Troperville
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Who designed this place? Cuisinart?
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. Shortcuts? Forget it. They either prove impassable or zap you back outside the laser grid. 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 riddled with spike traps. 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.
See also Alien Geometries, for something that does something similar, except to your brain.
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Examples
Anime & Manga
- Library Island from Mahou Sensei Negima. A library with not only monsters, but also booby traps.
- So much so that there's an entire club dedicated to exploring it. A member of the club actually becomes a full-fledged treasure hunter in a later arc. Library Island is apparently comparable to the most dangerous dungeons the Magic World has to offer.
- The Twelve Temples Stairs from the Saint Seiya Sanctuary Arc. An endless staircase on a mountain, with twelve temples to cross for everyone without using their superhuman speed or teleportation (though dimension warps do work, strangely), invader or non-invader. The kicker? The heroes have to go through these to save their Goddess, who would normally be owning the place if not for the Big Bad, and to add insult to injury, it even has this giant fire clock (12 flames, 1 hour for each flame) whose only purpose is to give a sense of time running out to the heroes. Architecture bearing ill-malice towards the legitimate owner of the place (and her warriors) on this level HAS to be this.
- Subverted in that the Anime seems to imply that several people know secret passages and shortcuts (but of course not the heroes). Which leads us into serious Fridge Logic territory, or in Screw The Rules I Have Plot territory.
- And let's not even get into how Sagittarius Aiolos greets visitors in his Temple in the anime. The whole temple is full of tests of determination/character disguised as booby-traps.
- To be fair, though, in the Hades Sanctuary Arc since the endless staircase + fire clock deadline is turned on the villains who are renegade Saints who Came Back From The Dead. It still serves no real actual purpose, besides making it harder for heroes and enemies altogether (and this is used as a plot point to justify that some characters can't come to help in time). This is a recurring argument point in fandom and lots of speculations are made as to how the restrictions and such works, since Word Of God said virtually nothing on this.
- Also, Hades' Castle and the endless spiral staircase leading to Hell. With no security ramps. And every character has to jump in the pit anyway, with a very likely risk to die in the process.
Card Games
- A number of cards in Magic: The Gathering's Stronghold set seem to be derived directly from this trope. Particularly malevolent examples include Ensnaring Bridge
 , Bottomless Pit, Shifting Wall, and Wall of Razors. As if those features weren't hazardous enough, the backstory has the eponymous Stronghold seated inside a volcano.
- In fact, most of the plane of Rath was made out of flowstone, an intelligent, malevolent substance that's keyed directly to the ruler of Rath.
Comics
Films
- From The Emperor's New Groove: "Why do we even ''have'' that lever?"
- Is that the one that drops the person who pulled it into the crocodile pit?
- In Galaxy Quest, Sigourney Weaver complains a lot about having to go through a Death Course to disarm a nuclear reactor:
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!
- 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.
- Not that the architecture in the games of the same franchise is much friendlier, though...
- 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.
- A more subtle example occurs in the film Targets; murderer-to-be Bobby Thompson
lives exists with his parents and wife in a suburban house "decorated" in such hideous sterile banality that it would drive anyone insane.
- The house at the center of the Jacques Tati film Mon Oncle is much the same, although this time it's played for comedy. In Tati's follow-up film Play Time, the theme is carried even further, showing an entire section of Paris ruthlessly sealed up in glass, concrete, glass, metal and then more glass.
- The Black Fortress in Krull was one of these, including pits that randomly open and a spike trap room with absolutely no purpose. Then again, almost everything in that movie was bizarre and fatal.
- City Of Ember has an escape route (meant to eventually be followed by all the inhabitants, no less) that requires activating a complex machine that moves around small boats, destabilizes a power reactor, generates a powerful water current and finally blasts the hapless citizens in the aforementioned tiny boats through a waterslide course any entertainment company would pay millions for (replete with suspended structure). You'd think they could have built, I dunno, an elevator instead... It might have been justified if not for the waterslide, since the place was already past its expiration date anyway.
- When Judge Dredd and Fergie are sneaking back into Mega-City One, they do so via a vent that belches fire every thirty seconds. Dredd mentions that some people figured out the pattern, but died trying to take advantage of it.
- This is the Weapon Of Choice of Death in the Final Destination, applicable to any location: Electric devices malfunction, containers holding liquids leak, sharp objects line up, heavy objects start moving, load-bearing structures break and so on.
- Doors in Star Wars often make you wonder if they were designed by Joseph-Ignace Guillotin. See the scene where Obi-Wan tells Luke that the Force will be with him always. Careful with that door, Luke!
- Played seriously and fairly well in The People Under The Stairs. The house is designed to keep people in, and includes secret rooms, trick stairs, and electrified doorknobs.
- Another literal example, like the one in Neverwhere, can be found in the Stephen King movie 1408. "It's an evil fucking room!"
- Can it be that no one has yet mentioned the ancient (Mayan?) Temple Of Doom at the beginning of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark? No one has set foot in it in centuries and everything is absolutely coated in dust and cobwebs the size of blankets, but every single Death Trap is in perfect working order.
Literature
- In Neil Gaiman's 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.
- Terry Pratchett's 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.
- That's not even mentioning the work of architect Bloody Stupid Johnson.
- Then, when Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett co-wrote a book, the M25 London orbital motorway is ascribed this status.
- The house from House of Leaves. And not in the "ludicrously designed" sense, but in the "actively trying to eat the residents" sense.
- The Dionaea House.
- Spoofed in Pelevin's Prince of Central Planning, where the protagonist has to pass through Prince of Persia-styled deathtraps routinely while going around his job (being a petty clerk in Central Planning).
- Justified in The English Patient; the characters live in a villa that was booby-trapped by retreating Axis forces.
- Hogwart Castle from Harry Potter show tendencies for this, with labrinthine corridors, disappearing stairs, doors that lead to a different room on Tuesdays, not to mention the death course that leads to the Philosopher Stone.
- And should you venture outside, don't forget that it's surrounded by a forest populated with people-hating, man-eating monsters. Have fun, kids!
Live Action TV
- 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.
- In fact, the Master bribed the architect to install death-traps, but the Doctor anticipated that he'd do this, and bribed the architect to allow for escape from said death-traps, but the Master anticipated this bribery, and bribed the architect to install more death-traps, but the Doctor anticipated this too, and bribed the architect in defense. Eventually, the Master decides that after meeting the Doctor, he'll go back and buy the architect an expensive dinner. However, the Doctor already had dinner with him.
- The Doctor Who episode "Paradise Towers" had a malevolent architect who designed his apartment complex to be a Death Trap because he couldn't stand the idea of people living in and "ruining" his perfect structures.
- In part 3 of The Keys of Marinus, a building full of Death Traps houses one of the titular artifacts.
- 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 defeated 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.
- Rose Red. (Also based on the Winchester Mystery House.)
- Let's hear it from Monty Python:
Mr. Tid: Gentlemen, we have two basic suggestions for the design of this architectural block, the residential block, and I thought it best that the architects themselves came in to explain the advantages of both designs.
(knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock)
Mr. Tid: That must be the first architect now. Ah, yes. It's Mr. Wiggin of Ironside and Malone.
Mr. Wiggin: Good morning, gentlemen. Uh, this is a twelve-storey block combining classical neo-Georgian features with all the advantages of modern design. Uhh, the tenants arrive in the entrance hall here, are carried along the corridor on a conveyor belt in extreme comfort and past murals depicting Mediterranean scenes, towards the rotating knives. The last twenty feet of the corridor are heavily soundproofed. The blood pours down these chutes and the mangled flesh slurps into these large containers—
City Gent #1: Excuse me.
Mr. Wiggin: Hmm?
City Gent #1: Uh, did you say "knives"?
Mr. Wiggin: Uh, rotating knives. Yes.
City Gent #2: Are you, uh, proposing to slaughter our tenants?
Mr. Wiggin: Does that not fit in with your plans?
City Gent #1: No, it does not. Uh, we— we wanted a... simple... block of flats.
Mr. Wiggin: Ahh, I see. I hadn't, uh, correctly divined your attitude...
City Gent #2: Uh, huh huh.
Mr. Wiggin: ... towards your tenants.
City Gent #2: Huh huh.
Mr. Wiggin: You see, I mainly design slaughter houses.
City Gent #1: Yes. Pity.
Mr. Wiggin: Mind you, this is a real beaut. I mean, none of your blood caked on the walls and flesh flying out of the windows inconveniencing passers-by with this one. I mean, my life has been building up to this.
City Gent #2: Yes, and well done, huh, but we did want a block of flats.
Mr. Wiggin: Well, may I ask you to reconsider? I mean, you wouldn't regret it. Think of the tourist trade.
City Gent #1: No, no, it's— it's just that we wanted a block of flats and not an abattoir.
Tabletop Games
- 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 & Dragons, 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.
- Tomb of Horrors is something of a Trope Codifier amongst RPGs. It was created with this trope in mind: a place where the layout and traps would provide most of the danger, rather than monsters and combat.
- Betrayal at House on the Hill generates a completely new, usually absurd house each time. Even with full cooperation from the other players, it's possible to discover a room with a door adjoining a room with solid wall. This is discussed in the rules and errata as being false doors, not uncommon in ghost story houses.
- The Underground Lake is also misprinted as an Upper Floor tile, which the errata says to play as discovered by a player suddenly falling from the Upper Floor into the Basement.
Video Games
- Dracula's Castle in all its forms in the Castlevania games. Given who it belongs to, it is quite literally malevolent.
- It is, as he puts it, "a creature of chaos". It isn't even his doing- its ever shifting, creating new deathtraps without his lifting a finger, although he does stock it with monsters- but some of them just appear regardless. After his death, his reincarnation has to deal with it just as the Belmonts did, and its just as bad, despite his metaphorical deed of ownership.
- 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.
- She actually mentioned installing them in the Gym, which is full of equipment made just for practicing traversing small platforms and balance beams like those in temples. It's hard to tell if she's actually serious or joking.
- In the movie, she actually has an ancient temple in her house, just to keep in practice.
- This features in an awful lot of games by Capcom, including Resident Evil, Devil May Cry and Haunting Ground. Most Capcom castles seem to have minds of their own.
- Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time had a room you couldn't get past unless you help the guard "activate the Palace Defense Systems," which, once activated hurt only the Prince and did not affect in the slightest any of the transformed sand monsters. The guard dies about five seconds later.
- To say nothing of the basic architecture of the rest of the palace. How the heck is a normal person even supposed to get to the prisons? Or the mess halls? Or the absurdly enormous and unusually spike filled library?
- In the next game of the series, Warrior Within, worn-out paths on the walls over chasms show that mooks have to wall-run routinely while going around as well.
- The Sands of Time trilogy has sort of an excuse, in that each time the sands are released, buildings start falling apart, necessitating much wall running. The next-gen Prince of Persia, however, makes no excuses, as it's implied people actually moved around the city as ruined as it is. In fact, when asked why she's so athletic, Elika responds that her home does not allow one to be weak. Yes, in a city that basically has no floor, one can imagine.
- 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.
- In the first Resident Evil, the architect of the trap-filled mansion was named George Trevor, who was hired because he liked to put such unusual quirks in his designs. Then other people started adding their own more additions to the mansion to make it even more complicated, and eventually Trevor got lost and died in the mansion because he did not recognize the layout.
- Trevor also was apparently partly responsible for places in town, in particular the police station. One wonders why an entire city was build by such an architect.
- The novels indicate (and thus lampshade) that most of the city's Powers that Be were nuttier then a bag of almonds.
- To be fair, a lot of the weird puzzles are intended to keep the place hard to access on purpose (for example, the Aztec sacrifice puzzle in Chief Iron's office, which lets a person access the sewers and which is not supposed to be there) — these are secret passages/chambers for a reason. Also, you do tend to show up at these places after the initial chaos of a Zombie Apocalypse is over; in several cases, it's quite plausible that the items were scattered by people panicking or trying to avoid being attacked or security details just getting things screwed up. And there are some cases where items are where they should sensibly be — Resident Evil 2 has a spare fuse in the superconductor room, where you need to fill it in order to create a replacement main fuse.
- 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.
- 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.
- Partially (but only partially, mind you) justified by the fact that the aftermath of the Resonance Cascade banged up the place pretty badly, and Marines and aliens shooting stuff what go "BOOM!" at each other all over the place probably didn't improve things. Nevertheless, the OSHA would probably have had a field day at Black Mesa even pre-Resonance Cascade.
- Not at all justified with the Room For Dropping Crates Into a Bottomless Pit.
- 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...?
- This troper always got the impression that the Trials were just to make sure that Summoners and their guardians aren't Too Dumb To Live. Actually communing with the fayth, during which they can presumably strike down someone unworthy, (and which always seems to take a toll on Yuna) seems to be the dangerous part.
- 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 that way on purpose for some reason and were then killed and buried in the very walls of the building.
- 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!)
- Not quite... the main danger's not the building, but either falling off bits of it (oddly for a platformer, falling more than about 1-2m would KILL you), or the wandering deadly things like thrown barrels, sentient firechickens, and so on.
- Largely averted in The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. 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.
- Played oh-so-straight in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Almost every Ayleid ruin has some kind of trap, and often more than one. One quest even had you walk through a grid of pressure plates which triggered darts if you didn't follow a pattern of symbols on the conveniently-given map. Also, this quest took place in someone's head. You gotta wonder about the mental state of someone who dreams this up.
- You could argue that it's justified in Oblivion. The Ayleids were very xenophobic of not only men but other elves and it makes sense that they would rig their cities, rather obvious in the landscape, to hurt anyone who comes in. Plus, it's pretty established that the guy who dreamed it up wasn't right in his head. After all, if the "challenges" were not trying to kill you, he would have gotten out of the dream state quickly.
- Metal Gear Solid series is somewhat guilty of this, but not as bad as some other examples. In Shadow Moses Island, there are trap doors around the pillbox armory, and there's a blast furnace room right now to an extremely cold room - the former makes it extremely easy for someone to be incinerated with a misstep (or a helpful little push). In Big Shell, the several-story high walkways with trap doors. Good for deterring the careless hero, but what about the guards that have to patrol the areas?!
- Naturally, The Last Days of FOXHOUND mocks this as with everything else with the series. First with the trap doors by that it had already killed several Mooks and nearly claimed Sniper Wolf, and later on, upon examining the Furnace Room/Freezing Warehouse (directly adjacent), Ocelot remarks that "whoever designed this place can go straight to Hell." Liquid had earlier criticized the trapdoors by asking if Dr. Doom was the architectural consultant?
- The impression that I got with the walkways in the Big Shell was that those platforms only fell because of poor workmanship; they actually stay gone after they fall, as opposed to the Shadow Moses trap doors that righted themselves after a few seconds (and over which guards could walk, even if the trap door was open, with impunity).
- The Big Shell walkway panels are, in fact, broken, and fall as the result of the damage the facility has sustained. It's easy to confirm this just by watching how the panels fall out.
- The haunted hotel in Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines is a labyrinthine maze where chandeliers fall on you, floors burst open, and vases, paintings and other small ornaments leap at you in order to kill you; at one point, the ghost(s?) even try dropping the elevator on you. Of course, the place is haunted, and wouldn't be very malevolent otherwise. Unlike...
- The house of Dr. Alastair Grout later on. In this case, it's 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 probably had little problem with the place himself — unfortunately, neither had other vampires, like the main character or the person who killed Grout.
- The Legend of Zelda series are all at least one half this trope. All of them. Come on, there are dungeons even in the bottom of wells.
- Ocarina of Time has to take the cake with invisible moving platforms, invisible spikes, illusionary floors, and doors trying to kill you.
- The builders of the U.E.S.C. Marathon decided to put crushing elevators and huge pits of lava in a civilian residential area, among other things. Oh, and the seven-platform puzzle which is monstrously difficult and requires an hour of trekking back and forth between control rooms which activate a mechanical staircase to get to the friggin' observatory.
- Arguably, this was evident in the Silver Surfer video game. One Hit Point Wonder Surfer tended to die just by touching the parts of the arena. Understandable if he was doing a significant fraction of c, but if he's slow enough that you can reverse...
- The Dungeon Keeper series (which has you, well, keeping a dungeon) demonstrates just why this is necessary.
- As does Evil Genius, though in that game, you have to make the choice between ease of use for minions and difficult to traverse for enemy agents: there's very little common ground between the two.
- Likewise for Tecmo's Deception. Hell, in the sequels, even the buildings inhabited by the heroes are filled with death-dealing devices which never shut off.
- Both Crescent Moon Village and Hotel Horror from Wario Land 4 have this in spades. The former seems almost unlivable, with the fire escape being the entrance, an open storm drain in the town and a cliff in the middle of nowhere, and the latter has huge vertical shafts in rooms with no floor. And randomly locked doors.
- Also, Glittertown/Neon City and Derailed Express from Shake it. The former has slot machines with bombs as winnable as well as fire and enemies, the latter is not only a freaking dangerous train, the timetable (one of the treasures in the level) actually says it's scheduled to derail at 09:29.
- In the game Dwarf Fortress, instead of trying to dodge Malevolent Architecture, you're the one creating it.
- Project "Fuck the World" is go!
- Succession games are particularly prone to this, with the fortress layout making absolutely no sense at all after a few people have been building, expanding and making mistakes.
- The fourth level of World of Goo gives this a Lampshade Hanging with a message from The Sign Painter, who apparently aspires to be The Narrator: "The Goo Balls were excited to explore the mysterious pipe system... even if it meant traversing ridiculously contrived terrain."
- Myst contains many examples of how the D'Ni seemingly wanted their lives to be a constant challenge, in which you couldn't go to the bathroom without solving a puzzle to unlock the control cabinet containing the switch which will free up the gear that you have to turn to open the lavatory door. The architecture can't actually hurt you (since there's no damage mechanism in the game), but it can block your progress and leave you frustrated for hours.
- Uru's Gahreesen age. Two rotating fortresses "connected" by nothing more than a small rocky platform. Time your jumps carefully. Justified as additional security measures (the aforementioned rocky platform is the only place an intruder could conceivably enter) thus making an attack on the age with an army of more than about five people pretty much impossible.
- Most older platforming games, especially NES games, have very hostile architectures which may leave the player wondering how would inhabitants navigate it.
- Gremlins 2 for the NES takes it to the extreme. The game takes place mostly in an office building whose architect would most likely be sued by integrating an extreme amount of spikes, electricity, lava, bottomless pits, inconveniently placed conveyor belts, spinning flails and moving platforms into the building.
- The original batch of DOOM games say that the influence of hell has literally changed the layouts of many of the proper Earth levels. Of course, once you enter Hell itself, all bets are off. Of course, keys in Hell itself are an explanation of Benevolent Architecture.
- The 7th Guest: Old man Stauf built a house, and filled it with his toys...
- Partially averted in the Thief; the levels are usually pretty logical and you get the impression that people COULD live in them; there are kitchens, bathrooms, toilets, etc. There are exceptions.
- Constantine's mansion in "The Sword", from Thief: the Dark Project and Thief Gold.
- Metroid's Samus Aran has to deal with traps and machines everywhere she goes, even ships and stations belonging to her Federation allies. On the other hand, these puzzles are always perfectly suited to her battle armor's powers; no one else could possibly get around these places. The Prime games set new records for both using and explaining away this trope — there are reams of scan text that tell you how, for example, Space Pirates unlock some of their doors with metal balls the same size as Samus's morph ball.
- This is justified in many cases in Prime by decay of some sort. Either the ravages of time or battle have messed up the status quo and your only hope is what's in your arsenal of gadgets, or the world is crashing down around you (Prime 1 for instance, where you start off brimming with techno-wonders and lose it all to an explosion as the station self destructs around you).
- The page picture is of Ultimecia's castle in Final Fantasy VIII, which, true to the trope, requires a good bit of puzzle-solving to navigate. In this case it's justified, partly by Time Compression, but mostly by the fact that the place is falling apart, requiring some creativity on the part of the characters to get around its broken staircases, blocked doors, and crumbling halls.
- In Cave Story, it's unclear how much of any given cave is designed, and how much was just naturally hazardous. Some parts make sense: The Labyrinth is supposed to be impassible because it's meant to confine the Gaudis and protect the Core. And some of it makes less sense, such as the Grasstown pathway running through Chaco's fireplace, or the pit with instant death spikes (helpfully labeled) in Santa's house.
- Subverted hard in Wigglytuff's story in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Explorers of Sky. Playing as Guildmaster Wigglytuff in his youth, you face a chamber with a puzzle on the floor, blocks to drag, crystals to hit, Spikes Of Doom, crushing walls with more Spikes, and a mysterious seal with a strangely shaped hole in the center. The solution? YOOM-TAH!!!
Web Comics
- In the Girl Genius Steam Punk comics, old Castle Heterodyne is not only extremely malevolent, but also sentient. And a Heroic Sociopath with a nasty sense of humor. 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.
- When the Absurd Notions cast is playtesting "Traps & Treasures", which is exactly as much of a D&D ripoff as you would predict from the title, they run into one of these.
Western Animation
- In Code Lyoko, Sector 5 or "Carthage" includes about every example of this trope: from crushing walls and Descending Ceilings to Laser Hallway or deadly doors, and even a whole room that just fall down on the heroes. And that's not even accounting the monsters.
- And all of this is on a timer — the heroes get trapped unless they press a switch within a certain amount of time.
- Being a parody of video games, Code Monkeys often has characters navigate through Malevolent Architecture when traveling within the Gameavision building.
- In the episode "If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Rich?" of Batman the Animated Series, there is a maze in an amusement park full of death traps, path-blocking puzzles, and highly lethal robots that prevent you from going back the way you came. None of which seems so unusual for Batman until you remember that this was meant to be navigated by the park-goers.
- Don't forget, the maze was "tweaked" after-market by the its designer, the Riddler, who in BTAS continuity is a Gadgeteer Genius, specifically to make it a deathtrap.
Real Life
- The Winchester Mystery House, a giant mansion begun in 1884 by Sarah L. Winchester, and under construction continuously until her death thirty-eight years later. It features hundreds of false doors, dead ends, stairways to nowhere, and closets that open into five-bedroom suites 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.
- Truth In Television: Egyptian tombs were equipped with false passages, false burial chambers and even Death Traps to foil grave robbers.
- Designed to impede your progress? How about prisons? Which, of course, makes for great video game levels.
- As mentioned in Literature, the M25.
- H. H. Holmes, one of America's first serial killers, built a hotel called the "Castle", which, in addition to being a grade-A Torture Cellar, featured windowless rooms, labyrinthine hallways, hidden passages, trap doors, rooms that were literal death traps (some were gas chambers, some were incinerators, and some were just soundproofed self-sealing rooms where Holmes could murder the victim at his pleasure), and a pit of lime for disposing of bodies once he was done.
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