Chest Monster / Video Games

Looting chests in a video game isn't a life-or-death situation? The Chest Monster is here to help.

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• The 7th Saga has Tricks. They're some of the hardest enemies in the game when you fight them, and that's saying something. They randomly drop a variety of gemstones, and with some Save Scumming, the player can acquire a hoard of emeralds and sapphires.
• Afterimage:
  • Later areas have Mimics, hostile creatures disguised as treasure chests which will reveal their true forms after being attacked.
  • Mimic Fungus look like the ordinary mushroom springboards that you can jump on at first, but making contact with them causes them to spring up and attack you.
• Alex Kidd: ? blocks in Alex Kidd in Miracle World will sometimes summon the Grim Reaper, who is an Invincible Minor Minion and hard to evade if not scrolled offscreen.
• Ancient Domains of Mystery has traditional mimics. They don't look like chests because you don't generally find stuff in chests, just lying around; so they look like stuff lying around, ie. items on the floor. There are a few ways to recognise one. They used to appear on the map even if you hadn't explored that area again to find them, unlike real items, but that was fixed. They also appear as a random type of item symbol in a random colour, so they often seem quite colourful — most armour and weapons is light grey for metallic, though special attributes on items have made the variety of real items more colourful as well. Finally, even when they don't appear on the map where you can't see them, they appear seemingly out of nowhere when in an area you've already explored; that's not impossible for an item, something could have dropped it there while you were away, but it is unlikely. The best place for them to hide is among the wide variety of stuff in a shop. Then, there are mimic lairs, that look like a shop without a shopkeeper. Every object in such shop is a mimic.
• Piles of coins on the ground in Angband might actually be Creeping Silver Coins, which will come to life and attack you when you try to pick them up. They even show up normally on a Scroll of Treasure Detection. On the bright side, after you kill them, you do actually get the coins.
• Arknights: The third season of Integrated Strategies "Mizuki & Caerula Arbor" introduces locked treasure chests that must be broken open to obtain their loot... and some of those chests are actually Seaborn disguised as treasure chests. Killing the chest Seaborn gives a hefty chunk of change, which is easier said than done due to their high stats.
• Athena has annoying and hard-to-kill flying heads hidden in certain blocks.
• In The Awakened Fate Ultimatum, after the first few dungeons, any treasure chest in the game has the potential to be one of these and they get progressively more powerful. By the end of the game, you'll probably end up having fought quite a lot of them. Especially if you're going for the Trophy for gathering all items, as certain items can only be found in chests, while others have a much better potential to be in chests than dropped by enemies or lying on the ground.
• Hermit Crab Mimics in Backpack Hero pretend to be treasure chests and ambush the unsuspecting player if they stumble upon an "ordinary" chest or use a key on it.
• Baldur's Gate has a single mimic in the entire series. It showed up in the sequel with confusing attacks. The Expansion Pack Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal added the nastier Killer Mimics in the Bonus Dungeon. Baldurs Gate 3 then properly introduced the archetypical mimic as a semi-rare and quite dangerous monster that usually appears alone, but there's one dungeon that contains an entire pack of four in one spot (the real chest is camouflaged nearby). Characters with good Perception can spot them from afar.
• Banjo-Kazooie:
  • The first game has literal Chest Monsters in Treasure Trove Cove.
  • Banjo-Tooie has fake Jinjos called Minjos that start appearing when you reach Witchyworld. They look exactly like the Jinjos, but they will try to attack you if you get near. To add to the confusion, they are often hidden in out-of-the-way places like the regular Jinjos. The methods to tell them apart include:
    • You can shoot eggs at them, and if they budge, die, or get frozen, they're Minjos (the eggs will pass through real Jinjos).
    • Minjos will respawn in areas and can change color when you exit and reenter the room; the locations of the various Jinjo colors is randomized at the start of the game, but they won't change colors once you see them.
    • Minjos will NEVER be in Jinjo spots that require a puzzle solved to obtain ^note  You may find a Minjo in a hidden room in one of the corners or in the middle, but not in specific Jinjo spots such as behind a hot waterfall in a small cubby that requires a specific set of steps to reach (one example is in Grunty Industries; there's a Jinjo spot high in the tower that requires the climbing shoes and is behind a timed door; Jinjos in spots like that WILL be real).
    • Once you pick up all of a Jinjo's color, the Minjos will still use that color.
    • A couple Minjos appear in areas where Jinjos are entirely absent, including Cauldron Keep and a spaceship that won't be accessible after a certain point.
  • Tooie also has the boss Mingy Jongo, the robotic "Crafty Shaman Impersonator" who appears in one of the two skulls of the friendly shaman Mumbo Jumbo in the last major world (one of them's red, the other is blue, and their locations are randomized each game; both must be visited if one wants to obtain all the Jiggys since Mingy is a boss that has one of the world's Jiggys). He's distinct from the original because he drops the genuine article's Hulk Speak. Must be seen to believed. Some methods you can use to tell the difference between the two include:
    • Mingy's hut has a Jinjo in it, while Mumbo's has a Minjo (itself a decoy trap enemy).
    • There is a fire going in Mumbo's, but not in Mingy's.
    • The words "Mumbo's Skull" will appear on the screen when you enter Mumbo's Skull; no wording will appear on screen in Mingy's hut.
    • When you go upstairs, if you see Honeycomb Health powerups on the windowsills in the hut, it's indicating that the room is a battlefield.
    • When you entered Mumbo's hut in the first game, he was always asleep. Mingy has retained this trait, but with one exception at Mayahem Temple, Mumbo hasn't.
• Baraduke has the blue "Octy" monsters release a treasure capsule which randomly contains nothing, a gem for score, a friendly alien for the bonus games, a weapon upgrade and an angry Pacmanesque purple monster. Alas, it's required to touch the capsules to open them, always prompting you to run away after doing so!
• Bendy in Nightmare Run: In the promotional art, Bendy tries to plunder from a living chest named Chester. In the game, Chester is the boss for the "Bendy Walks the Plank" episode. Justified in that Bendy's cartoon world features many sentient objects.
• Beyond Oasis:
  • The game features these. They're fortunately easy to detect due to them loudly snapping their mouths all the time.
  • Its prequel, Legend of Oasis, contains a chest monster named Tokipin. It acts as a faux-seventh spirit (there are only six, in canon).
• The Binding of Isaac:
  • While shops usually contain items to purchase, they may instead lock you into a battle with one of the mini-bosses themed around the Seven Deadly Sins — which is Greed or Super Greed, fittingly enough, who look incredibly similar to the motionless shopkeepers to boot. Especially infuriating since there's no way to tell if a shop contains Greed or not (beyond the fact that after fighting Greed once, they won't appear in a shop again), though you still have to spend a key to get in. Not only that, but they can appear in secret rooms as well. Killing them will reward you with either a number of coins or the Steam Sale item.
  • The Afterbirth+ DLC features actual trap chests, which will spring spikes when you get too close to them. Touching them will hurt you, though it will open the chest and reveal the goodies inside, though they're the same as regular brown chests. They're fairly easy to spot since they have holes on the front, though this wasn't the case in earlier updates to the game, where it was almost impossible to tell them and regular chests apart unless you were playing close attention. Repentance made them harder to tell apart from normal chests again, since now the only indication is a small blood spatter on the corner.
  • Repentance adds in Haunted Chests, which look like pale white chests. When you get close enough to it, a Polty pops out and throws the chest at you. You do get whatever goodies were in the chest for free, but you have to fight the ghost now before you can leave the room. Oh yeah, and you have to unlock Haunted Chests... by beating one of the hardest bosses in the game as a Joke Character. This game loves to troll its players.
• Blaster Master Zero II: Stranga is full of enemies disguised as health/energy pickups that'll suddenly sprout limbs to approach you when you get close. You can recognize them from real pickups if you notice they don't glow like regular pickups. There's also a few Treacherous Checkpoints that spring up to shoot a nasty beam at you.
• Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night Mimics appear as Spiders with a treasure chest for their lower abdomens. There is also a large slot machine that attacks with more traditional teeth.
• Bloody Spell has a malevolent female spirit hiding inside a (small) chest, who pops out the moment you investigate it. Said spirit can be killed by your sacred sword, and is the only one of her kind to appear the entire game.
• Boktai features mimics as enemies. They damage you when you try and open them and start hopping after you. They're rather hard to kill when they first appear, but you can blow their cover by attacking or using a See-All-Nut (which makes them glow green).
• Bonk: Some of the Florets contain "Venus Bonk Traps". You can tell a fake one from the real ones because they don't breathe.
• Borderlands series:
  • Borderlands (2008):
    • There's a literal example in the Loot Goon from The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned, a Tankenstein with a red gun chest on his back. Killing him lets you loot the chest.
    • In a more straight example, in The Secret Armory of General Knoxx some lootable weapons chests, dumpsters, etc, have midgets hidden away inside them.
  • Borderlands 2 adds a more traditional and horrifying version in Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep with the Mimics, who disguise themselves as unasumming chests who attack upon being interacted with. These mimics reappear in the spinoff Tiny Tina's Wonderlands.
• BoxxyQuest: The Gathering Storm:
  • Gold is called Karma, and is often found laying around in piles for you to collect. Some of these turn out to be Karma Chameleons, vicious monsters that like to ambush treasure hunters, and drop a ton of gold when killed.
  • Later on, in one of the Bonus Dungeons, there’s an encounter with an utterly massive Chest Monster called the Hateful Reliquary, which grows mechanical spider legs and hungrily chases Catie down a very long hallway.
• Brain Lord features quite a few Chest Monsters, but they almost always hang out next to actual treasure chests and have a slightly different palette, so if the player is paying attention they should be able to pick them out fairly easily.
• Brave Hero Yuusha has the Boxed Horror of the Desert Tower, as a blue chest, and defeating it also has the chest contain an item.
• Breath of Fire has a Chest Monster as a recurring enemy named "Mimic", which is a living, breathing mook chest. In a more straight example, Breath of Fire I and Breath of Fire II have actual trap chests with a variety of effects (poison, damage or even reduce HP to 1) who are inflicted on whoever is at the head of the team.
• Bubble Bobble: There are literal Chest Monsters in the Treasure Desert world of Bubble Symphony. Which are also named Mimic.◊
• Bug: Some "mystery" balls will contain enemies or hazards instead of Power Ups.
• Casper the Friendly Ghost: Casper: A Haunting 3D Challenge :
  • Some chests have Fatso hiding in them. You have to be ready to quickly get out of the way to avoid harm.
  • There are also fake vents Stinky hides in, waiting to give you a "Smell-o-gram!" These vents disappear along with him.
  • In the basement, Stretch's arm will reach out as you go past certain places. Usually where there's an item to pick up. He's the hardest one to avoid, as well as the scariest, given the atmosphere.
• In Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, hijacked Care Packages are rigged to explode when the next player tries to open it. Black Ops players can also do this with the Hacker/Engineer perk. Outbreak mode from Call of Duty: Zombies has the player loot many supply crates scattered around for all types of useful things, naturally. The problem is that this game also introduces Mimics: walking, talking Schmuck Bait. They can pretend to be those crates, and they don't automatically trigger like they do when they pretend to be support streaks or weapons. Enjoy the Paranoia Fuel!
• The 2D Castlevanias have a variety of such monsters, often called mimics.
  • Vampire Killer had trap candles that released slimes when whipped.
  • Castlevania: Symphony of the Night had a fake Save Point. In one room is a real save point (which, in this game, are coffins) and, just across the hall, is another room that looks like a different-colored save point, but will in fact trigger a battle with a succubus.
  • Castlevania: Circle of the Moon featured trick candles that would fall out after being whipped. Unusual that they didn't attack you, had tons of HP, and an alarmingly LOW drop rate for some of the best cards in the game, and they only appear in Boss rooms of Bosses you've beaten three bosses ago.
  • Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow featured bags of money that would damage you if you touched them, revealing a laughing skull.
  • Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow featured a typical Chest Monster, along with normal chests full of coins early on.
  • Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin was somewhat odd in having chest mimics... but no chests.
  • Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia has fake chests that are even worse due to the abundance of chests in the game compared to other games. It's also difficult (if not impossible) to distinguish them by looks from actual wooden chests until one tries to open them. They become hilarious when you play Albus Mode. In that mode, all treasure chests are removed except for two kinds: fancy chests, which hold life, magic and heart increasers... and Mimics, now the only wooden chests in the game. It's pretty easy to avoid them in this mode, needless to say.
  • Castlevania: Harmony of Despair features wooden chest mimics that slide across the floor quickly and usually can't be killed with just one attack.
• Cave Story:
  • The game does it with a killer door in the first dungeon. Not fun to be killed by, but tons of more fun to see your friends not notice its evil red eyes and try to walk through it.
  • Cave Story has unused data for a literal Chest Monster, as well as animate versions of jars and Save Points.
• Chrono Cross and Chrono Trigger have fake save point monsters.
  • In Chrono Trigger, at least one other save point triggers a battle because the monsters nearby hear the "ding".
  • Chrono Cross also has the Boxer Boys in Viper Manor. They impersonate treasure chests, and at the beginning of battle, give the player the option of attacking the Big Boxer or the Li'l Boxer. Depending on which you choose, they will either give you treasure or attack you.
• Clicker Guild: There are Mimics that appear as chests with a curved top, long, sharp teeth, and an elongated tongue. Shadow Eater is a more advanced version.
• The Mirage Tanks in the Command & Conquer: Red Alert games are a player-produced example. When stationary they disguise themselves as trees (and in 3, various other objects like signs and fences). Their cannons are deadly against vehicles.
• Commando (Capcom): Some of the secret bunkers in the NES port contain death traps such as snake pits or gas chambers.
• Contact: The final dungeon contains Chest Monsters that sprout limbs, pull out a sword from inside of them, and then proceed to inflict beatings.
• In Crusaders of the Lost Idols, the Treasure Box drops more gold than regular enemies. In "Captain Ghostbeard's Greed", the Mimic and Gold Mimic appear, and in the "Cursed Treasure" objective, an animated chest follows the party.
• Crypt Of The Necrodancer has not only chest mimics, but also shrine, crate, and wall mimics.
• Crystalis has chest monsters that look just like regular loot chests, except for when you approach them they begin jumping all over the screen and try to poison you.
• Dark Cloud and Dark Chronicle have Mimics, who suddenly sprout arms, legs and a tongue when you try to open them. There are also King Mimics, which are bigger and stronger.
• Dark Souls, as you would expect, has Mimics hiding throughout the world. If you try to open a Mimic, it'll pull you inside its mouth and chew on you, most likely killing you in the process. You can tell them apart from regular chests by either the position of the chain on the right side (in the first and third games) or whether they have visible locks or not (in the second). You could also just smack every chance you see, just to be safe, but in the second game it is possible to destroy wooden chests along with the item inside, so this is inadvisable (though they usually won't break if you only hit them once, and metal chests can't break at all). Attacking a Mimic will cause it to abandon all pretense and actively come after you. An active Mimic is extremely silly looking, running around on its long, skinny legs and making some of the goofiest noises you'll hear in a Souls game. However, they are nonetheless very deadly foes and those legs can easily football-kick your head clean off in one hit. They also have a very fast flying kick attack they will use at a distance, and staying up close puts you in range of their grab attack where they, again, shove you inside their mouth and eat you. Fortunately, there is a way to get the items they contain without killing them that the games never tell you about. If you hit a Mimic with a Lloyd's Talisman/Undead Hunter Charm, it will put it to sleep and you can safely grab its item without it ever noticing. Further, the effect stuns the Mimic in place for a couple seconds, allowing you to get damage in. They are also uniquely weak to spells that just damage anything in the vicinity, as the game won't consider it as an attack by the player.
• Dead Space features breakable loot containers which, on very rare occasions, contain several swarmers. This example is far less effective than most on this page, especially since the containers are opened via stomping.
• Deepwoken post-Verse 2 has a random chance for a chest in the Aratel sea to be rigged with monsters from the Depths, and as two players found out, has a rare chance of spawning a Nautilodaunt.
• Delve Deeper has Lumber Mimics, which disguise themselves as treasure chests and then attack when your dwarfs try to pick them up. They have relatively low HP, but high attack power.
• Diablo and Diablo II had destructible barrels with a high chance of containing an enemy skeleton instead of loot. Diablo III carries on the tradition, as well as having skeletons hide under lootable floor tiles and who knows what else.
• Dicey Dungeons:
  • Alongside the standard Mimics that masquerade as chests, there are also animate Rotten Apples. Both are visually identical to their helpful counterparts on the map screen, but the tooltip text will give them away if you hover the mouse over them. You might still find yourself accidentally walking into them, regardless.
  • Exaggerated with the Mimic Rule in the Bonus Round, where it makes everything on the map look like a treasure chest, items, shops, and enemies alike.
• dgeneration: C/Generations are shape-shifting monsters that disguise themselves as everyday objects like chairs, power-ups, and the people that you're supposed to be rescuing. They're also immune to your primary weapon.
• The Doom II mod Nuts 2 has a level that features a group of apparent megaspheres (200% armor/health refills) which turn out to actually be monsters with a machine-gun attack. And standing nearby are apparent dangerous monsters which turn out to be simple cardboard cutouts.
• Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest has Klobbers, which disguise themselves as regular barrels. The most common type are green Klobbers that just knock you around, but a rarer yellow variant will steal banana bunches from you if they bump into you. Rarer still, and thankfully so, are the grey ones with red eyes who will steal extra lives from you if they bump into you. An even rarer enemy called Kabooms are Klobbers that hide in TNT barrels. Thankfully, you'll most likely only see Kabooms in the optional Lost World levels.
• In Dragon Slayer, treasure chests would sometimes contain Shinigami that followed you around and prevented spellcasting.
• Dragon Age: Origins has a couple of these in the ruined temple during the Urn of Sacred Ashes quest. Glass phylacteries may also count, if the player has never encountered one before.
• Dragon Quest:
  • The series started the idea of always being a chest. There's usually at least two variants, the Cannibox and the Mimic. To the bane of players, they both have astoundingly high damage, very high critical hit rates, and the Mimic can cast Beat/Whack and Defeat/Thwack, which can instantly kill one or all of your party members, respectively. The Cannibox is even the main page image.
  • Dragon Quest V continued the trend with monsters disguised as jars
  • Dragon Quest VII went full ham with mimic monsters, having the typical chest mimic, the aformentioned jar mimic, but also wardrobe mimics, well mimics, book mimics (hidden on regular bookshelves), and even wine bottle mimics. If you were going to interact with someone, one has to take into account just about anything could jump at you
  • Dragon Quest VIII has a Chest Monster boss.
  • Dragon Quest X introduced a monster called a Chest Mimic, which disguised as a clothes dresser.
  • Dragon Quest XI introduced a new variant with slot machine mimics. In a few areas slot machines which act similarly to treasure chests but filled with casino tokens appear. The first few of these are legitimate slot machines but the mimic form is mixed in soon after.
  • Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime features bog-standard Mimics, but by virtue of the game's monster recruitment system, has a Mimic that will join your tank crew, where you can have it mimic a chest and wait to spring upon some poor sap who thinks it's ammo and tries to steal it. It's unfortunately not very effective, since it can take a while to trigger (and is downright useless if the enemy has no interest in stealing your ammo unless you're willing to carry the mimic all the way to the enemy tank), and it's even worse against human players since chests make for poor regular ammo and are unlikely to be bothered with.
• Dragon's Dogma features the Maneater, a very powerful snake-like creature that emerges from certain chests. It can swallow characters whole and cast instant-death magic. Thankfully, they randomly appear, but only in certain chests, so a savvy player can be prepared or simply avoid them once she knows where they lurk.
• Dream of Mirror Online had Toxic Trunks in the Inn Basement; although it was pretty clear that they were not treasure chests and actually were alive (they even wandered around their spawn area), they could be nasty to those not prepared or high-leveled enough to fight them; as the name suggests, they could poison you and even lower your defense. Couple that with their tendency to gang up on you, and it's enough to make any low-level player run for their lives.
• Dubloon: Early in, you get to a room where to get the key, you have to open 5 treasure chests in correct order. Opening in wrong order results in a battle with a skeleton. Also, the final boss is a literal Chest Monster.
• Duke Nukem and Duke Nukem II had chests that, while not technically monsters, had bombs inside that exploded after the chest was shot. In Duke Nukem II, these could be distinguished from chests containing health items by walking: if you passed in front of the chest, it contained health; if you passed behind it, it was a bomb. Careful level design made this nearly impossible to notice until it was revealed in the hints file for the registered version.
• Duke Nukem 3D features a variation: the trashcans throughout the game can be broken and they will provide you with power-ups. But later in the game, some of the trashcans contain hidden monsters, and there's no way of telling which ones do and which ones don't until you smash them open...
• Dungeon Keeper 2 has a trap called the jack-in-the-box. Disguised as a magical item, your imps will try to take it to your dungeon, when it explodes.
• Dungeon Siege 2 had Mimics that were nightmarish. They were uncommon but unbelievably dangerous. Luckily they also dropped a bunch of good loot when defeated.
• Ecco the Dolphin: The poison clams look like healing clams, but have a nasty surprise when activated-it's like being hit by the other enemies.
• The Enchanted Cave has mimics that look like a goblin hiding in a golden artifact chest, with only a pair of suspicious eyes peeking from under the lid when not attacking. Notably, they appear relatively late on and in large numbers at once, making it likely to confuse them for Suspicious Videogame Generosity if you're not careful or just that greedy.
• Enter the Gungeon expands upon this trope a bit.
  • The aptly named Mimic is a Chest Monster that can be randomly encountered throughout the game, though finding one is rare. It replaces ordinary chests, and looks exactly like them, save for the occasional movements and lack of a keyhole. When interacted with or shot at, they reveal themselves to be mimics, and proceed to attack the player. Mimics are notoriously hard to kill — their high HP coupled with erratic movement patterns and high rates of fire make them difficult targets. If the player moves into a room outside of the one which the mimic was found in, it will pursue them. Additionally, the "quality" of a chest affects Mimics as well — the higher the quality of a chest that a Mimic... mimics, the stronger the Mimic will be. Mimics that are red or black are particularly nasty as opposed to brown, blue, or green Mimics, by virtue of having a different, more dangerous attack pattern, and trading their magnums for miniguns.
  • The Expansion Pack adds item pedestal mimics (which always drop the item they display) and wall mimics (which can drop minor pickups and items). The chests in the Resourceful Rat's Lair can be Mimics as well, which have a different attack pattern than regular chest Mimics — including firing a missile when provoked. Unlike other Mimics, they drop the same every items - a piece of the Resourceful Rat's gear — in every playthrough.
  • A Mimic Gun also exists, which has a small chance of replacing any gun that you pick up. Once you pick it up, you can't switch to your other guns, and it actively tries to harm you by turning any enemy bullets it passes through into a more damaging variant. The only way to get rid of it is by dealing enough damage to enemies with it or picking up an ammo pickup, after which it will transform back into the gun that it was mimicking.
  • Finally, there’s a boss called the Door Lord, which is the door leading to the boss arena that turns out to be a Mimic as well. It’s very rare to encounter one of them.
• Etrian Odyssey V: Beyond the Myth: There's a chest in the locked area of the second stratum that, when opened, triggers a guaranteed blindside by a pair of Megavolt Marmots, which are identical to the Volt Squirrels native to the stratum but significantly more powerful. You have to trigger this chest and beat the enemies for a sidequest item, so it's a necessary misfortune.
• Fallout 4: Far Harbor has Anglers, who mimic Lure Weed plants when submerged. Fortunately, you have VATS to help you spot them.
• Fatal Frame has items that can be picked up marked by a glimmering point of light. During the first three games, they turn out to be very helpful in finding useful items that would otherwise be hidden in the dark environment. In the fourth, Tecmo pulls one of these where a ghostly hand grabs the character's wrist and requires the player to shake the Wiimote to get loose.
• Fate has Mimics similar to those in Torchlight, which masquerade as large treasure chests until you get close, and are completely impervious to magic and elemental attacks. However, they can be distinguished from actual large chests as they are smaller and can have their cover blown by ranged attacks. Sometimes, Mimics show up in clusters of three or four.
• Final Fantasy: These are sometimes called "enemy ambush" or "monster in a box", and most of them do give you items upon their defeat, often very valuable ones or Potions.
  • Although there weren't any Chest Monsters in the original Final Fantasy, there are certain spots near some treasure chests that will initiate enemy encounters the moment you step on them. While a bane the first time you encounter them, as they are pretty powerful the first time you go through a dungeon, because they are always encountered by stepping on those tiles, you can use them to level grind later.
  • Final Fantasy II is the first game in the series to introduce these. One memorable Chest Monster encounter pits you against Palette Swaps of a Demonic Spider species of enemy...that proceed to cast Cure on your party.
  • Final Fantasy IV has the box with the three Mad Ogres in it or the four Malboros. IV also has the Door monster, which only appears in one dungeon, but it's a Demonic Spider, which deals massive damage and transforms into a Manticore upon defeat^note Unless you figure out the trick to them: The Trap Door has two actions, a targeting action, in which it reveals the party member it's going to use its attack on, and an instant kill spell. The instant kill spell can be bounced back with Reflect, and thanks to the targeting action, you know exactly which party member to cast it on. Unfortunately, because of the Active-Time Battle system, you have literal seconds to cast Reflect before the instant-death spell launches - not enough time unless you already had Reflect cued up before the targeting action..
  • Final Fantasy V had a monster guarding the Save Point in The Very Definitely Final Dungeon, right before the final boss.
  • Final Fantasy V has the most infamous chest monster in the series, if not gaming in general - Shinryu, a Superboss who guards the strongest sword in the game. Neo Shinryu, an even stronger version of Shinryu that was added in the re-releases, also hides in a chest.
  • While Final Fantasy VI generally has its monsters hiding in boxes (even when its monsters are much too large to reasonably fit), one optional miniboss triggered by a chest is identified as an "angler welk," a gigantic snail-like creature with a chest attached to it like the glowing portion of an anglerfish.
  • Final Fantasy VII has a few, but in several locations.
    • The first is in the GI Cave's first area. There are four caves with rocks in them. The cave that is the second closest to the right of the room (with dialogue of "An odd-shaped rock") opens the way to the next room. Break any of the others and GI Specters descend on you.
    • An infamous example is in the Shinra Mansion in Nibelheim. There's a safe in one of the second floor rooms that requires a timed combination pattern to open (the clues to the numbers and their order are in various rooms in the house; one of them is written in invisible ink as a fourth option on the note that alerts you to the safe). When you attempt to open the safe, Cloud says, "I have a bad feeling about this" (just to clue you in to save and heal outside town before doing anything stupid) and if you persist, you then have 30 seconds to get the four-number combination right (you'll fail if you accidentally scroll past a correct number). Opening the safe unleashes the Lost Number boss on AVALANCHE (and this is one of the contenders for That One Boss), but if you survive, you win Red XIII's Ultimate Limit Break from the boss (it likely is too early to teach him since he needs to know all his other Limit Breaks), the Odin Materia that falls out of the safe when it opens, and a key to a side room in the basement prior to Sephiroth, where one of the "secret" characters, Vincent, is hiding.
    • Toward the end of the Ancient Temple, you can alter a giant clock hand to go to two of twelve doors. Doors #1 & 3 lead to actual Chest Monster encounters if you open them (a Jemnezmy and a pair of toxic frogs for Door #1, and two 8 Eye enemies with strong absorption spells for Door #3; both can be taken out with Bio). If, while on the clock, you get hit by the second hand, you fall into a room with Cloud's Nail Bat weapon and where two Ancient Dragons sandwich you; after killing them, the door out of here takes you a ways back in the Temple; it's possible to fight the dragons repeatedly.
  • Final Fantasy Tactics A2 has chests that sometimes are Mimics (White Gloves monsters) in disguise. They even get a surprise attack on the person that tried to open the chest. Afterwards, they act like a normal enemy and drop loot, which is usually more valuable than the potion or antidote commonly found in those chests (the more valuable chests look different and are never Mimics). They aren't much of a threat either, as they don't have a lot of health and are vulnerable to magic.
  • Final Fantasy VIII has an NPC monster in Esthar. It looks like an injured soldier with a darker palette, but when you talk to it, it giggles madly and transforms into a giant flying demon.
  • Mimics also make an appearance in Final Fantasy IX as 'monster-in-the-box' enemies (of course, this time the monster is the box).
  • Final Fantasy X:
    • The Omega Ruins occasionally pits you in Random Encounters with Mimics hidden in treasure chests, which if stolen from will reveal one of their four possible forms. Oh, and if this happens, you can't escape from battle until you defeat it. (They do drop a lot of Gil though. And you can safely Mug them; if it's not a real treasure, it'll still die before becoming a Mimic).
    • There are also loose treasure chests in several areas, four in each. To get the treasures they have, you must open them in the right order. Open the wrong chest and you get forced into a fight, and if you are able to prevail, all the other chests disappear.
    • Earlier in the Al Bhed's Home base, you have the option of making any chest you open be a Chest Monster. When you check a chest in this building, you get four choices of what you want to see in the chest written in Al Bhed, and one of the choices is actually Al Bhed for "Fiend" (the monsters in this FF universe; if you picked up enough primers, which are saved to the game's hard drive rather than the file, the words will be translated so you can see what your choices are). If you decide you want "Fiend" in the chest, ye shall receive...
    • In the Chamber of the Stolen Fayth area near the end of the game, a Random Encounter enemy called Magic Urn can be found. It is an urn with a purple humanoid alien creature in it that gives you items if you strike the right eye symbol on the urn. If you hit the wrong eye, however, it explodes with a powerful blast that will likely take out at least one of your party members and gravely injure everyone else. The items you got will also go away if this happens. Which eye is the right one is completely random.
  • Final Fantasy XI has treasure chests and coffers that are normally opened with Interchangeable Antimatter Keys. Thieves have a special ability to open them without a key, but that creates a chance that the chest/coffer will turn out to be a mimic. There's also a boss battle where you're confronted with three chests. One is an actual chest while the other two are mimics. Choose the real chest and you get the loot without a fight. Try to open one of the mimics and you'll have to fight both of them (or give up on the treasure and beat feet).
  • Final Fantasy XII, in any area where the treasure chests looked like round pots with four metal legs, some of them would of course turn out to be actual mimics. The game's monster lore provided a long, creative backstory regarding their creation. And then there are the "Crystalbugs", three monsters disguised as Save Points, which were impervious to all elements and attacked using high-level spells, but fortunately left actual Save Points behind upon their defeat.
  • Final Fantasy XIV:
    • Treasure coffers in Hullbreaker Isle that can transform into a Mimic which can do a lot of damage and inflict Poison on the party. You have no choice but the fight them since they drop stone tablets that are needed to open a door.
    • Palace of the Dead has Mimics that can randomly spawn when you try to open a coffer. They still hit hard, but they can also inflict Accursed Pox, which causes damage over time, reduces your strength, and disables your HP from regenerating naturally for 10 minutes. You can also get a minion version of the Mimic that is harmless and follows you around like other minions.
    • Heaven-On-High has the Quivering Coffer, which gets stronger and more dangerous as the floor count gets higher, and which can be found opening any non-gold chest (and rooms of monsters can be turned into them using a pomander of alteration on the previous floor). Up to floor 40, a single Quivering Coffer is not a problem. Beyond it, their incredibly high defense even against high-damage DPS jobs and their equally high attack power that can almost one-shot a DPS and knock off half of a tank's HP bar can end any solo run in seconds.
• Forever Kingdom has two different variants. One sort where a monster comes out of the chest and tries to attach itself to you, causing some sort of status ailment, and another where after opening, the chest will explode, which not only damages the player, but also causes him (or her) to drop all the money that they had been carrying.
• In Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade, two of the treasure chests in a Gaiden chapter contain fire Mamkutes.
• Flight Rising has a yearly event featuring chest mimics that attack the player in the Coliseum. While they appear as regular mobs enemies in the Coliseum, upon defeat they will sometimes drop a regular chest which can be opened for a chance at rare items, including a mimic familiar of the player's own.
• For the King has Mimics that impersonate treasure chests in dungeons and clam chests in the ocean. They can be exposed with an Identify scroll; otherwise, they initiate combat when you try to open them and have a special attack that destroys parts of the player character's equipment.
• Gauntlet has chests throughout the game that you open using keys you pick up along your way. Most of these chests contain food, money, or power-ups. But some of them have a ticking bomb inside them that cause damage to you if you are anywhere near it when it goes off. It also ruins any food or items that are in its range when it explodes, so if you set on off before you collect all the useful things around it you basically have two choices: Run around and collect the things and take the damage, or run away from the area and say goodbye to the items but take no damage. However, these chests are always in the same places, so if you have completed the level before and you remember which ones have bombs in them, you can avoid them or use them to your advantage to attack nearby monsters.
• Gems of War: The Mimic◊, which looks like a treasure chest, but the lid opening is actually its maw.
• Genshin Impact: Whopperflowers will occasionally disguise themselves as regular plants on the overworld and attack if you try to pick them. Two things give them away: the fake plants don't sparkle like any real item, and the icon next to their name is the speech bubble used for NPCs and signs instead of the item itself. They also do this in a Liyue Archon Quest, where the Traveler is asked by Zhongli to sing to wild Glaze Lilies to harvest them and ends up fighting a trio of Whopperflowers that they disturbed.
• Ghosts 'n Goblins has many of these, including living treasure chests, beartraps, and magicians who turned Arthur into a frog or other creatures. Maximo: Ghosts to Glory has mimics that look like treasure chests with giant teeth and wizards hiding in chests who will turn you into an old man or baby if they hit you with their spells.
• In God of War (PS4), Kratos can occasionally encounter undead enemies lying inside caskets that usually contain treasures.
• In Golden Axe Warrior, the later labyrinths have a few treasure chest monsters that try to kill you, though they're not very subtle about it.
• In Golden Sun, the Mimics actually drop some good items, so it is worth it to engage them even if you are aware they are traps. When first encountered, their huge well of HP is rather annoying, as it takes forever to kill them. This tends to balance out later in the game, when you can kill them rather quickly and easily.
• Granblue Fantasy features two types of chest / loot monsters as listed in the trope:
  • The players can encounter enemies known as "Mimics" in the first wave of Maniac-difficulty Showdowns and the Arcarum. They appear as the typical "monstrous chest" type and reward the player with 8 chests of a specific rarity from bronze, silver, or gold depending on the mimic's color.
  • In Arcarum, other enemies can hide from chests and will ambush the player when opened, resulting in a "Do or Die" battle. Some text descriptions of chests acquired in the map often provide a hint if a certain chest is suspicious.
• Half-Life had its own variation, a single first-aid station out of dozens throughout the game will explode if one tries to use it. It is conspicuous because it's sparking, but the temptation to heal up (or top off) after an intense battle just previously oft proves too great.
• Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets PC game: The occasional chest will turn out to contain Peeves the Poltergeist instead of useful items. This will not happen until the Skurge Challenge, though, where you're being tested on a spell that can be used to scare him off, so it could be considered part of the training. There's also a gnome in a chest in the Forbidden Forest level.
• Hollow Knight:
  • A sign in Crystal Peak directs you to a Save Bench, but it turns out to be occupied by the dungeon's boss, the Crystal Guardian.
  • There is also the Grub Mimic, which attacks you once you release it instead of happily burrowing into the ground. Most of these are located near actual captured Grubs and can be differentiated from them by hitting them with the Dream Nail.
• Hyper Light Drifter: One of the module containers is located in an open area that looks suspiciously like a Boss Room. When the Drifter opens the container, you get a brief glimpse of a shadowy monster where the module should be before the container explodes. He Was Right There All Along, and The Summoner emerges to fight you.
• Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms: Mimics show up as enemies and Greater Mimics show up as bosses.
• It Steals: The creature known as Legs can't make itself look like an orb, but it can mimic one by making its eyes glow blue and by emitting the same sound that an orb makes. It's smart enough to hide around a corner while doing this, so that it's indistinguishable from a regular orb until you get too close. However, unlike real orbs, it won't appear on the radar.
• I Wanna Be the Guy:
  • Among the things that kill you in this game, one is a fake Windows error message that makes fun of the fact IWBTG is a mess of barely functioning code that crashes if anyone so much as looks at it funny.
  • There a killer Save Point right before the final boss. It would turn into a regular save point upon being killed. It still appears in Impossible mode, which is supposed to have no save points; here the save monster disappears after being killed, but there's a 1 frame delay in which it's a normal save point that can actually be used.
• Jitsu Squad have monsters disguised as treasure chests, which reveals their teeth and legs after being checked upon. These monsters also have eyes growing in their throats, for some reason. Befitting their appearance, defeating them yields a ton of coins and gems.
• Kero Blaster: A few of the money safes in the game have menacing faces and jump at Kaeru to attack, and they still drop tons of money upon defeat. A giant boss variant appears in the White Laboratories level in Zangyou Mode.
• Kid Icarus: Uprising has Mimicuties, Underworld mooks disguised as treasure chests that, instead of biting you with their lids, stand up on surprisingly shapely legs and start kicking the mess outta you when you try to open them. They hit incredibly hard, move very quickly, and take more hits to defeat than nearly any other enemy in the game, making them extremely troublesome to deal with. Mimicuties make a return in the 3DS version of the fourth installment of Super Smash Bros., where they appear in Smash Run. Like in Uprising, they mimic chests that you can open to get stat boosts. Also like Uprising, they're a pain in the ass. One also appears as a Spirit in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, battling you if you open a chest in the Temple of Light, though luckily, it's a rather easy battle.
• The King of Dragons has teethed monstrous chests posing as normal ones, awaiting to jump at you when in close proximity. Fortunately, they aren't really hard to deal with.
• Kingdom Hearts:
  • Kingdom Hearts:
    • Early in the game, you come across the Mad Hatter's Tea Garden in Wonderland, and have a choice of which of the seven chairs you want to sit in to receive your unbirthday presents. Most of the chairs will summon tea utensils/boxes that will give you HP/MP balls and maybe a few items. Sitting in Alice's big red chair or the middle chair on one side of the table will make a rather dark-looking unbirthday cake appear and explode, filling the garden with Heartless enemies and making the whole table disappear; you have to fight and destroy the enemies, then leave and come back to reset. Each chair can only be used once.
    • Another example appears in the very last dungeon. You have to run from chest to chest to move on, because invisible walls are blocking every other path. Of course, every player has the great urge to open these chests, so a quarter of them are actually filled with The Heartless. To make matters worse this is the only part of the game where you CAN'T run from random encounters! On the other hand, each of these encounters does give you a good item when you beat it.
    • The Updated Re-release adds the Pot Scorpion, a King Mook version of the Pot Spider mentioned below. It's positioned randomly in a four-by-four grid of pots. It can be told apart from the actual pots by the fact that it doesn't move when pushed. When hit, it sprouts a stinger tail and starts spitting blobs of darkness everywhere. Your chance of getting the Pot Scorpion's unique drop depends on how many of the actual pots you destroyed before waking it up.
  • Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories had a better one- a treasure room called False Bounty. Three chests, but only one has treasure. Open either of the other two, you get a random fight.
  • In both of the above games, there are Barrel Spiders and Pot Spiders. Barrels and pots usually dispense health and magic orbs when hit, but come close to these guys and they'll sprout eyes and legs and start attacking you as well as blowing themselves up. Jafar can conjure up a Pot Centipede, whose segments are made from the regular Pot Spiders that spawn around the map.
  • Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep has Spiderchests, which are three-legged, poison-spewing Unversed that look like regular chests until you try to open them.
  • Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days:
    • The Cymbal Monkey and its stronger form, the Tricky Monkey, hide in fake treasure chests where one would normally find items.
    • The Ruler Of The Sky is an extremely decorative treasure chest and a sword when dormant. When active, the sword becomes part of its wings, and the chest becomes its mouth.
  • In Kingdom Hearts coded you can encounter Block Spiders, basically a block that got legs and attacks you. At one specific point of game where you have to recover your strength, you can encounter a variant — Prize Block Spider — that is very easy to defeat, looks like a Prize Block (a local variant of respawnable chest) and drops a power points to restore your strength.
  • Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance]: The Jestabocky Dream Eaters disguise themselves as treasure chests at times, though they're distinguishable by their brighter colors. They also very unconvincingly disguise themselves as items mid-battle (Actual items don't move and bob up and down in the air).
  • Kingdom Hearts III: While swimming through an underwater cave in the Caribbean, Sora finds a huge chest between a pair of glowing whiskers. He goes to open it and the Lightning Angler bursts out of the sand and swallows him whole, only to spit him right back out. Cue Underwater Boss Fight.
  • Kingdom Hearts χ: Pretenders are spring-loaded Heartless that pop out of chests like a jack-in-the-box when opened. They then retract themselves back into the chest again until it's their turn to attack, which is a particularly impressive feat since some of the larger Head Swaps look far too big to fit into the chest they emerge from.
• Kingdom of Loathing:
  • Lampshaded. Smashing a barrel in the Barrel Full of Barrels will sometimes result in a combat encounter with a mimic. The narrator even exclaims before the fight "You're confused — you thought these things could only mimic chests!"
  • There's also a mimic you fight in the Dungeons of Doom who's disguised as "something that looks like a cloak" (for which you pay 5000 local currency units directly prior to engaging in combat); after combat, you use the dead mimic's body to get either a transformation wand or a set of potions and a ring.
  • The "bag of airline peanuts" actually contains live snakes.
• Kirby's Return to Dream Land has Sphere Doomers, which have a habit of eating the game's standard collectible Energy Spheres and reveal themselves upon being collected. Defeating it will net the goodies. The Disc-One Final Boss is a King Mook version of them, Grand Doomer, which has eaten one of the "big" collectibles (the Lor Starcutter's mast).
• Knights of Pen and Paper: Mimics are referenced when the chest icon for the dungeon Random Events are selected:
  Master: Don't worry, it's not a mimic!
• In La-Mulana, the Twin Labyrinths has a fake Ankh Jewel that turns into a bunch of Goddamned Bats when approached. However, a similar bat explosion results when a necessary passage in the Temple of Moonlight is opened up.
• La-Mulana 2 adds actual chest monsters that instantly kill you if you're too close when you open them. Despite looking exactly like normal chests, they are very obvious. They always appear "unlocked", even though most chests in the game require you to solve a puzzle to open, and they're often surrounded by the skeletons of their previous victims. There is also an Ambushing Enemy that looks like a background door, and another fake Ankh Jewel which shoots lasers if you approach it.
• Last Scenario: One Bonus Dungeon is filled with killer save points. While they're fairly tough, there's also so many of them that it's almost always easy to pick them out after you fall for it the first time. The trick instead is to figure out how to get through the dungeon while fighting as few of them as possible, since they act as respawning roadblocks, and one part forces you to backtrack through a section of the dungeon while on a time limit.
• In ''Legacy of the Wizard, some chests are really a kind of monsters called Mimics, some of which are very lethal. And there is no way to retrieve the contents of the "chest" without touching them.
• The Legend of Silkroad have monsters appearing in the forms of treasure chests in a few areas, who grow legs and fangs when approached and chase after the heroes.
• Trails Series:
  • The Legend of Heroes - Trails has them, they're marked as dark red colored with silver trims. Opening one will start a battle with more monsters, and defeating them all will grant a useful accessory item in some installments.
  • The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky has a Running Gag in the English localizations of being able to get a funny message if you examine a trasure chest again after already having opened it. One of these reads in SC reads "Oh, no, it's a Mimic! Prepare for battle! ...Wait. No? False alarm! hehe."
  • In The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel II and IV, there are instead "Trial Chests" in which defeating the monsters will grant boons for future battles. In II, it will allow the characters associated with the chest to use the powerful "Overdrive" mode, while in IV it upgrades a character's "Brave Order," which buffs the party.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • Various games feature dungeon tiles that rise up and throw themselves at you to try to kill you.
  • Zelda II: The Adventure of Link occasionally has townspeople who turn into monsters after you talk to them. These are fairly easy to avoid, though — just... don't talk to the random townspeople. They very rarely have anything interesting to say anyway.
  • The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past do this with skulls (the Dark World's equivalent of rocks) and dungeon tiles coming to life. It also places mines and enemies under some bushes.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening features treasure chests that look normal but release Zols — weak slime enemies — when opened. Thankfully, these are somewhat rare.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time:
    • In the Spirit Temple, you're conditioned for most of the dungeon to believe that "reflecting light onto sun switches = good". However, a handful of these switches release booby trapped chests that freeze Link upon being opened and invisible Floor Masters or Wall Masters when tripped (the sun switches return for the Gerudo Training Grounds and one of the rooms in Ganon's Castle; the latter will summon Wall Masters if the wrong ones are activated; they also return for Majora's Mask's Stone Tower Temple). The Fire Temple includes a few door monsters that fall down on top of you when you try to open them (these doors, however, stick out a bit and should be obvious traps; they return for the room with the boss key in the Spirit Temple, which uses larger doors, which makes the door mimics stick out). Also appearing in several dungeons throughout the game are pots that, while not "fake" per se (they often contain the same minor items as normal pots), rise up off the ground and hurl themselves at you.
    • The boss of the Water Temple, Morpha, looks like a swimming pool when you enter the room.
    • The Poe sisters and Phantom Ganondorf who hide in paintings.
    • The Iron Knuckles look like statues until you attack them (which you will have to; each one is a Mini-Boss that needs to be destroyed to continue with the game when you see them).
  • In The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, sometimes small enemies burst out of jars.
  • In The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess there are giant worms which hid under floor tiles and jump up when you cross them. Luckily, they occasionally peek up to look around, and you can wait with the Gale Boomerang in tow.
  • In The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, you can occasionally come across rupees just sitting out in the open. These are attached to an antenna on a Like Like (monsters that look like a giant blancmange with a maw on top) that would pop out of the ground and try to suck you in if you get close enough.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks takes the familiar Like-Like enemy and makes it more frustrating by including ones that hide inside pots and burst out to attack you when you get too close. Pots containing them will occasionally shake, tipping you off to the shield-eating menace's presence, but chances are that you'll be either too busy or too eager to get whatever's inside the pot to notice. And then there's the one hidden inside an actual treasure chest. Fortunately, this only happens once.
  • The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds had some Like Likes disguise themselves as Red Rupees.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild features a variant of the Octorok — enemies that normally masquerade as random pieces of scenery — that wears a fake chest on its head; if Link approaches it, he'll be bowled over by the Octorok bursting into the open and rapidly running around. The chest looks like all the other metals chests that can be yanked out of the ground using Magnesis, except the Octorok's chest is not magnetic. Wearing the Champion's Tunic will also reveal the enemy's health meter.
• The Legendary Starfy series:
  • Densetsu no Stafy 3: The Treasure Monsters found in Misty Town look like ordinary treasure chests, but reveal sharp teeth and attack when Starfy or Starly tries to open them. One is used by Mad Piero to kidnap Starfy, and several others must be defeated to save Mamanezu's children.
  • In the fifth game, the Jaw Boxes are disguised as green treasure chests, looking identical to the other ones found in the S.S. Logwater. But star-spinning into them have them reveal their sharp teeth and chase after Starfy.
• Lucifer Ring has a one-of-a-kind monster in the caverns, disguised as a chest. As the player inspects it, the chest grows fangs and legs and attacks, but it goes down rather easily in a handful of hits.
• Lufia has these, though in the first game Mimics were random-encounter Metal Slimes rather than fixed encounters.
  • In Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals, red and blue chests are both mimicked, to annoying effect in the Ancient Cave. Both are distinguishable from the genuine article by their coloring being slightly off, but the blue mimics are much harder to pick out than the red ones, and if you get caught by one, unless you've really geared and leveled up well (read: went in with more than a few items from, well, blue chests and/or gotten really lucky), your ass is pretty much grass. They return in Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals, only this time they're visually identical to ordinary chests and release status-effect-inflicting gas when you try to open them (and they can't be damaged until you do so). There is a trick to them: normal chests have a fixed grid alignment on the floor; if a chest is out of alignment with the floor tiles, it's a Mimic. Oh, and occasionally you'll come upon a trap room filled with chests (read: possible Mimics).
  • In addition to Mimics outside of the Ancient Cave, Lufia: The Ruins of Lore can have monsters come out of any container you search inside of the Ancient Cave, in lieu of normal encounters. This includes the possibility of finding a Mimic inside of a monster-filled container, so you can fight a Chest Monster while fighting a Chest Monster.
  • The Ancient Cave also includes shrines, which can give bonuses if the hero is the right class...or reveal themselves as thieves, stealing money from the player.
• Mabinogi has monsters called Mimics, which look exactly like chests in the dungeon they appear in. Every room (or section of corridor) with more than one chest means that all but one is a mimic. And the fomor scrolls they commonly drop are quite lucrative. Unlike most examples on this page, these mimics are fun to encounter!
• Magicka has Chest Monsters in the Challenge mode, though their disguise is a bit illogical since the game has no real treasure chests. Like most things in the game, they were only added as a referential joke.
• Magic Sword: Heroic Fantasy has several trap chests scattered on the stages, which either explodes in a wave of fire pillars, releases a group of monsters or summons a shower of rocks upon you; all of which do considerable damage.
• In McDonald's Treasure Land Adventure, in the Pirate Ship level, treasure chest monsters are present alongside real treasure chests filled with gold.
• Mega Man:
  • Mega Man & Bass has literal Treasure Chest Monsters, in Pirate Man's level. There are also legitimate chests containing the CDs needed for 100% Completion.
  • Mega Man ZX Advent has the Vitaful, which looks like one of those capsules you pick up to fully replenish your health, only purple in coloration. They also stop flashing before they reveal their true nature, which happens when you get too close.
  • Mega Man 9: A few One Ups in the later levels are actually Metools in disguise. To make matters worse, it appears among a real one-up and some other goodies in an After Spike Gauntlet Recovery area. They're less likely to fool you when they appear in Endless Attack, since it's a mode where you only get 1 life.
  • Mega Man Legends had false treasure chests that would fire bombs at you when you opened them. Some even grew legs and started running! To add insult to injury one particular chest looked like it would be something you could money farm off of, it would stand up and generate a massive amount of refractor shards and dump them right in front of you...try to get them without the vacuum though and it would try to sucker shoot you with a single bomb!
  • Mega Man Battle Network: There's a chance that a green mystery data will contain a virus inside of it instead of an item, though it'll simply be one you can find in the area normally. This can be circumvented by simply using the inexpensive Untrap item which lasts until you leave the net and will remove said viruses.
• Some small chest monsters appears in Melfand Stories. Given that all the chests in-game (real and disguised monsters alike) are half the player's size, the monsters are ridiculously weak and dies in one slash.
• Metroid:
  • Metroid II: Return of Samus has Arachnus, an optional boss disguising itself as an item held by a Chozo statue. It can only be harmed by bombs and yields the Spring Ball after killing it.
  • Super Metroid: The first boss is a Chozo statue (named "Torizo" in the Player's Guide for the game that comes to life and tries to kill you when you take the power-up it's holding. It's not clear why the Torizo attacks Samus, especially considering the Chozo raised Samus, though lore from later games seems to imply that they're guardians of the Chozo's technology and certain areas. Alternatively, the Space Pirates could have taken control of it, but the answer is up in the air.
  • In Metroid Fusion, an X parasite mimics one of the Chozo statues that traditionally power Samus up. Two more X mimic missile and energy tank Power Ups. The blue X parasites, which are harmful when first encountered, can be found in large destructible blocks as well as floating freely.
  • Metroid Prime 2: Echoes has a weird variation in that the Luminoth cultivated plant life as storage containers. The Ing, on the other hand, turned weaker members of the species into containers.
  • Metroid Prime 3: Corruption: The Boost Ball power-up leads you to a boss battle against the Defense Drone when you approach it. You do get it after the battle, though.
• Justified in Michael Jordan: Chaos in the Windy City, where the titular hero collects Basketball power ups that have different uses. The Big Bad Maximum Cranium catches wind of this, and designs a "Ball-Bot" for the purpose of ambushing Jordan. The Ball-Bots disguise themselves as the Basketball power ups and drop down to attack Jordan when he approaches them. They're not hard to deal with, but the player has to be careful when collecting power ups. Defeating the ball bots gives Jordan the power up for real.
• In Miitopia, some of the regular treasure chests are trapped and contain various monsters the Miis will consequently have to fight. There is no way of telling if a chest is a fake. Although the big golden chests are never traps.
• Monster Hunter 4 has the Ruby Basarios, which disguise themselves as those patches of ruby crystals that you can mine in the Everwood.^note The basic Basarios isn't this trope, since its back does look like an innocent arrangement of rocks, but not like one that you can actually mine from.. You can safely tell that a particular patch of rubies isn't what it seems because a. actual ruby mining points only appear on the edges of areas, not in the middle like Ruby Basarios does and b. you can toss a paintball from afar; if it marks the target and wakes it up, it's obviously one of them; if it goes through, it's a real set of rubies.
• The Mimics from Monster Sanctuary are completely motionless in the overworld, looking exactly like the actual treasure chests. However, they always conspiciously come in groups of three.
• Middens has a monster that disguises itself as the Love Bus. While it looks identical to the actual Bus, it's not in one of its usual stops. It will show its true form and attack you if you try to enter.
• Minecraft:
  • Silverfish start out as a special type of stone block that mines curiously fast if you don't have a pick, and if attacked will summon their brethren to come out of hiding automatically. Once they start spawning, the best strategy is to just get the hell out of Dodge and wait for them to go into the surrounding blocks, which when mined will start the whole thing over again. Another possible but more dangerous strategy is to carry a bucket of lava with you and dump it in front of the oncoming horde. With some updates, players in creative mode have the ability to place these types of wall masters in wherever they please, which is most likely for people creating custom maps with traps. In survival mode, if you mine these special blocks with the Silk Touch ability in your pickaxe, you can harvest the booby-trapped blocks and place them anywhere else as traps for your friends. The item is even called "Monster Egg" in the inventory.
  • The Aether Mod introduces Mimics to the game, chests in boss dungeons — mixed with "normal", loot-filled chests — coming to life and attempting to bite the player when opening is attempted.
• Mother:
  • EarthBound (1994) has a number of Animate Inanimate Object enemies, most of which appear in a certain department store, which have the Overworld-Sprite of a present box despite looking nothing like one in battle. These include the Scalding Coffee Cup, which tends to drop a cup of coffee when defeated. Items can also be found inside garbage cans, but those can also turn out be enemies that pursue and attack you.
  • Mother 3 has just one Chest Monster in the Thunder Tower, which is slightly stronger than the random encounters. A few boxes in a haunted castle don't contain enemies, but do contain ghosts that cause a specific status ailment. Other boxes are even more pointless: some boxes set off fireworks, others cause little drum licks to play, and a few simply fart at you. To this, the game only responds: "...Ah." Also, "Lucas opened the present. Incredibly enough, there was a hot spring in the box!" Considering the fact that you have to get in a hot spring to be healed by it. Among the monsters there are also door mimics, slightly different from real doors. There's also a Men's Room Sign enemy in the final dungeon, which imitates a...men's room sign. That knows PK Starstorm.. Even one random encounter in the sewers of New Pork City hides in a trash can.
• Mystic Ark: Played with. The Mimics are quite friendly. Despite being locked up in the basement of Kidsdom Mansion, one of them will even heal you if you talk to it. In the Giant's world, there are Mimics but they don't disguise themselves, they are random enemies.
• Mystic Riders has treasure chest monsters distinguished by their color as well as by occasionally getting up and walking around.
• In Nethack, mimics are most commonly found in shops, which makes a nasty trap for lower level characters. They rarely ever imitate the correct item type, making for a fun little minigame of "find the odd symbol out" with, say, an ! (potion) icon in a rare book shop full of + (spellbooks). Won't help in a general store, however. Unless they mimic, say, the stairs up or down. Or the ] symbol ([ is armor, but ] is unused).
• Neverwinter Nights had a funny one, either the second expansion pack (Hordes of the Underdark. It was necessary to kill the creature to complete the story, as you had to use the creature's severed arm to cross a number of obstacles.
• Neverwinter Nights: Hordes of the Underdark has an odd example. Instead of attacking you, it steals all your gear. You have to destroy it to get your stuff back, and it's immune to all your attacks. It's basically a harmless but annoying Puzzle Boss.
• Ninja Gaiden II: Boxes are scattered all over the place, which usually give you some kind of health boost or extra essence. But every so often, it contains zombie fish which can seriously hurt you if you're not careful. This is actually carried over from the first game in the series, back on the Xbox.
• Nioh and its sequel, Nioh 2, feature Mujina, a badger type of yokai that hide in treasure chests. Instead of mimicking the chests itself, they mimic the player character and reward you for mimicking them in kind. When you open a chest containing one—or goad it out by using the 'whistle' emote, bypassing the Ki break inflicts on you—the Mujina will pop out, turn itself into a copy of your character and perform an emote. If you respond with the same emote, it will happily hand over its treasures and leave. If you pick the wrong emote, take too long to respond or simply attack them, you get to fight a copy of yourself.
• Noita:
  • Matkija (Mimic) is a type of monster that looks like a treasure chest, which will bite the player when they try to open it. Unlike chests, it can be stained by liquids, at which point it will show a conspicuous icon, and will float in water. It also does not show a "Treasure Chest" tool tip when the cursor hovers over it.
  • Jalkamatkatavara (Leggy Mimic) is a rare variant of the treasure chest mimic which lacks any of the above tells. When approached or attacked, it will sprout a number of legs and pursue the player to kick and bite them.
  • Pahan Muisto (Memory of Evil) is a rare variant which looks like an extra max health pickup, and will bite anyone who gets close. It can be identified by the white plus icon which is on its left, while actual pickups have the icon on the right.
• Nuclear Throne: Ammo Chest Mimics can replace a normal ammo chest on almost any level. They deal contact damage to any unsuspecting player trying to get an ammo pickup. They have an easy tell, however; while normal chests occasionally glint in the light, mimics don't, and instead lick their lips every few seconds. Health Chest Mimics exist as well.
• Ōkami: Such creatures are briefly encountered in the Ghost Ship portion. Fortunately, their coloration and a certain wind power can give away their disguise.
• Parasite Eve had Chest Monsters only in the Bonus Dungeon, the Chrysler Building. They didn't appear in the boxes until around the 30th floor or so and once found, you couldn't escape. Unless your armor had super high defense, you may not survive the encounter.
• Present in Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous and if you're on the Azata mythic path you can even recruit three mimics that show up to join the crusade.
• Perfect Dark featured the Dragon machine gun, which had a secondary mode that allowed you to turn it into a proximity mine. This was tons of fun in deathmatches. ("Hey, I think I'll stroll over here and grab this gun... What the...!?")
• Persona:
  • Persona 4:
    • The game hides Superboss Reaper in random treasure chests while playing through a New Game Plus. Thankfully, it's kind enough to give you an ambiguous warning when you try to open it. However, on rare occasions a Shadow will jump out of a treasure chest without warning and initiate a battle complete with an Enemy Advantage. Given the nature of the game, this would likely result in a Game Over.
    • Golden allows the Reaper to show up during a first playthrough. You still get a warning when you're about to open his chest, fortunately. And his arrival is announced with that lovely dragging chain. Be careful how many treasure chests you open. Not only does the Reaper arrive if you open too many on a single floor, but the odds of being jumped by a Shadow seems to go up as well.
    • There's also the occasional chests that sap your HP or SP when opened, accompanied by a very sudden red flash and "punch" sound effect. These chests are not present in Golden for some reason.
  • Persona 5: This is one of two ways to encounter Treasure Demons, they appear randomly while swiping loot from various objects in Palaces.
• Phantasy Star:
  • Phantasy Star I: The treasure chests dropped after Random Encounters were occasionally boobytrapped to explode or shoot an arrow when they were opened.
  • Phantasy Star II has a dead-end room in the final dungeon where a single treasure chest blocks your path. After navigating a maze dungeon with powerful monsters, one would imagine this implies the part where you get the final ultimate item you can use to reach or defeat the final boss; however, it turns out to be one doozy of a Chest Monster... The game series' recurring Big Bad, as well as the second-to-last boss of the game — Dark Force.
• Pikmin:
  • Pikmin 3: Flukeweeds are plants scattered around the game world that can be uprooted by Winged Pikmin to reveal a variety of goodies hidden among their roots, which can include nectar eggs, pellets, a number of collectible items, and on one occasion the Blue Pikmin's Onion. However, a number of Flukeweeds instead hide swarms of sheargrubs instead. This is downplayed by the female sheargrubs, which will only run around in terror and yield some easy corpses to make more Pikmin with, but male sheargrubs will quickly start devouring your Pikmin once they're pulled out of the ground.
  • Pikmin 4: Sunsquishes are enemies that hide in eggs and resemble the nectar that turns Pikmin into flower Pikmin, but will get up and attack instead. The Foolix also disguises itself as nectar, but is considerably more dangerous.
• Pokémon:
  • In the overworld, players can pick up items lying on the ground, which are marked by ball icons similar to Poké Balls. Occasionally, these turn out to be the Poké Ball-like mons Voltorb and Electrode, which have a nasty tendency to explode before you can KO them. This completely stopped making sense in Generation III. Prior to that, the sprite for item balls and the Voltorb/Electrode were just balls with red and white hemispheres. From Gen. III onwards, the sprite is very clearly a Poké Ball shape with a button in the center, which both Voltorb and Electrode lack.
  • Pokémon Gold and Silver: Sudowoodo pretends to be one of the trees that you're supposed to use Cut on. Instead, you have to water it because they're Rock-types. Used again in Emerald's Battle Frontier.
  • Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire: On the route just east of Fallarbor Town, dimples in the layer of volcanic ash can mean one of two things; a hidden item, or a disguised Ninja Boy who will leap out, say something ridiculous, and proceed to poison all of your Pokémon with the inevitable Koffing.
  • Pokémon Black and White: Foongus and Amoongus — mushroom mons with Poké Ball designs on their caps — play this role, as Voltorb and Electrode aren't native to the Unova region. They can't explode, but their Ability, Effect Spore, can give negative status effects to any enemy who hits them. Their 'Dex entry suggests they evolved their cap design in an attempt to fool their prey; this is less likely to attract Pokémon than it is to fool the trainer. At least they're slow, unlike Voltorb and Electrode, so if you want you can run away. Furthermore, since only their caps are disguised, their trick only works in tall grass.
  • Pokémon Black 2 and White 2: The trickery continues, but now you can even come across Foongus looking like an item in a Hidden Grotto. This doesn't even make sense anymore, since in the Hidden Grotto, the ball is shown in full and not just the cap. On the plus side, the Foongus won't have Effect Spore, but its hidden ability, Regenerator.
  • Pokémon Sword and Shield gives us Galarian Stunfisk, which has steel fins resembling the teeth of a bear trap and a mouth that looks like a Poké Ball. Its Shield Pokédex entry even mentions that Stunfisk uses its lips as a lure to draw in prey. In the actual game, however, they don't actually try to pretend to be an actual item ball due of how small they are and their lips are more of an indicator where they are laying.
  • Pokémon Scarlet and Violet takes the trope literally with the Pokémon Gimmighoul, a small imp that inhabits a treasure chest. This averted in its Roaming Form, though, which is in search of a new chest to inhabit and only has a single coin to carry around. Note that as there otherwise aren't any treasure chests in the overworld, you're unlikely to actually be tricked by the presence of a Gimmighoul.
  • Greavard is a Reconstruction of this trope after the shift to 3D made it so that Pokémon like Voltorb and Foonguss could not possibly be confused for Poké Balls. Greavard nests itself underneath the ground with the candle on its head sticking out so it can be mistaken for the sparkles that are used to indicate that a random item is in that spot. As a consequence, if you're trying to get through its habitat quickly, you can easily end up running into one by accident while you're trying to pick up items along the same path. It's possible to separate a Greavard from those sparkles, as the flame on its candle is not the same color, but it can be difficullt to distinguish that when you're racing through its territory.
  • Pokémon Colosseum and Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness: Item Boxes are square in shape, so Genius Sonority knew they couldn't use the old Fake Item Ball trick from the games. They still included their own brand of Paranoia Fuel with ceiling-mounted Cipher Peons, which are placed in otherwise empty hallways and love to drop in your path when you desperately need to get to the healing machine that they're most likely guarding.
  • Pokémon Super Mystery Dungeon has Ditto. In previous Pokémon Mystery Dungeon games, they were simply disgused as other Pokémon, but in this game, they are disguised as items until you pick them up. They will then transform into the currently controlled Pokémon and confuse the rest of the party. Unsurprisingly, they are Demonic Spiders.
• Ponpoko has "?" pots that release either bonus points or snakes.
• In Prey (2017), the most common enemy, the Mimic (scientific name Typhon cacoplasmus), is capable of transforming itself into a copy of a nearby item or prop in order to ambush you when you get close. In addition to doing this dynamically, there are also a few notable scripted Mimic encounters:
  • Your first encounter with an actual gun, the silenced pistol, is one you see lying next to a dead security guard on the other side of a door. This gun is a Mimic. Once you've been fooled by that, there's a real one just out of sight behind the door frame.
  • A Fabricator in the Psychotronics director's office has a useful item apparently jammed in it. It's a Mimic.
  • In one of the larger Psychotronics labs, nearly every item has a note reading "Not a Mimic" on it. A bunch of Mimics fall out of the ceiling, and several of the unmarked items are indeed Mimics.
• Prince of Persia 2: In Level 12, there's a sword lying on the ground at one point, which you may think is a weapon upgrade, but when you approach it, it bursts into flames and attacks you. Run!
• In Psycho Fox, eggs may contain enemies instead of useful items.
• Quest 64 and Quest: Brian's Journey have the traditional Mimic design, being a slug in a chest. It subverts it by making it a purely random encounter. There are no booby-trapped chests whatsoever in these two games.
• Ragnarok (Roguelike) (the roguelike version) features an interesting variant in the form of chameleons, which pretend to be other items until you try picking them up. Even telepaths cannot detect them, though you can sometimes deduce that an item isn't real if it has appeared since you last explored a level.
• Ragnarok Online has a particularly Fridge Logic-worth example; there are goddamned mimics (of two varieties, even), but there are no treasure chests!^note outside of guild halls, but even those are 3D, not sprites like the monsters. Although unlike the usual stereotype, these mimics don't even try to pretend to be those non-existent chests and lie in ambush — to the contrary the bastards are blindingly fast and attack on sight. Many a Squishy Wizard lies dead at their teeth...
• Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction has these.
• Rayman Origins features the Tricky Treasure Chest, it actually doesn't attack you nor it's hidden since the game has a special type of level just for it, instead when it sees Rayman & company, knowing what they're going to do at it, starts running away for its safety, making some frantically funny levels.
• Rayxanber III: Stage 5 begins with a bunch of powerups flying towards the player. They turn into monsters when approached.
• Resident Evil: In the remake, putting the red jewel instead of the yellow one in the tiger statue eye will cause snakes to drop from the ceiling.
• Resident Evil 4: Some boxes contain snakes instead of items.
• Revita: There's a chance of a green, blue, or red chest being a mimic in disguise, with the rarer the chest the enemy mimics determining how strong it is (and how good the relic gotten from beating it will be.) There's a curse to make mimics more common while also having a chance to drop no relic when defeated, and an item to make mimics more common and to drop two relics when defeated.
• Rogue: Some versions had the Xeroc, a monster that would look like the money, rings, armor, etc that lie around the dungeon.
• Rogue Galaxy: These things are strong; first few you meet a liable to cause a Total Party Kill. Not only are they about five times as strong as any random monster, but they surprise your party, leaving you unable to fight back for several seconds at the start of the fight! On the plus side, killing them always gives you a Hunter Coin. The lock on the box appears a little different from a normal area chest and the box stops opening partway just before the fight.
• Rune Factory Frontier has the Monster Box (and it's higher-level cousin, the Gobble Box), the classic example of a treasure chest with sharp, pointy teeth. They're rather easy to pick out (you'll notice the lack of a command before you get close enough to set it off), aren't a threat save for their high defense, and, like all other monsters other than bosses, can be tamed to follow you around town and the dungeons and spit out free jewels and metals every three days. The Monster Box also appears in Rune Factory 3, along with more higher-levelled versions.
• SaGa Frontier featured evil chests that spawned monsters. However, a lot of them dropped awesome prizes when defeated, so if you knew which were booby-trapped, you could grind and then go kick the chest's butt for loot.
• Salt and Sanctuary: Mimku are big squid monsters with the ability to shapeshift into anything they want. They have learned that by far the easiest way to get a good meal is to take the form of a treasure chest.
• Shining the Holy Ark has a particularly nasty example in the form of a Chest Ghost that possessed Soul Steal, likely killing Basso (your party's tank) until you could resurrect him in a church. Not pleasant when you need his attacking prowess for the area's boss.
• Shin Megami Tensei: Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne and Digital Devil Saga have trap chests that contain random encounters. There are also trap chests that damage and inflict status ailments on your party as well. Mute seems to be favored by Nocturne's damage chests.
• In Shantae: Half-Genie Hero, Hypno Baron's Castle has chests that will infinitely spawn Cute Ghost Girl enemies until destroyed.
• In Shovel Knight:
  • You find a chest in the water level, but when you open it, the chest is a part of anglerfish-like creature, with the chest instead of light, that turns out to be a miniboss.
  • The Specter of Torment campaign introduces the Memmec, a canine enemy that disguises itself as a chest. You do still get treasure from them, though.
• Silver has animated chests that spring arms and legs (and swords) when you try to open them and attack you.
• Skylanders: Trap Team has a boss called Chomp Chest (voiced by Patrick Seitz), who, as his name implies, is a treasure chest with teeth. The game also seems to imply that treasure is essentially food for him.
  Does your cafeteria here serve... TREASURE?! Just asking...
• Small Saga has Avarice Spiders, which are giant arachnids that hide inside of treasure chests and will ambush your team should you encounter them. Fortunately, they're not as deadly as they seem, and there are less than five of them throughout the entire game.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • Sonic 3 & Knuckles: An unusual case of a monster disguised as a harmful item, the spike enemies in the Marble Garden Zone imitates the spikes you see in the level until you get near, after which they show themselves and start shooting. Interestingly, they're actually more useful, as their apparent spikes actually work like a spring. There's also the boss of Flying Battery Zone Act 1, which looks like a normal animal capsule until you press the button on top of it, at which point it sprouts two spikeballs on chains and tries to kill you.
  • Sonic and the Black Knight features actual chests that can come alive and attack you.
• In Spelunky, pots may sometimes contain snakes or spiders. Random skeletons lying on the ground are usually just decoration that you can pick up a throwable skull from, but they can also rise up and attack if you're not paying attention. Treasure chests also may sometimes contain a bomb instead of gems (or in the case of the remake, both). Very annoying if you're carrying a damsel.
• In Stacklands, some of the Treasure Chest cards are actually Mimics, which reveal their true forms shortly after being spawned or if you try playing a Key card on them.
• Stardew Valley:
  • There's a variety of rock crab found in Skull Cavern that disguises itself as a (highly sought-after) iridium node. If you kill them they still have a decent chance of dropping iridium, but it's not guaranteed. Version 1.6 added a variant that disguises itself as a truffle on your farm, and defeating them makes them drop normal quality truffles.
  • In the volcano dungeon of Ginger Island there's a monster that looks like a regular Magma Cap mushroom unless you look closely.
• StreetPass Mii Plaza: In the StreetPass Mansion/Monster Manor, features mimics as treasure chests, but they function as the same type of Random Encounter as normal ghosts. Regular treasure chests are always opened normally without any risk of them being monsters.
• Sunless Sea: In the Zubmariner expansion, you can often find shipwrecks underwater, ones you can explore and loot. There are also Wreckships, which are pirate zubmarines purposefully made from old derelicts to resemble shipwrecks, and that will lie still at the bottom until someone comes to investigate, at which point they will float up and start shooting. They are a lot tougher than they seem, and they have strong guns on them, but they carry quite a bit of loot.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • Luigi's Mansion:
    • There are fake doors and ghosts attacking from various hiding places.
    • Jarvis, a ghost, is literally a jar monster. Approach the jar looking for treasure, cue mini-game and Mini-Boss battle.
    • Two rooms have literal Chest Monsters, and they're the Hidden and Sealed rooms (a few of the chests in the first room have ice ghosts in them, and the chest in front of the mirror in the Sealed Room has a four-pack of ghosts in it; both must be opened and dealt with to clear the room)
  • Luigi's Mansion 3: A few places have what act like chest monsters, however it turns out they are just possessed ordinary chests. You stun them, hit them with the black light to force the ghosts out, suck them up with your vacuum, then it becomes an ordinary chest you can open.
  • Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story: Parodied by Trashures (found in Dimble Wood) and Dark Trashures (found in Peach's Castle), whose treasure-chest disguise looks nothing like the ? Blocks that items are found in. Whilst they run away quite frequently, they open at low health, letting Bowser use his Vacuum command to suck in a lot of coins.
  • Mario Kart features Fake Item Boxes as a recurring item that drivers can pay as traps. They differ from regular item boxes only in that their signature "?" insignia is upside down. However, in Mario Kart DS, they also show up clearly different on the minimap, and after Mario Kart 64 they are colored red.
  • Paper Mario:
    • Paper Mario 64: The Hurt Plants look like Heart Plants. But while Heart Plants provide you with Heart Points, Hurt Plants initiate battles with you.
    • Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door parodies this trope by including large black chests holding slumbering evil spirits. Every time you open one the spirit inside places a curse on you, but the effect invariably end up being a useful in-game ability. By the time you find the last one, the party lampshades that they know what's going to happen when they open it.
    • Super Paper Mario has Zombie Shrooms, which resemble normal restorative items, but come to life and attack the player after a brief delay.
  • Super Mario 64: Even though they are a Guide Dang It! because nothing hints about them, certain butterflies turn into 1-Up Mushrooms if you let them approach you and land on your head. Knowing this, you're tempted to do this on every single butterfly you come across. However, some of them are actually bombs that slowly chase you when revealed. In the same game, Moneybags disguise themselves as coins before morphing into their true selves. The Mad Piano in Big Boo's Haunt can give the unsuspecting player a heart attack, as it suddenly becomes extremely loud when it wakes up. And a Red Coin is right behind it!
  • Super Mario RPG:
    • There are four enemies in the game that are actually item chests, and attack you when you open them. They are significantly harder than regular enemies, basically making them minibosses. They have high attack, defense, magic attack, can sometimes heal or summon, and are immune to just about all spells except for Mario's Jump. The remake even renames them to expressions of surprise and increasing exasperation as the player gets pranked again and again by them: Huhwhat, Whuhoh, Pleaseno and Comeon.
    • The Forest Maze has mushrooms strewn about, some of which you can pick and keep as a curative item while others were Amanitas in disguise that spring to life and attack when you get close.
  • Super Mario Bros. 2: The Mask Gate^note a bird head in SMB2, a different mask in Doki Doki Panic gate in World 7-2 attacks you. Once you defeat it, it acts like a normal Mask Gate that takes the player to the Final Boss fight against Wart (this doesn't apply in Doki Doki Panic, which used masks; this gate in that version is like all the others).
  • Super Mario Bros. 3: In certain levels, there are enemies called Pile Driver Micro-Goombas, which hide underneath and look like normal blocks until you get close, when they spring up and jump at you. In the NES version, you can tell these blocks from the normal ones because they don't "shine". In All-Stars, however, they are only spotted by the shine going into the opposite direction of a normal block.
  • Super Mario Sunshine: In the hotel level, you'll find a building-full of Boos when you are able to get in, and some coins. The coins that rotate slowly (in a manner so that the coin is facing Mario) are in fact Boos in disguise and will "poof" and attack when he draws near. In addition, during the Shadow Mario chase, the Boos will disguise themselves as Shadow Mario; these guys don't have his paintbrush, flash white a few times, and the Shadow Mario music will not play when getting near them unless Shadow Mario himself is nearby.
  • Super Mario Maker: One of the things a creator can do is put an enemy in a ? block instead of an item, and said enemies can range from Koopas to Hammer Bros to Boo Carousels.
  • Fooly Flowers (originally called Dizzy Dandies) in Yoshi's Island resemble the collectible Flowers, but have fangs and an evil smile. When Yoshi gets near them, they fall down and roll towards him. There are also balloons labeled "1UP" which indeed grant Yoshi a 1-Up if he eats them quickly, but if the player takes too long they explode to reveal a Fly Guy, hurting Yoshi.
  • Mario Hoops 3-on-3 has Mimics in Bloocheep Sea, which serves as an early indication that the game isn't just a ''Super Mario Bros.'' spin-off game.
  • In Super Mario Bros. Wonder, Noknoks are teal door-shaped enemies in who mimic the appearance of actual doors in an attempt to lure you close so that they can attack. They are still functional doors, though, and can be defeated and used by jumping on them to stun them and then opening them.
• Tales Series: Justified somewhat by the fact that they give you All Divides, which are one of the games' most powerful items.
  • Tales of Eternia: Fakes get special mention. They take something like 10 times lessened damage from every attack you can make, including those with fixed damage like Distortion. They also start the battle Poisoned and lose a significant slice of their HP every few seconds. This makes every Fake battle more like a Hold the Line fight. (Distortion actually is helpful against Fakes, for a different reason — it holds the Fake immobile for several seconds while still allowing it to take Poison damage.)
  • Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World has a normal monster in the shape of a treasure chest.
  • In Tales of Vesperia they give you various items, usually not All Divides, if ever. They also give large amounts of gald.
• Tap Adventure Time Travel: The Mimic is an enchanted chest that grows through various stages of development with the help of Imp workers who place organellas inside, granting various stat boosts until the Mimic dies and grants items to the rest of the party.
• In Tap Tap Infinity, the Treasure Chest enemy grant extra gold when defeated.
• In Terraria, Mimics will show up in worlds once "hard mode" is unlocked. They're fairly tough, but drop loads of money and a rare item when defeated. They are easy to spot, because they often aren't aligned to the furniture grid like normal chests. Furthermore, they can spawn anywhere, often in places you've already searched and thus know don't have chests. Even more blatant, underground chests in worlds generated past 1.3.0.1 only show up in the respective biome's underground cabin meaning that any chest not inside one is a mimic. They can also be told apart using a spelunker potion and/or hunter potion as treasure and ores are given a yellow-ish glow while monsters are lit up with a reddish-ish glow. It's important to note that these can also be spawned by wiring up a chest statue to any kind of switch; those unfortunately don't drop any items or coins though. There are even rarer versions specific to certain biomes that are even tougher, but drop more valuable loot. There are even easier to spot, as they're twice the size of a normal chest and don't conform to any design. You can even create them yourself by creating a key out of souls and leaving it in an empty chest.
• TimeSplitters 2: In the Notre Dame level, there are several enemy changelings chained to the wall, disguised as the maidens that you're supposed to rescue. They can be told apart from maidens by closely inspecting their faces, and by the fact that zombies attack maidens, but not changelings.
• Titan Souls has the boss Avarice, a large mimic chest that shoots gold coins at the player.
• ToeJam & Earl has mailboxes you can use to purchase gift items. It also has really fast, really tough "mailbox monsters" that disguise themselves as ordinary mailboxes. It's possible, but somewhat difficult, to distinguish between the two by close observation: the eyes of a disguised mailbox monster may appear briefly if you remain idle.
• Torchlight has the archetypal Mimics, but when they die they tend to drop much better loot than the usual not-trying-to-kill-you treasure chest. They can easily be spotted thanks to the fact they appear in places chests normally don't, among other things. If in doubt, fling a ranged attack at it. Mimics continue to show up into the sequel with elemental resistance and fire affinity. They also spawn where chests would spawn in map generation but they can still be told apart by the "Chest" label being taller than other chests.
• Touhou Project: The fangame Touhou Genso Wanderer has Nue mimic items in some dungeons. Using the item she's mimicking will cause her to appear and attack you. It's possible to identify her as an item, whereupon she'll stay in your inventory and can either be used (which causes her to appear and attack like using an item she's disguised as) or be sold to shops for a high price.
• Typoman has one section where HERO comes across a PART just sitting there. If the player doesn't pay attention to the fact that the "A", "R", and "T" float just off the ground when HERO gets too close, it will suddenly snap around and crush HERO's head, revealing itself to be a TRAP. HERO needs to find an S to put at the beginning in order to STRAP it.
• Ultima V, although you can tell there's a Chest Monster around if the victory music doesn't play after defeating the monsters.
  • A few games have mimics, but the Ultima IX mimic actually has the body of a chest, on scaly ostrich legs. It's tougher than most monsters in the same dungeons, but the rewards for beating them are usually better than what you find in standard chests.
  • Ultima III had killer floors in Exodus' castle, which looked exactly the same as the regular floor, and so couldn't be distinguished from the background either before or after they engaged you in combat. They, fortunately, weren't very strong, and could easily be defeated after you'd already killed one batch of them, by standing on the treasure chest the defeated floors left. All Ultima III combat when you're standing on a treasure chest, regardless of what's meant to be under the chest, has the standard "woodland" map. Against which things that look like castle floor are somewhat conspicuous.
  • In Ultima VI, a mimic appears in Sutek's castle. The Compendium describes mimics in more detail.
• Undertale has Lemon Bread, an amalgamate found in the True Lab, initially disguised as a Save Point.
• Vagrant Story puts an interesting twist on the Mimic: In this game, it's actually a giant hermit crab-like creature that uses an actual chest as its shell.
• Vandal Hearts has Chest Monsters as well, also called mimics. In the game, a tactical RPG, chests are opened by striking them; naturally, mimics are awakened in the same manner. They are indistinguishable from the normal chests until awakened. One Bonus Dungeon map takes this to the logical extreme, with a map filled with chests, only one of which is real.
• Village Monsters has a non-enemy example in Golbrick, one of the residents of the town. He's a living treasure chest with green eyes who doesn't do too well in social situations.
• In Warframe, The Sacrifice quest introduces a type of Sentient called Mimics that disguise themselves as stationary objects, but are easily given away by their shimmery appearances.
• Wario Land: Shake It! has man-eating treasure chests in one of the Big Boo's Haunt type levels, which act like the man-eating plants found earlier in the game. Strangely though, these treasure chests actually do contain the items needed in the level, and have to blasted open with a bomb to get the (real) treasure. Wario: Master of Disguise also has Chest Monsters.
• Wild ARMs: In addition to having mimics of varying strength scattered throughout, the games have a recurring Chest Monster superboss called the Black Box that you can only fight after opening every other chest in the game. In Wild A Rms 3 and Wild ARMs 4, the mimics were indistinguishable from regular boxes and gave you some unexpected encounters. The payoff was decent enough to make it worthwhile.
• Wolfenstein 3-D had a variation on this concept with some of the exit elevators. You may be given more than one door to choose, and if you pick the "wrong" one, then you find an elevator filled with guards, usually of the most difficult variety. Sometimes, the phony elevator may contain a secret wall that reveals rewards for your effort.
• World of Mana:
  • Children of Mana has exploding Chest Monsters.
  • Final Fantasy Adventure has Mimic Boxes.
  • Legend of Mana has the Polter Box, which looks like one of the game's treasure chests with spikes, eyes, and feet. They do live up to the treasure chest disguise, though, since they tend to drop rare and valuable crystals used for tempering your armor and weapons at the forge. It's also possible to get a Polter Box as a pet, and bringing him along guarantees a drop from any defeated regular opponent, thus increasing your chances of getting rare items from monsters.
  • Secret of Mana and Trials of Mana can have the randomly dropped treasure chests from monsters turn out to actually be chest-like monsters. In both games, they have extremely high attack power compared to normal monsters, but are less dangerous in the former, due to only showing up later on, and can be disabled through use of the Analyzer spell (at which point the chests become regular treasures). In the Trials, they can potentially appear at any point in the game, as a random "trap" on a trapped chest roulette, and have a stronger variant that starts showing up later (but you get the treasure from the original treasure box even if your chest turns into a Polter Box.) In fact, Polter Boxes can drop treasure chests that themselves can turn into Polter Boxes.
  • Sword of Mana has Polter Boxes, which look like regular chests but sprout eyes and horns and chase you when you get close. Their stronger varant, the Kaiser Mimic, is a far more obvious fake owing to the fact that it's blue. Rather infuriatingly, the trap roulette that accompanies most chests dropped by monsters can potentially cause either of these to spawn in place of your prize, replacing the original monster's drop with its own.
  • In the Trials remake, monsters drop item bags that are never traps. Rather, Polter Boxes appear in predetermined locations on the map, pretending to be dungeon loot. Since the Li'l Cactus bonus that counts treasure chests does not count Polter Boxes, you can sometimes discern them as fake simply because you already found all the treasure in the area. They're still worth fighting, though, because they always drop high-end Item Seeds.
• Wonder Boy and Adventure Island feature a grim reaper or eggplant monster hidden in some of the eggs, which cling onto you and drain your vitality. In Wonder Boy, the eggs containing this are spotted, while in Adventure Island there's no way of telling them of apart.
• Yakuza: Like a Dragon has two different types, despite being set in modern Japan:
  • "Pseudotrash" are men who disguise themselves as trash bags.
  • In the dungeon beneath Yokohama, there are a couple of safes with men hiding in them. Our hero Ichiban wonders how long they have been hiding in there.
• Zangband has an especially Interface Screw-y creature that makes itself hard to identify not only by being invisible or by looking like a floor tile even if you can see invisible monsters, but by having the name "It", so that all of its attacks will look exactly like those of a monster you can't see ("It touches you"). It's Monster Chatter has lines like "It summons Greater Undead!", screwing with the player even more.
• zOMG!!: The Flying Giftbox monster looks identical to the Magical Giftboxes that have randomly rewarded Gaians with rare items for years. But get too close and they'll attempt to eat you. Flying Giftboxes can talk, and tend to travel in groups. The real threat comes from the Ring Box, which is the Metal Slime version of the Giftbox. It also looks identical to a Magical Giftbox, but travels alone and does not speak, making it easier to mistake for an actual giftbox if you aren't familiar with their weaker cousins. (Ironically, there actually are Chests, Baskets, and Boxes in the game, and they all are Animated as well, but the only hostile thing they do is refuse to open until all of other the Animated on the screen are dispatched. However, there are certain chests that have Animated pop out of them; you get the reward after they're defeated). With a later update to the game, in Deadman's Shadow there are Animated chests that can and will attack players.

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