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Nightmare Fuel / Watch Dogs: Legion

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  • In the previous Watch_Dogs games, security corporations overwatching the populace with legal allowance was Paranoia Fuel on its own. This time around, it's genuine and heavily armed private security forces in a post-Brexit London, having superseded the British government after systematically undermining and usurping them. This force is ready to gun down anyone that gets in their way or opposes them thanks to bring granted top authority after local terrorist attacks. It's both a mix of Truth in Television from increasing paranoia of society's unrest, and a terrifying look into the dystopia that the Watch Dogs universe has become, almost feeling like a plot derived from the damn Clancyverse, and a huge escalation in just three years in-universe even if overseas. It also doesn't really help that real life modern Britain is already considered a borderline police state by many.
  • The "Tipping Point" short film. A narrator describing how the city went to hell, visuals that look like the animators of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse took drugs and played Hotline Miami for inspiration and an innocent taxi driver being branded a terrorist for saving the life of a resistance fighter.
  • The Black Hole of Battersea in its entirety, utterly pitch black with no other light source than a small news drone, and grinding, industrial noises in the background. The fact that it's a black-site prison camp for migrants and anti-Albion dissenters, who already suffer regular Cold-Blooded Torture, now have being stuck in a natural sensory deprivation chamber on top of all their abuse.
  • Everything you find in Skye Larsen's basement. We'd tell you to look for yourself... but since that would be a Zero-Context Example, once you dive into the basement, you'll transported into what appears to be outdoor old-style home. Inside, you'll discover the gory details: she uploaded her dog into a Spiderbot as a successful experiment, then she tried that to her mother Sinead's brain into a computer, then horrifically experimented on her in order to transform her into a docile home A.I. system. When you meet Sinead, she's struggling to find a way to beg you to put her out of her misery. Even worse, as you learn later in the game, this was hardly the last time she did this. You encounter more of Skye's "artificial" intelligence systems later, including a London cabbie whose mind was used to control all of London's self-driving taxis (and eventually went haywire and started running over Broca Tech employees as revenge), a nurse whose mind was used for a hospital's A.I. system (and also went haywire and started killing patients), and worst of all, Skye's own brother Bradley, who became the basis for the Bagley home A.I. system.
    MedTech A.I.: Backdoor detected. I cannot be stopped. I am life. I am death. All are expendable.
    • The spider-bot dog clawing its cage and barking (which it has apparently been doing for TWO YEARS) is something that is bound to traumatize dog-loving players.
  • During the mission "Inside Albion", you escape the Tower of London by going through the catacombs out to the river. The catacombs are dark, there are all manner of creepy noises, the signal is poor (preventing Bagley from communicating with you), and you find multiple logs by Albion employees who explored them before you and got freaked out — one of which ends with the implication that somebody didn't come back. Ultimately, there's nothing actually dangerous down there, but the atmosphere is still enough to scare even your Player Character (who, on this mission, is themselves a reformed Albion guard).
    • Data log 2 in this area ratchets up the nightmare fuel with a transcript between two Albion workers who were previously in the catacombs. One enters the room you are in now and freaks out at a statue he swears is watching him. It gets worse than that- the statue changes position to face the door you entered the room from, and does this when it isn’t being observed.
  • The Infiltrator Spiderbot's takedowns. Imagine this from the perspective of the victim: You're minding your own business when a giant metal insect creeps up behind you, crawls up your body, and electrocutes your face. It's no wonder unfortunate Mooks scream horribly when it happens to them, and while they're guaranteed to survive, they, unsurprisingly, hated your guts for doing it to them.
  • Coming upon various Albion guarded sectors can have a whole helping of nightmare fuel in them. As stated above, it provokes strong moments of Truth in Television in its setting. Holding cells with (or without) blood stains, chairs with constraints for obvious torture, over the top surveillance. Basically, these are various and literal black sites all throughout London! And then, there's the Clan Kelley Syndicate...
  • Everything dealing with Clan Kelley: Organ Theft, Mind-Control Device with a Kill Switch, and just Mary Kelley herself, as detailed in Complete Monster.
  • During the finale, if you take some time to travel to your destination, you'll see people being killed by death rays shot from somewhere in the sky. It turns out that, no matter how much effort you put into stopping Albion's Project Themis drone system, Zero Day reactivated it in an instant, and now the drones are going haywire and murdering people at complete random...
  • Entering the Aiden simulation in Bloodlines is very horrifying, as it shows even after 15 years, Aiden is still haunted by the bodies he left behind in his wake as the Vigilante of Chicago. To put things into perspective, Aiden's mind starts off like something straight out of The Shining, with Jackson entering a pristine version of his old home, though subsequent visits show it rapidly deteriorating before it goes straight into A Nightmare on Elm Street territory, with parts of Aiden's mind being underground passageways dyed in red mixed with overgrown vegetation and stuffed bunny rabbits that look extremely out of place. The last segment in which Jackson returns to his home is arguably the worst, with blood splatters and bodies wrapped in plastic bags found all over the place as if it were the site of a crime scene.

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