Nightmare Fuel / Watch_Dogs

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• Aiden himself.
  • He's a man who can turn the entire city into a weapon aimed directly at you with just the touch of a button. Imagine what's going through the heads of the mooks as fuseboxes explode in their face, their com-systems either refuse to work or let out a sudden, ear-splitting burst of static leaving them reeling in agony, and grenades activate on their belts, leaving them scrambling to get free: they must think they're up against some kind of murderous poltergeist.
  • All this coming from his obsession at protecting his family, to the point of becoming a borderline Sociopathic Hero at worst. To protect just two people, he can break the lives of countless others, including draining bank accounts dry (bonus points if it's the equivalent of one fifth their annual income), running people over, traumatizing the public with gangland shootouts in the streets, and generally spreading mayhem and destruction wherever he goes.
  • The player can play him via merciful and compassionate means, like only hacking the banks of the rick or immoral, actively stopping crimes, incapaciating enemies instead of killing them, etc... but an "Anarchist"/"Menace" Aiden callously crushes people on the hood of his car as he doggedly pursues a criminal doing less damage than him, incapacitating said target in a highly dangerous multi-car pile-up, or legitimately causing the city infrastructure to explode. Of course, the cops get called but it's not unknown for this psychotic to hole up somewhere and rain bullets down on waves of officers until they legitimately give up (it's hard to stop a police assault through sheer firepower, but is possible) and just have to let him go. And that's arguably not even the worst he can do, just some of the basics.
• Dermot "Lucky" Quinn's introduction, where he fatally stabs the man Aiden had been hired to extract from a lockdown, is chilling. Even worse when you consider the fact he ordered the hit on Aiden. He just went up to the man whose life he ruined and thanked him for his work.
• The "Alone" digital trip is surprisingly unnerving for being a simple modification to the game's rules. Eerie robots with flashlights for heads searching you in a bleak, deserted Chicago—somehow, it works. It's a particularly jarring experience since the game focuses on the player character's connections to the millions of people around him , and these people are entirely absent, their existence only hinted about by dozens of damaged cars laying around and confiscated weapons left around the city.
• The Auction, where girls from around the world are sold off into slavery.
  • They're drugged up to the point they can't remember their own name and their profiles are just names and numbers when you scan them in the Profiler. Aiden is clearly horrified by what he sees there, and vows to hunt down everyone who evaded the police raid Aidan sent on them.
  • If you think the auction itself is bad, try scanning the messages of the people attending, who are quick to make it clear that they see these girls as nothing but playthings to be used and discarded as they see fit. It's evil in a realistic and horrible way that will give even veterans of GTA V's infamous torture scene the shivers. What makes it all worse is the fact that shit like this happens in real life, where you don't have a magic phone and a pocketful of guns to stop it with.
    "You should treat your toys with more care."
    "But then I wouldn't have any reason to get new ones."
  • Knowing that these girls are anonymous runaways, or kidnapped from faraway places, one of the attendees casually texts his accomplice that he's found someone worth taking down to the woods.
• The Investigation side missions can Mood Whiplash into Nightmare Fuel territory real quick.
  • The Missing Persons investigation where Aiden discovers the bodies of several women wrapped in bags and having their faces covered with masks while laid next to gruesome bloody displays. The eerie music playing whenever you get near one of the bodies’ locations makes it worse.
  • The Randomizer camera feed videos you can be even more abrupt, especially since you can find them in bunches when hacking a new ctOS station.
• Just walk around with your Profiler on and see how many crimes occurred in Watch_Dogs' version of Chicago for yourself...
• In the mission Collateral, Clara visits Aiden at his hotel. While their conversation in itself is quite chilling, it gets even worse when Aiden stops her What the Hell, Hero? moment, and says for her to cover her ears. It's then revealed that Fixers are attacking the hotel. That's right, they traced Aiden's signal, and the fight trashes the hotel. As Aiden notes in the next mission, this firefight leaves him homeless.
• Several ctznOS Randomizer vids are amusing like the one of the father criticizing his son's game of Assassin's Creed everyone likes to talk about, but some are definitely at this end of the spectrum:
  • One is a clusterfuck of weird glitching, as if a real person were experiencing videogame clipping errors, complete with messed up sound. After a few seconds, ctOS gives up and reboots the camera.
  • A man humming to himself happily while placing a severed hand on a table. Because the videos are heavily stylized its impossible to tell if it's a real hand at first, but the scanner is able to identify it as belonging to a missing person. The man cuts the fingers off the hand, uses them to make cocktail sausage, and walks away eating one.
• Bellwether, which allows someone to use ctOS to influence the general population via data and media manipulation. It's used to get Mayor Rushmore elected. It's later used to get Rushmore to come to the conclusion that his wife is cheating on him, prompting him to divorce her.
  • There's even hints in the audio logs that show it learning things on its own. In short, Bellwether could be an AI!
• The Hanging Woman, The Dead Grandfather on the floor, The man putting a pistol in his mouth and pulling the trigger Privacy Invasion videos also are horrifying.
• From the ending; Evidently, even pacemakers are connected to ctOS and can be remotely shut down. Worse yet, they probably turn off during blackouts like everything else does. While nobody ever dies of Alden's blackouts (No programming for Karma loss), imagine living with a relative who gets a heart attack everytime when the electricity goes off. And without electricity, helping them is difficult.
• Perhaps the most chilling fact about this game is that according to Game Theory, virtually all the hacks shown can be done in real life.
• The entire game can be this.
  • While it's obvious focus is on digital technology, infrastructure vulnerability, abuse of data, and privacy rights there's a whole other set of issues people tend to not discuss that are implied in the game. The biggest being that ctOS is effectively privatization of an entire city: all public utilities and services are either managed through ctOS or directly controlled by it. Blume, presumably being a government contractor, then goes on to use its funding to directly influence politics to ensure its future control and has plans of expanding to every major city in the world. Oh and they're not afraid of getting their hands dirty to have their way. They'll hire hitmen to silence dissenters and they're not above making business arrangements with organized crime either if it furthers their agenda. The game ends with one of their executives incidentally becoming interim mayor of Chicago.
  • Just imagine a world where your tax dollars fund people's (dubiously) legal business and political ambitions on a global scale. The entire thing brings about another set of relevant and timely topics like privatization, government contractor scandals, and corporate/monetary interests in government/politics. Arguably Truth in Television depending on your personal inclinations, but even if not the idea is still creepy...
  • Made worse by the tie-ins to the Assassin's Creed franchise, where it's explicitly stated at one point that that series' villainous conspiracy is actively interested in ctOS. The terrifying part, in-universe is that Blume is better at their power-gaming than Abstergo. This says a lot, given how much power Abstergo already has.
• In Bad Blood, Aiden has three Audio Logs you can find.
  • The first two are pretty standard fare for him wondering if Jackson and Nicki will ever forgive him, but the third is simply him reciting a recipe for banana bread in a Creepy Monotone. It makes you wonder if everything he's gone through eventually ended up driving him insane.
  • He fully admits that he's probably never going to see or hear from his family again due to the risks involved in simply contacting them, and that one day, he's probably going to wind up killed by a fixer better than he is. The recipe really makes him sound dead inside, especially his emotionless recitation of the line, "Remember the most important step: Enjoy."
• In Bad Blood.
  • T-Bone winds up finding out Defalt's reason for hating him- His brother was one of the people who died in the 2003 blackout, and this is displayed with a model (Along with every other death) in a Room Full of Crazy stretching out across an entire lair.
  • From this scene, T-Bone losing it, ending with him screaming "Fuck you!" over and over as he stomps a TV showing a news report of the blackout.
• Some of the people you hack grenades on figure it out and throw the grenade. Others do not have reflexes that fast. Many a last word are along the lines of "Oh, God, no!" or "I'm live! Back away from me!"
• One of the random phone conversations you can hack involves two people discussing what sounds like an illegal drug shipment. One of them says that the shipment must have been tampered with, and mentions people drowning in their own blood because of it.
• Picture the final level from the standpoint of the citizens of Chicago.
  • You're going about your business on a seemingly ordinary day, when suddenly you hear warnings that ctOS has been compromised. Traffic lights all turn green, bollards pop up and cars slam into them, streets explode from steam pipes bursting, and finally the entire city is blacked out. For all the people of Chicago knew, they were being hit with a cyberterrorist attack (and in a way, they were).
  • Usually when you use the blackout hack, the most you'll hear are people complaining about ctOS. But when you blackout the city at the end? There's sirens everywhere. Remember that, in the fiction of this game, 11 people died during the 2003 blackout. Factor in the above hazards (lights, pipes, etc.), you have to wonder how many people were injured or killed this time.
  • And worst of all? Blume is able to spin the whole thing into good PR for them, resulting in their PR person being appointed the interim Mayor, as well as installing ctOS into every major city in the world.

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