Video games often have stressful parts in them,but probably some of the most stressful ones are things that aren’t as they seem.
10 games that misled us in really stressful ways.
Starting out with number 10,
Hellblade send you a sacrifice
and the all progress will be lost message.
So this is a game that’s
all about dealing with
mental illness and it pulls
a lot of interesting tricks
to try to put players
in the same head space
as the title character.
Right after the game starts,
you’re forced into an unwinnable battle.
Like the main character falls over dead
and the camera shifts to show
you it was all hallucination.
You don’t get off scot-free though.
Some of this weird black
rot crawls up our arm
and you get this message,
dark rot will grow every time you fail.
If the rot reaches Senua’s head,
our quest is over and all
progress will be lost.
The message is clear.
This game has some kind
of permit F mechanic
where if you die too many
times to lose your progress
and have to start the whole
story from the beginning.
They carefully word it to not
explicitly say permadeath,
but for most players it’s pretty clear.
The developers were very
purposeful in their words
though because here’s the thing,
you can’t actually lose
your progress in this game.
The dark rot does get
bigger every time you die,
but it never reaches your
head until the scripted moment
at the end of the game
where it always happens.
Before that you can retry
as many times as you want
and the game just keeps going.
It’s kind of a dirty trick,
but the developers intentionally wanted to
keep the players tense,
but they don’t actually want
to punish them that harshly.
(dramatic music)
If anything, it does put you
in the mindset of the character
because it’s basically making you question
the reality of the game.
And number nine is Resident Evil 4’s
secret dynamic difficulty system.
In contrast to Hellblade,
where the game tells you
that a mechanic exists when it doesn’t,
Resident Evil 4 doesn’t tell you
about a mechanic that specifically exists
to make the game easier.
If you didn’t know, Resident Evil 4
has a dynamic difficulty system.
That means if you’re low on
ammo, the game gives you more
or if you’re struggling
with certain encounters,
the game actually makes
future ones easier.
Or on the flip side, if
you’re getting through areas
way too easily, the game makes
sure that future sections
are a little tougher.
This basically is
intended to make it appear
like your resources are
always just on the verge
of running out, at least
on your first play through.
So a lot of first time
players, including myself,
would conserve ammo as much as possible,
but it’s a smoke screen.
The game always gives you ammo
and healing if you really need it.
So really things are never as desperate
or difficult as they first appear to be
because the game goes out
of its way to help you out.
(dramatic music)
(gun shooting)
A lot of games do have some
form of dynamic difficulty
but they don’t try to hide
it as much as this one.
And number eight is Hollow
Knight’s The Banker.
Dying in Hollow Knight
works pretty much the same
as any other Souls like,
obviously it’s a little
bit different in terms of
how it looks and what
perspective it’s played from,
but when you die, you lose the currency.
In this game it’s called Geo.
You lose all of it and you
have to go back to collect it
and if you die on the way,
that money is gone for good.
The difference with this
game is that there isn’t
any leveling up of any kind.
That money is used
exclusively for buying stuff.
So losing all your hard
earned cash could be
a real big setback.
Thankfully the game does throw
you a bone a little early on
by providing a bank that you
can store some loose cash.
It is a seemingly very
welcome addition, for a while,
but as you find out the
whole thing is a cruel scam.
If you deposit more than 2,550 Geo,
the Banker bug just disappears
and reveals that the bank
was just an empty facade.
This is probably the cruelest
trick the game pulls on you.
That’s like a hell of a lot
of money just to be gone
and it’s easy to assume that
that whole story ends there.
I wouldn’t put it past a Soul’s game
to leave you with a huge screw you,
but thankfully there is a
way to get that money back.
You can hunt down the Banker
and slap them around to get
your cash back with interest.
So in the end you can
actually come out on top.
(Banker grunting)
The game manages to trick people twice,
first into think of the Bank’s legit,
then into thinking the
money is gone for good.
You have to go out of your
way to find where the Banker
ran off to, but at least you can.
And number seven is Psychonauts
2 Compton’s Cookoff,
one easy way a game can
insert stress into a situation
is a time limit.
Time limits can be pretty
tight or pretty forgiving,
but the first time you’re playing a game,
you really don’t know how
strict a time limit is
and one of the only
levels with any kind of
time limit in Psychonauts
2 is Compton’s Cookoff.
The level where you’re
supposed to build these dishes
of food in a time limit and
with each complete order,
the complexity of the food increases,
while the time limit decreases.
By the last one, it’s a race
to get everything done in time
but it doesn’t actually matter that much
because you wanna know what
happens when the time runs out?
Nothing, nothing.
Seriously, you lose some mystery prizes
but you get them for free
just replaying the level,
so there’s just no reason to rush.
Like Hellblade, the time
limit is just there to put you
in the same head space as the
person you’re in the mind of.
It’s only for one level
instead of the entire game
and it’s not as severe as Hellblade.
But that ticking clock is more than enough
to stress people out.
Even after they know it
doesn’t actually matter.
And number six is Legend of
Zelda: A Link to the Past’s
Mad Batter, compared to
some of the other examples,
the amount of stress this guy generates
only lasts for a few seconds tops,
but those few seconds are so stressful.
Like when I found this
guy for the first time
when I was a kid, oof.
You can find the Mad
Batter hitting in the well
near the swordsmiths.
This is kind of ominous looking altar
and if you use some magic
powder on it, this guy appears.
Here’s the stressful part,
after waking up, he says that
he’s gonna get his revenge
on you by taking away
half your magic power
and that would really, really suck.
You have half your magic
taken by some random guy
because you wandered into a cave.
As far as the revenge goes, however,
this one isn’t actually that bad
because instead of actually
cutting your magic meter in half
it instead makes it so your
magic spells take half.
So he actually does the
opposite of what he said.
He makes your magic meter basically twice.
That’s not a punishment,
but he frames it that way.
I don’t know why, it’s a
great reward in all actuality
but for those few seconds
before he does it,
you’re like, Oh my god, what?
And number five is
Borderlands, the Secret Armory
of General Knox, the Crimson Armory.
In the third DLC for the
original Borderlands,
your goal is to gain access
to the titular secret armory
containing a boatload of guns.
Problem is when you finally get
inside, there’s a countdown.
If you don’t get out
before the timer runs out,
the vault locks down with you inside.
In this case, threats actually real
because once the timer runs out,
the door is closed and you’re
actually trapped in the vault.
The trick here is that it’s Borderlands.
When you die, you just
respawn at a new use station
with all your stuff intact,
so who cares if you get
trapped in the vault?
All you have to do is kill
yourself and you appear outside
with everything you looted
still in your inventory.
So that’s a pretty
meaningless time limit there
and they really do trick you
into being like kind of afraid
because like you wouldn’t
think that you’d get
to keep everything but you do.
And number four is in Shenmue II.
If there’s one thing that’s
almost as stressful in real life
is time, it’s money
and one of the first things
that happens in Shenmue II
is that Ryo’s bag is stolen,
along with all of his money.
So you’re stuck in a
new city with no money
and no place to stay.
Now Joy manages to get you a room
at the Come Over guesthouse
for just 38 bucks per night,
which is pretty damn good.
I mean, have you seen Hotel prices lately,
it’s usually are like four
to five times that much
for a normal crappy room.
But with no source of income,
you basically have to
do a bunch of odd jobs
or resort to gambling to keep
paying for your nightly room.
Now that’s stressful.
That is, until you realize
that you never actually
have to pay for the room.
The guy at the front desk
will just keep adding it
to your tab and you’re never
forced to pay off the tab.
It doesn’t matter,
no matter how much the
hotel owner complains,
you never actually have to pay them back
for any money that you owe them.
I mean, it’s morally wrong,
but it’s also a video game.
Killing is morally wrong
and you do a lot of that in video games.
So just not paying some
hotel owner for a room
’cause he is a pushover, not
really that big of a deal.
At number three is Sekiro, dragonrot.
On top of the usual punishments you get
for dying in other Souls game,
Sekiro adds an even more
debilitating punishment,
the dragonrot.
It’s vague in explaining
what dragonrot actually is
but it sounds pretty bad.
Every time you die,
there’s an added chance
someone in the world will
become afflicted with dragonrot.
It doesn’t kill them, but
it does make them useless,
so shops won’t sell anything.
Quest NPCs won’t give you Quest dialogue.
It actually sounds incredibly
punishing, doesn’t it?
In reality, it’s not nearly
as bad as it could be
and in fact the game gives you the ability
to heal people who have dragonrot.
Basically around every 10
deaths, someone gets dragonrot,
usually a side character
or an important NPC.
It takes a lot of deaths for the dragonrot
to become a real problem and even then,
certain plot critical
NPCs never get dragonrot.
It just can’t happen.
The game also has an abundance of items
that heal dragonrot.
These items are called
the dragons blood droplet
and they don’t just cure one person.
Using one of these
things will cure everyone
who has dragonrot.
For first time players, the
whole dragonrot situation
sounds really unfair but in reality,
it’s not that big of a deal.
It really doesn’t have a
lot of effect on the game.
So it’s not nearly as bad as the game
tries to make you think
it is at very least.
And number two is Undertale,
the Pacifist Route.
A game that really loves
pulling tricks on the player
and lying about what’s going on.
Let’s just be clear about
what Undertale is here.
I mean, one of the first
things that happens
in the entire game is
when it tries to trick you
into thinking the damaging
bullets are friendliness pellets.
So right from the start, the
game’s trying to throw you off
and leave you stressed
off first time through.
If you’re playing the game blind,
to pass this route gonna
be extremely stressful.
Like you never know if
you’re doing something wrong
or when the game might
suddenly become unwinnable.
If you’re going for 100% pass fist,
you’re always gonna remain at level one,
which basically means instant
death in any other RPG
’cause later enemies will
just kill you instantly.
But for this game, it is
perfectly possible to play through
the entire thing at Level one.
In fact, it’s kind of designed
for it, but anyone playing
through the first time
is not gonna know that.
And finally at number one, Antichamber,
the time remaining clock.
When it comes to stress inducing clocks,
they don’t get much more
pointless than this.
The very first room in Antichambers,
basically like a hub room,
except there’s a countdown
clock ticking down
from an hour 30 minutes.
The game says nothing
about what the clock means,
but it’s a countdown in a video game,
so it’s safe to assume
that it’s important,
like maybe you have to finish the game
in an hour and a half or
the whole thing resets.
Now you’ve gotten this far in the video,
so you already know this
clock is completely pointless.
All that happens when it reaches zero
is that a new message appears
and says live on your own
watch, not someone else’s.
Like it’s kind of a motivational
speaking type thing.
I don’t know why it’s even here.
It’s not motivational
because this whole time
we thought that clock was
gonna be a serious problem
and it’s just them saying like
don’t do life on someone else’s timeline.
I mean, all right, sure, why
is that a part of a video game?
Anyway, that’s all for today.
Leave us comment, let
us know what you think.
If you like this video, click like.
If you’re not subscribed,
now’s a great time to do so.
We upload brand new videos
every day of the week
and the best way to see
them first is of course
a subscription, so click subscribe.
Don’t forget to enable
notifications and as always,
we thank you very much
for watching this video.
I’m Falcon, you can follow
me on Twitter @FalconHero.
We’ll see you next time
right here on “Gameranx.”
10 games that misled us in really stressful ways
Video games often have stressful parts in them,but probably some of the most stressful ones are things that aren’t as they seem.
10 games that misled us in really stressful ways.
Starting out with number 10,
Hellblade send you a sacrifice
and the all progress will be lost message.
So this is a game that’s
all about dealing with
mental illness and it pulls
a lot of interesting tricks
to try to put players
in the same head space
as the title character.
Right after the game starts,
you’re forced into an unwinnable battle.
Like the main character falls over dead
and the camera shifts to show
you it was all hallucination.
You don’t get off scot-free though.
Some of this weird black
rot crawls up our arm
and you get this message,
dark rot will grow every time you fail.
If the rot reaches Senua’s head,
our quest is over and all
progress will be lost.
The message is clear.
This game has some kind
of permit F mechanic
where if you die too many
times to lose your progress
and have to start the whole
story from the beginning.
They carefully word it to not
explicitly say permadeath,
but for most players it’s pretty clear.
The developers were very
purposeful in their words
though because here’s the thing,
you can’t actually lose
your progress in this game.
The dark rot does get
bigger every time you die,
but it never reaches your
head until the scripted moment
at the end of the game
where it always happens.
Before that you can retry
as many times as you want
and the game just keeps going.
It’s kind of a dirty trick,
but the developers intentionally wanted to
keep the players tense,
but they don’t actually want
to punish them that harshly.
(dramatic music)
If anything, it does put you
in the mindset of the character
because it’s basically making you question
the reality of the game.
And number nine is Resident Evil 4’s
secret dynamic difficulty system.
In contrast to Hellblade,
where the game tells you
that a mechanic exists when it doesn’t,
Resident Evil 4 doesn’t tell you
about a mechanic that specifically exists
to make the game easier.
If you didn’t know, Resident Evil 4
has a dynamic difficulty system.
That means if you’re low on
ammo, the game gives you more
or if you’re struggling
with certain encounters,
the game actually makes
future ones easier.
Or on the flip side, if
you’re getting through areas
way too easily, the game makes
sure that future sections
are a little tougher.
This basically is
intended to make it appear
like your resources are
always just on the verge
of running out, at least
on your first play through.
So a lot of first time
players, including myself,
would conserve ammo as much as possible,
but it’s a smoke screen.
The game always gives you ammo
and healing if you really need it.
So really things are never as desperate
or difficult as they first appear to be
because the game goes out
of its way to help you out.
(dramatic music)
(gun shooting)
A lot of games do have some
form of dynamic difficulty
but they don’t try to hide
it as much as this one.
And number eight is Hollow
Knight’s The Banker.
Dying in Hollow Knight
works pretty much the same
as any other Souls like,
obviously it’s a little
bit different in terms of
how it looks and what
perspective it’s played from,
but when you die, you lose the currency.
In this game it’s called Geo.
You lose all of it and you
have to go back to collect it
and if you die on the way,
that money is gone for good.
The difference with this
game is that there isn’t
any leveling up of any kind.
That money is used
exclusively for buying stuff.
So losing all your hard
earned cash could be
a real big setback.
Thankfully the game does throw
you a bone a little early on
by providing a bank that you
can store some loose cash.
It is a seemingly very
welcome addition, for a while,
but as you find out the
whole thing is a cruel scam.
If you deposit more than 2,550 Geo,
the Banker bug just disappears
and reveals that the bank
was just an empty facade.
This is probably the cruelest
trick the game pulls on you.
That’s like a hell of a lot
of money just to be gone
and it’s easy to assume that
that whole story ends there.
I wouldn’t put it past a Soul’s game
to leave you with a huge screw you,
but thankfully there is a
way to get that money back.
You can hunt down the Banker
and slap them around to get
your cash back with interest.
So in the end you can
actually come out on top.
(Banker grunting)
The game manages to trick people twice,
first into think of the Bank’s legit,
then into thinking the
money is gone for good.
You have to go out of your
way to find where the Banker
ran off to, but at least you can.
And number seven is Psychonauts
2 Compton’s Cookoff,
one easy way a game can
insert stress into a situation
is a time limit.
Time limits can be pretty
tight or pretty forgiving,
but the first time you’re playing a game,
you really don’t know how
strict a time limit is
and one of the only
levels with any kind of
time limit in Psychonauts
2 is Compton’s Cookoff.
The level where you’re
supposed to build these dishes
of food in a time limit and
with each complete order,
the complexity of the food increases,
while the time limit decreases.
By the last one, it’s a race
to get everything done in time
but it doesn’t actually matter that much
because you wanna know what
happens when the time runs out?
Nothing, nothing.
Seriously, you lose some mystery prizes
but you get them for free
just replaying the level,
so there’s just no reason to rush.
Like Hellblade, the time
limit is just there to put you
in the same head space as the
person you’re in the mind of.
It’s only for one level
instead of the entire game
and it’s not as severe as Hellblade.
But that ticking clock is more than enough
to stress people out.
Even after they know it
doesn’t actually matter.
And number six is Legend of
Zelda: A Link to the Past’s
Mad Batter, compared to
some of the other examples,
the amount of stress this guy generates
only lasts for a few seconds tops,
but those few seconds are so stressful.
Like when I found this
guy for the first time
when I was a kid, oof.
You can find the Mad
Batter hitting in the well
near the swordsmiths.
This is kind of ominous looking altar
and if you use some magic
powder on it, this guy appears.
Here’s the stressful part,
after waking up, he says that
he’s gonna get his revenge
on you by taking away
half your magic power
and that would really, really suck.
You have half your magic
taken by some random guy
because you wandered into a cave.
As far as the revenge goes, however,
this one isn’t actually that bad
because instead of actually
cutting your magic meter in half
it instead makes it so your
magic spells take half.
So he actually does the
opposite of what he said.
He makes your magic meter basically twice.
That’s not a punishment,
but he frames it that way.
I don’t know why, it’s a
great reward in all actuality
but for those few seconds
before he does it,
you’re like, Oh my god, what?
And number five is
Borderlands, the Secret Armory
of General Knox, the Crimson Armory.
In the third DLC for the
original Borderlands,
your goal is to gain access
to the titular secret armory
containing a boatload of guns.
Problem is when you finally get
inside, there’s a countdown.
If you don’t get out
before the timer runs out,
the vault locks down with you inside.
In this case, threats actually real
because once the timer runs out,
the door is closed and you’re
actually trapped in the vault.
The trick here is that it’s Borderlands.
When you die, you just
respawn at a new use station
with all your stuff intact,
so who cares if you get
trapped in the vault?
All you have to do is kill
yourself and you appear outside
with everything you looted
still in your inventory.
So that’s a pretty
meaningless time limit there
and they really do trick you
into being like kind of afraid
because like you wouldn’t
think that you’d get
to keep everything but you do.
And number four is in Shenmue II.
If there’s one thing that’s
almost as stressful in real life
is time, it’s money
and one of the first things
that happens in Shenmue II
is that Ryo’s bag is stolen,
along with all of his money.
So you’re stuck in a
new city with no money
and no place to stay.
Now Joy manages to get you a room
at the Come Over guesthouse
for just 38 bucks per night,
which is pretty damn good.
I mean, have you seen Hotel prices lately,
it’s usually are like four
to five times that much
for a normal crappy room.
But with no source of income,
you basically have to
do a bunch of odd jobs
or resort to gambling to keep
paying for your nightly room.
Now that’s stressful.
That is, until you realize
that you never actually
have to pay for the room.
The guy at the front desk
will just keep adding it
to your tab and you’re never
forced to pay off the tab.
It doesn’t matter,
no matter how much the
hotel owner complains,
you never actually have to pay them back
for any money that you owe them.
I mean, it’s morally wrong,
but it’s also a video game.
Killing is morally wrong
and you do a lot of that in video games.
So just not paying some
hotel owner for a room
’cause he is a pushover, not
really that big of a deal.
At number three is Sekiro, dragonrot.
On top of the usual punishments you get
for dying in other Souls game,
Sekiro adds an even more
debilitating punishment,
the dragonrot.
It’s vague in explaining
what dragonrot actually is
but it sounds pretty bad.
Every time you die,
there’s an added chance
someone in the world will
become afflicted with dragonrot.
It doesn’t kill them, but
it does make them useless,
so shops won’t sell anything.
Quest NPCs won’t give you Quest dialogue.
It actually sounds incredibly
punishing, doesn’t it?
In reality, it’s not nearly
as bad as it could be
and in fact the game gives you the ability
to heal people who have dragonrot.
Basically around every 10
deaths, someone gets dragonrot,
usually a side character
or an important NPC.
It takes a lot of deaths for the dragonrot
to become a real problem and even then,
certain plot critical
NPCs never get dragonrot.
It just can’t happen.
The game also has an abundance of items
that heal dragonrot.
These items are called
the dragons blood droplet
and they don’t just cure one person.
Using one of these
things will cure everyone
who has dragonrot.
For first time players, the
whole dragonrot situation
sounds really unfair but in reality,
it’s not that big of a deal.
It really doesn’t have a
lot of effect on the game.
So it’s not nearly as bad as the game
tries to make you think
it is at very least.
And number two is Undertale,
the Pacifist Route.
A game that really loves
pulling tricks on the player
and lying about what’s going on.
Let’s just be clear about
what Undertale is here.
I mean, one of the first
things that happens
in the entire game is
when it tries to trick you
into thinking the damaging
bullets are friendliness pellets.
So right from the start, the
game’s trying to throw you off
and leave you stressed
off first time through.
If you’re playing the game blind,
to pass this route gonna
be extremely stressful.
Like you never know if
you’re doing something wrong
or when the game might
suddenly become unwinnable.
If you’re going for 100% pass fist,
you’re always gonna remain at level one,
which basically means instant
death in any other RPG
’cause later enemies will
just kill you instantly.
But for this game, it is
perfectly possible to play through
the entire thing at Level one.
In fact, it’s kind of designed
for it, but anyone playing
through the first time
is not gonna know that.
And finally at number one, Antichamber,
the time remaining clock.
When it comes to stress inducing clocks,
they don’t get much more
pointless than this.
The very first room in Antichambers,
basically like a hub room,
except there’s a countdown
clock ticking down
from an hour 30 minutes.
The game says nothing
about what the clock means,
but it’s a countdown in a video game,
so it’s safe to assume
that it’s important,
like maybe you have to finish the game
in an hour and a half or
the whole thing resets.
Now you’ve gotten this far in the video,
so you already know this
clock is completely pointless.
All that happens when it reaches zero
is that a new message appears
and says live on your own
watch, not someone else’s.
Like it’s kind of a motivational
speaking type thing.
I don’t know why it’s even here.
It’s not motivational
because this whole time
we thought that clock was
gonna be a serious problem
and it’s just them saying like
don’t do life on someone else’s timeline.
I mean, all right, sure, why
is that a part of a video game?
Anyway, that’s all for today.
Leave us comment, let
us know what you think.
If you like this video, click like.
If you’re not subscribed,
now’s a great time to do so.
We upload brand new videos
every day of the week
and the best way to see
them first is of course
a subscription, so click subscribe.
Don’t forget to enable
notifications and as always,
we thank you very much
for watching this video.
I’m Falcon, you can follow
me on Twitter @FalconHero.
We’ll see you next time
right here on “Gameranx.”
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