Video Game Cruelty Potential / Adventure Game

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• Bugsnax:
  • Gramble absolutely refuses to eat Bugsnax normally, given that he's a rancher who loves them to bits. However, the player can take advantage of his sleepwalking habits to unknowingly force-feed him some Bugsnax. Even worse, he believes he's the only one responsible for this and begs the player to wake him up if they catch him sleepwalking again. The cruelty is optional, but it's required to get two of the game's trophies.
  • During the mission where you have to bring Filbo to the Frosted Peak to meet with Eggabell, it is entirely possible to use the Lunchpad to spring Filbo off of the mountain.
• Choice of the Dragon: After defeating your rival Axilmeus, one of the choices for "dealing" with him amounts to injuring him repeatedly until he can no longer run away, then letting him bleed to death. Even the narrator will call you out on your level of bastardry.
• In addition to a certain amount of required rat-abuse, Ghost Trick also lets you cause a couple of hilarious alternate deaths for people you're allegedly trying to save. It can be very hard to resist the urge to, for example, recline Detective Rindge's chair while he's driving, or, when Yomiel shoots Inspector Cabanela, swap the bullet for a nearby hard hat instead of the knit cap you're supposed to use.
• In Hamtaro: Ham-Hams Unite! and Ham Ham Heartbreak, you can Tack-Q (roll) into other hamsters, leaving them to them chide you (Though some, such as Bijou, seem to enjoy it.) You can also bite, scratch and poke other hamsters with a stick.
  • Not to mention the Go-P command. Yes, it does exactly what it sounds like. Yes, every single hamster will react with disgust and/or horror to it.
  • In order to learn one of the Ham-Chats in Ham Hams Unite, you must Tack-Q a hamster in The Ruins, causing him to fall.
• In Harvester, you can kill anyone. ANYONE. Beat your mom to death with a pipe? Sure. Go for it. If you kill someone before entering The Lodge, you will be executed. After The Lodge, however? Kill the nonessential characters as much as you damn well please.
  • You can blackmail Sheriff Dwayne by copying the evidence from the WHAR safe, which gets you a chance to kill any non-crucial NPC once and get away with it. Dwayne will even ask if you enjoyed your bout of random violence.
• In the flash game Haunt the House, your goal is to scare everybody out of the house; you're warned not to freak them out too much, or else they may "do something stupid" (i.e. jump out of a window and kill themselves). Judging from user comments, quite a few people have finished the game by deliberately killing everybody.
• Hiveswap: One of the ways you can get Chixie to give you her ticket is by telling Zebruh about her protest plan. He'll blackmail her into giving up her ticket by threatening to say bad things about her on social media. The Steam achievement for using this method is even called "Mean".
• Jenny LeClue: The titular Jenny can be a Snark Knight at the best of times, but the player has the ability to dial up the abrasiveness from being occasionally bratty to being an outright bitch. You can have Jenny insult a classmate by bringing up their parent's affair, continuously blackmail and verbally abuse her cousin Suzie at every opportunity, and refuse to accept your mother's apology at the end of the game, among other interactions.
• In The Journeyman Project, you can dispose of the robot in NORAD by turning up the pressure in the sub dock and watch him crumple like a pop can. You lose points for a non-peaceful resolution, though.
• In The Legend of Kyrandia III, Malcolm can hypnotize a squirrel to wear it as a hat, put a squirrel through a machine to turn it into a leather ball, or make a squirrel paste sandwich out of it. Even though the squirrels aren't exactly friendly in that game (click on them too many times and they kill you).
• Both Little Big Adventure games pretty much allow the player to attack anyone. Some of the NPCs can even be killed (only to come back later once you leave the area), and some of them will fight back. Note that most of the friendly characters can't be hurt, but if they fight back, you do get the damage. In particular, try beating up the kids near the beginning of the second game when it's still raining, then go outside and watch an... interesting cut scene.
  • The second game also has some locations that allow for creative ways of killing the Franco guards. One can be lured onto an electrical bridge while it's turned off and fried on it by pressing the switch in time (complete with X-Ray Sparks). Another one can be tricked into following you into the space suit chamber on the Emerald Moon and sucked into space when you put the suit on, opening the gate.
• In Maniac Mansion, it's possible to steal Weird Ed's pet hamster, put it in the microwave, blow it up, and then show him its exploded corpse. Of course, he'll kill you for it, but it's worth a shot at least once, because hey, not many video games allow you to nuke hamsters in a microwave!
  • Subverted in the sequel, Day of the Tentacle; Laverne revives the frozen hamster in a 22th century microwave oven, while delivering a Fantastic Aesop. (She explains that in her century kids who microwave their hamsters are taken away and put up for adoption, so don't do it.)
• In the Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures, you do not control Pac-Man directly, but act as his offscreen helper, guiding him along and helping him achieve his various goals. It is very possible to put the poor guy through a lot of suffering. Some of it is unavoidable, like where you have to induce a crow to attack Pac-Man in order to knock down an out-of-reach item. The downside to tormenting him is that he'll start ignoring your cues and you won't be able to proceed further until his mood improves. The ability to abuse Pac-Man was even used as a selling point in the game's American commercial.
• In Otter Island, once you have the motor and gasoline, you can choose to escape the island with Jeremy and leave Connor behind with the monster. This leads to the bad ending, as although he and Jeremy escape, Zach is consumed with guilt for abandoning his friend to a gruesome fate.
• In Peasant's Quest, it's possible to throw a baby into a lake. In fact, it's necessary for 100% Completion.
• There used to be a list of evil actions you could take in the Quest for Glory series, titled Quest for Evil by the discussion board members that came up with them. They included such things as killing the unconscious EOF opponent when told to in QFG2 and stealing coins from the musicians in QFG3 and 5. In QFG5, the musician would even thank you for stealing by playing a song for you.
• Randal's Monday: The large majority of puzzles are based around this, even tricking someone into murdering yourself. Well, you from an alternate timeline.
• In Sam & Max: The Devil's Playhouse, you have to use ventriloquism to distract the Samulacra — you can have Max throw his voice into a warehouse, making the Samulacra assault the door. Or you can use ventriloquism to have them assault Bluster Blaster or Sal, depending on who you like least.
  • Sam & Max Beyond Time and Space: There's a totally pointless Easter Egg in Ice Station Santa which lets you fling bleach-laced yellow snowballs in the face of each of The Soda Poppers, just in case you don't like them.
• In updated rereleases of The Secret of Monkey Island, one Xbox Achievement/PS3 Trophy requires you to let Guybrush drown. Gee, thanks for making me feel guilty just for a virtual reward!
  • You could already do that in the original PC release, and many people did. Some did it by accident, others did it on purpose because their friends had told them how they did it by accident.
• In Snatcher, Handsome Lech Gillian Seed can flirt with almost every woman in the game, walk in on Jean Jack Gibson's daughter while she is showering (and she was 14 in the original JP version of the game; chances are her raised age in Western countries was due to how Squicky the scene could be), force a Robot Buddy to watch a porn movie, and go to a strip club. The problem? Gillian is married.
  • Gillian has nothing on his Spiritual Successor, Jonathan Ingram, from Policenauts. Gillian can hit on every woman. Jonathan can outright molest every single woman in the game, including fondling the breasts of every single female character. The remake for the Sega Saturn actually upped the amount of Fanservice "due to popular demand."
• Each mission of Star Trek: 25th Anniversary, you start with a landing party of Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and a Red Shirt. There is always, always a way to get him killed. Painfully.
• In Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP, the only way to get the Moon Key requires chasing down the bear/boar creature in the dreamworld, cornering him in a tree, and beating him into submission. Then you have the option of executing him while he is unarmed, beaten, and gravely injured (but you get the Moon Key either way). It comes across as a particularly Jerkass move considering the creature does nothing to threaten you (or anyone else), spends most of its time doing a weird little dance, will actively run away from you when you get too close, and only draws a weapon when you corner and attack it. You can also murder rabbits by making them explode, which you derive absolutely no benefit from.
• There's an unintentional example in Superman 64; several missions involve saving hostages, but due to shoddy programming, some of them don't actually require the hostages to be saved, so you can just fly away to wherever the final checkpoint is, leaving the victims to their fates.
• In the Tex Murphy classic The Pandora Directive, you can choose to be a complete drunkard who treats everyone like crap, helps nobody but himself and only cares about getting paid. Many people get killed if you do so. Pretty impressive for a game with FMV cutscenes.
• In The Walking Dead, the player is given default guardianship of a young girl named Clementine, who has been on her own since the start of the zombie outbreak. Her parents are missing and presumed dead, and the only person she's had for company is a zombified babysitter, which leads to the potential for an player to do all kinds of mean, nasty, and downright cruel things to her that will further degrade her already questionable sanity. Gore and guts can fly in her presence, along with swear words she learns and repeats down the line. It gets to the point of brutally murdering people in front of her eyes. In Episode 2, the player can refrain from stopping Clementine from eating human flesh, served to her by the family of cannibals.
• Point and click game The X-Files Game has many ways you can cause trouble to people around you. You can be a total asshat to people by giving mean replies, ringing the bell at the motel several times to piss off the receptionist, asking the same questions over again after getting the answer to them already, etc. You can even go a step further by arresting people you're not supposed to, kill innocent people, or even killing yourself. Those methods will result in a game over, though.
• There is one part of Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders where you have to raise hell on an airplane to loot the crucial stuff you need from it. First off, you plug the sink up with toilet paper and call the stewardess. She quickly shouts "Oh no!!!" and starts cleaning up the mess. Then, in order to keep her completely distracted, you go to the microwave...set in an egg and then BOOM! The stewardess then asks what the awful smell is and notices the microwave on the airplane is a mess. "AAAAAIEEEEEE WHO DID THIS?!" Poor stewardess... Zak would end up on Not Always Right for that!
  • You can also kill animals in inventive ways (bludgeoning a squirrel, running a fish named Sushi through a garbage disposal, etc.). Unlike tormenting the stewardess, these are optional.

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