Tabletop Games
Video Games
It sounds evil, but some challenges simply cannot be completed without trial and error.
— Tutorial for Sonic Erazor
Web Animation
"My tether, it transpires, stretched as far as the scrapyard level...I walked blissfully onto a featureless section of ground and was instantly killed by a landmine."
— Zero Punctuation on Dex
Egoraptor: What the fuck?! No one told me there were bombs there!
Meryl: Hey Snake, there are bombs there.
Snake burnt to a crisp: Aw, thanks, bitch.
Meryl: Hey Snake, there are bombs there.
Snake burnt to a crisp: Aw, thanks, bitch.
Web Original
See, in Alien³ you have the following — you control Ripley, crawling around in dungeons trying to rescue prisoners. You have a time limit to do so, and three lives. However, there is nothing resembling a map to the prisoners. Thus it is basically impossible to do any given level on the first try. Only when you die are the locations of the prisoners uncovered in an excessively long sequence of watching their guts explode.
..."Oh, stupid me, I should have known I couldn't climb that wall, because it seemed like the only logical way out, and it looked exactly like the wall I climbed two seconds ago." Or "Ah, instead of trying to jump on the platform that tricked me to fall on spikes by falling down when I stepped on it, I should have stood still and roar until another non-tricky platform appeared." Or "I'm such a goof, I should have known that though they're the exact same sprite, this was a killer bat, and not a bat I could climb on." Or "I should have known that I would land in water when I jumped down from that tree, because I shouldn't assume that giant oaks don't sometimes grow out of the water". Every jump is a leap of faith, all enemies appear half a second before they hit you. The result? A game that forces you to quicksave (a function of course not available on the SNES) and attempt the same goddamn jump twenty times before you find the incredibly stupid sequence of jumps and roars that are needed to keep your body off the spikes. The entire game feels like a bad practical joke, and you are on the ass end of it.
Web Video
"... this is one of the few Atari games you can actually beat, whereas most of them are just about trying to get a high score—and when I say 'it can be beat,' that's hypothetical, because honestly I think it'd be easier to find the real lost Ark!! Just the fact that you have to feel around secret passage ways and stuff it makes you feel like...Indiana Jones. Well, it got me there."
Gabriel: Do you know how you learned that was there in the last game? You jumped down, and you got shot, and you had to start again.
Yahtzee: Well, I wouldn't say you got shot. You got fucking shot.
Yahtzee: Well, I wouldn't say you got shot. You got fucking shot.
—Let's Play of Flashback remake (2012)
Derek: Pokémon Snap is not a game about "getting good pictures", but about doing right by Oak....His criteria is unpredictable and at times feels arbitrary. Like, "ARE YOU SERIOUS?? THAT'S THREE DITTO AND ONE OF 'EM'S STRETCHING! WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU?!"
Prof. Oak: "Hmm... it's not very good."
Prof. Oak: "Hmm... it's not very good."
—Stop Skeletons From Fighting, "Whatever Happened to Pokémon Snap?"
"I hate knowing I'm going to die, over and over and over again, and the only way I can beat it is by dying over and over and over again and remembering what killed me and trying not to do it again — but the first time I'm going through, I'm fucked! Something's gonna shoot out of the wall or something's gonna break, or I'm gonna get shot with something. Something's gonna fuck me, and I— [gets killed by spikes shooting up out of the moving platform he's on] LIKE THAT! THAT WAS IT! MOTHERFUCKER!"
— Michael Jones on 1001 Spikes, Ragequit
"Unfortunately, this is one of those games that is frustratingly hard and very quick to punish the hell out of you when you make even the smallest of mistakes. It's not impossible by any means, but it's pretty unfairly designed, with obstacles you would only really know about if you've already died to them."
— Diamondbolt talking about Tails' Nightmare, "WEIRD EXE CREEPYPASTA GAMES!"
Real Life
"In Super Mario, the player has faith that no matter how high in the air it may be, if there are coins there, you'll be able to collect them without coming to any harm. If the game was developed by people with a nasty streak, then a feature like that might be used to trick the player into losing a turn. If that were the case, then no matter how much you might want those coins, you wouldn't jump towards them."
I Wanna Be the Guy is a game about subversion. It's also a humor driven game. Predicting a player's actions perfectly as to maximize surprise and humor/frustration... It's very hard to have a brutal, mean game while still 'tricking' people to finish it. If a game is popular and brutal, it probably has something else going on that makes it work.
—Michael "Kayin" O'Reilly, I Wanna be the Guy official FAQ
