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A typical Wall of Doom. Note the related Spikes Of Doom with which it is adorned.
A rather frustrating form of That One Level in which the player must make rapid progress to outrun a giant threat. The threat in question can be anything from rising water levels, to giant robots, or, as the name implies, a slowly advancing giant wall lined with all manner of painful things. Other times, there isn't even a visible threat, and the screen simply scrolls on its own. Sometimes going off the screen or contacting the Advancing Wall Of Doom means instant death, at other times, it simply pushes the player forward, squishing them to death if necessary.
See also: Rise To The Challenge, Descending Ceiling, and Indy Escape for specific types of this. When the screen itself forces you to keep moving and anchors the camera to the wall, it's a Fixed Scrolling Level. Also compare Escape Sequence and Deadly Walls.
Examples:
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- In a video made by the Department of Homeland Security about declaring any fruits, vegetables, and meats you bring when entering the U.S., an anthropomorphic dog has a nightmare where he sneaks home with his fruits & veggies, opens up the bag, and finds bugs crawling all over. These bugs then turn into an advancing wall of doom made of flies, chasing everyone out of town.
Film
LiveActionTV
- The episode Starship Mine of Star Trek The Next Generation has the Enterprise in spacedock for routine cleaning by an energy ray that must sweep from stern to prow of the temporarily unpopulated ship over the next few hours. Needless to say, its nature as a very effective Advancing Wall of Doom becomes obvious when Picard is trapped aboard while playing cat and mouse with a group of arms smugglers.
- Sometimes the dungeon in Knightmare featured this.
Video Games
- Abuse had a mining drill/bulldozer machine that tried to run you over. You could destroy it, but it had a ton of health.
- Advance Wars: Dark Conflict had a map where you had to get at least one allied (uncontrollable) unit to an allied city which was on the other side of two Laser Walls. Behind you follows a whole army, who can deploy new units (you can't) and outnumbers you from the start. Your strongest unit is uncontrollable and works as a temporary wall (until it's destroyed).
- Several parts of a level in the Sega Genesis version of Aladdin had Aladdin outrunning boulders. The most frustrating of these came at the end of the level, where as you're falling the magic carpet catches you to whisk you away, but not fast enough to still get hit by the boulder and having to restart the level. This game seems Unwinnable until you discover that you have to fall left to avoid the boulder, and even then the timing is such that it makes it difficult to do consistently.
- Alone In The Dark 08 has an advancing road of doom in the first major driving scene.
- In Braid, the character (Tim) has to outrun a flaming wall of doom in one of the final worlds of the game.
- In the first mission of Call Of Duty 4, the ship you are raiding is hit by enemy aircraft and begins to sink. You must run behind your teammates all the way to the helicopter. If you lag behind just a little, you'll be "killed" and forced to retry the mission. It's made even worse by the fact that the ship begins to list heavily to one side, so you're actually running diagonally. And in the end, you need to jump over the side of the ship to reach the helicopter. Since this is very early in the game, you probably haven't gotten used to the correct "JUMP" button yet, so expect to die on the first try. In fact, the "Have A Nice Death" message actually says that "No one ever makes it on the first try".
- Castlevania Bloodlines has a few.
- One going up to avoid rising water.
- One going down to keep up with draining water. No idea why, since there's no huge drop to kill you (unless you go too fast and discover your Super Drowning Skills).
- Ascending a tower as it scrolls up. Made even harder by Goddamned Bats in the form of flying Medusa heads.
- Castlevania III has several as well, including one 'rising water' stage, a few auto-scrolling stages towers (one up, one down), and one where the auto-scrolling occurs in noisy "jumps."
- The Castlevania Adventure had a level that was MADE of this trope. Stage 3, Death Fair, featured a corridor where you had to destroy giant screws to keep the spiked ceiling from crushing you, a tower up which you had to slowly climb via ropes while being chased by a spiked floor, and finally another corridor where you had to outrun a spiked wall while killing enemies and balancing over bottomless pits. A Scrappy Level if there ever was one.
- In Condemned 2, you have to outrun a rabid bear through a deserted hunting lodge. And when you finally do get a chance to kill it, it's in a One Buwwet Weft situation.
- Conkers Bad Fur Day has a rising water level. Although you can swim, the water rises toward exposed high-voltage wires you have to sever to prevent electrocution. Apparently water touching the now-bare but still-live terminals doesn't shock you.
- A few of the earlier Crash Bandicoot games sent had levels where you run from a giant boulder. The worst part being that you're running toward the camera, making obstacle dodging and box collecting very much a process of Trial And Error.
- A few custom Doom levels give the same effect as an AWOD by having the player chased through a maze of Insurmountable Waist Height Fences by either Exploding Barrels or revenants' homing missiles.
- In Dynamite Headdy, the "Twin Freaks" boss is an insane AWOD. The screen scrolls at a set speed, but the boss doesn't. On top of this, hitting various switches needed to make progress makes him faster and invincible.
- "Decap attack" features this in the 4th level (I think) with a kind of weird totem pole thing which kills Chuck in a single hit. It can be surprisingly hard to escape from at times.
- Eversion features two, the latter apparently made of blood.
- Exile uses Quick Fire as an advancing wall of doom.
- Final Fantasy IV manages to get one into a turn-based RPG — the Demon Wall. If you don't beat it before it gets halfway across the screen, it starts using its Crush attack, which is instant death.
- Final Fantasy XII brings back Demon Walls twice in the same area. The first one is near impossible to kill unless you do some serious level grinding (or come back later in the game (or you spam Quickenings or Reflected magick)). The 2nd Demon Wall in the next room is much easier to beat and is required to kill to advance the plot. Both Demon Walls keep moving forward and if they press you against the door, it's an instant Game Over. The 2nd Demon Wall has a lot more space to work with than the first one and if you touch a correct flame during the fight, you can slow it down for a bit. Touching the wrong one will speed up the enemy's movement. It should also be noted that speeding up the game's battle system through the options menu does not speed up either wall's advancement.
- Final Fantasy Tactics A 2 has the same thing too, a giant demon wall that pushes the player units forward, eventually past the edge of the map (where units are promptly KO'd). Thankfully the wall has ridiculously low health and is easily dispatched.
- Or you can avoid the wall altogether by equipping the Fairy Shoes, which lets you teleport instead of walk, thus you can attack the wall from behind and it can't move backwards.
- It has a spell called Telega which teleports the target in front of the wall (and inflict Immobilize).
- Final Fantasy X-2 has an irritating subversion in one area. The Advancing Wall Of Doom is easily avoided, but you have to let it hit you to progress. Not because of anything special about the wall — it just cues a cutscene which lets the characters make a jump impossible in actual gameplay.
- Gears of War 2 is full of these in the level "Intestinal Fortitude," which is set inside the Riftworm. The Gears are trying to find a way out and to kill The Dragon's giant pet. At one point they have to avoid a "Debris Wall" or get crushed. Later in the level, while chainsawing the Riftworm's cardiovascular arteries (or whatever they are), you have to do it quickly and then escape the room before the rising water actually blood drowns you.
- God Of War has these a few times; the first two (one each in GoW1 and 2) are defeated by killing off the horde of Mooks that spawns on top of you, while the second is actually a time-based puzzle where you have to open a door.
- Half Life 2 has the advancing wall of the Citadel at the end of the level Nova Prospekt, which crushes you against a non-moving wall unless you can quickly find a small opening through which you escape in the latter wall.
- Donkey Kong Country has levels set in an ancient temple, where large spinning stone wheels will chase you. It also features the aptly-named Castle Crush, with a harmless rising floor that squished the heroes against the ceiling. At least it paused for a moment if your first character died...
- Donkey Kong Country 2 has one level with rising water, which has an invincible and aggressive fish in it, and Toxic Tower, a level that cuts out the middleman and serves up rising toxic waste instead.
- Donkey Kong Country 3:
- Had "Ripsaw Rage", a stage set in a giant tree, with an enormous saw slowly rising upwards, cutting the tree in half lengthwise.
- One of the bosses is a giant barrel that just hops forward and spits beetles at you. Touching the boss itself only does minor knockback without hurting you, but the killer is that, as the boss constantly moves forward, there's only so much room to move around in, and if he'll eventually push you off into a Bottomless Pit unless you manage to knock him back into the one on the other side of the room.
- Flashback has one of these, with insta-kill pits to jump over and a floating orb that will knock you flat if it gets in melee range. And you have to destroy it to roll into the end of the level.
- Gunstar Super Heroes has the File Crasher. If you get caught by it, it, um... erases your file. Actually, it only claims it will erase your save file, and even then only in the original Japanese version.
- Inspector Gadget: Operation Madkactus had quickly rising water in World 2-2, which invoked Super Drowning Skills. In the final mission, the wall of doom was the vehicle. There were also a Scrappy Mechanic that made jumps more annoying.
- I Wanna Be The Guy has a segment where you have to outrun a big wall of spikes that originally starts off as just another expanse of spikes that just flips up once you've jumped over it and starts chasing you. And you have to wall jump and dodge flying
apples giant cherries Delicious Fruit the entire way.
- Justified in any Indiana Jones game involving the boulder scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark. Justified as in it was in the movie, so why leave it out of the game?
- The same goes for outrunning the water flooding the mineshaft in the second movie.
- Jurassic Park Rampage Edition has a flood variation of this trope in the cargo ship level.
- Kid Chameleon: The "Hills of the Warrior" level. Especially bad because the giant wall of doom seems to have fairly strong Rubber Band AI.
- Also a "feature" in two other levels. One is a series of timed block puzzles, and the other gives you a rather unwieldy tank to try (and fail) at navigating the level with.
- A Scrappy Level late in the game has an Advancing Wall Of Doom that ends with a choice between top route and bottom route. If you pick the wrong one, "too bad!", there's a big wall, forcing you to die and start the level from the beginning.
- Kirby Superstar used this, much to the annoyance of some younger players.
- Kirby 64: Crystal Shards also did this on one level of Rock Star.
- Viy in La Mulana rises up from the bottom of the screen and has you continuously climbing up the endless chamber.
- The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina of Time LOVES this. One place has an advancing wall of fire, and the only way to escape it is to attempt a jump to a ledge that appears to be too far away to be grabbed, and Link does it. He's Just That Good.
- Then there's the room in the Shadow Temple with two spiked walls that want to crush you.
- Twilight Princess has a puzzle variation, where you have to move blocks to get the height to leap off a ledge before a wall of flame reaches you.
- Little Big Planet has the Skulldozer, a giant skeletal machine designed to destroy everything in its path. Oh, and it emits an infinite supply of Horrible Gas that dissolves player characters. Not too long afterwards, you are sent running from a giant flaming boulder.
- Marble Madness implemented this wall in two player games, and only advances it when the players go through the track. If one player moved quickly enough and the second player lagged behind, the slow player is teleported forward and loses 5 seconds.
- Some minigames in Mario Party use the collapsing-track version. They're races, and getting caught in the wall means you probably lost regardless.
- In Mega Man 2, the infamous Mecha Dragon begins its boss battle like this for a brief time. It spends a lot more time in this mode during its cameo in I Wanna Be The Guy.
- There are also two auto-scrolling segments in Dr. Cossack Stage 3 in Mega Man 4.
- The mining equipment in Armored Armadillo's stage in Mega Man X. can be destroyed with concentrated firepower.
- The same cannot be said of the advancing wall of magma in Area K of Mega Man ZX.
- In the original Metal Gear game for the MSX 2, The player had to destroy a bulldozer in a small corridor that would advance towards them pretty quickly. If it touched them they would instantly die. However, the player could leave the room into the previous one if they failed to get a sufficient amount of hits in on time, but this would restore all of the bulldozer's health.
- At least two stages in the various Metal Slug games feature a variant of this as Boss Battles. You have to not only stay ahead/above the screen filling menace but avoid its attacks and shoot back.
- Metal Storm for the NES has one of these in level 5, but it's so slow that it'll only catch you if you're deliberately waiting.
- There's also one or two death traps like this in Nightshade, a game that spoofed 30s supernatural noir. Game was tons of fun, but this troper never EVER managed to survive any of the advancing wall of doom death traps.
- Prince Of Persia 2 has crushing walls in its later levels, some of which are situated in inescapable pits so as to be a Death Trap.
- Psychonauts has two: First takes place in an air-bubble at a bottom of a lake, and there's also a rising water level in the Meat Circus level. (shudder)
- In Taito's Rainbow Islands the player must keep above the rising water of Doom.
- Anyone who has played the first Ratchet And Clank game will know of the horrendous part on the planet Rilgar in Blackwater City where the player has to run away from rising water while oncoming enemies attack you. The water inevitably catches up to you forcing you to swim the rest of the way and get out before you run out of breath.
- Resident Evil 4 had an advancing drill down a narrow castle corridor. Of course, it made no sense to have it in the castle anyway.
- Later on, there's an Advancing Giant Statue of The Dragon; you're expecting it to make sense?!
- Anyone who plays this should immediately recall the boulder.
- The remake of 1 had an advancing statue-with-a-spinning blade of doom in one of its puzzles.
- Rocket Knight Adventures has a few of them:
- A sort of a maze/descending ceiling hybrid in the middle of Stage 5. This gets extra tough when you consider that rocketing around, your primary means of moving fast, has ricochet. Very easy to bounce yourself right back under the crusher...
- The fifth boss has Axle Gear coming after you in a giant robot. However, this level redeems itself from being a total Scrappy Level because you get your OWN giant robot at the end of it, making it one of the few Advancing Wall Of Doom levels where you get to fight back, in rock'em-sock'em style even!
- In Secret Of Mana, there's a particular boss that you have to fight, whilst trapped in a room, that's a wall that slowly pushes you towards a pit of spikes on the other side of the room. Not defeating it in time means game over.
- Actually, that only happens if you take out both of its "normal" eyes. Focus on the middle eye and you'll be fine.
- In Silent Hill 2, Pyramid Head acts as one of these in the alternate hospital basement. If he hits Maria too many times before you reach the elevator(or if Maria takes too many hits at any time), it's Non Standard Game Over. Do not use ampoules during this sequence, as Maria then can't keep up with James. However, it turns out to be a Shoot The Shaggy Dog in the end, as Maria is given a Plotline Death.
- Silent Hill 3 has an harmless amusement park 'haunted house' with rather cheesy narration... until the exit, where a mysterious red light starts chasing you out of the building. If it overtakes you, it's instant death. (Made worse by a sudden perspective shift partway through that can leave you running the wrong direction.)
- In endgame of Silent Hill 4, your Distressed Damsel is compelled to shuffle into a whirling deathtrap while you fight the final villain. Defeating him before her doom is the only way to get a pleasant ending.
- The Genesis Sonic The Hedgehog games had a few.
- In Sonic The Hedgehog, Act 2 of Marble Zone has lava that starts flowing from left to right when you get to its level, if not before. It's only one narrow, if longish, passage before you can jump up to a high open area, but for the length of that passage, there's an Advancing Wall of Doom—and if you're not careful, it'll advance almost as fast as you do.
- The boss fight in Act 3 of the Labyrinth Zone involves outrunning a Rising Tide of Doom, while also avoiding Spikes Of Doom and other traps. And the zone as a whole is Down The Drain.
- In Angel Island Zone, Act 2 of Sonic 3, there's a portion before the Boss Battle where the screen starts scrolling to the right, then Robotnik's airship starts dropping bombs at you. If you let off the speed for a second, you'll drift too far left and get hit. All you have to do is hold right for 20 seconds.
- On the other hand, the advancing brick wall in the very next level — the beginning of Act 2 of Hydrocity Zone — was pretty darn nerve-wracking.
- In Sonic & Knuckles, in between the two Boss Battles in Flying Battery Zone, Act 2, you have to run through the collapsing airship quickly, otherwise you'll be crushed between it and the single wall and floor that remain airborne.
- Then in the next level, Act 2 of Sandopolis Zone had several areas where throwing a switch would cause sand to pour from the ceiling, and the sand would form a floor rising from below. With the winding passageways of the level, you could easily get crushed between the sand and the ceiling if you dawdled.
- Yet again, the Death Egg Zone Final Boss isn't really an Advancing Wall of Doom, but sorta becomes one if you die on your first try (there's no place to get rings on subsequent attempts).
- And then there's the pachinko-themed bonus levels, in which you collect powerups while outrunning a glowing double helix that crawls steadily upward.
- Sonic CD's Stardust Speedway Act 3. You are racing against Metal Sonic and Dr. Robotnik/Eggman is chasing after the two of you in his pod shooting lasers of death out from the bottom. If you touch it, you die. If you beat Metal Sonic, it slams against the locked door and then Robotnik flies at the door, blasting the mech to pieces.
- Sonic The Hedgehog 2006 contains infamous mach speed (mock speed) levels where Sonic was forced to run forward regardless of what happened to him, including if he died. If hit, he reacted by break dance while still barreling forward at insane speeds. It has
 to be seen to be believed.
- Sonic Heroes features a section where you have to climb out of a vat of "energy" (lava) that's rising up below you in... Power Plant? Act 2 (it's been a while, I don't quite remember the name.) It's more difficult if you're playing Team Dark.
- In the Ocean Palace level (the first level), there's a section where you run from one...then two...then three gigantic, ornately carved stone wheels. Apparently created and placed there for no reason other than to harass anyone who should happen upon that particular hill.
- The Master System Sonic The Hedgehog had a version during Jungle Zone Act 2. Most of the level is a vertical climb. The camera followed you up the level, but not downwards. If you fell and hit the bottom of the screen during that section it was instant death time. The near identical Game Gear version didn't have this, I'd guess because it would've made the level stupidly hard with the Game Gear's lower resolution.
- Spider-Man / X-Men for the Super Nintendo had, in Gambit's first level, a gigantic spikey ball of doom, slowly crushing everything in his path.
- The original Splatterhouse has the player pursued by a creepy pulsing purple wall of... Something. You'll only see it if you dawdle significantly, though.
- Stargirl and the Thief from the Exploded Moon has two. The second makes is much more annoying, since it randomly stops the scrolling for one of its attacks, either causing you to either miss a planned jump or throw the bomb just short of its hitbox.
- One of the later levels of Strider has a particularly frustrating one; if you lag at all, you won't have time to come out without being crushed.
- Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island:
- Super Mario Galaxy continues the trend, with two of the of the missions in the Dusty Dune Galaxy including a rising floor of sand trying to crush the player against the roof, and a later mission involving a whole mountain sinking into lava (at 3:25).
- The Pig King Statue in Lucas' first stage of The Subspace Emissary. Until Ness one-shots it with PK Flash.
- The Norfair stage in the same game has advancing walls of lava; two move toward the center of the stage from either the left or right side (though they don't go any further and move back after a while), while the third start from behind the stage and move towards it. Only a few characters can effectively jump over it, so a small safe room appears to assist those who can't. Getting hit by any of them is not a good thing.
- New Super Mario Bros has Mega Unagi.
- Super Metroid had some rising lava pits. They didn't kill you right off, but they did sap your health.
- Taz: Escape From Mars has the Moleworld drilling machine.
- The Tomb Raider series is chock full of spiked walls/ceilings that are too eager to impale and crush Lara.
- This is Dino Run's entire concept. It manages to still be fun because:
- You can get caught up in the doom wall and still escape with your life, and in fact can get bonuses for doing so, and
- The 'Pyroclastic Wall of Doom' is really, really cool looking.
- Tron 2.0 also did this in one level, where you had to flee a "partition formatting" wall or something, and got obliterated if it touched you.
- The 'Reformat Wall', a depiction of the reformat initiated by Ma3a to deal with a massive viral infection in the lab servers. And, in a way, it doesn't really count, because A: the wall actually helps you, for the most part, as it moves extremely slowly, obliterates enemies pursuing you, and decreases the number of places you have to worry about while fighting what by that point has become a small horde of Z-Lots. And B: it was freaking awesome! Amazingly well done, although if you're going for scary, it might be cool to have things be randomly disappearing with increasing speed, implying the player's soon going to be formatted as well.
- An extremely annoying version can be seen in this VIP 4 video by raocow in the Temple of Homing level, where the entire second half the level is trying desperately to outrun a homing missile at top speed, including flight (link to video)
- The first Wario Land uses an advancing wall of lava (which stays straight vertical the entire time, oddly) for the first in the volcanic stages.
- One of the Metroid stages also has a giant advancing wall of lava that comes in to cover over half the stage...
- The worst one involves not only a scrolling screen, but randomly moving cars that you have to jump between on the "Big Blue" track.
- In the MMORPG Maplestory, there is a particularly annoying area where you have to navigate through a maze of platforms while keeping well out of the area of a moving pillar that logically shouldn't kill you with one touch. But it does.
- X-Men: Mutant Apocalypse opted for the pursuing wall of lava approach, first horizontally, then vertically. Made even nastier by random walls dropping into your path that had to be destroyed. This, in turn, made the section nearly impossible for some characters (while others, such as Wolverine, could plow through with relative ease)
- Taken to its logical conclusion with a giant 30 foot high Mario that destroys everything in its path in this video of the aptly named The Mario by raocow.
- The Legendary Starfy (the localized one) featured a series of stages in which fire chased our five-armed hero upwards. Touching it meant losing a heart and restarting that bit of the stage.
- Henry Hatsworth In The Puzzling Adventure has a monster fish that chases you in one of the mid-game stages.
- Rayman 2 features three walls of doom. One is in the cave of nightmares, where the monster pursues you down a slide - hit too many obstacles and it catches up, which means you have to start over. The other two are the cliff levels where the brittle bridges you hurry along break down as they are shot at.
- A little less known but still death wall'y, the Tengu stage from Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers: The Movie for Game Boy. The second part of the stage forces you to outrun a drill tank. Unfortunately, you've got 3 rows of destroyable blocks to break through in order to move forward. As such, I'd assume anyone else who'd play this game would just use the password to skip this level.
- The Sega Genesis game De Cap Attack had a level in which you run from a totem pole that kills everything in its path, including enemies.
- In Star Wars: The Clone Wars (not the animated series this one came out with the movie and featured mostly vehicle combat) there is a level where the player has to outrun the purple wave of death created by the Sith Harvester (ball shaped thing that absorbs the force from living things and stores it or some such thing).
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