S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (series)/Nightmare Fuel

If the hideously mutated creatures don't get to you, the anomalies and intense atmosphere will.

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• Night-time in the Zone. Oh, Gods, night-time in the Zone. Just wait till morning, seriously. There's absolutely nothing you need to do that's so urgent it can't wait until a less terrifying time.
  • At night, you seem to hear various noises in the distance. Mostly screams.
  • Not to mention that stuff like this can happen to you. Just sleep when it gets dark, wait until morning.
  • Yes, even with night vision goggles.
• Emissions - Whenever you hear the nuclear explosion-like sound, the ground starts shaking, the sky turns hellfire-red, the light getting temporarily snuffed out, the sky erupting in hurricane-like lightning storms, you have never been so inclined to run and hide like a little girl-and this is an excellent idea, unless you have Anabiotics.
• Some of the more exotic mutant types are terrifying, such as the Bloodsuckers. The Snorks are pretty scary, too.
• the C-consciousness, especially when you find out that the people kept in the pods are the researchers behind the experiment and they willingly sealed themselves inside those tubes in order to take the experiment to its logical conclusion.
• The First time you meet a Controller.. by the Dark Gods This Troper remembers when she walked down a corridor after a rather intense shootout with some Military Stalkers and then got Mind Raped. Needless to say I never again wanted to set foot for a few months in Agroprom Underground.
  • YMMV: when the physics engine screws up every once in a while, and instead of falling to the ground, you find your ragdoll corpse thrown back hundreds of feet into a corner, the unending sounds that play while your body is bashed mercilessly against the wall. Doesn't happen all the time, but...
• This list is sadly incomplete without the addition of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl's Bloodsucker. Based upon appearance alone, these things are pretty damned creepy, as this picture demonstrates. But, a combination of secondary characteristics moves them out of creepy and straight into downright terrifying: 1) They scream real loud when they attack you. 2) They are hella fast. 3) They only come out at night (usually). 4)They are completely invisible with the expection of its eyes and the body's blur effect on surroundings until they attack you. That's right, unless you happen to catch one off guard (which you WON'T) the only thing you will see is that mother(EXPLETIVE) lunging at your face a split second before it tears you several new ones. If you are very lucky, you might just see their freaking glowing EYES, wandering aimlessly over the landscape in your direction before the attack comes. And the best part? To this troper's knowledge, the beginning area is the only area safe form these things, and they can show up anywhere. You'll just be walking along, minding your own business, dodging better equipped Stalkers and the military, when you hear, perhaps the faintest hint of movement. You stop, readying your trusty assault rifle, but no enemy makes itself apparent. You continue to press on towards your objective, when suddenly BLOODSUCKER ALL UP IN THIS SHIT. Cue Bullet Spamming.
  • Try facing their meaner, tougher, stealthier versions in Call of Pripyat (they are sometimes called Swamp spawns). Barely visible? Not anymore. Floating visible eyeballs? Nope. Only the shuffling sound all around you, since you'll never encounter only one of them.
    • There's a reason NPC stalkers seek shelter at night. Encountering one of these after sunset is the second-worst possible case scenario on CoP (the first one being stumbling upon a Chimera <shudder>): rather than just jumping you and clawing the living shit out of you, they'll sneak up to you, slash at you once for horrendous damage, and cloak again. And do the whole number all over again until you're very dead.
      • Scratch that. It gets worse. If they land a clear shot at your exposed back, you'll momentarily lose control of your stalker and the screen will shake: the damn thing's living up to its name and sucking off your blood.
  • This is even worse, because in one area of the game, the damn thing sets a trap for you, with a dying man lying on the ground crying out for help. When you go to help him, the Bloodsucker runs out from behind you.
  • Not to mention the sidequest where you are tasked to clear out an entire village of them.
  • Or the sidequest in Co P where you and another fellow are investigating the lair of some bloodsuckers. The worst part? You jump down a short elevator shaft in your investigations, and the only way to get back up is to sneak your way through a group of about 8 or 9 of the goddamn things, all "sleeping" yet still standing up. The worst part was your visibility meter cranked up to max when you got close, meaning they knew you were there- it was all a matter of keeping very, very quiet.
  • What made the Bloodsuckers really terrifying was not their invisibility, or their crazily-powerful claws, but the fact that the bastards were smart.
    • Not only that but the things will actually hunt you. They don't just go into combat immediately all the time.
    • Let's not forget their loud, distorted and ragged panting as they chase you
  • Bloodsuckers are a nice way to soil your drawers, Controllers use an attack that involves Interface Screw, Snorks can be best described as gas mask wielding monkeys that can kill you easily, and then there's the Pseudogiant, whose presence is similar to that of a T-Rex, despite its accurate description (it's no larger than a buffalo). The fun part? They only account for less than 5% of all the enemies you encounter.
  • Clear Sky had some wonderful Bloodsucker moments. The first one you encounter being in the swamp area you start off in. If you wander off the beaten path and are unlucky enough, a variant of Bloodsucker will come charging you from the brush. That was this troper's first encounter with one, promptly fired both barrels from my sawed-off shotgun, turned around, ran, and never returned to that patch of the swamp.
    • Snorks... 'Have you seen my mummy?' Anyone else?
      • Plus, they are apparently what is left over of the first military stalkers.
    • Hell with that, the Nightmare Fuel in STALKER doesn't require monsters, just realising that this is what the end of the world looks like.
      • What constituted just about all of the nightmare fuel was the environment. The dread just seeps off the walls. This is without mentioning the underground labs. They're on a level of their own.
        • Not to mention the Red Forest.
        • X 18 Lab (located under Dark Valley) has even its own type of monster called Poltergeist (unfortunately you meet them again only once) with ability to telekinetically toss different objects (barrels, wooden crates, etc.) at you, also while alive they look like flying electrical discharge, you might not even realize that they can be killed, that they are not just anomalies. Undoubtedly, X-18 is one of the best locations in that game.
        • For a really fun time, keep watching after your character is killed by dogs, and you can watch them chowing down on your corpse.
• People seem to overlook the fact that the whole Clear Sky faction disappears suddenly after the events of Clear Sky. The Monolith Faction seems to become proportionally more powerful at the same time, a Monolith faction entirely made out of brainwashed stalkers.
• One of the most disturbing scenes in the game in spotting the monolith guard at the beginning of the red forest, spinning their head maniacally around a fire. It only gets worse when the player finds an entire battalion of equally disturbed soldiers in the middle of a destroyed theater at the heart of a deserted and radiation-filled city, doing the same around a huge sculpture of "something".
• A section in Shadow of Chenobyl has the player fight through a sewer of military officers and bandits, which is chock full of deadly anomalies. This is one of the first missions. You see the exit and finaly want to get out, but wait, what was that noise just the- HOLY FUCK WHAT HAPPENED TO MY CAMERA WHY DID I JUST LOSE HALF MY HEALTH FUCK ITS LEATHERFACE]]
• It comes as a disappointment to this troper that the underground labs do not take up more space on this page. Okay, picture this. You just fought your way across an extremely dangerous area of the Zone, swarming with bandits, various mutants (including bloodsuckers and snorks, fun times), and boatloads of anomalies, not to mention the radiation. You killed the bandit leader, and made your way to an abandoned factory, to find a blast-type door hidden in a tunnel underneath it. You enter the lab, and it's about 90% pitch black the whole time. There's a dead body literally five feet from the entrance, and a skeleton in the corner. You loot the body (keep in mind you're guaranteed to be on the edge of your 60kg carry capacity already), hear a noise, and turn around. The skeleton seems to have moved about a foot towards you. Getting goosebumps on the back of your neck, you turn back towards the staircase to see a floating crate in the air. Cue the crate smashing you in the face, taking out half of your health bar. Bandaging up, you proceed onwards to find snorks, which are the remains of a military team sent into the lab. You take them out, pushing the innate desire to shudder at their ragged, strained, barely audible breathing into the back of your mind. After navigating a hallway full of burner anomalies, you find the corpse of a scientist who used to work in the lab who has a passcode on him. Keep in mind the whole time you're being pelted with anything that isn't nailed down (literally), and the only way to stop it is to kill all of the poltergeists in the lab, which are fast moving and near-impossible to hit, much less kill, especially considering that the only light you're guaranteed to have is your flashlight. Then you encounter a pseudogiant, which isn't that big of a problem since you took an AK-74 with grenade launcher earlier in the lab. Or at least you would have, if you could carry any more. After using up what little ammo you may have left (or part of your large stockpile, it depends) on the beast that you could hardly see, you find another passcode. After finally making your way to the room with the documents you need, you find indescribable experiments (evidently on the psyche of the human mind, going by the wires hooked up to their brains, and the Poltergeists) as well as a special poltergeist, that shoots flames at you. But the fun doesn't end there, you then have to fight your way back out of the lab, through a mix of a Spetsnaz strike team, and bandits who showed up wondering what all the commotion was about. Have fun trying to get out of there as fast as you can while being unable to move at any rate faster than a hobble due to wounds and a bulging backpack.
  • The really fun part? This is your introduction to the labs.
• The ENTIRE trek in Call of Pripyat through the underground tunnels from Jupiter into Pripyat. 4 squad members + the player versus: a 3-mile hike through poison gas-filled abandoned power plant tunnels, filled with hamsters, snorks, anomalies and zombies. And that's before you're attacked by wave after wave of heavily armed fanatical Monolith troopers, including snipers from walkways dozens of feet up. Did we mention it's pitch black the entire time?
• There are few video games on this page which come close to the level of creeping, grinding dread this game and its sequels inspires. The atmosphere of crushing horror is made far worse by the fact it holds quite old fashioned views about what the average player should be capable of. In other words, it wants you dead. Very dead. Remember those other FPS s where you had limitless supplies of ammo which took up no room in your magic bottomless bag? No. Remember those games where there'd be some guy who would helpfully fill you in on the boss's weak point before you fought him? No. Remember those games where the people not shooting you spoke the same language as you? Nyet. Remember those games where you didn't have to eat, where being injured was just a reason to be slightly more cautious, and you could heal by simply walking away and waiting for a bit? No, no, no, no, no. There is no salvation, no Hope Spots in the crumbling, radioactive ruins of the Zone; you will die and you will not understand what happened, except that your end was quick but not quick enough. Around the next corner from your near fatal encounter with an invisible mutant you will find not a safe house but a band of disinterested Ukrainians waiting to kill and loot your slowly bleeding-out meat. It is a game that will hook and hold you even though half the time you wish you WERE dead, such is the level of fear and suffering you are being put through, because just surviving in the Zone feels like a tangible achievement. That is STALKER.
• Call of Pripyat's X-8 Laboratory has one room in particular where you can hear what sounds like a little girl crying (in an abandoned Soviet-era lab in the middle of Pripyat). After wandering around the room for a while, you finally nail the source of the noise down to a rusty old door. On the other side is a Burer.
  • Worse. That lab has a secret room with three Burers. Depending on whether you're playing a mod that 'fixes' them and patches the game or not, these same Burers may be nigh invincible (even by Burer standards, as they are tough little bastards) and can see through the walls. That means as you wander around the lab, random bits of scenery will assault you with no apparent reason.
• Just thinking about what it might feel like to get caught in a Vortex anomaly, even if it doesn't kill you. With Call of Pripyat: Complete, anything that is killed by or in a Vortex explodes in a shower of gore. Best place to observe this is when Hermann and Ozersky ask you to test a theory using a scanning device in the Bitumen/Asphalt anomaly field near Jupiter Plant. Hang out in the field and the Snorks will swarm in to attack you... it is highly likely that at least one will be pulled or accidentally run into one of the Vortex anomalies during the fight. Splat!
• There are mods for SoC that patch up the bugs, unlock extra monsters and crank the realism Up to Eleven. (if you wanna try -- one of the most popular mod mashups is named AMK). Want to use a sniper rifle -- learn to use the sights' rangefinder and remember the bullet velocity. Want to shoot that suspiciously glowing chimera? OH GOD IT HIT ME WITH ELECTRIC ARCS. Remember these pretty head-mounted flashlights? Now the enemies turn them off and start walking back-to-back if they know they're being targeted. Love using your trusty Hollywood Silencer? Now the enemies can hear you well, and just have some trouble figuring out where you are. Want to use cheap night-vision goggles? Try to aim at enemies cross-eyed because of the simple lens. See that slow, rotting, unarmed zombie shambling towards you? He takes a dozen headshots to stop and a knife stab to kill. You just saw a Burer? You have less than a second to hide or kill him. Have the feeling of the air tingling? Prepare for 15 minutes of nervous bolt-throwing, because the anomalies change their location every day.
  • Call of Pripyat gets the S.M.R.T.E.R Mod. Does plenty of things that the other game's mods do, but comes also with the nifty little addition of throwing in Monolith troopers outside of Pripyat. Remember the old Water Treatment Plant where you had to take on a dozen mercs? Now there are twice as many Monolith forces there. The old factory in Jupiter? Used to have only a few blind dogs, pseduodogs and hamsters? Crawling with Monolith now. Going there without a metric ton of ammunition, a good armor, upgraded weapons and a hefty dose of luck is suicidal. You may turn the difficulty down just to make that section playable.
• Honorable mention goes to every single other mutant in the Stalker series. They managed to make even mutated pigs and rats scary.
• Bandits. As someone who is regularly antagonized, This Troper always consoles himself with the idea that if he had a bullet-proof suit, a shotgun and a few grenades, nobody would dare touch him. Then, the Bandits come along and ask you for your artifacts. "Oh, sure. Hey, is that a Chimera!?" POW! You've got a new brass crown. It takes guts to do that... and they're not on your side.
• In Call Of Pripyat, Vano is one of the more friendly characters, always smiling and cheerful. In one quest, you need to help him take out some Monolith in a bookstore. As he stands outside the store, he is likely to be attacked by wild animals, so to prevent the quest from failing before you even start, the developers made him invulnerable and had him ignore enemies while he waits for you. How could this become terrifying, you ask? Look. Look and weep while you still have eyes and a soul.
• Burers, I feel, deserve a special mention. In my humble opinion, they are the Demonic Spiders of Call of Pripyat. When they were removed from Shadow of Chernobyl, the developers were being merciful. No longer. Imagine the telekinetic abilities of a Poltergeist with the mind-blast abilities of a Controller. Then give it the capability to paralyze you and rip the gun out of your hands and pummel you to death. Not that it does you much good anyway, because they can use their telekinesis to deflect bullets. And using the old anti-Controller tactic of throwing a grenade at their feet won't work either. They are fast, they could run away. But they won't. Instead, they will use their telekinesis to raise your grenade up to the point where it explodes harmlessly, just to crush any hope you had of killing them. The best solution is to run right up to it and stab it with your knife until it dies, hopefully. And the best part of it all? You rarely run into just one of them, they come in pairs. I have faced Chimeras, Controllers merely annoy me and I laugh at Snorks. But I will never, ever get over the chill when I know one of these is within thirty feet of me.
• The Monolith faction. Brainwashed and Crazy is a good way to describe them, though they are also religious fanatics who display a devotion to their skewed "faith" that could make the Covenant take pause. One of the crazy bastards in Call of Pripyat starts giving a sermon while his comrades start slaughtering you and your friends. As if that was bad enough, they somehow have access to the best arms and armor in the zone, including Gauss rifles.
• The Jupiter factory complex in Call of Pripyat. It is an insanely large abandoned factory complex with fully modeled interior of most of the buildings. The majority of the rooms has no lightning, and certain rooms in the complex have hidden anomalies in them. Due to the often murky weather and the color pallet used in the game, it makes the entire place looks significantly more menacing than it seems. To this troper's surprise, only dogs appear throughout the entire complex, but the game tends to avert your ability to adapt to such setups when the player gets jumped out of the blue by a mercenary squad conspiring against a science team you're working for.