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This is based on opinion. Please don't list it on a work's trope example list.

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Nightmare Fuel / The Last Door

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With The Last Door, you would think the minimalist graphics would keep the game from being horrifying. You'd be incredibly wrong. With a mix of Victorian thriller and David Lynch-style Surreal Horror moments, this serial game is one episodic nightmare after another.

Moments pages are Spoilers Off.

Series-Wide

  • The Simurg, also called The Bird itself is nightmarish in its own right. Awoken in an attempt by boarding school students to pierce the Veil into the next world Gone Horribly Right, this eldritch avian creature haunts Jeremiah Devitt and almost everyone he comes in contact with. Due to its ultradimensional state, the only part of it that's ever seen is its eye, as pictured above. Even worse, notes in Season Two mention that the Simurg is the guardian of the Veil. If anyone approaches the Veil without proper preparation, then the Bird will see you, find you and kill you - one way or another.
  • The Veil itself offers a number of terrifying hallucinations and horrific creations caused by the weakening of the separation between this world and the next, causing nightmare sequences of Lynchian proportions.

Season 1

Episode 1 - The Letter

  • Having to control Anthony as he hangs himself starts the game off disturbingly.
  • The flock of crows. Every single time you see the flock of crows.
    • The first time you see the flock of crows, they're busy pecking and devouring something that Devitt can't see. After the second time you see the flock, you learn that they were eating another crow.
    • The second time you see them is the first time you see The Veil starting to collapse. In the basement, you find the record "Carnival of Venice." Put the record in the gramophone, and the music will come out distorted and off-key. After you leave the room with the gramophone, it will suddenly click off. Coming back in, you're greeted by the entire flock of birds in the room, staring straight at you, with the room tinted a horrifying blood red.
    • The third time you see them is after you read Anthony Beechworth's letter telling you to go back to their old boarding school. The crows suddenly crash in through the window immediately after you click out of it and begin devouring Anthony's corpse while Jeremiah watches.
  • Entering the boarded-up room and finding Anna Beechworth's decaying corpse lying on the bed, with the words "LEAVE ME ALONE" painted on the walls. Fridge Horror sets in when you realize that Anna could not have painted those words.
  • Finding Alfie the cat, and everything building up to the reveal. After leaving the crow in the dish, you begin hearing the cat wailing hauntingly. On tracking it down to the basement and breaking through the wall, you find Alfie sans eyes, who then suddenly pounces at your face and runs off into the shadows.
    Anthony Beechworth: "That goddamn cat... he meows every night and it's for me, I know it. He's mocking me!... I have to put an end to his miserable life... or better yet, I will make him blind!"
  • The atmosphere of the game in general, and walking through the dark hallway and basement with the lantern on and only the eerie, tense music and ambiance to keep you going. The worst thing is you move incredibly slowly when you have to use the lantern, adding even more tension to it, although nothing directly comes after you.

Episode 2 - Memories

  • The rabbits... just... the rabbits.
    • Okay, to be more specific, close to the end of the episode you go to your old dormitory and sleep in your old bed, only to undergo a nightmarish walk through a red-tinted, almost completely dark version of the hospital, with the staircase absolutely dripping with blood and with strange human shadows looking in at you through the windows in the main hospital ward. You read letters on the way of the tale of Mr. Rabbit, who discovers Mr. Wolf, Mr. Vulture, and Mrs. Viper debating which of them should eat him. Mr. Rabbit, afraid of death, tells them they should have a race to the forest clearing and whoever arrives first should eat him. As they race off, he runs in the opposite direction, but at the very end, he hears the loud boom of a gunshot as a hunter kills him. After reading the very last letter, six large rabbits surround you, and proceeds to do... nothing, except for following you with their blood-red eyes.
  • There's one nightmare you go through before the rabbit nightmare, aided by a psychologist after the traumatic events of the first episode. You're silhouetted in the moonlight and walk farther along, seeing visions of Anthony's hanging corpse and Anna clutching their child, which disappear in flashes of light. When the psychologist tries pulling you out of the trance, he counts to three. After he counts to "two", that's when you see the lovely picture above followed by an inhuman screech.
  • As you go farther along in the game, you learn that the friendly hospital handyman, Frank Baldwin, is not exactly what he seems. This culminates in the very end, where he bashes you over the head with a hammer and proceeds to give you a premature burial.
    • The first clue as to his true nature comes in the form of one of the patients who begs you to use morphine to put him out of his misery. On finding the morphine and going back to the ward, you find that the patient has mysteriously disappeared, leaving a note behind. The note is... revealing.
    Baldwin lies. Baldwin lies. Baldwin lies. Baldwin lies. Baldwin lies. Baldwin lies. Baldwin lies. Baldwin lies. Baldwin lies. Baldwin lies. Baldwin lies. Baldwin lies.
    • And right after, on going outside the hospital, you'll hear mysterious banging on the upright coffin out near the graves, eerily mirroring your own situation by the end of the episode.
  • The Monsignor himself isn't too creepy compared to the more inhuman things out there, but a sadomasochistic priest who harms himself and has killed at least fourteen people in the name of a horrific bird creature is still up there. The worst part is that the Monsignor is actually Father Ernest Glynn, Jeremiah's former teacher and one of the witnesses, alongside Jeremiah, which raises huge questions about what is going to happen to Jeremiah.
    • Another thing about the Monsignor? At some point he decided that the Lord was telling him to burn out his own eyes. Well, if the Lord said so...
    • On confronting the Monsignor for the final time in the secret lounge where it all began, the Monsignor goes through a Villainous BSoD after explaining what happened and what they did all those years ago. He then proceeds to drop a lamp and immolate himself.
  • At some point, you meet a nun who is undergoing a crisis of faith. After giving her a sign to keep going, she thanks you and then walks away. After that, if you go out to the beach near the hospital, you'll find her habit and walking stick on the beach, with absolutely no sign of her, and you never know what happened to her.

Episode 3 - The Four Witnesses

  • You first start out this episode the same place you were in at the end of the previous episode: in a coffin.
  • Everything you learn and discover about Daphne. Daphne was a golden-haired girl with the singing voice of an angel, who was sought after by a violinist (whom you get to talk to). However, the sickness came, and Daphne died. Or so you think.
    • To be more specific, you learn that somehow (likely due to The Bird's influence), Daphne's coffin broke free from her mausoleum and she made it into the sewers, where she slowly became a reanimated, sapient giant tree creature with tendrils all over the sewer system, singing a creepy, ethereal version of "Hush, Little Baby" to lead people wandering the sewers to fall asleep and be eaten alive by rats.
    "DO NOT FALL ASLEEP"
    • At some point, the violinist gives you his violin. What do you do with this violin? You put it inside the tree that Daphne's become. It consumes the instrument and then begins to grow wildly.
  • Each episode has at least one nightmare situation. This one gives us Cattie and her final performance for her papa, given to us through a very disturbing game of Red Light Green Light.
    "One, two, three... what time is it, Mr. Wolf?"
    • To be more specific, Cattie, first looking like an old, demented woman in a young girl's dress, tells you to play a game, to turn around to face the wall and shut your eyes. When you look around the first time, she's still there. The second time you look around, suddenly her father is there at the piano and she's taken the form of a little girl. The third time you look around, you're suddenly at a concert stage. The fourth time you look around? Her dad is dead, slumped over the piano with a knife in his back, his blood everywhere, written in a message on the floor, and a bloodstained Cattie is directly in front of you. It's a bit of a shock.
    • Also adding to it is the above mention of a character of sorts from the previous nightmare sequence.
    • Cattie's entire situation is pure nightmare fuel. She was overworked and abused as a child, which apparently drove her to murder her own father. Now she's an old woman, and she seems to have never been able to get over those memories. She may have Alzheimer's or a similar medical issue, and it seems like she's living alone in this old house? Tons of adult fear.
  • The mysterious laughter in the house. On finally tracking it down to a curtain, you pull it back to find it's a gramophone and a creepy mannequin of a woman laying there in the bed. The track on the other side of the gramophone? A man sobbing uncontrollably.
  • The well-dressed man in red hair seems to follow you no matter where you go, or, more specifically, the episode centers around you also trying to follow him. And at one point, while reading a note important to the puzzle, you discover he was looking at you the whole time you were reading the note.
    • There is also the secret where you witness him dissolve into a flock of crows.
  • Can we talk a little about the followers of The Bird? They're incredibly unnerving, and they have masks, which range from happy to sobbing to shocked to... whatever that last one was.
  • Hooray, the Eye of the Bird makes another appearance again! And while you're trying to peer in through a keyhole, too...

Episode 4 - Ancient Shadows

  • Your first hint there is something wrong is when you arrive onto Alexandre’s property and examine the doorway closest to you: the door to a greenhouse. Devitt even questions why it was latched from the outside. When you go inside, you can hear the sound of stone grinding and encounter some rather disturbing angel statues. A note in the house implies they move on their own. Once you find the syringe at the end, if you try to leave, the angel statues block your path.
  • At one point, you need to figure out how to create a red light bulb. Many players get stuck, wandering the house and the outside property, and end up quite shocked when they find the dead deer on the entrance path, torn open. Worse, clicking the light bulb onto the deer results in Devitt dipping the bulb into the deer’s blood and putting it back into his inventory.
  • The darkroom has a picture of a couple wearing rat masks. When you install the bloodied bulb, the picture turns black. When you finish developing the photographic plate and examine the picture, the couple materializes right beside Devitt with a Scare Chord.. It’s a relief when the bulb explodes and they return to their picture frame.
  • In the backyard is a grave. Clicking on it results in Devitt flashing back to his experience being buried alive. More flashbacks occur as you unearth the grave and open the box within.
  • Once you have gotten the star map, a horrible scream emits from within the house - from Alexandre, who has otherwise been nigh-catatonic since your arrival. When you get to his room, he is gone. There’s never any explanation for what made him scream or how he got into the basement.
    • Related is the diary entry from a former servant you find left in Alexandre’s wheelchair. It details how, one night, the servant woke up to see Alexandre standing on his balcony only to then also find Alexandre sleeping in bed. The servant wisely decides to quit.

Season 2

Interlude - The Mask With No Eyes

Episode 1 - The Playwright

  • In the asylum, you can find a room with a massive mirror for a wall, with chairs in front of it, and a window held open by a metal piece. Removing the metal piece shuts out the sunlight and reveals the ‘mirror’ is a false one and lets Dr. Wakefield see a man strapped down to a table and struggling. Returning to this room after certain events shows the man out of his restraints and curled up in a corner, striking the mirror with a fist, and departed from the room with the mirror now cracked.
  • 26 Paul Street has a hidden chamber with a machine operating for unknown reasons. It also has a masked figure in a yellow robe sitting in a seat. Dr. Wakefield removes the mask to reveal... nobody. Despite the robe maintaining a humanoid shape and no visible object for the mask to attach to, there is no one wearing either. The lights then flicker, and the woman who was praying outside is suddenly at your side, still chanting.
  • Sergeant Conghill’s story is a rather subdued one, but it’s still nightmarish to imagine walking into a fog, being separated from your allies, and then finding them dead on the ground.
  • In the very beginning of the episode, Dr. Wakefield recollects a recurring nightmare he had about walking down an empty, dilapidated street by lamplight and after making it halfway through, he stops unable to move as a grotesque looking man shuffles forth and asks him to give back what belongs to him. In a moment quite literally taken from David Lynch, Wakefield finds himself down that same street in order to reach the Opium Den at St. Giles, who then asks him the same thing.
  • The state of the asylum in general. There are only three staff members for the entirety of the asylum, none of them are doctors or experts in any regard, not to mention the old man from the earlier example, and going into the isolation ward at all is just a continuing source of Nightmare Fuel in each room.
    • The very first room you go to is absolutely overgrown with plants that look eerily similar to Daphne in Chapter 3, and all the while a woman is sitting there muttering to herself about bugs. Talking to her helps solve a puzzle and shed more light on Alexandre's time in the institution, but it's just generally disturbing and either patient care is so subpar that somehow giant roots have begun to grow in the cell, or the giant roots aren't entirely real or are a product of the Veil.
    • The second room is completely empty and at first glance seems barren of anything, until you hear the woman in the first room's story about the man who used to be in the next room being afraid of something watching him or hiding under the bed while he slept. Searching the bed will show that, yes, in fact, the thing hiding under his bed was very real and essentially stuck in a room hidden behind the second room with no exit aside from the hole in the wall. You need to find this in order to solve a puzzle.
  • The nightmare sequence in this chapter, although a little less intense than the previous chapters, doesn't pull punches in delivering surreal horror. After finding Conghill's superior in the opium den and learning about Alexandre and The Playwright organization, leaving the room will take you to the start of a nightmare sequence first involving a play with three characters, all in straitjackets and hospital gowns and with animal masks on (the masks happening to be of a Wolf, Vulture, and Snake, like in the Chapter 2 nightmare sequence). The play itself is dark involving marital affairs, but the audience seems to be stuck laughing at the darkest lines in the performance. After they bow out, Dr. Wakefield is thrust into a new room where going down the hall leads to him finding Jeremiah Devitt under a spotlight. As he keeps walking forward that first Jeremiah Devitt disappears, followed by another Jeremiah in a new pose. The more he keeps walking, the more disappearing Jeremiahs he sees until they all suddenly pop up all around him and taunt him, asking him why he even is bothering to search for him. As usual, the events come out of nowhere, make little sense, and are never referenced again.

Episode 2 - My Dearest Visitor

  • Going into Professor Wright’s basement. Unlike previous episodes, you do not have a candle or lamp to light your way. No, all you can do is light matches. One after another as each one slowly goes out. Until you are forced to stumble forth in complete darkness.
  • Returning to Professor Wright’s manor is rather creepy - all the lights and fires are out, you can’t find Professor Wright or his housekeeper, and there’s not even a note explaining why.
    • Upon solving the birdcage puzzle, there is a knock. Leaving the bird room treats you to the wonderful sound of a door opening. If you hadn’t yet opened the front door, you will find it opened.
    • Going upstairs gives you a glimpse of a previously-unopenable door closing. You can now go in to find the professor dead.
  • Making your way to the underground tunnel is a tense experience in and of itself, with the odd holes in the walls and the skeleton you can stumble over, and the cheerful waltz playing doesn’t help. It gets worse when you reach a bridge and the waltz stops.
    • The underground tunnel’s music doesn’t particularly help.
    • However, once you find the archway and try to leave, you hear a sound behind you. Of course, you go look. It’s just some rocks falling. The monster comes from the direction you were heading. It catches a lot of players off-guard, since the series doesn’t normally do such scares.

Episode 3 - The Reunion

  • The prologue shows how the experiment with the Gate went. Take a guess.
  • Chapter Three starts out pretty calm and almost nice. Wakefield is on the small Scottish island Eilis Mor, is greeted kindly by the people living there and even invited to dinner by Lord Donnán, all while hearing neat little bits about the Festival of Reunion, a ritual to meet your departed loved ones and scare away evil spirits. It returns to horror very quickly.
  • The graveyard, no matter when it is visited.
    • First there are masked villagers chanting underneath the big Alder tree. Later, they can be seen burying mirrors. The whole time, nobody answers or even acts as if they are aware of your presence.
    • Look into the crypt when you first enter the graveyard. Someone is talking about how he wishes to look behind the veil. As in, talking with someone that you can't hear.
    • After talking to the man in the lighthouse, Wakefield decided to dig up the mirrors. If you then leave the area, you hear a noise, only to return to someone in a golden bird mask having willfully destroyed them before running off.
  • The Hills are just a small path, a beach and a gigantic hole that makes odd wind noises.
    • There are later two teens wearing masks - one of a bull, one of a golden bird - there. One doesn't talk, the other is pretty helpful. When you return later, both are gone, but the helpful one left his mask while the other one begins to taunt you, such as by destroying the mirrors of the graveyard.
  • The solitary house, a house that was burned down by The Crooked One aka The Serpent. For the extra touch, there is also a nice big wickerman in front of it.
  • The Lighthouse has a wickerman hanging by a noose from a tree. Needless to say, once you finished your business there, it is burning as well. Passing it also gives a little Jump Scare.
  • Kieran. A young kid that was playing with the marsh spirits and then disappeared.
    • Following the odd villager in the golden bird mask leads the player to Kieran's Playroom which holds human-sized marionettes and a big stage. If Wakefield lifts the curtain and goes to the backstage he sees something humanoid crawling in the dark, refusing to even get close. It makes sickening squishy noises as well.
  • When finding and opening the secret passageway under the Abbey, the game goes dead quiet except for Wakefield's footsteps. Then the path becomes foggier and foggier. And then you start seeing the villagers with their masks standing next to you...
  • The episode ends with Wakefield being at the bottom of the big hole from the Hills which is revealed to be the crypt of the Laidcend family. Wakefield decides to take a look into the tomb of Brighid Laidcend's aunt, only to find an inhuman skull as the crypt suddenly goes dark, accompanied by the sound of someone putting a massive boulder over the hole.

Episode 4 - Beyond the Curtain

  • The prologue is over, the game starts: welcome to Zha'ilathal.
  • The hub area is just filled with men in yellow robes and masks, all either praying, begging or being on the verge of dying from exhaustion. If you successfully solve an area, the man linked to it disappears, leaving only a piece of his mask behind.
  • Area One brings you to Anthony's house. Naturally, it comes with its own version of the cat and the gramophone.
    • The cage in the basement with the shadow inside it.
    • Solving the area has four robed men scolding Wakefield for what he has done until it is revealed that they were scolding Anthony for having tried to get out of The Playwright through suicide, mocking his "legacy". Even worse when you recall Anthony's notes from the first episode about being watched and realize you're now seeing the same things he had before he died...
  • Area Two leads you to a odd version of the boarding school. It starts out pretty normal, though you get stuck soon. Walking back to find out what to do leads you to seeing yourself being mirrored at the beach.
    • You can find the shadow of a child in the classroom. It is terrified of you.
    • Decifering the inscription in the mirror world reveals that the Simurg isn't the only thing to be afraid of. There is also the snake, and both should never be awakened simultaenously.
    • Upon playing a sweet little tune on the piano, you can hear someone else playing it as well. When you reach the stage to see who it is, you find a massive shadow on strings, writhing in agony.
    • The implications of what happened to Hugo Ashdown after he went through the experiment. He found the same shadow of the child that you do only it does something to him. It's heavily implied through the initials on the clothes you find in the previous chapter that the monster you see at the end is what's left of him. And you came to this place by the same means...
  • Area Three is a maze inside a forest. Nothing happens in there other than the player most likely being horribly stuck since they most likely missed the symbols to help them. Not that the player knows that nothing happens...
    • Wakefield ends up on a cliff with a massive feather. Wakefield picks up the feather. Wakefield gets attacked by the Simurg.
  • The epilogue is Devitt or Wakefield thinking about what had happened and what he thinks of doing now with this knowledge since the Door is locked and the Veil is closed. Credits roll. Screen goes black...
    sound of something knocking against the window, followed by someone walking, opening the window
    Crow starts cawing

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