- Video games are a lot of fun — until the game pulls off all the stops and makes you its b****.
In most video games, death is an integral part of the game. The most common reason for a Game Over is the player character dying.
Often, death in games results in at least some frustration. Whether you timed Mario’s jump wrong or dropped a grenade at your own feet in a shooter, dying usually means you failed in some manner.
But there are games that almost seem to want to humiliate the player. They go out of their way to include cruel and unusual death conditions, seemingly for no other reason than to annoy the player.
Here’s a collection of just some of the most humiliating ways you can be killed in video games.
1. Getting Turned into a Chicken (Heretic)
Heretic is a 1994 first-person shooter. Essentially, it’s Doom but it’s fantasy instead of science fiction with demons. And like Doom, it has a primitive four-player multiplayer mode.
But while Doom is all about big guns, Heretic also features a range of magic items. One of them is the Morph Ovum — an enchanted egg that turns whatever it hits into a low-health chicken.
It can be useful when dealing with tough enemies in single-player mode, but it becomes a weapon of mass humiliation in multiplayer. Just imagine your friend tossing an egg at you and walking over to finish your chickenified ass.
But you can turn the humiliation around. The chicken has a very low-damage peck attack, so if your opponent is just barely alive…
2. Succumbing to a Spider Bite (Metal Gear Solid 3)
In Metal Gear Solid 3, the main character Naked Snake goes on a sneaky mission in a fictional Soviet jungle. In that jungle, venomous tarantulas can bite and poison Snake.
Now, jungle survival is a big part of the game, so you could argue this is a welcome touch of realism. But you have to consider Snake’s character to understand why this is so mortifying.
Snake is an incredibly capable covert operative who goes toe-to-toe with lightning-spewing Soviet generals, invisible knife fighters, and a straight-up ghost. His dying from a spider bite is just a bit anticlimactic.
3. Removing Your Operating System (NieR Automata)
In NieR Automata, the player character is an android, an artificial human. In other words, you’re basically a robot — a machine.
To function, the android needs an operating system, which is stored on your OS Chip. As part of gameplay, you enhance your character by adding and removing various customization chips.
The thing is, your OS Chip isn’t locked in place. It’s a chip like any other, so you can unplug it — and die immediately.
4. Using the Dud Club (Battlefield 1)
Battlefield 1 is a first-person shooter with a not-so-historically-accurate World War 1 setting. The player classes have various melee weapons that the player can customize with skins.
One of those skins is the Dud Club, which replaces your blunt weapon with a dud grenade. But the grenade might not be so dud after all — it can explode on impact, killing your opponent and you.
The thing is, the Dud Club was introduced in a paid expansion. It also requires some effort to make it through the in-game crafting system.
So, you can pay real money and spend hours grinding in the game to get this weapon — only for it to randomly kill you. Sounds rewarding.
5. Pressing the Don’t Touch Me Button (Lobotomy Corp.)
Lobotomy Corporation is a horror-themed base management simulator. You control a facility housing various supernatural entities while trying to keep them from slaughtering all of your staff.
One of the entities, or “Abnormalities,” is a big red button with a clear “DON’T PRESS THIS” sign. It can randomly appear in one of your containment cells.
The button doesn’t do anything on its own, but you can command your underlings to press it. If you do, congratulations — you just killed every human being in your facility.
Don’t say you weren’t warned.
6. Getting Poked (Worms Series)
Worms is a famous video game series about teams of cute little earthworms murdering each other with imaginative weapons. The game includes such famous WMDs as the Holy Hand Grenade, exploding donkey, and the Super Sheep.
And then there’s the Prod. A worm using the Prod gently pokes another, causing no damage but forcing the poked worm to move slightly.
Now, consider getting poked while standing at the edge of a cliff overlooking a minefield… When playing with friends, the Prod is a great way to ensure you won’t have friends once the game’s over.
7. Riding the Snake (Getting Over It)
Getting Over It (with Bennett Foddy) is a bizarre indie game where you control a naked man stuck in a pot trying to climb a mountain using a sledgehammer. The game is infamous for its absolutely sadistic difficulty.
Now, about halfway up the mountain, you’ll encounter a snake that you can grab and ride. But around the snake’s neck hangs a sign warning you not to do that.
There’s no way to die in Getting Over It, so technically riding the snake doesn’t count as a death. But it does take you all the way back to the beginning of the game.
You’ve probably spent hours to reach the snake, and since the game has no save function, all that effort is now wasted. And you have no one to blame but yourself — after all, the game told you not to ride the snake.
8. Mauled by Chickens (Zelda Series)
Nintendo’s legendary Legend of Zelda series has many recurring themes, characters, and locations between the various games. Among them are regular, everyday chickens.
You can attack the chickens, but they never die or fight back. You can just keep whacking the poor fowl and it can’t do anything about it.
And then you hear the clucking.
Bully a chicken enough and the game spawns a horde of chickens around you. And unlike their docile sibling, these chickens can and will hurt you.
Serves you right for abusing a harmless animal.
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