7 Times You Made the Game Unwinnable Through Stupidity

I usually make games unwinnable the old-fashioned way...

...by being not good enough at them to get past that one mission or miniboss and giving up.

0:53 They really put up a spoiler warning for a Garfield video game. You truly care about all of us.

has Andy finally nailed the 'Banker Going on an ill-Advised Fishing Trip with his Emotionally Distant Son' look?

"Remember to save often and in different slots."

Wasn't just friendly advice. It was a warning.

Morrowind had quite a few vital NPCs you would be informed that you could no longer finish the game if you killed them. You only saw this AFTER you killed them.

I'm not sure which possible fate in Myst is worse: being trapped in a featureless void for eternity or being trapped in a small stone room with a grouchy author who thinks you're an idiot and hates you for the rest of your natural lives.

Ironically, calling the Lady of Pain a deity is also a good way to get her to kill you. She refuses worship, and if she catches anybody trying to worship her, she flays them alive. She is, in fact, not a deity, but she is just as powerful as one. She also doesn't get along well with most deities, the exception to that being The Raven Queen, and even that is more of a mutual understanding than any true partnership

Fun Fact: The Lady of Pain is the only entity in D&D that doesn't have a stat block. All the gods have a stat block, making them technically killable. Except her.

One of my favorites is the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy game. It's already very odd and unforgiving, even for a text adventure game, but if you don't feed a dog a sandwich within the first minutes of the game, you will then be eaten by that same dog later (but somehow also earlier.)

I love how in the special edition remake of The Secret of Monkey Island, they specifically made sure you couldn't use the vending machine more than once. I guess spending all 478 pieces of eight on grog happened more than once, which is rather concerning.

There may not be a specific quest related to visiting Vault 106 in Fallout 3, but going there to collect the Bobblehead located deep within the vault is the only way to stop the completionist part of my brain from screaming, which is a kind of a quest...

I managed to once make the original Monkey Island unwinnable by mistake but through a different means - when you're on the Sea Monkey (the ship you buy at Stan's to travel to Monkey Island) you have to gather a bunch of stuff to actually find Monkey Island and get yourself to shore once you're within range. One of the items is a rope, which is called something like "large piece of rope", I think. You need to stick some in the cannon to form a fuse in order to use it to send yourself over the final stretch of sea. But I found I could keep doing this, using the rope on the cannon, and it made the rope's name change each time to be shorter and shorter, until eventually I had an "Infintesimal piece of rope" or something, at which point the name stopped changing and I gave up and continued the game. Except later on, once you're on the island, you need to use the rope again to climb down a cliff. I found that the infintesimal rope wouldn't work - evidently I made it TOO small, so I couldn't progress. Whoops :D

So to clarify whats happening in the death cut-scene from planescape:
The Lady Of Pain is believed to be a pillar of creation, she doesn't have a stat block and can therefore not be killed, she has never died in the lore and has canonically killed a god who tried to take over her city, and she did it so quickly no one actually knows what she did, just that his corpse was found floating in the astral sea.
Her abilities include: Inflicting indescribable pain onto anyone she looks at, including things that shouldn't be able to feel pain such as golems,
imprisoning people in pocket dimension mazes of which she has an unknown number of and can contain various creatures,
and the ability she uses during that cut-scene.
If her shadow is ever cast upon someone they are immediately flayed alive as their body disintegrates in the most painful fashion possible, they don't die instantly either, it takes a couple seconds for them to die during which time every moment will be unbearable agony.
Basically that cut-scene is your character being killed in the most painful way anyone could ever do by any possible method magical or otherwise.

Fun fact about the Myst Ages, the developers were made aware of their faux par with Dunny meaning toilet in Australia shortly after the game's release, and immediately changed it to D'ni in all subsequent games and lore! 😅 Also, every Myst game has unwinnable endings, too, with either ending up trapped in various Ages or siding with the wrong characters. I'm a huge fan of the series, so always excited to see it mentioned 😁

One of the stupidest examples of this is in Clock Tower 2, there's two enemies chasing you in the first level, a haunted doll and a suit of armor. If you beat the level without activating the armor, 2 hours later in the final level, it'll FALL THROUGH THE CEILING FOR NO REASON and crush you to death. Every other bad end is "you entered this scene as the wrong character" or "you forgot to get an item" and then there's this nonsense

9:42 “lady of pain? More like.. lady of mild inconvenience”
Lady of Lame was right there.

I love how this is representative of a very distinct era in video games. I was so bad at all these games as a kid...and maybe still now, in my 30s.

One thing they glossed over, it seems like there are something like 50-100 npcs in the City of Doors who will be happy to tell you to leave The Lady of Pain alone, and don't F with her Dabus. Seriously, the same people who have greater demon lords over for a pint at the local pub, will shake in their boots over annoying this ruler who usually doesn't even show her face. She is the ultimate boogieman of that world, and if you casually murder the Dabus, you have earned your Darwin Award.

In the first half of Final Fantasy 6, there's a single spot on the world map where it's possible to land the airship but not be able to get back onto it. Since you'll eventually need the airship to progress, you've basically softlocked yourself.

Jane doing a Secret of Monkey Island bit is like Mike doing a Silent Hill bit or Andy doing any driving bit... it's nice to mix things up but you have to imagine when the segment share out happens and they don't get the game you love, they promptly go kick a bin, shout into a black hole or throw a grenade at a set of motorbikes💥