r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Zeekay89 • 13h ago
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.
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u/Slow-Distance-6241 11h ago edited 11h ago
Frostpunk - Fall of Winterhome scenario
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.