Nightmare Fuel / Outer Wilds

Outer Wilds makes an art form out of "Oh fuck, I’m going to die in space"

"The stars! They're all dying! There've been too many supernovae for it to be anything else! We're next, do you understand?! Our sun! By Hearth's name, we're next!"

— Chert

Outer Wilds is a game about deep-space exploration, so there's no doubt that there's a ton of this. While it's balanced against a soothing atmosphere with tons of Heartwarming moments, many of the scariest moments in the game can be downright chilling.

Base Game

• If you don't know about it going into the game, the first time the sun goes supernova can be quite frightening since there is little warning of it. Sure, you might note that the sun is more red than orange fifteen minutes after takeoff, and maybe looks a little bigger, but you can try to rationalize it with being out of Timber Hearth's atmosphere. Then "End Times" starts playing no matter where you are or what you're doing, and as soon as the music stops, the sun rumbles and crumples up like a wadded-up piece of paper before suddenly exploding, flooding the world with blue-white light.
  • It's worse if you're underground or indoors when this happens, because all you hear is a distant explosion with no explanation before everything goes white.
• Over the course of the loop, various other stars can be seen exploding, which as Chert will tell you is definitely not normal. It's made worse when you find some key lore scans and learn the cause - the whole universe is ending, not just your star system.
• For your Space Isolation Horror, it's worryingly easy to lose your spaceship to various hazards, leaving you stranded on an alien planet with a limited supply of air and jetpack fuel, or worse, drifting through space while your ship moves further and further away from you.
• Ember Twin is riddled with pitch-black caves, and fills with sand over the course of the loop, so if you get lost at the wrong time there's nothing you can do except wait to be crushed against the ceiling, complete with pretty gory sound effects.
  • In the Lakebed Cave where you learn of how darkness can affect quantum objects, you can turn out the lights to experiment with this. One of the quantum effects as you flick your flashlight on and off is to see all the Nomai skeletons in the cave suddenly standing upright.
  • There's also a narrow gap in one cave wall, along with a Nomai warning about some "beast" beyond. Fire your Scout through it to get some light, and you're greeted by the toothy smile of a skeletal anglerfish. If you haven't been to Dark Bramble yet, it's an unwelcome preview of what's waiting for you there, while if you have, it adds the Paranoia Fuel that anglerfish can apparently leave that twisted hellhole.
• Brittle Hollow slowly collapsing can be pretty unnerving, especially if you don't think ahead and park your ship on an unstable piece of the shell. Watching your ship slowly drift off and fall into the black hole can be extremely unnerving, especially before you realize that falling in it won't kill you.
  • If you're acrophobic, Brittle Hollow is a nightmare just because of how much time you spend jumping from platform to platform over a distant singularity, or walking along the underside of an enormous hollow sphere.
• Giant's Deep is a perpetually stormy planet covered in massive cyclones that drift along the water. Diving down can evoke feelings similar to Subnautica, especially upon viewing the core, and flying around trying to dodge the cyclones can be a very intense experience. Thankfully, the only wildlife, while dangerous, isn't actively hostile.
• Dark Bramble is probably the single scariest location in the game, both in atmosphere and execution. Slowly drifting around in the fog and trying to sneak past the anglerfish is an intense experience, and to make matters worse, the whole place is implied to be alive and possibly sentient. It also somehow dragged the Nomai's Vessel inside of it, resulting in the deaths of everyone on board who failed to get to a lifepod, and the passengers of Lifepod 3. Coming across their bodies hanging motionless around a glowing seed pod is also quite scary, since it's the single largest gathering of Nomai corpses in the solar system.
  • This gets even worse when you consider the seeds. Talking with Chert and Feldspar make it clear that where Dark Bramble orbits used to be a planet, from which a seed grew and shattered it from the inside. Feldspar themself is camped out in the skeleton of an anglerfish which they guessed swallowed a seed and was ripped apart by its growth. It's not even known whether removing a Bramble seed is possible, so if the solar system wasn't already about to end, Timber Hearth's days may have been numbered already.
  • Let's focus on the anglerfish themselves - gigantic, toothy monsters that lurk in the foggy depths of Dark Bramble, and can swallow your ship in a single bite if you draw too close or make too much noise. Making them more scary is that like terrestrial anglerfish, they have bait to appeal to their victim, a glowing lure that, from a distance, appears identical to the light of a glowing passageway; you could be moving towards what you think is a seed that will take you to another part of the planet, or you could be travelling directly towards the hungering maw of a horrifying beast. The trick is to use your signalscope to follow either Feldspar's harmonica or the distress beacon from the Nomai escape pod, but if you don't know that, then travel through Dark Bramble becomes a nerve-wracking guessing game that will more than likely end with a screaming monster chasing you down and devouring you in one gulp.
  • Arguably the most terrifying moment in the game is having to fly directly through the anglerfish nest in order to reach the lost Nomai Vessel, buried deep within Dark Bramble. Not just one or two, but three anglerfish are lurking directly inside the entrance, meaning that you'll have to cruise right by their massive jaws to get through. So close, you'll be able to hear their heavy breathing and groaning, making each aching second as your ship slowly drifts by feel like an eternity. Worse still, it's difficult to tell just how far away you need to be before you can safely ignite your thrusters again; gun the engines too soon, and you might just hear that horrifying scream from behind you, signalling that you won't be making it to the Vessel after all...
• Nomai Projection Platforms can be pretty intense the first time you use them, especially if your first time using them involves the Ash Twin Project, in which case you get a vision of a dark, wildly spinning room with scary-looking glowing masks staring you down.
• Exploring the Nomai settlements, you'll notice that some of their skeletons are sprawled out in beds or slumped over desks, like the entire race was wiped out in an instant, without any warning. If you explore the Interloper, you learn that they were - the comet had a core of ghost matter inside it, under intense pressure and barely contained by an icy shell. The Nomai survey team who found the comet had just enough time to realize the mortal danger they were in before the ghost matter detonated, instantly flooding your solar system with lethal energy.
• Once you take the Advanced Warp Core out of the Ash Twin Project, a more intense version of "End Times" called "Final Voyage" starts playing, emphasizing that after hours of Death Is Cheap and Yet Another Stupid Death being in effect, you are now Out of Continues. Should you die after that point, the screen just fades to black and YOU ARE DEAD appears in ominous orange letters. Afterward, your failure is punctuated by the game's title in the main menu being completely broken, to show how much you messed up.
• The "Isolation Ending" where you remove the Ash Twin Project warp core and leave the solar system as the sun goes supernova. There's nothing. Just you, your ship, your incinerated solar system, and the ever darkening vast expanse of dead space.
  Now beyond the reach of the supernova, you drift through space until your ship's resources are finally depleted.
• Alternatively, you can remove the warp core, then travel to the Quantum Moon when it's orbiting the Eye of the Universe, escaping the death of your solar system... and ending up just like Solanum, 5/6ths dead. But at least you have company?
  How long have you been here? Minutes? Years? You are unsure, but it seems your journey has reached its end.
• While the "You've Met a Terrible Fate" endings were always unnerving, sometime after the Self Ending was added the "breaking spacetime" effect was updated to be even more cosmically terrifying. Now instead of just black tendrils emerging from the paradox and engulfing the screen in silent blackness you can actually see a series of technicolor tears in the fabric of the cosmos itself spread across the screen, accompanied by a brief but overwhelmingly dissonant sound effect (which will haunt you for days) with the whole screen suddenly inverting, shattering into pieces with the shards dissolving into non-existence, then the credits roll.
• The "Self Ending" is also particularly terrifying if you aren't paying attention and you are away from the Ash Twin Project facility.
• The Eye of the Universe, when you finally get there, has a very foreboding vibe. You're far out in the cold depths of space, now - with the swollen sun of your solar system just one of the many tiny stars filling the void. The air roils and crackles with thunder, with each lightning strike bringing with it quantum objects like rocks and trees popping into view, or disappearing just as suddenly. And in order to make it through, you have to fling yourself into what looks like a gaping vortex, which leads to a very surreal sequence that ushers in the end of the game. Fortunately, nothing here can actually hurt you, but the intense atmosphere can give one the chills all the same.
  • As one final "fuck you" to anybody who managed to brave the depths of Dark Bramble as described above, the Eye of the Universe features one final Jump Scare as you search for Feldspar in the forest around the campfire during the game's final segment. As you follow the signal of Feldspar's harmonica, an anglerfish will emerge out of the darkness and swim directly towards you. Of course, as mentioned previously, nothing here can hurt you, and so the anglerfish vanishes just as quickly as it appears, but it can feel like a rather vindictive kick in the teeth for anyone who thought they'd left those monsters behind when they reached the Nomai Vessel.

Echoes of the Eye

• The announcement trailer for Echoes of the Eye is notable for its unsettling atmosphere in comparison to the existing game. It opens with the cheerful tune of "Travelers" as per usual, showing an Outer Wilds Ventures ship drifting along lazily in the solar system, gradually shifting view towards the sun, at which point experienced players will probably go "Yep. I know where this is going." Only then, instead of "End Times" and the exploding, the music cuts out into static as something absolutely massive begins to eclipse the sun. A different far more ominous ambience begins to play as images of dark environments and strange machines flash before the player's eyes before the sun is totally eclipsed and ominous chanting introduces the DLC, informing everyone that things are going to be very different indeed going forward.
• When opening the game with the DLC installed, the player is met with a message that some content in the DLC might be too frightful for some people and there is an option to turn it off. Now keep in mind the above examples from the base game, and realize that the game itself is saying the DLC will be scarier than that.
• A more subtle horror with Echoes of the Eye is that unlike with the Nomai engravings in the base game, you can't translate the writings of the alien species in the Stranger at all, which gives a sudden feeling of unknown when you can no longer use a feature you might have taken for granted.
• The big question as you start to explore the ringworld is "Where is everyone?" You're clearly exploring people's homes, complete with faded family portraits on the walls, but unlike with the Nomai ruins, there are no skeletons around to give closure to what happened on the Stranger... at least, not until you find a hidden passage down into a circular room with an eerie green fire in the center, surrounded by mummified owl-elks strapped upright in little alcoves, holding strange lanterns in their withered claws.
• When you enter the dream world for the first time, you "wake up" in one of those round rooms, and suddenly all the bodies are gone.
• The realization in the dream world that you are not alone. There are lights moving in the distance, towards a house playing discordant music. There are footsteps thumping across the floor above you, as something larger than you paces restlessly. You can see a slide reel projection playing through a window, with a moving, antlered shadow cast onto it.
• Your first encounter with the Stranger's inhabitants is likely to be in the Shrouded Woodlands, where you venture into a pitch-black boggy forest and see ghostly green lights, much like your own artifact-lantern's, slowly moving in a procession across the terrain. Get too close, shine your lamp the wrong way, and you'll hear a clicking warble as one of those lights breaks off and slowly comes closer. Shine your spotlight towards it and you'll see a bipedal Ominous Owl stalking your way - and now it knows exactly where you are. The only way to evade the aliens is to douse your light and try to hide behind something, or stumble past them in utter darkness. And unlike the anglerfish, these aliens are neither blind nor dumb, they're even smart enough to hide their own lights and wait for you to reveal yourself, before resuming the hunt for you.
• To reach the Forbidden Archives hidden in the simulation, you need to go to certain spots to extinguish the lights in the alien settlements. And as soon as you do so, the nearby aliens will let out a scream, informing you that you've just pissed them off. Now you have to creep through a pitch-black wooden complex while the creatures previously out of reach are actively patrolling for you.
• As you explore the Stranger, the dam in the habitat will fracture before finally collapsing, unleashing a Giant Wall of Watery Doom that sweeps through the ring's interior, smashing structures, flooding buildings, and potentially sweeping away a trespassing Hearthian to smash them against rocks. It's quite a shock the first time it happens, and made worse for how it affects the simulation - you can still hear the muffled sounds of the dam groaning and breaking when you're in the dream world, and when the water sweeps into one of the circular fire pits and douses the flames, you'll suddenly hear a chorus of screams as all the aliens in one segment are suddenly killed. They even have an animation for it if you're close enough when it happens but entered the dream world from a safe space, letting you see the aliens suddenly rear back and scream before dissolving into vertical lines of green light.
• The horrifying vision that drove the Prisoner's people into blocking the Eye of the Universe's signal. One of them aimed his vision torch at the Eye and discovered what would happen if a conscious observer entered it: The Eye would detonate a Big Bang-sized explosion and destroy the entire universe to create a new one in its place. This Awful Truth drove their entire race mad with fear, and to keep the universe from being destroyed, they blocked its signal to keep anyone from ever finding it.
  The Prisoner: When my kind found the Eye and realized what it was capable of, they were terrified. It was too difficult a truth. Like a light too bright to look upon directly, it burned them. When they could not unlearn was hidden away in darkness — obfuscated, then lost. They did not want to see their story end.
• The expansion adds some additional Bad Ends:
  • "The Stranger Ending." You remove the Advanced Warp Core from the Ash Twin Project, then ride the ringworld as it escapes the blast radius of your sun. Now you're stuck on a millennia-old space station that started falling apart as soon as it had to move, with nothing but a bunch of bird mummies for company.
    Now beyond the reach of the supernova, you find yourself the only inhabitant of an abandoned world. Surely something here must be edible?
  • The "Dream Ending." Do the same, then die in a firepit room to permanently enter the simulation. Sure, your body is lost, and you're just another Virtual Ghost in the machine, but at least you escaped the time loop and the bounds of mortality... for as long as the ringworld survives to keep the simulation going, at least.
    How much time has passed?
    They don't even bother to hunt you anymore.
    Time passes, and passes, until your life before is some half-remembered dream.
    If only you could wake up.

---