miscellaneous
When the game lets you make an extremely dumb decision that kills you/gets you a game over/makes it impossible to win
Basically what it says. The extremely dumb decision that can only end in your death, game over, or make winning impossible is a valid option you can choose.
Mass Effect 2. Morinth is an Ardat-Yakshi, an Asari with a genetic condition that causes the Asari mind meld to burn out her partner’s nervous system and give her a euphoric feeling. If you choose her over her mother, Samara, she says that Shepard is special and can survive where everyone else has died. She’s lying and you die like everyone else if you sleep with her.
Nier: Automata. There are a lot of unique game overs in the game that usually involve dying during certain events. A few involve making truly idiotic decisions. Engaging your self destruct inside the pressurized space station blows it up. You can remove a component that is essentially your brain and instantly die. You can eat a fish that is said to be extremely delicious but destroys the insides of androids.
Lords of Aswick. One possible scenario in this choose your own adventure game is that you take in one of the king’s bastards as your squire. The king just had a legitimate heir and started killing his bastards to secure his heir’s claim. Later on, you have the option to declare in open court that your squire is the king’s bastard. The next scene is your execution with bastard having just been executed before you.
Fallout: New Vegas
In the "Dead Money" expansion, it is possible to get locked inside the Sierra Madre vault. If you choose the corresponding option, the Courier remains there forever, and the game displays a special ending
I read the entry that locks you in the vault first before reading the entry that warns you not to read the other entry which lead to a confusing first experience in the vault
In the Honest Hearts DLC, early on you get attacked by tribals. During this ambush a different tribal kills one of your attackers and you're supposed to go with him to get introduced to the plot.
Or, you see just another tribal, shoot him and the rest of that DLC is everyone and everything trying to kill you, as you've turned the friendly faction hostile.
In Wasteland 2, very early on in the game, you could accidentally activate the nuke while exploring the ranger citadel. the text simply says "button" and it is bright red. clicking it will result on an instant game over, and in the Steam version it gives you the "What does this button do?" achievement
In Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, the game actually lets you capitulate to the final boss and become her servant. If you select this option, you immediately get a game over.
This also happened in the very first JRPG, Dragon Quest. The Dragon Lord makes the standard villainous "We can rule together!" offer, and you can actually accept. Doing so gets you a game over.
Years later, the spinoff Dragon Quest Builders would take place in the timeline where the hero joined with Dragon Lord and the world went to hell as a result.
This also happened in the very first JRPG, Dragon Quest. The Dragon Lord makes the standard villainous "We can rule together!" offer, and you can actually accept. Doing so gets you a game over.
Because obviously the original Famicom cartridge didn't have enough storage to be able to boot you into a game of Civilization instead:
Which is the plot setup to Maoh Maoyuu Yuusha (Archenemy and Hero)
Note that in Maoyuu, the offering "I'll give you half of the world" (what the Demon King traditionally says to tempt the Hero) is seen as stupid by both the Demon King and the Hero.
The offer accepted in Maoyuu is "You will be mine, and I will be yours. Let's end this war together"
It's an anime about economics and tech development in a world where a nearly unending war dominates the society of the human and demon realms. Main characters agree to end the war slowly so that thousands of people don't die from the aftereffects of suddenly ending a war that's been going on for generations.
Downsides: anime ends about halfway through the story and it is incredibly difficult to find a complete translation of the manga. I still think it's worth watching.
And on the opposite side of the fence, you can actually refuse to take the first Pure Heart at the beginning of Super Paper Mario. Yeah, you’ll get a Game Over there too but it sure is funny!
Same game - the diary on the train. Don't read it. Really, stop reading this. There is absolutely nothing worth reading here, you shouldn't do this. OK, we warned you, you're dead.
If choose the Psionic Ascension pathway there’s a chance when you breach the Shroud you’ll be offered to enter a pact.
With this pact the benefits are huge but come with the warning: “Do not do this”
If you ignore the warning then you are given a timer for when the pact ends. When time is up, every world, ship, station, or whatever that you owned, is destroyed and you are left with a single poorly developed world.
Where your capital was, is now a giant Shroud entity that will try to wipe out everything in the galaxy, while every other faction hates your guts.
Is it possible to defeat it after it does that? That would certainly be an interesting playthrough if it’s possible to unleash a calamity that will wipe the rest of the galaxy while you scramble to turn one planet/system into the ultimate defensive position.
You can defeat it though it requires you to understand the game systems well. It also depends a bit on when the entity got summoned as its power level depends on the population that died when it arrived.
That creates an interesting balance if you want to go that route. You’d want to be tall enough you can build tall and defeat the monster after it comes from a single system. But you’d want to have enough population the monster can kill everyone else before it comes for you.
that "Do not do this" is also one of the only times in the entire game (if not the only one) where the game explicitly breaks the 4th wall in order to tell the player to do something.
In Fallout 1, you can join the Unity when you speak to the Master; if you do, the result is essentially a "game over" in which you are transformed into a Super Mutant in a very unpleasant process. Your knowledge is then used to launch an attack on Vault 13—you kill the Overseer, and all the Vault's inhabitants are either wiped out or captured and turned into Super Mutants—leaving you as the ultimate traitor to humanity.
Man I love the design of the Master in Fallout 1. The realistic yet uncanny 3d graphics of late 90s, early 2000s really elevate his visual impact on the player. You expect the Master of these huge muscular Super Mutants to be an even bigger and meaner son of a bitch to rule over them and no, its this barely recognizable as a lifeform mutation, yet incredibly well spoken and phylosofical and him having 3 voices that interject with different points of view during his conversation with you it gives him an almost mythical, godlike aura even though he looks so messed up. And the fact that you can even convince him to give up once you reveal that his plan will fundamentally not work due to Super Mutants being sterile, shows that he has enough self awareness, intelligence and humillity to recognize his mistakes and change plans.
I never played the original fallout games, but the design of The Master always left a huge impact on me.
To have this one available, you first need to make your character dumb. That is to say, during character creation, you need to put Intelligence at the minimum. It unlocks a bunch of dumb options throughout the game (including refusing to help the system at the end because you just want some ice cream), and also a very unique ending.
At one point in the game, you need to make the Hope, a ship full of thousands of settlers in cryo-stasis, jump between 2 planets in the star system, a very difficult maneuver. Because it's hard to do, you just let your on-board AI do it for you. Except that, if your character is dumb, you get the option to insist on making the jump yourself. You then get a short cutscene of the Hope jumping towards the sun, and the credits start rolling.
In the Baldurs Gate series, which is basically just 2nd Ed Dungeons and Dragons there’s a ton of fights you can pick that are really fucking hard unless you are super prepared and even then….
So like you find out you’ve been doing missions for a Red Dragon and he reveals this to you and lets you leave but…. You CAN fight him and you’ll probably die.
This led to a community named situation called “Bondari reloads” where you’d make a quick save, try something stupid and reload the game if it doesn’t work out in your favour.
So when the BG2 expansion “Throne of Bhaal” was released, the devs added a quest to the game where you encounter a group of adventurers in a dungeon and rescue them, named Bondari (a halfling thief), Nanoc (a barbarian, read the name backwards) and Tim (a human wizard and Monty python reference). So you get them to help you with some fetch quest and when they bring the stuff back they have a conversation within the group about how they can totally take you and then they attack, get absolutely massacred and then there’s just a text log line in the bottom saying “Bondari reloads” and the game jumps to before the fight, they are all alive again and they dutifully hand over the loot.
Magnificent use of the fourth wall and a kinda reverse example of the prompt in the OP
OH Firkraag is holding the holy avenger. I'm always beating him up. Last time I spammed everything I could to lower his saves and turned him into a squirrel.
My favourite quirk of D&D in that edition is that yes, that red dragon is now a squirrel, so he can’t breathe fire, but he’s still got the strength of a red dragon so that squirrel has HANDS
At that point in Baldurs Gate 2 you should absolutely be able to take the red dragon. You'll probably have to load a couple times because of RNG, but you should be able to kill it as long as you are using your potions, scrolls, and spells wisely.
It depends when you decide to go for a wander, my first playthrough I ended up leaving Baldurs Gate to explore the wider world quite quickly and I was waaaay too low level for him
Another rogue trader moment is trying to pilot through the incredibly deadly warp rift, with multiple chances to go back and warnings that yes, this will kill everyone here.
In Baldur's Gate 3, insulting the incredibly powerful Githyanki Queen Vlaaakith gets you wished out of existence. There are people who have had honor runs (high-difficulty permadeath) ended as a result.
You can also choose to kill the emperor. As he is the one preventing your ceremorphosis, you promptly lose control and are turned into a full Illithid. Which is GG.
You can also throw away the Netherstones into a hole, causing a game over.
Another stupid way to lose is if you enter the astral prism for the final pushyou can lose if you never got the Hammer, antagonize the Emperor into leaving you and then refusing Rafael
I think I read somewhere that she can use Wish repeatedly, because of her absorbing the souls of high level Githyanki and the sheer reverance of their species having her near ascension to divine (or something along those lines anyway)
You; former gangster and current president are trying to rescue one of the few survivors of humanity from the simulation that the alien who blew up the Earth trapped them in.
You; former gangster and current president are trying to rescue one of the few survivors of humanity from the simulation that the alien who blew up the Earth trapped them in.
Turns out, attacking the Daedric Prince of Madness within his own realm, where he is essentially a god, is not such a smart move. He smugly invites you to "Enjoy the view," before teleporting you thousands of feet into the sky above. Predictably, you then fall to your death.
In the game Tainted Grail, you come across a “Morgen”, which is basically an Arthurian-legend-themed Siren of the seas/lakes in the game.
She says that her kind are unfairly maligned, that they eat mostly krill and seaweed, and that men keep trying to dive after them into freezing waters in order to try to sleep with them, and then dying by drowning because the Morgen can’t pull the men back ashore to save them because they’re not strong enough.
She gives you a fetch quest to get a valuable treasure box she lost during a storm. At the end of the quest, she says that she’s very impressed, and has become infatuated with you because of your bravery. And she wants to spend one night with you as your reward. The game’s wiki even lists her as a Romanceable NPC, and you can successfully spend the night with her if you want.
Or you can just say “Nah”, and she’ll be sad, but will offer you the weapon that is inside the box instead.
If you say “Yes”, she embraces you, and drags you into the water. The game calls you a fool, and plays an ending slide-show that shows her eating you (in a non-sexual sense).
Jade Empire. In your final confrontation with the villain, he monologues his grand scheme and gives you the pitch of how it's all for the greater good, to ensure the Jade Empire will live forever. He asks you to go along with it, and you can.
The result is you dying, and there's a cinematic epilogue. A teacher tells a class of schoolkids a propagandised version of the Emperor's story. One of the kids asks questions challenging the story, and a jade golem behind the class begins to awaken. The teacher quickly shuts the kid down, and the golem goes back into resting position. The implication is that the Jade Empire is an eternal dictatorship where questioning carries a summary death penalty, even for children.
Cyberpunk 2077; it's possible to completely lock yourself out of Phantom Liberty's story at the beginning by telling Reed "no" when all three of you are in the safehouse when him and Myers asks if you'll help them
Songbird, I get what you're saying, but that is very much not on me. Like, I totally understand your meaning, but I'm not the one that crashed the plane.
They ask you "are you sure" or something like that, and if you say no again, you walk out of the safehouse. You still get to go to dog town and all that though
Yeah, that was the one I was thinking. It’s so funny. You’re trying your best to establish authority as a cop with some rowdy locals, and your last resort power play is to:
1) Pathetically beg your partner to borrow his gun, because you lost yours while drunk, and insist that he just needs to trust you
2) Immediately put the barrel in your mouth to everyone’s horror
From there, you have the option to back down, but everyone loses a lot of respect for you for whatever that display just was. The other clickable option is “pull the trigger.”
In Metal Gear Solid 3, you can eat a fake death pill which will send you into a death-like state, allowing you to fool guards into thinking you're, well, dead. It even plays the game over screen and everything, the caveat is that you have to eat a revival pill to get back up or else you will actually die
You also can only use the fake death pill once per encounter, if you try using it on enemies that have already seen you "die" and come back, they'll say something along the lines of "I'm not falling for that again" and continue shooting at you.
There's also Killing Ocelot when your first encounter him. He's knocked out on the ground and if you shoot or kill him another way you get the game over screen with it saying
"TIME PARADOX" instead
In the final mission, Untouchable, you are going after the big bad of the last 3 games. The one man in control of the global cabal called Providence, Arthur Edwards. When he dies, your handler Diana Burnwood gets put in charge and dismantles the organization from within.
When you finally make it to Mr. Edwards, he doesn't even run. He knows by that point that there isn't a point. He instead tries to talk you into using the pictured serum on yourself, which is effectively an instant and super effective amnestic that causes anyone injected to forget their entire life. This would place you back under his control, once again a heartless killer without remorse or feeling.
Agent 47 obviously says no. However, if his speech convinced you, you may wait around. After a period of time, Edwards asks if you have second thoughts, and you can inject yourself with the serum. This will play a pre rendered cutscene as he triumphantly says "I will take care of you now," placing you in a cell that (I assume) was similar to how 47's story started all those games ago.
You can also choose to inject Edwards himself with the serum for its unique cutscene. That's a different post, though.
Guybrush Threepwood, protagonist of Monkey Island, can "only" hold his breath for ten minutes. You get thrown into the sea near the docks. You can easily climb out, but if you wait underwater for 10 minutes you will finally drown.
Honkai: Star Rail has a few of these, that come as the consequence to joke dialogue options.
The first comes after the tutorial segment. You can say "no" to the offer of joining the cool traveling space family you've just met, and stay in the starting zone for the rest of your life as a lab researcher/guinea pig. Whereupon you get a few screens of narration about your uneventful life and how you never see the Astral Express again, and the game rolls fake credits and boots you back to the title screen, where you can reload back to the beginning of the dialogue.
In another instance, you get the option to "sleep until the heat-death of the universe" following yet another harrowing, planet-saving ordeal. Turns out this is literal. Narration plays about entropy marching ever onward, the universe dying around you, followed by the fake credit roll again and a "Honkai: Sleep Rail" title card.
In Pokemon Rejuvenation (Pokemon fangame), at the very start of the game you can talk to a guy who offers you a free trip to Hoenn. If you accept, you go to Hoenn, and that’s the end of the game. What happened to the evil team? What dark secrets lurked beneath the region? What terrible plots are brewing? Who knows! Not you, you’re in Hoenn
One of the victory conditions in Master of Orion II: Battle at Antares is a diplomatic victory where you are elected leader of the Galactic Council.
You can, however, be elected and choose to reject the appointment. The runner-up will become leader instead and unify all of the other races against you and immediately declare war.
The immersive-sim nature and high lethality of classic roguelike Nethack leads to a number of these... my favorites include things like:
zapping a wand of death in such a way that the beam bounces and hits you
putting on an amulet of strangulation, which strangles you to death
eating rotten food and dying from food poisoning
angering your God in one way or another, who smites you with a bolt of lighting
throwing an object or weapon upwards, which causes it to land on your head, potentially killing you if you have low HP
Reading a scroll of genocide (which permanently wipes out an entire class of monsters from the game) and specifying a class that includes your character's species
Kicking something solid, which results in damage from hurting your foot, and potentially death if you have low hp
as a Knight, immediately mounting your horse on game start, which has a chance for you to fall off and die
using a means of teleportation and specifying that you want to teleport to dungeon level -1 or lower - which, because the game counts dungeon levels from dungeon level 1 as you go lower, would indicate a place suspended in the air above ground. If your character is capable of flight or levitation you get a non-standard game over that you left the dungeon alive, otherwise you die instantly from falling to your death
Well, shit happens (no pun intended). But seeing your character being raped by an ogre, get all his or her limbs removed by a psychopath or getting all the skin removed by a lizardman while watching him or her slowly dying was way more horrifying.
In Divinity:Original Sin, you can loot basically everything that is remotely a container, including grave robbing if you have a shovel.
Usually this just gives you some trash, maybe something to sell.
There's one grave though that triggers a conversation between the two main characters about the morality of digging up a grave, basically trying to guilt you into leaving it be. If you then dig it up, it instantly explodes, killing everyone.
I loved this sooo much in Nier Automata. All the joke endings like eating the fish, taking out your operating system and stuff like that just made the game feel so alive.
It just lets you do stuff, even if it's an instant game over.
I choose to believe there’s a few seconds where 9S watches 2B remove the chip, hand it over, pocket the cash, and then crumple to the ground, Looney Tunes style
But only two of those actually involve the protagonist getting killed, because he's immortal and normally cannot die for good. The Lady of Pain is one of only two beings with the power to actually kill him permanently. Turns out, defying the omnipotent entity that can stop even gods from entering Sigil is a very stupid idea. "You have tested your immortality against the wrong creature and have been destroyed."
You encounter a latrine early on in the dungeon and you get the option to "jump inside".
The game promptly teaches you that you should not try every option just for the hell of it.
You get a message that the stench inside is overwhelming and when you try to interact with the wall you get a message that the walls are way too slimy to climb up and that you feel a sense of dead.
In the game your sanity slowly declines and the only option you are left with is waiting for it to become low enough to unlock the "suicide" action or you just reload your save.
I think it’s Suikoden 4 where you’re sailing out to find a specific island. You come across a different island in the beginning of the game and a character says hey this island is pretty cool what if we just stay here? You can agree and the credits roll.
Im replaying Wolfenstein: The New Order at the moment and it has a moment during the night train scene where one of the antagonists tests to see if you are "of true blood" by asking you to pick which cards make you feel a certain way. She also puts a gun on the table. You can reach for the gun instead and get instantly killed
In two there is a similar moment where you, when deep undercover, will walk right by a passed-out Hitler lying on the floor. You can choose to head-stomp the man to death, and are then immediately executed by the robot guards and troops that are in the large state-room with you. You get an achievement for it, but it's obviously a fail for your campaign and what you're trying to accomplish
Not necessarily dumb but not exactly smart: During the prologue of Cyberpunk 2077, you're in a meeting with an agent from a military corp who starts threatening you to answer questions. You have the option of staying defiantly silent. At which point she determines that if you won't talk, you're not useful to her, and she kills you. Really teaches you that trying to be a badass doesn't make you bulletproof.
in Deltarune's Light World, the player will always has the item Ball of Junk after entering Dark World. They can choose to throw it away at anytime, but the game will warn you that this is not a good idea.
The ball represents their Dark World inventory. If thrown away, the entire Dark World inventory, excluding equipped items, is discarded. Technically still possible to continue, but it's pain to do so.
In various Pokemon games, nothing stops you from releasing any Pokemon you have in Bill's PC. This means that you can travel into any island, releasing any Pokemon with Fly or Surf, save the game... and being permanently locked inside the island forever.
Some people did this to their games before selling them online. There's also a few videos online of people "Softlock-picking" games to see how they get out of that situation.
In heartgold, if your in cianwood with no pokemon in the pc and only 1 pokemon in your party, there will be a npc that gives the player a level 15 tentacool able to learn surf
I don't know about gens 1-2 but you can't do that starting in gen 3. I wanted to release my tentacruel but "it came back because it was worried about you." I assume that's kept through gen six but gen five and six are landlocked. There are islands but none with PCs. And in ORAS, you get the eon flute which is a key item that let's you fly around the map. Starting in gen 7, hms are removed and implemented in other ways.
In gen 3, the only way to lock yourself like you suggest is to:
Get a Pokémon with teleport
Set your teleport somewhere you can't leave, like evergrande city
put your hm pokemon in the daycare
Teleport
Get rid of all your items and money
Release all your pokemon until you only have a pokemon with self-destruct or explosion at lv 100 that can't learn hms.
Not in HGSS. An NPC in the Cianwood Pokémon Center will give you a Tentacool with the moves you need to escape the island if you have only one Pokémon. If you release it he’ll have caught another until you’re no longer softlocked.
Baldur's Gate 3: either you meet Gale of Waterdeep, or you can play as him. Either way you control his actions outside of cutscenes. Due to his past, he has a companion quest, and he gets access to a unique spell, and a quest that activates if he dies. Because he has a nuke in his chest.
The quest requires you to give him 3 magical items to absorb. If you don't, he explodes. Game over.
If he dies, you need to do a but of stuff and revive him. If you don't, he explodes. Game over.
You can activate his spell at any point after you get it, and he explodes. Game over.
You can use it at the end of Act 2 and get a bad ending, or at the final fight in Act 3 for a less bad ending.
For reading reference if you respond to her all cocky and ignore the “Take that back” dialogue she throws at you, she’ll use a wish spell and instantly evaporate your party
You can also, at the end of the game, side against the Emperor without having the Orphic Hammer to free Orpheus, which is an instant game over if Raphael is dead.
If Raphael is still alive, he'll appear and basically say "You have no choice now, take my deal for the hammer or it's game over." You can, of course, refuse his deal anyway and get an immediate game over.
On my first playthrough I accidentally opened and closed the "give gale a magical item" menu over and over without giving, him anything. He got pissed and left the party and I never saw him again
Yeah I think if you don't give him the first one he'll just leave and become a crater somewhere, but if you do the first two but don't give him the third, he'll take your party with him when he goes
In System Shock, you’re exploring an abandoned space station and after some exploring can come across a unlabeled control panel and a button with a glass cover over it. Power up the panel, open the cover and press the button?
Congrats dumbass you just fired a laser at Earth and ended all life
But that's what we do in video games all the time (press random unlabeled buttons, I mean)! That's how DOOM works! Also, you would think the planet-destroying laser would have some precautions against activating it by mistake.
The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind: you absolutely can kill any NPC in the game, including plot relevant ones, thus making the story impossible to continue.
Even then, 90% of the main story is basically a really long and technically optional sidequest intended to gain Vivec's trust and get him to give you the Wraithguard (a magical glove needed to safely wield Keening and Sunder - only two weapons capable of killing the big bad, Dagoth Ur) and teach you how to use it.
Even if you break the main quest, you can still simply kill Vivec, loot the Wraithguard from his corpse and show it to Yagrum Bagarn, who will jury rig it for you, allowing you to use it... unless you kill Yagrum too, at which point your only hope to beat the game is by exploiting alchemy/enchanting loops to create healing potions/equipment capable of offseting the damage of wielding Keening and Sunder without protection.
All that assumes, of course, that you didn't somehow misplace Keening or Sunder - at which point you're truly and well screwed.
Far Cry 4. If during the prologue you just sit still for 15 minutes after the antagonist excuses himself from the table, he'll eventually come back, you go off to scatter your relatives ashes and then go and shoot guns together, avoiding the main plot completely.
Even funnier, the speedrunners all choose this option because it makes the playthrough shorter. I love the "dumb" dialogue in the Outer Worlds 1. Just priceless.
You need high computer skills (and maybe engineering? It's been a while) while still being an idiot. It takes a lot of your skill points, but it's funny.
Not a decision, but an interesting mechanic with a game over outcome. In Kingdom Come: Deliverance, the hardcore mode has a certain percentage chance that when you start the game, you get a message that your character died in childhood due to some cause or another, and you just have to start another new game. It has very little effect on the gameplay, since you literally have no progress to lose, but it is an interesting inclusion.
In Fallen London (amazing browser game) there's many such cases. Notable ones include jumping into a furnace the game explicitly tells you will kill you and achieve nothing, and the entirety of the Seeking Mr. Eaten's name storyline. It's the storyline that permanently bricks your account, and ruins your stats and accomplishments.
The infamous bad ending dialogue for the fourth case, Farewell, My Turnabaout, after presenting the wrong evidence and/or presenting the evidence to the wrong person: "The miracle never happen." This gives you a game over
In God of War (2018) you use the Yggdrasil tree as fast travel, since all the realms are held up by it's branches. You're told several times to *stay on the path* because you are at that point outside all of the realms, so falling off will be very bad for you. Despite this, there is a specific spot where you have a button prompt to jump off, and if you press it, Kratos will in fact jump off with Atreus and die. There is a way to survive, but the way to do it involves spoilers and you can jump off regardless.
Basically at one point of the game you're confronted with the self appointed goddess of the Githyanki.
She will make a request, or rather order you, and you have the choice to actually refuse her (with Lae'zel heavily questioning your reasoning and intellect for doing so).
Pressing into the choice actually kills you as Vlaakith simply makes it happen via a powerful spell, because you know...the tyrannical goddess of Githyankis doesn't exactly takes no for an answer.
In Mother 3, you're supposed to dash into this statue with a metal ball attached from the front or left side to break the floor to progress. If you dash from the right side, you, as expected, get flattened and receive a game over screen.
Shin-Megami Tensei Nocture (or lucifers call in the EU)
At one point MIDWAY through the entire game there is a random bit of dialouge for a fairy after you rescue its freinds from demons "wow, weren't you scared?" if you can answer yes or no, if you answer no she asks agan "not even a little?" and again you can say yes or no, I answered yes since anyone would be a bit fighting demons.
muuuuuuuuuch later at the end of the game you are presented with a choice, you can ether remake the world as as a place with no emotion OR a place where only the strong survive OR a place where everyone is isolated to their own reality (kinda like infinite tsukoyomi from naruto).
You can choose to reject all these.
If you answered no both times to this random bit of dialouge halfway through the game, then you challange god to a fight, defeat him and restore the word to how it was before the apocalypse.
If you answered yes even once to the random bit of dialouge, god says fuck off and your a terrible person because now the world is gonna be stuck in this apocalyptic state forever and no one gets to be happy, there is not even a bossfight with god, you lose sir good day.
In "Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon" there is an encounter where you can find an enemy monster sleeping. When you approach it you have the option to pet the monster. Doing so wakes the creature up, and it bites your arm off.
For the rest of that playthrough you will have only one arm and cannot duel cast magic, use a shield in that hand, duel weild weapons, use a bow, or use two handed weapons.
There's also a morgren in act 3 that flirts with you after you do a quest for her and acts like she's different and actually into you and you're special blah blah blah anyways she drags you down into the deep and kills you if you flirt back lol.
In Neverhood there's a hole with signs warning you that you'll die if you jump in. You can, of course, jump in, and die as a result. This is the only way to die in the game.
Long story long, The City was ruled by a tyrant, against whom most people united in civil war. You are the new ruler and have to clean up the mess after him. After clearing the debris in search for survivors and building materials, you eventually get presented an option to check the Generator (giant semi-geothermal heater central to The City, that's necessary for people to survive in harsh Arctic conditions while preserving industrial lifestyle). Turns out it's not just malfunctioning - it's a ticking time bomb. You can do whatever you want, but it'll just delay the inevitable. You have to evacuate people on Dreadnought (giant train-like machine that's used for transporting people to the aforementioned Generator), but people lose hope in your leadership. You can either let it be and try to cheer them up one way or another... Or you can lie, and say you know of a city that you'll evacuate them to. Eventually one of the engineers realizes you're lying. You can either get him and his family first to evacuation, or you can kill him. Regardless, eventually rumours spread to a group of engineers. You can kill them too - but remember, you already have a limited amount of engineers, and you need the vast majority of them to just make generator last a couple days longer. Then you also need engineers for healing people and researching technology. So killing them is actively crippling all of that. You can also ignore/agree to tell the truth, but then people lose even more hope and get even more angry at you than if you just told them the truth right away.
About halfway through Suikoden 2 you can choose to nope out of an important battle. If you do, a few members of your party will join your escape, but the rest will die.
You're given multiple opportunities to turn back, but every time you refuse more of your friends die. At the end your character lives alone with his cowardice as the world burns around him.
The Outer Worlds-You can insist on doing the calculations near the final and if you are low intelligence this results in your ship going straight into a sun.
Even worse, you can try to get the Hardie Boys’ to answer your questions by holding a gun to your head and threatening to kill yourself. They call your “bluff,” but the jokes on them since you can actually choose to go through with it. There are plenty of chances to back out, too.
Golden Sun 1 has this. Very early on Isaac and his friend Garret survive an encounter on the forbidden mt. aleph and are caught by village elders who learn that Garet and Isaac are humanities only hope to stop a world ending cataclysm.
The elders tell you its up to you two if you wanna go. You can just say no I think twice and you just get a short "and thus the world ended" epilog and have to start from the conversation.
I remember early builds of Honkai: Star Rail giving you (the Trailblazer) the option to choose staying on the Herta Space Station instead of leaving on the Astral Express. Choosing so would give you a game over and some flavor text about how you were a research object Herta poured over in her quest to better understand Stellerons. Eventually, she got what she could out of you, grew bored, and you became another discarded object kept in what was essentially Herta's hoarding warehouse in space. I vaguely remember mentions of Astra taking good care of you though.
However, events from later in the game would indicate that you would probably have died on the station when it was destroyed by one of the galactic cataclysms that you stop from happening in your journey on the Express.
I don't know if this counts, but at the end of Mass Effect 3 if you decide to forgo any of the three main endings and instead shoot the Star Child, you get the Refusal ending where everybody dies and the next cycle begins.
The Quest For Glory series had a bunch of non-standard game-overs, my favourite of which is using a lockpit kit on yourself, with a sufficiently low lockpick skill, drives a pick into your brain, killing you.
Esoteric Ebb is full of these. It’s a disco-like with plenty of hard reminders that you don’t have to click on everything or say every dialogue option just because they’re available. There are so many opportunities to lose a huge chunk of your health or die outright, most of which involve your internal monologue insistently saying not to and yelling at you to not be a moron.
My favorite, I think, is when you go inside a windmill and notice something shiny stuck to one the cogs of a massive gear, but the gear is actively turning and you’d have to lean way out over a railing above the machinery to try and reach it.
If memory serves you have to click through like a dozen thought dialogues saying, repeatedly, “this is so stupid, do not do this, you don’t even know what this shiny thing is and you’re probably about to kill yourself” and then pass a really tough skill check. If you fail it, well, into the gears you go.
Wastelands 2 allows you to detonate the nuke in your base. If I remember correctly, the narrator describes it as doing it out of curiosity whether it will work or not. And if you confirm, you can get an achievement
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u/elysavira 12h ago
Fallout: New Vegas
In the "Dead Money" expansion, it is possible to get locked inside the Sierra Madre vault. If you choose the corresponding option, the Courier remains there forever, and the game displays a special ending