r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Zeekay89 • 18h 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/FullMetalCOS 15h ago
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