History Main / DeadEndRoom

* ''VideoGame/{{Fallout 3}}'' has an unintentional one in Vault 92 where you can glitch through the floor in the Overseer's Office and end up in an inescapable DisconnectedSideArea of the Living Quarters behind a jammed door.

* In the ''VideoGame/{{Marathon}}'' scenario ''Infection'', there are false exits on some levels that lead you to "Burn Like That Son of Aaaaah...", which consists solely of an elevator lowering you into a LavaPit with enemies firing at you from the windows on all sides. Another scenario, ''Gemini Station'', has the "Oubliette", where you are sent if you killed Jack Melville, which is a dead-end pit with a [[DescendingCeiling crusher trap]]. The main games also have a few secret rooms that are inescapable if you don't get out before the door closes, such as those on "Smells Like Napalm" and "Blaspheme Quarantine".

* In the ''VideoGame/{{Marathon}}'' scenario ''Infection'', there are false exits on some levels that lead you to "Burn Like That Son of Aaaaah...", which consists solely of an elevator lowering you into a LavaPit with enemies firing at you from the windows on all sides. Another scenario, ''Gemini Station'', has the "Oubliette", where you are sent if you killed Jack Melville, which is a dead-end pit with a [[DescendingCeiling crusher trap]].

* In the ''VideoGame/{{Marathon}}'' scenario ''Infection'', there are false exits on some levels that lead you to "Burn Like That Son of Aaaaah...", which consists solely of an elevator lowering you into a LavaPit with enemies firing at you from the windows on all sides. Another scenario, ''Gemini Station'', has "Oubliette", where you are sent if you killed Jack Melville, which is a dead-end pit with a [DescendingCeiling crusher trap]].

* In the ''VideoGame/{{Marathon}}'' scenario ''Infection'', there are false exits on some levels that lead you to "Burn Like That Son of Aaaaah...", which consists solely of an elevator lowering you into a LavaPit with enemies firing at you from the windows on all sides.

* In the ''VideoGame/{{Marathon}}'' scenario ''Infection'', there are false exits on some levels that lead you to "Burn Like That Son of Aaaaah...", which consists of an elevator lowering you into a LavaPit with enemies firing on you from all sides.

* ''VideoGame/PathwaysIntoDarkness'' has a secret teleporter that sends you to a room full of DemonicSpiders with no exit.

!!Non-video-game examples
[[AC:Film]]
* The titular cube of the ''Film/{{Cube}}'' series is a gigantic series of these. Some are booby-trapped, while others are safe, with almost no way of knowing until it's too late. Escape is made all the more difficult because [[spoiler:the rooms move]]. ''Film/CubeZero'' implies that even if you escape, [[spoiler:the monitors kill you, or worse lobotomize you and throw you back into the Cube]].

[[AC:Literature]]
* In the ''Literature/{{Discworld}}'' novel ''Discworld/AHatFullOfSky'', young witch Tiffany Aching leads the misunderstood but inadvertently lethal creature, the Hiver, through the door of Death, which it craves, but discovers that the Door is one-way only. She has to do some seriously lateral thinking to get round this and return to the living world.

* Subverted in several ''Franchise/StarTrek'' examples, where the protagonists manage to escape by the end of the episode.
** ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration''
*** "The Royale". An away team finds a revolving door on a deserted planet. When they go through, they find themselves trapped in what appears to be an old-style hotel/casino called the Royale. They discover that it is was created by unknown aliens based on an old novel. They can't leave until they figure out how to use the book's plot to discover an exit.
*** "Where Silence Has Lease". The Enterprise ends up trapped inside a black void. Despite all their efforts the crew can find no way to escape. Weird things start to happen to them, and they discover that they're being toyed with by an extremely powerful being called Nagilum.
* In the ''Series/StarTrekVoyager'' episode "Gravity", Tuvok and Paris go through a NegativeSpaceWedgie and end up on a planet in a pocket of space that can be entered but not exited, due to [[AppliedPhlebotinum gravimetric and time distortions]]. Some aliens outside this pocket want to destroy this NegativeSpaceWedgie leading into it, as it has already stranded many of their ships, but the crew of ''Voyager'' do manage to find the ReversePolarity needed to rescue Tuvok and Paris before the aliens can close the pocket for good (which would have collapsed the space inside it).

[[AC:Music]]
* A man encounters a No Exit example when he tries to stay at the title establishment in The Music/{{Eagles}}' "Hotel California".
-->"You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave."
* ''[[Music/ElvisPresley Heartbreak Hotel]]''
* The Four Winds Bar, in the Music/BlueOysterCult's hauntingly evocative ballad ''Astronomy''.

* In the ''Literature/{{Discworld}}'' novel ''A Hat Full of Sky'', young witch Tiffany Aching leads the misunderstood but inadvertently lethal creature, the Hiver, through the door of Death, which it craves, but discovers that the Door is one-way only. She has to do some seriously lateral thinking to get round this and return to the living world.

* ''Wriggler'' on the Spectrum has one in the Hell section.
* ''Dirty Harry'' on the NES has such a room, according to the UnwinnableByDesign page.

* The [=NES=] game based on ''Film/DirtyHarry'' can randomly send the player to a room with no exit and "ha ha!" written on the wall.

** ''Jet Set Willy II'' on the ZXSpectrum also adds "Water Supply". Up is out of reach, and down leads only through "well" ([[RuleOfFunny three times]]) to "Dinking Vater?", which is a dead end, and which in any case will kill you if you haven't got the fall from any height cheat.

* The titular cube of the ''Film/{{Cube}}'' series is a gigantic series of these. Some are booby-trapped, while others are safe, with almost no way of knowing until it's too late. Escape is made all the more difficult because [[spoiler:the rooms move]]. ''Film/CubeZero'' implies that even if you escape, [[spoiler:the monitors kill you, or worse lobotamize you and throw you back into the Cube]].

* ''VideoGame/JetSetWilly'' has one of the oldest examples -- "Entrance to Hades". This is a room where you [[CycleOFHurting just keep falling down, respawning at the top and falling again]] until you run out of lives. If the player enters by a non-standard route, he can stand atop the "DIE MORTAL" letters without being killed.

Usually a subtrope of UnwinnableByDesign (although can also be UnwinnableByMistake or even UnwinnableByInsanity), a Dead End Room is used as a fiendish trap by the game's designers. Dead End Rooms come in two varieties:
* '''No Exit''': The room simply has no exits, or if it has, they only lead back into the same room or into a closed cycle of rooms which connect only to each other, not to the main maze.
* '''All Lethal''': To hammer home the point, everything in the room hurts or kills you when touched, so your game will soon be over anyway even if you don't reset.

Note that a room is All Lethal only if ''everything'' kills you -- if it's only some (or even most) things, as in Entrance to Hades, the room is No Exit.

Another distinction is that No Exit rooms may have some kind of [[SarcasmMode friendly]] label to let you know you're screwed, such as "[[VideoGame/JetSetWilly DIE MORTAL]]"; All Lethal rooms, of course, need no label.

[[AC:No Exit]]

* ''VideoGame/ColossalCave'' has Witt's End, which appears to be No Exit, and traps you if you try to go back west the way you came (or in almost any other direction). Instead you have to keep trying to go north. More insidiously, there's an apparently worthless item (a magazine) you have to drop inside the room (''not'' where you deposit your treasures) to get that LastLousyPoint. Possibly the very first GuideDangIt.

* In ''VideoGame/{{Doom}} II'' [=MAP12=], "The Factory"; the door to the exit room is a yellow-key door outside and a red-key door inside, but ''there is no red key in the level'', so unless one is playing in deathmatch mode or cheating, once inside the only way out is through the exit.

* Several in {{VideoGame/Strife}}; if for example you go to see the Governor after having got the Chalice, he will lock the door and sound the alarm, causing a ZergRush of guards to teleport in (unless it's the registered version and you've completed his two missions, in which case he will simply tell you to get out as usual). A similar thing happens if you walk past the Power Station with the Chalice; you're not locked in, but still overwhelmed.

* Another UnwinnableByMistake scenario is some versions of VideoGame/DukeNukem3D (the four-episode version); if you play [=E4L9=] (Critical Mass) in co-op mode on a version where the bug hasn't been fixed, you had better make sure you do so without dying, or you will be stuck at the start of the level, facing a now-collapsed staircase which you can no longer get past.

[[AC:All Lethal]]
* ''VideoGame/TechnicianTed'' has probably the oldest All Lethal example -- [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin "Down in the Sewerage"]].

!!Non-video-game examples
[[AC:Film]]
* The titular cube of the ''Film/{{Cube}}'' series is a gigantic series of these. Some are booby-trapped, while others are safe, with almost no way of knowing until it's too late. Escape is made all the more difficult because [[spoiler:the rooms move]]. ''Film/CubeZero'' implies that even if you escape, [[spoiler:the monitors kill you, or worse lobotamize you and throw you back into the Cube]].

[[AC:Literature]]
* In the ''Literature/{{Discworld}}'' novel ''A Hat Full of Sky'', young witch Tiffany Aching leads the misunderstood but inadvertently lethal creature, the Hiver, through the door of Death, which it craves, but discovers that the Door is one-way only. She has to do some seriously lateral thinking to get round this and return to the living world.

[[AC: Live-Action TV]]
* Subverted in several ''Franchise/StarTrek'' examples, where the protagonists manage to escape by the end of the episode.
** ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration''
*** "The Royale". An away team finds a revolving door on a deserted planet. When they go through, they find themselves trapped in what appears to be an old-style hotel/casino called the Royale. They discover that it is was created by unknown aliens based on an old novel. They can't leave until they figure out how to use the book's plot to discover an exit.
*** "Where Silence Has Lease". The Enterprise ends up trapped inside a black void. Despite all their efforts the crew can find no way to escape. Weird things start to happen to them, and they discover that they're being toyed with by an extremely powerful being called Nagilum.
* In the ''Series/StarTrekVoyager'' episode "Gravity", Tuvok and Paris go through a NegativeSpaceWedgie and end up on a planet in a pocket of space that can be entered but not exited, due to [[AppliedPhlebotinum gravimetric and time distortions]]. Some aliens outside this pocket want to destroy this NegativeSpaceWedgie leading into it, as it has already stranded many of their ships, but the crew of ''Voyager'' do manage to find the ReversePolarity needed to rescue Tuvok and Paris before the aliens can close the pocket for good (which would have collapsed the space inside it).
* Used occasionally on the game show ''Series/{{Knightmare}}''. If a player took a wrong turn, he could be trapped in a room with no viable exits, and forced to wait until his [[LifeMeter life force]] ran out.
** An "All Lethal" variation was a room which ''appeared'' to be escapable, but contained a huge bomb which exploded before the player could humanly reach an exit.

[[AC:Music]]
* A man encounters a No Exit example when he tries to stay at the title establishment in The Music/{{Eagles}}' "Hotel California".
-->"You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave."
* ''[[Music/ElvisPresley Heartbreak Hotel]]''
* The Four Winds Bar, in the Music/BlueOysterCult's hauntingly evocative ballad ''Astronomy''.

[[AC:RealLife]]
* At London Heathrow Airport Terminal 5, the entrance to the Underground station appears to have been designed on the principle that anyone with a good enough head for heights to fly, is also capable of walking across a translucent glass floor with a clearly-visible 50-foot drop beneath.[[note]]This of course ignores the possibility that the person isn't there to fly, but to transfer to or from one of the many long-distance bus routes that serve the airport.[[/note]] For those who find walking across such a floor psychologically impossible, the escalator down to the Underground is an example of this trope; it does not lead directly to the station, but to a mezzanine floor from which there is no way back up, and where the only way down is to cross one of those glass floors (or to be rescued by a kind employee opening the emergency staircase to allow the person down that way). Since the terminal opened, at least two people have been caught this way.

* ''VideoGame/JetSetWilly'' has one of the oldest examples -- "Entrance to Hades". This is a room where you [[CycleOFHurting just keep falling down, respawning at the top and falling again]] until you run out of lives. It is No Exit rather than All Lethal because, if the player enters by a non-standard route, he can stand atop the "DIE MORTAL" letters without being killed.

* In ''VideoGame/YumeNikki'' and its [[FanSequel fan games]], getting caught by a "chaser" such as a Toriningen will trap you in a dead end where the only way out is waking up. Of course, there's also the infamous Uboa sequence, where you are trapped in the room with him, and contacting him will transport you to another inescapable area.

* The titular cube of the {{Film/Cube}} series is a gigantic series of these. Some are booby-trapped, while others are safe, with almost no way of knowing until it's too late. Escape is made all the more difficult because [[spoiler:the rooms move]]. Cube Zero implies that even if you escape, [[spoiler:the monitors kill you, or worse lobotamize you and throw you back into the Cube]].

* In the ''{{Discworld}}'' novel ''A Hat Full of Sky'', young witch Tiffany Aching leads the misunderstood but inadvertently lethal creature, the Hiver, through the door of Death, which it craves, but discovers that the Door is one-way only. She has to do some seriously lateral thinking to get round this and return to the living world.

Usually a subtrope of UnwinnableByDesign (although can also be UnwinnableByMistake or even UnwinnableByInsanity), a DeadEndRoom is used as a fiendish trap by the game's designers. {{Dead End Room}}s come in two varieties:

* '''No Exit''': the room simply has no exits, or if it has, they only lead back into the same room or into a closed cycle of rooms which connect only to each other, not to the main maze.
* '''All Lethal''': to hammer home the point, everything in the room hurts or kills you when touched, so your game will soon be over anyway even if you don't reset.

Note that a room is only All Lethal if ''everything'' kills you -- if it's only some (or even most) things, as in Entrance To Hades, the room is No Exit.

Another distinction is that No Exit rooms may have some kind of [[SarcasmMode friendly]] label to let you know you're screwed, such as "[[VideoGame/JetSetWilly DIE MORTAL]]"; All Lethal rooms of course need no label.

* ''VideoGame/JetSetWilly'' has one of the oldest examples -- "Entrance To Hades". This is a room where you [[CycleOFHurting just keep falling down, respawning at the top and falling again]] until you run out of lives. It is No Exit rather than All Lethal because, if entered by a non-standard route, one can stand atop the "DIE MORTAL" letters without them killing one.

* In ''[[Videogame/{{Portal2}} Portal 2]]'', while Chell and Weatley are running away from {{GLaDOS}}, the latter opens a room near your escape route and creates a bridge to it [[SchmuckBait while inviting you to go in.]] As soon as you enter it, you're trapped and deadly neurotoxin kills you.

* In the PC {{shareware}} game ''[=MasterSpy=]'' there are several; for example, in "The Underground Railway" are numerous ways to go through a train or turnstile to a sector where [[SchmuckBait none of the ticket machines correspond to any train or turnstile out]], so if you take a ticket you trap yourself.

!!Non-video-game examples

* The titular cube of the {{Film/Cube}} series is a gigantic series of these. Some are booby-trapped, while others are safe, with almost no way of knowing until it's too late. Escape is made all the more difficult due to the fact that [[spoiler: the rooms move.]] Cube Zero implies that even if you escape, [[spoiler: the monitors kill you, or worse lobotamize you and throw you back into the Cube.]]

* In the ''{{Discworld}}'' novel ''A Hat Full Of Sky'', young witch Tiffany Aching leads the misunderstood but inadvertently lethal creature, the Hiver, through the door of Death, which it craves, only to discover the Door is one-way only. She has to do some seriously lateral thinking to get round this and return to the living world.

* In the ''{{Star Trek Voyager}}'' episode "Gravity", Tuvok and Paris go through a NegativeSpaceWedgie and end up on a planet in a pocket of space that can be entered but not exited, due to [[AppliedPhlebotinum gravimetric and time distortions]]. Some aliens outside this pocket want to destroy this NegativeSpaceWedgie leading into it, as it has already stranded many of their ships, but the crew of ''Voyager'' do manage to find the ReversePolarity needed to rescue Tuvok and Paris before the aliens can close the pocket for good (which would have collapsed the space inside it).
* Used occasionally on the game show ''Series/{{Knightmare}}''. If a player took a wrong turn, they could be trapped in a room with no viable exits, and forced to wait until their [[LifeMeter life force]] ran out.

----

Usually a subtrope of UnwinnableByDesign (although can also be UnwinnableByMistake or even UnwinnableByInsanity), a DeadEndRoom is used as a fiendish trap by the game's designers. DeadEndRooms come in two varieties: