Nightmare Fuel / The Frontier

• The Frontier itself qualifies as this. Located in the ruins of Portland admist of a heavy snowstorm, the entire area is considered to be by many characters to be one of the coldest locations in post-war America and it shows. Going through the ruins of Portland brings back memories of the Capital Wasteland in Fallout 3 and it's just as dangerous as that place too. Scavs can be found all over the city looking to ambush any unsuspecting travelers along with the usual abominations you'd find in a Fallout game, such as ghouls who have become so frozen due to the winter that they have gained extra body resistence, which means you have to shoot their fragile limbs to take them down. You never feel safe while exploring.
• There is a hotel not far from the NCR base that the player can explore. The first thing one sees upon approaching the door is a corpse, which already doesn't give one much hope for what could be inside. Then, after you go inside, you discover that things are much, much worse. It turns out that the hotel was being used a slave auction, where slavers would come auction off their slaves for potential buyers to enact whatever degenerate thing they'd wish to perform on them and this becomes even more so apparent as you explore the hotel, finding the corpses of slaves scattered all around usually in sexually compromising positions that could've very well been the very last thing they experienced before dying. And this isn't even the worst part of the location. As it turns out, the hotel was attacked by an infestation of hermit spiders. Have you ever seen a hermit crab? Have you seen one hiding inside of a doll's head?◊ Good, now imagine that...but with spiders residing inside of human heads, and, to top it all off, who randomly burst out of the corpses spread around the place. This was considered so disturbing by the developers that an Arachnophobia Patch was developed for people who could not handle the idea. Yes, the mod's own devs censored their own mod for being too disturbing.
  • One of the rooms in the hotel is locked. Once you unlock the door, two slave kids run right out deeper into the hotel. One shudders at thinking about what they were locked in there for.
• Scavs are your typical raiders, except they are usually much more well-equipped than the raiders of the Mojave Wasteland. Not only do they have their own vehicles, but they somehow also have giant trained mutated humans known as Goliaths who chase you down and do extreme damage if they hit you. Encountering one of these for the first time is not only unexpected, but also very unnerving.
  • Scavs also typically have skeletons of their victims hanging from the bumpers of some of their vehicles. You better hope yours is not the next one.
• The NCR Questline, which plays like your typical linear Call of Duty game, has some moments that would put Spec Ops: The Line to shame. One moment is right at the beginning, where you and your platoon arrive at a bridge with the intent of setting up mines to ambush the Legion. As the soldiers plant their mines, one says their mine is not setting up properly. You receive an order to help that soldier out and as you approach him...Boom, Gorn everywhere!
  • On the same bridge, one soldier ends up being severely mutilated from a mortar strike. His screams of pain are very unnerving to listen to, even more so when he starts begging you to kill him to end the pain. Eventually, he has too much and pulls the pin on one of his own grenades, blowing himself up in extremely gory fashion. War Is Hell, indeed.
  • And right after that, you're captured by the Legion, after watching your CO getting his head blown off right in front of you. What you're put through next is a torture sequence that has a dialogue option to skip it in case you're too queasy about extreme gore. If you don't pick this option, you're made to watch as an NCR Soldier pleading for his life is brought in front of you and the man torturing you says that if you don't cough up what the NCR is after, that man's life will be slowly brought to an end right in front of you. In a twist of realism, the NCR Soldier begs you to just tell the Legion what they want instead of staying loyal to his faction. What follows next is entirely up to you. If you don't give the Legion what they want, you are forced to watch this man be chopped up to pieces in such a disturbingly grotesque fashion that it might make your stomach churn. You will be regretting not picking that option when you had the chance.
• Hotshot's death, which involved him blowing himself up with a grenade after being swarmed by legionnaires. No tearful goodbye, no last words, no Gory Discretion Shot, you get to watch as his giblets and guts are flung at your screen.
• Sticking true to the War Is Hell feel of the mod, you get a moment where you play through the Helios One battle between the NCR and the Brotherhood of Steel. Right after the battle, you are then ordered by your General to execute the wounded NCR soldiers instead of giving them first aid due to the NCR's medics being too overwhelmed to save everyone. And yes, the game makes you stand by every single dying NCR soldier and put a bullet in their head each as they call for a medic and wonder if they are going to be saved, including one of your own friends. This is a nightmare that no soldier wants to go through.
• As previously mentioned, the game features an Arachnophobia Patch. This is because the dev team did not hold back on introducing new creepy crawlies to the game. The tarantulas you can find roaming around the wasteland are big, fuzzy, fast and extremely deadly.
• Sanctuary may seem like an abandoned hotel at first, until you realize upon going in that it's inhabited by solely robots. The entire atmosphere of the place is completely unnerving as you feel very out of place with the robots watching your every step and if you talk to them, you can clearly tell that they do not want you there, even through their programming. Once you leave, however, things get far worse. A ghoul will approach you and reveal that he and his sister went into that hotel once and the robots turned hostile. While he was able to escape with his life, his sister got stuck inside and hasn't been seen since. If you decide to go after her, you must go inside the hotel and inquire to the robots about her whereabouts, to which one will slip something about a Red Room. There is a set of double doors that can take you to this Red Room and once you get in it, not only do you realize exactly what these robots have been doing this entire time, but you also piss off the biggest one of them.