Hostage Spirit-Link

"The only one of these games I really played was Area 51"

"Hey, Mr. Blonde! You see too many movies?!"

— Bain, PAYDAY 2

A curious phenomenon in modern Light Gun Games where accidentally shooting innocent people will cause damage to you, either through health and resources, or to overall score.

This is used to add difficulty and to prevent the player from spraying bullets everywhere whenever he turns a corner. Naturally, these innocents will be in places where it's easy to get startled and confused and shoot them. If handled poorly, it can often seem that the innocents are simply trying to get shot.

A form of Video Game Cruelty Punishment. Contrast Friendly Fireproof.

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Examples:

Action Adventure

• This is what made the not-so-final boss of the Game Boy Color game The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages difficult. Defeat the boss using a specific sequence of attacks? Easy, given time to figure out which ones. But the boss is holding your friend's ancestor (sorta) hostage, and hitting the ancestor drains Link's life instead.
  • This also happens earlier in the game when the titular and still-possessed Oracle is battled in a similar way. Additionally, in sister game Oracle of Seasons, Onox uses Din, who is still trapped in a crystal, as a shield in one phase of his fight. Hitting her with anything but the Rod of Seasons damages Link.
  • Especially jarring in Four Swords Adventures, there are a couple of points in the game where you must escort an NPC to safety and all of the NPCs have only a single heart's worth of health. If they die, all four Links will spontaneously croak - even in multiplayer.
  • In the final battle of Spirit Tracks, Zelda is Friendly Fireproof but must be defended from enemy fire. If she's hit, you lose some life.
  • The archery minigame in Phantom Hourglass mixes in girls with the ghost targets; hitting them is -50 points and resets the score multiplier to 1.
• Primal: Overlaps with Timed Mission shortly after acquiring the Undine form in Aquis. The queen, Aino, is raised out of the water, and you have to turn two valves on the other side of the opening lagoon to rescue her. She will eventually suffocate and die if you don't rescue her, and if that happens, Jen dies too.
• In the video game adaptation of Superman Returns, Superman does not have a health meter of his own; he's indestructible. When he's hit, his power meter goes down and he's stunned for a bit. Instead, the health meter is the health meter of Metropolis itself! So if there's too much damage to the city or the people, it's game over for Supes. Annoyingly, most of Superman's more powerful abilities tend to cause collateral damage.
• In Mission Impossible (1990) for the N, a top-down action-adventure, the fourth level boss uses Shannon Reed as cover. Accidentally hitting her will instead cause you to lose health. Fortunately, you have a fair few hitpoints, so this isn't devastating unless you're really inaccurate.

Action Game

• The Dick Tracy game for the NES has a bizarre variation. The eponymous detective is only allowed to shoot enemies who are shooting at him; if he shoots an unarmed enemy who is merely trying to punch him in the face, it is at the cost of a full unit of health. Keeping in mind that getting hit or shot by an enemy only costs half a unit of health, this is an especially extreme penalty.
• Batman: Arkham Asylum gives you a game over if you let any hostages die.

Adventure Game

• In Snatcher, there's a scene where the Snatcher that has replaced Benson Cunningham takes a woman hostage. Hitting the woman causes Gillian to take damage.
  • It's done once again in the Genre Shifted remake, SD Snatcher, where a certain robot will take an NPC woman hostage, and hitting the woman will cause Gillian to take damage.
  • The best use of this in Snatcher, though, is right at the end of the Sega CD version, when Gillian leaps into a room after a running fight with several other Snatchers and sees a figure in the shadows. Shooting the figure will give you a game over - it's Jamie, Gillian's wife.

Beat 'em Up

• The Konami beat'em'up Oz, also known as The Sword of Etheria in Europe and Chains Of Power in Korea, has a level with the ghosts of innocent people who were killed. Damaging them damages you.

Fighting Game

• In the Playstation port of the Capcom fighting game based on JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, the minigame based on the "Strength" chapter is in the vein of a light gun game. Here, the innocent is the stowaway girl that was introduced in the "Dark Blue Moon" chapter.

First-Person Shooter

• America's Army has an early training mission use this. The trouble is, the difference between "hostage" and "hostile" is a lot less than two letters. You'd think it's the people with guns, right? No; several hostiles don't have guns, and one innocent has a gun.
• In Soldier of Fortune II, if you accidentally shoot an ally, or if an Escort Mission character dies, you die too. In the first game, the game ends if too many innocents die or Hawk is killed.
• A nice way to stop team-killers without just preventing friendly fire: in some multiplayer modes in more recent Call of Duty games, any damage you inflict on a teammate is applied to your character instead. This is also an option for local and private games. Hardcore mode instead has normal friendly fire damage, but kicks any player who kills too many teammates.
• Other games like Left 4 Dead also have this feature if one is playing on a modded sever.
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 also has somewhat like the America's Army example above in the first level - you're timed for a run through a live-fire course with pop-up targets to determine what difficulty you're ready for. Killing civilians docks your overall score - in the Special Ops version of the course, where you're scored with one to three stars depending on how fast you finish the course, if you hit any civilians you're only getting two at best.
• PAYDAY: The Heist has civilians, which can be taken captive, left alone or killed. The more civilians you have captured, the longer times you get between assault waves. Causing them even the slightest amount of damage kills them however, which ramps up the enemy difficulty, costs you money from your reward, and increases the time it takes for you to be traded out of custody if you're caught.
• PAYDAY 2: Hostages have a habit of getting themselves killed. Each death you cause costs a large amount of cash, which is explained as "cleaner costs" to pay away the heat you're adding to yourself. It further increases on higher difficulties, to the point that it's entirely possible to come away from a heist with slightly less money. Granted, civs can be forced down and cuffed with cable-ties, but if a SWAT agent reaches them they can be freed — so expect to be firing at an enemy, only for an innocent to pop up and charge through the SWAT line of fire into yours.
  • The right skills can make the link run backwards too, providing benefits like damage absorption.
• Halo: Reach causes Noble Six to die the moment s/he kills a civilian, even accidentally. This may lead to some frustration if you're trying to save that first civilian on New Alexandria and you forgot you had a Needler out. In contrast to many uses of this, civilians have more health than expected to prevent instant death from a stray bullet that happened to hit a civilian, except a headshot will still instantly kill the both of you.
• A common(ly frustrating) variation, such as in the Medal of Honor series: if an escortee is killed, it's Mission Failed.
• Return to Castle Wolfenstein: "Mission Failed. You killed a civilian."
• In the Rainbow Six series, the death of a hostage causes immediate mission failure. This includes in the PvP-focused Siege, where someone killing the hostage in a mission immediately causes their team to lose. It also has the score-based variant, where (so long as you don't shoot them in the head) the hostage can be downed multiple times rather than just outright dying if he takes a few bullets in a crossfire, but every time you do so the HUD actually calls you a monster and deducts a hundred points, increasing by another hundred every time you continue to do so.
• In Fallout: New Vegas: Dead Money, your companions' bomb collars are linked to yours, so if they die, you die. In the second half, you're instructed to kill your companions, but can survive if you exit the location within time.
• TRON 2.0: Shooting any ally or innocent Program is an instant Non-Standard Game Over.
• In Fallout 4, if the Vault 81 Lab Mole Rats attack your companion, you somehow end up with the Mole Rat Disease as well.
• Judge Dredd: Dredd vs. Death: A big part of the game is the Law meter system: your status goes up if you successfully arrest perps, it goes down if you abuse your authority by being too trigger happy. If it hits zero, the SJS Squad will shows up to hunt down a rogue Judge.
• SWAT 4 not only deducts points if civilian hostages are wounded or killed, but it also deducts points if you don't follow proper procedure and order armed enemies to drop their gun before you open fire.
• Conspicuously averted in Cruelty Squad - you suffer no penalty whatsoever for killing civilians during a mission, not even a scolding from your handler. This goes to show how little value life is given in the setting, alongside reinforcing the game's Central Theme.

Light Gun Game

• While the Time Crisis games don't usually have innocents to avoid (except in those sequences which involve rescuing hostages), on the rare occasions where the final boss uses one as a Human Shield, you only lose points rather than a life if you accidentally shoot her. And when the other player is visible in your screen in certain scenarios, shooting him will deduct points, too.
  • Done straight in Time Crisis 3's Rescue Mission, in which shooting an innocent will take off a life rather than points. This has the side effect of making its third stage a Scrappy Level.
  • Also done straight in Spiritual Successor Razing Storm, where several civilians have not been evacuated before the gunfight starts. Shooting them penalizes half a life each, but the main problem is that some of them run back and forth, making your shots harder. Lampshaded in Stage 2:
    "Some of the civilians haven't evacuated."
    "We just have to steady our aim. Continue firing!"
    "Yeah? Well, easier said than done!"
    "You've fired that weapon a million times! It shouldn't be that hard!"
• One of the original Light Gun Games, Nintendo's Hogan's Alley, penalized you with a miss for each "innocent" you hit. This isn't really as peculiar, though, since the game apes the paper-cutout style of firearm training course, and hence scoring is expected to be artificial.
• Gunfighter: The Legend of Jesse James has innocent bystanders in several levels. Killing them costs you one out of your four life points.
• Teraburst contains fleeing civilians who happily runs into the middle of shootouts, even as you're busy dealing with waves and waves of alien mooks. Shooting them by accident remove points from your score. A stage set in Polynesia's beaches takes it to the extreme by penalizing you for shooting seagulls.
• Notoriously bad in the Virtua Cop series, where, after seeing you blast away hordes of terrorists, a civilian will always leave the safety of their cover to wave their arms at you wildly. VC3 is especially bad in one instance where two civilians stand up, and then one pulls a gun on you. You don't lose a life for shooting him but it counts as a civilian shot on your score. And yes, he does shoot you if you don't do anything. It's even more annoying because you appear to be firing some kind of non-lethal taser bullets anyway - well, assuming you didn't grab that magnum, SMG or shotgun powerup.
• Endgame has men in red waistcoats, stewardesses and scientists as hostages. Shooting them will give you a five second penalty.
• In the Police 911 series, you don't actually die, you just get treated to a time-wasting cutscene, and you lose a few ranks. The same applies to Lethal Enforcers 3, in which it shows a news headline reading "[occupation of civilian] shot by mistake."
  • It should be noted that in Police 911 every mission is timed, and you get a single timer for an entire level. The timer is replenished slightly every time you shoot all the criminals in a particular section, and the higher your rank goes, the higher your time bonus for each "apprehension." Running out of time gives you a Game Over no matter how many lives you have left, so this can kill you, it just does so more slowly.
• CarnEvil also has this, every so often, Betty (the player's girlfriend) pops up and you have to avoid hitting her or lose some life.
• Silent Scope. "BEEEEP!: Don't shoot innocent people!" Doing so takes off a full life box, as opposed to the half-box taken off by most damage.
• In the Terminator: Salvation arcade game, humans will periodically get in your way. Shooting a human causes a large X to appear over them. The human doesn't even get hurt and you don't even lose life/points for it. This was probably because the game is really freaking hard.
• Area 51, Maximum Force, and other Mesa Logic arcade shooters all follow this pattern.
  • Area 51 handled it exceptionally poorly. Often, in the middle of a pitched firefight, one of your teammates would suddenly jump directly into your line of fire, not to mention blocking 80% of the screen. Since accidentally shooting your teammate damages you, you're forced to stop shooting until the idiot moves out of the way. Of course, the enemies are still shooting at you while you wait, so you end up taking unnecessary damage anyway.
  • The game takes this trope to the next level by turning you into an alien and tasking you with killing soldiers in a special mode if you consciously off your buddies and don't kill any of the proper targets.
  • In Target Terror, if you shoot the pilot on the final mission, you get a Nonstandard Game Over with the plane crashing into the White House. If you directly shoot the hijacker, he blows up the plane with a Dead Man's Switch.
• The first two House of the Dead games had innocents being threatened by zombies. Killing the zombies before they harmed the innocents would often result in them rewarding you, but you would lose a life if you shot the innocent (but not if you simply failed to save him).
  • Averted in III in which you occasionally rescue the other player, and if you shoot him/her... nothing happens. In fact, this is prominently shown in a hint video in The House of the Dead 2 & 3 Return. The House of the Dead 4 simply does away with having to rescue anybody...for not-so-positive reasons.
  • In Overkill, you're docked 5,000 points (the amount you get for saving them) if you shoot them yourself, and Washington criticizes you - "Shit, man! That was a live one!" You suffer no penalty if they get killed, and G frequently makes a "can't save them all" comment.
  • And averted in the spinoff Typing of the Dead, where you can fail to save an innocent but can't shoot one. This actually makes sense: the Hand Wave for the "type to shoot" gameplay is that your weapon is actually under the control of a portable tactical computer and your typing provides the feedback allowing it to track targets, and discover and exploit boss vulnerabilities. Being entirely friendly-fireproof is the reason the expensive equipment's been issued to agents in the first place.
• Lethal Enforcers 1 featured both hostages/civilians and fellow police officers that, when shot, would detract a life from the player.
  • This game also had an interesting occurrence in one mission where an apparent civilian in a white suit would appear with hands raised and the usual "Don't shoot!" but instead of hiding again would pull a gun! Turns out it was a bad guy playing hostage. You can shoot them before they draw though without penalty if you know who it is.
• Various innocents appear throughout Operation Wolf, with literal hostages appearing in the second, fifth, and sixth levels.
• In the Point Blank (1994) and sequels, shooting certain objects—usually bombs, (cardboard) civilians, and targets of your opponent's color—will take off a life, on top of the life you will lose if you fail the stage. You can continue to shoot such targets until the stage ends. This means it's entirely possible to clear the stage but lose all three of your starting lives within the same stage.
• In Brave Firefighters, spraying burning victims with the normal spray instead of the sprinkler or letting them stay on fire will penalize your time. Yes, you're using water to put out a burn, but unless you switch to sprinkler mode, you are hitting the victim with enough force to knock down a standing adult.
• In Mad Dog McCree, shooting a hostage or civilian depletes one life.
• In Haunted Museum 2: Shh...! Welcome to Frightfearland, shooting victims by accident (especially when the victims are between the enemies) will decrease the player's hit points.

Platform Game

• In Dynamite Headdy, one of the bosses holds love interest Heather in its hand, and uses her as a shield to cover its face. Accidentally hitting her causes her to retaliate and hurt you.
• This is what made the final boss of the obscure NES game Wrath of the Black Manta difficult. Defeat the boss using a specific sequence of four ninja powers? Easy, given time to figure out which ones. But the boss is holding the kid, a friend of the Black Manta, hostage, and hitting the kid drains BM's life instead.
• In Super Paper Mario, killing a brainwashed Cragnon in Chapter 5 (which equates to accidentally jumping on them once or twice) will dock you a few hundred experience points.
• One of the levels in Mega Man Zero 2 has reprogrammed Resistance members as enemies and killing them hurts your mission score. Subverted to a degree that when killed, they always drop an extra life.

Shoot 'em Up

• Happens in the last stage of the video game of RoboCop. The Corrupt Corporate Executive uses his boss as a meat shield, and hitting him nets you an instant Game Over.
• In the old Amiga game Gunshoot, you're manning a bank and have to receive money from customers, as well as shoot any robbers that come in. If a robber shoots you, you die, but if you shoot an innocent customer (or shoot the poncho-clad robber before he's drawn his gun) you also die, with the odd game over message "You lost your brayn."
• Bank Panic is an old Sega arcade which inspired the above mentioned Gunshoot, with the same premise and mechanics. When you accidentally shoot a client, he/she immediatly sits up, bullet hole on the forehead still oozing blood, and angrily proceeds to show you a "wanted" poster to school you on what a real criminal looks like. It's actually pretty funny, except for the fact that you lose a life, of course.
• The indie game Graveyard Shift is particularly mean about this. You take damage any time a "damsel" dies, whether or not you're responsible, and typically there are quite a few zombies between her and safety.
• The Punisher for the Xbox. Blasting a hostage? Instant death for our hero, no matter what.
• One enemy in Prohibition is a gangster holding a woman hostage. Shooting him is worth 1000$ (the most any enemy brings, save mafia bosses), but shooting her costs you the same amount. It becomes very difficult late in the game when gangsters require multiple hits to die.

Stealth-Based Game

• Metal Gear:
  • In the original Metal Gear for MSX2 and NES, shooting a hostage will cause you to be demoted to the previous rank, which results in reduced maximum health and carrying capacity. Given that you have to be of a certain rank to get a specific item needed to beat the game, and rank is gained by rescuing hostages, of which there were only barely enough to reach the maximum rank if you didn't shoot any of them, this usually results in making the game Unwinnable. One of the bosses, Coward Duck (or Dirty Duck if you're playing one of the re-releases), actually uses this trick to kill you.
  • In Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, shooting a child causes Snake to take damage.
  • Metal Gear Solid does this pretty directly: the fight with Ocelot centers around a hostage hooked up to quite a lot of explosives. Accidentally (or not) shooting him causes the entire room to explode, instantly killing you. And Ocelot will call you an idiot. In the same game, killing Meryl will result in an instant game over. Harming her in any way outside of your Manchurian Candidate fight just before Psycho Mantis actually shows himself results in the bitch-slap from hell (although it doesn't actually take away a whole lot of health, but it does send Snake flying like he got hit with a missile). Fortunately there aren't any other hostages to avoid.
• Killing civilians in Assassin's Creed causes you to lose several points of synchronization. Justified in that synchronization reflects how well you're following your ancestor's memory, and the ancestor never attacked civilians.
  • Subverted at least by name in ACII and onwards. Your synchronization and health are not the same anymore, though when you kill a civilian, you still get desynch'ed for each one - up to a point. Kill three and the game just reloads you to a checkpoint nearby. However, this has the opposite of the intended affect in practice, since checkpoints are so frequent (you get a checkpoint every time you do anything remotely significant) and since you are always respawned with full health, so killing civilians to desync yourself is an excellent way to restore your health for free.

Tank Game

• More of a Team Spirit Link, but in Bz Flag, if you shoot a teammate, you hear a donkey bray and immediately explode.

Third-Person Shooter

• In Red Dead Redemption, essential Non Player Characters such as John's family members are not easy to kill accidently. Not only do they have large amounts of health, but the game prevents weapons from being fired while one of these characters are within your crosshairs. Nonetheless, it is possible to kill them using explosives, and the instant one of them dies, John will also fall down dead.

Web Comics

• xkcd has commented on the trope.
• In this Darths & Droids strip:
  Obi-Wan: Why exactly are we bombing a random town?
  Qui-Gon: It's full of evil gangsters, right? That's worth XP.
  GM: The innocent civilians are negative XP.

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