Yeah, because we all know how solid clouds really are.
The Fake Platform appears to be solid, but doesn't support your weight for even a moment if you land on it. Unlike the Temporary Platform, which you can run across or jump off of, the Fake Platform drops you instantly if you set foot on it. Usually, this is over a Bottomless Pit or Spikes of Doom.
Annoying even if you know it's a trap because it tends to restrict movement in ways that empty air in the same spot wouldn't.
Yet another type of Malevolent Architecture. May result from Depth Perplexion.
The typical Platform Hell game is loaded with these, but will only ever spring them on you when you least expect it.
Inversion of Invisible Block. For examples of this type of trap in other media, see This Is Not a Floor.
Examples:
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Films — Live-Action
- In RoboCop (1987), Clarence Boddicker attempts to leap from a catwalk onto the roof of an office, but it's one of those false, suspended ceilings that instantly collapses under his weight, causing him to fall painfully onto the concrete ground below.
- The Word of God challenge in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is a hallway that can only be traversed by stepping on the letters in the name JEHOVAH. All the other tiles will break away under a person's weight and drop them into a deep pit. Indy very nearly falls victim to this trap when he steps on a J, but then remembers that the name starts with an I in Latinnote and makes it safely to the other end.
Video Games
- The Unfair Platformer has too many of these.
- Standard fare in Castlevania II: Simon's Quest, as discussed/raged on at length by the AVGN. Dracula's Eye doesn't reveal them, either, so your best shot is to keep tossing holy water vials until they pass through the floor ahead of you. Fun!
- Commander Keen: The first game has blocks, often just before a key card, that Keen can fall through but not jump back up through. And in the fifth game, there are platforms that slide in the opposite direction if you approach them.
- The classic Crash Bandicoot (1996) did this with the level's "High Road" and "Bridge to Nowhere" in which there were 4 types of planks to jump on, Solid ones, planks that break after a couple seconds, planks that cause you to slide and make climbing up more difficult and finally the instant break plank or the fake platform.
- In Dangerous Dave, some purple metal girders are not actual platforms and you'll pass right through them. Level 9, in particular, drops you right onto one of them at the start of the level, so you'd better have learned how to tell the difference by then (look closely at their patterns). Incidentally, it's easier to spot the difference if you set the display to 4-color CGA mode.
- You can't jump on broken platforms in Doodle Jump; you simply fall through them.
- In Everybody Edits, one of the Secret blocks is solid black with no detail. It has no collision, and can be passed through freely as if it weren't there.note One of the other Secret blocks looks identical to this one, except with regular collision. Since Everybody Edits is a Game Maker, this trope can be Played Straight, Subverted, or Zigg-Zagged any number of times, depending on how the creator for any given game chooses to use them. It's also not uncommon for creators to Avert this altogether by using the blocks to achieve an effect irrelevant to this trope, such as Blackout Basement.
- One of the trap types in Evil Genius.
- One of the mini-games in Fall Guys, "Tip Toe", has the players navigate through a series of tiles, the catch being only a certain number of them are able to be walked on, and the rest are fakes that the players can fall through, taking them back to the start of the track.
- Geometry Dash had different types of these within its history.
- First, obviously fake blocks, introduced in 1.6. When alone, they're easily distinguishable. When combined with disappearing blocks, it turns into a memory part (like in Theory of Everything 2).
- Since 2.0, creators can fake the platforms, using outlines. It's rather hard to fake default blocks using that, but if the level uses completely custom design (like Modern style), it's very easy to create these fakes. Examples of levels using this are the memory extreme demons (Killbot, super probably level, troll level, Limbo etc.)
- And finally, in 2.2, creators can make any blocks into True Fakes by activating "Passable" option in "Edit Group -> Extra". They look absolutely identical to normal blocks, except you pass through them.
- I Wanna Be the Guy has at least one of these in the area after the Koopa Klown Kar fight. You have to jump to the one square on the left side of the platform that won't collapse. Land anywhere else on it and you'll immediately fall to your death. Also, there are sections of ground after the Mecha Birdo fight and above the "Incinerator of The Guy" that aren't necessarily platforms but will spin around and immediately let you drop down (leading to your assured death in the former case) if you don't jump over them.
- In the Jumper series, there are blue blocks. These blocks fall less than a second after you land. The time you have to move off is so close to instantaneous that to call them Temporary Platforms would be generous.
- Platforms that open from under you occur throughout La-Mulana, but not often enough to contribute significantly to the game's difficulty (though one in the Chamber of Birth can set you back to the beginning of an annoying maze). That is, until you get into the Hell Temple and find yourself falling into the Land of Hell again by stepping on what looked like a perfectly solid platform. Throwing bombs and the throwing knives as well as watching enemy movement patterns help sort out the fake platforms from the real ones here.
- The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess: In order to get to the Big Bad in the final dungeon, you have to go through a room full of these. Changing into your wolf form lets you see ghosts that point the way; aside from that, all you can do is avoid the ones that killed you last time.
- Little Samson deviously places a 1-Up on a fake platform above spikes at the start of the cave stage.
- The trapdoor blocks in Lode Runner, which you couldn't run into from the side. The one way to test for them was to stand next to an apparently diggable block and try to dig through it.
- Mario Party 10: King Boo's Tricky Tiles has Boos that disguise themselves as red tiles, though they are shown to the players before being hidden. Any players that try to jump on one of these fake tiles will fall right through and land in the lake below, costing them both time and points.
- Me (2017): You fall through the "Trap" platform.
- Appears in several Mega Man games. When they do appear, they can usually be detected by using a weapon that travels along the ground, which will fall through the ground when it reaches the false part of the floor. Mega Man 9 has enemies that create fake platforms in a few stages. Some of the stages have trapdoor platforms as well.
- Minecraft:
- Powdered snow works somewhat like this, as it looks almost identical to regular snow but you'll sink into it and slowly freeze to death if you walk over it. At least you can prevent it by either hastily digging yourself out or being prepared with some nice warm leather boots, unlike the next entry...
- Via a convoluted glitch, well beyond the scope of this website to explain, you can place a strange bugged block known as "Block 36" with some peculiar properties. By dropping gravity-effected blocks like sand, gravel, or concrete powder on it, you will put the block in a glitched state where the sand is there but has zero collision. This creates some great opportunities to be an asshole as, unlike with powdered snow or a piston trap there is no way to tell. You walk over it and fall through into whatever the trap maker put there, probably lava or some nice sharp dripstone spikes, with no chance to dig or jump before the pistons open or spot the tripwire or hear the skulk sensor.
- Open gates work like this with water, as they will fully block the water itself but everything else can pass right through it. This makes it ideal in conjunction with bubble elevators in water-based mob farms or item-moving contraptions which easily allow you to move things any which way without water flowing everywhere, as well as for "air locks" for entrances to underwater bases. It's also a great way to annoy friends by hiding a deadly pit beneath a pool of water that they intend to jump in to...
- There's a sequence in Portal 2 where you're riding an Excursion Funnel to certain doom, but a nearby girder looks like a possible way to go Off the Rails. However, the girder isn't solid, and trying to jump on it just leads to falling straight through it.
- The rotating tiles in the Temple of Doom portion of Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow and the Flame, which usually led to a fatal fall or a Death Trap. Like the loose tiles, jumping up and down would reveal their locations. Unlike the loose tiles, you couldn't drop them and then mantle off.
- Cleverly implemented in Sonic Adventure 2: In Eggman's section of the final stage, there is a floating platform in the middle over a gap, followed by an alcove on the other side. When you land on the platform to try to go to the other side, it immediately drops; the area it drops to is the area you're supposed to go down. The clever part is getting across; the entire level deals with switches that stop time, so if you backtrack a little to a completed puzzle, activate the time switch, and go back, the platform won't fall (because time is frozen), allowing you to get to the other side. Or just jump on the railing of your original platform, the height difference is enough that you don't need the dropping platform.
- Metroid:
- The first Metroid has a fake floor pitfall placed just before an Energy Tank in Ridley's hideout.
- Super Metroid: Appear on several occasions, usually immediately before an upgrade. Or a boss fight. Or both, as the bosses/minibosses tend to guard said upgrades.
- Several places in the Ty the Tasmanian Tiger series have such lovely elements of game design. In the third one, there's an optional maze of the blasted things. The object you acquire is considerably less than worth it, if not quite on the level of And Your Reward Is Clothes.
- In Within a Deep Forest, in the sub-level Shadowlands, one particular area has floating platforms that disappear right before you can touch them, indicating their false nature. Conversely, the solid platforms that you actually climb on are invisible until you're right on top of them (or more likely, underneath them, causing you to rebound back down to the ground).
Webcomics
- Parodied in this
strip of Brawl in the Family: Mario should really know that climbing onto a cloud doesn't end well. Or start well.
- Canonically, in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic Ms. Harshwhinny didn't choose Cloudsdale to hose the Equestria Games because they failed to impress her. Joey Waggoner and KTurtle, who remembered that only pegasi can walk on clouds, which that city is made of, have their own explanations for why she rejected them.
Web Original
- Referenced in this video on Japanese urban legends. One such legend involves a deep gorge and an illusion bridge (which mirrors a real bridge about half a mile away) over said gorge that periodically appears, tricking travelers into trying to cross it only to fall to their deaths because there's nothing actually there. This has even led to the location in question being mistaken for a suicide hotspot, but the locals firmly believe that most of the supposed suicides are actually accidents caused by this illusion bridge. The old man who relates the story to the submitter explains that they tried to put up signs to warn people that there was no bridge at that location, but the signs too kept disappearing, so instead they marked the real bridge with a shrine, hoping this would entice people to cross that bridge rather than the "other" one that isn't really there.
