Malevolent Architecture - Television Tropes & Idioms

"Would you put up with a row of whirling knives in the cereal aisle at Safeway?" the Double Dragon guy asked. "Of course not. Why, then, should Duke Nukem have to run through a corridor of them to get the health pack he needs to survive?"

--The Onion, "Video-Game Characters Denounce Randomly Placed Swinging Blades" [1]

Imagine if, every time you went to work, you had to negotiate a complicated laser grid just to get in the building. Every time you needed to open a door, you needed to go on a long trek to find a key, which disappeared into the aether as soon as you used it. If you needed a new stapler, you'd have to push giant granite blocks around a room. Every room is a puzzle, every hallway a maze, and the slightest mistake invites death. (And forget shortcuts.) And that's without having to fight every living thing that crosses your path. And it will be a different set of challenges during your next adventure. In short, everything is explicitly and obviously designed to make life as difficult for you as possible. (Not to mention in violation of every building code in existence.)

Such are the lives of video game characters, where the layout of buildings seems completely divorced from any practical purpose the designers might have originally envisioned for them. Castles aren't large walled structures where people live and work, they're intricate mazes. Temples aren't places where people go to worship their various deities, they're where the ancients practiced their Booby Trap- and Death Course-making skills (and they were so good at it that they are still functional after hundreds of years without maintenance). Even places like warehouses and sewers, where the design should be fairly straightforward, are designed solely to deter intruders, even if there is no earthly reason why it should be so, and even if it utterly inconveniences non-intruders. One wonders what the regular people do.

In short, anything can be a dungeon if the designers need it to be. Related to Soup Cans. The architectural equivalent of Everything Trying To Kill You.

Contrast Benevolent Architecture. Game worlds are often made up of equal parts Benevolent and Malevolent Architecture -- this is one of the Acceptable Breaks From Reality, as without the former you wouldn't have a game, and without the latter the game would be too easy.

Examples:

The entire Tomb Raider series really, but in particular Tomb Raider 2, in which an oil rig, a sunken ship and the streets of Venice usually feature doors that require a 3-mile away switch to open, deadly traps, timed runs through flames, extremely tall ladders, boulders, "dropped" keys that could only have been put there on purpose, and generally anything to pad the levels out and make them interesting.
- Legend both plays this straight and plays with it a little. In one particular tomb, Lara is somewhat disappointed to find that the death traps are not functioning. Even if activating them wasn't a requirement of passing the Broken Bridge puzzle that impeded progress through the level, one feels that she would have figured out how to get the traps running regardless. It's only a matter of time before she installs a sawblade corridor in Croft Manor.
Any temple left by an ancient civilization in any RPG, ever. In fact, any ancient anything. No wonder all these ancient civilizations died out -- they probably got killed by their own overly-complicated temples, outhouses and kitchens.
Two words: Resident Evil. Ooh, why not lock a very important door of a police station with four chess pieces (of all things), each of which held in a separate location far, far away from the others? Why not, indeed...
- Attempted justification in Resident Evil 2, where the police chief was stark raving mad, and did it on purpose.
  - And also on Umbrella's payroll. He probably put in a request with their Manager of Nonsensical Architecture and Security to refurbish the station one day.
Though not a video-game, Sigourney Weaver complains a lot about having to go through a Death Course to disarm a nuclear reactor in Galaxy Quest:
Gwen DeMarco: What is this thing? I mean, it serves no useful purpose for there to be a bunch of chompy, crushy things in the middle of a hallway. No, I mean we shouldn't have to do this, it makes no logical sense, why is it here?
Jason Nesmith: 'Cause it's on the television show.
Gwen DeMarco: Well forget it! I'm not doing it! This episode was badly written!
Lampshaded at one point in Voodoo Vince, in which the titular character stumbles upon a mansion that, for no apparent reason, contains a complex room-rotating system, and the narrator comments "wow, that must have been one screwed up architect."
The Malevolent Architecture of Chips' Challenge is the point of the game. Chip is traversing the deliberately malevolent clubhouse to win the heart of Melinda.
Subverted in the Doctor Who comedy special "The Curse of Fatal Death", where the Doctor reveals he popped back in time to have a word with the architect, so the Master's would-be death trap dungeon turns out instead to contain only a Sofa of Reasonable Comfort.
Also not a video game: the Discworld story Reaper Man features the Lost Jewelled Temple of Doom of Offler the Crocodile God. The priests have a very easy time of it as, of the very few people who ever find the place, none get past the Death Course, even as far as the jolly drawing of a thermometer for the Roof Repair Fund (a joke about the maintenance problems of old English churches, by the way). The priests barely look up from their game of cards to comment, "Heyup, another one for the big rolling ball, then." To date, two people have gotten through -- one is Mrs. Cake, feared by all churches as a stubborn busybody, and the other is Death. When the latter showed up, the priests ran screaming thinking it was the former.
- In Neverwhere, a room in the monastery of the Black Friars is literally malevolent, as entering it gives you horrific visions of your own worthlessness and cheerily urges you to commit suicide.
Two words: Silent Hill. An entire town forged of Chaos Architecture and designed by the subconscious guilt of the main character, that leads to such things as the entire city being transformed into a maze of rubble, uncrossable police tape, and fissures; doors held closed with keys being convoluted puzzles involving unnerving poems, and coins scattered around the building.
In Jedi Academy, in the second level on Vjun, about two-thirds of the way through the game, you start in a hanger with the series's star Kyle Katarn, who immediately runs to the locked elevator, then starts talking about how the switch to summon it is hidden in a control panel fourteen floors up, and generally mocks the trope he has lived in for about five games so far. This sequence is easy to miss as the real exit is blatantly obvious and closer than the elevator; approaching it starts a new cutscene where Kyle makes more comments about your next stop being a garbage compactor.
- Throughout the entire level, Kyle uses his superior abilities to bypass the jumping puzzles and deathlasers you must get through. While the presence of nonfunctional elevators in nearly every corner takes some of the edge off, the player still has to wonder what the architect was smoking. Of course, the architect was probably Vader, so maybe deathtraps are to be expected?
In the first Half-Life game, Gordon Freeman frequently needs to turn on equipment, but the required buttons, valves and switches are in dangerous or unlikely locations, such as underwater or on the wrong side of an enormous fan.
In the Girl Genius Steam Punk comics, old Castle Heterodyne is not only extremely malevolent, but also sentient. And insane. Its fractured personality core controls everything that goes on inside and delights in luring explorers (and repair crews of convicts) into death traps that make every Grimtooth dungeon look tame.
- This is somewhat justified by the fact that it was built by the Old Heterodynes, who were extremely powerful Sparks, combining fantastic talent at building ANYTHING with sheer insanity. Besides, it wasn't designed to be insane and fractured, it was broken during the coming of the Other.
  - Hell, the place KNOWS it's screwed up. When Agatha tries to get the kitchen in line by telling it she's the latest Heterodyne and already proved such to the mausoleum, the kitchen calls shenanigans and claims it hasn't heard from the mausoleum in decades. Oh, and did I mention that the impostor Heterodyne instructs the hired help with a lengthy lecture about what things are not to be touched, seeing as they're traps and will kill you? Malevolent Architecture indeed.
Alpha Complex, the dilapidated underground city in the tabletop roleplaying game Paranoia, thanks to the benevolent rule of your friend, The Computer (an insane and Orwellian Big Brother type A.I. that rules over all of Alpha Complex). Danger lurks around every corner and in every hallway, ranging from nuclear leaks, crazed robots, medical experiments and exploding prototype equipment to your fellow clone citizens out for a quick promotion. The bureaucracy is a maze that strangles you in red tape. And let's not even talk about the food vats. The slightest mistake (such as failing to display the mandatory, required level of happiness, or failing to duck in time) can be instantly fatal, or at least invite summary execution.
Many dungeons in Dungeons And Dragons RPGs, especially those with the infamous Grimtooth traps.
- ESPECIALLY the Tomb of Horrors. The dungeon was pretty much explicitly designed by Gary Gygax as a means to speed player characters to a painful doom, unless they were exceptionally lucky and of godlike intelligence. Justified in its sequel "Return to the Tomb of Horrors" where it's revealed that the original inhabitant of the Tomb, the lich Acererak, purposefully spread rumors of the fabulous wealth of the tomb to lure adventurers in, killing them and harvesting their soul energy in a bid for godhood.
The house of Dr. Alastair Grout in Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines. Justified by Grout being a) completely mad, and b) having intentionally designed the mansion to be a living hell to anyone seeking to intrude on him. Being a vampire, he had little problem with the place himself -- unfortunately, neither had his assassin or the main character.
If we're looking for a pyramid-shaped building complete with moving three-dimensional puzzle hallways and chambers, where death can jump at you from every angle in the form of deadly monsters, look no further than the movie AVP: Alien vs Predator. That pyramid was explicitly designed to be a maze where a lurking enemy is trying to kill you and the hunter can become the hunted.
Another prime example of Malevolent Architecture, created no doubt as a sadist experiment in human psychology: the trap in the chilling movie Cube. Every room is indeed a puzzle, and the slightest mistake will invite death. In short, everything is explicitly designed to be as lethal as possible, to force the unwilling participants to work together or perish.
The house from House Of Leaves.
Live Action Example: Robot Wars (no, not the super kind) and Battlebots, both shows featuring homemade combat machines, had the arena be as much of a potential threat at the other robots. Sawblades, spikes from the floor, fire coming from the ground, and many other things were available for potential damage. The former even had a Pit Of Do... Oblivion, which was an instant win if a team got the opponent in it, along with being a disposal bin of sorts for defeats robots; and the 'Drop Zone', in which defeated robots are placed on a square on the ground with something very heavy hanging above. What's about to happen should be quite obvious.
- Not to mention "The Flipper". Defeated robots got some of their dignity back by getting air time. LOTS of air time.
Sort of handwaved in Final Fantasy X. When Summoners go on their pilgrimage, they are required to pray at all of the temples across Spira. However, the 'Trial of the Fayth' is 'very dangerous'. Actually, most of them are block puzzle mazes or equivalents. Oh, and I wonder if the janitors are always going in after the Summoners to reset all of those 'blocks'...?
Subverted in ICO, where the deathtrap of a castle you're trying to escape was clearly a perfectly inhabitable building before the ravages of time knocked out most of the access ladders, walkways, ropes, bridges, and anything else that falls to pieces easily with time. (A few puzzles even involve accelerating this process with acts of creative vandalism to create new paths.)
The Fatal Frame/Project Zero franchise. It almost seems a common practise to create the building in ancient Japan as puzzle rooms requiring the inhabitant to find all the missing pieces or shuffle around blocks to get into the next room, not to mention certain rooms in the third game which can only be accessed by climbing around in the rafters...
- justified in a way that the architect really DID design them thatway on purpose for some reason and were then killed and buried in the very walls of the building
Real Life example: The Winchester Mystery House, a giant mansion built in 1884 by Sarah L. Winchester with hundreds of false doors, dead ends, and stairways to nowhere in an attempt to confuse the ghosts of people who were shot to death by the Winchester rifles her family made. It was part of the inspiration for the house in House Of Leaves mentioned above.
The Dionaea House.
Goes back at least as far as Donkey Kong, in which a building under construction is transformed into a series of deathtraps for poor Mario--because a gorilla jumps on the beams a few times. (Gorillas are heavy--but not that heavy!)
Old man Stauf built a house, and filled it with his toys...
Morrowind largely averts this trope-the player can explore tons of ancient ruins, especially those of the technocentric (and extinct) Dwemer, but the only things trying to kill you are the mechanical defenders. However, in the Tribunal expansion, the player can visit Sotha Sil's Clockwork City, where there ARE deathtraps which WILL kill you and anything else that they get ahold of.

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