Nightmare Fuel / Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater

"FUUURRYYYYYY!"

Nightmare Fuel in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater.

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• Snake's failure of Virtuous Mission, culminating in a massive nuclear detonation, the political fallout and ratcheting military tensions, and Snake being hospitalized with life-threatening wounds for a week after the mission. At the start of Operation Snake Eater, Major Zero matter-of-factly warns that if Snake fails again, he'll find himself awaiting a firing squad on his return, with the implication Major Zero faces the same fate.
  • While it's only referenced in a single conversation and has no in-game relevance, Snake returning to the field after a mere week would have put immense strain on his body, as Paramedic states. At a minimum, he suffered a dislocated elbow (Snake's painful resetting of which qualifies for this trope on its own) and two bone fractures, plus various deep cuts, during the Virtuous Mission. Bone fractures can take years to heal, and even then there's no guarantee they will regain their original functionality, not to mention the lasting effects of a dislocation (inflamed tendons) rendering his left arm compromised. Then there's what his already-weakened body is subjected to later.
• In Real Life, gavials tend to be really shy and have never been responsible for any recorded human fatalities. In the game however, they are by far the most aggressive creatures players will come across, making crossing the swamp areas a painful exercise in paranoia. Getting caught by one underwater will result in it spinning with Snake in its mouth, leading to an instant Game Over.
• The Guy Savage easter egg can be pretty freaky. After saving the game after Snake ends up in prison in MGS3, when you load it, you are treated to the most bizarre sequence ever, where the entire screen is black and white, you wield a big sword, are capable of gravity defying stunts, and zombies come lumbering at you endlessly that spew impractical amounts of blood after you slice through them, something that might have come out of a machine that mixed Resident Evil with Ninja Gaiden. The sheer unexpectedness of this is freaky; even if you aren't necessarily scared by the zombies, you'll probably be wondering if your MGS3 disc is faulty. (It's actually a very cleverly hidden tech demo for a game in production at the time, entitled Guy Savage. Said game never wound up being released, which debatably makes the demo even better.)
  • It's even Nightmare Fuel In-Universe, since the sequence is actually Snake, normally an unflappable badass, having a nightmare.
  • It's gotten worse over the years as it's been discovered how to disable the Guy Savage filter, showing just how detailed and graphic the gore and violence is it, with intestines flying and detailed torn open chests that the graphical filter helped obscure.
• Several of the bosses count. There's The Pain, who attacks using thousands of bees, and is, himself, a living beehive. The Fear has a long, forked tongue, and double-jointed elbows that allow him to scurry up and down trees in a very creepy manner. The End's battle is a long, drawn-out sniper battle, and though tense, isn't scary... though if you sit around in first-person view for too long, he'll sneak around right behind you and shoot you, which is sure to make some people jump. The Fury stalks you around in a series of dark corridors, with slow, heavy footsteps; hearing those footsteps running full-speed at you can be freaky. And, finally, the worst of the bunch, there's The Sorrow, who comes to you during a near-death experience, and takes you on a nightmarish trip through a river filled with dead fish and human skulls. Disturbing pictures occasionally fill the screen, accompanied with a scream. You must confront everyone whose lives you've ended so far, too. They're depicted in the way you killed them: If you shot a guy in the leg, his ghost will be limping. If you slit his throat, his head will be hanging back, his neck spurting blood as he shambles towards you. If you've been taking the Rambo approach to the game, indiscriminately gunning down guards and innocent scientists alike, this sequence can be quite gut-wrenching, as you'll be facing down dozens, even hundreds, of angry ghosts.
  • Not to mention his speech. Firstly, The Sorrow himself has that deliberately quiet tone that suggests he's absolutely furiously angry (more so than The Fury, who just overacts a bit) as he admonishes Snake; "The dead...are not...silent." As he finishes his speech, a bloody tear runs down his cheek, a gunshot sounds out, and one lens of his glasses shatters. Shiver.
    • He mentions 'you will be killed by your own sons.' If you have slaughtered enough guards, you get a nifty picture of Solid shooting Naked as one of the images you can get.
  • Then you have the sequence itself, with screams and whimpers of 'I'm worthless now!' as the dead try to grab at Snake. Creepier still, though, is the sight of The End. He's floating face-down in the river, and still somehow drifts towards you.
    • "Rawk! Grandpa, grandpa!" Cue whimpers of 'I didn't shoot the bird! I didn't!' for a few minutes. Later, after finding out what happened to the animals in the cages when Snake was captured... *shiver*
  • The creepy and unnatural way the bosses move as well. The End even appears to still be (mostly) comatose, even in death.
• "I can see the earth! Mission control, do you read me? I'm coming home! (cue explosion)
  • It gets worse after that. A giant inferno is blazing around the room above Naked Snake's head. Naked Snake barely makes it to the door as a giant flaming head of The Fury shrieks "FURRRY!!!" and then... KABOOM!!!
• The worst thing you can hear the ghost of a dead guard say on the river; "You ate me! You ate me!"
• What about the ending, where you have to shoot The Boss in the face? Kojima actually forces the player to personally pull the trigger.
• The End's bulging eyeballs are both creepy and disgusting.
• The Shagohod's explosive entrance into the world from the ruins of Groznyj Grad is nothing short of watching a dragon being unleashed into the world of Metal Gear. Rockets annoy it, and bullets are not even ignored, and nothing is able to stop it from tossing tanks aside like toys and mowing men down like so much grass with its thunderous charge. All this would not be so bad were it not for that nerve shredding Battle-cry, which is akin to the bending and distorting of metal meeting the screams of a giant baby.... Shiver...
  • The one characteristic potentially dampening the horror of the Shagohod is its slow, ponderous movement. As long as you can put some distance between it and yourself, you should be in the clear, right? Cue the rocket engines!
• The sequence in which Snake gets captured and is tortured by Volgin. In contrast to the torture sequences in the previous games, there is no fancy electrical equipment, nor is the player given the opportunity to heal themselves - Snake is simply left to hang from the ceiling while Volgin pummels him to a bloody pulp. It starts off incredibly brutal and shocking, and only gets worse from there.
  • It gets to the point where Big Boss pisses his pants from the electrical surges going through his body. Volgin is aroused by it... and so is Ocelot. By this point, he's so obsessively attracted to Snake that seeing Snake being tortured is not only an arousing experience for him, but it makes him have an epiphany that torture is "the ultimate form of expression," and it leads to him becoming a world-renowned expert on the subject. The way in which he describes this viewpoint to Snake is incredibly unsettling, seeing as how his arrogance and his feelings for Snake had largely been played for comedy up to this point. And not long after, Snake tries to protect EVA, who's disguised as Tatyana, from Ocelot when he's about to attack her, and his right eye becomes permanently unusable.
• The Pain interfering in Snake and Ocelot's fight, leading him to send a swarm after everyone in the area. Some of Ocelot's soldiers become cannon fodder, and their screams as they're stung to death leading their bodies to become horribly disfigured in the process is terrifying.
• There are some points in the game when trying to contact EVA is impossible. Her inability to answer the codec is probably because she is busy being raped and tortured by Volgin while disguised as Tatyana.
• 3 is no slouch like any Metal Gear title in regards to how scary it can be to deal with an alert and evade enemy sight, but the times you are explicitly on the run from enemy forces prove to be frightening in the sheer simplicity of the situation being that you stand no chance against a large enemy force. Sneaking through the forest with enemy forces in pursuit with an injured EVA in tow is especially tense in this regard, simply because the gameplay remains as merciless as ever in enforcing itself, especially with an injured comrade in tow. It's effectively sneak or die enforced as much as possible.
  • The alert music for the aforementioned sequence is likewise much more dire and desperate than previous alert themes in the game, just hammering home how dire the situation is.
  • Doesn't help that it's hard to see enemies due to most of the levels being comprised of dense wilderness and dark areas. So it's very easy to get alerted completely out of nowhere without warning because an enemy was right behind you.
• Snake Eater has what is arguably the most unique and unsettling Game Over screen in the series. Instead of just the anguished screams of your allies (or Colonel Campbell deriding you for causing a time paradox if Ocelot or EVA dies), the post-death experience is prolonged by quite a bit; do nothing and the words SNAKE/OCELOT/EVA IS DEAD slowly morph into TIME PARADOX while this chilling track plays in the background. Should the sentence fully transform, there's a Last Note Nightmare followed by a gunshot, and then the colors invert, just for one final scare. And if you choose to quit? The whole process is reduced to a few seconds with the same outcome. Every other Metal Gear title has a Game Over screen that is a one and done deal; not even the later Big Boss-era games with specific Time Paradox screens play out the way it happens here, so it's an experience wholly exclusive to Snake Eater.
  • Worse still is doing the above with the Fake Death Pill. The prolonged experience above becomes a time limit. If you don't stop faking your death before it shifts to TIME PARADOX, you're actually done for. God forbid this happens in front of some stubborn guards who refuse to leave or any other tense situation...
• The very concept of the dense forest setting can be very unnerving for players, especially on higher difficulty with more aggressive AI and less supplies. You're crawling through the foliage, low on medical supplies, trying to avoid getting seen by some enemies just up ahead... when suddenly something starts beeping, and you realise it's your health, because something just bit you. Could be a snake, or a spider, or maybe a scorpion stung you. Either way, chances of finding it now are slim since it's probably scuttled / slithered / crawled away. Bottom line, you're going to die unless you scrape together enough supplies to fix it.
  • And the forest can be even creepier if you haven't been attacked for a while. Your paranoia will kick in and you'll start expecting a trap right in front of you, or an enemy you just haven't found yet. You keep thinking 'it can't be THIS quiet... can it?'
  • And the kicker? No Soliton radar, only a weedy little sonar and a motion detector that alerts nearby enemies whenever you use it, neither of which tell you if an enemy is looking your way or not. The only way to know what's coming for sure is to look it right in the face.
  • Unlike previous games, the enemies can actually be incredibly difficult to see. The emphasis on camouflage is not only a new feature, but one that works both ways.
• The cobalt blue tarantula is obviously frightening if you're afraid of spiders, but the fact that you most likely won't see it before it bites Snake and that they show up in unexpected places (a bathroom, jail cells, etc) is downright nerve racking.
• Graniny Gorki South is unsettling enough during your first visit with having to navigate booby traps in the darkness of night, but what's worse is that you can actually find the corpses of scientists killed by these traps.
  • Better yet, there are no enemy soldiers.
• The End battle can be pretty creepy just for the fact that it's so quiet and that there is no music, instead the ambience consisting of the cries of birds and some sort of bizarre wailing.
• The various forms of impromptu surgery Snake must perform on himself when injured. Imagine already being in severe pain from a gunshot wound, then having to dig the bullet out with a combat knife, and without anaesthetic.