I just played Man of Medan with my buddy. I played Julia and was joking the whole time about how funny it would be if I survived the whole game only to die from the beer. We were disappointed at the end that our choices never came back to haunt us. And then the post-credit scene rolled.
So, for Clock Tower, there were two possible locations where the statue was sent to. Therefore, logically, if you get the wrong one first, the statue is clearly lost forever as there's nowhere else it could be :D
@@JusteazyGamesExcept in that last cutscene she says “Without knowing the whereabouts of the statue, all leads have come to a dead end” which implies she genuinely didn’t consider going to the other location and just gave up
I have to bring up the most obscure one possible - not giving a cheese sandwich to a dog at the start of the Infocom game of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. By not feeding a random stray before even leaving Earth, you're doomed to be eaten by said dog later on, when you're transported back in time and miniaturized into a passing microscopic space fleet. You know, standard stuff you could see a mile away.
I was thinking of this game, too! I always fed the dog (having read the book, it seemed important), but I still remember when I realized I had ruined my game by not taking the junk mail from the front stoop with me, thus denying me a Babel fish, and subsequently, the code needed to reach the device in the glass case. Man, Hitchhiker's Guide was wild 😂
In the 1980s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text-based game, there was a scene early on where you were in a pub. You had to buy a cheese sandwich from the barman, then go outside and feed it to a dog, before coming back in the pub to continue the game. There were no hints to suggest you should do this. Toward the end of the game, you got shrunk down and traveled back in time on a microscopic spaceship. The dog would eat the spaceship and kill you if you hadn’t distracted it with the cheese sandwich at the beginning of the game. I can’t imagine how anyone got through that game without a walkthrough.
I kind of liked that about old-school PC gaming though. Developers didn't give a flying f**! if you had to lose 10 hours of gameplay to reload an old save. Lol. People complain about Souls game difficulty. It makes me laugh because so many games back in the day had "gotcha" moments like that. Lol. "Oh you died a lot? Get back to me when you lose 20 hours of gameplay because you missed the one item you needed to get through the last section of the game." Lol. Excellent reference man. Brought back some good memories lol
@@b1oh1 Except that such scenes have nothing to do with "difficulty" or "skill". They're simply about either knowing a convoluted plot twist ahead of time that you have no way of knowing without consulting a walk-through, or losing days of gameplay because of the writers being trolls. Remembere those old Monkey Island point and click games? While they were good games (mostly(, the gameplay simply trained the player to pick up every item and constantly try to use everything with everything else.
@@Mostlyharmless1985 But only if you don't buy the cheese sandwich as Arthur, because apparently the pub only has one sandwich. If Arthur has the sandwich, you're stuck, because you don't have access to Arthur's inventory as Ford.
I laughed my arse off when Julia died of the bends. I was playing with my brother and we were competing with eachother to keep as many of our own PCs alive as possible. He drank the beer accidentally and was kicking himself for it in the moment. We then both completely forgot about it. The credits rolled, it was a draw, one character alive each. Then Julia just fucking died 🤣
Man, imagine losing a competition because of something like that. I'd lose my mind especially if I remember like halfway through that I'm screwed if I don't keep at least one or two people alive aside from my now royally screwed Julia
You know the part that sucks? If you're playing the Curator's Cut, where you play the "Player 2" side and the AI plays the parts you would have in standard game play, THE FRICKING AI KILLS HER THAT WAY!
@@robertbeisert3315 who was warning you because that's not what would happen. If you have decompression sickness you kind of know it from the shortness of breath and pains in all of your joints and the risk of alcohol. one side effect of decompression sickness is dehydration and you'd have to drink a lot whilst feeling really unwell. A lot of people are sharing this misconception in this comment section. A trained, responsible diver knows that you don't dive and drink to excess not because you'll get magic surface based decompression sickness but because you'll dehydrate yourself. A trained diver would also know that regardless of what's happening above, you don't give yourself the bends especially since both characters clearly have flares, buoys and a GPS system strapped to them on their chartered boat trip.
There are like 50 ways you can make Kings Quest V completely unwinnable, from “not stopping a cat from catching a mouse” to “not grabbing an item in time on a screen you only see once” to “entering an area of the map too early”
Was just about to comment about that - probably my new favourite joke in an Oxbox list video and it was said as such a quick throwaway line, like a comedy surprise attack xD
At least Fahrenheit / Indigo Prophecy was nice enough to give you an _immediate_ Game Over for taking the wrong actions. Old-school Sierra games were _infamous_ for the sole solution to a given puzzle being something you might have lost (or merely failed to acquire) HOURS earlier, with NO recourse but to start a new save file. For example, in Quest for Glory 1 locals might talk about a mythical "White Stag" in the local forest, and if you attempt to harm it, a local Dryad will take such offense that she turns you into one yourself (Game Over). But as the Dryad never leaves her home screen (and you must meet her at _some_ point as part of a later puzzle) it could be many hours between attacking that deer and discovering that it doomed your save file. Fortunately, the games aren't _actually_ that long once you've figured out how to solve each puzzle, but still. You could fill AN ENTIRE LIST with just classic Sierra games!
Yeah I never found out that was a way to doom yourself because I never saw the White Stag and immediately thought "I'm-a kill it!" I _did_ doom myself in QfG2 once though by choosing to learn magic from Aziza, but that at least happened immediately. (Technically didn't doom _me,_ but literally disappearing from the world for 20 years during a countdown to doomsday is... not ideal.) Edit: Also if you get to that point in QfG2 without ever playing the first game, or without ever visiting Erasmus' house in the first game, it is impossible to get his nomination to join WIT, thus forever ending your career path as a Wizard.
@@jodinsan Pretty sure Erasmus will sponsor you regardless, otherwise you CANNOT complete the game as a magic user. Or something, it's been a very long time since I last played the games.
@@StratelierYes, even if you haven't played the first game, it will still assume the events of that game happened. Not sure what happens if you HAVE played the first game without visiting Erasmus, although why you would play a wizard without visiting Erasmus is beyond me
God, I remember Police Quest had a fellow police officer do something slightly shady and if you don't immediately report them to Internal Affairs (with the game telling you IA is srs bsns) then at the end of hte game, the literal end, your partner betrays you and murders you.
Clock Tower 2 The struggle within had an even worse example of this, where in chapter 1 if you didn't interact with a samurai armor at a certain point said armor will fall from the ceiling to crush you in the last chapter giving you a game over and forcing you to restart the whole game again.
Funniest shit in the whole game. Not the fucking you over and not telling you till the end, but the actual scene of this armor body-checking the shit out of the mc
@@GamingG4276 Other countries outside of Japan didn't get the Japanese Clock Tower 1, so for the rest of the world Clock Tower 1 is Japan's Clock Tower 2 and Ghost Head is the rest of the world's Clock Tower 2
Same. I really liked Ciri and I wanted to be the kind of dad that was fun, so I picked all the options that I thought she would like the most. Definitely happy I got the best ending for her.
I think I did one wrong or something. Idk. Maybe I took Emyr's money? I'm pretty sure I was like, "I can just give this to her, right? Or she'll understand I'm a Witcher taking a contract." something like that. Because I think the options were "take the money" or "don't." and there wasn't something like, "You can shove it. I'm going to look for MY daughter anyway, asshat." But nooo, they're not smart enough to let me give Ciri like 4,000 gold I swindled from her bio-dad to help her out if she owes anyone anything or just wants to start her own life or something. That might not even be what I did, because I feel like I remember rejecting it, doing the snowball fight or whatever, trashing the lab, and being like, "I'll be right outside the door if you need me." at the Lodge meeting. Trusting she can handle it herself but being able to bust down the door and come to her aid if she asks for it. So idk if I failed at the 5th choice I don't remember or the money thing. But honestly, I think Empress Ciri is the best ending, anyway. I know most people say Witcher Ciri is, because duh. BUT she would be a way better ruler than Emyr, AND she canonically has a BODY DOUBLE who often takes her place in less important meetings and stuff. So guess what she can do all the time? Witcher stuff with real dad Geralt. But also make the Niflgaards not suck.
Until Dawn has a few of these... Probably the worst is when you fire off a flare gun into a snow storm because much earlier you chose agree with your very pushy girlfriend who just told you she's always right. Doesn't help anyone escape and just means you have no weapon when you get attacked later. Thanks a lot Em.
to be fair, that doesn't actually doom you unless you decide to try and help her when the tower falls. if you decide 'screw her' and jump across straight away, you'll actually be safe and prevent that character from succumbing to an unavoidable death. a better example is if you decide to shoot Ashley. even though the gun is loaded with blanks, Ashley doesn't get over it, and Chris will be killed regardless of whether he makes it back to the house or not.
@Dandamayn the thing with shooting Ashley is that you know its a bad idea at the time. Its like you're stuck between a rock and a hard place and all the options are bad. it's not obvious that giving Emily the flare gun or having matt fire it could kill matt though, Poor matt.
@@bigdognuniff That's very true. Ashley is yelling at you to shoot her. If you've invested in the Chris/Ashley relationship you really don't want to. You know you're making a big decision there. Saying "going to the watchtower is a bad idea" and immediately getting shut down and going anyways makes it seem like you made no decision at all.
I’ve come to realise that the reason many of these early 90s games had these annoying little gotchas was because of the rental market. A lot of people watching this won’t know that video rental stores like blockbuster and videoezy didn’t just rent movies, they also rented video games for both console and PC. Because most of these games could easily be finished over a weekend the developers would either make the puzzles frustratingly obtuse or include innocuous choices or easy to miss items at the start so that it was usually impossible to complete the game on your first play through thus necessitating rehires.
@@jamesherb4384 Developers for TLK actually confirmed that the publisher insisted on them making the difficulty level "almost impossible" _specifically_ because of videogame rentals.
Believe it or not, but it's not the reason you say. The earliest examples of logic that didn't make sense in adventure games come from the PC market where there's no such incentive. These are often referred to as "moon logic" puzzles and are a staple of early gaming. A lot of it has to do with the youth of the industry and designers who were implementing what made sense to them rather than thinking about what made sense to the player. Sometimes this was intentional (the Hitchhiker's Guide text adventure was supposed to be absurd, but also there's a mentality among game designers sometimes that the player losing means that they won) and sometimes it was completely inadvertent, not realizing that players wouldn't immediately recognize a puzzle solution.
I mean I get your logic but it doesn't make sense with the rental market. For the arcade model, that is exactly how it works. But the rental market didn't give portions of sales to developers or studios. They bought copies outright and kept the rental fees for themselves. Side note: I'm not saying it didn't exist, but I don't remember ever seeing PC games for rent at any video store. Plenty of nes, snes, megadrive, PS1, etc. Just no PC games. That could have just been my area though.
In Demon's Souls there's the time when you rescue a seemingly friendly NPC from a cage, and a while later characters start dying in the hub area. How were you supposed to know he was a murderer? Yes, he has an extremely creepy laugh, but that's like 50% of people in Souls games.
reminds me of ac odyssey where you save one family,because its about to get killed,"inquisition" claiming they have a plague on them,so you kill the inquisitors,making the family leave,only to find out the next place they setlled is in ruins because the family did brought the plague over.
Bloodborne has a similar thing, although thankfully it's much more obvious what's going to happen given that you literally first meet him while he's eating a person, and at least he kills the useless NPCs first.
in Silent Hill 3 the protagonist Heather will come across a woman in the confessional of a church who asks for redemption for her sins which Heather can grant or deny, granting her forgiveness will earn Heather a bunch of negative karma points and the game's bad ending as granting forgiveness is God's domain because Heather carries the cult's god inside her body and by granting forgiveness Heather has assumed the responsibilities of the god the cult of Silent Hill worships.
@@sebastiaoantuneslambelho8403 Yup, because you’ve got a sort of antichrist baby growing inside you in that game, and in any way assuming the role of Christ will basically wake it up
@@sebastiaoantuneslambelho8403 It depends on your doctrine exactly what you think about forgiveness in a liturgical sense. Oftentimes forgiven =/= absolved, as absolving someone of sin is God’s domain while forgiving them is anyone’s. However, in the game I’m not sure the distinction is made, and thus her forgiving sin is also absolving someone of it, meaning she takes on the role of Christ, and wakes up the antichrist
@@sebastiaoantuneslambelho8403 Ye, it demands you to think about your choices in a way that really only makes sense when you have knowledge of the endings, which is very unfair
@@lucillefrancois150 You forgot that you also need to have a certain amount of "murder points" which you can only get enough of by killing almost every enemy in the game with the Sexy Beam in the Princess Heart costume, so it's barely feasible that you'd get the bad ending even accidentally. And it just shows a 5-second scene of Heather having stabbed Douglas so it's not worth it anyway.
I actually kind of agreed with the snowball fight decision in the Witcher III, though I totally agree it is not the most obvious "this choice may doom Ciri." However, the one I disagreed with was the one where you have to trash the room of Ciri's elf mentor (lol I can't remember his name). The other option, the "bad" one, has Geralt being like "Ok calm down let's just think about this rationally" and Ciri understandably gets even angrier--she's mad and upset and just wants to break things. I get it. But I feel like letting her destroy the room is kind of... childish? In not a good way, unlike the snowball fight which is childish in a good way. It just feels like if you're trying to be wise, not only is that the "wrong" option, but Ciri wouldn't appreciate it. And maybe she wouldn't! Clearly we're all different people here, but I just felt slammed that any choice centered around cool, collected wisdom isn't valued. Trashing the room being the "good" option made me feel like the logic here is "give the candy to the spoiled child throwing a tantrum so they'll stop throwing a tantrum. That's good parenting."
Multiple things to remember is Ciri is childish sometimes. She was forced to grow very quickly after the sacking of Cintra and lost a lot of her childhood due to that. Also for the other choice in that scenario Geralt puts Lara Dorren's necklace around Ciri pretty much saying to Ciri that that is who she is, Lara Dorren's heir and to accept it. She's always hated feeling like that is all she is so Geralt putting that necklace around her is a slap in the face.
I just took all views from Ciris perspective and what she would want. They clue a lot that she's tired of people making decisions for her. But I completely agree with the reasoning behind that decision too.
I recently finished playing through the Witcher III, going out of my way to avoid any guys, and managed to get the "bad" ending. It's annoying how easy it actually is to get the bad ending - 2/3 negative decisions I made to get the bad ending were accompanying her to see the Witches to help ease her nerves, and not letting her throw a massive tantrum in someone else's house. How's that bad parenting?! The only other mistake I made was taking her to drink at Kaer Morhen, and that's because I thought the moral lesson of telling her she didn't need to be good at everything was better than dismissing the question with whimsy - if I'd known what the two options actually were, I probably would've taken the latter! I'm glad Toussant gives Geralt another chance at a happy ending, because I would've been left so ticked off by the main game otherwise - almost 90 hours of gameplay down the drain because of what seemed like minor decisions I'd made literally days earlier.
The decompression and alcohol ending had me check into that. While a lot of places say it can intensify symptoms I noted several said there have been no "studies" to link the connection. Umm YEAH, It's probably pretty hard to do a "study" where you ask people to intentionally go through bends and get drunk to see if it hurts more or they drop dead. Can't imagine why they couldn't get any studies done on that. :)
There's enough idiots out there that I'm surprised there isn't a study of incidents at least. What percent of deaths or collapses did the person have alcohol, vs. the percent that have alcohol i any situation seems pretty simple.
@@SimonBuchanNzone of the problems is people act drunk as a symptom and they aren't always doing blood alcohol tests on people dying. After 12 hours of consumption the traces are gone in blood and 48 hours if a sample is stored properly. Having enough statistically relevant data for solid conclusions is hard to come by.
Long Live the Queen is a game that lives and breathes this. You play a cute little princess trying to survive until her coronation, but literally EVERYTHING can kill you or bite you in the ass. I once managed to brutally win a civil war only for my character to eat poisoned chocolate because I didn't level up decorating enough?
Oh I am so happy someone else thought of Long Live the Queen! I died so many times from choices early on that when I stumbled through it truly felt like a survival game @__@ Every choice you make actually counts toward something and unless you are using a guide you have no idea what it will lead to. I Love it!
I hate and love this game. I sometimes know what I need, but still can't get enough levels in like dancing and court manners when I know the scene before I need insight or animal handling. 🤦🏽
@@michaelandreipalon359 hey 👋 So not necessarily an ex, more like a marriage candidate. There are a few warnings and some time to prep to make sure you don't die though. On the contrary there is even a marriage candidate you as a player can kidnap too. The game has some seriously solid branching paths so most playthroughs will be different. You can play as a sweet girl, a tyrant, a war strategist, a magical girl, or just plain evil for the most part. I will let you know it is a Visual novel primarily so if that genre is not your Forte then I'd check out a let's play. (There is a death checklist btw as well as 4 different endings if you live and multilevel epilog texts to see how your Queen ran the country when she came of age)
Thanks, La Crowned... guess I'll try running as a mahou shoujo/witch then. And don't worry, visual novels are also a favored genre on my account. Besides, I do need a break from FPS and RTS games.
I feel like that one was telegraphed pretty well, in terms of the risk it represented.... the augmentation clinics are controlled by the bad guys, you know they're up to something on a massive scale, your augmetics have just started experiencing random minor glitches, and the clinics are ever-so-helpfully suddenly offering everyone a free upgrade to fix the problem. That being said, yeah. That decision takes a while to come back and bite you.
@@stevencowan37 That rule exists always, not just in dystopias. Add to corporations, governments. If governments are giving you something for free...it is likely just to control you.
Every time I started a new playthrough, I thought to myself that I'd play as a jerk but then I'd fall back to being goody-goody cuz I couldn't live with the idea that Ciri would die, just couldn't do that.
in Persona 1 the good and bad ending are completely dependent on one innocuous dialogue choice with a little girl you find in a rose maze like 3/4ths into a game, there is still multiple hours of gameplay before you reach the end and you have no indication your on route to the bad end, this also has no New Game + so the only thing you can do is reload the game from a previous save or start again from the very beginning!!
This happened to me. The bad ending was so many hours of gameplay after that conversation that I didn't have any saves left from before that point. No way I was replaying the game from the beginning so I just quit.
What? That first one was great! A whole game dedicated to teaching you the dangers of scuba diving AND jumping over rusty pits? What do you have against education?
Dragon Age Inquisition. There's a conversation with Leliana in Haven where you (a prisoner, who's only still alive because of your usefulness when everyone thinks you're a terrorist/mass murderer and you have amnesia so you can't even prove them wrong) have to butt in and argue against her decision to (fairly mercifully) kill a traitor who's been proven to have killed several of her agents. If you butt in by agreeing, or simply stay silent and hesitate to interfere, then towards the end of Leliana's arc if you try to insist she not murder somebody she acts like you've spent the whole time drowning puppies and sacrificing kittens for blood magic...because of one conversation choice back when you didn't rightfully have a say. It was...frustrating, to say the least.
@@RazorO2Productions I was roleplaying my (first playthrough, bad plan that) character as starting out unsure of herself and growing bolder as time went on, so when Leliana responded that way dozens of hours later, I was both shocked and baffled. I just wish the middle choice (don't interfere) could still have resulted in Inspired Leliana if you got all the others right, because I spent the rest of that playthrough terrified I'd wind up with Murderpope.
what leliana does there is dependent on several dialog choices with her throughout the game. it will even effect what kind of divine she becomes if that's the ending she gets.
I'd say the Iron Bull in the DLC is another good example. Because you prioritized an alliance with the Qunari over his mercenary squad in the main game he joins the Qunari in trying to murder you.
Kolgrim, from the first game, is one of my favorite video game characters of all time (even though you only interact with him about three times maximum), so I wonder what the Leliana vacancy is like in Inquisition. Pleasing Kolgrim in Origins forces the death of Leliana, unless she is hardened.
There are plenty of these kinds of moments unintentionally sprinkled throughout Clock Tower Ghost Head, the worst of which being if you didn’t interact with the samurai armour in the opening level after a specific key item was picked up, if you never interacted with the armour the game ends abruptly at the beginning of the final level where you are only allowed access to one specific room where the suit of armour will fall through the ceiling and kill you for a bad ending, seriously what in the holy hell were Human Entertainment smoking? (Shout out to Nitro Rad and his video on Ghost Head)
Yup, same with the little kid and not locking her in. Or in the spiritual successor nightcry, I think it was a ring you had to get in chapter 1 with a character or you cannot move on beyond like chapter 3, or some gobbledygook like that. Complete idiocy.
There's another example in a later Clock Tower game. If you don't aggro the enemy wearing knight armor early on, it will give you an unavoidable game over later.
I've also heard that Ciri might survive the worst ending, but just doesn't want to be around you anymore and goes back to wandering the multiverse, alone.
I was definitely one of those people who accidentally killed Lucas with painkillers & alcohol at the start of the game in Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy. It definitely taught me to not necessarily pick everything up in similar games.
I remember Space Quest having an alien with giant lips that wandered around semi randomly. If you ever ended up getting seen by it, it would kiss you and move on, allowing you to keep playing normally. About an hour later, a baby alien would pop out of your chest and you'd die. Hope you hadn't overwritten your save since the kiss.
Persona 4, the game has a climax point where your team believes to have caught the serial killer you've been hunting for the entire game, and find him attempting to escape from his hospital room, what follows is a series of character choices where you need to make exactly the right combination of choices to move on to the standard ending, otherwise you get one of two bad ends here, either everyone goes back to their daily lives unaware that the world is about to end after fusing with the Shadow World, or the same but your cousin dies in front of you breaking your uncle mentally as well
This is nasty because the first climax point involves being in an argument with an over-emotional Yosuke, and it was not immediately apparent how to de-escalate the situation the first time I played it. In a twisted sort of way, I liked this bad ending, because Nanako's death was painful AF. There's a 2nd climax point for the true ending can be missed depending on your actions for the final day, and P4 Golden has a "Golden Ending" which can be missed out on if you didn't max out Marie's social link to get access to a bonus dungeon. I believe Persona 5 Royale does something similar, but I haven't played it.
@@TheBlackSeraph Persona 5 makes is rather obvious where paths diverge based on your choices fortunately (as does 3 funny enough), and in Royal the new content is basically tied entirely to a single social link, with basically nothing there to derail it once you unlock it, I would argue that's one of 4 and Golden's greatest weaknesses, it genuinely does not want you to complete the game properly, as the path at climax points is either not clear or actively requires you to do something you would normally never consider
I did this, because I genuienly believed Namatame was behind everything and was seething as much as Yosuke was, P4 broke me man. I also didn't make backup save so I had to play the game over again... Learned my lessons that day, and a 16 year old me broke down in tears.
@@TheBlackSeraph P4's best ending is especially nasty because the game encourages you to skip it. You have to visit all your friends and then say no twice when the game prompts you to leave. Not exactly intuitive.
SMT:DDS 2 carries over your choices from the first game. One of your party members will die permanently if you try to fight back against his pretend betrayal that he didnt go over with you before attenpting. At that point in the first game the decision doesnt seem to change anything, but all the way down the line in the second game he gets pissed because you dont trust him despite him having been your right hand man. It really sucks when that happens because I had good skills on him because he was one of my favorite party members
Eyy fellow DDS fan, but i wouldn't say it really dooms YOU, the protagonist or your game, and Roland is still there if you made all the wrong Heat choices so not getting him for the final dungeon isn't consequential (also skills don't always transfer well to heat so at least when i played heat was WAY weaker than everyone else meaning i barely used him :/)
@@mirraisnow6050 yeah, the devs thought no one would get him so much they didn't even dub his lines, he uses his japanese battle lines and nothing in the story changes
I always saw it as more of an abusrdly tough easter egg to get him back in your party, than for it to be a punishment that is almost impossible to avoid.
When you equipped the wrong pistol: Mass Effect 3! It's literally possible to softlock yourself on Mars if you equip certain pistols, as they reload too slowly to get off enough shots during a scripted scene at the very end. The Paladin, Acolyte, Scorpion and Executioner pistols all do this, and the game never recognices that the pistols don't work for this scene, meaning that you will fail, get stabbed, and then have to repeat this loop forever! And the checkpoint is during the scene itself, so you have to reload an earlier save or restart the mission entirely, equip a pistol that works, and then redo the rest of the mission again...
There’s also the dialogue tree shortly before that point, where failing to pick a dialogue prompt means you’ll be unable to make some key conversational choices at the very end of the game.
@games and glory there are a lot of key conversations but this one stands out to me: it's particularly close to the beginning of the game, it's connected to three other conversations, and unlike most of the other choices it's not really obvious how important your response is
Lucas' delivery on that narration after he dies always kills me. It's just so weirdly casual "Aaaand, that's the end of my story." Like he just got finished talking about a crazy day he just had and didn't know how to end it.
Love seeing the Dark Pictures games getting some love! Julia’s death of the Bends is such a cheeky death, two small things at the beginning of the game completely screwing you over after the credits 😂 Absolute troll death
@@_Twink Yeah, GameStop isn’t exactly the most reliable when it comes to that. But when you do get The Devil in Me, you’ll be in for a treat! Best game in the series as of yet IMO
@@pagingdrwhom2300 literally the last "new" ps4 version. I could order it again they say, but now apparently all pre orders and store transfers cost $10, which is like, why would I ever? I like having the physical version, but digital can already be a lot cheaper. Even before a $10 gamestop tax on most games now. Gamestop declines Rant aside, I am excited. So far, I've only played "until dawn", "the quary" and "house of ashes" but I've like completely fallen in love with the company. Like some of my favorite horror movies mixed with like black mirror 🪞 I think they, along with much less interesting Quantum dream, are pioneers.
Add Final Fantasy X-2 to this list. Just, all of it. You want the true ending where you actually get a happily ever after? Well, you better not make the wrong dialogue option, or fail to ace every possible minigame, or step through a specific unmarked loading zone before checking everything behind all the other unmarked loading zones, because that one loading zone doesn't let you go back and talk to the person, or open the treasure chest, or whatever the highly specific, seemingly random, and supremely easily missable thing is that you need for that fraction of a fraction of a percentage that will keep you from the true ending unless you feel like playing through the entire game again in new game plus, or keeping multiple saves to play through entire sections again when your completion percentage isn't exactly what the walkthrough says it should be. And make sure you don't skip a cutscene while you're redoing those sections, because that counts toward your percentage too! TLDR, there's a person in a moogle costume at the very start of FFX2, and if you don't think to stop in the middle of a thrilling chase sequence in order to talk to them, you won't get the true ending without playing through the game again on New Game+, at least once. And there are missable things like that (and many that are far more obscure) throughout the ENTIRE GAME.
@@robertbeisert3315 I forced myself through it with the controller in one hand, and the walkthrough in the other (sometimes literally), and though it was, a lot, I can't tell you just how happy I was when I got to see that ending by my own hands. I also have no intention of ever playing that game again so long as I live, but still. The achievement (actual, not virtual) meant a lot to me (which is more than I can say about any of the virtual achievements/trophies I've gotten.).
Well thank fuck for you mate, I never would have known about this before I started playing X-2 next week lmao. Now to find a good guide with no horrible mistranslations
@@reaperofthings Good, it's definitely better with a guide, even if you're not aiming for 100%, because there is just so much that you can miss. And despite what I said about not wanting to play it again, it really is a good experience. Have fun with it, and absolutely make sure that you keep multiple saves, it's not always (read: rarely) clear when you've missed something, and you definitely don't want to have to play the first half of the game again because the guide says you should have 50%, and for some stupid reason, you only have 49.9%. I'm saying this from experience, seriously, keep lots of saves and always check the completion percentage when the guide mentions it, it'll save you a lot of time and frustration. But overall, have fun. :)
The first time something like that happened to me was in the PS1 X-Files game. Towards the end of the game, your character gets in a fight with another guy. If you kill the guy, you'll always die at the end. I remember spending hours back in the days pointlessly reloading my save (from right after the fight), trying to get the good ending.
This list brought back memories for me. Being greedy in Resident Evil 2's A campaign or getting trigger happy in Resident Evil code veronica, or not giving Moira the opportunity to overcome her phobia of firearms in Resident Evil Revelations 2. Rewinding time to rescue myself from death at the start of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and receiving my just desserts a game and a half later. In Crono Trigger, I thought I was being polite, but everything was taken the wrong way. In Pathologic, being a decent person even once.
As long as we’re talking old games, too, let’s not forget the bonding plant in Return to Zork. Plucking or cutting it in the first screen makes the game impossible to complete.
For the second one, I should point out that the early Sierra adventure games are notoriously brutal and unforgiving at times. From being able to use up an item that is crucial to succeed in the game to extremely tight timed events (most of the games have several!), the various Quest games are a test of a gamer's mettle.
A similar thing (albeit not fatal) choice occurs in Dark Pictures 3 House of ashes. Where if you call in air support at the very start of the game, or keep one side character alive long enough to fix a radio. Then no matter what happens to Salim, he will always be captured and never see his son again.
@@marhawkman303*Spoilers for House of Ashes* In the game, having air support seems like a logical thing, and having the radio work would make sense. But the monsters in the game only appear above ground for the duration of the 2003 eclipse, and won't make it in time to assist you in any way, if support arrives later than the Iraqi solder, Salim, is able to leave the group of US soldiers that he'd allied himself with before they're collected by the helicopters. So the air support technically doesn't help or hinder keeping characters alive, Salim's ending can be changed drastically from a choice made before you even meet him.
I got stuck playing the infocom hitchhiker's guide game back in the day because i failed to get the babel fish, because I hadn't picked up the junk mail from Arthur Dent's doormat literally at the start of the game.
I feel like you could've filled this entire list with examples from the King's Quest franchise. Hell, there's a decent chance that just _one_ King's Quest game has enough examples to fill a whole list.
tbf she never dies, she just decides she no longer wants to be with Geralt and leaves, on one ending she never returns, on another ending she goes to Nilfgaard, and the best ending, which is the one I assume you got, she stays with Geralt
Games like Bioforge are why I now hoard healing potions terrified that I'll get to some point in the game where "oh you don't have 100 healing potions? You literally need 100 healing potions to continue and there's no way to get any more"
The funny thing about Witcher 3 is that I got what I thought was a good ending, and I still think it is, but consensus doesn't seem to think so. I ended up with Ciri going off to be Empress. I thought that seemed pretty good with her in position to do the most good for the most people, but most players seem to feel that the ending where she becomes a Witcher is best. Oh well, I'm not sure exactly what decisions do what, but I've played it through 3 times and I always end up with that ending.
Either don't take her to see Emhyr when prompted, or ensure that Nilfgard loses the war. Personally, I prefer the first option, since Emhyr is a dick, but both Radovid and Djikstra are worse and end up dead.
I usually let her become Empress for the good of people - she herself was thinking about that too. Both options are the good ending but I really love the interactions you have with everyone in White Orchard vs just meeting her in the tavern alone and giving her the sword.
@@SgtSupaman Isn't it just the choice to take her to see Emhyr or not that decides it? Not any more difficult than the Witcher ending. I see both as good; in one she lives the life she wants with her family, in the other she has the opportunity to change the world for the better.
It was a long time ago, but in my playthrough I'm pretty sure I took her to see Emhyr and Nilfgard ended up winning the war, yet we still ended up witchering together. I don't think I screwed up the rest of the choices (had the snowball fight, let her handle the meeting with the witches alone, trashed the lab, etc).
The fact that I managed to do all the correct bonding choices with Ciri without a walkthrough shocked me I only learned she could die at the end of the game after I'd made all the choices already - and then the game is so cruel as to pretend she did die up until the very end of the closing sequence.
There's an even better way to screw yourself over in King's Quest V: when Cedric is wounded by the harpies, decide you're fed up with him and leave him. You then get screwed at the finish line. Also, good on you to include it, as it brings a smile to my face to see the classics get some love, but maybe it would've rounded it out if you got uppity about how the narrator rubs in your death(s) with atrocious puns?
Also in Man of Medan telling the military the name of the ship and failing to leave. If you don't name the ship you are arrested but name it and it becomes shoot on sight
Mass Effect 2 : giving away Legion to Cerberus. You only feel the effects of that blunder in the next instalment, but it get you not only to get shot in the face, but also locks you away from resolving the Geth/Quarian war in a diplomatic fashion ! Bonus points for all the Paragon sheps out there who spared Dr Rana Thanoptis in Saren's lab. Granted the effect is minor... For yourself.
@@Dustemikkel_Rev The thing with sparing Rana or killing her in ME1 is nothing changes. Just that terror bombing she did in ME3 still happens just by an unnamed Asari who was indoctrinated. Giving Legion to Cerberus and not responding to Grissom Academy are two really bad choices to make which cause the death of both characters with Jack being by your own hands near the end of the game.
This isn’t even the only Clock Tower game you can make unwinnable. Clock Tower Ghost Head will kill you at the start of the final area in the game, if you didn’t make a samurai armor ghost chase you in the FIRST area.
The quarry : breaking into the cabin or not. If you chose not to break into the cabin at the start of the game, Dylan won’t need his hand cut off and will survive.
Hohoho, this zombie title will definitely have more ammo as I continue! 😅 Recently made that mistake in the B scenario of RE 2 remake. Felt like a foolish youngun all over again.
I remember a friend playing a game, one of the Cyberia series maybe, with a scene in which an NPC tries to kiss your character. There are absolutely no button prompts, but you can either let her kiss you (the default if you do nothing) or stop her from kissing you. If she kisses you then another NPC kills you later in the game with no way to prevent it.
It's kind of an odd thing to say but I really want it to get noticed: the intro music is quite soothing yet inviting. Thanks, guys, for keeping it. It really sets the tone of the video.
Mostly Walking is a rather excellent weekly livestream that plays adventure games, and they refer to this phenomenon (getting yourself stuck/screwed over because you made some seemingly harmless decision early on) as "getting Zorked."
Specifically I believe after the Return to Zork puzzle where if you accidentally kill a plant on, I think, one of the very first screens, you just can't complete the game.
When I got the worst ending, I made it like an hour into the end dlc stuff before I said fuck it and went back on the past 6 hours of game play to get the mediocre ending because to get the good ending I'd have to lose much more progress
Right?! Like! I’m still so torn about it. I felt pretty balanced but also was like Ciri, just watch and learn. Don’t jump headfirst into adventure because you feel guilty or bored. NOPE APPARENTLY
Sierra Games could give you an almost endless supply of videos like this. Like that time in Laura Bow and the Dagger of Amon Ra when you didn't look through a random pile of garbage in a taxi cab. An opportunity that occurred exactly ONE time.
In the first installment of the Zenonia mobile series, you get locked into the absolute bastard route if you decide to break an innocuous monument that seems to be negatively affecting your fairy companions. How was I supposed to know that rock held the world together?!
When I saw King's quest V, I thought you were going to use the save the mouse from the cat puzzle. Honestly, you could have filled this whole list with stuff from Sierra games.
The one that sticks in my head from childhood is Space Quest 2 (and I'm remembering from 30 years ago here) where if you don't dodge an alien kissing you, you get an alien style chest burst much, much later.
@@Yesterzine It's not _that_ much later. As I recall it's on a five minute timer, with it being forced early if you get too far through the game. On the other hand, it's enough later that you've probably saved and reloaded several times by the point it happens, possibly forcing you to start over because Roger is mpreg in all your saves. At least the game is clear on why you died; 'I never picked up/already used up $ITEM from the game's beginning' is usually far worse.
IIRC KQ5's cat-and-mouse puzzle occurs almost literally on your _first visit to that screen?_ You have like 3 seconds to scare off the cat or you will _(very_ much later on) find yourself softlocked with no way forward, because the intended way forward is for that same mouse to come help you.
Add "Hunted: The Demon's Forge" to that list. There's a drink called Sleg that makes you super powerful (I'm going off of memory here!) but if you drink it, your character is doomed.
I instantly knew kings quest or one of the Sierra adventure games would be on here. Pretty much all of them have dead ends that you don't realize are dead ends until much later. The most annoying one i remember is where you have to throw a boot at a cat in one of the kings quests to save a rat that will later come save you from imprisonment. Or in space quest where you have to know to pick up a piece of glass from your broken windshield (are spaceship windshields made of safety glass?) When it doesn't even have a sprite
Reminds me of how in AC Odyssey I had Kassandra express worry and try to manage expectations about redeeming Alexios in private with our mother (just to be clear: HE WAS NOT THERE) but still doing my best to win him over when I actually saw him. This resulted in him killing our mother and then attacking me, forcing my hand against him.
Clock Tower Ghost Head, aka the struggle within has several but the one I want to talk about is the samurai armor, it's in the first level and it kills you in the third chapter of the game, aka the last one, the only way to not die that was is to look at it after getting a key item in which it'll be possessed and starts to chase you.
Oh, Indigo Prophecy, good times. I'll forever remember sitting down to "finish the meal and not look suspicious" after the impromptu murder, only to have the detectives comment "he sat down and finished his meal after the murder, what a complete psycho" afterwards.
The pendant item in Koudelka is a pain if you don’t remember to retrieve it from a fountain after it’s lost in the opening cutscene. Technically, you can get it by farming random drops from a specific enemy type right before the final boss if you missed picking it up before, but it’s an instant kill if you face the boss without it, and it’s apparently a pretty rare drop even then.
6:15 I just love it when game designers give you an item that seems completely useless and then present you with multiple scenarios in which it would be useful. Taking it the next step and ruining your game if you use it too early is brilliant
Corpse Party and similar pixel-style horror survivals have plenty of these too - not reading the newspaper in chapter 1 despite someone having painstakingly carved 'do not read the newspaper' into the floor with the last of their strength, not picking up all of Naho's notes before entering a specific room (I did this by mistake despite knowing I needed two more notes), not finding specific and easily missed items in Mayu's chapter in Book of Shadows where you have to check the same body like five times before meeting Nana- The series also encourages you to check everything, only, and while this isn't a guaranteed death or bad end, checking the anatomical model before reading Naho's note in the lab will make it attack you, and Yoshikazu appear and attack you, and the door to lock-
You missed the worst part about the pie in kings quest 5. You can use the pie to solve another puzzle earlier in the game. You need to lure a mouse, you are supposed to use cheese but you can use the pie. You even get points for doing it, indicating you did the right thing. I don't think you get points for eating the pie, so at least you may have some idea you did the wrong thing.
OMG that King's Quest one! What a deep dive and a reminder of how angry I was over that one! Not to mention that just carrying around a custard pie in your inventory, with no refrigeration, the darn thing should have gone rancid within days! And feeding the eagle is FAR more intuitive than "Attacked by a yeti? I'll fight it off with SLAPSTICK COMEDY!!"
Kings quest, you don't throw a boot at a mouse to save it, you open a genie bottle and a million other things. I grew up with them and I still love the later games.
I have a sever anxiety disorder and your guys videos help break me out of my downward spirals, occasionally. Thanks for keeping things simple and light.
This was more of a bug, but Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete for Playstation had a demo where Alex could give up his ocarina and free up his sixth inventory slot. The save file from the demo could be then transferred to the game proper (where Alex couldn't give up his ocarina, and it filled one of the six slots he has for items). Only there's something near the end that will kill you if you don't use the ocarina.
Speaking of The Witcher 3, getting the good ending to Blood and Wine is also quite complicated (unless you consider sacrificing Syanna to Detlaff the good ending).
I 100% consider Syanna dying as the good ending, because it's the one where you don't have to fight Detlaff, and therefore Regis doesn't end up being hunted for the rest of his (immortal) life.
I mean, if the Dutchess doesn't want to believe my advice about the sister I've been hanging with a lot lately and who she hasn't seen in years, then that's her business. It seemed like the most thematically fitting end to a story about fairy tales going wrong (or never actually having been right to begin with).
Dragon age inquisition taught me this lesson majorly. Having no prior experience of the games I did some weird choices in the beginning (darn those choices where the wording makes the outcome unclear). Spent the rest of the game trying to get lelianas good ending only to have it fail in the end due ti one of my first choices.
I immediately thought of The Immortal (NES/Genesis) where missing a potentially missable item early in the game (I think like level 3 or something?) made the final boss unbeatable. But you weren't given any indication that you needed that item. You were also not given any indication upon progressing past that point that the game was now unwinnable. You'd happily play through the rest of the game, get to the final boss, and have no way to kill them without the item.
Man of Medan had soooooo many people mad at the QTEs cos they were too fast. Also, that decompression? If you don't drink beer, getting hit during the game will cause the exact same death at the end. .... Seriously, what a dick of a game.
Great list but i would have loved to see Darkseed here. Just too many ways to screw yourself over. Like forgetting to put all your belongings under the cell bed when you’re arrested. Of course what was I thinking...?!
Yep this game is insanely unfair. I think one of the things it requires you to do in advance - with no hint you'd need to do it - includes finding an item that only have a 1-4 pixel hitbox and no graphical hint that it's there?
I just played Man of Medan with my buddy. I played Julia and was joking the whole time about how funny it would be if I survived the whole game only to die from the beer. We were disappointed at the end that our choices never came back to haunt us. And then the post-credit scene rolled.
So, for Clock Tower, there were two possible locations where the statue was sent to.
Therefore, logically, if you get the wrong one first, the statue is clearly lost forever as there's nowhere else it could be :D
Correct
I think it's more that scissorman found you before you could get to the other place.
@@JusteazyGamesExcept in that last cutscene she says “Without knowing the whereabouts of the statue, all leads have come to a dead end” which implies she genuinely didn’t consider going to the other location and just gave up
I have to bring up the most obscure one possible - not giving a cheese sandwich to a dog at the start of the Infocom game of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. By not feeding a random stray before even leaving Earth, you're doomed to be eaten by said dog later on, when you're transported back in time and miniaturized into a passing microscopic space fleet. You know, standard stuff you could see a mile away.
To be fair, having read the novel, this makes sense.
I was thinking of this game, too! I always fed the dog (having read the book, it seemed important), but I still remember when I realized I had ruined my game by not taking the junk mail from the front stoop with me, thus denying me a Babel fish, and subsequently, the code needed to reach the device in the glass case. Man, Hitchhiker's Guide was wild 😂
Infocom games are wild, and they could get away with such because computers at that time are heavy and not easily thrown out the window 😅
@@slcchina Yup.
Isn't there an even worse one of these involving the babel fish?
In the 1980s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text-based game, there was a scene early on where you were in a pub. You had to buy a cheese sandwich from the barman, then go outside and feed it to a dog, before coming back in the pub to continue the game. There were no hints to suggest you should do this.
Toward the end of the game, you got shrunk down and traveled back in time on a microscopic spaceship. The dog would eat the spaceship and kill you if you hadn’t distracted it with the cheese sandwich at the beginning of the game.
I can’t imagine how anyone got through that game without a walkthrough.
I kind of liked that about old-school PC gaming though. Developers didn't give a flying f**! if you had to lose 10 hours of gameplay to reload an old save. Lol. People complain about Souls game difficulty. It makes me laugh because so many games back in the day had "gotcha" moments like that. Lol. "Oh you died a lot? Get back to me when you lose 20 hours of gameplay because you missed the one item you needed to get through the last section of the game." Lol.
Excellent reference man. Brought back some good memories lol
@@b1oh1 Lmao maybe, but at that point I'd just feel like I wasted my time, return the game, and go do something else.
@@b1oh1 Except that such scenes have nothing to do with "difficulty" or "skill". They're simply about either knowing a convoluted plot twist ahead of time that you have no way of knowing without consulting a walk-through, or losing days of gameplay because of the writers being trolls.
Remembere those old Monkey Island point and click games? While they were good games (mostly(, the gameplay simply trained the player to pick up every item and constantly try to use everything with everything else.
@@FoxeralArt you can feed the dog as Ford.
@@Mostlyharmless1985 But only if you don't buy the cheese sandwich as Arthur, because apparently the pub only has one sandwich. If Arthur has the sandwich, you're stuck, because you don't have access to Arthur's inventory as Ford.
I laughed my arse off when Julia died of the bends. I was playing with my brother and we were competing with eachother to keep as many of our own PCs alive as possible. He drank the beer accidentally and was kicking himself for it in the moment. We then both completely forgot about it. The credits rolled, it was a draw, one character alive each. Then Julia just fucking died 🤣
Man, imagine losing a competition because of something like that. I'd lose my mind especially if I remember like halfway through that I'm screwed if I don't keep at least one or two people alive aside from my now royally screwed Julia
You know the part that sucks? If you're playing the Curator's Cut, where you play the "Player 2" side and the AI plays the parts you would have in standard game play, THE FRICKING AI KILLS HER THAT WAY!
I been luck and completed them all with every character alive
I like that touch. I used to dive, and that's exactly what they always warned would happen to us if we did exactly that.
@@robertbeisert3315 who was warning you because that's not what would happen. If you have decompression sickness you kind of know it from the shortness of breath and pains in all of your joints and the risk of alcohol. one side effect of decompression sickness is dehydration and you'd have to drink a lot whilst feeling really unwell.
A lot of people are sharing this misconception in this comment section. A trained, responsible diver knows that you don't dive and drink to excess not because you'll get magic surface based decompression sickness but because you'll dehydrate yourself. A trained diver would also know that regardless of what's happening above, you don't give yourself the bends especially since both characters clearly have flares, buoys and a GPS system strapped to them on their chartered boat trip.
There are like 50 ways you can make Kings Quest V completely unwinnable, from “not stopping a cat from catching a mouse” to “not grabbing an item in time on a screen you only see once” to “entering an area of the map too early”
Kings Quest is the dark souls of point and click adventures.
You could do this entire list with just King's Quest without repeating games. Let alone Space Quest.
@@AshenVictor You could do this entire list with just a single King's Quest game. And you could use any of them.
@@jackd6881 at least Dark Souls is *fair*
I never really played point and clicks, my first console was an N64.
Most of the logic, doesnt seem logical haha.
"Controls are like an Irish pub band - extremely fiddly." Made me snort. Thanks Mike.
Was just about to comment about that - probably my new favourite joke in an Oxbox list video and it was said as such a quick throwaway line, like a comedy surprise attack xD
Awesome line! Got an audible, "ha!" from me. 😄
I literally snorted.
Bravo Mike on this, glad it made a lot of us laugh
But does it end with an Irish girl who played the fiddle in said band (by the name of Saoirse) falling in love with an Englishman?
At least Fahrenheit / Indigo Prophecy was nice enough to give you an _immediate_ Game Over for taking the wrong actions. Old-school Sierra games were _infamous_ for the sole solution to a given puzzle being something you might have lost (or merely failed to acquire) HOURS earlier, with NO recourse but to start a new save file.
For example, in Quest for Glory 1 locals might talk about a mythical "White Stag" in the local forest, and if you attempt to harm it, a local Dryad will take such offense that she turns you into one yourself (Game Over). But as the Dryad never leaves her home screen (and you must meet her at _some_ point as part of a later puzzle) it could be many hours between attacking that deer and discovering that it doomed your save file.
Fortunately, the games aren't _actually_ that long once you've figured out how to solve each puzzle, but still. You could fill AN ENTIRE LIST with just classic Sierra games!
Yeah I never found out that was a way to doom yourself because I never saw the White Stag and immediately thought "I'm-a kill it!" I _did_ doom myself in QfG2 once though by choosing to learn magic from Aziza, but that at least happened immediately. (Technically didn't doom _me,_ but literally disappearing from the world for 20 years during a countdown to doomsday is... not ideal.)
Edit: Also if you get to that point in QfG2 without ever playing the first game, or without ever visiting Erasmus' house in the first game, it is impossible to get his nomination to join WIT, thus forever ending your career path as a Wizard.
@@jodinsan Pretty sure Erasmus will sponsor you regardless, otherwise you CANNOT complete the game as a magic user. Or something, it's been a very long time since I last played the games.
@@StratelierYes, even if you haven't played the first game, it will still assume the events of that game happened. Not sure what happens if you HAVE played the first game without visiting Erasmus, although why you would play a wizard without visiting Erasmus is beyond me
God, I remember Police Quest had a fellow police officer do something slightly shady and if you don't immediately report them to Internal Affairs (with the game telling you IA is srs bsns) then at the end of hte game, the literal end, your partner betrays you and murders you.
Yep, same with Space Quest 1, where you could sell your... hover-vehicle to a stranger without bargaining... or have it just stolen from you
Clock Tower 2 The struggle within had an even worse example of this, where in chapter 1 if you didn't interact with a samurai armor at a certain point said armor will fall from the ceiling to crush you in the last chapter giving you a game over and forcing you to restart the whole game again.
Funniest shit in the whole game. Not the fucking you over and not telling you till the end, but the actual scene of this armor body-checking the shit out of the mc
No offense, but that was not in Clock Tower 2. It was in Clock Tower Ghost Head on PSP.
@@GamingG4276 it was localized as clock tower 2
@@GamingG4276 you mean PS1? Also it was clock tower 2 in the US
@@GamingG4276 Other countries outside of Japan didn't get the Japanese Clock Tower 1, so for the rest of the world Clock Tower 1 is Japan's Clock Tower 2 and Ghost Head is the rest of the world's Clock Tower 2
When I finished Witcher 3 and found out I got all five "correct" choices with Ciri, I felt so good I almost adopted a child
"Daddy/Mommy why did you adopt me?"
Well you see, there's this video game....
Same. I really liked Ciri and I wanted to be the kind of dad that was fun, so I picked all the options that I thought she would like the most. Definitely happy I got the best ending for her.
Well the best ending is objective but I thought she'd make a better ruler than her dad so that's the decision I made for her. Lol
I think I did one wrong or something. Idk. Maybe I took Emyr's money? I'm pretty sure I was like, "I can just give this to her, right? Or she'll understand I'm a Witcher taking a contract." something like that. Because I think the options were "take the money" or "don't." and there wasn't something like, "You can shove it. I'm going to look for MY daughter anyway, asshat."
But nooo, they're not smart enough to let me give Ciri like 4,000 gold I swindled from her bio-dad to help her out if she owes anyone anything or just wants to start her own life or something.
That might not even be what I did, because I feel like I remember rejecting it, doing the snowball fight or whatever, trashing the lab, and being like, "I'll be right outside the door if you need me." at the Lodge meeting. Trusting she can handle it herself but being able to bust down the door and come to her aid if she asks for it.
So idk if I failed at the 5th choice I don't remember or the money thing. But honestly, I think Empress Ciri is the best ending, anyway.
I know most people say Witcher Ciri is, because duh. BUT she would be a way better ruler than Emyr, AND she canonically has a BODY DOUBLE who often takes her place in less important meetings and stuff. So guess what she can do all the time? Witcher stuff with real dad Geralt. But also make the Niflgaards not suck.
I got 3 of them right.
Until Dawn has a few of these... Probably the worst is when you fire off a flare gun into a snow storm because much earlier you chose agree with your very pushy girlfriend who just told you she's always right. Doesn't help anyone escape and just means you have no weapon when you get attacked later. Thanks a lot Em.
This! Bloody emily
to be fair, that doesn't actually doom you unless you decide to try and help her when the tower falls. if you decide 'screw her' and jump across straight away, you'll actually be safe and prevent that character from succumbing to an unavoidable death. a better example is if you decide to shoot Ashley. even though the gun is loaded with blanks, Ashley doesn't get over it, and Chris will be killed regardless of whether he makes it back to the house or not.
@@jamesherb4384 I can agree with that. Matt can still survive. But by that point most people will probably try to save Emily.
@Dandamayn the thing with shooting Ashley is that you know its a bad idea at the time. Its like you're stuck between a rock and a hard place and all the options are bad.
it's not obvious that giving Emily the flare gun or having matt fire it could kill matt though, Poor matt.
@@bigdognuniff That's very true. Ashley is yelling at you to shoot her. If you've invested in the Chris/Ashley relationship you really don't want to. You know you're making a big decision there. Saying "going to the watchtower is a bad idea" and immediately getting shut down and going anyways makes it seem like you made no decision at all.
I’ve come to realise that the reason many of these early 90s games had these annoying little gotchas was because of the rental market. A lot of people watching this won’t know that video rental stores like blockbuster and videoezy didn’t just rent movies, they also rented video games for both console and PC. Because most of these games could easily be finished over a weekend the developers would either make the puzzles frustratingly obtuse or include innocuous choices or easy to miss items at the start so that it was usually impossible to complete the game on your first play through thus necessitating rehires.
thats also why games like lion kind and Aladin had insane difficulty spikes only a handful of chapters in.
@@jamesherb4384 Developers for TLK actually confirmed that the publisher insisted on them making the difficulty level "almost impossible" _specifically_ because of videogame rentals.
@@jamesherb4384 it all started with coin operated consoles. Make the game almost impossible and it’ll generate more revenue.
Believe it or not, but it's not the reason you say. The earliest examples of logic that didn't make sense in adventure games come from the PC market where there's no such incentive. These are often referred to as "moon logic" puzzles and are a staple of early gaming. A lot of it has to do with the youth of the industry and designers who were implementing what made sense to them rather than thinking about what made sense to the player. Sometimes this was intentional (the Hitchhiker's Guide text adventure was supposed to be absurd, but also there's a mentality among game designers sometimes that the player losing means that they won) and sometimes it was completely inadvertent, not realizing that players wouldn't immediately recognize a puzzle solution.
I mean I get your logic but it doesn't make sense with the rental market. For the arcade model, that is exactly how it works. But the rental market didn't give portions of sales to developers or studios. They bought copies outright and kept the rental fees for themselves.
Side note: I'm not saying it didn't exist, but I don't remember ever seeing PC games for rent at any video store. Plenty of nes, snes, megadrive, PS1, etc. Just no PC games. That could have just been my area though.
In Demon's Souls there's the time when you rescue a seemingly friendly NPC from a cage, and a while later characters start dying in the hub area. How were you supposed to know he was a murderer? Yes, he has an extremely creepy laugh, but that's like 50% of people in Souls games.
It's also turned into a recurring theme in Souls games.
reminds me of ac odyssey where you save one family,because its about to get killed,"inquisition" claiming they have a plague on them,so you kill the inquisitors,making the family leave,only to find out the next place they setlled is in ruins because the family did brought the plague over.
@@r3l1csvk I REMEMBER THAT! I actually restarted my playthough. That affects a part of the story later on too.
I agree even the more friendly NPCs seem to be creepy
Bloodborne has a similar thing, although thankfully it's much more obvious what's going to happen given that you literally first meet him while he's eating a person, and at least he kills the useless NPCs first.
in Silent Hill 3 the protagonist Heather will come across a woman in the confessional of a church who asks for redemption for her sins which Heather can grant or deny, granting her forgiveness will earn Heather a bunch of negative karma points and the game's bad ending as granting forgiveness is God's domain because Heather carries the cult's god inside her body and by granting forgiveness Heather has assumed the responsibilities of the god the cult of Silent Hill worships.
Lmao Heathers gonna have a hard time on credit karma now
@@sebastiaoantuneslambelho8403 Yup, because you’ve got a sort of antichrist baby growing inside you in that game, and in any way assuming the role of Christ will basically wake it up
@@sebastiaoantuneslambelho8403 It depends on your doctrine exactly what you think about forgiveness in a liturgical sense. Oftentimes forgiven =/= absolved, as absolving someone of sin is God’s domain while forgiving them is anyone’s. However, in the game I’m not sure the distinction is made, and thus her forgiving sin is also absolving someone of it, meaning she takes on the role of Christ, and wakes up the antichrist
@@sebastiaoantuneslambelho8403 Ye, it demands you to think about your choices in a way that really only makes sense when you have knowledge of the endings, which is very unfair
@@lucillefrancois150 You forgot that you also need to have a certain amount of "murder points" which you can only get enough of by killing almost every enemy in the game with the Sexy Beam in the Princess Heart costume, so it's barely feasible that you'd get the bad ending even accidentally. And it just shows a 5-second scene of Heather having stabbed Douglas so it's not worth it anyway.
I actually kind of agreed with the snowball fight decision in the Witcher III, though I totally agree it is not the most obvious "this choice may doom Ciri." However, the one I disagreed with was the one where you have to trash the room of Ciri's elf mentor (lol I can't remember his name). The other option, the "bad" one, has Geralt being like "Ok calm down let's just think about this rationally" and Ciri understandably gets even angrier--she's mad and upset and just wants to break things. I get it. But I feel like letting her destroy the room is kind of... childish? In not a good way, unlike the snowball fight which is childish in a good way. It just feels like if you're trying to be wise, not only is that the "wrong" option, but Ciri wouldn't appreciate it. And maybe she wouldn't! Clearly we're all different people here, but I just felt slammed that any choice centered around cool, collected wisdom isn't valued. Trashing the room being the "good" option made me feel like the logic here is "give the candy to the spoiled child throwing a tantrum so they'll stop throwing a tantrum. That's good parenting."
Thank. YOU. I’m glad I’m not alone in that opinion. Getting that ending after choosing genuinely reasonable advice felt like a kick in the nose.
YES
Multiple things to remember is Ciri is childish sometimes. She was forced to grow very quickly after the sacking of Cintra and lost a lot of her childhood due to that.
Also for the other choice in that scenario Geralt puts Lara Dorren's necklace around Ciri pretty much saying to Ciri that that is who she is, Lara Dorren's heir and to accept it. She's always hated feeling like that is all she is so Geralt putting that necklace around her is a slap in the face.
I just took all views from Ciris perspective and what she would want. They clue a lot that she's tired of people making decisions for her. But I completely agree with the reasoning behind that decision too.
I recently finished playing through the Witcher III, going out of my way to avoid any guys, and managed to get the "bad" ending.
It's annoying how easy it actually is to get the bad ending - 2/3 negative decisions I made to get the bad ending were accompanying her to see the Witches to help ease her nerves, and not letting her throw a massive tantrum in someone else's house. How's that bad parenting?!
The only other mistake I made was taking her to drink at Kaer Morhen, and that's because I thought the moral lesson of telling her she didn't need to be good at everything was better than dismissing the question with whimsy - if I'd known what the two options actually were, I probably would've taken the latter!
I'm glad Toussant gives Geralt another chance at a happy ending, because I would've been left so ticked off by the main game otherwise - almost 90 hours of gameplay down the drain because of what seemed like minor decisions I'd made literally days earlier.
The decompression and alcohol ending had me check into that. While a lot of places say it can intensify symptoms I noted several said there have been no "studies" to link the connection.
Umm YEAH, It's probably pretty hard to do a "study" where you ask people to intentionally go through bends and get drunk to see if it hurts more or they drop dead. Can't imagine why they couldn't get any studies done on that. :)
tbf, you could probably find a way to test it on mice. wont be the same of course but could be done.
There's enough idiots out there that I'm surprised there isn't a study of incidents at least. What percent of deaths or collapses did the person have alcohol, vs. the percent that have alcohol i any situation seems pretty simple.
@@SimonBuchanNzone of the problems is people act drunk as a symptom and they aren't always doing blood alcohol tests on people dying. After 12 hours of consumption the traces are gone in blood and 48 hours if a sample is stored properly. Having enough statistically relevant data for solid conclusions is hard to come by.
Long Live the Queen is a game that lives and breathes this. You play a cute little princess trying to survive until her coronation, but literally EVERYTHING can kill you or bite you in the ass. I once managed to brutally win a civil war only for my character to eat poisoned chocolate because I didn't level up decorating enough?
Oh I am so happy someone else thought of Long Live the Queen! I died so many times from choices early on that when I stumbled through it truly felt like a survival game @__@ Every choice you make actually counts toward something and unless you are using a guide you have no idea what it will lead to. I Love it!
Hmm, guess I'll have to try out this game someday.
And let me guess, one of the people who's going to kill her is an ex-boyfriend/ex-girlfriend?
I hate and love this game. I sometimes know what I need, but still can't get enough levels in like dancing and court manners when I know the scene before I need insight or animal handling. 🤦🏽
@@michaelandreipalon359 hey 👋
So not necessarily an ex, more like a marriage candidate. There are a few warnings and some time to prep to make sure you don't die though.
On the contrary there is even a marriage candidate you as a player can kidnap too. The game has some seriously solid branching paths so most playthroughs will be different. You can play as a sweet girl, a tyrant, a war strategist, a magical girl, or just plain evil for the most part.
I will let you know it is a Visual novel primarily so if that genre is not your Forte then I'd check out a let's play.
(There is a death checklist btw as well as 4 different endings if you live and multilevel epilog texts to see how your Queen ran the country when she came of age)
Thanks, La Crowned... guess I'll try running as a mahou shoujo/witch then.
And don't worry, visual novels are also a favored genre on my account. Besides, I do need a break from FPS and RTS games.
That battery bit reminded me of the Deus Ex: Human Revolution's "free upgrade" which makes a particular boss fight near impossible.
Oh yeah because that's the one with what's her face where if you get it she can disabled your cybernetics
I feel like that one was telegraphed pretty well, in terms of the risk it represented.... the augmentation clinics are controlled by the bad guys, you know they're up to something on a massive scale, your augmetics have just started experiencing random minor glitches, and the clinics are ever-so-helpfully suddenly offering everyone a free upgrade to fix the problem.
That being said, yeah. That decision takes a while to come back and bite you.
Rule 1 of cyberpunk dystopias: always be *extremely* wary of anything offered for free by a corporation.
@@stevencowan37 That rule exists always, not just in dystopias. Add to corporations, governments. If governments are giving you something for free...it is likely just to control you.
@@Nempo13 cory, the local government isn't trying to brainwash you with popsicles.
I'm glad you showed what happens in the witcher because in all my playthroughs i dont have the heart to trigger that ending
Every time I started a new playthrough, I thought to myself that I'd play as a jerk but then I'd fall back to being goody-goody cuz I couldn't live with the idea that Ciri would die, just couldn't do that.
I seriously fucked up and got that ending the first time I played! I thought I was being a protective dad! 😭😭😭
in Persona 1 the good and bad ending are completely dependent on one innocuous dialogue choice with a little girl you find in a rose maze like 3/4ths into a game, there is still multiple hours of gameplay before you reach the end and you have no indication your on route to the bad end, this also has no New Game + so the only thing you can do is reload the game from a previous save or start again from the very beginning!!
This happened to me. The bad ending was so many hours of gameplay after that conversation that I didn't have any saves left from before that point. No way I was replaying the game from the beginning so I just quit.
sswishbone good on you
What? That first one was great! A whole game dedicated to teaching you the dangers of scuba diving AND jumping over rusty pits? What do you have against education?
“Truly gravity was the greatest enemy”
Jane definitely Dark Souls
jane is the deepest poet of our time.
freaking patches
Dragon Age Inquisition. There's a conversation with Leliana in Haven where you (a prisoner, who's only still alive because of your usefulness when everyone thinks you're a terrorist/mass murderer and you have amnesia so you can't even prove them wrong) have to butt in and argue against her decision to (fairly mercifully) kill a traitor who's been proven to have killed several of her agents. If you butt in by agreeing, or simply stay silent and hesitate to interfere, then towards the end of Leliana's arc if you try to insist she not murder somebody she acts like you've spent the whole time drowning puppies and sacrificing kittens for blood magic...because of one conversation choice back when you didn't rightfully have a say.
It was...frustrating, to say the least.
Every play through I make sure to soften Leliana because a softened Lel is best Divine.
@@RazorO2Productions I was roleplaying my (first playthrough, bad plan that) character as starting out unsure of herself and growing bolder as time went on, so when Leliana responded that way dozens of hours later, I was both shocked and baffled. I just wish the middle choice (don't interfere) could still have resulted in Inspired Leliana if you got all the others right, because I spent the rest of that playthrough terrified I'd wind up with Murderpope.
what leliana does there is dependent on several dialog choices with her throughout the game. it will even effect what kind of divine she becomes if that's the ending she gets.
I'd say the Iron Bull in the DLC is another good example. Because you prioritized an alliance with the Qunari over his mercenary squad in the main game he joins the Qunari in trying to murder you.
Kolgrim, from the first game, is one of my favorite video game characters of all time (even though you only interact with him about three times maximum), so I wonder what the Leliana vacancy is like in Inquisition. Pleasing Kolgrim in Origins forces the death of Leliana, unless she is hardened.
There are plenty of these kinds of moments unintentionally sprinkled throughout Clock Tower Ghost Head, the worst of which being if you didn’t interact with the samurai armour in the opening level after a specific key item was picked up, if you never interacted with the armour the game ends abruptly at the beginning of the final level where you are only allowed access to one specific room where the suit of armour will fall through the ceiling and kill you for a bad ending, seriously what in the holy hell were Human Entertainment smoking? (Shout out to Nitro Rad and his video on Ghost Head)
Yup, same with the little kid and not locking her in.
Or in the spiritual successor nightcry, I think it was a ring you had to get in chapter 1 with a character or you cannot move on beyond like chapter 3, or some gobbledygook like that. Complete idiocy.
There's another example in a later Clock Tower game. If you don't aggro the enemy wearing knight armor early on, it will give you an unavoidable game over later.
I've also heard that Ciri might survive the worst ending, but just doesn't want to be around you anymore and goes back to wandering the multiverse, alone.
Yup didn't even realize she died in the worse ending.
Wandering around the Multiverse alone... yeah, not a good end.
@@michaelandreipalon359 I dunno, not being around Geralt sounds like a good end to me.
Holy shit
I'm not sure if that's better or worse.
I was definitely one of those people who accidentally killed Lucas with painkillers & alcohol at the start of the game in Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy. It definitely taught me to not necessarily pick everything up in similar games.
I remember Space Quest having an alien with giant lips that wandered around semi randomly. If you ever ended up getting seen by it, it would kiss you and move on, allowing you to keep playing normally. About an hour later, a baby alien would pop out of your chest and you'd die. Hope you hadn't overwritten your save since the kiss.
Fun fact Julia would've died from a Pepsi too. This is because the alcohol is not the problem but rather the carbonation itself.
Your fun fact license is hereby revoked.
@@youarewinner93 ... but why?
@@Frozenskulltube It's just a joke, implying the fact wasn't that fun (as it's about death).
@@youarewinner93 Yes I understand. I failed to convey my tone correctly, lol. I was trying to be funny and keep the joke going.
Would Pilk have been ok tho?
Persona 4, the game has a climax point where your team believes to have caught the serial killer you've been hunting for the entire game, and find him attempting to escape from his hospital room, what follows is a series of character choices where you need to make exactly the right combination of choices to move on to the standard ending, otherwise you get one of two bad ends here, either everyone goes back to their daily lives unaware that the world is about to end after fusing with the Shadow World, or the same but your cousin dies in front of you breaking your uncle mentally as well
This is nasty because the first climax point involves being in an argument with an over-emotional Yosuke, and it was not immediately apparent how to de-escalate the situation the first time I played it. In a twisted sort of way, I liked this bad ending, because Nanako's death was painful AF.
There's a 2nd climax point for the true ending can be missed depending on your actions for the final day, and P4 Golden has a "Golden Ending" which can be missed out on if you didn't max out Marie's social link to get access to a bonus dungeon. I believe Persona 5 Royale does something similar, but I haven't played it.
@@TheBlackSeraph Persona 5 makes is rather obvious where paths diverge based on your choices fortunately (as does 3 funny enough), and in Royal the new content is basically tied entirely to a single social link, with basically nothing there to derail it once you unlock it, I would argue that's one of 4 and Golden's greatest weaknesses, it genuinely does not want you to complete the game properly, as the path at climax points is either not clear or actively requires you to do something you would normally never consider
@@kurosakikun96 P4 is a murder mystery, so the possibility of failure is very much in character.
I did this, because I genuienly believed Namatame was behind everything and was seething as much as Yosuke was, P4 broke me man. I also didn't make backup save so I had to play the game over again... Learned my lessons that day, and a 16 year old me broke down in tears.
@@TheBlackSeraph P4's best ending is especially nasty because the game encourages you to skip it. You have to visit all your friends and then say no twice when the game prompts you to leave. Not exactly intuitive.
SMT:DDS 2 carries over your choices from the first game. One of your party members will die permanently if you try to fight back against his pretend betrayal that he didnt go over with you before attenpting. At that point in the first game the decision doesnt seem to change anything, but all the way down the line in the second game he gets pissed because you dont trust him despite him having been your right hand man. It really sucks when that happens because I had good skills on him because he was one of my favorite party members
Eyy fellow DDS fan, but i wouldn't say it really dooms YOU, the protagonist or your game, and Roland is still there if you made all the wrong Heat choices so not getting him for the final dungeon isn't consequential (also skills don't always transfer well to heat so at least when i played heat was WAY weaker than everyone else meaning i barely used him :/)
@@Brian-tn4cd oof. I lost my heat and in the first game i used him so much. Im glad im not missing out too much
@@mirraisnow6050 yeah, the devs thought no one would get him so much they didn't even dub his lines, he uses his japanese battle lines and nothing in the story changes
I always saw it as more of an abusrdly tough easter egg to get him back in your party, than for it to be a punishment that is almost impossible to avoid.
When you equipped the wrong pistol: Mass Effect 3!
It's literally possible to softlock yourself on Mars if you equip certain pistols, as they reload too slowly to get off enough shots during a scripted scene at the very end. The Paladin, Acolyte, Scorpion and Executioner pistols all do this, and the game never recognices that the pistols don't work for this scene, meaning that you will fail, get stabbed, and then have to repeat this loop forever!
And the checkpoint is during the scene itself, so you have to reload an earlier save or restart the mission entirely, equip a pistol that works, and then redo the rest of the mission again...
There’s also the dialogue tree shortly before that point, where failing to pick a dialogue prompt means you’ll be unable to make some key conversational choices at the very end of the game.
@@daniellefoster6039 those exist throughout the entire game, several times.
@games and glory there are a lot of key conversations but this one stands out to me: it's particularly close to the beginning of the game, it's connected to three other conversations, and unlike most of the other choices it's not really obvious how important your response is
@@daniellefoster6039 Wait, which dialogue is that? I know the pistol scene at the end but which choice are you referring to?
You have a chat with TIM
Lucas' delivery on that narration after he dies always kills me. It's just so weirdly casual "Aaaand, that's the end of my story." Like he just got finished talking about a crazy day he just had and didn't know how to end it.
Love seeing the Dark Pictures games getting some love! Julia’s death of the Bends is such a cheeky death, two small things at the beginning of the game completely screwing you over after the credits 😂 Absolute troll death
I ordered devil in me at gamestop 3 weeks ago. I'm begging to think I'll be getting it on steam. Gamestop has been terrible lately
@@_Twink Yeah, GameStop isn’t exactly the most reliable when it comes to that. But when you do get The Devil in Me, you’ll be in for a treat! Best game in the series as of yet IMO
@@pagingdrwhom2300 literally the last "new" ps4 version. I could order it again they say, but now apparently all pre orders and store transfers cost $10, which is like, why would I ever? I like having the physical version, but digital can already be a lot cheaper. Even before a $10 gamestop tax on most games now.
Gamestop declines Rant aside, I am excited. So far, I've only played "until dawn", "the quary" and "house of ashes" but I've like completely fallen in love with the company. Like some of my favorite horror movies mixed with like black mirror 🪞
I think they, along with much less interesting Quantum dream, are pioneers.
Add Final Fantasy X-2 to this list. Just, all of it. You want the true ending where you actually get a happily ever after? Well, you better not make the wrong dialogue option, or fail to ace every possible minigame, or step through a specific unmarked loading zone before checking everything behind all the other unmarked loading zones, because that one loading zone doesn't let you go back and talk to the person, or open the treasure chest, or whatever the highly specific, seemingly random, and supremely easily missable thing is that you need for that fraction of a fraction of a percentage that will keep you from the true ending unless you feel like playing through the entire game again in new game plus, or keeping multiple saves to play through entire sections again when your completion percentage isn't exactly what the walkthrough says it should be. And make sure you don't skip a cutscene while you're redoing those sections, because that counts toward your percentage too!
TLDR, there's a person in a moogle costume at the very start of FFX2, and if you don't think to stop in the middle of a thrilling chase sequence in order to talk to them, you won't get the true ending without playing through the game again on New Game+, at least once. And there are missable things like that (and many that are far more obscure) throughout the ENTIRE GAME.
Thanks to TH-cam, I managed to see thw true ending. Never happened on my PS2, I can tell you.
@@robertbeisert3315 I forced myself through it with the controller in one hand, and the walkthrough in the other (sometimes literally), and though it was, a lot, I can't tell you just how happy I was when I got to see that ending by my own hands. I also have no intention of ever playing that game again so long as I live, but still. The achievement (actual, not virtual) meant a lot to me (which is more than I can say about any of the virtual achievements/trophies I've gotten.).
Well thank fuck for you mate, I never would have known about this before I started playing X-2 next week lmao. Now to find a good guide with no horrible mistranslations
@@reaperofthings Good, it's definitely better with a guide, even if you're not aiming for 100%, because there is just so much that you can miss. And despite what I said about not wanting to play it again, it really is a good experience. Have fun with it, and absolutely make sure that you keep multiple saves, it's not always (read: rarely) clear when you've missed something, and you definitely don't want to have to play the first half of the game again because the guide says you should have 50%, and for some stupid reason, you only have 49.9%. I'm saying this from experience, seriously, keep lots of saves and always check the completion percentage when the guide mentions it, it'll save you a lot of time and frustration. But overall, have fun. :)
The first time something like that happened to me was in the PS1 X-Files game. Towards the end of the game, your character gets in a fight with another guy. If you kill the guy, you'll always die at the end. I remember spending hours back in the days pointlessly reloading my save (from right after the fight), trying to get the good ending.
17:00 To the oxbox crew: Whenever Jane makes fun of a haircut you had, just remind her of what happened when she let that game scan in her face 😜
2K15 😂
What happened?
@@ravionjohnson8852 Just search their vids for 2K15. Can't remember if it was a preview/review but it was horrific 😃
This list brought back memories for me. Being greedy in Resident Evil 2's A campaign or getting trigger happy in Resident Evil code veronica, or not giving Moira the opportunity to overcome her phobia of firearms in Resident Evil Revelations 2. Rewinding time to rescue myself from death at the start of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and receiving my just desserts a game and a half later. In Crono Trigger, I thought I was being polite, but everything was taken the wrong way. In Pathologic, being a decent person even once.
"What do you mean I need to win a doll of myself to get the best ending?" -Me playing Chrono Trigger
Chrono Trigger, great game. That's all just needed to say it
Wait, how did Prince of Persia hurt you a game and a half later? Never played it before.
Ah yes, the infamous "trial"... That said, even if you did everything right you still get thrown in jail though.
As long as we’re talking old games, too, let’s not forget the bonding plant in Return to Zork. Plucking or cutting it in the first screen makes the game impossible to complete.
My favorite thing about this channel is I am always being introduced to games I completely missed at the time, and had no idea they existed.
For the second one, I should point out that the early Sierra adventure games are notoriously brutal and unforgiving at times. From being able to use up an item that is crucial to succeed in the game to extremely tight timed events (most of the games have several!), the various Quest games are a test of a gamer's mettle.
A similar thing (albeit not fatal) choice occurs in Dark Pictures 3 House of ashes. Where if you call in air support at the very start of the game, or keep one side character alive long enough to fix a radio. Then no matter what happens to Salim, he will always be captured and never see his son again.
neither of those sound like bad things....
@@marhawkman303 Salim is one of the best characters
@@marhawkman303*Spoilers for House of Ashes* In the game, having air support seems like a logical thing, and having the radio work would make sense. But the monsters in the game only appear above ground for the duration of the 2003 eclipse, and won't make it in time to assist you in any way, if support arrives later than the Iraqi solder, Salim, is able to leave the group of US soldiers that he'd allied himself with before they're collected by the helicopters.
So the air support technically doesn't help or hinder keeping characters alive, Salim's ending can be changed drastically from a choice made before you even meet him.
@@breakinggreens ah, typical Choose-your-own-adventure logic. Choices made do not always have the outcome you expect.
Salim carried the game when I played coop with a friend. He had quite the arm.
I wore the Oxbox shirt to PAX this year. Had to represent the hivemind.
My kind of hero 🙌
I got stuck playing the infocom hitchhiker's guide game back in the day because i failed to get the babel fish, because I hadn't picked up the junk mail from Arthur Dent's doormat literally at the start of the game.
Or fed a certain dog.
I feel like you could've filled this entire list with examples from the King's Quest franchise.
Hell, there's a decent chance that just _one_ King's Quest game has enough examples to fill a whole list.
Sounds like any Sierra game really. Most can probably make 2+ lists.
I thought I was playing Quake but it turned out to be Doom...
I "Doomed" myself.
🥁
Never even knew that Ciri could die... looks like I got those decision right in my three playthroughs
tbf she never dies, she just decides she no longer wants to be with Geralt and leaves, on one ending she never returns, on another ending she goes to Nilfgaard, and the best ending, which is the one I assume you got, she stays with Geralt
"With combat controls like an Irish pub band - extremely fiddly" - Underrated metaphor, Mike.
Games like Bioforge are why I now hoard healing potions terrified that I'll get to some point in the game where "oh you don't have 100 healing potions? You literally need 100 healing potions to continue and there's no way to get any more"
The funny thing about Witcher 3 is that I got what I thought was a good ending, and I still think it is, but consensus doesn't seem to think so. I ended up with Ciri going off to be Empress. I thought that seemed pretty good with her in position to do the most good for the most people, but most players seem to feel that the ending where she becomes a Witcher is best. Oh well, I'm not sure exactly what decisions do what, but I've played it through 3 times and I always end up with that ending.
Either don't take her to see Emhyr when prompted, or ensure that Nilfgard loses the war. Personally, I prefer the first option, since Emhyr is a dick, but both Radovid and Djikstra are worse and end up dead.
Yeah never really got how her becoming a pseudo witcher was the good ending as she is probably going to die painfully
I usually let her become Empress for the good of people - she herself was thinking about that too.
Both options are the good ending but I really love the interactions you have with everyone in White Orchard vs just meeting her in the tavern alone and giving her the sword.
@@SgtSupaman Isn't it just the choice to take her to see Emhyr or not that decides it? Not any more difficult than the Witcher ending. I see both as good; in one she lives the life she wants with her family, in the other she has the opportunity to change the world for the better.
It was a long time ago, but in my playthrough I'm pretty sure I took her to see Emhyr and Nilfgard ended up winning the war, yet we still ended up witchering together. I don't think I screwed up the rest of the choices (had the snowball fight, let her handle the meeting with the witches alone, trashed the lab, etc).
The fact that I managed to do all the correct bonding choices with Ciri without a walkthrough shocked me
I only learned she could die at the end of the game after I'd made all the choices already - and then the game is so cruel as to pretend she did die up until the very end of the closing sequence.
There's an even better way to screw yourself over in King's Quest V: when Cedric is wounded by the harpies, decide you're fed up with him and leave him. You then get screwed at the finish line. Also, good on you to include it, as it brings a smile to my face to see the classics get some love, but maybe it would've rounded it out if you got uppity about how the narrator rubs in your death(s) with atrocious puns?
I always love that these guys provide a spoiler list.
Also in Man of Medan telling the military the name of the ship and failing to leave. If you don't name the ship you are arrested but name it and it becomes shoot on sight
Mass Effect 2 : giving away Legion to Cerberus. You only feel the effects of that blunder in the next instalment, but it get you not only to get shot in the face, but also locks you away from resolving the Geth/Quarian war in a diplomatic fashion !
Bonus points for all the Paragon sheps out there who spared Dr Rana Thanoptis in Saren's lab. Granted the effect is minor... For yourself.
It's about the only Paragon action that really does result in an unambiguous bad thing, IIRC.
I never spared Rana. That and punching the Quarian war mongering general in 3 are the two renegade options I can never resist.
@@Dustemikkel_Rev The thing with sparing Rana or killing her in ME1 is nothing changes. Just that terror bombing she did in ME3 still happens just by an unnamed Asari who was indoctrinated. Giving Legion to Cerberus and not responding to Grissom Academy are two really bad choices to make which cause the death of both characters with Jack being by your own hands near the end of the game.
@@02091992able Oh, I know, but I just don't like her. Killing her is just for my enjoynment.
Similar vein, going to do another side mission after your crew is captured. Never had a game punish me for not doing the main story right away before.
I make a mundane choice that dooms me to death and misery every time I decide to get up in the morning.
Relatable.
This isn’t even the only Clock Tower game you can make unwinnable.
Clock Tower Ghost Head will kill you at the start of the final area in the game, if you didn’t make a samurai armor ghost chase you in the FIRST area.
I still quote Indigo Prophecy to this day. Mostly when unfortunate things happen I just go, "And that's the end of my story."
The quarry : breaking into the cabin or not. If you chose not to break into the cabin at the start of the game, Dylan won’t need his hand cut off and will survive.
First time you played Resident Evil and you thought "Hey, there must be dozens of these ink ribbons lying around, better save than sorry..."
Hohoho, this zombie title will definitely have more ammo as I continue! 😅
Recently made that mistake in the B scenario of RE 2 remake. Felt like a foolish youngun all over again.
5:09 i work for rentokil and I confirm, I would not be able to make it up that hill in my van, and I don't get paid enough to deal with yetis
"controls that are like an Irish pub band, extremely fiddly" well done oxtowers for coming up with that one.
I remember a friend playing a game, one of the Cyberia series maybe, with a scene in which an NPC tries to kiss your character. There are absolutely no button prompts, but you can either let her kiss you (the default if you do nothing) or stop her from kissing you. If she kisses you then another NPC kills you later in the game with no way to prevent it.
I reloaded a previous save with the Ciri one, worth every step I retread to see her happy
It's kind of an odd thing to say but I really want it to get noticed: the intro music is quite soothing yet inviting. Thanks, guys, for keeping it. It really sets the tone of the video.
Mostly Walking is a rather excellent weekly livestream that plays adventure games, and they refer to this phenomenon (getting yourself stuck/screwed over because you made some seemingly harmless decision early on) as "getting Zorked."
Specifically I believe after the Return to Zork puzzle where if you accidentally kill a plant on, I think, one of the very first screens, you just can't complete the game.
The Witcher 3 one got me. I was thinking I was doing everything right only *BOOM* helicopter parenting is bad.
When I got the worst ending, I made it like an hour into the end dlc stuff before I said fuck it and went back on the past 6 hours of game play to get the mediocre ending because to get the good ending I'd have to lose much more progress
Right?! Like! I’m still so torn about it. I felt pretty balanced but also was like Ciri, just watch and learn. Don’t jump headfirst into adventure because you feel guilty or bored.
NOPE APPARENTLY
You made my girlfriend almost fall off the couch laughing at your Irish folk bands being ‘fiddly’ joke, amazing 👏💖
Sierra Games could give you an almost endless supply of videos like this. Like that time in Laura Bow and the Dagger of Amon Ra when you didn't look through a random pile of garbage in a taxi cab. An opportunity that occurred exactly ONE time.
Or kept a custard pie no matter how delicious it says it is.
King Graham: mmmmm, this custard pie is delicious! Just the thing to give me the strength to climb this mountain.
Yeti: So you have chosen death.
In the first installment of the Zenonia mobile series, you get locked into the absolute bastard route if you decide to break an innocuous monument that seems to be negatively affecting your fairy companions. How was I supposed to know that rock held the world together?!
When I saw King's quest V, I thought you were going to use the save the mouse from the cat puzzle. Honestly, you could have filled this whole list with stuff from Sierra games.
The one that sticks in my head from childhood is Space Quest 2 (and I'm remembering from 30 years ago here) where if you don't dodge an alien kissing you, you get an alien style chest burst much, much later.
@@Yesterzine It's not _that_ much later. As I recall it's on a five minute timer, with it being forced early if you get too far through the game.
On the other hand, it's enough later that you've probably saved and reloaded several times by the point it happens, possibly forcing you to start over because Roger is mpreg in all your saves.
At least the game is clear on why you died; 'I never picked up/already used up $ITEM from the game's beginning' is usually far worse.
IIRC KQ5's cat-and-mouse puzzle occurs almost literally on your _first visit to that screen?_ You have like 3 seconds to scare off the cat or you will _(very_ much later on) find yourself softlocked with no way forward, because the intended way forward is for that same mouse to come help you.
@@boobah5643 Fair, like I say this is a memory of me aged about 8 so it's just a smidge fuzzy :D
@@Stratelier Crikey, my habit of grabbing a coffee or checking twitter on the way into a new screen would kill me dead :D
Add "Hunted: The Demon's Forge" to that list. There's a drink called Sleg that makes you super powerful (I'm going off of memory here!) but if you drink it, your character is doomed.
Except the first time, I believe thats scripted. I had a lot more fun without using it though.
I instantly knew kings quest or one of the Sierra adventure games would be on here. Pretty much all of them have dead ends that you don't realize are dead ends until much later. The most annoying one i remember is where you have to throw a boot at a cat in one of the kings quests to save a rat that will later come save you from imprisonment. Or in space quest where you have to know to pick up a piece of glass from your broken windshield (are spaceship windshields made of safety glass?) When it doesn't even have a sprite
Fun fact: That King's Quest example is also from King's Quest 5.
Reminds me of how in AC Odyssey I had Kassandra express worry and try to manage expectations about redeeming Alexios in private with our mother (just to be clear: HE WAS NOT THERE) but still doing my best to win him over when I actually saw him. This resulted in him killing our mother and then attacking me, forcing my hand against him.
Clock Tower Ghost Head, aka the struggle within has several but the one I want to talk about is the samurai armor, it's in the first level and it kills you in the third chapter of the game, aka the last one, the only way to not die that was is to look at it after getting a key item in which it'll be possessed and starts to chase you.
Oh, Indigo Prophecy, good times. I'll forever remember sitting down to "finish the meal and not look suspicious" after the impromptu murder, only to have the detectives comment "he sat down and finished his meal after the murder, what a complete psycho" afterwards.
How do you not include Arthur Morgan beating up Mr. Downes. Literally the moment that doomed him, even if the gang got rich and went to Tahiti.
I reckon that's because it's main storyline and totally unavoidable
The pendant item in Koudelka is a pain if you don’t remember to retrieve it from a fountain after it’s lost in the opening cutscene. Technically, you can get it by farming random drops from a specific enemy type right before the final boss if you missed picking it up before, but it’s an instant kill if you face the boss without it, and it’s apparently a pretty rare drop even then.
This entire list is just the embodiment of "Congratulations, you've played yourself."
6:15 I just love it when game designers give you an item that seems completely useless and then present you with multiple scenarios in which it would be useful. Taking it the next step and ruining your game if you use it too early is brilliant
"Should you rush to the surface or wait to decompress"
Me with a diving license: Yep she dead.
Corpse Party and similar pixel-style horror survivals have plenty of these too - not reading the newspaper in chapter 1 despite someone having painstakingly carved 'do not read the newspaper' into the floor with the last of their strength, not picking up all of Naho's notes before entering a specific room (I did this by mistake despite knowing I needed two more notes), not finding specific and easily missed items in Mayu's chapter in Book of Shadows where you have to check the same body like five times before meeting Nana-
The series also encourages you to check everything, only, and while this isn't a guaranteed death or bad end, checking the anatomical model before reading Naho's note in the lab will make it attack you, and Yoshikazu appear and attack you, and the door to lock-
You missed the worst part about the pie in kings quest 5.
You can use the pie to solve another puzzle earlier in the game. You need to lure a mouse, you are supposed to use cheese but you can use the pie. You even get points for doing it, indicating you did the right thing. I don't think you get points for eating the pie, so at least you may have some idea you did the wrong thing.
OMG that King's Quest one! What a deep dive and a reminder of how angry I was over that one! Not to mention that just carrying around a custard pie in your inventory, with no refrigeration, the darn thing should have gone rancid within days! And feeding the eagle is FAR more intuitive than "Attacked by a yeti? I'll fight it off with SLAPSTICK COMEDY!!"
12:10 that joke had me laughing! Mike looked so genuinely happy to hit the breakfast buffet 😂 perfect timing and a good joke
Kings quest, you don't throw a boot at a mouse to save it, you open a genie bottle and a million other things. I grew up with them and I still love the later games.
Yup, told Ciri she didn't have to be good at everything. Big mistake.
Jane, again with those one-liners that crack me up at 1:17 😂
Wow I’ve always chosen the snowball fight I honestly didn’t know there was a bad choice here
I have a sever anxiety disorder and your guys videos help break me out of my downward spirals, occasionally.
Thanks for keeping things simple and light.
So the reason Ciri lived at the end is because I absolutely love the Father/Daughter relationship between her and Geralt.
This was more of a bug, but Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete for Playstation had a demo where Alex could give up his ocarina and free up his sixth inventory slot. The save file from the demo could be then transferred to the game proper (where Alex couldn't give up his ocarina, and it filled one of the six slots he has for items). Only there's something near the end that will kill you if you don't use the ocarina.
Speaking of The Witcher 3, getting the good ending to Blood and Wine is also quite complicated (unless you consider sacrificing Syanna to Detlaff the good ending).
I 100% consider Syanna dying as the good ending, because it's the one where you don't have to fight Detlaff, and therefore Regis doesn't end up being hunted for the rest of his (immortal) life.
@@little_valkyrie That's the interesting thing with the Witcher, there is no ending that is 100% good.
I mean, if the Dutchess doesn't want to believe my advice about the sister I've been hanging with a lot lately and who she hasn't seen in years, then that's her business. It seemed like the most thematically fitting end to a story about fairy tales going wrong (or never actually having been right to begin with).
Dragon age inquisition taught me this lesson majorly. Having no prior experience of the games I did some weird choices in the beginning (darn those choices where the wording makes the outcome unclear). Spent the rest of the game trying to get lelianas good ending only to have it fail in the end due ti one of my first choices.
The worst I ever got screwed over by a choice was in Phantasmagoria. I didn't buy the cross in chapter four so I couldn't beat the end of the game.
I immediately thought of The Immortal (NES/Genesis) where missing a potentially missable item early in the game (I think like level 3 or something?) made the final boss unbeatable. But you weren't given any indication that you needed that item. You were also not given any indication upon progressing past that point that the game was now unwinnable. You'd happily play through the rest of the game, get to the final boss, and have no way to kill them without the item.
Man of Medan had soooooo many people mad at the QTEs cos they were too fast. Also, that decompression? If you don't drink beer, getting hit during the game will cause the exact same death at the end.
.... Seriously, what a dick of a game.
Controls like an Irish pub band! That was one of the winning-est lines you folks have ever written. Well played!
Great list but i would have loved to see Darkseed here. Just too many ways to screw yourself over. Like forgetting to put all your belongings under the cell bed when you’re arrested. Of course what was I thinking...?!
Yep this game is insanely unfair. I think one of the things it requires you to do in advance - with no hint you'd need to do it - includes finding an item that only have a 1-4 pixel hitbox and no graphical hint that it's there?