Nightmare Fuel / Metroid Prime 3: Corruption

"Darkness coming..."

—Aurora Unit 313

Much like with the first two games, Corruption shows a huge amount unsettling imagery to spook the living daylights out of players.

Unmarked Spoilers Ahead!

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• The Game Over screen for this game consists of a slowly expanding pool of Samus' blood on a white background. If that's not enough, if you get Terminal Corruption, the blood is blue.
  • Except that isn't just blue blood...
• THE G.F.S. VALHALLA. A lot of players consider it one the scariest levels in the whole series, and it's easy to see why. You don't encounter much life while on board: aside from mutated Metroids and the occasional Phazon-mutated creature, all you have to keep you company are the mangled corpses lying in various states of agony, creepily quiet music, the eerie blood-red glow of the nebula outside, and the occasional shuddering of the structurally unsound ship.
  • The background music aboard the Valhalla is downright haunting, even by Metroid standards. It starts out ominous enough, but once you've set foot into a certain corridor for the first time, the music becomes tenfold eerier for the rest of the game. Brrr...
    • Interestingly enough, the Valhalla BGM is also known as "Dark Sad Kowa". The last of those three words means "fear" in Japanese, fitting for a such a Bleak Level as this.
  • You can use the scan visor on corpses to determine how everyone died. While you can do that in multiple places, the death messages are creepiest on the Valhalla. Among these "gems" include: crawling towards an exit before being attacked from behind, impaled with a scythe before being tossed into exploding canisters, a PED malfunction eating a Trooper alive, Phazon grenades, Explosive Decompression due to broken visor, self-inflicted and friendly fire while trying to remove Metroids, and getting attacked through walls by phase-shifting Metroids.
    • Two of the last trooper corpses you find in the Valhalla belong to two PED Troopers whose PED devices explosively ruptured; when you find them, their corpses are impaled and suspended from the Phazon tendrils, looking almost as if they were crucified. Worse still, scans reveal that the Phazon is consuming their flesh, and shooting the two troopers reveals that there's nothing left inside their armor.
  • There's one part where you enter a small storage locker. The second you open the door, a dead Federation trooper's corpse greets you and instantly decomposes! Not only is that bad enough on its own, but it's the way that the corpse disintegrates. You get just enough of a glimpse to tell that the body was a grey and dessicated husk...the exact aftermath of a Metroid attack. Just in case you forgot why exactly these creatures are the stuff of nightmares in Federation space.
  • Whatever you do, don't look out the Valhalla's windows. That entire nebula out there? Metroids as far as the eye can see, some of them MASSIVE.
    • Particularly freaky is when you see one of these Metroids floating lazily down a hall...and then you notice that it's dragging a corpse behind it. Of course, it drops said corpse upon seeing you and proceeds to attack.
    • Oh, did we forget to mention that these Metroids can now phase through walls? Because they can now phase through walls.
  • And finally, there's the "secret message" from Aurora Unit 313, its voice ominously slowing down and becoming less coherent as it powers down and is gradually corrupted with Phazon. Its last two words (quoted above) become even worse when you consider the fact that Dark Samus' leitmotif is titled "Darkness"; some have speculated that she entered the AU's room at that moment to to claim her prize.
• As if the Valhalla wasn't bad enough, the Metroid Xenoresearch Labs at East Skytown on Elysia are no better.
  • As you enter the labs, you're welcomed with a disintegrating Peek-a-Boo Corpse Jump Scare identical to the aforementioned one on the Valhalla, except with a Space Pirate instead of a Federation trooper. If you've played Super Metroid before, you'll probably recognize exactly what caused the Space Pirate to decompose: having its life sucked out by at least one Metroid.
  • Then when you investigate further, you find dozens of these drained Pirate corpses littering every passageway, and you can learn the gruesome details of how each one died. Heck, you can even see the claw marks that one of the Pirates left in the wall in his dying moments.
  • Fun fact about those Metroid victims, by the way: Unlike in Super, their drained bodies make an utterly chilling Scare Chord -esque sound when they disintegrate, like some sinister death rattle only a Metroid's prey can make. And you have to comb your way through tons of these things! Good luck sleeping tonight!
  • Venturing deeper, you pass by several trapped Metroids, but they do nothing, as they are properly contained. Then you acquire the Seeker Missile, the lights go out, and you KNOW what's waiting for you on the way back. And if it's your first run, PRAY!
  • This one's even worse because it's self-inflicted; as noted you bypass all these properly contained Metroids (who do nonetheless try to eat you, it's unnerving to see one try), but when you get to the room with the Seeker Missiles, there's an energy cell powering the entire place. By now you've probably encountered at least one so you know taking it will disable things. Thus, the feeling of dread when you know that taking it (which you HAVE to do) will release the Metroids. Once the power's out, the game uses the music to put you even more on edge, to boot!
  • Then you learn that this mutated breed of Metroids can not only phase through walls, but missiles as well.
• The Body Horror Samus experiences thanks to the Phazon in her body. First, there's the Facial Horror; as her corruption progresses, she gets Tainted Veins on her face, along with a combination of Glowing Eyes of Doom and Black Eyes of Crazy. Also, after defeating the first Leviathan guardian, Samus keels over and pukes up a mess of radioactive sludge, on-screen. Finally, if you use Hypermode for too long, you get a Non-Standard Game Over in which Samus becomes an exact copy of Dark Samus.
  • One of the cooler features of the game is the ability to sometimes see Samus's eyes inside her visor while playing. As you become corrupted, her eyes go from Green( non-PED Suit), to blue, to blue with some strained blood vessels, blue with glowing eyes, and finally deep blue glowing eyes, with tendrils made of pure phazon crawling up her face◊.
• The Pirate Homeworld isn't quite as scary as the Valhalla or the Skytown Xenoresearch Labs, but it's one foreboding place all the same, and not just for being the Space Pirates' capital. Not only is it more corrupted with Phazon than the planets before it, it also suffers from extreme industrial pollution, with acid rain constantly falling from the reddish skies above. Some of the strongest standard enemies in the game are encountered here, and the Pirates have rigged the place with lethal booby traps to hinder your progress.
  • When first visiting the Pirate Homeworld, your main concern isn't so much the Pirates themselves as it is the weather. Even if you're at full health, the acid rain will kill you in seconds if you try to walk through it without the Hazard Shield.
• After Gandrayda is defeated, she goes through a Shapeshifter Swan Song, finally settling on Samus' form. As Dark Samus appears to absorb her the way she did the last two bounty hunters, Samus knows there's nothing she can do to help Gandrayda, and essentially goes through the epic mindfuck of watching herself die horribly. Gandrayda's awful scream and Futile Hand Reach as she dies just make things even worse, especially since Samus herself is pretty corrupted by this point; the dying Gandrayda shows her just how corrupted she's become, and the grimmest reminder yet of what awaits Samus if her mission fails.
• Omega Ridley is pretty horrifying in concept; he's an irradiated sadistic undead cyborg space pirate dragon-like alien pirate/terrorist, and you can clearly tell that Ridley himself is pretty much just a living corpse under the cybernetic enhancements. Even as a cybernetically-enhanced corpse, he still takes a large amount of effort to put down, and even after Samus defeats him again, the zombie cyborg Ridley manages to escape the destruction of Phaaze.
• Phaaze is pretty much a planet made out of Nightmare Fuel. Before going there, you are only 75% corrupted, and your ship can still sense that it's Samus that tries to use its facilities. Once you land on Phaaze, there is a quick cut-scene in which Samus becomes fully corrupted. As a result, her own ship can't even sense that it's her anymore, and to make matters worse, you're stuck in infinite Hyper Mode. On the bright side, you can't die due to lack of Energy. On the not-so-bright side, your 100% Phazon-Corruption-rate means you're only one step away from dying every second, meaning the atmosphere and any hostile attacks can actually kill you if you're not careful. And since your ship doesn't recognize you, you're stuck on that planet until you slay Metroid Prime/Dark Samus for good. Playing this part of the game right before sleeping is not a good idea if you actually want to sleep.
  • For extra flavor, Phaaze isn't just some sort of Eldritch Location of Phazon; it's an entire planet effectively composed of the stuff, to the point of the Valhalla outright proclaiming in its Apocalyptic Log that it's sentient. Not just alive, not primal - sentient. It's not helped by the fact that Dark Samus essentially has an entire planet at its finger tips that can corrupt whole worlds into more copies of Phaaze to spread it across the galaxy.
• The Aazelion, a creature found on Phaaze, is the page picture on the series' page for good reason. In one of the last rooms on the planet before the final boss, Samus falls down a shaft...and is suddenly ensnared by the Aazelion, which slowly drags Samus towards its mouth in an attempt to eat her. It's even worse on Hypermode difficulty, as the creature's increased health makes it all but impossible to prevent it from taking a bite out of Samus. To add fuel to the nightmare, the Aazelion is one of the few creatures in the trilogy that has no records in Samus' Scan Visor, and was only expanded upon post-release by the creature's designer; it's essentially a Giant Space Flea from Nowhere.
• After killing the Infant Leviathan in the Genesis Chamber and before jumping down the final shaft, take a look around with the Scan Visor. You'll see some weird looking growths along the wall and, naturally, will want to scan it. Those "growths" are actually husks of several Metroid Primes.
• The Stinger ends the game, and by extension the trilogy, on an ominous note. After reminiscing about her fallen comrades, Samus leaves Elysia, heading off for more adventures. Mere seconds later, a sleek, blue and green ship slowly and quietly hovers into view, engaging its engines before jumping after Samus. After years of speculation, it's since been confirmed that it was none other than Sylux. You know, the one who wants to burn the entire Galactic Federation to the ground out of sheer hatred? He has been known to successfully shadow Samus, after all...
• The preview channel set up for the game's release, available on the Wii for a short time, is horrifying, and really set the tone for the game to come at the time.
  • One video opens with an offscreen voice saying, "She can feel it changing her. It's becoming a part of her. Corrupting her. But what frightens her most... she likes it." Just the thought that Samus knows Phazon is within her, knows it's killing her, and yet its power is alluring to her... perhaps that's part of what drives Phazon madness in the first place.
  • Another video describes the PED Suits for the Federation's soldiers, closing on one soldier appearing to have an arm seizure, looking around to make sure no one saw, and proceeding with his day. Chilling.