Nightmare Fuel / Metroid Prime 2: Echoes

Hunted by a mysterious entity...

Just like with the first game, Echoes spends an extensive amount of effort to unnerve the player right out of the gate. Listen to this whilst viewing for added nightmare-inducing effect.

Unmarked Spoilers Ahead!

• The beginning of the game works slowly on building its atmosphere. Per the opening lines, your contract terms are to find a stranded group of Federation Marines and render assistance. Naturally, this means they'll all be dead by the time you arrive, but if only that were the worst part. You crash-land pretty much directly into their base, and the first sign that something is off is that you're traveling through subterranean tunnels bearing the marks of insectoid and arthropod life. Go down a little deeper, and you find massive piles of corpses of enormous bugs with entire rooms dedicated to gassing the things with pesticides.
  • You'll be able to read a few reports and logs before things kick into gear. Basically, they found themselves stuck on the planet and had the misfortune to be forced to set up shop right on top of a hive network of an aggressive insect species. The splinter soldiers are getting past the meager defenses they have, and posing serious threat to the remaining marines on their own. On top of that, they're having troubles with gates disengaging, locking, and malfunctioning at the worst times, leading to holes in the defense and, in one instance, a few poor soldiers essentially being gassed by their own pesticide. Something's not right down there...
  • And then you open a door and find the Hive Tunnel, where several GF Marine corpses have been strung up as foodstuffs by splinter drones. The scan data only makes the sight even more horrific.
  Source of fatal wounds: Galactic Federation assault weapon. Trooper was, in all likelihood, killed by friendly fire. Whether it was an accident or not remains to be seen.
  Cause of death: excessive blunt trauma to numerous critical points. Bioscan results indicate that there were at least thirty individual attackers involved in this trooper's demise.
  Scans indicate this trooper died of cardiac arrest. Chemical levels in body suggest a state of extreme fear at time of death.
  • Stress and paranoia were eventually running high among the Task Force Herakles, with Benet noting the odd and crippling security issues, while Reevs and Exeter both noted that even if they managed to repel or destroy the local hive, there are likely innumerable other hives connected by underground tunnels. Haley was apparently cracking from the fear, losing his grip and becoming a danger to his squad.
  I hear. Them. Everywhere. They're coming. Can't sleep. Ever. They'll eat me. Eat.
  • And then come the Dark Troopers. The corpses you've been walking past, already unnerving enough, get up and begin firing at you, stumbling and shambling forward like zombies, with the flesh under their broken visors purpled and their eyes red and bloodshot. And you have no idea which corpses are going to get up from then on.
    • A more detailed look at the Dark Troopers' character models reveals a few unsettling features. They have Ing tentacles growing out and wrapping around their bodies and purple, skull-like faces with glowing red eyes. The Dark Missile Trooper has it even worse, as not only is their skull even more exposed, they seem to have a piece of shrapnel embedded in it. If the Ing didn't mutate them to look more horrifying, these particular troopers were already severely decayed or partially eaten by Splinters. And it's...just...the horrible way they move. The jerky, "puppet with too few strings" motion, more zombie-like than a lot of actual game zombies. Especially when you're just starting out, and this music starts playing... The concept art for the Dark Troopers is even more horrifying, playing up both the Body Horror and their possession.
  • When you finally reach the marines' compound, the last recorded video is a log from Exeter detailing the Task Force Herakles' final stand: their struggle to repel the aggressive splinter colony was ended when a huge invading force of black-shelled, red-eyed splinters swarmed the compound, killing all the soldiers, and then doing something extremely unlike any colony of mindless insect predators: storming the ship afterward.
  • There's only a couple instances of it, but you can spot bigger, stronger creatures participating in the attacks on the marines. They're huge, they've got maws full of teeth, and they take a lot to go down, but the Scan Visor can't identify them any further than that. It seems that in the Ing's final attack on the marines' base, they chose to bring in some heavy lifters, as they're not native to the locale. (They're Grenchlers, and when you finally meet them, you'll understand the fear any of the troopers would've experienced.)
  • Halfway through this eerie starting area, you have your first encounter with Dark Samus, a silent, dark clone of Samus that, barring the 100% ending of the previous game, goes completely unexplained. Samus follows her through a dimensional anomaly into a dark, scary world, and their initial encounter ends with Dark Samus strolling off, having shattered a protective barrier and leaving Samus to be overtaken by the approaching Ing.
• The core concept of Aether's backstory is terrifying and, next to Hunters, the closest that the series has ever come to a Cosmic Horror Story. Imagine this: you're a peaceful race with no real enemies who lives a life that, by most standards, is pretty close to utopian. One day, something unknowable and unspeakable flies out of the sky and slams into your planet so hard that it becomes dimensionally unstable and opens a door to a Dark World version of your world. This dark world has a horrifically-lethal atmosphere and is populated by an incredibly aggressive and hostile race of completely alien beings who either cannot or will not communicate with you, start bodyjacking your race almost as soon as you learn that they even exist, and quickly overrun you. You start producing Killer Robots to fight back against those things under the assumption that they can't possess mechanical beings, only to quickly find out that they have zero issues possessing those as well. With nothing left to fall back on, all that's left is to pray for some sort of miracle that you have no reason to believe will actually come. Thankfully, Samus does come, but it is only due to sheer dumb luck, and the Luminoth were within a hairsbreadth of complete annihilation due to cosmic caprice by the time she got there.
  • Then there's what Aether has been turned into today. Because it's so unstable and Dark Aether is encroaching, violent storms have started up and have turned the place into a pitfall. Going in risks storm damage, and landing cuts off all communication due to atmospheric interference. Samus' fate upon making planetfall could've been that of the GF Marines and the Pirates—there's no way out. And there's only so much time until an Ing notices that wonderful fleshy body you've got, ripe for the taking...
• Agon Wastes, possibly the most uninviting area introduced. It's a desert whose look and soundtrack whisper "abandon all hope", with the sky covered in silvery gray clouds that never rain, and odd lightning strikes here and there. A heartbeat can be faintly heard in the background music...which changes to a flatline when you enter the dark, gloomy, and incredibly hostile Dark Agon Wastes. Running from light crystal to light crystal, finger twitching on the fire button with each new room you enter...
  • There's certain rooms in the Dark Agon Wastes, where despite appearances of being barely-sentient warmongering monsters, the Ing reveal a terribly cruel side: they sent captured enemies into pits as fodder for their young and eager recruits to slay to prove themselves.
• Torvus Bog is a quagmire where just about everything is a predator. The worst of these is the Grenchler. If you thought the Baby Sheegoths from the first Prime were bad, the Grenchlers are worse. They don't sleep so you can't get the drop on them, they're constantly on the move so sniping them is difficult, they can jump after you if you attempt to gain the high ground, you'll find that they're faster than you in an underwater encounter, and they don't have a crippling weakness to any of your beam weapons. Also, they have Hitbox Dissonance. Good thing Dark Grenchlers are only encountered in a single room.
  • Some of the rooms in Torvus Bog's subterranean area have strange platforms that extend from the walls. The game never tells you what their purpose was, but if you look inside them you'll see some suspiciously shaped forms... and a look at the internal data reveals that these "platforms" you have to jump on are actually Luminoth graves.
• The Sanctuary Fortress, located high in the cliffs, is an amazing technological utopia and a place quite special to the Luminoth... only, when Dark Aether came, its mirror image happened to be the Ing Hive, their very own stronghold, making it the least secure place imaginable—picture an insane madman living inside your house, who only just realized you were there. Machines were built to try to assist the Luminoth's defense, and their pinnacle was Quadraxis; an enormous war machine whose every step makes the ground tremble. Armed with a laser-guided annihilation reaction cannon, a powerful force field generator, and a hatred of all life courtesy of the Ing twisting it to their own ends, it is a formidable foe, as are its smaller, like-minded cousins, the Quads.
• Emperor Ing. What's not to be terrified of? An immensely powerful, mutated Ing far stronger than any other Ing. He's powered by about a quarter of the planet's energy, can regenerate by leeching off said energy, and can take many different forms. He knows you're coming, and he is intent on killing you or dooming the planet to do so.
• Dark Samus. Although un-explained, this is essentially the Eldritch Abomination from the first game stalking Samus through another adventure. Despite repeated encounters posing the terrifying possibility that Metroid Prime simply cannot be killed, she never takes center stage until the very end, always content to remain on sidelines and take shots at killing Samus only when their paths cross. A rogue element, she is not just extraordinarily powerful, but sinister, with body language and odd movements hinting at an animalistic exterior with a calculating intelligence. Oh, and that picture up top? That's her underneath the Samus Aran Power Suit. Even Samus herself looks on with a horrified expression as Dark Samus gets back up after their final battle, releasing a haunting, pained wail before she huddles towards her with the intent of absorbing her Light Suit.
• The game over screen is incredibly morbid even for this series; showcasing Samus' heart visibly flatlining inside of her body as what seems to be her Power Suit going out with her judging by the flashing errors. The player has to see her die of a CARDIAC ARREST, not to mention it came right from the trailer, where a soldier of the Galactic Federation is killed, including the visor shutting off. At least it's rather quick, but it makes quite the best of its time...
• Imagine being one of last few Luminoth left and you're told you have to enter a cryogenic sleep to preserve the rest of the race before everyone is wiped out. You're put in a deep sleep and entrusting U-Mos, the only remaining active Luminoth, to bring salvation. You don't know when or if you'll wake up. Either the Ing threat is resolved and everyone wakes up, or Aether falls to the Ing and the Luminoth are doomed. The latter would have happened had Samus not arrived on time.
• From the moment Samus stepped out of her ship to when she acquired the Energy Transfer Module, she was as vulnerable as any other living being to Ing possession. If any of the Ing that possessed Splinters or the Alpha Splinter during the fight in the Temple had decided to go after her instead...