Ascended Fridge Horror / Video Games

• The Ecco the Dolphin series does this in Ecco: Tides Of Time, (the sequel to the original game) with the questions the concept of time travel raises. The original had Ecco time travel into the past one time to get a globe from past-Asterite to bring to present-Asterite, and another time to save his fellow dolphins from a Vortex invasion. One cannot help but think the developers noticed this left various questions about the effects of time travel in the minds of fans, because the sequel explored them in frightening and confusing depth.
• Pokémon:
  • Pokémon Black and White introduces Team Plasma, an Animal Wrongs Group that believes keeping Pokemon is slavery and forcing them to battle is cruel, which is an idea that's been around ever since the start of the franchise. However, it turns out that while N is sincere about his motives, Ghetsis only preached this to try and convince everyone else in the world to release their Pokémon so that he'll be the only one with Pokémon, thus delving even deeper into the back of the fridge. By definition, criminals don't obey the rules, so trying to stop people from using Pokemon altogether would only make things worse.
  • On the same note as Pokémon Adventures listed above, Pokémon Colosseum and XD let the Donphan out to play with Cipher attacking trainers that try to obstruct their operations. The S.S. Libra is the biggest case, with its human crew lost at sea after XD001 takes their ship away.
  • In Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team, you play as a human who was turned into a Pokémon. In the ending, as your character is returning to the human world, they wish to stay a Pokémon. A lot of people found it offputting that they would choose to abandon the friends and family they presumably have back home forever. Two games later, in Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Gates to Infinity, your partner is hesitant to wish you back for this exact reason.
  • Pokémon Sun and Moon and their Ultra versions take a deconstructing approach to sidequests, including five powerful Eevee trainers from the past who in the present day all middle-aged, elderly, or in one case dead, and a woman whose husband died to his own Machoke in an accident. Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon also touch on long-speculated things like what happens to Pokémon abandoned in the PC, as well as the thought of Ditto, a Pokémon that can theoretically mimic anything, and Zorua, a Pokémon with the power to cast illusions to pose as other Pokemon and people, replacing humans.
  • Pokémon Sword and Shield finally shows what happens when fossil Pokémon are put together the wrong way before reviving them. Even better, this is based off of a period in British history when paleontologists would actually do this (minus the reviving part, of course).
• When Marle is temporarily removed from the timestream early in Chrono Trigger, she's still alive and conscious in some sort of void. Chrono Cross explores the implications of changing the timestream and condemning people to that void.
• As a game that incorporates time travel, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time led to the belief that the adult timeline didn't vanish just because Link stopped Ganondorf in the past, leading to two splits:
  • First came The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, which confirmed that theory, revealing that in said timeline the whole world was flooded because Ganon returned and Link wasn't there to stop him from taking over.
  • When the Hyrule Historia artbook was released, it confirmed that a third timeline existed that fans rarely acknowledged; if Link failed and died. This led to the "degradation of Hyrule" timeline that follows Hyrule after Ganondorf reaches and corrupts the Sacred Realm. This timeline where The Hero Dies spans several millennia as things go from bad (Link to the Past's World Half Full) to worst (Zelda I and II, where society was seven mildly populated towns among a massive barren wasteland of monsters).
  • Strangely, the only timelines where Ganon(dorf) is Killed Off for Real are ones where Link wasn't around to stop him at some point. In the Adult timeline, he dies for good in Wind Waker, and in the Downfall timeline, in the original The Legend of Zelda. Breath of the Wild potentially throws a wrench in this, but it's confusing regarding the timeline in the first place, seemingly deliberately.
• The Extended Cut of Mass Effect 3 retconned various aspects of the endings, after fans pointed out that the original ending had accidentally caused several major Inferred Holocausts. However, getting the Destroy ending with low EMS takes all the horror from the vanilla endings and makes it that much worse.
• The Mega Man Zero series used this trope to its advantage when it was called to make a Post-Script Season. Zero 3 was the original Grand Finale, and while its ending ties up most loose plot threads and resolves Zero's concern over his identity, it leaves one big loose end hanging—by the end of Zero 3, a revived Copy X and the remainder of his ruling cabinet are killed off, leaving Big Bad Dr. Weil alive and essentially with sole rulership over Neo Arcadia. Zero 4 explores this and kicks off its plot with a caravan of human refugees fleeing the hellhole that Neo Arcadia has become under Weil's iron fist.
  • Even at the beginning of the series, the first game's main villain, Copy X, showcases a potential worst case scenario which lingered in the X series backstory. What would happen if Dr. Light didn't subject X to 30 years of ethical testing? As the copy was created as a quick replacement to take over the original's role and duties, the untested and inexperienced copy of X quickly became a brutal Knight Templar, branding various reploids as mavericks and sending them to their executions over the most minor things, eventually going Maverick himself.
• In the third Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney game, that fact that one of the game's culprits was executed is a plot point. It's never stated whether any of the other killers you've helped convict were given the death penalty, but seeing as most of them don't appear afterwards, it's certainly likely, though it's never addressed. Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, however, doesn't sidestep the issue: the true culprit of the second case is shown being executed on-screen,^note she wasn't actually executed, though, though it sure seemed so at the time and via horrifying Cruel and Unusual Death to boot. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Spirit of Justice also explicitly says that the defendants of the trials set in Khura'in will be given the death penalty if they are convicted. Gyakuten Kenji 2 confirms that not all of the murderers are given the death penalty, as Frank Sawhit from the first game is still alive in prison and will be freed once his sentence is over.
• The ending of Myst, at least the "good" ending", shows us the results of Atrus's decision on how he'll handle the atrocities that his son committed. That result left the player wondering what really happened to them when Atrus enacted his decision. Myst IV: Revelation put that wondering to rest quite firmly.
• The "Moriya Arc" in Touhou Project ^note Mountain of Faith, Subterranean Animism, Undefined Fantastic Object, Hisoutensoku, and Ten Desires, named because all of them are caused directly or indirectly by the Moriya shrine introduces three new factions to Gensokyo, each wanting to expand their worshipers and ideology, and each having reason to dislike the others and the local authorities. With each introduction fans were wondering whether war would break out, and speculated endlessly over how it would happen. Then comes Hopeless Masquerade, where the human population falls into desperate pessimism because Gensokyo Is Always Doomed (another bit of Ascended Fridge Horror) and all three exploit the crisis to gather more faith for them themselves, fighting the other factions over worshipers. Turns out they were all manipulated by an independent party, though.
• Kingdom Hearts:
  • Many fans have long observed that the series' many "worlds" (levels) seem suspiciously small, particularly since they're implied to be entire parallel universes. Even in levels that supposedly take place in countries on Earth (like "Deep Jungle" and "The Land of Dragons"), we never see locales other than the locations of the movies, making the worlds seem more like horribly claustrophobic pocket dimensions. ^note  By the same token: it can seem a bit creepy that the Destiny Islands are seemingly the only landmasses on an otherwise empty planet. The prequels actually build on this idea, revealing that there's more than a little truth to it: turns out that the world of Kingdom Hearts was once a Universe, and only became a Multiverse when all of reality was irrevocably shattered by the Keyblade Wars. So the worlds seem claustrophobic because they're actually the splintered remains of a world that was once whole.
  • In Kingdom Hearts II, it's revealed that the antagonist of the first game was really Xehanort's Heartless, and Xemnas (the current antagonist) is his Nobody. Both entities are created when a person loses their heart, and the player is told that the hearts of transformed people are "freed" when their Heartless is slain. However, the game never explains what happens when a person's Heartless and Nobody are both destroyed, leading many fans to speculate that perhaps Sora didn't really defeat Xehanort like he thought. Then the secret ending of Re:coded and 3D proper reveal that killing a person's Heartless and Nobody brings the original person back just as they were before losing their heart. You've brought back the Big Bad of the series.
  • The original Kingdom Hearts left a lot of fans wondering what happened to Snow White, Cinderella and Aurora's homeworlds after they were kidnapped by the Heartless. We never actually see the fates of those worlds—but considering Aurora hails from the same world as Maleficent, the leader of the Heartless, it probably isn't good. In the interquel Kingdom Hearts 0.2: Birth by Sleep -A fragmentary passage-, Aqua travels through the Dwarf Woodlands, the Castle of Dreams and the Enchanted Dominion after they're absorbed by the Realm of Darkness, confirming that they fell to the Heartless after all. The experience is every bit as nightmarish as you'd expect.
• Persona:
  • The mysterious places that appear in every game can be absolutely lethal to Muggles, since they on principle don't know how the dimension works unlike our heroes. In Persona 4, the main antagonist is somebody that uses that game's mysterious place to go on a killing spree, simply by forcing normal people in and letting the Shadows take care of the rest, since the victims can't escape on their own. And to make matters worse, he's been chosen by a higher power of his own.
  • Since Persona 3, the character gifted the Wild Card ability (usually the protagonist) takes up the Velvet Room's contract and uses their powers for good. Fans had speculated what that power would look like in the hands of a major antagonist for years, until Sho Minazuki (a violent misanthrope with a deranged Split Personality) and Goro Akechi (a person screwed over in life on a twisted quest for revenge) answered their question.
  • Shadow Selves are shown to be the repressed feelings of the individual, and for most games the ones we see are from average people with mundane (but still meaningful) truths attached to them. Persona 5 shows what a corrupt person's Shadow Self acts like — they act like the unrepentant bullies and abusers that you really wish weren't their true selves.
  • While fighting and defeating a Shadow Self is present throughout the series, actually killing one is never shown due to their importance to their real world counterpart. In Persona 5, it's explained that a person with a dead Shadow Self goes into mental shutdown. While this isn't necessarily fatal on its own (as seen with Ohya's former partner), it can be to people in poorer health, such as Okumura. And if the victims, such as Wakaba and Kobayakawa, suffer this fate in the middle of oncoming traffic...
  • Persona 5 has the Phantom Thieves engage in Heel–Face Brainwashing by using the Metaverse to change the hearts of their targets, turning the targets from horrid people into good ones who feel sorry for what they've done. The ethics of doing this were brought up a few times, with the Phantom Thieves ultimately getting drunk on their power in the bad ending, but it's generally portrayed as a justified last resort to dealing with people who can't be brought to justice through normal means. Persona 5 Strikers examines this more closely by having the villains use the Metaverse for mind control instead, showing what happens when someone without such strong convictions has that kind of power.
• Paper Mario: Sticker Star introduced Things, giant real world objects that can alter the world around Mario or be used as incredibly powerful attacks. Given that they could do anything from knock out a giant rampaging dragon to create tornadoes, Things carried a lot of destructive potential, but Paper Mario: The Origami King really dived into just how dangerous they were through its primary bosses, the Legion of Stationery, a collection of living art supplies who have all of the power of Things and absolutely nothing stopping them from going all out with their abilities. Special mention to Hole Puncher, who stole the sun so he could use it as a disco ball, and Scissors, who is pretty much living Kryptonite to a world made out of paper and cardboard.
• In The World Ends with You, people playing the Reaper's Game exist in the UG, a plane of reality parallel to the RG(real world) and are Invisible to Normals outside of certain stores, but can influence people by imprinting various thoughts in their heads. NEO: The World Ends with You examines up the horrifying implications of misusing this power when one opposing player uses his abilities to force a woman to cut ties with her friends For the Evulz. Similarly, while Neku and his friends paid for all their purchases, one opposing player in NEO engages in shoplifting as a form of stress relief, taking advantage of the fact that he becomes invisible once he leaves the store.
• In XCOM 2, Earth was conquered by aliens and has been ruled by an oppressive dictatorship called ADVENT for 20 years. The alien leaders, the Ethereal Elders, are known for their extensive knowledge and experiments with genetic engineering and Bio-Augmentation. Those who managed to escape the cities into one of the La Résistance shelters or joined with XCOM are glad to be away from the Elders' grasp, but one of the few things usually missed from the days under their rule was the ADVENT burger, which was said to be absolutely delicious, even though nobody knew what's actually in it. Many fans speculated that the ADVENT burger is probably made with excess human meat that the Elders no longer need for their experiments. XCOM: Chimera Squad not only confirms this theory, but also that this isn't the first time the Elders fed a sapient species to themselves!

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