Fallout: New Vegas/Nightmare Fuel

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.



Main Game

  • Meeting Mr. House. Like President Eden, he's seemingly a computer, but claims that being so is merely his only way of prolonging his original existence as a human. But despite his claims of humanity, his monitor displays a face, and it never changes. It's stuck in one neutral pose, and it reeks of the Uncanny Valley.
    • And then, if you hack his terminals, you find his true, shriveled, barely alive form.
    • And so does his home, the Lucky 38 Casino. From outside, it's lit up, and can be seen for miles. When you get in, you find a place that is squeaky clean, uncharacteristically intact for the wasteland, and horrifically barren and silent, especially considering what a casino usually is like. And this isn't even because of the usual reason buildings are empty in Fallout, as New Vegas is packed with people. You know, without anyone telling you, that no soul has stepped in for over two hundred years. Mr. House just doesn't trust any humans, and so the only other things in his casino are his trigger-happy robot guards.
    • House's underground bunker. It's not so bad going in, just turrets, robots and radiation. Going out... all the guard robots are dead, and now the soldier Securitrons are lined up against the windows, staring at you with their unmoving faces. It's unnecessarily creepy. Not to mention Victor is never seen again after that little event. What the heck happened to Victor?
    • In Lonesome Road, Ulysses will imply that siding with House will likely end with "Your face on a robot's screen"... and you realize it's perfectly in character for House to do that to you eventually, "rewarding" you by turning you into a loyal robot slave. Independence ending suddenly sounds very tempting.
  • Some find Yes-Man a little unsettling in all his... over-enthusiasm. "Easy Peasy!" is funny right up until you realize you're alone with a Psychopathic Manchild. Being a securitron, he's also one glitch away from grinding you into paste. And really any one of your enemies can turn him against you just like you did to Benny right?
  • The White Glove Society, and their casino, the Ultra Luxe. They're dedicated to being the utmost elegant, luxurious, and sophisticated organization in the Wasteland. But their masks are Nightmare Fuel, and almost every White Glove wears one, complete with a voice changer. According to them, it's to form a Mysterious Atmosphere, but many characters just say they're creepy. Making things weirder, they also were cannibals before Mr. House came along, and some of them still are. You get to hear stories about people who have gone missing over the past few months, such as a bride a day or two before her Wedding. Unless you have a high stealth level, you won't have a gun to save yourself with if they suspect you are onto them. Their weapon of choice is a loaded cane; somewhat unsettling when you compare their methods to everyone else. To top things off, the Ultra-Luxe is almost futuristic in design, making it feel totally alien in the Mojave.
    • The kitchen and basement area of the Ultra-Luxe, in contrast with the rest of the casino at least, feels a bit too much like a Torture Cellar as you walk through it trying to prevent someone from being eaten. Granted, it's basically just an industrial kitchen, but in context it still feels creepy. Oh, and if they're short a main course, you can sell them one of your companions.
  • Clanden in Gommorah, and his Snuff Tapes. These tapes contain horrific sounds of murder and violence. You hear Clanden engaging in violent sex with women, and then hear the sounds of visceral and violent murder being carried out. Confront him about it? He maintains his normal demeanor while threatening you:

Courier (paraphrased): I think the Gomorrahh bosses would be interested in hearing these tapes.
Clanden: I think I should kill you before you have a chance to show those tapes to anyone. What do I have to lose?
Courier: I'll keep the tapes, but you leave Gommorah and never come back.
Clanden: Fuck it, I was getting tired of this place anyway. I can find girls to play with somewhere else.

  • Check out Mick and Ralph more closely. Everything is normal until you go upstairs where there's strange meat in the refrigerator. Those familiar with the Fallout series will know what strange meat is, but maybe Mick and Ralph didn't. Maybe they just ended up buying it from someone without knowing what it was. Then you look in the oven and found a strange meat pie...
    • In fact one of the nearby NPCs mentions that some one not too long ago sold people in the town the meat.
  • Try walking around Freeside for a while. Occasionally, you'll hear the loud terrified scream of a woman being attacked or raped.
    • It's worse then that. You can hear the sound and try running towards it to kill a thug... only to find no one there. Especially for good players. There's that aching feeling that, even after saving countless lives, there was one you could never help...
  • Also in Freeside, you can see some children chasing a rat, if you kill the rat, the girl bends down to it and starts ripping it to pieces and eating it raw.
    • Several or even all of the kids do that, it seems to be random. What's disturbing is their cheerful "Thank you, Mister/Miss!" if you talk to them; it's easy to think they were playing a game until the rat wound up dead and they started eating it.
  • The Big Bad of the game, Caesar's Legion, is introduced in the most horrifying way imaginable. The player is asked to investigate a town that has lost contact with the outside world, and has started to billow smoke. Upon arrival, everything is surprisingly quiet, and then one man runs out acting happy as can be, loudly boasting that he won the lottery, and seemingly too crazy with laughter to explain any further. Then you enter the town the way the guy left, and start to see that EVERY OTHER PERSON IN TOWN has been crucified, and then you learn the "lottery" allowed that man to go free. A closer investigation reveals the mayor was burned on a pile of tires, some people got enslaved, some got decapitated for a quick death, and the runner-up got his legs crippled but was left alive and free. And after you arrive, the loathsome bastards who committed this atrocity just...saunter off as you arrive, leaving you alone amidst the ruins, the crucified bodies, the burning...
    • The worst part about this? Have a look around Nipton. You'll find that for all of Vulpes' talk about how Nipton was a wicked, sinful place that was planning to sell out everyone in the town for a pittance... it turns out it was true.
    • Crucifixion has of course been real life Nightmare Fuel for the last 2500 years, but the Legion's resourcefulness somehow makes it even more horrible- they use cut-down utility poles. This may serve to remind the player how easily a mundane object may be converted to an instrument of death. And that millions of these things line the highways. The Legion will NEVER run out. It's also a Shout-Out to The Stand, where one society crucifies people in the same way.
  • If you don't kill Benny at The Tops casino, you will find Vulpes just standing right outside there in an NCR civilian disguise, telling you that you are pardoned and that you shouldn't screw the Legion over again. The scene itself is not that scary, but considering that he virtually always seems to know where you are and that he can sneak in and out of New Vegas as he pleases...
  • In addition to the back-breaking labour and implied rape, Silus has managed to make Legion slavery even worse. His collars are fitted to slaves just tight enough not to choke them, but will also force them to spend their lives in horrific pain and discomfort.
  • Vault 22. Stay out!! The Plants kill!
    • The worst part about it is that they're not even marked as NPCs. You're walking along, minding your own business...Monkey on a stick! Pissed off green things!
    • Speaking of Vault 22, part of the background noise sounds like someone talking.
    • There is some Fridge Horror to this as well. The vault probably housed at least a few hundred inhabitants, yet you only encounter maybe a few dozen or so Spore Carriers inside. The door to the vault is open. If you have played Honest Hearts, you know that some of the Spore Carriers managed to travel to Zion Canyon. So where are the other Spore Carriers that didn't remain or go to Zion Canyon?! It should be noted Randall Dean Clark's second wife was one of the Vault Dwellers from 22 and she didn't become a carrier. But then, it's also straight up told to the player via Randall's notes that the Vault Dwellers ate the others and raped the women.
    • When checking one of the terminals, you come across a note saying that since the lead researcher is away taking care of his sick wife and daughter, he's taking over. To find the access codes to the deeper sections of the vault, you need to enter a vault living quarters - occupied by two adult spore carriers...and one child spore carrier near a child's crib.
    • Then there's the realization you get after reading the logs about the spores. That they're still in the air. The air you're breathing. Keely's notes says she's unaffected solely for being a ghoul, but you? It's too late. Of course, you're unaffected for no apparent reason, and while the cybernetics you get in Old World Blues can provide one explanation why, if you haven't been to Big MT yet, it's quite a horrifying realization...
  • Vault 11. Going inside, you see campaign posters stating the candidates' rivals are evil, so vote for them, not me. That's just odd, though, right? It Gets Worse. The winner of the vote becomes overseer for a year, before sacrificing themselves in the depths of the vault, or else the entire vault gets killed. Potential for Heroic Sacrifice at least, right? It Gets Worse. Too bad the vault quickly divided into voting blocs, and started using their status to sentence men to death for being lucky at poker, and extorting sex from their wives under the false pretense of sparing them. Okay, that's bad, but at least the overseers are shown for once to be 100% on the up and up, for once in the series, right? It Gets Worse. The last overseer used her power to abolish elections in favor of a computerized lottery, leading the voting bloc in power to riot and causing the deaths of all but five of the vault dwellers, who kill themselves. Well, that's bad, sure, but it doesn't compare to some of the other vaults we've seen in the series, does it? It Gets Worse. Get through the sacrificial chamber, itself Nightmare Fuel where a calm, polite voice invites you to reminisce upon the good moments of your life while thanking you for your needful sacrifice just before unleashing a squad of killer robots on you. Survive, and you find out the whole test was designed so that if the vault refused the sacrifice they told was necessary, they're rewarded for valuing human life. Not a single death needed to happen.
  • Vault 34: The fact that every resident had access to some rather impressive weaponry, while food supplies were very low, ended up causing a revolt. During the revolt, the reactor goes nuts, and floods the vault with radiation, killing most of the residents, and leaving a frightening number of ghouls. The truly scary part? You meet a resident who had left the Vault only a couple of years ago, who left because he thought he was becoming a ghoul due to his hair falling out. You also get a message from residents who are still trapped and need help. This means that the the aforementioned events didn't happen a couple hundred years ago: they may have happened as early as a week ago!
  • Vault 19. The logs show it was deliberately half-filled with people showing signs of paranoid schizophrenia; the other half was a group of sane people. The Vault was an experiment to see if they could drive the sane people mad by having a self sufficient reactor crew working all hours of the night under their feet, making barely heard noises, their intercom chat whispering on the system above, and generally making life miserable for everyone up above without realizing it. Medical records showed everyone was mad, but only half of them were genuine. The Vault's experiment, from what little can be derived by the logs and the overseer's terminal, was to see who would survive, the slowly going insane experiment group, or the already insane control group.
  • Poor Vault 3. A control vault with no experiments, the inhabitants were very nice and well adjusted, but a bit naive. When they first opened the Vault, the Fiends were among the first groups they met. The Fiends promptly slaughtered everyone in the Vault and moved into Vault 3 themselves.
  • "The Coyotes" It sounds like a simple enough quest at first, just investigate some missing people. By its end, however, you will have a crippling fear of teddy bears, slavers, and an unmeasurable hatred for Cook-Cook.
    • Just about anything involving Cook-Cook counts. The guy buys slaves, and in one recent case, bought 3 girls and a boy, then forced the girls to watch as he burned the boy alive. Then his rape of both Corporal Betsy and Pretty Sarah, the latter he didn't just rape, but burned just enough to let her live.
    • A major bit of Fridge Horror is the fact that other than himself and a few fiends there are no other people at Cook Cook's encampment. Nobody tied up, nobody half dead from torture, no corpses. The implications clearly being that Cook Cook serves most of his victims as a meal once he gets done with them. Those three women with the boy? They were probably brutally raped, roasted alive, and served as a main course in that exact order. After all... what better way to dispose of the bodies? Screw Legate Lanius, Cook-Cook is the true Big Bad of New Vegas.
  • Wandering through the irradiated Camp Searchlight, a former NCR outpost bathed in a sickly green haze and filled with feral Ghouls, but the town's fire station holds the big surprise. All seems relatively well, going on a merry scavenger hunt, until you walk through the station's doors and straight into a Radscorpion Queen literally half the size of the garage and bigger than a military truck.
  • There is an animal farm near Camp Searchlight that has a sad and frightening tale to it. You find journal pages scattered around the greater property written by somebody (their gender is never mentioned.) Apparently, their parents left to trade at Camp Searchlight and did not come back, so after several days they set out there to find it in its current, irradiated state. Eventually they find their parent who have been turned into feral ghouls from the radiation and is forced to kill and bury them, and ending up living on their own. Through the entries you can see this person slowly devolves into paranoia and fear, thinking that that the animals of the farm are trying to eat them. Eventually the paranoia get so bad, that they end up setting fire to the house with themselves inside, and either being burned alive or dying of smoke inhalation.
  • Jacobstown. Technically there is nothing bad about the town, it is full of friendly people who are just trying to get along with their lives and stay safe. Thing is, they're Super Mutants, and to someone who only played Fallout 3, they're the Exclusively Evil monsters you got used to shooting in the face. This time around, they're perfectly safe. It's just...very unsettling the first time.
  • The Nightkin are back from the older games in glorious 3-D gameplay. Basically, imagine a Super Mutant, except it's invisible. All you need to know. Also, their standard form of greeting seems to be appearing out of nowhere three feet in front of you with a big-ass rebar club swinging right for your face.
  • Nightstalkers. Half-coyote, half-rattlesnake, all temper and venom. They come running at you. And due to some strange glitch, shooting them in VATS sometimes doesn't work, the shots just miss even though they're up close.
    • One particularly Nightmare Fuel moment comes just after you've circled the mountain pass west of Nipton and are heading up to Novac. Out of freaking nowhere, a huge pack of Nightstalkers may just show up. If you're lucky, they'll pounce on the Legion patrol hiding behind a billboard. That in itself is pretty freaky, though, because those bastards will tear recruits apart like wrapping paper, then come after with all the fury of a starving animal.
    • Take a look inside Bloodborne Cave. You fall off that ledge near the entrance, and find yourself in a room full of corpses. Then, the next room over, you see something big moving around, and realize you're in the nest of the Legendary Nightstalker. And the only way out is through...
    • In Charleston Cave, some of these goddamned things are cloaked via the stealth boy they chewed.
    • Adding to their fear is what they represent in game. Encountering a normal rattlesnake is bad enough and they're well known danger in the American west. Fallout gave them legs.
  • Everyone remember the Centaurs of Fallout 3? They got worse with newer, even more mutated forms that often appear alongside the "normal" ones. Thankfully, they seem to only appear in highly irradiated areas. Then again, the ones in the Devil's Throat, near Bitter Springs, are as big as a Deathclaw and twice as horrible.
  • Did you think the original Deathclaws were tough? New Vegas has new, even stronger, mother and Alpha types... and let's not even get started on the Legendary Deathclaw.
  • Ghouls, especially of the feral variety. Complete with the same creepy, raspy cry they had in Fallout 3.
  • Cazadores. Giant wasps the size of dogs that are ridiculously fast, hard to hit, and can soak up quite a few bullets. As if that wasn't enough, they evolved from tarantula hawk wasps, which are considered to have one of the most agonizing stings in the insect kingdom. If an inch-long wasp can knock a grown man down, what do you think they can do when they're two feet long?
    • Giant wasp-monsers that are incredibly tough to kill, fly surprisingly fast, and can infect you with a lethal poison. Now imagine stumbling upon a place called 'Cazador Nest'.
    • As revealed in Old World Blues, the Cazadores aren't mutated creatures of the wastes, they were delibrately made like that by the scientists of the Big MT. Except they never knew that the cazadores could reproduce...
    • Swing by Zion Canyon for an evening. Yao Guai? No problem. Giant Cazadores? RUN. Imagine a wasp the size of a BEAR.
    • So you're checking out Silver Peak Mine, hoping maybe you'll get lucky and find a Stealth Boy so close to Jacobstown. Nope! Cazadores! But Wait! There's More!! As soon as you start climbing towards the upper "floor" of the mine, you meet the Legendary Cazador. Twice as big. Twice as fast. Twice as poisonous. Twice as many hit points. In other words, twice the Nightmare Fuel.
    • They are even worse playing on Hardcore mode. Imagine bringing companions along, and having to sit and watch your companions slowly succumb to the poison, completely helpless.
  • Speaking of giant bugs, very early on you are directed to travel to a town via a highway. A quick look at your Pip Boy reveals the town in question is directly east whilst the highway does a long loop south, so why not save some time and cut across the desert, right? Scorpion Gulch is why. Those Giant Radscorpions which were horrible to look at in the first game but not so tough? They're back, shooting them now only pisses them off, they've got little cousins which pour forth without number out of dark holes from sheer canyon walls, and their poison will send you mad, if the scuttling, hissing sound of half a dozen of them eating you alive doesn't do that first. Stick to the roads.
  • Occasionally, you come upon a dead giant radscorpion being swarmed by Giant Ants, and a line of ants carrying it off to their nest stretching past the horizon. This is exactly the kind of behavior you'd expect from any kind of ants, but at this scale it's horrifying.
  • Lakelurks aren't really that scary. Sure, they're ugly as sin, and that sonic attack is extremely overpowered, but they aren't that bad. Just ask the guys at Camp Guardian. Except you can't, because the Lakelurks maimed them all and then dragged their unconscious but still living bodies into the caves to be devoured. You can find a survivor who's so horrified he quits the NCR on the spot and runs for California as fast as his crippled legs can carry him.
  • Go to a graveyard at night and you can hear whispering.
  • You may recall Fallout 3 having corpses rigged with explosives, right? Well, we have that here too. Well, except they aren't corpses. They're dismembered, living people, begging you to stay away and kill them. You'll only realize they are rigged after trying to talk to one!
  • Even though it's actually a good thing, you get a slo-mo kill cam whenever the last enemy in an encounter goes down, even if you were never aware of them in the first place. So your trusty sidekicks run off by themselves, leaving you alone and wondering where they went... then *SPLORTCH* smash-cut to a monster's head exploding in slow motion.
  • Even the game's glitches can be terrifying. Due to the not infrequent occurrence of enemies glitching through small solid obstacles, the player cannot assume that something that appears "trapped"- in a cage, under a trailer, between rocks, etc.- is going to stay that way. In particular, a certain caged group of bark scorpions might seem like easy pickings for a low-level player, until one randomly and suddenly pops out of the cage and into the floor of the room with the player, its poison stinger gliding through the floor like a periscope.
  • Any time the twitchy corpse bug goes into effect. Especially if the corpse fell near a wall, it'll smack into it and make little thudding sounds that sound like someone running quietly. And they'll be doing that any time you enter that area for the rest of the game.
  • Mods are not exempt from this either. Take, for example, some of the monster designs from the popular Monster Mod.
    • Rad Horrors, which are basically giant heads with chicken legs.
    • FEV Mutants, which are Super Mutants so ghastly mutated that they look like they're half-ghoul.
    • Evolved Ghouls, which go beyond a simple Centaur re-skin and goes into something far, far worse.
    • Someone who was quite clever managed to somehow make a mod where, among other monsters, they managed to stick Mutants from the STALKER series.


Dead Money DLC

  • The Sierra Madre villa, casino, residents, environment, back story... and pretty much everything else.
  • The weird laughing sound the holograms make if they see you.
  • Beep... beep... beep... beep beep beep beepbeepbeepBEEPBEEPBEEP BOOM!
  • The Ghost People already look creepy as hell, with their hazmat suits, bestial gait, and the fact that they can spring out from anywhere in the fog, then you learn that they were originally the maintenance staff of the hotel who, thanks to the effects of the Cloud, are trapped forever in their hazmat suits and have mutated into... something no longer human. Then there's the fact that they try not to kill their prey and instead drag them off somewhere to do God-knows-what to them.
    • One theory is that there's still a bunch of those hazmat suits lying around, and the Ghost People force their KO'ed victims into these hazmat suits, effectively turning the victim into a new Ghost Person.
  • Christine's imprisonment prior to the Courier arriving in the Sierra Madre. Trapped in an auto-doc for weeks while the machine performed it's grisly task of operating on the poor girl while she was still awake. Mind you that there wasn't enough medication to keep her calm and ran out an hour into her claustrophobic nightmare of being trapped in a tube while metal instruments cut her up, in the dark for days or even weeks before finally being let out. And then when she gets to her part of the plan to get into the casino, the Courier can force her to crawl into a tiny room full of moving mechanical parts in the dark...
    • You can go right ahead and experience a little of this yourself, before you rescue her. When you arrive at the Madre, you have three radio frequencies that you can tune your Pip Boy to. Two are just of the other two companions talking to themselves while waiting, while Christine's is just breathing and a plaintive knocking-on-metal sound. Occasionally, there starts up a whirring drill noise and clicking, and the knocking and breathing frantically speed up.
  • "Dog? Master wants you to pull on your chain as hard as you can..."
  • Similar to one of the situations in Fallout3, you stumble upon a family trapped inside the Sierra Madre's theater. On the ground are two adult skeletons, one with a revolver, a doctor's bag and closest to the child are several Med-X syringes. Trapped, and rather than be killed by the holograms or starve to death, they took the only option out left to them.
  • Vera was also trapped in the Casino, and loads up on every chem available to her. The recordings of her last thoughts wander around the same level, repeating her final words in a spooky resonating mirror of a life lost over 200 years ago. She's terrified, she's trapped--and the machines are still recording her. She's just another ghost of the Sierra Madre, a ghost that can kill you thanks to their deadly hologram technology.
  • The "Bad Ends" for Dead Money: First Bad End: Instead of paying attention to not one, but two warnings before entering the Final vault, the Courier gets locked inside the vault and slowly dies. Your dying image becomes yet another hologram in the Sierra Madre. The Second Bad End: The Courier sides with Elijah, joining him on his crazed mission of vengeance and domination as the combined force unleashes the Cloud upon the Wasteland, covering the bright and cheerful Mojave with a deadly cloud that kills -everything- in its path.
  • While heading to the Bell Tower, the courier will pass through what appears to be a mortuary. One of the slabs has an arrangement of black candles that seems to resemble an altar of sorts. Why? By who? No explanation. Absolutely no information or hint is given, and the only thing you know about the area is that there is a high Ghost People presence there.


Honest Hearts DLC

  • "Honest Hearts" is honestly the most light-hearted of the DLC... this does not keep it from being utterly terrifying on occasion. It all starts simply enough. The courier gets a message telling them about an expedition to Zion Canyon. Enticed, they head out to meet with the people they will accompany. After a few minutes of chatting and getting to know your new companions you all set out. Then everything goes to hell. As soon as you arrive the White legs ambush you and begin killing your allies one by one as they scream in fear. Because this is a scripted event they all die leaving you to face the white legs alone. Oh, and due to a rule the leader of the expedition had, you were only able to bring 100 lbs (maximum) of equipment with you. Fortunately, Follows-Chalk soon shows up to give you a hand.
  • This DLC also finally lets the courier come face to face with Joshua Graham, the infamous burned man himself. He even becomes a companion! Plus his whole body is covered in bandages from his horrible wounds. He also helpfully tells you that every night he feels the pain of being burned alive and nothing, not even chems, can do anything about it.
  • One quest seems innocent enough, get high on some of the local stuff and kill a bear. Easy right? Well, once you start you'll be tripping out as you make your way to the beast's lair. Along the way you'll come across some spore plants and spore carriers from vault 22. Then the "Ghost Of She" appears and attacks you. Due to the effects of the drug, mystical ability possessed by the Yao Guai itself, your own mind freaking out due to fear, or some combination of the three the Ghost Of She catches fire and splits into several Giant Yao Guais. Which one is real? It doesn't matter, whatever is causing you to see multiple Ghosts of She also forces you to kill them all. Only when the last one falls can you breathe a sigh of relief.
  • Honest Hearts has a fridge version too. Daniel mentions that the White Legs killed children, pretty brutally.

Daniel: "They beat children in... in... beat them in their beds while they slept."

    • Now imagine you're a 6-year old child and you wake up in the middle of the night and there's a scary white-paint-faced, dreadlock-wearing, half-naked tribal over you who then beats you to death with a club. Didn't help that they also stripped the bodies naked and nailed them to cliffs around the city.
    • Even worse is the fact that the war club has a special move called "lights out" that, judging by its name and what it does, means that those children probably didn't suffer for very long...
  • If you chose to help Joshua Graham exterminate the White Legs sometimes when killing them Joshua lets his colors past his normally calm gravely voice.
  • Go to the Zion Valley Welcome Booth and take a look at the drawings on the rocks behind the toilet. Looks like Slenderman still lives hundreds of years into the future.


Old World Blues DLC

  • The Mojave Drive-in with Old World Blues installed. Nothing like walking to the top of a hill in the middle of the night and seeing a giant blue-tinted eye watching you in the distance.
  • The Big MT. Imagine being stalked by creatures who have had their brains removed and skeletons wielding laser weapons. Not ghouls, SKELETONS! This is where nearly all the mutant horrors of the Mojave Wasteland came from, including Nightstalkers and Cazadores. It's also responsible for how the Sierra Madre ended up a toxin-filled ghost town full of aforementioned skeletons. This is where the plant monsters of Vault 22 were first born. This is where Chinese prisoners of war and American citizens were taken and experimented on. This is where people are still being experimented by beings who don't even an idea of what morals are. This is the Big MT, and you are all alone. No companions, just you, a bunch of random appliances, and a talking stealth suit.
  • The Trauma Override Harnesses are one of the saddest and creepiest enemies in New Vegas. The suit itself was designed to return a soldier to a predetermined home base when he got too injured to move himself by overriding the motor functions of the wearer and 'walking' him. Being a prototype, the suits had a few errors which ultimately led to the suits walking and attacking with their wearers kept captive in the suit until they eventually died (of exhaustion, dehydration, starvation, exposure, any number of things). Over two hundred years later, the suits are still walking around with the remains of the test person still inside. As they move, the player can hear the bones of the dead person rattling in the suit.
  • Little Yangtze. No matter how you put it, no matter how much lovely jazz music your pip boy may be playing, it is still a Death Camp whose prisoners were fodder for experiments that would make Nazi scientists pale with terror. If the knowledge of the experiments won't make you feel sick, the rows and rows or graves in the camp will.
    • And there are ghouls there, labeled "Survivors." First they were imprisoned, then they were trapped there for centuries. Not to mention that when Elijah showed up he experimented on/tortured them all over again. And then you will probably end up killing them.
  • One End pretty much confirms all the fears you may have about the potency of the Think Tank. An Evil Courier's brain gets bored and decides to unleash all of Big MTs secrets... whatever happens to the Mojave, there isn't much left afterward.
  • The Cuckoo Nest, which, despite its innocent-sounding name, is a den of absolute horror. Piles of mutilated bodies and bits of organs are scattered around everywhere and the whole place is filled with lobotomites. It really doesn't help that its inside a cave on the edge of the Big MT's map. But the worst part of all is that you HAVE to go here to retrieve the personality of one of The Sink's inhabitants (and get one of the achievements). Who is it? Why, the Toaster, of course!
  • After exploring both Vault 22 and Zion Canyon, you thought you were done with spore carriers, right? Well, they also appear in Old World Blues... including Patient Zero.


Lonesome Road DLC

  • Lonesome Road brings a new terrifying horror to the wastes - the Tunnelers. Imagine a glowing, reptile-like humanoid that hits just as hard as a goddamn deathclaw. But they're smaller (thus harder to hit), can crawl on walls and ceilings, come in packs, can pop out of the ground under you, bred quickly, and eat up a crapload of damage. And these things are apparently slowly tunneling their way towards the Mojave.
    • About halfway through The Divide the Courier must travel underground on a funicular car to proceed. During the whole ride explosions are going off all around you and making the player worry that the car might crash. Then, as if nothing could get any worse, swarms of these bastards start climbing up the sides of the car and begin attacking you. When the ride is finally over you then have to make your way back above ground by going through a destroyed hotel filled with even more Tunnelers. It's the least fun funicular ever.
  • When walking the Lonesome Road, you come across a trailer on a highway bypass that's splattered in blood. When you go inside and walk down to the far end to see what's in that ammo box, a goddamn Deathclaw leaps on top of the trailer, takes down ED-E in one hit, and comes into the trailer after you. There is no way to kill the Deathclaw beforehand; it's a scripted event. And even if you manage to kill that Deathclaw, chances are you've alerted the other three just down the road...
  • At the end of the Divide, you come across a small cave. Inside is a rotted skeleton and a dead deathclaw. After picking up a distress signal holotape from the corpse, you discover that they were trying to kill a giant death claw that was pinning them down. Well... the corpse is over there, so they killed it, right? Wrong! Just around the corner is a special giant Deathclaw named Rawr, surrounded by corpses. And just then the cave entrance crumbles behind you, trapping you inside. Have fun.
  • At the beginning of Lonesome Road, you find the Marked Men. At first it's pretty obvious that they've been driven insane from radiation and want to kill you. But it's not that simple. They're cannibals. And not just mindless cannibals that chew on corpses; there's a Hopeville basement where there's skeletons hung up on meat hooks and hacked corpses on tables, right next to an old kitchen. The radiation has made them insane, but kept enough of their humanity so they can gut you like a pig on the butcher's hook. Oh, and did we mention that their appearance is due to the Divide's windstorms stripping the flesh from their bodies, leaving their raw muscle exposed to the elements? The only thing keeping them alive is the Divide's high residual radiation, and even that does absolutely nothing to dull the pain.
  • The Divide in general appearance. Throughout all the Fallout games you've seen destruction and death, seen the remnants of once proud cities, stared across blasted plains of wasteland, observed the vile corruption of places like the Pitt, Sierra Madre, and Point Lookout. Observed the Old World horror shows of the Big Empty, and the Vaults. Even saw brief snatches of hope in Oasis and Zion. However, it all pales in comparison to the amount of destruction that is in the Divide. In the Divide there is only destruction, there is only death, this is the picture of devastation. This place is not a place of honor, no highly esteemed dead is commemorated here, nothing valued dwells within the Divide. It is a place best shunned and left uninhabited.
    • Here's the real kicker. The reason the Divide is as bad as it is? It's all your fault.
  • It Gets Worse. Want to know something else about the Divide? You're being watched the entire time. Not through ED-E, Ulysses is quietly watching you from a distance, monitoring your progress with his own two eyes. Observant players have been able to spot him.

Oh god. ED-E. Something is here...

  • scared beeping*
  • snarling sounds*

WHAT WAS THAT?

  • The Courier's Mile is horrifying, not only because of the locals (who are mildly peeved with you for setting off a nuke over their heads]]), but because it gives a window into what it must have been like directly after the two-hour nuclear exchange that killed the world 200 years earlier; all nuclear glare and bleak desolation. Oh, and the background radiation silently screws with your Pip Boy's motion sensor. Your trusty tool shows safely empty surroundings, and you probably won't notice something is wrong with it...until a Deathclaw is chewing on your head.
  • Speaking of Ulysses, there's the man himself. Talking to him through ED-E reveals that he is very learned about the history of the Old World and knowledgeable about a lot of things in the Wasteland. He is cryptic as to his actual aims, but very cool and calm, and obviously has some well thought-out ultimate goal. When you finally meet him face to face, you find out that goal is to use the remaining ICBMs in the divide to destroy your home. If your Courier has sided with either the NCR or the Legion, he's trying to destroy either his own former enemies or one of the more brutal and nasty factions in the Wasteland. But if your Courier is independent, he'll just aim the nukes at the Mojave. It's kind of terrifying to break through the veneer of a Warrior Poet and find an Omnicidal Maniac willing to slaughter untold thousands of innocents and obliterate one of the few remaining bastions of human civilization just as a means to get back at the Courier and/or prove a philosophical point.