Nightmare Fuel / Metro: Last Light

• The trailer shows how the nuclear apocalypse began in Moscow, and how an infant (who may be Artyom) was taken into the metro in the first place. Good luck getting sleep after watching the chaos and hearing the screams.
  Radio: The missiles were launched. This is the end. May God help us.^RU Ракеты были запущены. Это конец. Да поможет нам Бог.
• Artyom goes to the surface more often in the sequel. You get to truly appreciate the alien landscape of ruined Moscow as well as the crazy that inhabits it.
  • One part has him and a companion stumbling upon the burned out wreckage of a passenger jet. There is plenty of Mind Screw until you get to the cockpit, where you encounter an eleven alarm hallucination of the plane and its passenger's final moments. Imagine being stuck on a plane that gets disabled by an EMP and coming from the cloud line at 200MPH to see a mushroom cloud in the middle of Moscow. It's a newer, more advanced plane with fly-by-wire electronic controls that got zapped by the EMP, rendering the plane a dead-stick. The pilot struggles to get any response from his now-useless controls while the copilot screams that Domodedovo International Airport's air traffic control is gone and freaks the fuck out.^* If you listen carefully, you might hear that the ATC isn't gone... it's mechanically repeating the word "Atom! Atom! Atom!" over and over again, like a code word or broken recording. And you get to watch all the way to the point of impact. For those with a fear of flying already, this becomes a true worst case nightmare scenario. Helpless with plenty of time to think just how you may die.
  • An optional point in Metro: Last Light: During "The Dead City", you can see the silhouette of a corpse illuminated by a light in a piece of open sewer, and when you check on the place where the body should be, a Lurker jumps out and scares you. But that's not it. What is, is when you get to the other side a few minutes later. You stand there, in the place where the Lurker and the body were, and now it's your shadow on the wall. Except for a few seconds, your shadow is missing all its flesh, leaving a moving skeleton still wearing gear and a helmet, silhouetted on the wall.
  • Everything regarding "The Dead City" is just plain creepy. From all the whispering, crying, and the laughing of the ghosts, to all of the other strange phenomena, such as the mysterious phenomenon that you encounter, or hear about in the audio recordings left by various surface explorers over the course of several years.
• The shadows of people in Last Light that are only visible when they are not in the center of the viewpoint are disturbing as all hell.
• There are a whole bunch of little rooms alongside the tracks in "Regina", which Artyom can explore; most of them contain mutants, ammo, weapons, etc...however, the last one is a bit different. Your first clue that something is off is the bloody corpse lying outside of the door that vanishes into thin air after a few seconds, accompanied by strange whispering sounds. Go inside, and the whispering starts again, and you'll notice numerous human shapes visible only in the corner of your eye, including a hanged man. Stay longer, and the whispering eventually increases in volume till it sounds like it's RIGHT in your ear, and all the ghostly shapes fully materialise. Men are writhing in agony on hospital beds, bottles of medicine clatter against the walls, and the whole spectacle goes on for several interminable seconds before it all suddenly stops, and all the ghosts vanish. At least you get a weapon and two moral points out of the whole thing.
• Spiderbugs. An arachnophobe's worst nightmare. Sure, you can literally kill them with a flashlight, but it's still nerve-wracking trying to fight groups of them in tight spaces. There are whole stretches of tunnel that they've completely taken over, where even the Nazis fear to tread, covered from top to bottom in thick webs and fleshy, pulsating egg sacs. Worse yet, Artyom theorises in one of his diary entries that they may not actually be mutants, but rather some kind of monster that's been around since time immemorial, choosing now to emerge from the darkness since mankind no longer rules the world.
• Listen carefully to some of the enemy chatter, and you'll hear some rather scary ghost stories. In "Bandits", the titular brigands during the stealth section tell two such stories.
  • The first is apparently about the Darkness anomaly that you later encounter in "Undercity"; a guy is walking down a pitch-black passage with his buddies, and they walk into a strange black cloud that disables their flashlights. He suggests that they leave, and his friends respond in voices unlike their own, saying that they'd rather stay. He uses his lighter to illuminate the area, and the mist is flowing in and out of his friends' mouths, and they scream at him to turn off the light. The guy runs away and never sees them again.
  • The second story is about a malevolent entity called the "Tunnel Master"; those who are contacted by him suddenly say "I've been summoned by the Master" and walk off down a dark tunnel, never to return. According to the bandits, even if you tie down someone who's been summoned, they'll simply chew through the ropes and escape.
• Courtesy of the Faction Pack DLC, the Librarians are back, and by god, they're worse than ever. They've been redesigned to look even scarier, with much thicker and heavier limbs (the better to tear you apart with) and faces that look like the demon spawn of a Cave Troll and the Predator. And due to the structure of the mission (you can only get better equipment as you progress deeper and deeper into the library, bringing back artefacts to exchange for filters and weapons), it's entirely possible to run into one while carrying substandard equipment. Joy.
  • On a related note, there is a constant moaning sound that echoes across the library basement. Whatever it is, it sounds like it is in horrific pain and makes that part of the level even creepier than it already is.
• As you approach the Church at nightfall, there's this sound that could either be singing or screaming coming intermittently from one of the ruined apartment tower blocks. Although you never have to go in there, but...
• The "Spider Lair" mission from the Developer Pack DLC is specifically engineered to be terrifying, and it works. Trapped in an abandoned missile silo FILLED with hundreds of Spiderbugs, unarmed, and quickly finding both of your friends dead, it really emphasises the "survival" part of "Survival Horror". Even after picking up the Flamethrower, the sheer amount of spiders coming at you in the dark while your filters quickly wear out keeps the heart racing all throughout. And in the end, after barely escaping the spiders' lair, you belatedly remember that you're no safer on the surface, and the last thing the unfortunate Stalker sees is a Watchman pouncing on his face.
• Khan and Uhlman's level from the Chronicles Pack may be one of the most disturbing ones yet— quite fitting, given Khan's central role in it. The early push through the ruined train car has some really intense ghost imagery, complete with overlapping voices in your ear and shadowy specters running straight toward you, only to disappear, and ends with Uhlman falling unconscious just as he experiences a Flashback Echo of the passengers' final moments. Then, there's the inexplicable flood of rats that nearly devours the pair, which is only warded off by the return of the Anomalies from the first game. However, the worst may be the end: Uhlman and Khan reach Polyanka and run into what might be the two ghostly Metro dwellers Artyom met in the novel, followed by an emotionally powerful extended flashback to when Khan and his friends at Polyanka were attacked by a massive swarm of Nosalises, which brutally kill almost everyone in the station and force a desperate Khan to leave the others behind to prevent them from spreading to the rest of the Metro.
• Falling into the water and getting Eaten Alive by Shrimps. You expect a typical video game drowning death, but then you see one of those armoured freaks swimming toward you, mouth wide open...
• The part in "Regina", after you open the airlock and have to put on your gas mask— the silence is suddenly broken by the howl of Watchmen, a mutant you don't normally find in the tunnels. One of them spawns directly behind you if you take the left path and explore the crashed subway train.
• The introduction to Last Light, where you play as a nameless Metro dweller on guard duty by a campfire with your friends. There's suddenly screaming from down the tunnel, and a group of Dark Ones appear right in front of you. The people near you are suddenly replaced by frenzied mutants trying to tear your throat out, but every time you shoot them, there's a flash and instead of a mutant, one of your fellow guards is in its place falling down dead. The sequence concludes with a mutant trying to bite your face off, and as you stab it in the skull your character finds himself only face-to-face with a dead human. The nameless Metro dweller collapses to the ground, staring at the blood on his hands while a discordant screaming soundtrack begins to build up, and he's too broken to resist at all as a Dark One reaches down to do ...something to him. It's never made clear whether or not this is a dream Artyom had or an actual event, but it's a darn effective demonstration of just how horrifying the Dark Ones are to the people of the Metro.
• Naturally, a creepy game has to have creepy music, like the track "Rustling in the dark" with even the title being unsettling.
• One of Artyom's diary entries (from the level Torchlight) is particularly chilling:
  "The tunnels and stations of the Metro are but a part of the subterranean construction projects carried out in the long ages of Moscow’s history. The Dukes would build secret passages and hideouts, the tsars would construct catacombs and reliquaries - and even then, centuries ago they would routinely stumble upon even older passages created in times immemorial, and perhaps even not by humans. Caves, underground riverbeds… Nobody really knows what’s there around the Metro stations, above them or below them. There are no maps, for the cartographers never come back from their expeditions… And those strange, nightmarish creatures inhabiting the catacombs - were they really born of radiation? Could they have always lived there? Perhaps they would just avoid men before, but now, feeling that our end is near, that we're no longer the masters of the Earth, they got braver and now approach us closer and closer to finally jump us and feed on us while we're still warm?"
• While Artyom and Pavel are escaping the Reich base, one part forces them to bluff their way through a Nazi rally, posing as security. And that's through; they're walk through the middle of a crowd while the Fuhrer gives a speech on cleansing the Metro. Whether it's from the Fuhrer's hate-filled language or being surrounded by people willing to murder you the second they know how you are, the tension is palpable.
  • The above scene is doubly frightening if you the player are any of the following: left of center in your politics, Black, Asian, Amerindian, Jewish or pretty much anybody who does not fit whatever 'ideal' the Nazis have. The Nazis in Metro 2033 were portrayed as scary but also as kind of goofy fanboys who would unconvincingly use German and get confused between more Soviet or Russian manners of speaking then remembering to act like Nazis. In Last Light it is very clear that the Reich faction is feared and hated for very good reasons.
  • Hell, the Nazis in general. Even with their short appearance, their brutality and ruthlessness is starkly apparent. In your first encounter with them, they shoot some poor Hanza citizen in the chest in cold blood for the crime of having skull proportions not up to their (completely arbitrary and subject to change whenever the fuhrer feels like it) standards, mentioning to throw his body down a garbage chute. Once you and Pavel head down said garbage chute to escape, the chute's destination is filled with corpses of their victims.
• The level "Bandits" doesn't feature supernatural horrors or weird unexplained shit, just humanity at its vilest. You encounter a refugee caravan that's escaped the Red Line and ran into a group of bandits, with the forward group that contained most of the fighters being killed or captured by the bandits. Said group included women. Sure enough the first bandits you encounter are about to rape one of the woman, who screams for help. If you take too long? They don't rape her, they just beat her to death. That's the point where many players dropped the Pacifist Run. One of the captured men begs for mercy and resigns himself to being anally raped as a bitch just to survive (mercifully, nothing gruesome happens). The final captured group you encounter near the end is just a mother and her children begging that the children are let go, even if it means she's killed.
• Doubling as a Tear Jerker, right at the start of the game, as you exit the Metro-2/D-6 tunnels with Anna to head to the surface, you stumble upon a drainage sewer full of civilian skeletons, including parents clutching children, who tried to seek shelter there but ultimately died of radiation poisoning or starvation. There are a bunch of makeshift graves but most of the skeletons are unburied. Some have blown their brains out with AK rifles. It's chilling to be reminded of the human cost of the war and how pitifully these people died, in fear, pain, sorrow and misery without any dignity.
  • It's implied by the pile of skeletons near the door to the Metro-2/D-6 tunnels that some of the civilians tried to seek refuge in there but either nobody inside D-6 knew they were seeking refuge, or they knew but didn't care.
• The "Heavy Squad" DLC mission has you play as a Nazi Heavy Trooper wielding a Gatling Gun repelling a Zerg Rush of Red Line troops, including their Heavily Armored Mooks. That's not the Nightmare Fuel part. The Nightmare Fuel is the "triumphant" cutscene at the end where you see the pile of dozens of mutilated bodies, some of them missing limbs, with the occasional soldier twitching because they're still alive.