Basic Trope: Harmful pointy objects.
- Straight: A game has metal sharp triangular-shaped spikes which harm or kill the character on contact.
- Exaggerated:
- A game has spikes almost everywhere and spikes are in almost every variety.
- Even though spikes don't seem sharp at all, they're still lethal on touch even on sideways.
- Downplayed:
- Spikes in the game won't kill the character, but do deal a decent amount of his health.
- Spikes are in the game, but are not all that common.
- Justified:
- Those spikes are drawn very sharp and always far below the safe ledges and won't hurt you when touching sides of them.
- Spikes might not look very sharp, but they're electrified.
- The spikes are made to be highly acidic.
- Inverted:
- Spikes won't kill the player but flat ground does.
- Alternatively, grooves of healing.
- Alternatively, spikes are destroyed when player touches them.
- Subverted:
- What appears to be a pit of spikes, happen to be collectible items.
- The hero simply carefully navigates through the spiked floor, making sure not to step on a spike
- Double Subverted:
- And one group of those items turns out to be real spikes.
- ...And then trips and falls on them anyways.
- Parodied:
- A cutscene is shown where a main character touches a side huge triangle and dies instantly due to it being counted as a spike.
- The hero cannot touch the pointy end of a sewing needle without exploding in an incredibly violent and disturbingly funny way.
- Zig Zagged: The game features different classes of spikes featured, ranging from harmless to lethal. Only, the player cannot tell by looking what kind of spikes are on the screen, so it is decidedly random.
- Averted: The game doesn't have spikes.
- Enforced: The writer was accidentally impaled as a child and harbors a pathological fear of sharp objects.
- Lampshaded: "Just be sure to avoid those big, pointy things down there..."
- Invoked: The Big Bad is getting reports that the security at his fortress is too easy to bypass, so he places a special order for a spike-based defense system.
- Exploited: A way of quickly offing the Demonic Spiders in the game is to lure them into spike pits which kills them instantly.
- Defied: The Big Bad decides that spikes are too easy for his nemesis to bypass, so he constructs a complicated laser-based security system instead.
- Discussed: "Let me guess, touch the spikes and I die?"
- Conversed: "Why do dungeons always have pits with spikes in them?"
- Deconstructed:
- The Big Bad constructs spikes inside his fortress for protection, but the maintenance cost of constantly cleaning and sharpening those spikes causes him to go bankrupt and the bank to foreclose.
- The spikes will turn out to be too blunt to cause any serious harm.
- Reconstructed: The Big Bad purchases specially constructed spikes for his fortress that never go dull and that are made especially slick to prevent stains.
- Played For Laughs: Bob makes a suicide in humorous way by jumping into spikes.
- Played For Drama: A dead body of a protagonist's friend can be seen impaled by those spikes.
- Played For Horror: Bob navigates a spiked maze in a dark room and gets horrified, seeing a head impaled by one of the spikes.
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