What's the strangest or creepiest video game behaviour you've encountered?
Did a game ever delete your save data? Or brick your entire console? Have you ever come across horrific visual bugs? Or scary audio? What are your experiences with glitches?
I Want To Be The Guy was a brutally difficult side scroller platformer. You can find play throughs online to see how challenging it is. On top of being difficult, it was also pretty buggy and would frequently crash popping up the Windows XP send error report dialog.
In one level, you see the dialog show up, but the game is actually still running. And if you don’t act fast, the dialog box crashes down and crushes the player.
Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem had a bunch of fun effects as your character lost their sanity. In the game, you might start seeing blood dripping on the walls, or statues would turn their heads to follow you, but there were some meta ones too like having the game mute with the “mute” text showing up on the screen making it look like you sat on the remote or randomly throwing up the “controller disconnected” message right when you entered a room with a bunch of enemies.
One of the best ones was when you opened the menu to save progress, it fudged the controls to make you think you accidentally deleted your save file.
When Spyro 3 was being made, aggressive piracy was a huge thing. So the developers decided to design the game so that crude copies of it would play a highly modified, unwinnable and intentionally buggy version of the game that didn’t reveal its existence as unwinnable until half-way through the game where the save fairy gives you the warning this meme conveniently displays. Guess what “game” my introduction to Spyro was?
To add onto this, one of the Arkham games had a bug in the last fight with Joker that wouldn't let you finish the fight with mouse/keyboard. It was a QTE and it would recognize the button press, but wouldn't recognize you were holding it down, so the animation kept resetting like you were taunting the joker before finally finishing him off.
InB4 someone mentions Doki Doki Literature Club. I can’t remember all the weird shit that it had, but when you complete the game it corrupts the game files so you can’t play again.
That’s a game I can only play once, and I suppose you only really need to. But knowing the things that happen now I don’t think I could go back even if there is more to do. Very interesting and well done game but it’s fucking harrowing.
Maybe not exactly what you were getting at but the start of Prey (2017) really stands out to me. I don’t want to ruin it for anyone who hasn’t played it, but it’s was one of the few times a game actually made me pause to seriously reflect the situation.
If you do get the game don’t look at any reviews or guides if you get stuck before you reach the Talos 1 Lobby.
Massive spoiler for the first hour of the game, seriously don’t read unless you don’t play games:
spoilerYou take a helicopter ride from an apartment to take some tests before you are to go to a space station. Only one of the testers is attacked by something alien and you are knocked out by a test chamber’s gas. You wake up on the same day back in your apartment, but this time there’s a dead person in the hall way and you’re stuck in the apartment building. Breaking the window of your apartment (something you aren’t prompted to even do) reveals the entire space you traveled the prior day has been theater conducted inside a massive testing chamber already on the space station you were told you were heading to.
Watched this a few months ago. Started out as an interesting idea for a video. Thought I’d save it for later and move on after watching the first 10 minutes since it was going to be like watching a full length movie. I ended up watching a bit more and was looking for a good place to stop and finish another time. … I ended up staying up to finish it, as the story just got more and more intriguing, the longer I watched. (Two Thumbs up)
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