A - C | D - F | G - L | M - R | S - Z
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A
- AI War 2: Any number of undesirable minor factions can be allowed into the galaxy if you do the wrong thing. Destroy the engine disruptor keeping the Marauders off the galaxy? Call over an ancient, near-indestructible giant vessel that destroys everything it finds, eats it, and moves on? Destroy the only thing keeping the Nanocaust from infesting everything it finds and turning things into a three-way war? Go right ahead. It might even help if you're that desperate, and you get a bunch of Science for your troubles anyways. Destroying the AI Communicator Nodes tends to count; you'd think having multiple AIs attacking each other more than you would help, right until you see they don't hold anything back when fighting against an equal enemy, and bring in the big, big stuff that can casually kill you on the way to their real enemy.
- Burrowing near a flower in Alien Hominid gives you an extra life. But hopefully the players who reached level 3-2 remembers that there's a giant Sand Worm monster that eats anything who digs underground in that level, with the spot by the health-giving flower being no exception, otherwise...
- The Brass Bull, the Iron-Maiden, and the Shoulder-Shattering torture chambers in Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Go ahead, light the fire beneath the bull statue, and hoist the empty chains up to the ceiling. Or wander up and poke the Iron-Maiden's spikes. On a lesser level, you get a hand prompt when hovering over a fire or a pot of acid. Clicking on them does exactly what you're thinking it does.
- In Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, there is a memory that you can unlock involving Filbert and Kid Cat. They're talking about the rocket when Kid Cat invites the player into the conversation. Filbert is interested in the giant launch button, but Kid Cat and the player suspect it to be real. Filbert gets talked out of pressing the button at first, but the temptation is too much and he presses it, thinking nothing will happen. When Kid Cat and the player finally realize, in horror, that Filbert pressed the launch button, they panic, and Kid Cat decides to board said rocket and go to space. He makes it back safely.
- Antichamber: In one room, the ceiling says, "Don't look down." If you look up at that, then down, the floor disappears.
- In Arcaea, one of the Partners you can unlock in a limited-time event is Nono from CHUNITHM. Promotional material for the game states that if you get an EX grade or higher with her, you'll earn a whopping 2,525 Fragments (for context, you typically earn 10-20). When you unlock her and check her stats, you find out that she has a Frag stat of 0.5, which translates to a 0.01 multiplier, meaning that you will only get 25 Fragments. That said, she's a subversion in that if you continue up her map, you'll unlock Regulus who has legitimately good stats, so you have to unlock Nono if you want Regulus.
- Arx Fatalis:
- A literal trail of gold coins leads to a treasure chest, and when walking up to it, you can hear goblins talking about ambushing the human. By this point in the game you can probably take on a few goblins without breaking a sweat, but the chest is empty anyway.
- A quest to find the merchant's daughter can lead you to a cult that plans on sacrificing her to summon a demon. After killing the cultists, instead of freeing her from the altar (and so long as she's still alive), you can use a sacrificial blade nearby to kill her... completing the ritual and summoning the demon, who immediately attacks you.
- You can invoke this in Assassin's Creed III: Entering a hiding place gives you the ability to whistle, which lures guards to investigate, allowing you to easily take them out. Hilariously, the opportunity for this is an example in itself, because this can easily send four guards your way, more often than not making your discovery guaranteed.
- Assassin's Creed: Valhalla: One side-quest has Eivor come across a bard playing at an inn who suggests everyone have a drink. Clues from his singing and around the area all make it screamingly obvious that drinking that ale is a bad idea. Should Eivor do so, everyone else drops dead, and the bard tries to finish them off.
- Astra Hunter Zosma: In Nadir's boss fight, he has two Soul Bomb minions. Due to the way other bomb-like enemies work in the game, the player could easily assume that they have to defeat the bombs before they explode. In reality, defeating these bombs cause them to explode and revive to full health to start the cycle anew, and they automatically take damage each turn so that they'll eventually explode even if the player avoids attacking them.
- In text adventure game Asylum, at one point you find a written note that tells you to "look up". Something that you don't want to do.
B
- Baldur's Gate: The final game hands you a greater wish. If you wish to grow stronger by getting more experience, you get handed a ton of enemies guaranteed to wipe you off the face of Faerun. That said, it's quite a fun fight and reasonably winnable at a high enough level.
- Banjo-Tooie: In Targitzan's Really Sacred Chamber, there's a very obvious Jiggy. Banjo and Kazooie even note how easy the game is so far, then it turns out Targitzan himself was guarding it. Cue boss fight.
- The Binding of Isaac has a card called the "Suicide King" with the ominous pickup text "A true ending?" It turns out to live up to its name: using it kills you instantly, bypassing any health, shields, or even invincibility. Downplayed in that extra lives can be used to circumvent this, and it also spawns a number of pickups and even an item or two appropriate to the room's item pool, so experienced players who have an extra life to burn can use this to their advantage.
- Bioshock Infinite: "Dewitt, stop. Do not alert Comstock to your presence, stop. Whatever you do, do not pick number 77, stop. Lutece." Granted, the game forces you to pick #77, and even in-universe, Booker is choosing at random.
- Blasto has buttons in the first few levels that have a big sign reading "DO NOT PRESS" over them. If you actually do press them... you explode. Except for one particular button that instead reveals a secret pathway.
- In several places in Bloodborne, a path ends with a pit or a ledge that, if the player has been taking notice of where secrets are often hidden, may look like the leap of faith one would normally go down to find an item or a NPC; instead, they just lead to death by fall damage. It's common practice for players to leave notes either warning players away or egging them on.
- In one of the Chalice Dungeons, there's a great bell hanging from the ceiling in one of the rooms. Hitting it has no effect... other than summoning every monster in the dungeon to that room.
- Borderlands:
- The Vault contains The Destroyer and not the great riches promised but never seen.
- The main quest "Jaynistown: Getting What's Coming To You" is an obvious trap... which you have to trigger.
- The "Claptrap Rescue" mission in the Robot Revolution DLC. It's an ambush.
- BoxxyQuest: The Gathering Storm:
- At one point in the tutorial dungeon, there's a large pile of gold surrounded by many bloodstains. This is your introduction to the local flavor of Chest Monster, Karma Chameleons, who lie in wait to ambush greedy travelers.
- In the final "battle" with Boxxyfan's breath mask, you might notice that you have the option of running away instead of just smashing the mask, tempting you into thinking there may be a pacifist solution. Nope, you just end up getting brutally backstabbed for your efforts.
C
- Call of Duty:
- Modern Warfare:
- Played straight in the Museum "credits" level of Modern Warfare 2. After browsing the lifelike dioramas re-enacting scenes from the game, the player will invariably notice a large button, to which the onscreen prompt responds "Do Not Press (whatever the action button is for your platform)". Pressing the action button results in all the figures coming to life and bloodily ending the unprepared player. If you're prepared, though, it's not all that hard to survive as long as you get out of the room fast enough.
- Modern Warfare 3 gives us the Airdrop Trap support killstreak, which is a booby-trapped care package crate intended for your enemies. Savvy players quickly learn to never go near one (especially if it's placed somewhere stupid like in the middle of the map), but with a little bit of acting and a tantalizing prize inside (such as an Osprey Gunner)...
- In Call of Duty: Black Ops:
- In multiplayer mode, some players will use care package crates as Schmuck Bait, throwing them out in the open and waiting for an unsuspecting enemy to wander over and attempt to steal the crate. Doing so leaves the "Schmuck" standing still in a helpless state for several seconds, enough time for the other player to score an easy head shot or tomahawk kill.
- The reverse can also happen to the owner of the care package. If a person with the Hacker Pro perk kills the owner before he/she can get the package, the hacker can booby trap the crate and leave an unpleasant surprise waiting for their victim or any of their victim's teammates that happen upon the trap. Let the
multi-kills ensue.
- Modern Warfare:
- Putting the PlayStation game Castlevania: Symphony of the Night into a music player plays a hidden audio track of the main character Alucard reminding you that the disc is meant to be used on PlayStations only, and that track 1 contains computer data, so please, don't play it. He also hangs a lampshade on this by saying, "But you probably won't listen to me anyway, will you?" Back when this game came out, CD-ROM data was not as common as it is today, and most of the earliest CD players would try playing the data track, resulting in a screeching wall of sound that can damage your speakers. To keep people from doing this, a lot of games had a similar track.
- In Cave Story, the first time the pit of instant death appears in the game is adjacent to a sign saying: "Watch out! Deathtrap to your left! One touch means instant death!"
- At one point in Chrono Trigger, you'll get a chance to go to Ozzie's fort in 600 A.D. After defeating powered-up versions of Flea and Slash, you'll be led into a room where Ozzie's operating an obvious Death Trap, where a guillotine is guarding a delicious-looking treasure. Attempting to grab it while the machine's running will cause damage to your party. Instead, you'll need to go up the stairs to chase after Ozzie, at which point a greedy imp will attempt to open the treasure box, only to get chopped to bits by the guillotine. You can grab the contents after chasing away Ozzie, but there's not much of use in there anyway (just a Hi-Potion). There's a corridor on the lower-right where Ozzie has hidden most of Magus's most powerful equipment. Curiously, he leaves this portion of the room unguarded.
- The 580-point version of Colossal Cave has a button marked "EMERGENCY STOP — Do not push!". If you press it, the game deliberately enters an infinite loop. And this was written for a single-tasking operating system, so the only way to regain control of your computer is to reboot.
- Commander Keen 2, subtitled "The Earth Explodes", has an alien mothership orbiting Earth, with numerous death rays that will cause it to, you know, explode. Each of those comes with a convenient switch that allows the player to activate them. Oops.
- To correctly disable the death rays, you need to shoot a nearby glowing purple thing under glass. On some levels, it's high up on a ledge, high enough that you'll think, "I should stand close to that ledge and use my pogo stick to reach it." The Alt key is both 'pull out/put away pogo stick' and 'flip switch'.
- In Cookie Clicker, the game tells you it's a bad idea to purchase the late-game upgrades "One Mind", "Communal Brainsweep", and "Elder Pact" in their descriptions and gives you a series of increasingly ominous warning messages if you attempt to buy them. If you go ahead and buy them anyway, expect for strange things to happen to your game screen.
- Crash Bandicoot games contain the piles of boxes. Some of them hide a TNT or Nitro box inside, so if you try to spin them, you'll promptly get blown to kingdom come.
- Crimson Land offers you a choice of randomly chosen Perks every time you level up, each of which has its own benefits (and occasionally drawbacks). Two of the Perks- Grim Deal and Death Clock- will kill you, in exchange for increasing your current score by 66 percent and giving you 30 seconds to kill for double points, respectively. It's possible to get one or both of them as a choice for your first level up, and they will end your game with a rather disappointing score if chosen.
- Cultist Simulator: You can romance Saliba, whose lovers "are a little less" each time he takes his pleasures from them. He outright quips that "this will end badly" if you start trying to romance him. In the epilogue, you, too, are eventually reduced to nothing.
- The Cyberpunk 2077 side gig "Sweet Dreams" has a guy named Stefan who offers you a preem braindance that you have to use his equipment in order to play since it's a much earlier version than your BD wreath can play. Playing it gets you knocked out and sold to the very same scavs that you and Jackie took down in the very first mission of the game, with Johnny mocking you for falling for such an obvious trick, and you then have to get out, retrieve your gear, and deal with the scavs.
