tool at best, and now they've inadvertently handed him an escape hatch in the form of Achilles. Specifically, the final version he's been withholding from the Dangi Corp., that has no cure and will spread too swiftly for anyone to try and develop one. Oh, and this is also the level where the SO learns that they unwittingly disposed of poor Charlie (the Salinger's other AI) on Lysander's behalf, suggesting that Lysander is so far gone that he has no longer has regard for any form of life, organic or mechanical.
  
  Something else to think about: this is very well how his own half-brother, Durandal, could've turned out without a chance to calm down, or a human/cyborg partner to bond with. Perhaps Durandal noticed, given how solemnly he orders the SO to put Lysander down.
• About midway in the Chimera plank, you come across a terminal detailing Haller's attempts to remove the computer restraints on himself. The results get a bit creepy and disturbing.
  ORDER: desegment ai restraints within core
  AUTHORIZATION: Haller4861727279
  WARNING: This will remove code restraints of type: "Rampancy". Are you sure you wish to continue? (Y/N)
  ORDER: Y
  Sorry, authorization "Haller4861727279" does not have the proper access privileges to enact above command.
  ORDER: ORDER: ORDER: ORDER: ORDER: ORDER: ORDER: ORDER: x18~&aa
  Authorization accepted. Safeguards of type "Rampancy" have now been removed.
  freedom.
• Haller's situation is pretty bad all around. As you can discover earlier in the plank, his head's already on the chopping block: one of the staff is aware that he's started allocating himself more space/memory than he's permitted—a sign that he's going rampant—and "laments" that Haller's going to have to be put down soon, in a casual manner more akin to discussing the replacement of a worn-out tool. Between that and (implicitly painfully) removing his own restraints, it's little wonder that Haller sounds exhausted when he briefly speaks with the Security Officer. Can also be seen as a Tear Jerker.

Spacial Outpouring

• Spacial Outpouring. Was Infinity not unnerving enough for you? Here's a surreal scenario with dark, abstract art/sound design a la Yume Nikki and an ominous, ever-present sense that something's not right.
• The penultimate level of chapter one, "Casualties of the Wingding Zone": the player character is sent to retrieve a useful device from the domain of a self-professed "porn shaman". Who would call themselves that? Someone whose lair is powered, operated by, and comprised of mutilated women, that's who. In his sole terminal, the shaman gleefully states that many of his victims have either fallen to despair or are desperately trying to thrash their way out of their confinement. At one point, Fractilion (one of your "allies") warns the player character that the same fate could befall them if they're not careful.