History Main / InsurmountableWaistHeightFence

* You can't climb anything that isn't a ladder in ''VideoGame/DarkSouls''. This can lead to ridiculous scenarios where you're blocked from moving by a ledge that only goes up to your ''knees''. Probably the worst case was in ''VideoGame/DarkSoulsII'', where your main objective for the first half of the game is to get to Drangleic castle, but you are blocked from doing so by a pile of rubble that a child could easily climb over. To get around it, you need to run all over the game world to find and slay four legendary beings of immense power and acquire their souls, then head up a barely noticeable dirt path next to the rubble and use those souls to open a tiny building called the Shrine of Winter, which has an exit on the other side, allowing you to finally continue on past the rubble to Drangleic Castle. This raises the question of why the rubble even needed to exist in the game at all when the developers could have just put the Shrine of Winter where the rubble was and left it at that.
** There's also Belfry Sol, which you 'trap' yourself into by hopping down into a pit whose sides only come up to your head. The only way out is to climb the provided ladder and make your way through the belfry, even though you could theoretically just pull yourself up over the ledges, or even just climb up the provided latter and step off on the side once you've climbed 5 feet.

*** Due to the way the game handles map geometry, fences are either completely pass-through or infinitely tall. This often leads to flying enemies being unexplainably corralled in because they can't fly over them.[[note]]It actually takes considerably more mapping effort to make a fence that is ''not'' infinitely tall: rather than simply plopping down a linedef, you have to put down a polygon of linedefs to establish a map sector, define the height of said sector, ''and then'' use the fence texture as the sides, effectively creating a solid wall disguised as a fence.[[/note]].
*** [[HitboxDissonance Things]][[note]]the engine's name for all entities[[/note]] [[HitboxDissonance are infinitely tall]] as far as collision with other things is concerned, so it's impossible to jump over or going under anything that has a collision hull like a candelabra far below or a hanging corpse five yards above. Improvements to the engine implemented with ''VideoGame/{{Heretic}}'' fixed this, and advanced source ports backport this feature to ''Doom''.

** Integral to much of the level design in ''VideoGame/{{Doom}}'', ''VideoGame/DoomII'' and ''VideoGame/Doom64'', where any protrusion above knee height might as well be Mount Everest until you find the right button to lower it. A number of source ports have since added jumping to the game, which allows players to skip huge swaths of some of the classic levels by simply hopping over these obstacles.
** ''VideoGame/Doom3'': Although you can jump in this game (unlike in the previous ones), you are incapable of surmounting waist-height obstacles such as broken stairs.

* ''VideoGame/Borderlands2'' contains two examples very close to each other in the main story, both of which are blatant attempts to [[FakeLongevity draw out the endgame]]. The first is a bridge which is raised to bar your progress, to which the main characters have to undertake a convoluted sidequest to bypass, despite there being a huge pipe crossing the expanse that could be climbed on (if the characters could climb anything other than a ladder.) The second is another pipe, this time with a ladder which falls off when you approach. You must undertake another pointless quest to burst the pipe and walk through it. The second example is worse, because you can ''actually get on top of the pipe in another location,'' but are stopped from walking to your destination.

-->'''Loading Screen:''' Yes, you can climb now. Get over it.

** ''VideoGame/MetroidOtherM'': There's a missile tank in Sector 1 placed at the end of a balcony that would be theoretically easy to get with the Screw Attack, except an InvisibleWall is preventing any access from side of the spot Samus goes thoguh first. [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_nS1ADTJY0 See for yourself]].

* ''TabletopGame/{{Paranoia}}:'' While everything about Alpha Complex varies DependingOnTheWriter, one constant is that the Complex's dystopian police state is divided into color-coded areas indicating what level of security clearance is required to enter them. In most versions, this rule is absolute -- if your security clearance is ORANGE, then you will be shot on the spot if you walk into an area painted YELLOW. This is true even if the the YELLOW zone is only a meter-wide stripe on the floor of an otherwise ORANGE corridor.

* ''VideoGame/StarOceanTheSecondStory'' features a short trip through a swampified forest early on. When you approach a marshy area, the hero will say "It's impossible to go further," and won't budge. An NPC actually gives you boots specifically for crossing the marshes just before you set out, making this something of a head scratcher. It's never explained that the boots are ''an equippable item'', and that they must be worn in the "Greaves" slot by one of your characters. It would definitely stymie a first-time player, especially when all the other PlotCoupons in the game are treated as key items.

** ''VideoGame/Myst'': Invisible walls are found everywhere. On Myst Island, you can't walk across the mountain behind the observatory, for example. Ironically, in the blurb, it says something akin to 'pick your path through the forest'. Yet, whenever the player attempts to do such, they constantly find themselves up against invisible boundaries that are there for no apparent effect other than to break immersion.

** Integral to much of the level design in ''VideoGame/{{Doom}}'' and ''VideoGame/DoomII'', where any protrusion above knee height might as well be Mount Everest until you find the right button to lower it. A number of source ports have since added jumping to the game, which allows players to skip huge swaths of some of the classic levels by simply hopping over these obstacles.
** Although you can jump in ''VideoGame/Doom3'', you are incapable of surmounting waist-height obstacles such as broken stairs.
** ''VideoGame/Doom2016'' game subverts this entirely by adding [[DoubleJump double jumping]] and ledge catching to the player's repertoire...which you will need in order to navigate the game's many treacherous jump puzzles.

** ''VideoGame/FatalFrameIICrimsonButterfly'' has Mio encounter the ''Unclearable Debris'' in the Osaka underground passage. Despite the rocks being large and looking sturdy enough for a teenager to climb over, she refuses to do so.
** ''VideoGame/FatalFrameIIITheTormented'' has Rei encounter a dresser, which [[GenderRestrictedAbility could only be moved by a man's strength]], and proclaims the same about a somewhat wide gap between rooftops. When playing as the male protagonist, they can be easily moved.

* ''VideoGame/ThereIsNoGameWrongDimension'': Spoofed in the two chapters parodying ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfZelda'', where the path to the Dimensional Temple is blocked by several comically small bushes which TheHero has to cut through with the Sword of Life. In both cases, the Hero seemingly has to backtrack through what all the other worlds in his game to obtain it. [[TheVoice The Game]] of course has no patience for all that, so you have to solve several puzzles to [[CuttingTheKnot find a quicker way to reach the sword]], with the Hero lamenting at one point that the Game should've just given him [[StatingTheSimpleSolution a pair of gardening shears]].

* Modern era ''VideoGame/SonicTheHedgehog'' games seem to zig-zag this trope, depending on the stage. Some stages, Sonic can walk under water with no problems whatsoever with the only problem being lack of air. Other stages, once he goes past knee-deep, he encounters the ''Knee Deep Water of Uncrossibility'' and Sonic cries out "NO!" as he loses a life. Unless he's going [[WalkOnWater fast enough]], in some cases.

* ''VideoGame/SuperMario64, VideoGame/SuperMarioSunshine'' and ''VideoGame/SuperMarioGalaxy'' have slopes that are very slippery. Mario, of course, can easily jump -- or even fly -- right over the slope... and into an invisible barrier.
** In ''VideoGame/SuperMarioSunshine'', this is more prominent when you consider that you're on an ''island'' and could probably swim to each area, minus a couple up on the slopes, without having to go through the hub world.

** In ''VideoGame/MetroidOtherM'' there's this one missile tank, well, [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_nS1ADTJY0 see for yourself]].

** [[PocketDimension The Wasteland]], the pocket dimension where the titular train travels on, is populated by [[VampiricDraining Ghoms]] that will kill anyone who are fool enough to pass by there. Additionally, if any Train denizens happen to be in the wasteland and get too far away from the Train, a mysterious, repulsive force will draw them back and prevent them from going too far from the train.

* ''VideoGame/TeenTitans2003'', the tie-in video game to the cartoon, is pretty bad with this. In outdoor areas, you'll be blocked by electric fences that needs to be deactivated by hitting certain switches, never mind you're controlling a Titan who can ''fly''.

* '''The InvisibleWall''' -- in which there's not even a flimsy justification for why you can't go that way. You just can't. Used as a last resort when developers either don't care, or can't come up with a HandWave.

* While everything about [[TabletopGame/{{Paranoia}} Alpha Complex]] varies DependingOnTheWriter, one constant is that the Complex's dystopian police state is divided into color-coded areas indicating what level of security clearance is required to enter them. In most versions, this rule is absolute -- if your security clearance is ORANGE, then you will be shot on the spot if you walk into an area painted YELLOW. This is true even if the the YELLOW zone is only a meter-wide stripe on the floor of an otherwise ORANGE corridor.

* '''The Knee Deep Water of Uncrossability''' -- a body of shallow water which may as well be a BottomlessPit as far as your ability to ford it is concerned. See also SuperDrowningSkills.

** You could probably build Mount Everest out of the ''Frictionless Hills'' and ''Gentle Slopes of Unclimbability'' in the [[VideoGame/LEGOAdaptationGame Lego Star Wars series]].

* ''VideoGame/{{Crysis}}'' mostly lets you use your super powers to do awesome things. However, after a while, one begins to notice that the entire island is made of valleys with walls just slightly too steep to climb and just slightly too high to jump over.
** ''Crysis Warhead'' doesn't. While you can drive down trees with your Armoured Personnel Carrier and blow up whole buildings with nothing but a grenade, you will still get stuck (sometimes permanently) in the same flimsy wood fences that you could kick down even if you ''weren't'' a nano-suit augmented super soldier.

* Integral to much of the level design in ''VideoGame/{{Doom}}'' and ''VideoGame/DoomII'', where any protrusion above knee height might as well be Mount Everest until you find the right button to lower it. A number of source ports have since added jumping to the game, which allows players to skip huge swaths of some of the classic levels by simply hopping over these obstacles.
** Although you can jump in ''VideoGame/{{Doom 3}}'', you are incapable of surmounting waist-height obstacles such as broken stairs.
** The fourth ''[[VideoGame/Doom2016 Doom]]'' game subverts this entirely by adding [[DoubleJump double jumping]] and ledge catching to the player's repertoire...which you will need in order to navigate the game's many treacherous jump puzzles.

** Do you think M1 Abrams tank is able to overcome ankle-high curbstone? Think again.
** The ''VideoGame/RainbowSixVegas'' games suffer likewise.