Drop In Nemesis - Television Tropes & Idioms

The Drop In Nemesis is triggered when you do a certain thing in a particular video game setting. Suddenly, a bad guy or environmental obstacle enters the scene (often by Offscreen Teleportation) and wastes no time in killing you. Paralyzed by Cutscene Incompetence, you have no option but to stand there helplessly as you are put out of your misery. Apparently, whatever you did was the wrong thing, in the eyes of the bad guy and of the game designers. Have a Nice Death!

For an enemy to be a true Drop In Nemesis, there shouldn't be blatant warnings (like the sound of the monster's approaching steps or that it is one moment away from coming to eat you/stab you/shoot you/zap you with a spell,) giving you a chance to hide. You are more typically given vague and misleading warnings that the enemy could be passing through/returning to the area at any unexpected time. This won't be so unexpected when you've been killed by the villain every time after performing the trigger action.

This trope includes vehicles which only appear to get the player into deadly highway accidents.

This whole scenario borders strongly on Paranoia Fuel: as if environments filled with Everything Trying to Kill You weren't enough, there are things hiding offscreen that you can't see coming until they're the last thing your character will ever see.

Compare Teleporting Keycard Squad, Easily Angered Shopkeeper(Stealing is bad!)

If you were expecting an article on videogame bosses that drop from ceilings, you may be looking for He Was Right There All Along or Wall Master.

Examples:

Air Buccaneers features invulnerable murderous mushrooms that sprout from the ground and will lunge at you- thus making the ground less safer than the air, where you're barraged by cannonballs, scorched by flamethrowers or stabbed by vicious boarding parties.

Zork gives us the famous example:

Oh, no! A lurking grue slithered into the room and devoured you!

In the 1980s RPG Ragnarok, you can use a potion of phasing to walk through the walls of the game map. If you make it out to the edge, there's nothing but sea ... and then Jormungand eats you.
Within A Deep Forest. If you try to jump across the water at the far right of the forest, a dragon's head pops out from offscreen and eats you. You need to travel to the Bad Future, where the dragon is long dead, to get across.
Early Clock Tower games did this.
The evil wizard Manannan had a bad habit of showing up at any time in Kings Quest III - no matter where you are in the world - and killing you on the spot if you gave him even the tiniest excuse. If you left his mountain, or were carrying anything that could be used as a magical ingredient and/or couldn't be picked up in his house, or forgot to cover your tracks, he'd zap you. It felt damn good to finally dispose of him.
- The sorceress in Kings Quest VII performs a similar function.
- And Mordack in Kings Quest V.
- The Minotaur in Kings Quest VI. Worse, he appears if you don't have the right item in your inventory when you enter a required room—but it's one of the items you can't backtrack to obtain once you've entered his labyrinth. And if you do have the item, it lets you spy on him as he fiddles around in a different room entirely.
- The Dwarf in the original, although it didn't kill you, would steal your treasures, rendering the game unwinnable.
In Paper Mario The Thousand Year Door, you're at one point given a diary by a ghost and told not to read it. If you read it anyway, the ghost reappears and kills you on the spot.
- It was reserved for plot cutscenes, but the terrifying aspect of this is evident in playing Super Paper Mario. Consider: Dimentio spontaneously appeared in Merlon's house, interrupting a conversation, to kill your entire party. Shortly after doing the same thing to Luigi. The unsaid implication is that, if he wanted to, he could have done that at any time, in any stage...
The SA-X enemy in Metroid Fusion, which appears during scripted events now and then. Being a clone of Samus Aran's Power Suit at full power, you stand absolutely no chance head to head and instead must run and/or hide, often while under fire from it. Being part Metroid in this game, Samus can be frozen by the SA-X's obnoxiously powerful Ice Beam. If this happens, death is pretty much certain.
- Amusingly enough, though it is pointed out in a cutscene that the SA-X possesses a very high degree of intelligence, it's an entirely scripted enemy when chasing Samus and, as such, tends to display really bad AI in some situations, such as continually hopping up and down if Samus should hide under the lip of a platform on one occasion.
In the original Leisure Suit Larry, if you don't Look Both Ways before trying to cross the street, a car will appear out of nowhere and flatten you.
- And if you wander into a dark alley, a thug beats you to death.
- Police Quest II had the same.
- And don't flush the toilet.
Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers has a nice example of this scenario: regularly, the Voodoo Museum is a safe place, but entering on a certain day causes Gabe to have a potentially fatal run-in with a constrictor snake.
One screen in I Wanna Be The Guy is an apparently safe hallway straight out of Mega Man. You must clear it quickly or else Guts Man will fall on you from out of nowhere. But nobody said this game was fair.
- If you take too long on the Tetris screen, a giant Dr Mario pill falls on you.
- In one part of I Wanna Be The Fangame, the punishment for taking the easy way is death by kamikaze watermelon.
In the original Jurassic Park game for the SNES, entering a darkened room without night vision goggles would result in your immediate death-by-unseen-dinosaur.
- The same game also had several spots on the world map where stepping into the wrong location would cause a T-Rex to suddenly appear and eat you.
In Laura Bow: The Colonel's Bequest, taking a shower resulted in a homage to the infamous murder scene from Psycho, complete with the MIDI version of Psycho Strings.
- And in the second game, The Dagger of Amon Ra, Laura will get run over by a car if she tries to cross the street by herself. Hilariously. Every damn time.
  - For that one, you need to look both ways before crossing the street, making the car that would normally hit you cease to exist.
Less deadly, but lacking in any particular trigger (and still seeming like a "Drop-In Nemesis"), was Blake Stone's Mad Scientist Big Bad, Dr. Goldfire, who eventually showed up as a normal boss on the ninth level of each installment but would occasionally teleport in from nowhere on one of the first eight levels, teleporting out (and apparently healing any damage he took) after you shot at him a few times. Yes, the main villain acted as a Random Encounter in a First-Person Shooter, a genre that doesn't have Random Encounters. Of course, being the type of villain to normally rely on his genetically modified monsters and other guards, he's only armed with a pistol, so he's more of a nuisance than an instant death.
Try to cross a body of water in the creature stage of Spore? An unexplained giant fish will suddenly jump out of the water and eat you. Quite jarring, as it isn't player-made and never appears in any other stage.
- Must be because no one has decided to make a water-dwelling creature yet. oh wait...
- Actually, the fish monster appears in the tribal stage if you use the omnivore's skill. It makes a bunch of fish fly out of the water.
A literal case of this is Nemesis in Resident Evil 3 Nemesis, who has the habit to pop out in random corridors to chase Jill down. Sometimes even right outside a safe room, much to many a player's surprise.
- In Resident Evil 4, shooting a couple of bullets into the lake while standing on the end of the dock results in Del Lago leaping out of the water and eating the whole dock!
This happens a couple of times in games based on Indiana Jones.
- In Indiana Jones And The Infernal Machine, after exiting the third boss's lair, Indy steps uncontrollably into a trap and is captured by Dr. Volodnikov.
- In Emperor's Tomb Indy gets gassed into unconsciousness and captured by Colonel von Beck immediately after obtaining the second MacGuffin. Both serve as excuses to get Indy into a Cardboard Prison located conveniently near information on where the next MacGuffin can be found.
- In the NES version of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, running out of time results in Mola Ram dropping in and tearing out Indy's heart.
Both orcs and elves (as well as Gollum and a mysterious tree-dwelling monster) made appearances in the old text-based game of The Hobbit. Whether you could escape before they attacked seemed to be random (except the monster, which could be eluded only by a specific set of commands). The wood elf, although he only captured Bilbo rather than killing him, also tended to capture orcs and vicious wargs, or even the Balrog, and send them to the same prison cell.
Puzzle Pirates has the Black Ship, a nigh-invincible NPC ship that punishes players who try to pick on far weaker opponents. It takes the place of your opponent in battle to beat the crap out of you and take nearly everything on your ship. It has been defeated a handful of times, being made stronger by the developers after each defeat.
There are several of these in Shadoan, and most have a different way of insta-killing you, with the result of Trial-and-Error Gameplay.
Most (probably all) Beat 'em Up arcade games have a hidden timer that will instantly kill you if you sit idle for too long, or take too long to finish off a boss. (See also Stalked by the Bell.)
- The Spider Man and X-Men arcade games (bombs drop on your head)
- D. D. Crew (the Big Bad knocks you out)
- This happens literally in Zombie Revenge if the timer runs out. A demon you'll never see anywhere else in the game, suddenly appears in the room, says something unintelligible, waves his arms, and suddenly a big, blue explosion rocks everything, causing everybody to lose a life. It's made even more jarring by the fact that afterwards, you're right back in the exact situation you were in before he showed up, as though he somehow aimed the explosion.
In Silent Hill 1, you encounter a kitchen cabinet tied with a chain. If you remove a ring which is part of the chain (and also a necessary item), and try to leave without using a certain artifact on the cabinet, a couple of tentacles will suddenly emerge from it and kill you instantly in a cutscene. There's no warning given beforehand, of course.
- The sewers of Silent Hill 3 have a monster that kills you instantly if you try to cross a certain bridge, unless you electrocute it by throwing a hair dryer in the water. Then there's the roller coaster in the amusement park that always runs you over unless you turn it off (it turns itself back on, but Heather jumps off just in time).
D�j� Vu II has Stogie, a supremely annoying mob goon who will magically appear to kill you should you try to stray out of town. He doesn't seem to care where you are at the time, either. Trying to ride a train out? He hopped on too. Trying to escape through the desert? No good, he's right there to get you.
- A non-lethal example: The first game had a mugger that beat you up and took your cash.
In the original Space Quest, the desert has sand worms that devour wanderers, looking into the hole in the cliff gets you eaten alive, walking across the grate gets you pulled under and eaten, and wandering around the Deltaur's exterior gets you blasted into space dust. In Space Quest II, if you go into the cliffside cave without the glowing gem, you get eaten by a Cave Beaver. If you fail to deactivate the hovercraft's distress beacon, Vohaul's troops will eventually track you down and kill you. If you go the wrong way in The Maze, you get eaten by a Cave Squid. III has Arnold the Annihilator, who you must lure into a trap to obtain his Invisibility Cloak, and the Scumsoft Henchmen, who will trap you in a block of Jello if alerted. IV has the Cyborg who summons the inescapable Droid of Death, and the Sequel Police, who will shoot you dead if you take a wrong turn.
720 Degrees has the "Skate or Die" killer bees that chase you down and kill you after the timer expires.
If you touch any of the ghosts in Alone In The Dark 1992, they will come to life and chase you down, killing you instantly. Other instant-death nemeses include the De Vermis Mysteriis book, the Eldritch Abomination / Man-Eating Plant guarding the front door, and the giant worm (Chthonian) in the catacombs (if you enter them from the basement).
In the game of Below The Root there are some random NPCs that show up on certain screens. Running into them will lead to your character being captured and put in a prison house by one of two renegade factions opposed to Green-Sky's unification, or roughed up and sent back to your home with an ominous "you were found unconscious," and a day of game-time lost.
Enter the Big Bad's apartment in Police Quest: Open Season without first looking through the door with a MacGyvered stick mirror, and his dog will maul you to death. Later, he unavoidably knocks you out and empties your pockets. At this point, don't go back into the bedroom without first equipping the lighter and hairspray. In the original game, you must put your gun in the locker outside the jail before uncuffing a suspect, or he will turn it against you. In the first SWAT game, go around a corner without slicing the pie and the criminal will ALWAYS be waiting there to shoot you.
In Alex Kidd in Miracle World, the Grim Reaper appears randomly out of ? blocks, in addition to being triggered by pink skull blocks. If he appears, the only way to escape is to scroll him off the screen. If it happens to be in a bonus room, there's no escape.
On The Adventures Of Rad Gravity's second planet, if you fail to retrieve Kakos from the Conveyor Belt-O-Doom, he turns into a Killer Robot and kills you.
In Frenzy, if you shoot Evil Otto in the room with the giant version of Otto, a swarm of Ottos appears and instantly kills you.
In Unterwegs In Duesterburg in one dungeon is a sword in a stone next to a Lava Pit. If you choose to take it, a giant hand comes out of the lava and kills you. Considering this happens in a dungeon full of deadly traps, you could've seen it coming.
The titular Ao Oni likes to pop up both when you might expect him, such as when you've just discovered a vital item or clue, and when you're just wandering around his house. Typically, you can survive by outrunning him, or trying to hide in a cabinet... though it's not a good idea to try that while he's in the room.
- A straighter example would be when you pick up a certain key in the basement. If you don't close the door behind you, he will rush you with no chance to move. See it here.
In Kickle Cubicle, running out of time would result in Striker, a big yellow star, swooping in for an almost instant kill.
In Baldur's Gate II, if you kill a plot-central character during the opening few acts, an invincible assassin named Arkhanis Gath will appear and gib you.

Degraded Boss

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