Nightmare Fuel / SINoALICE

The stuff that Nightmares are made of.

Considering that the main brain behind this world is none other than Yoko Taro, it's no surprise that this game is filled with moments that can make one stay up all night. "Tales of Terror", indeed.

As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

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In General

• The nature of SINoALICE itself is this since the characters are stuck in an endless loop of killing each other.
• The fact that nearly the whole cast (barring those such as Parrah and Noya) takes a known fairytale character and twists them into insane, deranged, and some cases downright inane versions of them.
• Red Riding Hood in a nutshell is this. Her idea of play is that of violent murder and wanton slaughter. All the while behaving like the innocent girl she is.
• The Half-Nightmare classes, natch. Lore-wise, each character is shown halfway through transforming into the very things they fight against. While all of them are slowly but surely going through Sanity Slippage as their concepts turn into Desires and take over them, some even come with a hefty dose of Body Horror. Small wonder that so many players chose to use skins over them, aside from wanting to play as their favourite characters instead of the ones that have their designated roles.
• The 7 August 2020 Colosseum adds new BGM is played as the guilds enter the Colosseum... and all of a sudden, the screen glitches and the center of the Colosseum is ripped apart to show modern-day Tokyo. As if it wasn't scary enough, this is all connected to the Act of Elimination.

Main Story

• After the events of the Act of Reality, The Library has begun to fuse with the real world that the Reality versions of the Characters come from. The fusion is similar to a mix of terrorism attacks and natural disasters. Make that of what you will.
• Upon completion of any Character's Acts of Reality or Fusion before Chapter 5, a cutscene featuring Parrah and Noya will play. Chopin's Nocturne op.9 no.2 never felt so unnerving, as the puppets' dialogue hints at even worse events to come, with the destruction of the world for Reality and the escalation of the Deadly Game for Fusion. And for the latter, the song gets more distorted as it goes on.
• The entire Act of Fusion must be horrific for any of the civilians of Shinjuku, and can strike a nerve considering the very real threat of terrorism. The city is seemingly bombarded by acts of terrorism resulting in countless deaths and property destruction. Then it turns out the terrorists are actually giant monsters and young women wielding powers of mass destruction. Not even the JSDF could stop them.
• Red Riding Hood and Cinderella's crossover story in the Act of Elimination (Part 1) has what looks like someone's innards as the stage background, melted Nightmares as enemies, and Red Riding Hood suffering a Sanity Slippage after the events of Chapter 1 of her Act of Elimination. With the exception of Stage 9, be prepared to go through the chapter on an empty stomach...
• Chapter 5 of the Act of Elimination begins with the resurrection of Lewis Carroll, Alice's author. Except that he Came Back Wrong. He appears as a skeletal... thing with one too many joints. And unlike the other chapters, there's only 1 stage and that's where it appears in, so the player is pretty much alone when it comes to taking it down. Defeating it doesn't make things better; after a Due to the Dead montage, Snow calls out to Alice and after getting back to the chapter selection the Act of Elimination gets renamed to 'Act of Elimination - Part 1'. Looks like this wild ride isn't over just yet...
• How Dorothy gets defeated in the Act of Elimination Part 2. She preys on the Three Little Pigs' identity insecurities and when they start questioning themselves, she eats them up like how the wolf did to them in their original story. However, this gets turned on her as they eat her from the inside, assuming their Breaker Ext. selves in the process. We hope your stomach is empty for this one...
  • Speaking of Three Little Pigs/Breaker Ext., Body Horror ensues as their stomachs become a Belly Mouth, with tongues in each of their lifeforce colours and complete with their own set of children's teeth. Yeesh.
• The ending of Alice and Snow White's cross chapter in the Act of Authors ends with Lewis Carroll giving in to his Nightmare instincts and eating Henrietta Wild alive. Out of the outcomes possible, this marks a very bad future for both Alice and Snow...
• The Act of SINoALICE has a Mass "Oh, Crap!" moment - the game exists in our Reality too, but for some reason anyone who downloaded the game and has their Desires detected will be turned into Nightmares, with the only solution being a swift death by Character. Humans who don't play the game but are caught up in the arc's events are also subject to Nightmare-fication via Despair Event Horizon, as seen in Sleeping Beauty and Little Match Girl's story. Thank the stars this won't happen to us... or will it?
  • The same arc and story has Little Match Girl's dark persona turned into a Nightmare some time after she and Sleeping Beauty come across the corpse of a girl-turned-Nightmare who started playing SINoALICE, and the light persona lamented that while the sight is shocking, being in Library is just as miserable. Poor Sleeping Beauty tried to beg Dark!Match Girl to not kill her, only for the latter to do so, and Light!Match Girl was so horrified she went after her Dark self. Her and Sleeping Beauty's chapter ends with both Match Girls in a Mutual Kill.
• The Taiwanese and Global server's finale, despite ending the story on a relatively uplifting note, raises some rather disturbing questions regarding Alice's mental state in reality. Imagine that you go to school with a seemingly ordinary young girl, who is rather quiet and subservient. Now, imagine that this girl, much like a certain other depressed teenager, dreamed up a fantasy world containing gratuitous amounts of violence, numerous deranged murderers, disturbing imagery, and her own suicide — as what is heavily implied to be a coping mechanism. It's almost a relief when she wakes up, destroying Library in the process.
• The Act of Reality is already horrific and depressing enough due to its Realism-Induced Horror but Reality!Hamelin has by far the most graphic end of the lot - in his despair over the fact that he will never achieve the perfect sound of beauty which was kickstarted by the death of the prodigy he was teaching, he used a knife to gouge out his eyes and chop off his ears, then slit his own throat. At said student's funeral no less. And depending on who you ask, Tomoaki Maeno either hit it out of the ballpark by perfectly conveying Hamelin's despair or made the imagery worse through his anguished screams.
• Jesus Christ, the end of the Act of SINoALICE. Some years have passed and everyone in the world had turned into Nightmares, and the only person left is Alice who's still fighting the Nightmares while clinging onto whatever sanity she has left (Implying that Snow and Dorothy died offscreen). At the end of the story, just when the book closes on Alice as she goes peacefully, the screen glitches and suddenly shows Parrah and Noya announcing that the climax of the SINoALICE Project has come thanks to the Characters and as they taunt the player, the screen zooms out and reveals a horrific... thing... that resembles a brain with nerves as tentacles and has 5 eyes surrounding an orb as seen on the page image, which is heavily implied to be the true form of the Library. The screen then turns black and announces the final Chapter... the Act of Desire.
• Upon reaching the Act of Desire, the main image on the story page will change to the Eldritch Abomination last seen in the climax of the Act of SINoALICE. Occasionally its tentacles will reach out to the screen and cover it, as if to grab the player personally. Eww.

Events

• During Campfire Cuisine, Alice, Sleeping Beauty and Dorothy end up in an neverending cycle of camping and cooking racoons, as the last chapter features them Laughing Mad as they cook and eat yet another one. Brr.
• The Fragment of a Nightmare event, by virtue of being a crossover event with Higurashi: When They Cry. Majority of the plot follows the first chapter, Onikakushi-hen, but with Pinocchio as Keiichi and Aladdin as Jirou Tomitake. As things go From Bad to Worse, Parrah and Noya had to go as far as to summon Red Riding Hood to help after Aladdin is seemingly killed and Pinocchio succumbs to Hinamizawa Syndrome.
• The Wishes of Three Piggies event by far is one of the more nauseating Spirit events - after the youngest pig finds a certain spirit heavily implied to be the Proud Lion spirit, she was given its power but her newfound eating habits freaked out her older sisters. Eventually the eldest ran away, and was offered the power to stop her youngest by a certain black cat. The two clashed, with the middle sister crying and screaming for them to stop, but eventually as seen in the class art the youngest eventually ate her sisters - first the eldest skinny pig then the middle pig who was just right, all in an attempt to stay together forever and always.
  • As the event story progresses, the half-eaten Nightmares look bad enough but the character stills and the UI also have bite marks on them, showcasing a very horrifying case of The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You.