Nightmare Fuel / Metroid Prime

Something sinister lurks in the depths of planet Tallon IV...

Despite being marketed as a Sci-Fi First Person Adventure, the entire Metroid Prime trilogy has so much Nightmare Fuel that they might as well add "Horror" to the list of genres it lies within. The first game works wonders with this approach, and since that's the one it starts out with...

Unmarked Spoilers ahead!

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• The very first thing that happens when you boot up the game is this menu music. While not overtly scary, the strange beeping that opens the song is sure to make anyone feel at least a little uneasy.
• The beginning of the game. After an epic opening, your first task is exploring a derelict Space Pirate ship. There's no music or life outside, or even any signs of damage, just you and a billion stars, so you don't know what to expect. But by the time you get inside, you're treated to an utter nightmare: almost everything on the ship has been massacred. It's like something straight out of Dead Space! It's dark, most of the machinery is short-circuited or on fire, there are dozens of corpses everywhere of mutilated and mutated wildlife and the Space Pirates who were slaughtered by them, and the music doesn't even have the decency to not be incredibly creepy.
  • Quite unlike Dead Space, the atmosphere of the Orpheon is almost painfully quiet and there are few enemies at all, and all of them go down without much of a fight. The real horror is in wandering around waiting to stumble into what put them in that state to begin with.
  • One of the creatures behind a sealed stasis pod is awake and will begin desperately trying to break the door down and kill you. You never get to see what it is, but the scan declares it a "xenotropic life form" and the scan image is terrifying; it looks like a creature with an enlarged skull and claws reaching for you. Though the mystery is lessened if you know the other Metroid games.
  • The injuries many of the Space Pirates have suffered in the beginning of Metroid Prime are downright gruesome, and scans even show images of their injuries. Two of the worst ones happen to be one whose exoskeleton's joints were fused together by acid, leaving him unable to move, and another pirate who died by having his internal organs eaten while still alive. The Remastered version ups the ante by showing the character models' injuries in much more grisly detail, with even pieces of their flesh bitten out.
  • The Frigate's Escape Pod Bay also offers a mild Jump Scare that truly sets the tone for Metroid's new 3D incarnation. After encountering nothing but small Parasites throughout the first rooms of the ship, you open the door—and sitting on the floor is an enormous monster, nearly forty feet long and with its mouth open in a silent scream, surrounded by the corpses of Pirates (some of which are feebly clinging to life) and fire. You quickly figure out that it's already dead, so you're in the clear, but it's still quite a surprise to first-time players. It gets worse as you scan the creature—a dead Parasite Queen—and discover all of the bizarre mutations on it, including its gigantic size, acid-spewing jaws, and ability to give birth from an organ on its tail. And that's when it hits you...if this creature is dead, then where are the newborn Parasites coming from? Unsurprisingly, you get your answer later—there's another Parasite Queen lurking in the Frigate, this one very much alive...
  • The Escape Pod Bay is also terrifying because, up until this point in the Metroid series, the Space Pirates were the toughest of the tough—big, scary monsters that aren't afraid of anything. The fact that whatever was lurking on the Frigate Orpheon sent them into such an absolute panic that they ran like hell tells you that there's something very, VERY dangerous about this place...and yet you have no choice but to keep exploring. Heck, the Pirates—the most hated criminals in the galaxy—were so desperate that they sent out a distress signal to every ship in the area. Imagine being so absolutely terrified of the monsters that you've created that you're willing to face being captured to escape.
  • When you enter the reactor you walk past several pirate corpses, with scans indicating that they were used as a food stash for a huge predator and whatever was eating from them is most likely still nearby.
• The Chozo Ruins are pretty scary, all things considered. It has a very dead atmosphere, in that it used to be a paradise of nature—water and greenery everywhere. After the fall of the Chozo, nature has been merciless in re-taking it, with most of the greenery gone, what little left heavily saturated with poison, and the ruins crumbling around you. What little life is left tends to try to kill you. Vultures circle the outside ruins, but going inside is worse—it's dark, quiet, and there are those damn Shriekbats and War Wasps buzzing and shrieking everywhere.
  • The level of toxicity in the water. It can easily kill Samus, despite her being in a thick metal suit with energy shielding. Scan it in some of the rooms for the exact parameters: the toxins in the water are so destructive that they've killed off all the water-borne microbes that would ordinarily be found there. Keep in mind, this is not the most dangerous substance on the planet. It's a byproduct of a mutated creature that was exposed to Phazon, something much more hazardous even before its mutagenic qualities are taken into account.
  • Flaahgra, which looks like an enormous cross between an insect and a plant with a horribly proboscoid face and scythes for arms. And then, after you beat it and take the only exit route available, you will catch a glimpse of a creature you won't see for quite some time, detailed directly below.
    • The Remaster ups the ante for Flaahgra, as the scythes now look like skulls. Suspiciously avian skulls, which makes you wonder what happened to some of the Chozo's bodies.
  • And then, after you've been going through the game a while and long since beat the Ruins' boss, the game directs you to come back. No big deal, all the enemies here are easy by now and you know the layout very well. But then you keep exploring until you get to a room called the "Hall of the Elders". You enter, look down and see a Chozo statue holding something emitting an odd fog. You jump down, and the ball of fog rises up into the air. All of a sudden the doors lock, the entire room goes very dark, the music becomes hysterical, and the ball of fog forms into a glowing white humanoid that attacks at high speed and hisses and shrieks! It will vanish and reappear, and only when you manage to scan it will it be revealed as a Chozo Ghost. And all those weapons you've spent your whole game collecting? They won't work on it. And these things now populate a large section of the ruins, always in groups of two or three. Have fun!
    • The scan visor even uniquely lists the Chozo Ghost as an "aberration", because it doesn't know what the fuck this thing is! The only other creature to get that treatment is the local Eldritch Abomination, the titular Metroid Prime itself.
    • To make things even worse, their energy attacks are so bright that they cast reflections of Samus's eyes on her visor. The first time this happens is quite the Jump Scare, and even after, it is always unsettling!
  • The in-game Chozo Lore scan-files contain a fair amount of Nightmare Fuel too. Especially if you read them all in a row. Essentially, the Chozo lived peacefully until a meteor carrying the sentient toxin, Phazon, hit Tallon IV, killing off anything unable to adapt. And while they were slowly dying (or worse), they waited for their prophetic saviour, Samus, to arrive and save them all. And she never came.
• The Phendrana Drifts is where the terror starts to ramp up. After the stressful Chozo Ruins, you get to enjoy some head-banging music as you enjoy the volcanic Magmoor Caverns with its lava snakes and heavy percussion beat. Then you get to Phendrana, which is frozen and comparatively very nice and calm. There's even a lot of enemies that won't even bother you. Hey, what's that pile of ice on the ground? Why is it getting up?
  • You just had your first encounter with a Sheegoth: a bipedal creature consisting of a hard shell covering its only weak point, and the rest? A hideous maw of teeth too big for its face. Which the scan visor helpfully displays to have six eyes.
    • And these are the infants. They are by far the toughest and most aggressive non-boss creatures you've seen, they're as big as Samus herself...and they're babies. Yes, these hellbeasts are infants of the species. The encounter with a fully grown one is even worse—it's thirty feet tall and a lot more vicious.
• And then you find the Space Pirate base, Glacier One. This is where the game stops messing around—you're plunged right into their territory, only this time the Pirates aren't mostly dead and weak when alive. They're healthy, murderous, and they populate the whole area. This theme makes sure you'll understand they are to be feared. And once you've stopped sweating after killing them all in each room, you'll get to read up on all of the ways they've experimented on any life form unfortunate enough, up to and including themselves. This leads to both Phazon becoming understood as a true threat and the Elite Pirate program being revealed.
  • The knowledge that the Pirates will do anything to make themselves stronger as a race, even surgically modifying their own genetic structures. Even without the self-inflicted Phazon mutations, the updated models in the Remastered version make it clear that all of the pirates have unsettlingly grafted cybernetics, such as mechanical spinal columns, and in the case of the Elite Pirates, artillery cannons grafted right into their backs with their flesh healing around the joints.
  • The game goes out of its way to draw attention to the very first Metroid you encounter here. Which, only after you scan it (so you know what it is, for first-time Metroid players), it will shatter its cage and come after you.
    • That scene is, by far, the absolute worst the first time around for fans of the original series. Why? Because you quickly realize you're in the worst possible situation: locked in a room. With a Metroid. And no ice beam.
    • The way the Metroids grip your face in first-person. Probably one of the nastier things to come out of Metroid going into 3D.
  • Once you penetrate deep enough into their base, the Pirates respond by turning the power off on you, hoping to seal you in with them while they butcher you. Everything is pitch-black, the containment fields for the Metroids are down, and the only way to see, let alone fight back, is with the Thermal Visor. Did we mention that, after picking up the Thermal Visor, Shadow Pirates now infest this specific Space Pirate base? If you haven't been Sequence Breaking then prepare to face a bunch of them on your way out, have fun with that.
• All of this, culminating in Thardus, the boss of Phendrana Drifts. An enormous rock monster brought to life by Phazon, doing its damnedest to kill you. The enormous cave it's fought in seems to have been constructed around it purely for the purpose of containing it.
• And thus, we are now in the know about Phazon. It is a ridiculously radioactive and toxic mutagen that kills off anything that isn't naturally or mechanically durable enough, can induce madness even in sufficiently shielded beings, and the experiments thus far have produced horrors such as the Parasite Queen, Flaagrah, and Thardus—the last of which highlights the substance's "lifelike qualities"—it animated a rockfall and turned it hostile. The Space Pirates hope to use it as a weapon, and to that end have been infusing their own embryos with it. The Chozo rightfully hate and fear it and took desperate measures to contain it, but even they succumbed: the reason those Chozo Ghosts attack you? They've been driven insane due to Phazon madness. This evil living mutagen corrupted the Chozo so thoroughly that their symptoms control them beyond the mortal coil and have ripped them away from the afterlife.
• The tunnel between the crashed Orpheon's exit and the elevator to Phazon Mines, where a natural bridge spans a pit of Phazon (your first look at its raw form in-game). Here, the catchy Tallon Overworld music changes to the creepy "Phazon Radiation" theme as Samus' HUD warns "intense radiation detected" in red lettering. And as ominous as this moment is (especially the first time), 'tis but a mere glimpse of what comes next...
• The last third of the game features the dreaded Phazon Mines. The Pirates here are stronger than ever, presenting a serious threat even to Samus Aran as they defend their operations. Checkpoint Starvation ensues as you fight your way down through ambush after ambush, with extremely tough pirates popping out of alcoves and chasing you around twisting hallways. And being alone and in peace isn't much better. The "Phazon Radiation" soundtrack can make anything creepy.
  • In order to relieve that starvation, you have to beat the Cloaked Drone. Yes, it's invisible. No, your Thermal Visor won't help you see it. And no, you can't scan it—meaning you not only have no way of seeing or tracking it, but your most useful tool can't help you fight it while it dismantles you. It's like the damn Chozo Ghosts all over again. You can make short work of it with the Wavebuster or even one-shot it with a well-placed Super Missile—that is, if you have any missiles left by the time you get this far.
  • All the while, you get more reminders of how amoral and ruthless the Pirates are. But more terrifying than what happens when they fail is what happens when they succeed: the Elite Pirate, a twenty-foot-tall hulking behemoth heavily-armed and ready to kill you. You'll see a lot of these things in stasis tanks before you fight your first one, but they're bosses in their own right, and you fight them in highly cramped areas. The kicker? You'll pass by a lot of them, but you'll never know which ones are going to wake up and attack and which won't.
  • The Omega Pirate itself is the pinnacle of these horrific experiments, having been infused with so much Phazon that it can use it to recover from damage. It is also insanely durable plus able to teleport and turn invisible. And when it does turn invisible, it's Phazon infused veins can be seen as it vanishes and in the X-Ray Visor. It's very unsettling, not to mention thinking that these were planned to be mass-produced.
• Scanning data in the Elite Control Room in the Phazon Mines reveals that the Space Pirates actually tried to reverse engineer Samus' morph ball. The R&D team then decided to cancel the project after several test subjects came out horribly disfigured. To give you a rough idea, imagine being thrown into a car compactor...
• The Game Over sequence. On taking a fatal amount of damage, Samus lets out an echoing, agonized scream as her view distorts, turns to static and shuts off. It then suddenly cuts to a short-but-unsettling cinematic showing a close-up of her helmet's visor with a huge crack in it, and the Life Support Systems of her Power Suit all failing at once. You then see the screen filtering to red as Samus flatlines, and her head slowly sagging to one side as she begins to die. At that point, the screen suddenly cuts to black with a high-pitched electronic screech.
  LIFE SUPPORT SYSTEM: CRITICAL
  LIFE SUPPORT SYSTEM: OFFLINE
  GAME OVER
• The titular Metroid Prime itself truly exemplifies the horror that Phazon itself brings. It's a Metroid so heavily mutated by Phazon that it barely resembles a Metroid anymore, resembling a fusion of crab, spider, and scorpion more. The first form has an absurd amount of durability to boot. And when it dies, Prime goes all One-Winged Angel and abandons the carcass to reveal its final form, the Essence, which only goes down to Phazon itself. Disturbingly, in both forms, Prime's face looks humanoid, albeit without a mouth. Must've been foreshadowing to the birth of Dark Samus. In fact, it looks like a face before it even unfolds.
  • The 100% Ending has one last haunting scene of the nightmare to come, cutting to a lonely puddle of Phazon left behind in the remains of the Impact Crater and lingers on it before an armored, HUMAN hand, one that shares the same black and red color scheme as the Phazon Suit, begins to claw its way out as an eye opens up on the back to look around wildly. Metroid Prime was bad enough. What it reincarnates into will be so much worse...
• Meta Ridley, the result of an already terrifyingly Nigh-Invulnerable monster of an Arch-Enemy being cybernetically enhanced. After an agonizing metamorphosis, he's now equipped with internal missile systems and bombs, and only actually becomes harder the more he is weakened. All while letting out haunting roars and screeches. And never stopping.
  • The Remaster released on the Switch adds a bit of tarnish to the metallic parts of his body, along with making the purple on him more obviously fleshy. The end result is that Ridley looks less like a badass cyborg dragon, and more like a robotic dragon wearing his own corpse as adornments.