Nightmare Fuel / Sonic Adventure

Perfect Chaos, our main villain. Sweet dreams.

All spoilers are unmarked! You Have Been Warned!

• There are very few places in this game where you can drown without doing so on purpose. Accessible water that goes over the characters' heads is relatively scarce, and the water you do find that meets this criterion can usually be escaped with a single jump. However, if you do find yourself in a tight underwater situation — usually with Big the Cat, owing to his water-based gameplay and often traversing submerged passages to find the best fishing spots — all your childhood nightmares will come to life as the infamous drowning music from the Genesis games plays, this time embellished with an entire orchestra. Even worse, your character doesn't simply fall off the screen like in the 2D games; you see them outright choke, visibly inhale a lungful of water, and then their dead-eyed corpse slowly floating to the surface.
• Red Mountain, a Norfair-like PG-rated Hell, with the addition of tombstones, narrow platforms over rising lava pits, creepy, spindly Giant Spiders crawling around, and walls with cells containing ghosts dressed in prison uniforms. A mission card in Director's Cut hits the Surprisingly Creepy Moment home:
  Mission: A fugitive have escaped from the jail of burning hell! Find the fugitive!
• The Orca that attempts to devour Sonic as he speeds across rickety ramps and bridges to get to the other parts of the Emerald Coast. What's scary is that this Orca is gigantic compared to Sonic and it comes out of nowhere. If the Orca catches up, he'll smash through the ramp you're on; causing you to fall into the sea and die.
• Perfect Chaos, pictured above. A gigantic, tentacled reptilian beast made of water that materializes out of a destroyed building, complete with a loud, distorted roar and a close-up of one of its crocodile-like eyes focusing threateningly on the screen.
• The Lost World has creepy music, a sinister underground city laden with elaborate booby traps — including Flaming Arrows, red-hot fiery stones that slide out the ground, and more spikes than you can shake a Ring at — and long dark areas over pits of deep water, all of which is unsettling. And at the end, a mural of Perfect Chaos destroying Knuckles' entire tribe◊; Sonic, not knowing what it means, is flummoxed.
  • Falling off the giant snake can be traumatizing; as Sonic raises the water level, it eventually becomes impossible to make his way back up, leaving him to either slowly drown or jump off into the endless abyss. And the snake is glitchy; it's all too possible to simply fall right through it as it's moving.
• A portion of the Lost World stage has Sonic being chased by a giant fiery boulder, a la Indiana Jones. Worse, being hit by it can not only cause damage, but launch you straight off the narrow walkways and into the huge Bottomless Pit it straddles if it catches you at just the wrong angle. Even worse, when you start spin-dashing away from it to gain distance, the boulder suddenly accelerates to close the gap just behind you, which can easily catch you out if you're not expecting it.
• The flashbacks to the past that Tikal takes all of the playable characters on reveal the dark backstory to the reason Chaos exists, and why Knuckles is the last of his tribe. In his tribe, a girl named Tikal befriends the Chao. Her militaristic father, Pachacamac, wants to take the Chaos Emeralds for himself and has no problems with slaughtering all of the Chao along the way; he doesn't even hesitate to throw back his own daughter. This naturally triggers Chaos' Berserk Button and he destroys the entire tribe, and to stop him from destroying the entire world, Tikal has to seal Chaos and her own soul inside the Master Emerald.
• During Sonic's boss battle with the Egg Viper, if you succeed Dr. Eggman will try to kill you one last time — by crashing his collapsing Egg Viper onto the remaining platforms you're standing on. Worst if they're the only platform left standing. Then you'll plummet below with the mad doctor. The fact that Dr. Eggman would go as far as to try to commit Murder-Suicide in a family-friendly game makes things even more unnerving.
  Tikal: (to Sonic during battle) Watch out! He's up to something!
• This game's Eggman is portrayed in a considerably darker light than he was in earlier games. His plan is to team up with an ancient, civilization-destroying Eldritch Abomination to decimate a major city, so that he can build his own twisted vision of utopia upon its ruins.
  Eggman: With all seven Emeralds in him, he'll be invincible and work for me! Together, we'll destroy Station Square, and on its ruins, I'll build Robotnikland! The ultimate city where I will rule it all!
  • What's Eggman's Plan "B" after Chaos is apparently defeated? Blow up Station Square with what's suggested to be a nuclear missile. The threat of annihilation by a weapon of mass destruction that actually exists only makes this game's version of Eggman scarier.
  • The frantic music that plays during the first half of this scene coupled with the red light from the sunset makes the whole thing even scarier.
  • Made even worse when you realize that Eggman knew the missile was a dud the moment of impact, but made no effort to flee the blast zone. He was planning to pull a Taking You with Me on Station Square simply to spite Sonic and friends!
• Eggman's chilling threat to Tails before he fights him one last time. It's supported by the exhausted way in which he realizes that Tails beat him to the missile, and then he threatens to make them all pay for it before he summons the Egg Walker; this is one of those few times the Eggman makes a genuinely unsettling line. His low, growling voice, the lack of music, and the presence of civilians reacting in horror to Eggman appearing and fleeing screaming as he goes on the attack do very little to help.
  Dr. Eggman: You fool! Away, before I make mincemeat out of you!
• Amy's entire story is sort of a survival horror, involving her being endlessly chased by a persistent robot called E-100 Alpha "ZERO". It never stops following her. The worst part is that certain times, ZERO seems to disappear, only to crash through a wall and continue chasing you. As Tikal puts it in her calm, emotionless voice, "The robot that was following you is closing in on you. It'll be over if that robot catches you."
  • You can stun it with a hammer attack, but do it enough times and it'll activate a sort of overdrive mode where it can't even be stunned until you lose a life or finish the stage, cutting your defenses to near nothing.
  • Amy's Twinkle Park. It starts out just fine, outside in Pleasure Castle's amusement park with the cheerful ride music playing. Then, unlike any other character who visits the level, Amy unlocks the castle's main doors and gets to go inside. It quickly becomes clear that something is very wrong with the rooms inside, especially within the screwy halls of mirrors. And the best part? ZERO. Still following you.
  • In Hot Shelter, one part involves Amy collecting colored cubes to fit in slots that will supposedly do something. The area has video monitors all around it that all display static. Once the last cube is placed, the screens go silent, then cut to shots of ZERO threatening you... cue the real ZERO smashing through the screens and blasting you. You escape the room through the hole it made.
• The Limestone cave level has yet another example of spooky music. The area itself inspires some acrophobia, especially as slipping just a little off the precarious ledges can send Sonic plummeting all the way to the bottom. It's even worse with Big, who can break through the ice to access a network of submerged tunnels where all the fish — and Froggy — are. They're particularly deep and winding, so it's all too easy to get lost or stuck down there and drown, even if you do have the Life Belt.
• One NPC in the Mystic Ruins implies that his friend never found a way out of the maze-like jungle.
• The Continue music, aptly called "Will You Continue?". It's like you're in a between-life-and-death limbo.
• The depiction of Station Square after Perfect Chaos goes on a rampage in the Final Story is legitimately horrifying in a real sense, and it may even remind you of recent tsunamis and floods in various places, like New Orleans, New Jersey, and Tokyo.
  • Perfect Chaos first appears by bursting out of a skyscraper. Fast forward to September 2001 in New York.
• Chaos, in general. Especially when Knuckles is alone on the soon-to-crash Egg Carrier with Chaos 6.
• If you exploit a glitch that allows Knuckles to reach Sky Deck through the Egg Carrier's swimming pool, you'll enter his flackback with Tikal as normal, but there will be no dialog whatsoever. Even when you reach the area where the emerald shrine is on fire and Tikal and the Chao are laying on the ground, no cutscene plays, making it seem as though they're all dead. The kicker? You're stuck here forever. If you quit the game and return to Knuckles' adventure, he'll still be there with nothing to do but watch the shrine burn endlessly. The only way to fix it is to start a completely new file.
• E-102 Gamma accidentally walking into the room with his "brother" E-101 Beta being rebuilt into his Mk II form. The scene is implied to be very traumatic and scarring for Gamma to see, especially since what is happening to Beta is implied to be the robot's equivalent of being horrifically mutilated and dissected then put back together into something else. No wonder it plays a role in Gamma's eventual Heel–Face Turn against his master.
• The Sound Test has Dummied Out jingles that would have played during loading screens for each adventure stage. And it's easy to see why.
  • The Station Square jingle has a disquieting feel to it. It's supposed to be serene and welcoming, but it just feels very off.
  • The Egg Carrier jingle is incredibly ominous, consisting of hissing, clanking and reassembling machines. It's very unnerving.
  • The Mystic Ruins jingle starts off with a sharp Scare Chord followed by distant, frantic jegog drumming.
  • The Past Mystic Ruins jingle is downright bone-chilling. It’s less of a jingle and more of a Mayan Scare Chord.