Nightmare Fuel / Nancy Drew

Ryokans are great to stay at... right? This screenshot isn't even the scariest part of the game, this is just the trailer.

Nancy Drew is a great mystery game for children and adults alike... Too bad there are some moments that makes the audience uneasy.

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General

• For the uninitiated, Nancy whispering "Dare to Play" and "It's up to you as Nancy Drew" can be this.
• Some of the Game Over sequences can function this way as well. Drowning, falling, suffocating, burning, getting blown up, getting electrocuted, getting crushed by heavy objects, getting caught snooping, getting murdered by the culprit... the possibilities are endless.
• Some of the culprit reveals can be unnerving. Some of them turn out to be the characters who were seemingly the nicest or most helpful person Nancy interacted with. Unfortunately, their masks drop once Nancy discovers their involvement in the mystery and even try to kill her.

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Going by each game:

#02 Stay Tuned for Danger

• The ending of this game definitely needs a mention. The villain locks you in a TV studio and gives you a really long rant about how life is a soap opera and no one appreciated his talents. And if you don't do anything to stop him, he murders you. With his bare hands. Laughing. With red lights and random screaming in the background from his other victim.

#03 Message in a Haunted Mansion

• The mirror in the hallway. You walk past it a few times, nothing happens. Then... floating ghost girl!
• Don't forget the painting that whispers "I see you" when you walk past it and the screech when you go into your room the second time and the creepy voice on the telephone!
• So much other things to count. We also have...
  • The rare occurrence in the dining room where the lights dim, the candles light on their own, and you hear very creepy whispering. Then everything goes back to normal.
  • The woman crying in the hallway.
  • A red chair seat rising up in the foyer outside the parlor as if someone invisible just sat up.
  • The phoenix flicking its head in the parlor.
  • A vase filled with flowers that look healthy the first time you see it and then on immediately clicking back they'll be dead.
  • One of the paintings can wink at you. (The Victorian painting on the stairway in the same area where you hear "I see you".)
  • The noise and green light coming from behind the windows in the parlor.
  • The random ghostly howl in the hallway.
  • The seance.
  • The shadow in the back of the hallway. Plus the freaky noise that accompanies it.
  • The note that says "LEAVE THE MANSION, NOW!!!". It's written in such a way that it appears to be somebody screaming at you up close. Yes, the game somehow made it possible to make it look like a note screams at you.
  • The random shadow walking past the stained glass door...right into the wall.
  • The door slamming shut as you come up from the basement.
  • If you scour the game enough, you realize most of these are faked by Abby and occasionally Louis, but some like the parlor swan, the flowers, the red chair and the dining room candles are never really explained. The dead roses in Abby's room imply she's swapping them out, and the soft hiss audible in the red chair clip suggest an air-pressure mechanism is responsible, but we don't know.
• When you talk to Emily Foxworth about the meaning of Gum Bo Fu, you can hear the door to the parlor room open and close during her response. This happens every time, even in the middle of the night when Louis isn't supposed to come in for hours. So somebody was listening in on Nancy.
  • How you learn about Gum Bo Fu can also lead to this. You learn it from watching Louis steal a book from the library and hide it in his briefcase. When you ask him what it means, he immediately asks you where you learned it. You have a choice to make; learn it from a book or read it in a magazine. If you tell him "magazine", he tells you how it means House of Great Books. If you tell him that you learned it from a book? He immediately tells Rose, who sends you back to River Heights. That's right. Louis's hold on Rose is so strong that he convinces her to throw you out for something he did.
• The attic and the secret rooms behind the library fireplace and behind the saloon mirror are some of the most genuinely unnerving areas in the game, and funnily enough are some of the few areas in the game where no haunting events happen, but the attic takes the cake. You're stuck in a dark, cluttered room, with an unblinking baby doll's head at one end of the room undercut by the tensest theme in the game. It doesn't help that when you first try to leave, the handle snaps off, leaving you trapped in the room until you find a crowbar.
• A lot of the music is very spooky, with a lot of the deeper piano octaves. For example: "MHM" (the theme song), "Hallway", "Abby's Room", "Attic"...

#04 Treasure in the Royal Tower

• Nancy being stuck in the elevator. Nowadays, if someone was stuck in an elevator, especially if the building has multiple floors, this could induce a panic attack.
  • The sounds in the shaft don't really help.
• Nancy's deaths in the elevator shaft. If she tries to jump to the ladder, she'll fall to her death. If she's on the shaft's floor for too long, the elevator will crush her - complete with sound effects.
• Nancy being locked outside the hotel when she looks for the green medallion. Imagine the fear of being trapped in the freezing cold and not knowing what to do. It's especially frightening once you learn that Lisa set Nancy up, possibly intending to kill her for the diamond.

#05 The Final Scene

• Everything about Maya's abduction. Your friend has been kidnapped and may be hidden somewhere in a building scheduled for demolition in a few days. You have no leads of where she may be and you could possibly never see her again.
  • Made even worse because Nancy mentions that Maya's parents are overseas in Vietnam during this time of year, making them unavailable for contact - meaning that all this happened to their daughter without their knowledge.
  • What makes the situation worse is that Police Are Useless is in full effect here: Not only do they refuse to believe that Maya is being held hostage at the theater, but there comes a point later in the game where they will actively hinder Nancy's attempts to find Maya, which results in a Game Over if she isn't careful.
• The electrified gate Nancy encounters on the second day and the Game Over sequence if you accidentally touch it without gloves is pretty horrifying.
• The music can get pretty dark as well. The intro to the song "Theater", "Lobby" or the "Danger" songs for example contribute to the creepy atmosphere already created by the paranoia of the kidnapping and impending demolition, along with the dusty redness of the theater.
• The climax. Nancy has a limited amount of time before the theater is demolished, and Joseph has her locked in the projectionist's room in addition to blocking her path to the marquee lights. Unless you select the correct choice, Nancy, Joseph and Maya will all die.

#06 Secret of the Scarlet Hand

• The entire endgame sequence where you are trapped inside an airtight monolith with a corpse. And if you think that sounds bad, you also only have a limited time to figure out how to get out, because if you don't, you'll suffocate (a fact Nancy helpfully reminds you of fairly often). Oh, and it's pitch black, so you have to use a tiny green glowstick to see. Have fun!
  • Add to it that you have to reach into the corpse's mouth to start making your escape, as well as the Fridge Horror when you realize this was just a young girl who happened to write down a chronicle of events that depicted Pacal in a way he didn't like, and for this she was trapped in the monolith and died the same way Nancy does if you don't escape in time. Even with the culprit's hammy performance and the weird poetic Gainax Ending acting as grade-A Nightmare Retardant, it only does so much.
  • In addition to that, if you don't get Nancy out in time, you get to hear her gasping for breath slowly runs out of air. Afterwards, the game shows a newspaper article from 700 years into the future, saying that scientists were baffled at finding two mummies in the monolith - one of them being Nancy. Yes, we finally get to see what the famous Nancy Drew looks like...as a decayed and mummified corpse.
• The moaning and aimless movements that Henrik displays after falling from the pyramid. Anyone familiar with head injuries will realize that Nancy came very close to witnessing an innocent person's death!

#07 Ghost Dogs of Moon Lake

• Five minutes into the game, after you're confirmed to be stuck out in the middle of nowhere in an old house (sans locks) the house gets attacked by the eponymous dogs.
• Nancy's letter quickly mentions the house being empty and just with a note from Sally warning that 'something terrible happens here at night'. Nancy's subsequent call with her at night is also cut off shortly before the dog attack.
  • Said dogs have a tendency to bang themselves against the doors. Very loudly and abruptly.
• You can also hear them howling randomly in the distance if you're walking through the forest near the house at night. Needless to say, it's a little unnerving.
  • And the ease with which you can lose track of where you are and get lost in those woods, with creepy ghost rottweilers howling in the distance, does not help.
• Paw prints are on the crypt of Mickey Malone!
• In one puzzle during the tunnel ending, you can potentially flood the room, making Nancy drown.
• After Nancy photographs the red-tailed hawk for Red Knott, she's immediately knocked out by the culprit and wakes up in the shed, which is on fire.
  • Bonus: if you don't dump a bucket of water on this fire, it will become a forest fire.
• Once again, the ND music gets the creepiest when it's barely audible. The "Tunnel" music is this, along with the similar "Spooky".
• In the endgame when you're confronted by the culprit, who happens to wield, of all weapons, a heavy metal-plated bone, and you have to make all the right moves and cover your tracks to avoid the culprit lest you get a Gory Discretion Shot preceding the bone bashing your head in.
• The eerie music that plays in the forest, accompanying all the gravestones you can find at the cemetery.

#08 The Haunted Carousel

• The teaser trailer dropped for the game has nice creepy vibes, down to the organ. We're given a basic barebones of the situation along with Nancy gasping and hanging up. Nothing Is Scarier indeed.

  Nancy: Bess, hi, it's Nancy. I'm at this little amusement park on the coast. I wish I could say I was having a wonderful time. But the fact is some pretty spooky things have been happening here. There have been some strange accidents and the carousel, it starts up in the dead of night all by itself like it's haunted or something. You know me, I don't get scared very easily but I saw it myself last night and...(gasps) I'll call you later! I've got to run! I've got to go RIGHT NOW!

• The culprit has Nancy go to the haunted house attraction seemingly helping her with the case. However, it turns out they lured her to a trap where they try to drop a porcelain pufferfish on her.
• During the investigation, the culprit drops one of the tracks on Nancy's leg and activates the ride with the intention of running Nancy over while she's trapped. She has a limited amount of time to wire certain circuits to stop the ride, or she'll get hit by the moving car and it's Game Over.
• When Nancy confronts the culprit, there are three different Game Over scenes that happen where the culprit reaches out to strangle her while wearing a demented grin.
  • One of these Game Over sequences involves saying the wrong thing to the culprit.

#09 Danger On Deception Island

• The game in general isn't a very scary one, but the climax surely has to rate a mention due to its suspenseful nature. You have to sneak through the culprit's ship in the fog without being caught, hearing the voices of henchmen all around you and knowing that one misstep or moment of hesitation will get you an instant Game Over. Finally the true villain appears, corners you in a locked room, and walks slowly towards you with a murderous look on their face while gloating about how your death will look like an accident. If you're not fast enough, the culprit will advance with their hands outstretched to strangle you as the screen goes dark. The worst part? The culprit is quite arguably the character who has been the nicest to you the whole time, even bringing you out to the ship to rescue your friend, all to get you into the position where it'd be easiest to kill you.

#10 Secret of Shadow Ranch

• About halfway through the game you can visit Dry Creek, the local ghost town. Of course, it's not really a ghost town the first time you arrive, as there are random shadows drifting through the worn, crumbling buildings and the occasional noise of rocks falling or birds fluttering.
  Nancy: I'm getting the definite feeling I'm not alone...
• At the end, when you're chased by the culprit (Shorty) and fail to stop him in time, he'll pop his head around the corner and cheerfully say "Heeeeeeeerre's SHORTY!".
  • It's even worse when you play the game through a second time, since Shorty starts to seem a lot less friendly and a lot more like a Stepford Smiler Type C waiting for you to let your guard down.
• Some of the music can get quite unsettling. The music in the ghost town mostly, which makes the already unnerving imagery there even worse. "Desert" plays in all the remote desert areas and uses a big electric guitar to disturbing effect. They really got the dark side of the desert/wild west covered with this game.
• In one area you ride your horse to, you find an old grave a cowboy made for his dead mule.
• The close call with the rattlesnake in the vegetable garden is rather more disturbing than the other games' various "notice the alarming noise or die" incidents, considering that somebody else on the ranch is already in the hospital from a rattlesnake bite.

#11 Curse Of Blackmoor Manor

• The entire atmosphere of the game is just... freaky. The music, the (first) nightmare, the castle at night, the secret passageways...
  • When it comes to the music, "Dulcimer" is the freakiest song with its subtlety and all the kinds of potential nightmarish imagery it evokes, "Wolf" is aptly named with ominous strings, "Prep" is all creepy ambiance that plays in the secret passages, and "Fairy" fits the sometimes scary secrecy of the Penvyllyns.
• It's scary half a minute in! You walk up to the front door and see a pair of glowing red eyes! "Nancy..."
• Blinking. Monkey. The monkey above Jane's door sometimes rolls its eyes and blinks.
  • This is also one of the only things in the game that can't be explained away by the actions of the culprit or Ethel. It just happens. Though, considering the Penvellyns are a family half-filled with Gadgeteer Geniuses, many of whom integrated their contributions into the manor itself including moving statues already, the truth isn't necessarily supernatural.
• Coming down the hallway after your first attempt to go to sleep and seeing the mysterious cloaked figure walking just around the corner while you hear the ethereal scream of an unseen woman. Likely the scream actually came from Linda, and it turns out that Ethel was very likely the figure in the cloak.
• One optional creepy moment being woken up at midnight by the sound of your room's doorknob being rattled. It suggests obviously that someone was trying to get in. When you check your door later, there are scratch marks, such as an animal's claws might leave ... except they're at shoulder height, not floor level.
• Another optional moment is when you get an ominous letter slipped to you under your door. Inside is a wolf's tooth.
• The disturbing dreams you can have at night under the right circumstances, including twisted versions of the main hall portraits.
• The chanting during your first night is quite disturbing to say the least. We never find out what made it until after Nancy types up Nigel's memoirs that it was Ethel and Jane holding a midnight ritual in the great hall.
  • And yet, the voices sound male...
• The suit of armor in the secret passageways always seems to be watching you...
• This conversation with Linda:
  Nancy: Can I get you anything?
  Linda: A glass of water would be nice. I get so thirsty sometimes. And I get so hungry.
  • Then she yells at you to get out, and when you come back there's a bleeding-raw steak on her bedside table. Eeeugh.
  • Also, in the east passageway, there's a secret viewing compartment where you can spy in on Linda's room, right behind her nightstand. Cue Jump Scare as you see her hand extend to grab a mirror, a hand that's completely covered in fur, followed by an eerie shriek of dread from Linda as she sees herself in the mirror. Not only is it nightmare fuel of the highest sort but it shows just how absolutely and completely devastating the toll of the curse is on Linda. Eventually it turns out Jane was just sneaking hair growth treatments into the lotion also on Linda's nightstand.
• The passageways are pitch black, ancient, and at times dangerous. The curse Linda read is here, and you have to use glow sticks to create any sort of light to gage from when exploring the area. Sometimes, the glow sticks will run out, which will leave you wandering in the darkness for a bit. How fun.
  • THE MOVING ROOMS. You're already very deep into the ambiguous, dark-lit secret passageways. Now you're in the middle of a years-old contraption of rooms that spin around their placement every new room you enter. The only guide you really have is a rock map thing with eerie symbols; one (the way to the forge) is an angel sign, while the places you can get killed by traps are marked by devil signs. Imagine not understanding at all how the rooms work, let alone being there without light source!

#12 Secret of the Old Clock

• The tunnel under the Lilac Inn is somewhat eerie to explore.
• Richard Topham can be this if he catches you snooping around. The dim lighting coming from the room behind him give him a very menacing look.

#13 Last Train to Blue Moon Canyon

• Dolls. Rows and rows of dolls. One says 'Mama' in a creepy voice when you pick it up. One has literally two left feet. Another has a cracked face that even the husband of the doll collector thought was creepy.
• The singing, coming from nowhere. Also the glowing yellow lights that fly alongside the train.
  • Though it's not nearly as creepy if you read up on the in-game backstory of the train.
• When Nancy visits Copper Gorge's cemetery and encounters an apparently disembodied and quite unnerving voice, which informs her that it's the cemetery's caretaker. Even she's disconcerted.

#14 Danger By Design

• The swimming in the tunnels is very paranoia-inducing. You have limited air and can potentially get stuck in an underwater fan contraption. Not a good way to go at all.
• The ending of the game. This is the first time in a game where Nancy is forced to fight the culprit to survive. If they manage to beat Nancy, it's implied they kill her. Yikes!

#15 The Creature of Kapu Cave

• Arriving at the trashed campsite and discovering the tape recorder that caught the roaring and grunting of whatever did it. Even when you find out it was just Dr. Craven, it's still an unsettling thing to begin the game with.
• The eerie whispering that you hear occasionally when moving to another area in the island. It ends up being just bugs, but the effect is still there.
• Hearing Frank drown if you choose the wrong route through the underwater tunnels can be pretty disturbing.
• The Hilihili can feel freaky thanks to the ominous music ("Hilihili", which is similar in composition to "Pele") and the men in yellow suits.
• Solving a puzzle in Kapu Cave wrong will get you shot with a dart that calls for Second Chance.
• During one of the possible Game Over scenes, Nancy can fail to make a jump and fall - into a pit of lava. From first-person perspective.

#16 The White Wolf Of Icicle Creek

• By far, the constant threat of hypothermia outside is one of the most unnerving things about this game. You have a temperature meter, which gradually goes down. If you get too cold, hypothermia will happen and Nancy sometimes whispers ominously; "All I want to do is... Lie down..." Followed by a thump. This paranoia is especially prominent when you're deeper in the snowy outdoors.
• Nancy gets in an avalanche. She's then stuck in a bunch of thick snow, and the only reason she survives this is because the wolf shows up and digs out a hole she can breathe through (although not without growling at her).
• The music can get very eerie. It's extremely sparse most of the time, mostly made up of small twinkly sounds like bells and flutes, which accents the stark threatening cold of the outside.
• During the game, after you go ice fishing, you get attacked by the culprit who proceeds to blow the ice shack up and steals your coat. When you later get back to the lodge and clean rooms again, Nancy will discover the culprit left her coat in one of the unoccupied rooms with a nasty note saying LEAVE NOW. And the coat's been torn up.
  Nancy: Somehow, I get the feeling I'm not welcome.
• At one point, Nancy gets trapped in the sauna, and it's heat level is raising rapidly. You have to fix it before getting overheated.

#17 Legend of the Crystal Skull

• If you look closely, there's a little bit of Paranoia Fuel in the gumbo van. The avatar used for the gumbo seller is exactly the same as Shorty's from Shadow Ranch. It's probably just laziness or an Easter Egg on the developer's parts, but it's still creepy to think about.
• The very first five minutes of the game have you getting up close and personal with a skeleton man who knocks you out with hoodoo powder.
• This game's atmosphere in general is uneasy and dread-inducing, taking place in Louisiana entirely at night. Macabre reminders of mortality and death are scattered throughout the game, with a cemetery in the backyard, and main puzzles that rely on hunting discarded glass eyeballs in order to uncover the eponymous Crystal Skull, which the deceased Bruno Bolet owned out of fear of death.
  • You also have to go on a lengthy scavenger hunt in said cemetery!
  • The game being set in New Orleans, and beginning on the night of an intense thunderstorm, felt even more grim at the time of its release, just two years after large parts of the Big Easy were decimated IRL by Hurricane Katrina.
• Going into Renee Amande's room, you'll see an empty rocking chair in front of the bed. On going and getting a KoKo Kringle bar and backing out, you'll see the rocking chair start to move, and when you turn to face it, you're faced with a creepy doll sitting there now. In fact, it's one of the dolls from Blue Moon Canyon. Funnily enough, it's not the only scary doll in the game.
• The other creepy doll is a pirate animatronic in Bruno's secret room. This animatronic is responsible for the demonic sounds that Renee had been hearing from her bedroom which is important to solving a puzzle, a puzzle that involves pressing buttons and having the pirate open its eye and speak a string of syllables in a dead, flat tone. That said, it also doubles as nightmare retardant as you can make it speak in as much Simlish as you want until you finish the puzzle and take the glass eye from its socket.
• Over the game you learn about Bruno Bolet's induction into the Jolly Rogers Krewe, a defunct Mardi Gras planning society that teetered the fine edge between Cult and, well, a Brotherhood of Funny Hats considering they all dress in skeleton costumes. Eventually, you have to get Bess to listen in on one of their meetings, which leads to her being caught by her cellphone and getting taken hostage by the Krewe! The fact that a secret society mainly focused on petitions and Mardi Gras festivities, no matter how secretive, was willing to kidnap someone is shocking as is, and the fact that if their leader, Doctor Buford, didn't know Bess Marvin already and if she didn't threaten to let slip about his attempted graverobbing expedition it's never made clear what would have happened to her.
  • Later, when Bess is explaining everything to Nancy via phone, she lets slip that she may have told Doctor Buford how close Nancy was getting and that he never went back to the Jolly Rogers meeting. Just as Nancy's about to reassure Bess that she'll be okay, lightning strikes and the connection is instantly cut, leaving the player to be on the lookout for someone lurking in the shadows for some time.
    • However, it turns out Doctor Buford was making his way to the Bolet house, but only to apologize and offer Bess and Nancy a tour of the best spots in New Orleans as penance for his misdeeds.
• Early on, you have to scare away Bruno's poisonous pet spider by playing notes on some sort of string instrument. If you try taking the key under the spider, it will bite and thus kill Nancy.
• The endgame reveals exactly how Bruno Bolet died from the Skull. Renee forged a letter of authentication saying the Crystal Skull was a fraud hoping he would hand it over. However, Dr. Bolet was running basically off the premise that the Skull was letting him live forever and, when the power of suggestion was broken, he instantly died of a heart attack in the foyer. A deadly case of Your Mind Makes It Real.
  • The culprit indirectly responsible also deserves a mention. Between their cold willingness to leave Nancy to die and their honest delusion that the Skull will tell them the secrets of the universe, Renee Amande is one of the more unpredictable villains in the series.
• The freakish whatever-it-is in the glass canister at Zeke's. Tap the glass over and over. Yikes!
• Some of the glass eyes Nancy collects are pretty weird-looking. Think about it enough, and you'll wonder how much it freaked out his dental patients to see the guy tending their teeth with one of those peering out of one eye socket...

#19 The Haunting of Castle Malloy

• During the opening cinematic, Nancy is driving her car along a deserted darkened road and a glowing, shambled figure flies across the windshield. Right afterward, when you have to explore the castle's grounds, you hear a screech.
  • Which repeats itself again and again randomly as you play through the game.
• The Background Music ranges from pretty Irish tunes to outright disturbing instrumentals.
• The entire nursery was freaking creepy. The morbid little nursery rhymes on the chalkboard... Bleh...
  • "TRUTH SPEAKS EVEN THOUGH THE TONGUE WERE DEAD"
    • With a pretty little flower design stitched directly below the above quotation.
  • Not to mention when the banshee pops up in front of the window!
• When you discover the truth about the banshee. Sure, she's not a supernatural entity, but it's still pretty frightening to turn around and find a feral old woman right behind you while you're in her shack. As Nancy tries to explain herself, she doesn't say a word, just advances on her to push her down a trap door.

#21 Warnings at Waverly Academy

• In the climax of the game, you find out that the "Black Cat" is none other than Corine. Her reaction to the exposure? Trapping you in a hidden room and setting a giant pendulum guillotine to slowly descend and slice you if you don't escape.
  • And Corine is Nancy's roommate. She was sleeping in the same room as a murderer.
• The two "pranks" mentioned are pretty darn disturbing. A claustrophobic girl was locked in a closet for an entire night and had a breakdown as a result, while another girl was slipped food tainted with something she was allergic to and had to be rushed to the hospital.

#24 Trail of the Twister

• The main theme of the game is focused on storm chasing. Towards the end, Nancy has to open a storm shelter as a tornado is approaching.

#23 Shadow at the Water's Edge

• The trailer has a nice little preview of things to come. The picture above shows the end of the trailer, a ghost girl who haunts the ryokan that is the main setting of the game.
• The first scary moment happens when Nancy goes to sleep the first night. She wakes up early in the morning, and sees a floating shadow of a girl going across her window. When Nancy opens the door, she sees nothing...
  • The second scary moment involving "the ghost" is when Nancy is about to take a bath at the ryokan. She then walks to the mirror, and sees a girl facing down in the reflection. Scared, Nancy turns around and sees nothing, but turns around to see the ghost holding her arms up, mouth gaping open and wide eyes, crawl as fast as if she was teleporting, crash her hands into the mirror and shatter it.
  • Third scary moment is when Nancy is heading down a hall, only to see the lights flickering and the doors slamming all on their own.
  • During the mandatory moment in the game where Nancy is trapped and has to escape for her life, the ghost locks Nancy in one of the bedrooms, and she has to decipher the puzzle or get a large wooden support beam slammed on her head.
    • Don't forget that she has to decipher the puzzle while listening to Darth Vader-esque breathing, the constant sound of dripping water, and random loud slams against the bedroom door.
    • And the slamming sound is always the same. This means that any slam you hear could precede a death sequence.
  • You're staying alone in Yumi's apartment for the night. It's pink and full of adorable critters, should be okay, right? Sure, until you wake up to glowing green letters slowly spelling out a message in the window next to your bed. "I know your secret. I can't wait to see you again."
  • The fourth and last scary moment is the end, when discovering the puzzle in the hidden bath where Kasumi died. After solving the puzzle, Nancy opens the safe, reads the letter, and finds a sword... only to turn around and see the ghost face to face, still wide-eyed and gaping-mouthed as the ghost pins Nancy in the water and attempts to drown her. After solving the puzzle, though, it's discovered she was a robot.
• So you're walking around the pond looking for clues and you see a shadow near the water's edge that you can click on. You look into the water and OHMYGODTHEREISAFACEINTHEWATERAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!. After it fades and you restart your heart, you look in again. There's nothing there.
  • It's in the pond under the tree on the right, if you've exited from the ryokan lobby. Mind you, it doesn't appear every time. Look for Kasumi's face.
• The soundtrack of the game is most likely the most unsettling of the series. Only a handful of the Background Music is nice, the rest? Unsettling, distorted traditional shamisen instrumentals, which almost sounds like metal grinding against metal.
• The creators have admitted that their goal was to make the scariest Nancy Drew game so far.
• That scary cat. It looks like a demon!
• The culprit's methods when you really think about it: Rentaro is essentially Gaslighting everyone into believing the Ryokan is haunted so that Miwako has no choice except to close the place down. Even worse, he's exploiting the death of Kasumi (Miwako and Yumi's mother/Takae's daughter) to achieve his goal. While he claims to be doing this for Miwako's benefit, it's hard not to see how mean-spirited and ugly his actions are, and how they're causing untold pain for everyone involved.

#24 The Captive Curse

• The overall theme of this game is that a gigantic, unseen monster that lives in the woods has been kidnapping young women from a German castle for centuries. Which means that the whole game is predicated on a series of murdered young women. This is serious territory.
• Late in the game, Lukas, a sometimes-annoying little boy, is kidnapped and thrown into a small, dingy cell in a dungeon—a dungeon that has caved in before, leaving several people near death.
• At one point, when you return to Nancy's room after finding a German dress on the bed, her regular clothes have been completely torn to shreds.
• What compounds all of the above is the identity of the culprit... Anja. She's a Woman Scorned who's so determined to destroy her former boyfriend's life that she's willing to do unspeakable things. That fire in the public courtyard that could have easily burned down several people's homes? She started it. Those clothes you found ripped to pieces on your bed? She did that, likely with her bare hands (so it would look like a humanoid monster was behind it). Lukas, the boy she kidnapped? That's her own nephew, and she's using him as live bait. Then, when you confront her in the endgame, she sounds positively delighted at the prospect of causing a "deadly accident" - that is, killing you. She's almost sociopathic in her desire to get revenge because all she cares about are her own goals, and she will hurt or kill anyone who gets in her way.
  • Also at the very end, you've essentially successfully managed to become the new target of her vengeance, as she vows that she and Nancy will meet again. Considering this was only four games after RAN featured the return of an Ax-Crazy earlier culprit, and the game afterwards being a vengeance plot, likelihood is Nancy has not seen the last of Anja.

#25 Alibi in Ashes

• Late in the game, when Nancy is finally freed from jail, she's talking with George in her house... and someone throws a rock through her patio door, completely shattering it. There's a nasty note attached. There are two layers of Fridge Horror here: not only could Nancy or George have been seriously hurt, some of the citizens of River Heights - which, for twenty-five games, has been viewed as the picture of an ideal American small town - are willing to hurt the girl detective who they've loved for so long.
• In nearly every other game (Ransom of the Seven Ships being the only exception, as the villain is an old enemy), the culprit has been one of the various people Nancy meets when she stumbles onto a mystery. Sometimes they're mean, sometimes they pretend to be nice, but even when they try to harm her, it's only because she's in the way of their achieving their (criminal) goals. But in Alibi, the one behind it all committed a potentially fatal case of arson - because that person hates Nancy that much. During the game's Motive Rant, the villain outright says that the whole point of the crime was to either kill or discredit the girl detective. There's something downright horrifying about a person with that much hatred.
• Building on the above, this is probably the most grounded game in the series (and notably, it comes right in the middle of a stretch of games that focus on the supernatural). The suspects are all complex and realistic, the mystery is about an extremely recent crime as opposed to an ancient legend or possible haunting, and it all takes place in a realistic American town as opposed to an exotic location. So the fear is more subtle - it's about how horrible your own neighbors can be, and how there are people in the world who will stop at nothing to destroy their rivals, even if it means lying, cheating, or other criminal activities.

#28 The Ghost of Thornton Hall

• First and foremost is the fact that Word of God has said their goal was to make a game that was even scarier than Shadow At The Water's Edge. For many fans, it appears they have succeeded.
• One of the tombstones in Thornton's family cemetery bears Nancy's name.
  Nancy: Who did this?
  Wade: Let's hope it's one of the living.
• The creepy singing that can be heard from time to time in the corridors of the mansion.
• In some areas you can spot a creature running◊ in creepy jerking movements across the floor of the mansion. It looks like an armadillo, but slimier and more disgusting. Such creatures are never mentioned again, their nature and purpose are never explained. Did we mention that Nancy sleeps on the floor in this game? It was apparently a naked mole rat, albeit a very, very creepy one.
• One of the Non-Standard Game Overs in the climax really deserves a mention. When you finally find Jessalyn Thornton, you have the opportunity to threaten them with telling everybody where they hide. Her voice momentarily becomes trembling and scared, then she sics Charlotte's ghost on you. The worst thing is that if you choose the other conversation option, this person appears completely normal, if understandably very scared and frustrated. You'll spend the rest of the game knowing what they are capable of. Sweet dreams.
• Even the Easter eggs in the game are terrifying. One of them is found in a skeleton's eye-socket, and when you find all of them, you get a poem that reads like something out of The Flowers of Evil.
  If you've no dress, do not fret
  You can still attend the same
  We'll let you share with Charlotte
  A gown of coal and glowing flame
  And as the last song is played
  And night sneaks in the window panes
  We'll huddle together in the walls
  Forgetting one another's names.
• If you watch Doctor Who, the moving statues are more than terrifying, even if shortly before, Wade might have explained this may have been one of the 'contraptions' from the war that one of the Thornton's ancestors built.
• Charlotte's death. She was celebrating a masquerade party in honor of her 21st birthday. until the building it was being held in caught fire because of Clara - and she didn't escape. Pretty horrible way to go, especially considering she was so young and had her whole life ahead of her.
  • The fact that Clara can die in the same manner if Nancy chooses not to save her. Judging by her behavior when Nancy does try to help her and the extreme guilt she feels over her role in Charlotte's death, she's fine with that.
• Even the more "mundane" aspects of the game are unnerving. For example, the explanation for the hauntings: Nancy and company were unknowingly inhaling constant lungfuls of carbon monoxide due to Thornton Hall's faulty furnace. If you're a hypochondriac, have a good time obsessing over that idea.
  • And, according to Word of God, that carbon monoxide was giving you hallucinations. And these hallucinations, coupled with the gas-induced drowsiness, could shock you badly enough to cause a heart attack. That's their explanation for most of the seemingly supernatural stuff that took place in-game and why you sometimes wind up at the Second Chance screen. Have fun replaying the game and wondering how much of it is real and how much is the fevered rantings of the hallucinating protagonist... who thinks she's perfectly sane and it's everyone else who's crazy.
• Special mention goes to the end of the game, when the house catches on fire. At that point, you have several different options, depending on which characters you choose to save. In two of the three possible endings, if you choose not to save Clara, Nancy will state in her letter afterwards that she still hasn't been found. If you saved Jessalyn and Harper without going back for Clara, Nancy will also mention that a girl in town told her she swore she saw the figures of two women floating in the smoke above the island. Yes, the game developers did just give you the chance of leaving someone to die.
  • It's even worse if you choose not to save anyone. If Nancy doesn't help Jessalyn and Harper escape, she will mention in her letter to Ned afterwards that they've been hospitalized. The extent of their injuries are not mentioned, but judging by how badly the fire tore through Thornton Hall, it's probably pretty bad.

#29 The Silent Spy

• Nancy gets shot at. And the shots are heard again in one of her last flashbacks. The shooting was faked, but it's still terrifying.
• The first time you visit Moira and Revenant agents break down her door to take her away. And if you don't find a place to hide, they'll find you too.
• The entire plot of the game, for that matter. Nancy thinks she's going to Scotland to investigate her mother's death - instead she has to stop a terrorist organization from exposing the entire city of Glasgow to a virus that may or may not kill much of the population. If she fails, said terrorist organization will personally send in the help necessary to get Glasgow on its feet, while essentially taking over the city in the process. For all that this isn't explicitly discussed very often, it's still a terrifying idea when you really think about it, especially since it's one of the rare cases when Nancy herself isn't enough to stop everything in its tracks.

#30 The Shattered Medallion

• To many fans, the true fear is this game being someone's first experience with the franchise.

#31 Labyrinth of Lies

• The gradual revelation of Thanos as an Ax-Crazy mafia member, which reaches a climax when Nancy finds a letter written by Grigor, confessing to the plot because he fully expects to be killed by Thanos after the art heist is complete.
  • Thanos isn't even the Big Bad. The real mastermind has a chilling monologue, coupled with Wham Line, after shackling Nancy to the throne room in Tartarus.
  Nancy: It's not too late to turn back, you're not like them!
  Xenia: Of course I'm not. I'm smarter. I've got Niobe under my thumb, Thanos wrapped around my finger, and my heel on your throat.
• After Nancy imprisons Thanos in the underground cage, you have to leave the room to find something. When you come back, the cage is empty...and he could be hiding anywhere, waiting to jump out at you.
  • Not only that, but at the end of the game Thanos escaped prosecutions using his Mafia connections, and while he's more of a Psycho for Hire and likely wouldn't be out for vengeance, the fact that one of the most menacing and brutal villains in the series is out on the loose does not bode well for anyone.
• The slow lead-up to the villain reveal is rife with tension: from your employer suddenly firing Nancy and insist that she leave, to every suspect giving similar warnings that Nancy should really head home, until both Nancy and the player are forced to realize that every person there is in on the heist. And Nancy's the only one other person there for miles. There's no escape.

#32 Sea of Darkness

• The ice caves. Deep, winding caves in Skipbrot with no signage, few recognizable features, and several levels. Despite the black sky, Skipbrot is often presented as well-lit interiors or wide open spaces. The caves feel cramped, alone, and somehow darker.
  • You receive a pick early on. If you use it on any wall EXCEPT the exact right wall at the exact right time, the cave will collapse and you and presumably Magnus will die. The culprit tries to kill Nancy in this method later on.
  • Later in the game, you realize some of the ambient noises were Magnus screaming for help. Every time you explore the caves, a man is trapped behind ice, yelling for your help.
• After you fix the lighthouse, the doors slam shut and you are locked in as the windows open. Nancy remarks on how cold the wind is while the wind roars, and you have a limited time to leave before Nancy freezes to death.
• The bloody crime scene left behind when Dagny disappears and is presumed kidnapped. It's all a fake, of course.

#33 Midnight In Salem

• Near the end of the game, when you finally find Mei unconscious in the underground tunnels, you can see a splotch of red beneath her. While this is obviously paint, it can be easy to mistake it for blood.
• Also near the end of the game, when you are trying to escape the flooding tunnels, many ghosts of the accused witches during the Salem Trials appear and fly right at you!
• The accident Mei was in when she was nine, which caused major burns on her body. Doubles as a Tear Jerker.
• Slightly downplayed version with the vandalism of the Parry house mid-game. It's enough to make poor Teegan burst into tears.

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