I just love it when video games let you do really stupid shit that kills you immediately. I love being like "oh this is a terrible idea" and being able to do it and then die. It's good game design.
Highlights from the notes:
- Mouthing off to a literal god in Baldur's Gate 3 so badly that she undoes your very existence. Also making out with a mindflayer and letting someone perform an ice pick lobotomy on you.
- The joke endings in Nier Automata, specifically the one where you eat a fish after being told it will kill you which immediately kills you and removing your OS chip for funsies. Gotta say tho, I'm kinda bummed none of you mentioned self destructing on the Space Station, which is my personal favorite Dumb Ending.
- Having sex with an alien that kills everything it has sex with in Mass Effect.
- The seemingly hundreds of you who, upon being given control of Link, immediately ran off the cliff at the start of Breath of the Wild.
- Sierra Games. Just...Sierra Games <3
- Jumping into the toilet in Fear & Hunger. (Huh???)
- Disco Elysium killing you for the crimes of *checks notes* sitting in a chair or turning the lights on.
- Fallout 4 letting you jump into a forge full of molten metal. Also honorary mention to the Fallout series as a whole, aside from Sierra they really are the kings of this. (Shoutout to the legends who take the Black Mountain/Quarry Junction route to Vegas! Sure is a great way to Die Badly!!)
- Whatever the fuck kind of softlock mind games are going on in Sunless Sea. Truly the most "damn bitch you live like this??" shit I've ever heard. 100/10
- The absolute CHADS who mentioned how you can just refuse to try to save the world right at the start of Golden Sun which gives you a unique ending telling you how fucked everything gets bcs you decided to be a lazy piece of shit. (My fiancé is giving you all a fist bump bcs this is one of his favorite games of all time.)
- Eating the jarrin root Astrid gives you to poison the Emperor in Skyrim. (Like yeesh you just hand me poison and expect me not to shove it in my mouth as fast as I can??)
- Minecraft blowing your ass up for trying to sleep in the Nether and the End, specifically for giving you the death message "[Player] was killed by intentional game design".
- Being able to pilot the ship in The Outer Worlds right into the heart of a star bcs you decided you were smarter than the autopilot.
- Portal 2 my beloved for giving you so many chances to just let GLaDOS and Wheatley kill you. You even get an achievement for it!!
Please keep the stories coming these truly are delightful <3
Additional stuff I forgot:
- The Paper Mario series also does the yes/no prompts where no leads to instant death.
- Plenty of people mentioned Soulsborne games, which, for those unaware, are as batshit hilarious as they are brutally hard, and being curb stomped by enemies is absolutely not the only way to eat shit and die. My favorite is the random bottomless pit in the starting area in Elden Ring that is just out of place enough you'll probably jump in it to see if it leads to something cool. It doesn't tho. It just kills you.
- God of War telling you not to jump off the world tree bcs you'll die and then just...letting you do it anyway. Also one of the games apparently has a level where if you deviate from the marked path you will die, and like 90% of you deviated immediately and died.
- They aren't technically deaths but multiple Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons games will let you say no to taking over the farm, which sends you back to the title screen. However the best one is Harvest Moon DS(I believe?) where you can straight up let your dog kill the Mayor, which gives you a Bad Ending.
- Red Dead Redemption for letting you jump into a geyser full of boiling water or join a death cult right as it's about to get to the death part.
- Scribblenauts lets you nuke yourself. And also kill yourself about 50 billion other ways.
- The only thing I know about Lethal Company is that it's "die badly" the game.
- The Stanley Parable(my beloved <3) also has many moments where you can kill yourself doing something stupid, and The Narrator usually makes fun of you for it. (This ofc makes the time when you have to do it that's explicitly not funny even more harrowing.)
- Shooting the lake in Resident Evil 4 after being told not to, which summons a monster that kills you.
- MANY horror games that give you a unique ending if you simply choose to immediately hit the bricks rather than go into the spooky forest/building/town.
- Amnesia however is not one of them; if you jump out of the open window you find in an attempt to get the fuck out of there you die.
- These:
