Death World / Video Games

• Another World (Out of This World in the US): The planet your mild-mannered scientist character is teleported to is like this. The very first screen of the game features a sea monster that will pull you down to your death if you don't start swimming to the surface. The next creatures you encounter are tiny slug-like things which will slash you with deadly poisonous barbs if you get too close. And this is in the first minute of gameplay; it only gets worse from here.
• Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon has Rubicon 3, a planet that was home to a bustling human civilization thanks to the newly-discovered substance "Coral", which unfortunately turned out to be Toxic Phlebotinum that caused not only the planet to basically catch on fire, but the entire solar system. By the time the game begins, the solar system is no longer burning, but Rubicon 3 is now reduced to little more than harsh deserts, frozen wastelands, and abandoned cities contaminated by Coral. The MegaCorps fighting with one another over control of the remaining Coral, and the mercenaries in their employ, do little to make the planet less hostile.
• Avernum: The setting of the series. An enormous cave system similar to the Underdark of Forgotten Realms. By the start of the series, several large caves are civilized enough to support cities. The First Exploration, however, found an underworld full of slithzerikai (savage lizard-people), undead, demons, and giant bugs. Part of the fun in the first game is to find the remains of the first explorers, all without fail dead in some corner of Avernum.
• Baldur's Gate: The games made by Bioware may not always look deadly, but eveything seems to be out to kill everybody, whether you're an adventurer seeking a rapidly shortened lifespan in Durlag's Tower, or a halfling messenger half-an-hours' saunter from Beregost.
• Baten Kaitos: The land beneath the Taintclouds (the surface) is a deadly poisonous wasteland filled with all manner of deadly and vicious beasts. At least according to legend. When you actually go down there you find it's not poisonous at all (anymore), people live a quite peaceful and comfortable life there, the monsters aren't even that powerful, and other than being a bit gloomy thanks to the cloud cover it's not a bad place at all.
• Bayonetta:
  • The lovely world of Inferno, as depicted in Bayonetta 2. Naturally, as a Fire and Brimstone Hell, it is far from hospitable. The easiest ways for a mortal to get there are to venture to the top of the sacred mountain Fimbulvetr, or venture through an obstacle course of floating ruins under a subterranean ocean. If you get there, you'll be witness to hordes of incredibly powerful demons that even the strongest Umbra Witches in the world have trouble against. Attractions include a constantly-shifting living forest inhabited by soul-eating nagas capable of turning you into a helpless child, fire-breathing spiders, demons forced to eat their siblings to survive, and colossal dragon-like demons; giant rivers of boiling blood home to mile-long centipedes; an enormous tornado wrapped in thorny tentacles; and even the ground can turn out to be a giant manta ray that can hold you in its guts for all eternity. Bayonetta sure doesn't stick around here for long.
  • Paradiso can be just as deadly, even if it is a Fluffy Cloud Heaven. Solid ground is at a premium, and the only way forward is typically through an angel-filled death course. And these angels are tough. To the average human, even the weakest are quite resistant to conventional weaponry. They only get tougher from there. If you really piss them off, you may have to deal with high-ranking angels like Grace and Glory, a pair of especially obnoxious Lightning Bruisers; Glamor, which can cleave a jet fighter in two with a swipe of its claw and summon waterspouts and tsunamis; or even the Auditio, which are basically forces of nature personified and can cause widespread destruction with their presence alone.
• Billy vs. SNAKEMAN: The Wasteland is an expanse of Death World made of ninja villages blown up by the sheer awesomeness of their leaders. The safest parts of even the outskirts of The Wasteland can be described as "Like the Sahara but the sand is poisonous". Near the center, sunlight occasionally spontaneously focuses into a laser, homicidal unicorns are perpetually searching for new victims, and the corn will eat you if you're too slow.
• Biomutant is set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland that consists primarily of wide-open natural vistas where nature has reclaimed the world in Humanity's Wake. Portions of the world, however, consist of areas that have been particularly ravaged by the Abusive Precursors' disregard for the environment: radioactive badlands, toxic cesspits, and airless vacuum barrens.
• Borderlands brings us the wonderful planet of Pandora, which resembles many people's idea of Hell. To the point that one minor character, Corporal Reiss, accepted his death with grace because it meant he wouldn't be on the planet anymore.
  • Days that are 90 hours long, seasons that are 7 years long. The planet was first discovered and settled in the winter, and everything seemed to be going fine for the first couple years. Then spring rolled around, and all the hibernating animals started waking up.
  • The multiple wholly unique species of extremely omnivorous creatures perfectly willing, and capable, of bagging humans:
    • Skags are dog-like creatures that live everywhere on the planet and can eat nearly anything.
    • Rakks are predatory avian/bat-like creatures that swarm prey on the ground in massive numbers.
    • Spiderants live in massive colonies and have armored exoskeletons capable of repelling gunfire.
    • Stalkers are predators who can turn invisible, fling spikes at ranges comparable to sniper rifles, and have organic shields.
    • Varkids are insects that can rapidly mature from small, easily-killed larvae to massive flying tank-like horrors.
    • Drifters are enormous arachnids that are several stories tall.
    • Threshers are a species of massive, subterranean serpents with long tentacles that move with terrifying speed and can attack from any direction and they're actually an introduced species.
  • This is not counting the presence of the Vaults, whose ancient alien technology gives the local wildlife elemental properties, so any of the above could be covered in electricity, breathe fire, or shoot acid. The only creatures that weren't immediately hostile were the crystalisks, which were implied to be sentient lifeforms, but they turned on humanity with a vengeance when the Dahl corporation tried to "mine" them.
  • There's also intense heat and horrendous weather, along with schizophrenic climate that includes a completely frozen area with active volcanoes. The opening of the first Vault made this even more violent and chaotic, to the point that hydroelectric dams literally froze overnight.
  • And humanity made it worse, with a population of untold numbers of angry, mutant, or simply insane criminals and bandits, all armed to the teeth. Not counting tremendous environmental damage even before the first Vault was opened, causing the rampant growth of Eridium across the surface. It doesn't help that it's all but confirmed that Pandora's Eridium can and will drive people insane. Most were apparently driven insane and mutated by an alien Vault Key found by mining operations. Before that they were murderous criminals brought for prison/slave labour, but were mostly normal murderous criminals — although admittedly that qualifier doesn't make a huge difference.
  • The local plants get in on the act as well. One inhabitant experimented with rolling herbal cigars from the local flora. The result? Death from massive internal bleeding. The obviously lethal plants include electric cacti and firemelons.
  • The continent of Aegrus, first seen in the DLC Sir Hammerlock's Big Game Hunt for the second game, has its own host of deadly inhabitants. The region appears to be mostly swamps, with its own variety of the aforementioned drifters, large beetle-like quadrupeds the size of farm animals, scorpions the size of a person, giant floating spores that shoot out smaller, explosive variants of themselves, and a bunch of cultists that worship Hyperion and Handsome Jack.
  • To get how bad Pandora is, one sidequest gives you a mission to help a Goliath and his pet goldfish escape the planet. It, strangely enough, involves getting a targeting beacon for the orbital Hyperion space station's cargo launcher. Fetching it for him leads to the Goliath setting up the beacon, activating it, and gleefully yelling that he's leaving Pandora forever... right before being crushed by a cargo crate shot from orbit. It's that kind of game.
  • As bad as Pandora is, characters will often allude to life on the unseen planet Promethea being even worse. You finally get to visit it in 3 and it's swarmed with cultists, hostile Maliwan soldiers and ratches. Lots of ratches. And a very angry Vault Monster.
  • In the DLC Commander Lilith and the Battle for Sanctuary for 2, the villain's goal is to terraform Pandora into a livable environment. Unfortunately his idea of doing so is to use a biological weapon to mutate the land and kill off everyone, creating various horrible plant-based monstrosities.
  • Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel! introduces us to Pandora's moon, Elpis. While we don't know much about what things were like before the Crackening, by the time the game starts, it's about as welcoming as Pandora itself. In fact, in some ways it's even worse; at least Pandora had a breathable atmosphere. Oh, and most of the inhabitants have Australian accents.
  • 3 has, in addition to the aforementioned Promethea, the ironically named Eden-6, home to dinosaur-like Saurians and sentient primates called Jabbers, Nekrotafeyo, the original home of the Eridians, and even the seemingly idyllic world of Athenas, which is fraught with danger. And that's just the main game!
• Bug Fables:
  • Snakemouth Den is regarded as this story-wise, as a hostile cave that has killed several Explorers who ventured in it to find a lost artifact. Gameplay-wise, it's the tutorial area, and houses the weakest enemies in the game except for Seedlings. Unless you visit the upper levels that is...
  • The Dead Lands is a mysterious location that, prior to the events of the game, nobody who has entered has been known to come out. Its only known entrance was sealed before the Ant Kingdom was established and the Bestiary says that the monsters within are too dangerous to fight or research. Gameplay-wise, it's by far the most dangerous area, having powerful enemies that are immune to the Encounter Repellant. Also known as the Giant's Lair, it's just an ordinary abandoned house, except for some reason it's infested with bizarre beings that barely resemble any bug or living creature. An exceptionally large one roams the place, but it would rather drop smaller monsters on bugs than fight them directly. The Roaches guard the Everlasting Sapling here to deter anyone from misusing its power.
• City of Heroes has the Shadow Shard, four zones of floating rocks, populated by a conglomeration of minor Eldritch Abominations and spirit-replicas of all the baddies that you already hate to fight, all in the service of a demigod who eats universes. The main means of travel are "Gravity Geysers" that launch you from rock to rock, and should you happen to miss your landing site, you will fall to you death and have to start again at the beginning of the zone.
  
  And now, in the backstory of Going Rogue, we have Praetoria, an alternate Earth where the majority of the planet has been taken over by the Devouring Earth, led by the Hamidon. By part-scientific, part-magical means, Hamidon caused The End of the World as We Know It, by causing the Earth itself to literally rise against humanity. The player can't actually leave the safety of the city of Praetoria, but apparently, should you leave, the rocks, trees, and fungi around you will literally come alive and kill you.
• Command & Conquer: Tiberium:
  • Earth itself has been turned into a Death World due to the transformation caused by the ludicrously lethal yet economically valuable Tiberium—which in C&C3 was revealed to be a Gray Goo Depopulation Bomb to weaken/xenoform Earth for the extraterrestrial Scrin's harvest. Unfortunately for them, Kane had other plans.
  • The average threats in the Tiberium-infested earth include the air, which is laced with Tiberium and breathing it in translates to infection, and mutation if you're lucky, if you're not you end up meaning consumed by Tiberium, crsytals that cover the floor and slowly either mutate or consume all organic material on it, and happens to be spreading, and the countless mutants already turned into tiberium-based monstrosities by the stuff.
  • Oh, and it's already assimilated enough of the planet for stuff like this. For scale, the big two-gunned tank on the top is about the size of a house. Large masses of Tiberium also generate enough energy to create Ion storms, which are basically giant EMP lightning storms, with far, far, more energy. Oh and it's a naturally valuable resources, so people end up fighting for it and even planting more of it on purpose to gather it.
• Earth in Darksiders is a perfect example. Humanity has been wiped out by the Legions of Hell, who have settled in and attack everything they see outside of each other.
• Every setting in Dark Souls. All three are infested with mindlessly aggressive Hollows (and even most of the nice people are at risk of becoming Hollows themselves due to the Undead Curse), there's bottomless pits scattered everywhere, demons of various kinds, nasty creatures like slimes and basilisks, the Abyss popping up where least wanted, and that's not even getting to the actual bosses.
  • On top of the above, Lordran has Blighttown (nasty poisonous swamp), Anor Londo (nice shiny city until you notice the man behind the curtain), the Catacombs & Tomb of Giants (Gravelord Nito lives there with a lot of necromancers and skeletons), the Duke's Archives (crawling with Seath the Scaleless's failed projects), the Demon Ruins & Lost Izalith (Lethal Lava Land plus a truckload of particularly tough demons), and the Abyss (case study in why the First Flame must remain lit).
  • Drangleic is post-apocalyptic after a brutal genocidal war with the Giants, and the remnants of their armies are now Hollows who attack everyone they meet, on top of the normal smattering of dangerous monsters. But it still came off better than the three neighboring kingdoms explored in The Lost Crowns trilogy, one of which is covered by poisonous gas (courtesy of some idiot stabbing the dragon Sinh and making him lose control of his poison), the second of which was destroyed by its short-sighted ruler, the Old Iron King, and the third of which was actually a really nice place until the the remnants of the Flame of Chaos from the first game showed up there.
  • Lothric is the crumbling remains of a kingdom full of Abyss-infected monsters and menaced by Aldrich and Sulyvahn's machinations. One optional late-game area, the Untended Graves, is even worse, because it's the initial area, if the First Flame really had gone out for good.
• Tau Volantis from Dead Space 3. Its an Ice World full of treacherous terrain, populated entirely by mutated, reanimated corpses. In addition to these threats, our heroes have to travel through unstable centuries-old (sometimes malevolent) architecture, hounded by Unitologist soldiers and deal with cranky teammates.
• Deep Rock Galactic: The main reason Hoxxes IV still has all its mother lodes of valuable minerals is that the planet is so ridiculously deadly it literally defies physics. It isn't just the main threat of the Glyphids, omnipresent, highly varied and extremely dangerous bugs that are both highly carnivorous and viciously territorial, though they're a very big reason; the rest of the biosphere, and even the geological and geographical features of the planet's various underground biomes try to kill whoever is within at every turn. And the surface is so utterly irradiated not even the Glyphids visit it. But even in the future, dwarves will do anything for valuable ore. The only other company known to start exploiting Hoxxes IV used unmanned robots and AI for every step (and that only made DRG itself immediately turn to industrial sabotage to make things even harder for them).
• The Desert Moon, where the player's ship of engineers crashes. It's filled with tons of vicious aliens- Runners are fast and lethal, Bursters are even faster and explode when killed, and Hunters are heavily armored and burrow underground to evade attacks. Then there's also the engineers from the other half of the crashed ship who didn't exactly survive and can convert living engineers into more of them.
• Only mentioned in its lore books^* Specifically, the Books of Sorrow, Fundament from Destiny is home to acid rain and lightning storms above, a perpetually roiling sea below, and several cannibalistic species to boot. Little wonder that such a world would spawn Oryx, the Taken King; and his sisters Savathûn, goddess of trickery and betrayal, and Xivo Arath, goddess of war.
• The so-called Nirvana in Digital Devil Saga 2. It is a barren wasteland where ever single thing withers and dies from overexposure to the black sun's data. And if you're human? You're turned into stone, eternally trapped between life and death. Nighttime is safe, but it is noted that the carbon dioxide concentration is climbing so fast (there are no plants around) that it is only a matter of time before the atmosphere becomes unbreathable.
• Gristol, the island that pays host to the city of Dunwall (of Dishonored fame) is a subtle example of this.
  • The local rats will attack humans and can devour a whole corpse in a matter of a minute or so. The local barnacles are capable of killing humans. Fish in the river will attack humans and try to rip out chunks of their flesh for food, like movie-style piranha. Even the local houseflies pack a venomous sting and lay their eggs parasitically in human flesh! And this is the urban wildlife; gods only know what sorts of monsters are lurking in the wilderness beyond the city...
  • Oh, and the continental landmass, Pandyssia? Just enough is known about it that even with all the other vicious pests in Dunwall, even at the height of a deadly plague, nobody even tries to flee and settle there. Enough said.
• The Constant in Don't Starve qualifies. The characters are perpetually trapped in a hostile land and has to starve. The local monsters include both physical monsters that can slaughter you, mental monsters that will manifest once your sanity gets low and the darkness (Charlie) that will kill you if your light runs out in the dark.
• The Deep Roads in Dragon Age: Origins are pretty awful thanks to the literal Demonic Spiders, the Deepstalkers that erupt from the ground en masse without any warning, the hostile ghosts and out of control Golems in the lost thaigs, and Darkspawn. Lots and lots and lots of Darkspawn. Everywhere. Even if you somehow evade all of those, the only way to avoid starving to death is to eat Darkspawn flesh since nothing else is readily available. Assuming the Taint doesn't kill you outright, this will turn you into a Ghoul. Then you'll die in a few years anyway thanks to the Taint. In the Dwarven Noble Origin, the death penalty applied to you is being sent into the Deep Roads with nothing but a sword.
• Dome Keeper has four of them! It doesn't take long after your Dome lands on a new planet for the local fauna to decide they've found something new to smash.
• Dwarf Fortress, where just about every moving object tries to murder your dwarves. This is especially true in evil biomes, where lasting more than a few in-game years against the undead hordes and disease-spreading weather is an accomplishment.
• The Elder Scrolls
  • Several of realms of the Daedric Princes in Oblivion fit, along with being Eldritch Locations, Fisher Kingdoms, and possibly Genius Locis. To note:
    • The realm of Malacath, Daedric Prince of the Spurned and Ostracized and patron deity of the Orcs, is known as the Ashpit. It will kill most mortals in minutes unless they have a means of magical breathing and levitation. It air is thick with choking dust and soot and even the buildings are made of smoke. It is also said that the Ashpit stretches endlessly across the planes, extending even behind the stars to Aetherius, granting access to every worthy Orc who crosses from this life into the next.
    • The realm of Mehrunes Dagon, Daedric Prince of Destruction, is known as the Deadlands. It is a very much a Fire and Brimstone Hell crossed over with Mordor. Despite the seas of lava and such, it is said to feel deathly cold to mortals.
  • Black Marsh, one of Tamriel's southernmost regions consisting of nearly impenetrable swampland. Most of the Black Marsh is full of dangerous flora/fauna, is extremely difficult to navigate, and is flat out toxic to non-Argonians. Even Tiber Septim didn't bother to conquer it completely during his conquest of Tamriel. Rather, he captured a few border settlements (where humans can comfortably live) and called it a success.
  • The continent of Atmora, to the north of Tamriel, is described as a frozen over land where everything is a predator. This says a lot about why the ancestors of the Nords, who hailed from Atmora, were already fierce warriors by the time they migrated south to Tamriel.
  • Skyrim is also a harsh and unforgiving land, mostly due to a combination of frigid landscape and hostile wildlife, and the presence of vicious natives in the Reach, magical anomalies, the aggressive and cruel Falmer, and now dragons returning, the region is one of the most hostile places on the continent to mortals of any kind. It's no wonder the Nords are proud to call it home.
  • Akavir, which means "Dragon Land", is considered this as well by the denizens of Tamriel. Though no one has thoroughly explored the continent and returned to tell the tale, accounts state that most sapient species there consider Men and Mer a delicacy.
• Elemental — War of Magic - An arid barren waste, filled with giant spiders, trolls and golems? Sounds good.
• The game Elite II: Frontier came with the booklet Stories of Life on the Frontier, short novels set in the game universe. One depicted a group of game hunters visiting Bigg's World, a jungle planet where everything was vicious, deadly and/or poisonous. In an interesting twist, human proteins were even more poisonous to the native wildlife...
• Escape Velocity Nova has Cunjo, named for its top predator. Auroran warriors sometimes hunt them for bragging rights, and rendered a minor Federation world unsuitable for colonization by introducing cunjos to it. The Auroran capital worlds also qualify: ridiculous levels of pollution from extreme overpopulation makes them uninhabitable outside of arcologies.
• Evolve takes place on Shear, which manages to be extremely dangerous despite being one of the most Earth-like worlds in the galaxy. It has entire lakes of acid and enough active volcanos that building structures nearby them was considered reasonable. For wildlife you get such friendly creatures as giant aggressive beetles, huge carnivores that can accurately mimic boulders, massive crocodile-like creatures, aquatic animals best described as sea monsters, and various types of vicious scavengers that are found nearly everywhere and won't hesitate to attack passerby. And all that was before the monsters came...
• Fable II has Wraithmarsh, a swampy region that's over run with Banshees and Undead. Ironically, Wraithmarsh used to be one of the villages of the first Fable, one of the nicer ones, and the one where the Hero was born.
• The world of Fallout features giant ants, murderous mutants with mini-guns, scarce food and radioactive water.
  • Fallout 3's Capital Wasteland is, illogically, the worst version shown so far. The ruins of DC are filled with homicidal super mutants. The sewers are home to feral ghouls (zombie-like mutants). The outskirts are held by Raider tribes. On top of this, the entire region is a desert, even the Potomac River is both dry and irradiated. Not to mention that all food is 200 (yes, two hundred) years old, and what water there is is radioactive, unless it's put through time-consuming purification. The one source of clean water can be used as a delivery device for a bioweapon.
  • Even worse is The Pitt, from the expansion pack of the same name, where the industrial pollution combined with the heavy radiation has resulted in a mutagen that (in this order) disfigures its victims, drives them insane, or transforms them into the subhuman beasts known as Trogs. The progression of which is unpredictable. Not to mention that the whole place is a Raider/Slaver city, and this is better then the just under two hundred years of anarchic chaos, as it at least ended the gang rapes and cannibalism.
  • Fallout: New Vegas has the expansion packs Dead Money and Lonesome Road, which, respectively, takes place at the Sierra Madre and the Divide, both of which are veritable hellholes. The former is blanketed in a corrosive red fog and inhabited by holographic "ghosts" and mutated workers in extra creepy hazmat suits, while the latter is scoured by earthquakes and blistering, irradiated sandstorms. Not to mention the horrific tunneling mutants.
  • As it turns out, both were contributed to by the Mad Scientists of the Big Empty (from the expandable content Old World Blues), and the Courier was inadvertently responsible for sealing the fate of the latter. The Divide manages to one up itself with The Courier's Mile, ground zero of a nuke that you set off during the course of the DLC which is massively irradiated and needs huge amounts of Rad-X and Rad Away to for a player to last even a few minutes, and is full of pissed off Deathclaws and Marked Men (who are healed very quickly by the radiation). Ulysses wastes no time in calling you out recklessly causing such a place
  • Fallout 4 has the Glowing Sea, which was Ground Zero of the nuke that hit Boston. Like the Courier's Mile, it is irradiated as hell and filled with incredibly dangerous critters. The rest of the Commonwealth is somewhere between the Capitol and the Mojave Wastelands in terms of danger.
• The Game Mod for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Falskaar, has the titular island as this in the backstory. A good number of the original Nord migrants died due to the freezing cold (to put this in perspective, Skyrim is perpetually chilly most of the time and yet a good number of the native Nords walk around with hardly much protective clothing, so Falskaar must have been real bad), which was noted to be extreme even by the standards of Skyrim, and what life there was tried murdering them. Dragons were also reportedly on the island. This changed after the southern half of the island was terraformed, although the northern half is still off limits.
• In Final Fantasy XIII the people who might have come into contact with the fal'Cie are deported down to the main planet Pulse, which is supposedly a Death World. Though it turns out they were just put on trains to the next death camp. Late-game, you travel to Pulse, and learn that while it's covered in very tough creatures, it's not as hellish and horrific as Cocoon claimed it was.
• Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers has The First, an alternate reality in The Multiverse that found out the hard way that Light Is Not Good: a severe imbalance in the world's aether has caused it to be nearly completely obliterated by the overhelming power of Light. Now, the entire world is bathed in Endless Daytime, and prolonged exposure to that light carries the risk of being mutated into a sin eater (if another sin eater doesn't kill you or mutate you first). And that's just in the continent of Norvrandt, which is the only continent remaining: the rest of the world consists solely of a bleached white desert wasteland that is completely devoid of life.
  • On the reverse of the spectrum, there's also the Void, also known as The Thirteenth. Like The First was flooded with light, the Void was flooded with darkness and its denizens are mutated by the excess darkness into aether-hungry Voidsent just by staying in the realm. Not even death is an escape since the darkness prevents Voidsent from properly rejoining the lifestream, meaning that they'll eventually just come back to life to suffer again. Hence why Golbez sets his sights on invading the Source: so he and the denizens of the Void can finally escape the cycle of undeath and resurrection and return to the Lifestream, even though his plan will likely end in the Source's destruction.
• Final Fantasy XV has the world of Eos, which starts off as fairly idyllic: the lands between settlements may team with hostile wildlife, but it's a pretty safe world, so long as you don't get caught out in the wilds at night when the Daemons arise. Late game, however, Ardyn plunges the world into The Night That Never Ends. No sunlight means Daemons have free reign over the world, and the only safe places are the precious few settlements that can provide enough power for bright lights to keep the Daemons away.
• The entire world in Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles is completely uninhabitable to live in unless you're under the protection of a crystal.
  • The whole world is covered in miasma, which is an extremely toxic gas that is harmful to living beings and will kill anyone who breathes it in and only crystals can repel the miasma; this also carries into the gameplay where if you leave the protective zone of your chalice's crystal, you'll take rapid damage from the miasma. Most towns and cities are under the protection of a large crystal and said crystals have to be recharged every year with myrrh, which is a rare and sacred water that only grows from myrrh trees that are buried deep within dungeons filled with monsters. Myrrh trees need time to replenish its myrrh, which means people will have to venture farther out and make longer journeys just to find more myrrh elsewhere.
  • It's also implied that monsters get stronger every few years so that the next journey in the same dungeon will be even more dangerous and the caravanners tasked with bringing back myrrh have to be in top form to survive the stronger encounters or they'll be killed. One of the dungeons is actually a town whose crystal died because its caravanners never returned, causing the place to be overrun with miasma and monsters. The road between towns and dungeons aren't always safe either since they can be filled with bandits and con men looking for gullible and weak caravanners to take advantage of.
• The planet Malta in Freelancer has Cardamine floating in the air; breathing that stuff is the in-game equivalent of breathing heroin. (It even gets into your genes, making the addiction permanent for you and all of your descendants.) Leeds, meanwhile, is so goddamn polluted their people lose their senses of smell and taste within 6 months, Pittsburgh is an inhospitable ball of sand and stone, while winters in New Berlin last an entire year and reach temperature similar to the ones in the Antarctica.
  
  Still, these places are a walk in the park compared to Carinea, one of the unlandable earth-like planets, in the same system as Malta. Said planet is hidden in a radioactive nebula cloud, but the planet itself is almost ridiculously Earth-like, right down to having massive biodiversity. It's even described as a Paradise. It just has only one tiny problem regarding human settlement. All the life—both the animals and plants—have a chemical that's quickly and 100% fatal to humans. Humans wisely decided not to attempt colonization.
• Far Point is set entirely in an alien planet infested with gigantic insects and various monsters who devours everyone who landed. The two main characters, astronauts Dr. Eva Tyson and her colleague, Dr. Grant Moon, were accidentally stranded on that planet after getting sucked into a wormhole and spends the whole game trying to escape, but to no avail because it turns out said planet is 3 billion years away from earth.
• Silence in the F-Zero series is an unusual example, in that there's simply nothing on the planet to sustain life. The entire place is a plain white ball or rock, and utterly sterile with no native flora, fauna or microbiology at all. The planet gets its name from the fact the entire planet is dead silent because of it. Also Death Wind, a greenish planet constantly ravaged by winds capable of shoving a 1.5-ton hovercar around.
• The planet Kaduna 3 in the hybrid IF game Gateway is one of these. It has spiky plants whose spikes shoot at you if you as much as breathe at them, worm-like creatures that cling to you the moment you depart your ship and will gnaw your space suit off if given enough time, and other plants that grow so quickly that you'll die if you stay in one place more than a few turns. And then there are the spiders and snakes...
• Gears of War:
  • Sera seems like a fairly nice place....until you realize that underground it is coursing with explosive, mutagenic chemicals that cause terrible sickness in humans, and aboveground during the wintertime, it is quite common to encounter "razorhail," which are shards of glass-sharp ice pouring down from the sky and able to rip human beings apart and even damage tanks. And that's before you get to the Locust Horde and all the other assorted monsters roaming underground... On top of that, there's the Kryll. It's not known whether they are part of the the Locust Horde or if the Locust just control them. What is known is that they'll eat anything that comes into the darkness at night in seconds. Nighttime will kill you on Sera.
  • By the time of Gears of War 3, it's got worse. While the Kryll have been wiped out, it is now entirely possible for Lambent Stalks to erupt anywhere, spewing bioluminescent, homicidal mutants without warning (even over the ocean!). The surface-dwelling Locust have gone feral, killing anything they see. And to top it all off, Imulsion, the miracle energy source all the human tech runs on, is a parasite that is consuming Locust and humans alike.
• The world of Balaho from Halo has an atmosphere of methane, suffers from two winters, and is subject to random geysers of fire popping out of the ground. Disease is also rampant, forcing the inhabitants to burn the bodies of their relatives as basically an everyday chore. Considering that this is the Grunt homeworld, you'd think they'd be a bit tougher for all this. That said, it's implied that most of Balaho's troubles are the result of a relatively recent environmental collapse caused by over-industrialization, and the Grunts themselves are actually pretty strong and tough compared to regular humans; it's just that they're overshadowed by other Covenant species who are even stronger and tougher than them, not to mention that they have to wear heavy and fragile environmental suits just to survive outside of their homeworld.
• The premise of Heavy Metal F.A.K.K.2 is that the planet is defended from invasion with a universally recognized beacon declaring it to be a Death World. And if you wander outside of civilization, that's exactly what it proves to be.
• Jak and Daxter: Pretty much every zone outside Haven City from Jak II: Renegade onwards. There is a reason the city is surrounded by tens of meters high wall and protected by Eco shield. Wasteland from Jak 3: Wastelander is even more so — at least around Haven City you have manageable weather conditions where only the local wildlife and mainly Metal Heads are the problem, but Wasteland is a giant unforgiving desert with frequent sandstorms and plagued by The Marauders that shoot first, ask questions never.
• Kenshi is set on tidally-locked moon that has undergone at least three civilization-ending catastrophes, is covered in dangerous monsters, and it rains acid. And that's some of the nicer parts, without even mentioning the endless plains of toxic smog hiding ravenous mutants, or the deserts with an ancient Kill Sat ominously floating above...
• Killzone 2 reveals the Helghast world of Helghan to be a death world, with giant killer dust storms, air that goes from "nastily polluted" to "downright freaking acidic", lightning bolts with enough juice to destroy ISA armored vehicles...and then there's the Helghast themselves, who had to evolve into hulking, bald, glowy-eyed Neanderthals in order to survive in Helghan's environment. This was briefly discussed in the manual and cutscenes of the first game, but this is the first time we get to see first-hand just how bad it is. Prior to Killzone 2 being made, this was a case of All There in the Manual as the Helghast world and the Helghast's struggle to adapt to it conditions was explored in more detail in an historical timeline on the official Killzone website.
• The eponymous planet of Kalevala in Legend of Kalevala is brimming with biomechanical creatures that are all trying to kill the protagonist, pits of lava and acid, and all sorts of spikes, bombs, and other hazards. Turns out it's only a Death World for the protagonist; he is inhabiting the body of a Kuririi, which everything on the planet has been programmed to destroy.
• The Dark World in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past illustrates this trope considering that if Link goes there without a particular artifact, he's transformed into a helpless pink bunny. Hyrule in general counts throughout the series, even the light world. A place where crows mug you, setting bats on fire just powers them up, chickens are highly organized and vengeful unstoppable engines of ruin, and the flowers variously explode, shoot you with seeds, try to eat you, or sell you overpriced low-quality merchandise. And then there are the actual monsters.
• The dying world of Eltria in Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's Portable: The Gears of Destiny, where the lands are desert-like, the waters are contaminated, and giant, rampaging monsters roam everywhere.
• In Marathon 2: Durandal and Marathon Infinity: Blood Tides of Lh'owon, the player visits the eponymous planet of Lh'owon under the command of the eponymous AI Durandal. The planet was covered mostly in vast marshes. However, the alien race known as the S'pht had turned nearly the entire surface into a city. After that, sometime around the 1800's, another alien race known as the Pfhor enslaved the S'pht, leaving behind only a few marshes and volcanoes (both full of hostile wildlife), along with crumbling ruins and the immense deserts void of life where these great cities once stood proud.
• Mass Effect:
  • The krogan homeworld, Tuchanka, is one of these. The most common cause of death before the invention of gunpowder weapons was "eaten by predators". The krogan themselves evolved into one of the toughest, meanest, and most temperamental sapient species in the galaxy as a result. And managed to make their homeworld even worse. After the invention of gunpowder, their most common cause of death became "gunshot wounds", and it stayed that way once they got off their homeworld. Furthermore, when they were discovered by the salarians, they were in the grips of a nuclear winter with the last remnants of their race struggling to survive. Finally, once they were taken off their planet and placed in a safer environment, their population exploded, since without Tuchunka's many natural dangers to balance out their birth rates, they were impossible to contain. Let's put it this way: one of the planet's native apex predators kills and eats a Reaper in single combat.
  • Kruban, a world in the same system as Tuchanka is even worse—a Venusiform planet. Most ships will get crushed if they don't have enough protection, and stepping out into the open is certain death - even for krogan. Regardless, it's something of a suicidal ritual to attempt to prove their manliness. Many krogan went out of their spaceships in the buff to the surface of the planet, deciding that if one of them survived, that'll be the sign of a real man. The number of survivors? 1!
  • Several of the planets visited in the game will kill you over time unless you're wearing a protection suit or stay in the Mako, and even a protection suit won't help in the worst places. Furthermore, some planets are inhabited by massive Thresher Maws easily able to chew through a shielded armored Infantry Fighting Vehicle in one bite. The same vehicle that can absorb quite a few shots from even the worst Geth energy weapons.
  • Eletania is a world teeming with life, and an oxygenated atmosphere, perfectly suited for life. So why is it on this page? Well, the native animal life consists of a myriad of microscopic symbiotic creatures, which cause severe anaphylactic shock in non-native lifeforms whene inhaled. Additionally, these creatures are necessary for the ecosystem to thrive, and impossible to filter from the air, meaning that in order for a settlement to be established, either the inhabitants need to wear fully sealed environment suits, or the complete replacement of the entire ecosystem.
  • Lair of the Shadow Broker in Mass Effect 2 introduces Hagalaz. The planet's average daytime temperature is 72 °C and drops to −64 °C 15 minutes after sundown, causing the oceans to snap freeze. The only 'safe' place is in the pressure system caused by the extremes which creates a constant lightning storm capable of frying anything unfortunate enough to be caught in it. Shepard themself questions the Broker's sanity for having his base located in the storm.
  • Javik reveals in Mass Effect 3: Citadel that the Protheans controlled a planet called Atespa that made Tuchanka look hospitable. It was so bad that the Reapers couldn't even harvest it because the local predators would just eat the husks and then spit out the metal. They eventually gave up on utilizing the planet's inhabitants and bombed the whole thing from orbit.
  • The vorcha homeworld Heshtok is described by one human as "hell, plus vorcha". It's why the vorcha are so unbelievably adaptable as a lifeform. The Codex indicates that the Reapers are having a tough time exterminating the vorcha, because they aren't really able to come up with any weapons or strategies deadlier than what the planet has already thrown at the species.
  • Ilos has a particularly charming feature that the player, fortunately, doesn't have to experience: because of its high amount of plant life, but almost total lack of animals (the Reapers shot them all), it has a lot higher oxygen concentration than Earth — so much so that random lightning strikes cause enormous explosions and firestorms.
  • Pragia is an accidental example. The uninhabited world was chosen by the Batarian Hegemony as their breadbasket 200 years ago, where they began introducing non-native, industrially-mutated strains of plants into the environment. While they flourished in the world's volcanic soil, the plants began to synergize with Pragia's natural chemotropic microbes, which caused new strains of poisonous and even carnivorous plants to start overrunning colonies in just days. They've since overrun the entire planet and are predicted to suck the soil dry in about 400 years.
  • The drell homeworld Rakhana, even if it was mostly arid desert, used to be teeming with life. Unfortunately, thanks to uncontrolled industrial expansion, the drell caused irreversible environmental damage that was set to devastate their insanely large population. Today, Rakhana is a cemetery of a planet, with depleted topsoil, acidified oceans that can't sustain life, and barely a few thousand drell still alive.
  • Mass Effect: Andromeda features a number of previously-inhabitable worlds turned into Death Worlds by the time the Andromeda Initiative gets there: Habitat 7 now has a completely toxic atmosphere, Eos is a heavily irradiated wasteland, Voeld is frozen over, Havarl's ecosystem is out of control and mutating rapidly with deadly wildlife and plants, Kadara's water supply is poisoned by deadly amounts of sulferic acid, and Elaaden is a sun-baked, arid desert. Fortunately, reactivating the Remnant's terraforming equipment on all these planets (except the first, whose terraforming base explodes) begins to reverse these conditions.
  • Elaaden stands out the most of all. It's a tidally-locked moon. On the sunny side, the temperature gets to around fifty-five degrees centigrade, in the shade. The planet is covered with sinkholes, some of which are miles wide, and if someone falls into them, they're screwed, as the temperature skyrockets to ninety degrees centigrade. It's a planet so inhospitable, the kett haven't even tried setting up a base on it. And that's before we get to the locals, who are psychotic raving maniacs, many of whom got kicked off Kadara for being too psycho. Gangs, slavery and cults are apparently rife around the tiny habitable part of the moon with the only water supply. The only people who like being there are the local krogan, who just love it (but they think it could use more thresher maws).
• The Metroid series shows several planets that are unsafe for people to live in, if anything can live there at all. How the Chozo saw fit to settle in some of these places is anyone's guess.
  • SR388 wasn't given a proper planet name because it was so desolate, dangerous and just plain remote that nobody wanted to acknowledge it in any capacity.
    • The Metroids (practically indestructible floating beings which can shoot destructive energy blasts and drain the life from any being they come across) were the dominant lifeform on the planet (despite there apparently being only a few dozen of them) and any other creature had to be very strong in order to survive in such an ecosystem. After Samus wiped them out, the planet is taken over by a kind of shapeshifting bacteria (which the Metroids were the primary predator of) which most likely wiped out all other life on the planet, and prove a severe threat to human researchers (and eventually, the whole galaxy).
    • Even without the Metroids or X, SR388's surface also has thunderstorms and tornadoes every now and then, which would explain why most of the planet's ecosystem is underground. It's later revealed that the Chozo engineered the Metroids as the perfect predator to keep the X parasite under control and prevent it from from completely screwing up the ecology of SR388.
    • The Metroids are so damn indestructible because they had to be the top of the food chain on the deadliest planet the Chozo had encountered. Metroid Dread reveals that when the Metroids got out of control, the Chozo, or more specifically the Thoha tribe, not only tried to seal them up within the depths of the planet, they decided blowing up the whole planet was the only way to guarantee neither the Metroids nor X become a threat to the universe, only to be massacred by the Mawkin tribe before they could go through with it, with the Mawkin only seeing the Metroids' potential as a bioweapon for galactic conquest. Fortunately for the universe, one Mawkin came down with a case of X, and the quarantining of the soon-to-be-fully-infected tribe by Raven Beak stalled him long enough for Samus to wipe the Metroids out. You know a planet is bad when Samus' reputation remains untarnished after she drops an X-infested research station on it to destroy them both.
  • Zebes is a rather nasty place too.
    • It's been described to be uninhabitable for normal humans (Samus was able to live there only because of being infused with Chozo blood, and even then she was only able to survive in the least deadly areas) and filled with miles of underground caverns crawling with all kinds of dangerous creatures. It got nastier when the Space Pirates conquered it, too.
    • When Samus comes back in Super Metroid, the surface is pouring with acid rain and there is barely any life to be seen save for sparse vegetation growing in rocky soil. While most of Zebes' dangers are underground, one of the surface's deadlier attractions is the wreckage of the ship the Chozo came to the planet with, which has since been haunted by the vengeful ghosts of the crew who died in the crash and Phantoon, an Eldritch Abomination that caused the ship to crash. The planet blowing up after Mother Brain's second death suggests that exterminatus is the typical Chozo reaction to planets going bad.
  • The planetarium in Prime features some data on other planets the Space Pirates are interested in, including one with radioactive dust storms and another inhabited by a Hive Mind created by a sentient and deadly virus.^note When you scan the hologram of the planet Bilium, it tells you, very matter-of-factly, that that the "atmosphere is rife with Miteralis, a sentient gaseous Global Exterminator virus". Not only will the very atmosphere kill you, it wants to. And as pretty as Tallon IV is, consider that Samus is exploring it in a special suit and is still in danger of dying from its fauna (aggressive Beetles, spiky Zoomers and Geemers, and explosive Blastcaps) and flora (Sap Sacs, which explode, and Bloodflowers, which have a projectile attack). And this is while you're still in the Overworld. It didn't need a Phazon-infused meteor to be deadly to insufficiently-protected humans, and that only made things worse.
  • In Metroid Prime 2: Echoes You spend about half her time running around one of these in Dark Aether.
    • Not only do the resident demonic Bee People want to kill you, but the toxic atmosphere constantly drains your health unless you find a spot to rest in. Even worse the Phazon meteor that crashed into Aether creating Dark Aether royally screwed up the original too with the records left by the Luminoth lamenting that their once beautiful planet is now inhospitable: the plains are a desert filled with sand worms, the forest is a sunken bog filled with the most out-of-control wildlife and the robots used to defend their fortress have turned against their programming in order to kill them and are steadily being possessed by the Ing.
    • Notably, the Ing consider regular Aether this even without the aforementioned cataclysm. As natives to the Dark World, they can't stomach the regular "real" dimension anymore than most life can survive Dark Aether, forcing them to commit Demonic Possession just to survive for any length of time outside (ironically making these ones the only survivors when Dark Aether was destroyed). It's implied this would have changed had they successfully destroyed Aether and fully stabilized Dark Aether before Samus showed up, and several Ing were willing to take their chances jumping straight into Aether without viable present hosts once Samus set their whole dimension to collapse on itself, though none of them managed to escape the portal in time.
  • Bryyo from Metroid Prime 3: Corruption is tidally locked, with one half burned to a wasteland by the sun and the other frozen over, and only a tiny sliver of the equatorial area is inhabitable. This area is filled with hordes of nasty creatures (including two species that can teleport), lakes of explosive and corrosive Fuel Gel (many of the creatures have adapted to live off or weaponize Fuel Gel), ancient but still functional war machines, and treacherous landscapes, and that's all before the Leviathan hit and corrupted the planet. Now it also includes pools of Phazon and Space Pirate bases, and most of the fauna are Phazon-powered.
  • Downplayed with Elysia. The Chozo created a colony there in the form of SkyTown before moving on to other worlds, leaving the place to be maintained by a race of self-aware robots. When the Federation made contact with the planet and formed a treaty with the Elysians, the gas planet's atmosphere proved unsuitable for humans (and the only known organic species found on the planet at that point are a strain of the Puffer family and bio-engineered Chozo plants, and Samus seems to tolerate the atmosphere unarmored in the hidden endings on account of her Chozo DNA infusion), and has several storm clouds in the background. Despite being an artificial environment, parts of SkyTown itself don't seem to be designed with organic safety and traversal in mind, and by the time Samus explores it, the facility seems to be in a state of disrepair if the occasional shaking is any indication. And this was before the planet got hit by a Leviathan, with the Phazon even corrupting SkyTown and its mechanical inhabitants and the Space Pirates setting up yet another base.
  • The Pirate Homeworld. It is plagued by constant acid rain powerful enough to eat through the strongest of metal, and even energy shielding. All rock formations seem to have been melted away, and the only structures are very well shielded, making the planet appear to be completely metal. At the time Samus visits, it's also being transformed into another Phaaze by a Leviathan, and features giant pools of phazon and tentacles reaching up from the surface. It's clear from the beginning that this place is bad news.
  • When Samus goes to Phaaze, her path to Dark Samus is not only covered with hordes of super tough baddies and nightmarish monsters, but the atmosphere itself is slowly corrupting her because the planet is almost entirely made of Phazon. And the planet itself is a sentient, living creature.
  • ZDR from Metroid Dread
    • The planet similar to Zebes and SR388, being a Chozo world with a variety of hostile environments underground and many more hostile lifeforms (and that was before some sections of the planet started being patrolled by super persistent Nigh-Invulnerable Killer Robots that were reprogrammed from research drones to hunt down Samus), and apparently, the planet's so cold even deep underground that the Chozo use geothermal energy pumped from the planet's Lethal Lava Land region to keep the planet from freezing over.
    • Aside from superheated and supercooled sections, other dangerous regions include an Abandoned Laboratory with hostile robots and bioweapon beasts running amok, a flooded marine research lab, and an underground jungle with gigantic carnivorous plants. And none of that is even the worst part about the planet. After the massacre of the Thoha tribe, an X parasite snuck back among the ranks of the Mawkin, infecting the whole tribe in Elun and leading Raven Beak to quarantine them there. Half-way through the game, Samus stumbles into Elun and Raven Beak releases the X from quarantine, infecting every other living creature on the planet in a matter of minutes, and some of them get the idea to stall the geothermal pumps to deep-freeze the planet from the inside and kill Samus that way. Like SR388, Samus determines that ZDR is unsalvageable and the only course of action is blowing it up.
• Similarly, Minecraft can easily be regarded as a Death World.
  • Sure it's pixelated and only domesticated farm animals seem to be the most of your troubles at first, but once the Sun sets or you start exploring you realize this seemingly serene world is trying to kill you in every way possible. The terrain is littered with random cliffs, deep drops and pits of lava one could easily kill themselves in and random forest fires happen a lot. At night armies of undead zombies and skeleton archers along with kamikaze creepers and gigantic spiders will track you like heat-seeking missiles if they see you while the almost 3 metre tall Endermen will wipe the floor with any unprepared player does as much as glance at them.
  • Meanwhile booby trapped ruins experiment with different ways to creatively end you; from housing nests of huge poisonous spiders to being able to blow you and all the treasure to bits or having tripwires primed to shoot any trespassers. Even seemingly "safe" mobs like the wolf will descend upon you in packs if you hurt any even by accident. It even has the Nether; it's version of Hell, home to it's own collection of death-toting enemies from huge fire-shooting Eldritch Horrors to 2.5 metre tall sword-welding skeletons that will cause you to literally wither away. At least with a Hell you'd think there would be a Heaven right? WRONG. It's just another Hell, where bottom void surrounds the one tiny island and Endermen are everywhere; if that's not enough there's also an almighty dragon that kills anyone on the island. And if you are playing on a server, sometimes other players will be yet another thing you have to avoid if people are after you for your blood and gear.
  • 2b2t, the longest-running of the so-called anarchy servers is infamous for being Nightmare Fuel even for seasoned Minecraft players. All that is left of the spawn area is only an empty cobblestone shell, offering newfags nothing but pain and starvation, and it's constantly getting even worse. Those who somehow survive are mercilessly hunted down by groups of players armed to the teeth with endgame gear. Even outside the spawn, the landscape is littered by death traps and ruins of destroyed buildings, and pretty much everything else that inevitably falls into the hands of griefers is expected to turn into that.
• Minotaur Hotel: The valley. While only a little dangerous towards most people, towards Asterion, it's a Place Worse Than Death as terrible monsters come after him.
• Played with in Monster Girl Quest!. The monster continent of Hellgondo is this to any human (even the absurdly powerful Luka) since it's dark, eerie, and crawling with rather dangerous monsters. Alice and the other monsters, however, see it as a very pleasant and nice place to live.
• Mortal Kombat:
  • Just like in the live-action movie, Outworld definitely counts as a Death World with its purple wastelands, pools of acid, living forests and populated by all sorts of monsters and evil races. It doesn't help that Outworld is also ruled by cruel despots and tyrants that seek to merge other worlds into Outworld.
  • The Netherrealm is even worse than Outworld by virtue of being Hell in the Abrahamic faith inhabited by demons and spectres of the living.
  • Chaosrealm is in the same league as the Netherrealm, being home to dangerous flora and fauna of its own, in addition to geography that defies what we know of physics and denizens who worship chaos and discord as a religion unto itself, so don't expect a very warm welcome.
• While most of the Ages of the Myst game-series are livable, Age 233 (where Gehn's office is) is a rather nasty place, with caustic oceans that have deeply eaten away the mountains up to high tide level. Selenitic is geologically unstable and has suffered some nasty meteor strikes in the past, and one false step in Spire will send you plummeting to your death in the fires of a green star. Riven becomes one at the end of the eponymous game. The Expanded Universe of the novels describes how Ages which haven't been visited in centuries have been known to turn into Death Worlds in the interim, forcing one of the Guilds to send scouts to check out such places in full-body protective armor.
• Naev's backstory has Sorom, which kept killing off its inhabitants by progressively worse plagues that eventually culminated in the Empire quarantining it. The Soromid only survived because of a breakthrough in LEGO Genetics that allowed them to augment their immune systems. Then Sorom was caught in the blast from Sol blowing up.
• One iteration of Nexus Clash included the charmingly named Acid Springs, a world where every possible location one could visit blasted would-be visitors with fire, acid, poison or the raw power of Death itself. There was only one building in the entire plane, a fortress in which it took a constant struggle to even breathe. It was also organized as a maze, without the helpful wayfinding coordinates that could be found on other planes, so death was often the easiest and most likely way to leave.
• While the worlds of No Man's Sky are generally a handful to deal with just on their own through resource management, certain worlds manage to push the boundaries into the absurd, especially if you don't have any Plutonium to take off and abandon it immediately. Some planets have more extreme conditions, such as a radiation storm that occurs regularly, and depletes your shielding at double the normal rate if you're caught out in the open in one. Some worlds have Sentinels that attack you on sight, some are completely devoid of any plant life or exposed minerals whatsoever due to their incredibly toxic atmospheres, and some are inhabited only by creatures that just want to kill you. The absolute worst worlds contain all three of these. However, said planets often have valuable resources on them, making exploring them worthwhile.
• PNF-404 in Pikmin. It is actually Earth in the far future. From our perspective it's a pretty standard planet. When you are an inch tall and can't breathe Oxygen, things get a bit more dangerous
• In Ori and the Will of the Wisps, Niwen is becoming this via the encroachment of The Corruption following the death of its Spirit Willow, with the most severely corrupted areas having become outright Mordor.
• The Outer Worlds gives us "lightly terraformed" Monarch, which has a way of reclaiming human settlements. Even if you're behind walls thick enough to keep the mantisaurs and acid-spewing raptidons out, famine and the omnipresent, maddening stench of sulfur test the wills of any colonists eking a life out on Monarch.
• The various Pokémon regions, where bugs the size of car tires are the norm.
  • People in the Pokeverse say that traveling without a Pokemon companion of your own is dangerous. They are not joking, even in a Lighter and Softer Death World like the Pokéverse, Pokémon Colosseum and Gale of Darkness' Orre stands out in particular. First, it's based on real-world Arizona, which neighbors hellish California and Nevada. So, natural desert is the majority of the landscape. Second, if you think humans have it bad, wild Pokémon in Orre are said to be rarer than water, and that's saying something given that the only flowing water in the Eclo Wastes is in Phenac City ^note Agate Village has flowing water and greenery, but it also houses an artifact explicitly blessed by Celebi which helps resist desertification, which excludes it from the desert just outside in Colosseum. Third, the place is a Wretched Hive with the criminals in charge, and Cipher is top dog. Isn't it fitting, then, that the most badass protagonist in the history of the series happens to come from this very hellhole?
  • Pokémon Mystery Dungeon has the titular mystery dungeons which have caused the local Pokémon to go wild and feral and the layout constantly changes (so the same place never has the same dungeon) and are filled with traps that can be lethal.
    • Exaggerated in the Explorers of Time/Darkness/Sky games with the bad future where time is stopped and crazed ghost Pokémon roam the dark world ruled by the insane Primal Dialga.
    • Super Mystery Dungeon brings us the Voidlands, a dark hell where the spirits of Pokémon that were turned to stone end up. A bunch of old murals explain that enemy Pokémon in the Voidlands dungeons are apparitions made of hate and there are monsters called Void Shadows that eat trapped Pokémon alive. They get a few party members and even almost the player.
  • Pokemon Sun & Moon's infamously dark Pokedex entries shed some frighteningly dark details on life in this world, both for humans and for the Pokemon who are unfortunately lower on the food chain. Various entries go into details about hunter-prey relationships, stating that Corsola are on the brink of extinction in the Alola region due to the sheer brutality of their predators. Others explain how dangerous these creatures are to humans as various ghost types sneak up on unsuspecting victims with absolutely no chance of escaping, or possess humans for resources before draining their life force. Some of these entries are less malevolent, yet still terrifying, such as Bewear's which states that it sometimes snaps it's own trainer's spine from trying to hug them due to their immense strength.
• Ratchet & Clank has some planets like this in every game. Some notable examples:
  • Orxon from Ratchet & Clank (2002) is so heavily polluted that just getting out in its poisonous atmosphere for more than a minute or so without oxygen mask will kill Ratchet, hence you need to explore it with Clank at first. Its rivers is mostly a sickly green glowing toxic sludge, the enemies are mutated land lobsters, you get the picture. This is because Drek intentionally poisoned it so he can sell land on his newly built planet.
  • Oozla from the sequel is a Bubblegloop Swamp. Interestingly, there is a Megacorp facility that is protected by defense perimeter. When you get there, that perimeter is shut down, and you can witness some employees getting killed by local wildlife.
  • Tabora and Grelbin from Going Commando are also notable as they are vast open areas with seemingly nothing in them but the Mac Guffins you need to collect. There is a ton of enemies that are burrowed underground that are especially infamous in Grelbin. Running out of ammo and having to retreat to the local hub to resupply is a common occurence on these planets.
• In Rimworld
  • Your settlers will crashland on a planet riddled with Space Pirates, Future Primitives, lethal mechanoids, and dangerous animals. In extreme climates, survival may be even more difficult: Extreme Deserts are scorching hot and largely devoid of life, and unless you set up a hydroponics basin then your only hope for crops will be some patches of gravelly soil where hardy potatoes might grow; in the opposite extreme, Ice Sheets are, as the name suggests, arctic permafrost several kilometres thick with no arable soil and almost no wildlife - trade and cannibalism may be your only options for food.
  • Building your base deep in mountains or large hills for safety is also not a guarantee, as you might be attacked by an infestation of giant underground insects, and occassionally an enraged super AI will unleash psychic effects on the planet, driving humans and animals mad. There's also the possibility that the world may be shrouded by an eclipse (disabling solar power), random heat waves and cold snaps that wipe out your crops and threaten to kill your colonists with heatstroke or frostbite, sudden flashstorms burning down huge swathes of grassland, and random eruptions of radioactive fallout that poisons all life around your colony.
• Parts of RuneScape, and a few dimensions that can be gotten to with portals from RuneScape, are Death Worlds:
  • The Wilderness, with all its volcanoes, dragons, haunted graveyards, evil spirits, and absolutely everything trying to kill you. To make matters worse, it's a player-versus-player area, and player-killers can be even more deadly than the monsters.
  • The Gorak's Plane that was visited very shortly during the "Fairy Tale, Pt. II" quest, which is a Pocket Dimension populated entirely by powerful, vicious monsters.
  • The God Wars Dungeon. Imagine a huge open space with dozens of deadly monsters running around, protecting insanely powerful bosses with powerful bodyguards. Even some of the most experienced players tend to avoid that place.
  • Not so much in terms of gameplay, but Yu'buisk is considered one. Once, the place was an idyllic plane. Then Bandos showed up. Nowadays, it's the water is toxic, the land itself is a burned husk, and literally nothing can survive on that plane. The Player can stay there as long as he/she wants though, with on ill effects. It's just that there's nothing to do there.
  • The ultimate example of this is Freneskae, the homeworld of the Mahjarrat, a race of powerful beings who have shaped many of the game's major plots. The world is filled with poisonous gas, volcanic eruptions, and random surges of magical energy which makes just standing there deadly. Also, it is home of a possibly comatose creator god who spawns legions of Muspah horrors if she falls asleep.
  • Many of the other worlds in the Universe, possibly even the majority, are also this.
    • Abbinah, the homeworld of the Aviansie race, is a collection of Floating Continents that frequently crash into each other and the only water source is at the center.
    • New Domina or Hallow, the homeworld of the Icyene rotates so slowly that it is constantly daytime during the summer and constantly night in the winter, which makes it dangerously cold, forcing the Icyene to regularly migrate from one hemisphere to the other to stay in the sunlight. Losing the ability to fly is usually a death sentence for an Icyene on New Domina.
    • Infernus, the homeworld of the Demon races, resembles Fire and Brimstone Hell, and many of the native species are Big Red Devils or even Eldritch Abominations that are also cannibals (both because they eat humans and each other).
    • Vampyrium, the homeworld of the Vampyre race, is home to blood thirsty predators.
    • The Abyss is inhabited by swarms of extremely aggressive Eldritch creatures, some of which are from Infernus, or even previous versions of the universe.
    • Muspell, the homeworld of the Auspah, is described as being engulfed in flames.
    • Gielinor, the perfect world and the main setting of the game, will eventually turn into this if the Elder Gods are not stopped somehow. All other worlds except for the abyss will be destroyed. This is the same thing that happened to Frenekae. And this has happened many times before.
  • Morytania, once known as Hallowvale, is a country ruled by tyrannical vampyres who wrecked the region's environment long ago. Most of the country is covered in swamp land infested with very nasty wildlife, such as acid spitting giant snails, and ghasts, which are the undead forms of people who died of starvation in the swamp and are unable to be harmed without a special item. Even outside of the swamp, people who die there have a high chance of become some form of undead. The forests to the north are also infested with dangerous animals as well as feral vampyres, corpse eating ghouls, and also a hive of gigantic spiders that are some of the worst boss enemies in the game. The largest city is a huge slum where humans are treated like cattle, the capital is populated by vampyres who kill humans on sight. Another city was wrecked by a plague that turned living humans into zombie like beings and the dead into undead shades. The only other remaining human city is falling apart and the inhabitants starving likely due to the lack of farmable land.
• The Hell Dimensions of The Secret World. A Fire and Brimstone Hell built in the collapsing ruins of a dying reality, the place is fundamentally inimical to human life: lava pits dot the terrain, anima-draining machinery siphons off your health if you get too close, sandstorms can strip the flesh from your bones, and just about every single native is out to kill you for one reason or another. Also, anyone experiencing a sudden shortness of breath there should worry: it's a sign that your blood has started turning to metal. Even the Bee-imbued player characters can't tolerate the place; the only human who ever managed to survive Hell on a permanent basis had to physically modify his body to the point of becoming a Demon of Human Origin.
• Shin Megami Tensei IV has three timelines, all of which result in Tokyo being a demonic hellhole:
  • In Blasted Tokyo, God has successfully wiped out most of Humanity with a global cluster of nukes - everything is a burning desert. Pluto is spewing a 100% lethality poison into the atmosphere; either you use full body protection or you die - amputation doesn't work. Demons are struggling with all they have to eradicate the few survivors, who can only live in underground shelters.
  • In Infernal Tokyo, God's plan was stopped - by introducing demon fusion technology to humans. This led to everyone either choosing to fuse with a demon to become a Demonoid or remaining human and serving as their food as a Neurisher. Society rotted away as new power lines were drawn; this happened globally. Demons also reached this world en masse, though they are not as openly aggressive as in Blasted Tokyo.
  • Main Timeline Tokyo is no exception, either - demons are also massed there and one of the two organizations dedicated to dealing with them is guilty of horrifying atrocities, there are abundant poison swamps, growing food is dificult without an actual sun, and with no natural game, demon flesh is left as one of the few actual options.
• Chiron, a.k.a. Planet of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, has an environment highly toxic to humans and animals, predators (including aquatic and aerial forms) with Psychic Powers and Body Horror modes of reproduction and, incidentally, is semi-sentient and not very fond of humans or other unassimilated sentient thought. And then there's that whole "accidentally killing off all life on its surface every few million years" thing.
• While not an entire world the Four Islands of the Dark Sea from Sky Odyssey count. These isolated islands have the worst and most unpredictable weather in the world, on top of frequent geological activity. Frequent hazards include windstorms, hurricanes, blizzards, earthquakes, rockslides, and active volcanos. In fact the main challenge in the game is trying to fly you aircraft through these islands without getting killed.
• Planet Ortega in Space Quest III: The Pirates of Pestulon requires wearing special underwear to survive the intense heat.
  • There are only three planets in Space Quest V that require you to beam down onto the surface as part of the storyline. Of those three, one of the planets has a toxic atmosphere requiring the use of a rebreather. All of the other planets in the game have conditions so hostile that you will die immediately upon beaming down to them.
• The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series (which DeathZone above spun off of) features the real life Chernobyl exclusion zone... which, thanks to Soviet Superscience (more specifically, an attempt by a group of Soviet scientists to use all of humanity's mental energy to be formed into one, to end all suffering and conflict and Alternate History (the experiment came in the 90s, using the abandoned Chernobyl area to conduct research in peace), has been morphed into a highly radioactive wasteland, where psychic storms that fry your mind occur on a daily basis, powerful mutants (some who can kill you with their brains) rip the inhabitants to shreds, The Mafiya and various thugs crawling everywhere to rob and murder anyone in sight, the Military, who are essentially bandits with superior tech, rips and tears in space-time called "anomalies" that defy physics - ranging from raging infernos, moving bursts of lethal electricity, being tossed several feet into the air, being trapped for all eternity in a localized bubble of one moment, extremely acidic goop (some of which hides in the ground and doesn't pop up until it's too late) that chews through metal like nothing, and gravity itself picking unwary men up and tearing them apart mid-air. On top of that, well-armed militant fanatics who worship the Zone shoot up and kidnap what the Bandits and Military don't get to - and if they don't kill you, the chance of being caught in the crossfire between two armies, one who want the Zone to be open to all to improve human technology, and one who want it destroyed and sealed, will. Welcome to hell, Stalker!
• The various planets in Starbound are like this. In addition to the ravenous beasts populating the landscape (which only get worse at night or underground), the planets have other hazards, such as acid rain or lakes of poison. Just visiting a snow biome planet without the right equipment can kill you in seconds. Some of the intelligent life you may encounter will also be hostile towards you, especially around prisons and dungeons.
• Star Control 2: Planets with either weather and/or tectonic ratings of 5 or higher or high temperatures (over 300° C, the hottest one being the gas giant Zeeman 1 with a temperature of almost 5200° C), as Venus in the Sol System, will destroy your unprotected lander very fast. Others may be friendlier in that regard... except for their lifeforms, especially if your lander has not been upgraded to deal with them.
• StarCraft:
  • Char is a Single-Biome Planet of volcanoes, which the Zerg have come to call a de facto homeworld, because it is a practice for them to settle in harsh environments to force natural selection upon themselves. One soldier reports that "the planet itself joins in the killing". There is a part of Char that isn't a lava-blasted plain covered in ash. It's an acid swamp full of zerg eggs.
  • Redstone is a molten planet, much like Char but even more so. The vast bulk of its lava is not contained, but floats freely in a massive sea, which naturally has tides.
  • Kaldir is an ice planet so cold that it gets "flash freezes" which freeze all units other than the native ursadons (and Zerg that have consumed them) solid. The Protoss had a research colony there that was attempting to terraform it for colonization, and a Zerg Broodmother was sent there to use the environment to toughen up her brood (but she was killed by the Protoss).
  • Zerus, the real Zerg homeworld, was very similar to Char when the Xel'naga first got there, but by the time we see it, it's a lush jungle world. Filled with deadly Primal Zerg organisms that have spent the intervening millennia fighting each other in a dog-eat-dog existence and evolving. And unlike the Zerg under the Overmind, they don't have a Hive Mind—each and every Primal Zerg is a sentient, sapient predator dedicated to killing you and each other.
• Zoness from Star Fox 64 is a planet comprised entirely of machines and structures built on a toxic, acidic ocean that corrodes your Arwing. Also Solar from the same game, though that's justified in that it's a star. It's suggested that Zoness used to be a paradise before Andross' forces started messing with it. Also from Star Fox is the appropriately named planet Venom. It's completely covered in yellow dust clouds, the oceans are acidic enough to melt a spaceship, the gravity is twice as strong as the other planets in the Lylat System, and plant life can't be found anywhere. Sending Andross here in exile was thought to be the Cornerian equivalent of a death sentence.
• Star Wars:
  • In Jedi Academy, Jaden Korr is assigned a rather nasty mission to the planet Blenjeel, a Desert World swarming with sand burrowers (which bear a suspicious resemblance to the Graboids from Tremors).
  • Oh, and there's a fierce lightning storm going on in the upper atmosphere, which forces Jaden's ship into a not-so-happy landing on the planet's sandy surface. By the looks of things, this is a common occurrence. After Jaden escapes from the planet (being the first person to ever do so, apparently), Kyle Katarn wisely decides to report this planet in public databanks as one to avoid at all costs. Vjun gets a little expansion beyond being the home of Darth Vader's castle. The planet is incredibly barren, devoid of plant life and has acid rain.
  • The Very Definitely Final Dungeon of Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords is Malachor V, the planet destroyed by Revan during the Mandalorian Wars. Prior to the Mandalorian Wars it was a lush, agricultural world. After the Mass Shadow Generator devastated the planet, however, it became an inhospitable world covered in jagged mountains and cliffs, with constant seismic activity and extreme lightning storms. Poisonous gas vents became active, and the only living beings on the planet were Storm Beasts — giant lizards that are corrupted by the dark side aura that plagued the planet since its devastation. The planet is also the site of a number of gravitational anomalies, making it suicide for even the most skilled of pilots to try and land there. In addition, the planet's devastation caused a "Wound in The Force" that became the Eldritch Abomination Darth Nihilus. Said Force wound has the charming side effect of causing great mental anguish to anyone who sets foot on the planet. For non-Force-sensitives. Those who are Force-sensitive (and not protected by the negating power of the Exile) are instantly driven into Dark-Side-fueled insanity. It is theorized this is where Darth Revan... made most of his/her army.
  There is a world on the Outer Rim surrounded by mass shadows. Past the graveyard of Mandalorian warships, this planet suffers, crushed in gravity's fist. To walk on its surface is to feel it crushing every cell of your being. It is like being buried alive until it seems you will never breathe again. What manner of creature would have birthed such a thing? Nothing human, to be sure.
• Subnautica
  • The Dunes are a near-barren biome with low visibility, home to no less than eight Reaper Leviathans. As you enter it for the first time, even your PDA has its doubts.
    PDA: Detecting multiple Leviathan class lifeforms in the region. Are you certain whatever you're doing is worth it?
  • The Crash Zone is like the Dunes, except the visibility is even lower, deadly radiation will kill you in under a minute if you enter it without a radiation suit, and unlike the Dunes - which can be entirely bypassed - you're required to enter the Crash Zone to get to the Aurora, which has the only set of blueprints for the Neptune Escape Rocket. Oh, and you can access it before you even have a Seamoth or a PRAWN-suit. Have fun getting mauled by the eight Reapers swimming around...
  • Surrounding the crater in which Subnautica takes place is the Crater Edge biome. This biome has no floor (at least not one a player can reach without exceeding the crush depth of their vehicle and drowning), no resources and is described by the PDA as an "ecological dead zone". It's only home to microscopic life (which is useless to the player), and three adult Ghost Leviathans, which will spawn in and attack you if you swim over the Crater Edge. They're extremely hostile, and will keep attacking until you either die, or swim back to the main crater.
• In Temtem the player crash-lands on the island of Tucma, “The End of All Things”, which is very loosely based on Central America. A desolate wasteland marked by toxic fumes, acid lakes, and roving bandits. The island is a breeding ground for Toxic-type Temtem, with most humans and other Temtem residing deep in the Underground City of Quetzal to avoid the poisoned surface.
• Don't let the colorful, 2D graphics deceive you—the randomly-created worlds of Terraria are Death Worlds, one and all.
  • Killer slime can be found in the safest environments. Vultures, sharks, hornets bigger than you are, killer bats, and even piranhas await you above ground. Razor-sharp feather-slinging harpies inhabit the upper atmosphere. The underground is filled with skeletons, killer roots, vampire bats, and far enough down, demons.
  • The hills and caverns are steep enough that you can die from fall damage just by traversing the terrain, plus the risks of drowning or falling into pits of lava. Meteors and Hellstone will burn to the touch unless you've built a charm to ward them off. Legions of zombies and enormous, disembodied eyes will pound at your door all night, every night. Eventually, an army of goblins will descend upon you with little warning. And every night has a chance for the Blood Moon to rise, increasing the number and might of the zombies, and turning even the harmless bunnies of the wilderness into walking horrors. The first instructions you get upon starting the game are on "surviving your first night."
  • Creating a world using "theconstant" seed makes it even worse by adding mechanics from Don't Starve: you can now starve to death, nights become actually pitch black without a light source, and spending more than a few seconds in total darkness will get you killed by... something.
• Them's Fightin' Herds has the Huacaya Mountains. It's a barely-habitable wasteland with a severe lack of anything edible, frequent natural disasters, sheer cliffs, lethal cold made worse by freezing tempests, water both rare and as likely to be sickening salt as fresh... and if all that doesn't kill you, Paprika's affection might.
• Todd's Adventures in Slime World is set on an alien planet whose environment is blatantly hostile to human life.
• Total Annihilation has a few: Barathrum (named after a Latin word for Hell) is Lethal Lava Land, Kral is covered in seas of acid, and Core Prime is a sterile metal-covered world inhabited solely by thinking machines.
• Discussed in Ultima Underworld II. When speaking to Iolo about the worlds beyond the blackrock gem, he expresses concern that one of the gem's facets could lead to an ocean floor or a planet of poisonous gases. (It doesn't.)
• The Unreal Tournament 2004 Onslaught map simply called Red Planet is a weird hybrid. It's a planet without a sun, but the entire planet somehow radiates its own red light constantly. According to the map description, the effect drives a man insane within 18 hours. Thankfully (or not), you won't live that long...
• Warframe:
  • Pretty much every world in the Origin System has turned into this. Earth is a technological wasteland covered in a bio-engineered forest designed to prevent anyone from using it for anything useful, and one of the few clear areas is filled with half-dead Sentients that stalk the plains at night. Venus was terraformed by the blunt method of dumping ridiculous amounts of coolant on its surface, turning it into an ice world that requires large heat generators for anyone who wants to be outside for more than a minute. Mercury is a mining world completely under the brutal control of the Grineer. Mars is little more than a desert, with the ruins of its former inhabitants slowly being consumed by the sands.
  • Ceres is a polluted industrial world barely habitable any more. Jupiter is being mined by city-sized ships that are not particularly concerned with employee safety, so tumbles into the clouds are common. Europa is a natural ice moon famous for crashed Corpus ships littering the landscape. Saturn was once known as a merchant world, but Grineer blockades make it impassable for nearly everyone else. Uranus is an ocean world that would be uninhabitable except that some Grineer scientists decided they wanted labs on the ocean floor. Neptune is a Corpus industrial world—it's not quite as bad as Ceres, but it still alternates between cold and lethal and high altitude and lethal. Pluto is another ice world, with the added fun of swarms of Corpus robots. Sedna is only barely habitable at all, and most of its better locations are poisonous factories. Eris has been completely overrun by the Infestation, and thus anyone who gets close will be assimilated.
• Wild ARMs has the numerous incarnations of the planet Filgaia. While its level of Death World-ness is variable, it is always a steadily degrading world that's mostly unfriendly, if not downright hostile to human life, usually thanks to environmental catastrophes or wars. Wild Arms 3's Filgaia is especially bad, as all the oceans actually dried up (there's nothing but endless sand formations left, which strangely behave a lot like water), water is awfully rare, nasty flora and fauna are everywhere, there are titanic monsters running around some locations (including one that systematically attacks anything that goes faster than a horse in its territory and wrecked many trains already) and several ingame sources hint that the environment is too far gone for anything to help: even nanotechnology is useless by now.
• World of Warcraft:
  • Outland, the shards of a destroyed planet where the fact that it exists partially in the endless darkness of the Twisting Nether that gives demons their powers is the only thing sustaining gravity and an atmosphere. What with the Hellfire Penninsula, Netherstorm, Shadowmoon Valley, and Blade's Edge Mountains (where black dragon carcasses decorate the landscape, killed by the mountain-sized gronn), every zone here falls under this trope except the verdant Nagrand, creepy Terokkar Forest, and just-plain-weird Zangarmarsh (which is still full of fungus and predators).
  • There are parts of Azeroth that could probably qualify as well—Northrend is certainly one. Sithilus is dead, infested by silithids and qiraji. Felwood, and the Plaguelands (especially the east) are blighted, with the latter slowly recovering. The Burning Steppes, Searing Gorge, and Badlands are as pleasent as their names would indicate. Desolace and the Blasted Lands used to be nothing but wastelands, but are slowly recovering post-Cataclysm.
  • Draenor (aka Outland before it blew up) tends to be a rather nasty place. Frostfire Ridge is half frozen and the other half is on fire. Gorgrond is half wasteland filled with murderous giants and half lush jungle populated by Plant People who want to wipe out all non-plant life. A good deal of why the Laughing Skull clan is so feared is because they're both tough enough and crazy enough to live in Gorgrond.
  • Azeroth and Draenor both are much nicer in recent history that in the ancient past. Azeroth spent the first ages of the universe as a battle-scarred wasteland with four biomes: rocky mountains, lava fissures, deep oceans and maybe a desert or two. Then the Old Gods arrived, adding one new biome: temple cities filled with slave labor and humanoid sacrifice. Prehistoric Draenor fell victim to a Hive Mind of plant species that wiped out all other forms of life, and was very close to exhausting the planet's resources. The introduction of a balancing force caused a millennia-long war that only allowed other lifeforms to emerge once both sides had mostly killed each other.
  • Argus, the homeworld of the Draenei, used to be a pristine world.. then the Burning Legion arrived, and in the present day, the planet has practically been drained of life to sustain the Fel Magic of its now-corrupted Eredar population, oh yeah, and the planet has a hole in it. It is such a Death World that even the World Soul inside it ^note A Nascent Physical God embodying the world is twisted into something that can only be described as Omnicidal Mania in the hopes that it will be able to Mercy Kill itself in the end.
• Mira, the setting of Xenoblade Chronicles X. While the air is breathable and most of the flora edible or harmless, save the dandelions that shoot parasitic seeds into your skin and the explosive papayas, it's filled to the brim with hordes of house-sized megafauna that want you dead. The five continents are all nasty: Primordia is covered in steep cliffs, Noctilum is a huge jungle with poisonous rivers and home to a madness-inducing virus that makes the infected wildlife attack all living creatures, Oblivia is an arid wasteland where dust storms and electromagnetic storms are common, Sylvalum is choked with spores and patrolled by mysterious giant robots, and Cauldros is a war-torn volcanic landscape patrolled by hostile forces. And that's not factoring in the hostile alien invaders and dormant machines that can lay waste to an entire army. Death is a constant fact of life for anyone that works outside New Los Angeles, as BLADE members die in droves to the megafauna, even with the aid of Skells. And the water is contaminated with foreign, dangerous bacteria. Oh, and all these notes on human survivability? Every human in the place is using a robotic body capable of taking a 10-storey fall without consequence. Biological humans wouldn't have a hope.

---