Eversion/Nightmare Fuel

Eversion starts off as cute and cuddly. You're a heroic flower out to collect gems and Save the Princess by using the Goomba Stomp on happily smiling and running goomba expies. Then things get less cheerful as you everse into slightly darker and darker worlds, until... Well, let's just say It Got Worse.

The enemies changing as you evert. They start off as cute and cuddly...then they slowing become more and more terrifying.
World 4-5. DEMONIC HANDS.
- SKREEEEEEEEEEE
And then the fake ending... You've saved the princess, hooray! Then... the lights flicker, and the princess... changes. And walks toward you. Slowly. As the incredibly creepy X-8 music plays. Then you hear the "scree" sound effect, you get a game over screen... And the game closes itself. See it here.
And in the good ending the same thing happens...only you change as well.
- The concept of Eversion itself. You're literally turning reality inside out, and just try to imagine that concept in Real Life. Just imagine some random person finding a weak point in the universe and sending us all through worlds X-1 through X-XXX.
  - ...Holy crap.
- Think about what the ending means. Maybe Zeetee turned into something weird because of all the weirdness outside?
And then there's the Steam-exclusive hidden ending, in which you get warped into X-4. And both you and the princess get turned into immobile statues.
It's really terrifying when you hit the happy smiley block in 4-1, taking you to 4-5.
- Have you noticed the animation when you hit that block? You're knocking its eyes out.
X-9 is very similar to the worlds X--8 through X--2, but the enemies look the same as you. Consider what that means for a second.
- What does it mean?! Unless...oh, no. You Are the Demons. More specifically, the Asterisks are just as demonic as everything else. Zee Tee is one of them, but he is stuck in Flower-Man mode, and he needs the gems to turn into one of his own kind, even if it means killing his own kind to do it. And you helped him. You Bastard!
The backgrounds in the HD edition. X-1 has some somewhat blurred hills in the distance, with some trees. X-2 makes the hills look artificial. X-3 had the world falling apart. X-4 as a totally motionless, stagnant ocean. X-5 has a lifeless wasteland. So far, it's creepy, but not to the extreme. X-6 turns the hills into Eldritch Abominations. Bet you didn't see that coming. X-7 is the same, but even creepier. X-8 introduces grasping tentacles in multiple layers of backgrounds...
- And the X-8 music? It Gets Worse.
It's a bit jarring when you first reach 2-3, although not as much as it is to reach 4-5, as above. X-2 still has happy trees and flowers and clouds. X-3 turns the clouds a smoky yellow, shrivells the flowers and removes the trees.
- The same goes for first reaching 3-4, where the flowers are completely dead, the goombas are one-eyed and motionless, and in the HD version, the landscape is changed into a dull green "sunset". The total lack of activity combined with the unnerving music and the desolate landscape make for an overall Nothing Is Scarier mood. Things start rapidly going downhill from exactly this point on.
8-1. It's all shiny and happy, but at the end there is a demonic hand that really isn't expected. It's quite terrifying.
Greyish rocks appear in the later levels, but they never appear before 5-5, for some reason. X-6 makes them look edgier. X-7 causes them to turn a dark reddish purple colour and start walking around. X-8 turns them into downright monsters. The fact remains that the harmless rocks never appear before 5-5. 4-5, just before, is when demonic hands appear. 5-6, just after, is when flowers become deadly. This is the steady descent into darkness. Maybe the rocks ARE the demons, appearing along with the rest of the evilness, disguised as harmless rocks until it becomes evil enough for them to emerge?
The faces on the blocks. in X-1 and X-2, they are happy. In X-3 and X-4, they are neutral. X-5 makes them look freaked out, probably to amplify the terror of 4-5. In X-6, they're decayed.
- Decayed? They look like they're melting. In X-7, they become spirals, as if they're being warped into the red eyes we see in X-8.
Think about it this way: Zee-Tee is chosen to go on a quest because of his everting powers. He knows that it's a bad idea to go beyond X-4, since that decay can creep into the happier worlds. As he ventures, he begins to lose his mind because he has to go to lower eversions to get though the worlds. As he loses his mind, he also loses control over the everting, loosing walls of death and blood and releasing those hands. Then, depending on version, there's 2 alternate stories from here:
- In the older version, when he gets all the gems it unlocks the super-guarded X-8, which was protected because it was so supremely evil. Zee-Tee only collected the gems because his twisted mind WANTED to unleash the horrors of X-8. He then reaches X-8 and subsequently loses all control, everting rapidly between all the layers as he tries to reach the princess. Too bad his everting insanity has distorted both him and the princess!
- The new version is the same, but when he sees X-8 he has enough sanity remaining to try and escape, so he everts back to X-1, only to find that it's too late for them all, X-8 has already corrupted and taken over everything! Zee-Tee's sanity evaporates as he too succumbs to the forces of darkness. *shivers*
The game mentioned that the princess had been kidnapped and you had to save her. Well, we get to see the princess. Now imagine what the kidnapper must be like.
- Or maybe she hadn't been kidnapped at all, and it was a rumor... *shivers*
- Or the kidnappers simply didn't know until it was too late.
- Maybe this can help... http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5955677/1/Rotten_Heart
I SEE YOU
- BEHIND YOU
- STOP. GIVE UP.
- READY! TO DIE
- MOTHER
- .
Thumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthump. If you listen closely at the music, you can hear it speeding up veeery slightly. Are you getting more scared as you going through X-7? It's not the game. IT'S YOUR OWN HEART.
- X-8 is even worse. Not only does the heartbeat acceleration become even more obvious, but it adds screams and distorted cries and Psycho Strings. Oh god...
World 3, wherein you pass a checkpoint, and without any warning, you suddenly evert to World X-4 and a giant wall of blackness appears behind you, and if it hits you, you die. Made worse by the fact that, prior to this, most of the worlds had been, while ominous, not entirely scary. Possibly made worse by the fact that it's a checkpoint, so any time you start the game again, you're greeted by giant gaping shadow wall of death.
- You get another one in World 6... made of blood. This also takes you by surprise. Made worse is the fact that there are those hands popping out of everywhere.
Many of the fanarts made for Eversion are pretty damn creepy too in the spirit of the game, like the one on Deviant ART that shows an animation of a tiger-like character named "Sly" everting. His eversion includes him closing his eyes and his forehead splitting open to reveal a replacement eye.
- The above picture is another fine example of a brief sum of X-1 to X-8.
In X-1 and X-2, the music is happy. in X-3 it's slightly less cheerful. In X-4 it's only partly scary. Then there's THIS. X-5 has a typically scary tune, but it's the last actual soundtrack, and X-6 is the same as X-2, but it's constantly changing speed and pitch. If you have your speakers high enough, X-7 is a heartbeat. Finally, X-8 is... um... wow.

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