Beware the Gatekeeper
- The music for dungeons
in general for Oblivion has a much darker and sinister tone to them compared to either Morrowind or Skyrim. Even when facing no enemies at the time, the ambient sounds and tones can be enough to unsettle you or have you jumping at shadows trying to make your way through any dungeon you come across. And keep in mind you'd have to deal with this music on top of other Nightmare Fuel points listed further. - Start with the fact that Cyrodiil's breed of giant rat is based on the common brown rat and is quite realistically rendered. They're also typically as big as a medium-sized dog. This is bound to startle anyone who is afraid of or even squeamish about rats. The "skeevers" in the succeeding game, which look more like a wolf or fantasy animal, are much less nightmarish in comparison.
- "The Deadlands", one of the planes of Oblivion and the ubiquitous one in this game, looks like a typical Fire and Brimstone Hell. It's filled with demonic-looking beings, lava pits and a red sky that is deeply unsettling. The resident zombies and corpses are always intensely disturbing. And that's where you have to go to fight off an invading army.
- Mehrunes Dagon is (one of) the world's Daedric princes and the leader of said invading army. The Oblivion Crisis is only the last time he tried to conquer Mundus, making it even worse before then, knowing an invasion could happen at any time... what's that? Elder Scrolls Online is a prequel?
- The vampire dreams are creepy, and a big reason why you rarely see sleeping vampires... let's see, a normal looking woman with a child turns out to be a corpse mother and a plague bloated child, or your flesh bubbling and falling from you... or... eating at a normal banquet that turns out to be filled with larvae, which eat through your stomach; necromancers dissecting your body with scalpels, being buried alive, death by sneezing, and having your mouth sewn shut as you try to drink from a pool of blood... creepy. Thanks to engine limitations however, those are just a small wall of text. Imagine if Bethesda actually decided to show the imagery being described...
- The penultimate quest for the Dark Brotherhood, "Following a Lead," is by all means disturbing:
- You are told to hunt down a traitor to the Brotherhood. First of all, you'll find that the traitor, in what seems to be a homage to Friday the 13th Part 2, keeps the severed head of his mother in his basement. Once he's found, you're told to return to the quest-giver, Lucien Lachance. However, by the time you return to him, your bosses (including the traitor) have killed him, skinned him, and hung him from the ceiling. Granted, you've seen rotting corpses in the game plenty of times. What makes this so unsettling is that you actually knew the deceased. This is made even worse by the fact that this was done by your allies. Who go on to talk about how fun it was.
- The actual basement. Everything from the lighthouse keeper's reaction when you get the key to the moment you decide to leave that pit of Hell is horrifying. Part of it's the rotting, mutilated corpses (animal and human) littering the basement. There is not a square yard of space that doesn't have something grisly in it. But mostly, it's the diary you find by the desiccated and mummified head...
- Two sidequests provide In-Universe Nightmare Fuel:
- Vaermina's Daedric quest. A wizard has turned his fortress into a literal nightmare world, filled with upside-down rooms, dark abysses, and lots and lots of detour horror rooms, particularly one that has you standing on a pillar in the middle of a vast black space filled with caged corpses and horrible screams. Trying to leave the dungeon via the wrong exit shows it situated in the middle of what looks like Hell. After trekking through this waking nightmare, you finally come to Arkved (the wizard) lying asleep on his bed near the artifact he stole from Vaermina. There are notes scattered about that imply he was at first eager and excited to explore her realm, but the last one merely reads 'I shall lie here in the dark waiting for death.' One more note, fallen on the ground, simply reads "THE HORROR. THE HORROR." Vaermina says when you return to her shrine that Arkved 'will live out the rest of his days in nightmare,' even if you killed him. This essentially means you've killed Arkved's physical body, but Vaermina still has his soul.
- The Bravil sidequest called "Through A Nightmare, Darkly." Kud-Ei's friend Henantier subjected himself to some kind of self-discovery spell that left him in a coma. You must enter Henantier's mind, which is a nightmare landscape that doesn't obey normal physical rules, and then complete four smaller quests to recover his lost virtues of patience, perception, courage, and resolve. These quests involve a variety of nasty physical and intellectual tests, and you have to pass all of them without any weapons or magic.
- On the east coast of Niben Bay, there's a location called the Cadlew Chapel which looks like any normal chapel out of town. The chapel has been raided by four necromancers. There's recently chopped off body parts on the altar of the chapel along with a recently dead adventurer on a bloody table. What tops that though is the decaying corpse (presumably the chapel's priest) hanging from the ceiling, over the altar.
- Another one from Thieves' Guild is a quest, Arrow of Extrication, where you must go to Bravil Wizard's Grotto. At the bottom of the underwater cavern, if you swim all the way down through the hole at the bottom, you'll come across a Giant Slaughterfish. It comes out of nowhere, scaring the living shit out of you.
- There is a quest that requires you to go on a haunted ship to release a spirit. The ship isn't so scary as it is only filled with ghosts but when you reach the end of the ship, you face a wraith as a boss which keeps wailing creepily. Since the wraith was now dead, you think nothing else scary would pop up but after you release the spirit in the back room, when it vanishes, it does a noise resembling a sudden, loud, ghastly scream.
- The quest where you have to enter Tiber Septim's tomb has many wraiths, and a possible glitch can cause them to not fall down dead, but just float in place as if they were alive, still screaming forever. (Happy backtracking!)
- Anything and everything behind the Oblivion Gates.
- Particular mention goes to the "containers" used in place of standard treasure chests: mutilated torsos that, when you check them for items, make the same sound as when you remove meat from a roasted rat. They're labeled in-game as "The Punished."
- You may find the corpse of a fellow who, by the evidence, was captured and stripped by the Daedra, escaped, and finally met his end crawling over the plains. His hand is hacked off.
- That house opposite of the player's Skingrad mansion. Yeah, you're going around at night, breaking into some houses, stealing this and that? Well, you might want to skip said house, because it's full of ghosts and zombies. Who the hell would expect that?! It's in the middle of a freaking town! Also, if you're high enough level there will be a fucking Ancient Lich in there! But the creepiest thing of all is that the fate of the person who originally lived there is never explained. All we know is his house is full of zombies and he's nowhere to be found.
- Sheogorath's transformation into Jyggalag. After saving the lives of either the Golden Saints or the Dark Seducers, you return to Sheogorath's palace triumphant and ready for more orders. But something is wrong. The normally jovial Sheogorath is suddenly downtrodden and solemn. When you talk to him, he has a chilling monologue about the concept of time, and reveals that he will transform any moment. Despite your pleas, he remains convinced that all is lost, and pleads with you to flee back to Cyrodiil. Just then, he doubles over and starts screeching in one of the shrillest, most terrifying voices ever, which begins celebrating that Sheogorath is dead and proclaiming that "all shall tremble before Jyggalag", meaning Sheogorath was literally just Killed Mid-Sentence! Sheogorath's body then catches fire and starts growing taller and taller, finally disappearing in a burst of hellfire. Even Haskill is freaked out by it.
- In the Shivering Isles expansion, north of New Sheoth, there's a zealot stronghold called Fain on a tall hill; inside, you go about your business mutilating them all as usual, then you find a book, detailing that people (it never clarified if they were innocent travelers or other zealots) are thrown into a very deep pit in the center of the ruins to be sacrificed to what you can only imagine to be some kind of Eldritch horror. Thankfully (or perhaps not), the only thing down there are a few baliwogs, so either they're the things they worship, or the Eldritch Abomination is out elsewhere. Since Sheogorath's main trait is to mess with people's heads and he loves paranoia, either could be equally true.
- The Oblivion Thieves' Guild quest "Ahdarji's Heirloom" has your character infiltrating Castle Leyawiin to steal the Countess' ring. During the information gathering stage of this quest, it's possible to have other characters tell you about the Countess' "secret torture chamber." Turns out? Those rumors are all true. As you make your way through the dungeon, you encounter this room,◊ which is strewn with forks, sickles, and a warhammer. But it gets worse: this isn't some Necromancer lair in the middle of nowhere; this is the Countess of Leyawiin doing this in her own castle! And even worse, it's implied that the only reason this room exists is because she doesn't like Argonians.
- If you become a vampire and you're playing a Khajiit or Argonian... there were no vampire eye textures created for the beast races, so you get the default vamp eyes. One of the creepiest things found in the game is the sight of those pale-pink human eyes in an animal face. It's remarkably unsettling.
- The Daedric quests in Oblivion in general. Vaermina is probably the scariest, but a good few of them have you doing fairly horrible things. Completing all of them results in, among other things:
- The Khajiit settlement of Border Watch in a panic that the world is going to end because Sheogorath (or YOU) thought it'd be a fun prank.
- A group of priests of Arkay murdered in the darkness by the group of people they were trying to save because Namira took it as an insult.
- A Dark Elf couple enslaved by Ogres because Malacath was feeling protective. Said couple having been slavers themselves, the slaves having been these very same ogres.
- One of the families in Bleaker's Way completely wiped out for some inexplicable reason known only to Mephala.
- The only unicorn in Cyrodiil murdered because Hircine thought it would be good sport.
- A paladin grieving for his dead wife corrupted because Molag Bal was disgusted by his virtuousness.
- Someone from every race in Tamriel murdered because Hermaeus Mora needed their souls to divine... something.
- Soul Gems. Binding a being's soul to a gem and then using that gem to drain their spiritual energy to make an enchanted item. The concept of having your soul ripped from your body and transferred to a gem, then to a weapon where your existence presumably dissolves as you power the item with your existence is bad enough. But then imagine those who don't suffer this fate and are trapped in a soul gem forever. Oblivion also introduces us to Black Soul Gems, which exist specifically to trap human souls (which is otherwise impossible).
- Mankar Camoran's "Paradise". While the dimension is actually beautiful (qualifying as Visual Effects of Awesome), the island is crawling with roaming Daedra which will randomly attack you and the Ascended Immortals, for whom this is apparently Training from Hell. If you think that's bad enough, there are "The Punished" chests absolutely everywhere - THEN you see the torture chamber, where prisoners and people repenting their actions end up being made immortal, chopped into giblets, and then dropped into lava- you can hear the nonstop screaming and at one point it almost happens to you!
- As if Hackdirt wasn't unsettling enough as it was, try going to sleep in the inn or going underneath the town.
- The Ayleid ruin of Culotte was rather eerie. You walk in to hunt for the Ayleid statue and there's no enemies at all. You find the statue and turn around to see the whole place is now covered with zombies. Cue running to the exit.
- During the Thieves Guild quest "The Ultimate Heist" the player is attacked by Ayleid statues which come to life. This can be pretty startling, especially since the guardians blend into their surroundings pretty well and seem to come from out of nowhere.
- A combination of nightmare fuel and squick: One of Mannimarco's followers claims to want to keep your body mostly in tact so that "Mannimarco can suck the marrow from your bones".
- During the Mages Guild questline, a necromancer threatens to "make your corpse dance and rip itself apart". Not a pretty mental image.
- The very first time you see a Land Dreugh will be one of the most surreal and startling experiences in your Oblivion playthrough. Just imagine it: You've finally hit a fairly high level and decide to go exploring, you start by returning to a remote cave or fort you clear out some time ago. Only this time, when you load in, you're treated to the sight of this thing with multiple crab like limbs and no face sauntering up to you. It doesn't look like anything else in the game and moves in a very disturbing manner. That is a Land Dreugh, and you will be seeing much more of them in the future.
