Basic Trope: An empty room with no purpose.
- Straight: Wandering well off the beaten path in the Jungle Japes area may lead you to a cave entrance. There are no enemy encounters or anything of interest in the cave, and it does not lead to any other areas.
- Exaggerated: Completing a set of well-hidden puzzles will lead you into a full-fledged cave system containing nothing of interest whatsoever - not even any music.
- Downplayed: The cave is empty aside from a minor Healing Potion in the center.
- Justified:
- The cave system contains some of the most beautiful aesthetics in the game, such that you'll want to get needlessly lost in it.
- The cave has an ominous description and contains all sorts of ancient glyphs etched on the walls. It also contains some of the strangest ambient music in the game. The area as a whole is meant to feel cryptic and discomforting, perhaps increasing the believability of the world the game takes place in.
- Inverted: A hidden room that does not seem significant is actually the location of the Player Headquarters.
- Subverted: Empty Room Until the Trap
- The empty cave has nothing in but you can place your base camp in any sufficiently large wilderness location. As it has no encounters its purpose is a conveniently located safe area.
- Double Subverted: The "trap" is a Cat Scare.
- Parodied: The cave is structured like a long, narrow hallway. There are rumbling noises and distant growls that grow louder as you progress, and when you finally get to the end of the hallway... you find the stereo set that was making the noises, and a signpost that says "you've just wasted forty seconds walking through an empty area."
- Zig Zagged: ???
- Averted: A building system means that any empty room can be used by the player for whatever purpose they want.
- Enforced:
- The cave was originally meant to contain all sorts of items and special enemies that can't be encountered anywhere else, but the developers were on a time constraint and didn't have time to implement what would have made the cave more than just a blank room.
- In order to speed things up, the developers started with a procedurally generated map instead of designing it from scratch, which sometimes produced this kind of hiccup and they only fixed/used the instances in the story critical areas.
- Area 3-6 wasn't meant to have a cave, as such it doesn't have a valid Cave ID Pointer, which is treated as pointing to the empty cave map instead of loading whatever garbage it points to as a cave map.
- Lampshaded: "I wonder why this room is empty."
- Invoked: "Let's put an entirely blank room here!"
- Exploited: Your rival wants to waste your time, so he empties out a room and puts a cryptic hint in it.
- Defied: The cave is completely empty... but as soon as you try to leave, the exit caves in, and your rival steps out of the shadows. He announces that you have fallen into his trap, and must fight him to the death if you want to escape.
- Discussed: "I ran into an empty room. There didn't seem to be anything of interest in there."
- Conversed: "There has to be something here. The developers wouldn't just add a blank room, right?"
- Implied: The heroes discuss what they've explored. One says that he wandered into an empty room.
- Played For Drama: The empty room is in Bob's house. He has a Dead Little Sister and goes ballistic on all burglars after they emptied his house while he was away. Although it doesn't even draw commentary from Bob the emptiness is the point of Alice's room.
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