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Everything Trying To Kill You
alt title(s): Everything Is Trying To Kill You
Tonight on "You're Gonna Get It, Charlie Brown"...
Did I just die by walking into the fucking door!? Yeah, everything kills you, literally everything.
-The Angry Videogame Nerd's review of Dragon's Lair on the NES

Q: APPLES DO NOT FALL UP
A: They're more like giant cherries....
FAQ for I Wanna Be The Guy.

Video games struggling for creativity will invent unlikely obstacles. If a level in a Platformer takes place in a mountain, it's unrealistic you'd run into sequential Lava Pits but there's a logic in that you want to avoid the obvious, skin-boiling danger (though you'll be okay if you just don't touch it).

In some games though, you can be injured by the strangest things, often far out of proportion to realism. Stumbling onto a kicked soccer ball hurts just as much as being run over by a car. You're also likely to have that soccer ball literally come out of nowhere outside camera shot rather than someone kicking it. All manner of inanimate objects seem primed and ready to hurt you, especially if the setting doesn't allow for more extravagant opponents. Oftentimes, just to really hammer the point home that the game's creators are true bastards, your character will be a One Hit Point Wonder, and the slightest infraction might even have you explode into a fountain of blood.

You can usually blame Collision Damage for this.

And heaven help you if the place is inhabited. Nearly every living thing in the area suddenly gets a taste for your tender flesh, even if they're normally herbivores. This may be a modern take on the older version of this trope: in old adventure stories, if the hero goes camping or even just for a walk through the forest, he can expect to be attacked by bears, stalked by wolves, jumped by mountain lions, infected by poison ivy, torn apart by thorns and so on. Mosquitos will be strangely uninterested in him. (This is... not exactly how it works in real life.)

Is nothing safe? Walls? The sun? The boundary of the screen?

While a common trope in the Nintendo Hard generation of games, this has more to do with old-style games than difficulty. Some games that normally avoid this will design a deliberately ludicrous yet highly dangerous enemy/obstacle for comedic value.

A Platform Hell game will often take this trope to ludicrous places for comedy. See also Malevolent Architecture. If the entire planet is like this, it's the dreaded Death World. If the entire universe is like this, you're screwed.

Compare Animals Hate Him and Super Persistent Predator.

Examples

Video Games
  • Paperboy is infamous for having everything from runaway lawnmowers to breakdancers to the Grim friggin' Reaper running around the middle of the street for no discernible reason other than to mess with the titular deliverer.
    • That's probably why his exploits made the front page of the newspaper every day. In fact, one theory that's been floated is that the titular delivery person is, in fact, dead, and the delivery route is his personal purgatory. Only by delivering the paper and surviving every day for a week is he able to escape.
  • Brain Dead 13. Everything. From the leaves in the hedge maze, to the fire in the stove, to the bookworms in the library.
  • The Genesis game Greendog turned this into the plot: the titular character had been cursed by an amulet that made all animals attack him on sight.
  • This was one of the fundamental differences between Sierra and Lucas Arts, the two big companies in the heyday of Adventure Games. With no quantified attributes, such a game's hero could only survive or not survive. Sierra celebrated the way of character death, embraced it, became one with it. Many games would kill for making one seemingly innocuous false step, and then mock you for getting yourself killed. It became slowly more forgiving with time, replacing Unwinnable situations with instadeaths (which is a good thing, kind of) and eventually granting an "Oops" button or two.
    • Take the second Laura Bow game. It would kill the title character by means of an automobile that appeared out of nowhere if she stepped off the pavement onto a seemingly empty road. You were apparently supposed to look at the road first to confirm that no cars were approaching, but the same would happen even if you did that and the game told you it was all clear. (It expected you to look both ways before crossing the road. Just looking once wasn't enough, in one of Sierra's more... pedantic puzzles. Luckily, you can get everywhere by taxi, and just skip the stupidity.) Another scene would kill you if you wandered into a dark passage without a light. Somehow, a woman in her early twenties would be swarmed and overpowered by quite ordinary bats — unless she had a light to scare them with.
    • Not all that many games make players try to kill off their characters in every possible way, even fewer have them enjoy it. The latter include the farcical Space Quest and Leisure Suit Larry series, where even the narrator is basically a Deadpan Snarker. A fan website has catalogued 67 distinct ways to die in Space Quest V alone. In Space Quest III, trying to pick up a simple piece of metal scrap one room away from the start of the game would result in Roger cutting himself, severing an artery, and dying of blood loss within seconds. Total play time to first death in that situation? About 20 seconds.
    • Even the slot machine can kill you. Get three skull-n-crossboneses, and it turns you into dust with its built-in Disintegrator Ray.
    • Leisure Suit Larry, which should be a nonviolent mature game, has so many ways to kill your character. Especially the second game: This troper can count at least five ways to die at the hands of KGB agents, four ways to die from the "helicopter girls", three separate ways to die from "Mama Bimbo", two lethal chefs, and a guy named Carlos, who, thanks to U.S. foreign aid, has many extra bullets that he enjoys firing for amusement - on you. Throw in many Unwinnable situations, and you are in for a very frustrating game.
      • Furthermore, at some point you gain points for picking up spinach dip for no good reason. Later, you end up starving in a lifeboat, and will automatically eat the spinach dip, thus dying from salmonella poisoning. The "solution" to this "puzzle" is to throw away the dip after picking it up.
      • A related Space Quest example is the unstable ordnance in the fourth game. You gain points for picking it up for no reason, then die if you're still carrying it a minute later. The "solution" again is to pick it up, then put it down.
      • Hilariously, the flag take caused the unstable ordnance to kill you was only for one very specific event. If you pick up the unstable ordnance after that event, it will never blow up and never kill you, which is strange considering the bumps and bruises Roger receives later in the game are much worse than the bump that causes the ordnance to blow up in the first place.
    • The Police Quest series is just plain atrocious. Sonny Bonds, a trained police homicide detective, would be killed by a speeding car if he tried crossing the street without pushing the walk button on a nearby streetlight first.
      • Even more bizarre is the paradox contained in the sequence in the first game in the series, in which Bonds had to go on patrol in a squad car. If you followed proper procedure and inspected each wheel of the vehicle by walking around it before driving off, there would be nothing wrong with it. If you failed to do so, one wheel would without fail be faulty and you would soon suffer a flat tire, which prematurely ended the game even though Bonds was not injured at all.
      • In the third game, a mere loony can kill you with a single swing of his fist. And you are not allowed to shoot him (or you lose).
    • Even Police Quest is trumped by Codename Iceman, where you play an elite multi-skilled spy. Every single thing in the game goes wrong unless you explicitly check it. The guard that asks for your ID gives you the wrong ID back, leading to a dead end unless you bother to check. Machines break down with no warning unless you explicitly oiled them in the last chapter, even though that's the technician's job. And you die for no reason if you walk away from a cardiac arrest victim, because it would be heartless not to give her CPR, which is nigh impossible without reading the manual.
    • The character of the adventure/RPG hybrid Quest for Glory series has hit points, so a majority of hazards are not immediately fatal. Still, there's a number of situations that result in an immediate game over. From what this troper remembers from the first game of the series: If you attempt to pick up any item in the hermit's lair, he'll teleport you into a waterfall, drowning you; if you attempt to pick any lock during the day, the hero will refuse, saying that it isn't safe and that he ought to wait until dark ... except for the door of the guardhouse, which you can attempt to pick in broad daylight and in front of the sheriff, leading in your immediate arrest; also, if you attempt to pick any single lock one too many times in a row (at night), you "make too much noise" and get arrested without any chance of escape; using a lockpick on yourself will make the hero pick his nose with it and (unless your skill is high enough) resulting in brain hemorrhage and death (quite easy to do in the VGA version; in the EGA version, you at least had to type PICK NOSE, making it a fine Easter Egg); you need to say a password to enter the witch's hut; if you say it too close to the hut, it'll descend on you, crushing you to death; ordering (and drinking) Dragon's Breath in the tavern also results in your death. Not to mention several Unwinnable situations.
      • Also, in the thieves' guild, if you walk in front of the chief as he throws knives at a dartboard, one will hit you in the chest and you die. Also also, the three stooges, the antwerp-tripwire, getting danced to death by the faeries, damaging the sacred tree, just about anything involving Baba Yaga, failing to solve the final bandit puzzle, etc.
      • Not to mention if you stood under the portcullis in front of the baron's castle the guard would drop it on your head. Considering how long it took to start to drop, and how slowly it was lowered you had to be deliberately trying to get skewered by it.
      • You'll also die from "not buying a saurus" in the second game, because said saurus plays a (terminally minor) role in the plot later, which would be left unrevealed if you don't buy it. However, the character selling the saurus gets increasingly persistent if you refuse his offers, eventually flat-out stating that you NEED this saurus.
      • Specifically, not buying the saurus results in you dying, within feet of the entrance to the city, because (and the game over windows states this) you didn't buy a saurus. It was Anvilicious for a reason, but still...
    • Kings Quest and its sequels had their fair share of ludicrous character deaths. For one, the minute you start the first game, if you move too close to the castle moat, you will fall in and die. You will also inexplicably get killed by a sliding rock if you push it from the wrong angle. That's right, pushing a rock away causes it to fall on you.
      • AGD Interactive also proved that they could do it too if they really tried in the remake (entire re-working, more like) of King's Quest 2. There is one location containing six fairly innocent-looking rocks around the base of a larger one. Examining any but one of these, however, will cause it to explode and kill you.
    • Aversion: Nothing in Leisure Suit Larry 5 can kill you. Nothing. Even if you try to electrocute yourself with a wall outlet. There is never an Unwinnable situation in the game, either.
  • Lucasarts was kinder and gentler, and its games were more cartoonish. Character death was possible in its more realistic games, but it would take blatantly stupid actions. In general, Lucasarts believed that players should not be punished for experimenting with their games, seeing as most of the time puzzle solutions in adventure games in general had a tendency to be on the obscure side. This policy was adopted by Lucasarts during the development of The Secret of Monkey Island, but dying was still frequent in their earlier titles such as Maniac Mansion and Zak McKracken & the Alien Mindbenders.
    • Death was rare but possible in the Full Throttle adventure game. Each time Ben was killed, the game would automatically backtrack to the point where the fatal mistake was made, allowing you to try it again—with Ben saying quickly over the black screen, "Lemme try that again." This is because, similar to Monkey Island 2 (see below), because the game is being told in flashback by Ben (the opening monologue makes this clear).
      • Death only becomes possible in Full Throttle in the endgame, when it's made blatantly clear that you're in a life-or-death chase sequence.
    • The Monkey Island games, for example, averted this trope. Nothing could kill its hero, Guybrush Threepwood, or even do permanent harm. Not even getting repeatedly punched sky-high by the Big Bad.
      • The only way to die in The Secret of Monkey Island is a major Easter Egg by its rarity alone: After Guybrush gets thrown into the bay by Sheriff Shinetop, simply wait ten minutes (which is how long Guybrush can hold his breath) until he drowns.
      • The same game has another sequence where Guybrush can walk off a cliff. A Sierra-style death screen comes up, followed moments later by Guybrush bouncing back onto the cliff's edge, with two words of explanation: "Rubber Tree."
      • Guybrush could also die in Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge if you took too long spitting your way out of the Death Trap in LeChuck's lair, but since the game was told in flashback form, Elaine (to whom Guybrush was telling the story) would point out that Guybrush couldn't have died if he was here talking to her, and Guybrush backtracks his story. In the easy mode play, it's impossible for Guybrush to die, and the Death Trap is solved automatically (via an alternative bodily fluid).
      • In Curse of Monkey Island, Guybrush has to fake his death to progress in the game, prompting one character to comment "I thought you couldn't die in Lucasarts adventure games." He fakes said death (at a later point in the game he states that he simply went into a temporary coma) by usage of combining medicine and alcohol, an act that he lampshades by noting that if he wasn't a "lovably inept cartoon character with the potential for a few more sequels", that he more than likely would have been killed by doing this. You can see the whole event here.
      • In Escape From Monkey Island, the only possibility of death this troper recalls is a brief time-travelling episode in a swamp. Future Guybrush would tell present Guybrush things and give him things in a specific order, and if that order was not replicated exactly by the player (when the player controls future Guybrush), a time vortex would open and swallow everything. (And that doesn't really end the game - you get another try to do the sequence right. For shocks, you can also try shooting your alter ego with the gun he had handed you ...)
    Guybrush: "Wow, I guess it's true that gun owners are nine times more likely to shoot themselves."
  • While not exactly everything trying to kill you, all of the killable characters in the PC game Vivisector: Beast Inside — whether they're humans or Half Human Hybrids — attack you the moment you first load up the game, even after you switch from the former's side to the latter. There's an attempt at handwaving, dealing with some flimsy excuse of the humans not authorizing your presence in the game's setting and the hybrids being programmed to see humans as the enemy, but really, it's just an attempt to bring in Fake Difficulty to the game.
    • Similarly, Shadow The Hedgehog has both good and evil enemies, and they'll all attack Shadow regardless of his Karma Meter (except when they're busy fighting each other!)
    • Another example of this sort of thing can be found in Far Cry 2. Ostensibly you are a mercenary working for one side in a civil war in Africa. They try to handwave it in game by claiming you're a disposable asset that nobody knows about. In reality even when working a mission for one side you will be attacked by both sides. Constantly.
  • In the SNES RPG Earthbound, all manner of unlikely enemies are out to kill the party, in keeping with the absurd tone of the game. These include dogs, crows, mice, bears, cups of hot coffee, robots, fire hydrants, abstract art, trash cans, dinosaurs, oversized single-celled organisms, and the infamous New Age Retro Hippie.
    • Exploding trees.
    • The game sort of jokes about this: there's an NPC who claims she got badly wounded by a mouse.
    • This troper would also like to add that cavemen, street signs, seedlings, little UF Os, mushrooms, zombies, and even a circus tent want to crush you.
      • Did I forget to mention I once lost to a team of battle slugs?!?!
      • Battle slugs? Hah! So easy! ...It's the friggin' ANTS you have to watch out for.
  • The NES platform game Monster Party had some pretty out-there enemies. Disembodied legs stuck in the ground and walking pants are just two examples. Then there's the bosses, which include a giant bubble-spitting pitcher plant, a giant snake with Medusa hair that throws tsuchinoko (a type of semi-mythical snake famous in Japanese cryptozoology; Dunsparce is a Tsuchinoko) at you, and a giant fried shrimp which eventually morphs into an onion ring, then a kebab.
  • Besides cars, motorcycles, trucks, snakes and alligators trying to kill him, Frogger also demonstrates Super Drowning Skills.
  • Abe's Oddysee (sic) has about 5 friendly NPC's in the entire game. And they don't talk, they just sit there. Everything else is actively dedicated to the death of our blue friend. The wildlife, the soldiers, even his own people, for whom he plays the messiah (literally) will greet him with a lethal slingshot if he doesn't whistle right. Add to that no means of self-defense, and you have Abe's Oddysee.
  • The 80's light gun arcade game Who Dunit requires you to not only guide a detective through a mansion, but protect him from things like pimps throwing their hats at him, and beach balls bouncing all over the place. Because anything that touches him will instantly skeletonize him, his soul drifting away. Yes, even the beach balls.
    • Another Exidy light gun game, Crossbow, is pretty bad about this one as well; the Heroic Fantasy warriors you're defending will go up in flames if anything touches them, even if the implement of their destruction was a coconut thrown by a monkey. But hey, it beats getting turned into a skeleton by a beach ball.
  • The freeware game I Wanna Be The Guy uses this to and past the limit, featuring killer spikes, apples giant cherries Delicious Fruit that can also fall up and the moon as the most common killers in the game. Add to that ripped-off enemies from 8-bit games, several innocuous-looking objects suddenly dropping lethally on your character (including a star, thunderbolts, a glass of wine thrown by the Symphony of the Night Dracula during a cutscene and a killer pop-up), a Tetris segment where you must avoid being squashed by the blocks, a floor of spikes that suddenly develops wheels and chases you and even a killer save point just before the final boss to get a hair-tearing frustration masterpiece.
    • "YOU JUMPED INTO A SWORD, YOU RETARD!"
    • Contrary to popular belief, not everything is trying to kill you. The air is relatively safe. Everything else will kill you, rape your carcass, nail you to the wall, cut you up and post you to Greenland. Then kill you again. Twice.
      • If you're lucky.
      • And being lucky might kill you a few times, too.
    • Incidentally, at one point the only way to survive a certain jump is to land in a pool of water. Making it one of the rare games where the water DOESN'T kill you (particularly odd given that that would have been one of the deaths that made sense in real life if it had killed you).
  • Due to a glitch in Grand Theft Auto Vice City, Tommy would sometimes take damage by walking off an ordinary street curb- apparently the mechanism that causes him to be damaged by falls sometimes misjudges the height of the curb, triggering a hit. Fans called this "stubbed toe damage". Getting a steroid powerup causes a sort of Bullet Time that enhances Tommy's speed, dramatically increasing the damage this causes, meaning Tommy can get killed by running over a street curb.
  • Nearly everything in the video game movie Warlock could harm you, including water dripping from the ceiling and otherwise harmless birds if they fly into you. Even worse, there's one stationary hazard, a thorn vine trap, that will damage you even if you cheated and used a Game Genie to give your character unlimited life and/or gave you unlimited Mercy Invincibility. Then again, you could also be killed with those cheats on through Super Drowning Skills and staying immersed in lava.
  • This trope is pervasive enough in video games to be parodied in The Neverhood, where there was only one way in the whole game to die: jumping into a big pit with a sign over it that said "Do not jump in this pit. You will die."
  • Also inverted in Loom: try as you might, there is no way you can get yourself killed.
    • Which is kind of funny, as you end up fighting against the incarnation of Chaos and his/her/its army of the undead. Various people you meet over the course of the game get killed. Your stepmother (who is kind and loving, not a Wicked Stepmother) gets blown up. The universe gets ripped in half. The ending makes it look like you are one of the very, very few people in the world who makes it out of the game alive.
  • After playing both God Of War games, this troper would like to nominate not only them, but any 3-D platformer with fixed camera positioning. I've never had the goddamn camera try to kill me.
    • No, 3D platformers in general. Upon first playing Mario 64, I immediately came to the conclusion that the game's boss was not Bowser, but the Lakitu Bros.
    • In 'Red Ninja - End of Honour' not only was the camera out to get you, but also the control system.
  • Kingdom Of Loathing has its fair share of unlikely enemies, including hippies, ninja snowmen, animated nightstands, anime smileys, fire-breathing ducks, pastiches of characters from Final Fantasy VII, and the Guy Made of Bees. Then there's the many twists on standard RPG enemies, like Orcish frat boys, apathetic lizardmen, misspelled undead (including zmobies, lihcs, and ghuols), and the 99 Bottles of Beer On A Golem. There's also an area (accessible only while high on astral mushrooms) where you can fight things like some really interesting wallpaper and the urge to stare at your hands. Really.
  • Home Alone 2 for the NES was ridiculous. Not only did every random stranger in the hotel try to get you, but so did vacuum cleaners, luggage, and mop buckets (both the moving mop and the inanimate bucket).
    • The Infogrames staff must have played this game before coding Tintin in Tibet. In the hotel level alone, you could get Collision Damage (and lose one of your four hit points) from waiters carrying a platter, maids vacuuming the floor, luggage carelessly knocked over by said maids, and little dogs that don't bite. Oh, and the timer too.
  • The 16-bit game The Immortal had many, many ways to kill you, all of them creatively animated, sudden and well-hidden (look for the You Tube video). The most pathetic? Approaching a down ladder from the wrong side.
  • The text adventure Bureaucracy, written by Douglas Adams, has you dealing with a series of what would normally be minor, petty annoyances. However, these annoyances raise your character's blood pressure, and if your blood pressure goes up too high, you die of a brain aneurysm.
  • The Crusader games, being set in a dystopic future run by a Mega Corp so obsessed with profit their attitude towards things like worker safety makes China's human rights record look like they give dissenters pats on the backs for being good chaps, has a some less ridiculous variants of this. However, as the game progresses, the nearly-invisible traps, sensors, and hidden weapons of moderate destruction get so cramped you'll be surprised they have room for their immoral experiments. And then there's the vending machines that randomly dispense grenades instead of soda.
  • One word (maybe two) Battletoads
  • Have we somehow forgotten Shadowgate?
  • The Jurassic Park game on the Sega Genesis. Ooh, what a cute little lizard, OW! Half my health! Ooh, a climbing rope! OW! Vertical poison ivy? WTF? YES! Finally near the bottom! What? Oh come on, a Pteronodon carries me back to the top?!? Hey! Where the hell did half my health go? Stupid rocks. Seriously, this troper finished it ONCE, with the raptor, who doesn't get carried off by a stupid Giant Flyer with an unhealthy obsession for humans. On easy. Just. And I think I skipped a level or two but I don't remember. Hell, they don't even make it clear if the freakin' Ptero wants to eat you or if it thinks your it's baby. You think Alan Grant would have just SHOT the damn thing! Also goes with Nintendo Hard.
  • Jumping Flash. Killer mosquitoes, dragonflies, strange creatures with cannons for mouths that launch missiles, a diversity of frogs, giant mechanical scorpions... just about the only thing in the game that isn't trying to kill you are the air whales.
  • In a way, nearly any Rhythm Game (such as Guitar Hero or Dance Dance Revolution); any time you miss a note, your life meter drops. So one way to see these kinds of games is this: notes are flying across the screen trying to kill you, and your only weapon against them is a line or set of markers at the top or bottom of the screen that vaporize notes passing over them.
  • Adventure Quest, the online Flash RPG, has odd monsters like giant Salt Shakers, and Candy Golems.
  • In the original Silent Hill, Harry must get a dagger off the door of a fridge. Simple, right? Not quite. If you don't use an item called "Ring of Contract" on the door and try to walk away from the fridge, a cutscene kicks in, which shows a huge tentacle that grabs onto Harry's leg and drags him off into the abyss.
  • In the NES game Silver Surfer, aside from enemies, simply touching an obstacle will kill you.
  • While a relatively friendly game, the Banjo-Kazooie series is jam-packed with all manner of inanimate objects that come to life, sprout cartoonish eyeballs, and try to kill you. The Freezeezy Peak level in Banjo-Kazooie features the Sir Slush enemies, giant, immobile laughing snowmen who are positioned all over the damn place and will endlessly barrage you with snowballs until you kill them, in addition to the Chinks, which are giant ice cubes with eyes that are near invisible before they spring to life and come spinning after you. Also annoying are the Boom Boxes in Rusty Bucket Bay, crates of TNT that chase you and explode, which are accompanied by bouncing life preservers. This is taken to even more ridiculous heights in the sequel, Banjo-Tooie, where you're frequently pitted against bouncing shovels, coin-spitting slot machines, flowers, various nuts and bolts, oil drums that release suffocating gas (which also has eyes and chases you), more crates of TNT, and so on. This even spreads into some of the bosses, such as Old King Coal, a massive, animate lump of carbon; Mr. Patch, a skyscraper-sized, dinosaur-shaped inflatable toy that coughs up exploding beachballs; Weldar, an enormous welding torch; and Terry, a giant pterodactyl that spits out "Mucoids", which are giant blobs of green snot with eyes that try to kill you.
    • And then there is Conkers Bad Fur Day... featuring The Great Mighty Poo (An opera-singing animated cesspool that has you collect kernels of corn for it, and in gratitude, tries to kill you.).
  • Final Fantasy XII features a couple of dungeons where the save crystal is not actually a save crystal. It's a monster you have to defeat before the real crystal appears. For further fun, the one in one of the bonus dungeons is resistant to just about everything, and spams high-level black magic onto your party.
    • It also averts the trope: Nearly every level has at least one resident type of monster who will not try and kill you. Granted, this changes if you attack them first, but otherwise, they're harmless. Yes, Virginia, even some of the bonus dungeons.
  • Persona 3 has enemies that are called Shadows. While that sounds reasonable, take into account that their appearances include tables, gloves, scales, castles, and even one boss that is a giant heart. The sad part is that these enemies are actually threats and can easily kill you if you are not prepared.
  • The entire collection of bosses (and many enemies) in the Wario Land series. Last time you heard of a living cuckoo clock that tries to electrocute the character and use a grabbing claw, or an inflatable teddy bear being a boss and trying to kill you?
    • The latest game takes it a bit further, with an evil race car driver, robo clown with flamethrower and frying pan riding duck chef as bosses.
  • Mario Kart can be accused of this if you are in first place. Between everyone behind you out to spill your blood by spamming powerful items at you, several that can't be blocked, and trying to dodge track obstacles like pipes, thwomps, or fireballs, this is a game that wants to make sure you don't have it easy.
  • Demonophobia. Not too surprising, since it revolves around a girl trying to find her way out of Hell, but every single room has a different gruesome fate in store for her. Learning to avoid them is half the game.
  • Pokemon: Mystery Dungeon (1). Natural disasters keep occurring and once-friendly Pokemon start attacking everything they see. Scary.
    • And the traps. If a real forest contained poison spikes, warp traps, pitfalls, and land mines, this troper would never set foot in a nature preserve again.
    • Clearly Pokemon: Mystery Dungeon is a metaphor for the Vietnam War.
  • Jumping Flash 2 has a reverse of this trope in both regular and Extra world 6-1, where you can actually safely stand on one of the many rotating spike balls in the level.
  • This is pretty much the entire plot of zOMG, which features enemies called "the Animated". This Troper's personal favorite is the OMG, a Nice Hat that has grown legs and teeth. The Braveheart-esque Lawn Gnome General is a must see as well.
    • Not to mention the cute pink balls of fluff that can kill you with one hit.
  • Dragon Quest VIII features enemies like living handbells, bags of money, and, in the game's penultimate boss fight, a homicidal, sentient castle.
    • Dragon Quest VII had it even worse, with the aforementioned bags of money (a staple monster for the series), a giant rose bush, books, pots, wells, eggplants, anteaters, columns, clowns, a moose, clouds, Aladin-style lamps, Easter Island heads, starfish, snails, penguins, and wine bottles .
    • Don't forget solar systems. Every Dragon Quest game featured some bizarre enemies, it seems. Dragon Quest II had robots, in a medieval fantasy. Dragon Quest III had jewel bags, carnivorous treasure chests, and evil mushrooms. Dragon Quest VI had evil mirrors, castles, and waves.
  • Similar to the Dragon Quest VIII example, one of the bosses in the second Xenosaga game is called Cathedral. It is Exactly What It Says On The Tin.
  • Believe it or not, the Barbie game for the SNES falls under this trope terribly. Any and everything that hits you takes away life—people, beach balls, low-flying birds, frisbees, snowballs, clods of dirt, and the list goes on...
    • The Barbie game for the NES is even worse: pizzas, jellyfish (complete with creepy music), clothing, water spouts, kites, tennis balls, skates, soda...
  • Most of Ecco The Dolphin's foes are logical for a dolphin - sharks and jellyfish for the most part. The angry crabs and giant water spiders are a bit weird, but the Prehistoria levels take it to the extreme with trilobites and giant seahorses who shoot their young at you.
  • In the first Tomb Raider, absolutely everything and everyone is out for Lara's blood. A few of the later games, however, had people and/or creatures that wouldn't attack her unless she attacked them first (examples: the warrior monks in the second game, and the monkeys and the gang members from certain levels of the third game). However, even if you attack just one of the monks in the second game, every single monk in the entire level will be trying to skewer you.
  • Sunday Funday puts you up against plumbers, disco dancers, businessmen, joggers, big-headed women wearing pearl necklaces... All of them want you dead for the terrible crime of going to Sunday School.
    • This game was a 'Christianized' Re Tool of earlier title Menace Beach. All they did was change the storyline ('rescue your girlfriend' is now 'get to Sunday School') and the sprites (from somewhat more acceptably threatening ninjas, evil clowns etc. to more innocuous yet equally threatening enemies ).
  • Sera from Gears Of War is one inhospitable place. Not only is there an invading army of monsters from below, but there's also the lethal Imulsion, the Kryll, who will kill you if you so much as step in darkness, and Razorhail which is Exactly What It Says On The Tin.
  • In Return to Castle Wolfenstein, when you stumble on a fight between zombies and Germans, both sides immediately forget each other and make a beeline for you. During WW 2 the US Army and the Wehrmacht were not on the best possible terms, but this troper feels they might make a temporary alliance against the undead.
  • Completely averted in indie game Karoshi. Absolutely nothing is trying to kill you, and some things will even prevent your death. Unfortunately, the point of the game is to die...
  • Pretty much every object in the games on the So Bad Its Horrible Action 52 multicart is trying to kill you. Elton John kills you(Non Human). Money kills you(Streemerz). File cabinets kill you(French Baker). The floor kills you(Meong). Pasta kills you(Alfredo, only playable via some emulators). Erlenmeyer flasks kill you(Silver Sword). You'll wish that the game would self destruct and kill you in real life.
    • Star Evil is pure evil, the way it puts your ship 2 inches from a cinderblock at the start. And the stage boss moves like a DUI driver (according to mpn1990's Unlicensed Garbage show on You Tube).
  • 720 Degrees: Police on scooters, bodybuilders, lugers, breakdancers, frisbee throwers, recumbent bikers, cars, other skateboarders, and rollerblading skeletons are all out to slow you down and inhibit your escape from the killer bees that appear when the timer runs out.
  • The MUD Aardwolf takes this trope to utterly ludicrous levels, as some magically enchanted areas have A Wizard Did It (literally) related creatures, from the traditional walking broom to irritated neck-ties, nightstands, gardening equipment, cabinets, violent cacti, and man-eating pot pies. D&D wishes it had gotten this crazy with mimics and evil sorcerer aides. To make matters worse (read: funnier), a generic NPC creator was used in the construction of this MUD. So it's not uncommon to see people walking around with Boots skinned from A Lampshade or A Helm skinned from A Shovel. This editor's personal favorite: his own cloak skinned from above said necktie, and gloves skinned from a beef pot pie.
  • See also: Nethack and many other Roguelikes. Alphaman heads in the other direction by having various typically-tame woodland critters as enemies and children's cartoon characters as major bosses. (Gumby will kick your ass.) Also note that virtually anything in Nethack, animate or not, can either kill you outright or lead to your grisly death. Sinks and fountains can spew Goddamned Bats, some magic items can strangle you when equipped, old food can rot and give you food poisoning, etc. Also, all the initially peaceful NPCs can become hostile.
  • And then there's Slash'EM, a Net Hack variant that's even more deadly and unforgiving.
  • This page would be remiss without a mention of a Sega Genesis X Men game whose first level started in a jungle. And in this jungle, getting a lance thrown at you did damage, getting carried off by a Giant Flyer did damage... and having a dragonfly buzz past you did damage. The hell?
  • Enemies in Legacy Of Kain : Soul Reaver 2 had the rather alarming tendency to forget who they where fighting and come after you, this is even worse when demons and demon hunters become best of freinds for the amount of time it takes to kill your character.
  • Averted in World Of Warcraft. While it has the massive amounts of hostile wildlife present in most RP Gs (up to and including other players, depending on what server you're on), there are also more passive creatures (which have their name in yellow rather than red) which only attack if you damage them first. In addition there are exceptionally weak "critters" which can be one shotted by anyone and are occasionally attacked by predatory creatures.
    • While the above is entirely correct, the game overall cannot be said to be an aversion of this trope. Many areas contain astonishing numbers of lions, tigers, bears, panthers, hyenas, gorillas, dinosaurs, spiders and similar predatory animals, who [i]will[/i] attack you on sight. One can easily be attacked by ten to twenty beasts trying to cross a quarter of a mile of otherwise unexceptional countryside, and that's if you're trying to [i]avoid[/i] them.
  • Several games in The Legend Of Zelda series contain rooms where the floor tiles will fly up to attack you. Link's Awakening takes this to a whole new level, where one boss IS the floor of the room you just walked in.
  • In Jackie Chan's Action Kung Fu, besides encountering goons, you'll encounter and beat the life out of of wide variety of enemies including, but not limited to tigers, crab under a rice bowl, river kappas, gameras, Surprise Fish and so on.
    • Animated Buddha statue too, let us not forget that!
  • Bible games anyone?
    • No thanks, I'm full.
  • Tsukihime is not QUITE as bad as the other examples, but it did amuse this player that only one of the potential female characters (and three characters in total, if you count the TV-announcer) will not try to kill you at some point in the game.
    • Even worse, check out Kagetsu Tohya, the sort-of sequel. You can get eaten by a magical leopard that springs out of Arcueid's underwear drawer and lectures you. Even Shiki is baffled and unbelieving of this one. There are random bizarre deaths like this strewn all over.
  • Dragon Ball Z: Infinite World. Specificly, the level where you must escape from Namak by finding Frieza's spaceship. But of course, you have to literally jump through hoops (checkpoint gates) before the game lets you "find" the ship, even though its right in the level not at all hidden. You must go through 13 gates, all the while dodging random flying rocks from the sky and lightning that's there for no reason other then to kill you. And then once you find the damm thing it just keels over.
  • Legend Of The Mystical Ninja, in addition to having ordinary citizens of peaceful, feudal Japanese towns trying to kill you, has a particularly mean enemy: deer. The deer deal out a ridiculous amount of damage, they bound around very quickly and haphazardly so they're difficult to dodge, and worst of all, you lose health if you hurt them. Because you're beating up on deer, you jerk.
  • So many RPGs employ the use of deadly walls as bosses that they may deserve their own subtrope. These come in the "passive" variety, which will stay put as they try to kill you (Final Fantasy VII), and the "aggressive" variety, that advance either on a timer or over a set number of turns and crush the party for an instant game over (Secret of Mana) or an instant kill (Final Fantasy IV).
  • Text Adventures are notorious for everything being able to kill you in some way. One of the funniest is in Zork II, where this troper's sister couldn't figure out what to do with a bucket and in frustration typed "KICK THE BUCKET". The game was happy to oblige.
    • Averted hard in A Mind Forever Voyaging; it's (probably) impossible to actually die in the first two parts of the game. In the simulations, it starts out hard to die and gets easier in later simulations, until the last one, where you die just by moving to a new area. Fortunately for you, the point there is to die, and you only get thrown out of the simulation upon death.
  • Impossamole. Just Impossamole. Any object or animal can be a God-damned Bat or Demonic Spider. Even innocent little penguins. And origami birds. And rolling barrels. And ceiling tiles even after they've fallen.
  • Surprised how Spelunker hasn't been mentioned yet, considering you can die becouse of being in mid-air, just fall from any height higher than your character is and you die. This leads to be able to lose all three lives you start with and get a game over in less than three seconds after turning on the console.

Tabletop Games
  • In Warhammer 40000, pretty much everything is trying to kill you. Some planets have it worse than others, but anything that's not of your race is probably trying to to kill you due to Fantastic Racism, and even those who are of your race may end up trying to kill you, or is anyway. If you both live that long.
  • Dungeons And Dragons was all over this trope like chaotic evil jam on toast that hungers for your brains. The old Monster Manuals are full of seemingly innocuous objects that are actually monsters waiting to eat you. Examples include the roper (a stalagmite that sprouts a mouth and tentacles), the piercer (a stalactite that falls on you in an attempt to stab you), the cloaker (looks like an old cloak but is actually a levitating manta-ray-like thing), the mimic (can look like any innocuous object but canonically resembles a treasure chest), the green slime (an amoeboid thing that looks like typical dungeon muck), the crystal ooze (an amoeboid thing that looks like a pool of water), the shrieker (a giant mushroom that screams when you approach it; it isn't trying to kill you but the curious monsters investigating the screaming might), the galeb duhr (a spellcasting boulder with legs), and on and on. This troper can think of three different monsters (caryatid column, gargoyle, and stone golem) that can all be summed up as "stone statue that comes to life and tries to kill you." And let's not forget the Doomy Room Of Doom: the lurker (looks like a cave ceiling), the trapper (looks like a cave floor), the stunjelly (looks like the wall), and the gelatinous cube (perfectly square transparent ooze, so the space inside the room can kill you!)'
    • and the Greater Mimic, which can imitate larger objects, like a ROOM. The Lurker, Trapper, and Stunjelly in one. There's also the "Killer Pillow," "Flannel Beast," and "Sheet." . Then, of course, the great and might House Hunter Mimic, which is a house that reproduces by budding, with its offspring being sheds, outhouses, and of course, gazeboes.
    • Later editions seem to have moved away from this trope, but most of the old monsters have become icons of the game, and continue to be reprinted from one edition to the next. Furthermore, in Third Edition D&D, there are rules for animated objects as monsters, allowing for dungeon masters to easily turn anything within line-of-sight into something that will try to kill you. Wee.
    • One word: Gazebo.
  • In the RPG Paranoia, this can rapidly become the case, particularly if, intentionally or otherwise, your character ends up in a section of Alpha Complex with the wrong color-coding.
  • This trope is more or less the 'twist' that makes the board game Robo Rally so exciting. The players not only have to make sure their robots stay out of lasers, crushers, and random pitfalls, they also have to avoid the other robots (who indecently have the possibility of gaining extra powers).
  • Tomb Of Horrors. That is all.
  • City jumper is more or less "everything just stnds there a you will die if you touch them" than "everything grows legs and kills you". You can die of trees, crabs, and even clouds.

Web Comics

Other
  • Arguable Truth In Television: Australia.
    • That's not very nice :(
      • No, this Aussie can comfirm that this is true. About the only things that aren't dangerous or poisonous are some of the sheep. And maybe wallabies. The following things will kill you: common spiders, the most common snakes, ticks, crocodiles, sharks, jellyfish, stonefish, we have a seashell that will go for you and deliver a very painful, fast death. Even platypus are poisonous.
      • Even the Trees can kill you!
      • Except that, if a spider spins a web (as in a traditional, picturebook cobweb), it won't kill you normally. Just make you wish it had.
      • One hesitates to point out that the sheep aren't native to Australia.
      • This troper collapsed in stitches at reading "SOME of the sheep." One wonders what the other ones are like.
      • RAMpaging maniacs. Didn't you ever read The Last Continent?
      • Is this because wallabies are too small to kill you?
      • ...yes.
      • a wallaby could still probably break a few of your ribs by kicking you, and thats pretty bad as broken ribs can lead to punctured lungs or a punctured heart.
      • Then there's the most humiliating thing of all - death by Wombat. .
      • Don't forget Drop Bears
      • and then there is the kangaroo, which is quite capable of disemboweling a person with its back feet, .
      • Breaking the old stereotype that island faunas are wimpy, kangaroos have proven themselves quite able to compete with other animals on the mainland. So don't diss the 'roo, mate!
      • Looking at the top 10 list of nearly any given venomous animal in the world, numbers 1-9 probably live in Australia, and the one that doesn't is a pushover by comparison.
      • I believe I read that the most poisonous snake in the world lives only on one island near Brazil, but have a population density of between one and five snakes per square meter. Apparently no one has ever managed to successfully live on said island, to the point where the Brazilian navy declared it totally of limits for everyone ever.
      • We also have a poisonous Monotreme (sub-species of a Mammal), the Platypus. I think it is the only poisonous mammal on earth.
      • Actually, it's the only VENOMOUS mammal. Still, WTF a venomous mammal!!
      • According to the Made Of Explodium page, eucalyptus trees have a rather amusing tendency to, well, explode given the proper stressors. Truly a gamer's contintent.
    • The only non-poisonous creatures in Australia are the Great White Sharks and Salt Water Crocodiles.
      • That's a good thing? This troper would rather be bitten by a funnelweb than a Saltie. At least spiders kill you faster.
    • That is one of the reasons why Steve Irwin is considered one of the best Real Life badasses. "Now watch as I approach the kangaroo's babies, if I'm not careful the mama will rip off my arm and start beating me with it!!" Nothing he says is worth anything less then two exclamation points.
      • Kangaroos are very, very badass. They have been reported to beat the crap out of Australia's native apex predator, the dingo. There are stories of kangaroos grabbing dingos and drowning them underwater.
    • If you think that's bad, Australia was even more of a Death World back in the Pleistocene, when humans first arrived. Carnivorous buzz-saw toothed kangaroos? Ckeck. Monitor-lizards the size of a city bus? Check. Climbing warm-blooded saw-toothec crocodiles? Check. Gigantic killer pseudo-python? Check. Marsupial lion with sickle thumbs? Check. The Demon Duck of Doom! (I'm not joking, scientists actually call it that). Oh yeah, its there. Ninjemys, a gigantic horned turtle built like a panzer tank (and yes, the name means exactly what you think it means), check.
    • This Cracked article feels appropriate. No, it isn't all in Australia, but half of it is.
      • Then there's the Dingoes. Some animals can do worse things to you than kill you.
      • They could get your baby?
    • Any child growing up in Australia learns(unless the parents are trying to kill the kid) a long list of things that can kill you, practically by heart, its a long list, and just to make sure at least one state teaches it in primary schools.
    • As an Australian I briefly thought this was a bit overkill - then I remembered that there are only two species of ant in the world that are potentially lethal, and both have colonies all over our property. I've been bitten by them a few times as well..
    • And this list doesn't even take into account the humans born and raised Australia!
  • There are more than plenty literary examples of the old "Wild Animals Want to Kill You" version of this trope, but one stands out for this editor. It was a children's book series about Barney, the brave dog who protected his family and their rather remote Arkansas farm from the man-eating predators who were everywhere. Of these, the greatest is the book in which he saves the pregnant mother and her youngest daughter who are lost out in the woods from a bloodthirsty... Cheetah. And the author clearly knew as much about cheetahs as the fellow up in RPG examples knew about gazebos. (Also, a cheetah. In a forest. In Arkansas.)
    • Heh, this editor found and reviewed a copy of this very book and did not let any of the things you've mentioned pass without snark.
    • Well, this troper is from Arkansas, and we did recently have some complete IDIOT with an illegally kept pet tiger decide the best way to avoid being busted by the feds was to let the thing go...(Happy Ending, at least, they caught it before it mauled anything and it's happily living in some zoo now.)
  • There's also the Fire Swamp, with its fire spurts, lightning sand, and ROUS's.
  • Used regularly in Primeval, where human-hungry predators seem to wander through the anomalies nine times out of ten. Averted occasionally as well, such as when the team thought the pteranodon was hunting humans, but it really wasn't.
  • Used to a ridiculous extent in the Philip K Dick short story "Colony," where humans unwittingly colonize the homeworld of a race of malevolent Shape Shifters that can turn into absolutely anything. This results in priceless scenes such as a microscope trying to strangle someone. Philip K Dick said in the commentary for an anthology the story was in that he considered Everything Trying To Kill You to be the ultimate form of paranoia and was curious to see if he could write a story where such paranoia would have a rational basis.
  • In the classic story Rikki Tikki Tavi by Rudyard Kipling, the author effectively depicts India is a place where deadly venomous snakes are everywhere and the most innocent action could put you in dire peril. Furthermore, the only defense seems to be having a mongoose to protect you.
  • Star Trek holodecks. You can almost say, "...just, holodecks." Chances are, if an episode is set on a holodeck, something broke and now, well, Everything's Trying to Kill the Crew. Or desecrate the series.
  • One could argue that Real Life itself is loaded with this: wild animals, natural disasters, disasters from space (gamma ray bursts and black holes are among this troper's faves), wars...And let's not get into the megadisasters on Earth: supervolcanoes, supertornadoes, megatsunamis, hypercanes, giant asteroids...the list just goes on and on and on...
  • Lone Wolf, constantly. At one point, you have to break down a door and it's played out as a combat—and one of the more difficult encounters for some reason. Supposedly, you take damage from exhaustion, but the scenario isn't so time-sensitive you can't just take a break. Clearly the door is trying to murder you, and the text is just colluding with it.
  • A planet called "Felicity" is the first world of the Death-World Trilogy. Directed evolution moving at a vastly accelerated rate with the single goal of killing humans... finding the exceptions to this trope is actually what allows the main character to "win".
  • In a similar vein to the above the novel "Red-Liners" pits a group of trigger-happy space marines (but NOT WH 40 K types) trying to protect civilian colonists against an entire (local) ecosystem that is trying to kill them.
  • The book Fragment has this in spades. The island ecosystem which the story revolves around is so nasty that most mainland species (including humans) die within two minutes of being released inside the ecosystem. Its so bad its less apt to describe it as an ecosystem, and more as a biological orgy. Everything isn't just trying to kill you, its trying to kill everything. A tiger-sized predator will be attacked by a group of badger-sized ones, only for the badger-sized ones to be eaten by a swarm of rats and wasps, as the swarm cannibalizes itself to get to the fresh meat. Oh, and the plants aren't really plants (with one important exception), they're either acid spewing Ediacaran creatures or giant bugs. And yes, they want to kill you as well.

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