Nightmare Fuel / ONE (2019)

ONE is rife with Nightmare Fuel, especially considering the creator has a passion for dark and gory art.

• Doux, like the Elsen, is capable of going Burnt if his emotions get out of control. The results are certainly not pretty.
  • A ghost in Zone 0 warns Doux that if he loses control of his emotions, it can kill him.
• The new Zone 1 looks rather pretty, until you see its dark side - spectres suffer from the cold and are brainwashed into believing the place is beautiful.
• The confrontations with the New Guardians. In each encounter, Doux goes Burnt and attacks them. Their defeat scenes aren't much better - high-quality images of their dying bodies, slashed and broken, with Doux (and in later battles, Blight), looming over them with their bloodstained weapons.
• The Nightmare rooms in Zone 3. Each nightmare corresponds to a character and true to their name, they're horrifying.
  • Doux's Nightmare (The Playroom). It starts off as a pretty, pastel-coloured nursery, which gradually becomes more and more demented, as the rooms become bloodier and puzzles and nursery rhymes hint at death. It hints at Zacharie being an asshole who never loved Doux and instead wants to kill him. When Doux reaches the end, he comes face-to-face with the evil Zacharie... who thankfully is actually being impersonated by Doppel, who fights him. After Doppel is defeated, Laisser confronts you and fights you as well. His defeat crosses into Heartwarming territory when Doux comforts him, but if Blight is in the party at the time, he will kill him, reassuring that he is now in a better place.
    • One of the best parts is in one of the rooms, you will see a sign in front of a ladder. The sign questions your choices and actions, just like the rest, but climbing up the ladder will suddenly cause a model of Doux to hang from the ceiling, badly frightening him and causing him to beg the player to let him leave.
  • Blight's nightmare is no better. This is only accessible if you picked up the Old Papers at the beginning of the game, which Blight reads, causing him to break down and run away. This nightmare involves you exploring his tragic past. His creators didn't manage to make him the way they wanted to, which causes them to treat him with hatred, hurling insult after insult at him. Blight will begin to wonder why they keep him if they hate him so much. The player will have to go through several scary rooms in order to find and rescue Blight.
    • The rooms have a dark colour scheme, which fits Blight's situation.
    • The corridors you must walk through to access parts of the nightmare are filled with shadows, and are a good example of Nothing Is Scarier.
    • The prison room. It is basically symbolic of Blight being trapped within his rotting body. The insults start to get worse here, and Blight finds a Hope Spot by digging a bunker in which to escape from the abuse.
    • This leads to a furnace, which does damage when walking through. There is no way to deactivate it, meaning that Doux will have to run through a raging fire. Reaching the other side treats you to a nice cutscene of Blight being abused again, complete with red flashes and noise implying that his tormentors physically attacked him.
    • And it doesn't get better. You end up in a dark maze, pursued by Umbras. The battles are not easy. The maze itself is a shambles, further implying the messed up nature of this nightmare.
    • This takes you to a cliffside, where you will see more insults as you go along, leading to a creepy red vortex, which takes you to a badly glitched version of the first room, where the floor itself is constantly changing.
    • There are many different parts of this area according to the game files, and according to the game files, there are different ways to get into this nightmare.
  • The Swamplands, which could be Zacharie's nightmare, is a reconstruction of the well-known story about the Toad King. The Toad King is a tyrant, who will kill his subjects over minor infractions. Said subjects live in fear.
    • The guards can be just as vile as the Toad King himself. They carry out his orders without hesitation and aren't shown to have any sympathy for anyone. They even act incredibly suspicious of Doux and don't look like they're afraid to attack him.
    • The mines, where you will need to go to get some ore for a sidequest. It is very dark, and you are attacked by monsters, which demonstrates just how low the safety standards are. Furthermore, the guards yell at you to keep working, while the miners complain about how long the hours are and that they are tired. The people of this village are basically treated like slaves.
    • The prison to the south of the Elsen's part of the village. Since you cannot get inside yet, one can only imagine just what happens to the prisoners inside.
    • The Blacksmith of the village asks for your help to deliver some ore in order to forge a sword for the Toad King. Once you bring it back to him, he forges the sword while your party rests. Next thing you know, everyone in the entire village is accused of treason and are attacked while you sleep and when you wake up, almost everyone has been slaughtered. Even the survivors are left frightened and confused.
    • The swamplands after being razed. Bloodstains and dead bodies are strewn all across the place, with the only sign of life being the guards, which immediately attack you. In fact, so many villagers are killed that the waters have turned blood red.
    • The Frog King himself. It was implied that he was genuinely kind, or at least not a tyrant, until he "changed". He has basically had his henchmen wipe out an entire village just because he suspected them of treason, which they did either because they were brainwashed, frightened, or just as evil as him. The second reason holds some ground as when you fight him, he has some decent stats and competences compared to other bosses in the game.
    • Of course the Frog King dies, but many villagers have been slaughtered and it will definitely be hard to rebuild society. At least it's only a nightmare...