Video Game Cruelty Punishment

Attack the Cucco at your own peril...

"Cuccos will wander around the stage, minding their own business. If you're heartless enough to attack one, you deserve what you get."

— Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

Some games let the player do things that are a bit... immoral. Some players are just fine with that and will gladly take advantage of it; after all, the video game is a consequence-free world, one where you can do things such as shotgun a crowd of innocent bystanders, torture mooks for information and kill them even when they tell you what you need to know, or be an all-around jerk. Honestly, the exact reason many people find these games fun is because they can do horrible things with no negative effects. At worst, you'll slide toward the evil end of the game's Karma Meter and the storyline will play out differently… or not.

At least, that's how it usually is. Sometimes, a game will allow you to be cruel, but will make sure that you get your comeuppance for doing so. Were you laughing gleefully while chaingunning your fellow soldiers? You probably won't be when the rest of them turn against you and fill you with bullets. Were you butchering unarmed scientists who were just doing their jobs? You may have been amused, but MI6 wasn't — mission failed. Did you stab that passing Innocent Bystander to death? Turns out he had critical information, and now you can't finish the game. Have you been carelessly marching your soldiers into certain doom? They're gone for good, and now you're badly outnumbered and outgunned by the enemy.

This also shows up in conjunction with Multiple Endings and Karma Meters with increasing frequency. These games may allow you the freedom to be the most despicable Villain Protagonist possible, but that choice can now have a direct impact on the game's story. Consequences for your actions often include increasingly-less-subtle What the Hell, Player? moments from party members and NPCs, a boss fight against a Hero Antagonist who proceeds to karmically tear you to shreds, and a bad ending that's rarely worth any of the above effort. And if you're really unlucky, as a last resort the game may just bust through the Fourth Wall entirely to mete out the real-life punishment of completely resetting your game progress.

This can also be used not for morality's sake, but as a way to keep a game from being Banned in China, leading to a mere 18+ rating in many cases.

Hostage Spirit-Link is a specific form of this, though in that case it is generally used to prevent you from madly spraying fire every time you open a door rather than to punish you for being cruel.

The most common subtropes are probably I Fought the Law and the Law Won and Shoplift and Die, in which your comeuppance comes in the form of overpowered Non Player Characters intent on either locking you up or beating you down.

Contrast Mercy Rewarded and What the Hell, Player?, which are less overt methods of chastising a cruel player. The inverse, naturally, is Video Game Caring Potential.

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Examples:

Action Adventure

• The Legend of Zelda:
  • Attacking Cuccos (and sometimes other animals, such as the pigs in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker) results in them fighting back in swarms. Endless, invincible swarms. Even better, if you piss off the pig at Link's home island after it grows to full size, it does more damage per hit than anything else in the game.^note In the battle mode of The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures, this is actually a sneaky tactic — attack a Cucco inside a building enough times and a swarm of them will appear and attack your pals; since they do not attack anyone inside buildings, you're safe! Spoofed in this Dorkly Bits parody of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. Link, having acquired a Portal gun, uses the Cuccos to kill Ganon.
  • In The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom:
    • You can actually weaponize this tendency by baiting enemies into hitting the Cuccos, who will promptly retaliate.^note However, the enemies will survive the onslaught if their HP is massive like the Lynels. They've been toned down for this game, however; they only attack for about 10 seconds, meaning if you have plenty of heart containers/healing items and/or just keep running so they miss you, it's easy to survive.
    • Similarly to the retaliation from the Cuccos, you can swing your weapon at friendly NPCs. They'll all safely dodge the blows, but the Goron elder Bludo and Riju's bodyguard Buliara in particular will knock you on your back as well.
    • In Breath of the Wild, Mellie, an old lady in Kakariko Village who will yell at you if you step into her private plum garden. In Tears of the Kingdom, she'll have a squad of Cuccos ready to attack any trespassers.
  • There's an interesting variation on this in Twilight Princess, where you temporarily control the Cucco you've been attacking.
  • Similarly to the store below, there's a stand in Twilight Princess with jugs to fill your potions and you choose how many rupees to put into the box. If you give less than what they cost, such as only one, the bird will simply berate you but give none and the bird will attack you when you return. Conversely, you can actually pay more than what an item is worth, or even for nothing at all, though all you get for doing that is some warm gratitude from a hard-working bird.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening:
    • Stealing from the store causes all the Non Player Characters to refer to you as THIEF for the rest of the game. Plus, the shopkeeper zaps you to death if you're dumb enough to go back into the store. In the DX (color) version, the photographer will actually snap a commemorative photo, too. And you need to do it to achieve 100% Completion.
    • The dogs around Mabe Village will always charge at you if you hit them with anything that doesn't kill them.
  • In The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, there's a little girl in Ikana Canyon whose father has turned into a Gibdo. You play the Song of Healing to return him to normal, which gets you the Gibdo Mask. While she's thankful to Link for helping her father, she's still very traumatized by the whole ordeal, so if you talk to her while wearing the Gibdo Mask, she'll kick you out of the house.
  • In The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks, you can attack Zelda with various items while she's possessing a Phantom. If you hit her too many times, the red haze and "you've been spotted by a phantom" music will play, and she'll attack back.
  • In The Legend of Zelda:
    • Hitting the old man with the sword or other weapon will cause the fires to shoot at you if you are in an underground dungeon.
    • Bombing certain walls or burning certain bushes can reveal a secret room. Some of the rooms are actually homes of an old man who will demand that you pay him for the door repairs.
  • In Oracle of Seasons, after defeating the Great Moblin, you find him in a house in Sunken City, crafting bombs. You can throw a lit bomb or ember seed into his stockpile, then flee the house and watch it blow up with him inside of it. Try this repeatedly, and the third time he catches you and traps you inside the house when it blows.
  • In The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, when you enter a particular cave, a Hinox begs for mercy and offers Link money to leave him alone. Refuse the money, and he offers even more rupees. Do it too much, though, and he absolutely flips out and attacks Link, turning invincible and doing an absolutely massive amount of damage unmatched by pretty much any other enemy in the game (including the final boss). Bully and extort NPCs at your own peril…
• In the NES game Nightshade (1992), you are a superhero. You gain reputation for defeating mooks, and the more reputation you have, the more people will help you. Very high reputation yields such rewards as a healing booth (which you will need). Attacking someone defenseless, however, causes your reputation to take a nosedive.
• Beyond Good & Evil lets you fire on friendly boats and airships from your hovercraft. However, if you keep shooting at them, they'll eventually call the police on you, who will fine you. Some Non-Player Character ships are quicker to phone the cops than others… And if you maneuver quickly, you can actually avoid the police!
• In Star Fox Adventures, repeatedly attacking Tricky with Krystal's staff early on has no repercussions. However, doing it too many times after he's learned the Flame command results in him setting Fox on fire.^note Although you can use that to your advantage to save on GrubTub use. (Not that you really need to; you can stop collecting them ever again stupidly early without that trick and still have enough to finish.) And this will lead to a game over, as the fire actually causes damage to Fox.
• In the Superman Returns game, you don't have a life meter. Instead, the town does. So even though you can interact with just about everything, doing so with the intent to destroy can "reward" you with a Game Over. Inverted with the Bizarro side-missions, where you have to destroy the city.
• In Mission: Impossible for the NES, if you kill a civilian in the first level, a helicopter flies in from nowhere and captures your current character, which has the same effect as killing him.
• The Goonies II allows you to strike friendly characters with your fists or a hammer. If you hit certain characters, though, they refuse to help you in the future.^note There's another spot, though, where the only way to get the missing Magic Implement is to beat the crap out of an old lady by hitting her repeatedly.
• In Hi-Fi Rush you can avoid catching Korsica as she falls. While it leads to a funny scene, it also leads to one of your teammates scolding you and a significant score penalty.
• In Armored Core for Answer, you're allowed to take a mission where you kill 100,000,000 people. If you complete that mission, you're rewarded with the mission "Occupation of Arteria Carpals", a mission where you have to defeat 4 NEXTs — a single NEXT qualifies as That One Boss, so this is definitely a punishment. Also, the NEXTs are piloted by your former allies, who declare that you are a douchebag and your right to continue existing has just been revoked. (Although, if you use lots of Kojima Weaponry, it's relatively easy to win.)
  • Killing civilians in the first Armored Core game punishes you by taking credits away after completing the mission.
  • An early mission in the first Armored Core game has you being paid by a corporation to cause mass destruction in a city, with you getting bonus pay explicitly for causing more civilian casualties (one of the biggest bonuses in the level is earned from blowing up a monorail car full of people). Toward the end of the mission, the player will be confronted by Valkyrie, the number two ranking AC, who is more than likely the first AC opponent you will encounter this early in the game. She has a back-mounted shotgun with cheated stats to make it fire at the rate of a machine gun which can make swiss cheese out of you in seconds if you're caught lacking.
• In the first Soul Reaver game (which is the second Legacy of Kain game), civilians and vampire hunters will fall on their knees and worship you — even let you feed on them — unless you start killing them, in which case the civilians will run away and the vampire hunters will attack you. They're not especially dangerous, but they can be inconvenient.
• Ōkami: Although not as severe as some of the other punishments, biting some of the larger animals (specifically the tigers and bears) will cause them to attack you.
• In The Legend of the Mystical Ninja, attacking innocent people in towns will cause a swarm of angry guards to assault you. They will keep spawning unless you leave the area.
• Tomb Raider:
  • In Tomb Raider II, attacking the Tibetan warrior monks in the Barkhang Monastery will result in every single monk in the entire level going for Lara's blood — and it can be easily done if the player is simply trying to help the monks out in their fights against Bartoli's Mooks and accidentally target a monk instead of a gunman. They aren't hard to kill, but since there's so many of them that it can be easy to become overpowered. Also, they can be a huge help when they're attacking enemy mooks instead of you.
  • There is a similar situation in Tomb Raider III at the High Security Compound, if you do the All Weapons cheat to circumvent your lack of weaponry and shoot at the prisoners who are fighting the guards. There is at least one prisoner who is completely invincible even to rocket launcher blasts. A similar situation happens with the soldiers at the Crash Site and the flamethrower guys at the RX-Tech Mines.
  • In Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness, Lara can interact with people and can give nice or mean responses. Getting too nasty with Bouchard, a gangster, will have him shoot Lara dead.
• In the Nintendo DS version of LEGO Batman, once you unlock Alfred as a character, he'll usually be peaceably standing around as an NPC in the batcave. You can attack him, but once you do, he'll come after you with a bat.
• Oddly enough for the theme of the game, Overlord II punishes a few specific instances of vandalism, which it usually rewards. In the Empire Slums/Sewers area, some destroyable houses block off drainpipes that, when unblocked, endlessly spawn giant frogs, which can devour your minions, killing them regardless of health, level, and equipment without chance of in-combat resurrection. So, in this one area, you're better off destroying as little as you can.
• In the video game adaptation of Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace, in most levels you could run around killing innocent civilians willy-nilly. However, in certain levels, doing so would result in a character you were meant to interact with or escort refusing to speak with you (resulting in you being unable to complete the level), or would cause the game to immediately kill one of your allies (resulting in an immediate Game Over).
• In Secret of Evermore, The Boy can interact with one of the chickens in the market, who will squawk audibly. Doing so 100 times will result in The Boy being addressed in allcaps by a fourth-wall-breaking developer, who hits him with an explosion that leaves him with a single hit point, and then admonishes, "DO NOT TAUNT THE CHICKENS".

Action Game

• The Warriors punishes players that attack their own allies by having them turn against the player for a while. They attack much harder than any Mook and Elite Mook in the whole game. What makes this funny is if they kill you and you have some flash on you, they will revive you, even though they just finished kicking your ass! Likewise, attacking a female civilian may have her mace you and sometimes a random man will attack you if he spots you beating up women.
• The Australian version of 50 Cent: Bulletproof will give you an automatic game over if you kill a civilian. This was to get an MA15+ rating after the uncensored game was refused classification.
• In Zone of the Enders, you can get away with just a chewing-out for damaging the colony (deliberately or accidentally) if the damage isn't too great. However, should you fail all SOS missions by destroying every building and letting all survivors die, a feat almost impossible to achieve unless you go out of your way to do so, you'll get a Non-Standard Game Over preventing you from advancing further into the game, as Thunderheart is abruptly killed by an explosion shortly after he's introduced. The explosion having been caused by the Jehuty damaging some of the colony's lifelines, Leo, and by extension the player, is directly responsible for his death, a fact ADA chews both of them out on.
• In River City Ransom: Underground, the River City police will come after you if you hit any innocent civilians in outdoor areas or if you commit acts of vandalism, and they'll continue to pursue you until you duck into a hideout.
• In Knight Rider for the NES, destroying blue (civilian) vehicles and Knight trucks will remove five seconds from the mission timer.
• In Zombies Ate My Neighbors you start out with ten victims to save in each level. If one of them dies, the number gets reduced for the next level. By letting neighbors die, you lose out on bonus points and extra lives. This can get to the point where levels will have only a single victim to save, which can render it a frantic Luck-Based Mission or even outright Unwinnable by Design depending on what's between you and the victim, and your only way to reset the number of victims back to normal is to quit and load from a password… which costs you all your weapons, items, and keys, save for the starting load-out of 300 water pistol shots, some decoys, and a first aid kit. Save those victims!!!

Adventure Game

• Below the Root takes place on a planet where the society is very strictly pacifist, and so orderly that Kleptomaniac Hero is utterly averted as no one thinks of just walking in and swiping another person's stuff without permission. At some point, you can potentially get a sword-like object, the wand-of-Befal, from a rebel group called the Nekom. If you use it for any purpose other than hacking down plants (i.e., killing people or animals), you lose spirit points permanently. Spirit points give you various magical powers as you get more of them, and it's possible to make the game unwinnable if you lose enough of them.
• Borrowed Time: Killing people you're not supposed to, like the window cleaner, results in you going to jail and a game over.
• Early on in Codename: ICEMAN, you need to save a drowning girl on a beach. If you decide to just walk away instead, the game ends on the spot before letting you move to another screen.
• Conquests of the Longbow concludes with a Character Witness trial. You will get chewed out if you decided to be cruel to the witness in question. If you do really poorly, King Richard will even find you guilty and hang you anyway.
• In Deceive Inc., killing an innocent NPC will increase your Heat level, making you more vulnerable for a while. And should you kill the VIP, your Heat level will instantly reach maximum.
  • In Ghost of Thornton Hall, you can leave up to three people to die in a fire, but the endgames that result are less fulfilling and explanatory than the Golden Ending.
• In Déjà Vu (1985), shooting any person besides one specific NPC results in either the cops hauling you off or your intended victim being faster on the draw.
  • In the first game, you can kill people with the syringe, and get away with it… until the police catch up with you. Since you have to speak to the police to win the game, killing any innocent makes the game unwinnable.
• In Goodbye Volcano High, choosing to be as much of a jerk to Fang's friends, acquaintances, and brother will cause the characters to react accordingly. And much of the game's content is locked behind being nice to everyone, which triggers scenes, flashbacks, and photos, meaning players choosing to be cruel won't experience significant portions of the game's content.
• In Heroine's Quest, you can follow the standard adventure game logic of taking anything that's not nailed down. If you take the wrong item, however, you will find that most of the human characters, who before may have been praising you for your heroics, now consider you a despicable person and refuse to talk to you, demanding that you leave. If you make the (not very difficult) leap of logic that the item you picked up is causing this, you might think to restore a save game from before you grabbed it. Then the game specifically states that the item jumped across save games to follow you.
• This is basically the whole point of the computer game based on Harlan Ellison's I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. Doing the right thing is the only way to win, and anything that looks like a shortcut or easy solution to a character's main issue is a trap. Each scenario in the game is explicitly crafted by AM to exploit his victims' flaws for his own amusement, so doing bad/selfish things either lowers your Spiritual Barometer (which you need maxed out to get anything like a good ending), wastes your time, or instantly ends the scenario by killing you or worse.
• King's Quest:
  • The early ones are sneaky. Taking the violent option when a peaceful one is available costs you completion points. Leads to a lot of Guide Dang It!, as the non-violent path (that gives full points) is often more difficult.
  • King's Quest II: Romancing the Throne especially follows this trope, as typing in "kill monk" while you are in the church results in the game telling you that "Anyone who would kill a man of the cloth doesn't deserve to play this game. Therefore, we will end it." You then immediately drop dead. The AGD Interactive Fan Remake of the game subverts this, as the monk is recharacterized as the leader of a werewolf cult whom you have to kill to complete the game.
• In Little Big Adventure 2, you are able to go into the kindergarten and attack small children. However, the moment you leave, their older brothers will be waiting outside to take turns in beating you up.
• Stealing Weird Ed's hamster in Maniac Mansion is required to complete the game. Giving it back is optional. Also optional is exploding it in the microwave. If you give it back to him at that point, he will kill you. This is highly likely to render the game unwinnable; if you had required items in that kid's inventory, you won't get them back.
• Nancy Drew: Danger on Deception Island
  • It's possible to give Nancy and Katie food poisoning. You can make Nancy a sandwich that turns out to be the most volatile sandwich ever created (such as putting jellyfish, baking soda, Koko Kringles ice cream, mayonnaise, tomatoes, and peanut butter on a sandwich) or have her give it to Katie. However, this gives you a game over. It's actually the mayonnaise that's the bad thing, since it expired in 1994 (for context, the game is presumably set in 2003). BLEGH.
  • For that matter, doing cruel things in the games (especially to Nancy) almost always gives you a game over. This is inverted in Danger by Design, where you can get someone fired but are merely given a Bittersweet Ending, and in Legend of the Crystal Skull, where you are required to do some rather mean things to a poor shopkeeper in order to complete the game.
• The Homestar Runner game Peasant's Quest:
  • Attempting to attack Poor Gary, the old horse, will result in him killing you with a kick (after the game says that you're only hurting him because "you kinda suck at this game"). You still have to spook him to progress, though.
  • Lowering the baby down the well and then leaving the screen without retrieving him will kill you. The game doesn't even bother with an explanation, it's just so disgusted with you that it won't let you play anymore. Throwing the baby in the lake does not have this consequence, but only because he's an amazingly skilled swimmer for his age.
• In Police Quest 4: Open Season, you can decide to use your gun on innocent civilians. The first time you do, the narrator simply chews you out and demands you put the gun away. Insist once or twice (depending on the person), and your character actually does shoot them (albeit only the shot is heard), causing the game to end in failure on the spot.
• Return to Zork has The Guardian. If you kill someone you're not supposed to kill, or take something that doesn't belong to you without permission, he takes (almost) all of your items, which is a pretty good incentive to play nice.^note Although you can get past this. Kill someone you don't need to anymore and watch as they make a very overly-dramatic death animation. Drop all your items down, and the guardian will take away your nothing. Then you can pick up your items, drop them, then go on a killing spree.
• Attempt too viciously to get into Katrina Gibson's pants in Snatcher and she will throw you out.
• In Thy Dungeonman 3, attempting to kill a plot-important bird causes the bird to peck you to death.
• Unavowed: On multiple occasions, you have the option to kill supernatural creatures, or allow them to live. (You get achievements for every choice, so you're encouraged to experiment.) In the endgame, you have to pass several obstacles, and you can summon the aforementioned creatures to get them to help with specific ones. If you chose to kill any of them? Better hope you can find an alternative solution. Thankfully, it doesn't render the game unwinnable at any point.
• The X-Files Game will end your game if you do something really stupid, such as shooting innocent people or pissing off the wrong person by annoying them (such as ringing the receptionist bell too many times or being an asshole to specific people). You'll usually find yourself dead, fired, or sent to jail.

Fighting Games

• In the story mode of Bushido Blade, you must make sure to follow the code of Bushido when fighting your enemies. If you kill them during their pre-battle speech, throw sand in their eyes, attack them In the Back, or otherwise breach the code, your playthrough will be brutally cut short by a random message berating you for it, before the game boots you back to the title screen.
• Super Smash Bros.:
  • Cuccos show up in Super Smash Bros. for Wii U/3DS. If you hit one, you'll get mobbed. If you pick it up and throw it at somebody, they'll get mobbed. If a Cucco gets harmed by a stage hazard, everybody gets mobbed.
  • In one level based on the Game and Watch game Oil Panic, attacking the customers will result in the player taking damage.
• Cuccos appeared long before that in Super Smash Flash 2. You can pick one up and use it as recovery, throw it at opponents, or you can attack it. Guess what happens when you attack it long enough.

First-Person Shooter

• In GoldenEye (1997) and its Spiritual Successor Perfect Dark, killing civilians results in mission failure. Shooting the scientists, but not killing them completely, may cause them to shoot you with the DD44, a powerful handgun.
• Halo:
  • Throughout all of the games, killing enough marines will get them to turn against you and kill you. The exception are the plot-important ones with Gameplay Ally Immortality, as you can't kill them — but they will still turn against you if you kill enough marines, and it's still impossible to kill them.
  • In Halo: Combat Evolved, if you kill your captain in the first mission, you'll be locked inside the bridge and a squad of invincible marines will rush in to butcher you.
  • Killing a civilian in Halo: Reach causes Noble Six to spontaneously drop dead.
  • In later games, being a team-killing fucktard in multiplayer too often can get you booted (even if it was a genuine accident).
• Deus Ex has a minor one: if you took the violent approach and shot up NSF rebels, your armorer will reprimand you and remind JC that the UN troopers are peacekeepers first and soldiers second, and will withhold extra lethal ammo, instead giving you the multi-purpose multi-tools.
• In Marathon 2: Durandal and Infinity, blasting enough humans or S'pht'Kr results in them turning against you. This was carried over to Marathon's Spiritual Successor, Halo, as mentioned above.
• Security guards in Half-Life will attack you if you start killing them. In both expansion packs, killing friendlies before the game proper starts (during the training course in Opposing Force or during the prologue in Blue Shift) results in an immediate Non-Standard Game Over.
  SUBJECT: Adrian Shephard
  STATUS: Awaiting court-martial
  • A similar technique is used in the original game if you kill some NPCs vital for game progress:
    SUBJECT: Freeman
    STATUS: Evaluation terminated
    POSTMORTEM: Subject failed to effectively utilize human assets in achievement of goal
• Metroid Prime 3: Corruption has soldiers and maintenance workers in the first area that you cannot harm, but if you keep shooting them, a turret appears and the ship's AI warns you to cease fire. Shooting more or shooting the turret will cause it to fire at you. Wreck it, and a stronger one appears. Wreck that one and an even stronger one appears that will instantly kill you, can't be destroyed, and you can't dodge its attack.
• No One Lives Forever would cause immediate mission failure if you killed civilians or even killed monkeys (citing you for "excessive simian casualties", a GoldenEye (1997) Shout-Out). This was actually plot-relevant, as the Big Bad leader of H.A.R.M. is revealed to be a drunken civilian character who showed up in every level of the game, and if you could Just Shoot Him, it would create a plot hole.
  • Also, don't shoot Bruno's corpse. Although if you do, you'll probably figure out a twist coming later…
• Call of Juarez prevents you from corpse-beating (shooting or hitting dead enemies), and even causes an immediate game over if you somehow manage to do it. This is actually plot-relevant, as at the very end of the game, the Big Bad only appears to be dead after the first time you fight him; he returns for more shortly afterwards. The Video Game Cruelty Punishment prevents you from shooting him in the head while he's down and making him dead for real.
• While Duke Nukem can kill lap-dancers in Duke Nukem 3D, his reward is only to get more enemies to spawn.
• Operation Flashpoint is a bit more lenient than most: you can "accidentally" kill one or two of your teammates during a firefight before the rest gun you down, but if there are no enemies nearby when you kill a teammate, you're as good as dead.
• S.W.A.T.
  • In SWAT 3, your fellow officers will immediately shoot you if you kill any of them.
  • In SWAT 4, you can fail the mission by shooting the bad guys too much or without warning.
• If you shoot an instructor in America's Army, it teleports you to a Leavenworth jail cell in a Non-Standard Game Over.
• In Call of Duty: World at War's DS version, meleeing an ally will result in him returning the favor — killing you in one hit.
• Inverted in Modern Warfare 2. Trying to save the civilians in the infamous No Russian scenario by killing their attackers nets you an instant game over. Likewise, trying to block their line of fire by standing in front of them will result in them just shooting you. The most you can do is not actively participate in the slaughter. In the German/Japanese version, this is all you can do; shooting the civilians in those versions nets you an instant game over, as well.
  • "Hardcore Ricochet" game modes were added to MW2 multiplayer, where friendly fire only inflicts damage on yourself. More "Hardcore Ricochet" modes were added to Modern Warfare 3.
• And in the first Modern Warfare game, there's a point in one mission (the one that flashbacks to 15 years ago) where you encounter a wild dog, which your partner tells you to simply avoid. If you decide to take "Shoot the Dog" too literally here, well… the end result is the dog's pack swarming you, like the Cucco Revenge Squad, only with ANGRY DOGS. While a little luck and a little skill will see you and the Captain through, it's just a pointless waste of time and risk. Your partner berates you as such if you survive.
• In Star Trek: Elite Force Virtual Voyager mode, you can go on a psychotic rampage if the mood takes you, but it will invariably lead to either a brigade of Starfleet Security phasering the shit out of you, or your character being beamed into the brig, where a random character will walk up and ask What the Hell, Player?
• Shogo: Mobile Armor Division has one. If you shoot at your commander in the opening level, he'll give the order "Kill Him," and a group of soldiers will rush you and continue to attack until you're dead.
• Clive Barker's Undying: Yes, the remaining servants are doomed. No, that doesn't mean it's okay for you to shoot them.
• Killing the Little Sisters in BioShock actually makes the game more difficult than sparing them. Killing the Little Sisters gets you the most ADAM at once. But sparing them ultimately nets you more ADAM from Tenenbaum's gifts that she'll send for sparing every few Sisters. On top of that, some powerful plasmids can only be obtained in these gifts. So, the only reason to kill the Sisters is if you feel like being a jerk. (Doing the math, you actually get the most ADAM by saving them up to the point where you get a gift that increases the amount of ADAM you get… and then killing them for the rest of the game.)
• Lampshaded in Serious Sam 2 in the Kleer planet. After dispatching some Kleers who are burning a giant doll of Sam on a stake, shooting the doll itself damages you and causes Sam to exclaim "I knew it. I KNEW IT!" Also in The Second Encounter, where one secret takes you to a miniature set of the final level of the first game. Blowing up all the scenery and props nets you some items, but if you so much as touch where the mini-you is? Instant death.
• Portal 2 inverts this with GLaDOS specifically telling you that, since the puzzle room exit does not contain an emancipation field, you should not abuse the opportunity to grant the companion cube freedom. Despite having the player expressing care more than cruelty, she still punishes you by detonating it in your arms.
  GLaDOS: I think that one was about to say "I love you".
• Redneck Rampage has you end each level by hitting your brother with a crowbar. Shooting him instead has the game kill you a few seconds later.
• Killing any innocent programs in TRON 2.0 will end your game immediately with the now-legendary "This program has performed an illegal operation" message.
• Left 4 Dead:
  • There is no official system in place for people who intentionally harm and team kill other players, but some 3rd party servers have modded systems in place where any intentional friendly fire is reversed back to the shooter, making the player hurt himself instead of his target, and other servers will instantly kick or ban players who try to grief others this way. Depending on the griefer, they will try to get themselves killed anyway to hurt the team.
  • For people who are not griefing others but are tired of dealing with the less than stellar survivor bots, killing a survivor off makes the game a lot harder since now you are down one player and are more vulnerable to attacks from zombies.
• The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay allowed you to kill many of the inmates you encounter, primarily in Single Max. It becomes much more difficult in Double Max; attacking any of them that are in the vicinity of gun turrets just means the player is Too Dumb to Live, but it can still be done. Triple Max really exemplifies this particular trope, however: you are dropped into a small secluded room for daily exercise with an incoherent and unresponsive inmate, whom you can easily kill. Doing so results in the Butcher Bay computer announcing that you have been sentenced to death, and it starts injecting kill poison into your bloodstream through your cryogenic suit.
• PAYDAY: The Heist has a punishment system in place for players who go out of their way to kill civilians (or done by accident thanks to the lemming behavior of the civilians). Every civilian killed adds a 5-second delay to your negotiations for your release should you be apprehended by the cops and each civilian killed incurs a monetary penalty at the end of a successful heist, which can make leveling up more tedious.
  • PAYDAY 2 uses the same punishment for killing civilians as the first game, except the time delay for release from custody is now an extra 30 seconds per civilian, enough to make you wait out multiple assault waves if you kill more than a couple, and the monetary penalty is directly deducted from your funds, making it remain even if you quit or restart the mission.
  • PAYDAY 3 ramps up the monetary penalty from a flat fee depending on difficulty to deducting a portion of the heist's total profits, meaning even a single civilian casualty will cost you a fair chunk of cash and killing too many will gut your profits extremely quickly.
• Far Cry 3; if you choose to make an evil choice in the end, karma ends up punishing you for it. Whereas if you make a good choice, karma ends up punishing the source of punishment in the former. Also, attacking any friendlies, or even just driving into their car by accident, will result in all allies in the area turning on you. Thankfully, this doesn't follow over after you've killed/evaded them.
• In Shadow Warrior (2013), there are no friendlies outside of cutscenes, only demons and yakuza, but there are the neutral critter bunnies. Killing them is totally ok, except when they're having sex. Then you only kill one of them, and the other turns black and glowing, gets insanely fast, metal music starts playing, and it starts beating on you. It's got a moderate amount of hit points and does minor damage which is healed fairly easily, but the damn things are so fast that you can barely hit them.
• In Judge Dredd: Dredd vs. Death, killing civilians or surrendering perps, or using incendiary rounds on anything other than zombies, all cost you points. Lose enough points and the Special Judiciary Service ("Who watches the Watchmen? We do.") turn up to gun you down. Amusingly, they show up in places they shouldn't even have access to, including the final mission on Deadworld, an evil alternate universe populated by the undead.
• In Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, when playing on the Hostage Rescue game mode, if you shoot one of the two hostages on the map, you will lose a massive amount of money, which could've been used to buy something like an AWP or armor.
  • Additionally, killing enough teammates in the Competitive gamemode, or doing enough damage, will result in you getting kicked from the match and having to suffer a temporary ban from playing Competitive or Wingman, which can last up to a week. Doing this enough might cause an Overwatch^note ''CS:GO''s player review anti-cheat system report to be filed against you, which might result in a permanent ban from playing the Competitive modes!
• In Dark Watch, you are allowed to commit as many atrocities as you like while playing as an evil vampire and get away with only your spiritual guide chewing you out for your deeds and occasionally your momentary allies turning on you and requiring you to kill them. However, during the Hangtown level, if you choose to gun down your fellow Darkwatch agents, they will fire back, and they will keep coming in endless waves until you die, and given that they are armed with silver bullets, it shouldn't be too hard to bring you down. This is the only part of the game where you are seriously punished for your evil acts.
• In Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019), there are plenty of civilians, children, and innocents caught in the warfare. Deliberately killing any of them will get you a "Are you serious?" and boot you back to the mission selection screen.

4X

• Civilization
  • Use one nuke, and your popularity drops considerably. Use a lot of nukes, and the global environment can collapse!
  • Even without nukes, being a warlord has consequences. Engaging in conquest, even early on, will likely make trading and diplomacy pointless for the rest of the game because no one will give you a reasonable deal, not to mention you'll be rendered an acceptable target for other civs to attack with minimal diplomatic penalties. Earning a reputation as a warmonger basically rules out any course of action other than world conquest, as you'll be under attack frequently and unable to gain anything without force anyway. At the most extreme, you'll be declared a threat to global stability by the likes of Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun.
• In Europa Universalis III, there is the 'raze' option, by which you can order your armies to raze a territory. Doing so drastically lowers taxation and production income in the province for years, as well as lowering the territory's manpower contribution for years to come.
• Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri:
  • Using a Planet Buster causes every other faction in the game to declare war on you. More than that, using Planet Busters (or just excessively damaging the environment in general) is a bad idea — when you hit Planet, Planet hits back, sending a nearly overwhelming swarm of its worst mind worms to chew through your bases' defenses. In Alpha Centauri, planet destroys you!
  • "Minor" atrocities like using nerve gas, using biological warfare, or nerve-stapling or destroying base populations will result in the planetary council imposing trade sanctions against you, and the faction you committed the crime against will almost certainly remain your sworn enemy for the rest of the game.^note But note that you can avoid most of this by repealing the UN Charter. This makes "Minor" atrocities legal, although Planet Busters still cause all-out war, factions you committed "minor" atrocities against will still hate you, and planet despoilment still causes Planet to go berserk on you.
• Using nuclear weapons in Rise of Nations reduces the "Armageddon Clock". Too many means the game ends in apocalypse.
• In a very blatant example, in Superpower, using (along with the nuclear armed AI nations) too many nukes results in not a cool explosion scene, but a game over message saying you will get no cool explosion scene because making the earth uninhabitable for human life is not an accomplishment.
• In Master of Orion 2, every AI faction instantly dislikes a player using biological weapons. Anything else up to Stellar Converters is okay, though.
• Stellaris:
  • It is possible — easy, in fact — to be an oppressive bastard. Slavery, genocide, torture, and forced relocation are all things your space empire can engage in over the course of a game. Just don't expect anyone else to like you for it. If this "anyone" is a Fallen Empire of the Enigmatic Observer type, well, you just might find yourself on the receiving end of a little retribution.
  • The Unrest mechanics make it harder to keep the slaves under control. Normally, your planet's Unrest rating isn't anything to worry about until it gets above 50%. Enslaved pops, on the other hand, start to make problems for you with as little as 10% Unrest rating, and a successful uprising can lead to them taking your planet right out from under you. To add insult to injury, they'll most likely start allying themselves to your rivals as well, forcing you to choose between giving up on reclaiming your territory or getting into a war on multiple fronts.
  • Aggressive, warlike empires who keep hammering at their neighbours' territory had best be very confident in their military strength, because sooner or later, everyone else will swiftly form federations and start hammering back.
  • Empires founded entirely around bloodshed and slaughter such as Driven Exterminators, Fanatic Purifiers, and Devouring Swarms take penalties to diplomacy on par with bringing about the end times. Although they mostly do not care, as the majority of diplomacy options are disabled on their own end too. The only exception is Driven Exterminators with other Driven Exterminators — two swarms of bio-hating robots can agree to an alliance.
  • Think very carefully before accepting the deal from "The End of the Cycle". You may get a significant power boost to your empire, but at a steep cost: After a specified amount of time has passed, your entire empire, save for one tiny colony, will be taken over and converted into an undead army hell-bent on destroying the galaxy. Even on the off chance that this army of the damned is routed and the galaxy is saved, your sole remaining colony will be slapped with a diplomacy penalty so steep that the remaining civilizations of the galaxy will likely hunt it down next.
• In the third Orc mission of Warcraft 3, attacking Grom Hellscream's town will cause him to turn hostile. Considering what Grom is doing in the story at this point, it might not count as videogame cruelty, but regardless, attacking an ally turns him into an enemy.

Light Gun Game

• In Operation Wolf, shooting civilians or hostages increases the player's damage meter. Shooting animals, on the other hand, is rewarded.

MMORPG

• World of Warcraft:
  • The game used to have a thing called Dishonorable Kills. If you killed a player of much lower level than you or an Non-Player Character marked as a civilian, you would be given a dishonorable kill, which would affect your rank. This was removed during a major revamp of the PvP system.
  • In the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, there's an achievement you can get by killing fifteen turkeys in three minutes, and there are only a few places where there are enough of them to make it possible. Completing this achievement causes all turkeys and many other formerly nonaggressive creatures to become hostile to you and flocks of enraged turkeys will occasionally spawn and attempt to peck you to death. Fortunately (or not), the effect is temporary, and it's nearly impossible for them to kill a character who's of a sufficient level to belong in the zone. The achievement can also turn dryads against you.
  • Killing normal animals (in self-defense or otherwise) in the Borean Tundra of Northrend will cover you in their blood, and the usually friendly DEHTA members in the area will attack you until it dries after 3 minutes or you wash it off in a body of water. They have no problem with you killing Scourged animals, players, or humanoids, of course.
• Guild Wars used to have a reference to the "Cucco Revenge Squad" described above — normally, killing animals is fine, but there was one particular moa bird which, if killed, would cause a horde of other moa birds to appear out of nowhere and attack you.
  • Also referenced in Guild Wars 2. Attacking chickens in Ebonhawke spawns incredibly tough chickens that attack you. They aren't strong enough to do serious damage, though, and can (eventually) be killed.
• Age Of Wushu is an open PvP world, but if you kill any "innocent" player (those minding their own business and not actively in a PvP event, like Spying, Script Stealing, Cart Escorts, etc.), you gain infamy points, which remove themselves very slowly, and only if you are online. Any infamy points will turn your name orange and label you as a player killer. Gain enough infamy, and your name will turn red and NPC guards and "Constable" players will come after you. If you are killed with a Red name, you're sent to jail and must remain online trapped in a small jail cell the entire time until your infamy goes back down to zero. If you manage to get your infamy so high that your name becomes purple, your infamy will no longer decrease with time, and once defeated by any means, you'll be instantly sent to DEATH ROW, and have your character executed by public beheading the following day. Once executed, your character is not deleted, but respawned with a debuff that halves your stats for 24 logged-in hours. Alternatively, any player that's killed by another player has the choice, in certain situations, to place a bounty on the player who killed them, and have them confined to jail for an amount of time depending on how much the bounty was.
• In the upcoming MMO Star Citizen, shooting a pilot who has bailed out of his ship is considered so reprehensible that even some pirates will turn on you for it, and it puts a huge bounty on your head if anyone catches you doing it.
• MMOs, understandably, may restrict a player's access to their games if they violate the game's terms of service, but some have gotten creative and implemented in-game jails that contain and penalize players who behave poorly. Typically, these are areas segregated from the rest of the game that can only be reached by having an in-game moderator transport you there, and you will be restricted from doing anything other than chat with a moderator to explain yourself. Final Fantasy XIV has Mordion Gaol, for instance. In most cases such as this, if the player agrees to change their behavior, the moderator will permit them to return to the game. In other cases, such as Everquest II, the punishment may be much more severe: players who break rules in EQII may be sent to a "prison server", where they are permanently segregated from the rest of the game.
• Runescape has a unique way of dealing with cheaters: if the game detects that a player is using bots to cheat, it will banish the cheater to Botany Bay, where they will be dressed down by the Botfinder General in front of an audience of other players. Afterwards, the audience will be given a chance to vote on the cheater's punishment: crushed by the Claw of Justice, devoured by an abyssal wyrm, or vaporized by the gods. All of these also come with a permaban for the cheater.

Platform Game

• Conker's Bad Fur Day eventually punishes you in the multiplayer for excessive teamkilling in the form of your own teammates labeling you a traitor and attempting to kill you (at least for that life). The enemy A.I. would still want to blow your brains out, so no hiding out with them. Usually accompanied by a neat little sound clip when one of your buddies blows your brains out along the lines of "Fucking traitor!"
• In the Sonic Adventure series, if you severely abuse your Chao, they won't listen to you or let you pick them up, and if you're really cruel, they won't eat, and will even die earlier, without a chance to reincarnate.
• Bravoman featured a friendly robot at the end of each level who would give you power-ups and life-restoring food. You could punch it to net a series of funny messages like "OW! What are you doing?" and "You will regret hitting a friend". You will indeed if you do it too many times, because the robot will get pissed at you and won't show up anymore for 4-5 levels. The game is already Nintendo Hard by itself (and almost without healing items in-game), so it's not a wise choice to "hit friends"!
• There's a truly bizarre variant in Mega Man Zero 2. The Crystal Cave area is full of Reploids under enemy control; you're supposed to save them, but if you kill them instead, you get a 1-up! (Maybe the life you took has been added to your own?) On the other hand, this is hell on your rank for the mission, and they won't become helpful Non Player Characters at the Resistance Base like other Reploids you've saved.
• In Lyle in Cube Sector, a couple of puzzles require you to batter around a cow and a baby bird, respectively. Don't do this more than absolutely necessary, or else they will wreak horrible revenge on you.
• In Elf, aside from ubiquitous bad guys that you have to shoot, there are also cute little animals like bunnies and ducklings. Shooting them brings up messages like "boo!" and so forth. However, shoot too many of them, and once you complete the game, the beautiful girl you were trying to save has become really ugly.
• In Jak II: Renegade, you can 'accidentally' hit civilians once without repercussion, but killing them gets the Guard on your ass. Trying the same thing on wastelanders in Jak 3: Wastelander just gets you shot at and occasionally killed.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • One level in Super Mario World involves crossing an entire river by jumping on top of various dolphins that can only be found in this level and in one secret area. In the Japanese version, you can actually let Yoshi eat the dolphins as if they were enemies. Unfortunately, doing so will prevent any of the dolphins from returning, since said dolphins cannot respawn, therefore making the level much harder than it is supposed to be. This is not present in international versions, however.
  • In New Super Mario Bros. Wii and New Super Mario Bros. U, you can screw with the other players by doing things like throwing them into pits and knocking them into enemies. Trying stuff like that in Super Mario 3D World is not recommended, since all the players share lives this time around.
  • In the modern versions of the Game & Watch game Chef, you play as Princess Peach cooking meals for Yoshi. Feeding him cooked foods over time will make him grow, lay an egg, and have the egg hatch into a baby Yoshi, upon which the cycle continues. However, you can also feed Yoshi burnt foods, which will instantly reverse one step of the process (though you still get points for doing this).
• In Conquest of the Crystal Palace, you can try to buy stuff from Kim's shop when you're low on gold. Do it too many times, however, and she'll get mad at you and throw you out.
• Subverted in Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando: On Todano, there's a bus full of tourists and you can continue to slaughter as many of them as you like. The Helpdesk messages will tell you to stop and after 2 more messages escalating in intensity, a final message will tell you that you have been reported to the authorities and that you will be punished. This results in the release of an enemy — one that you are well able to handle by this point in the game, making it a slap on the wrist.
• It is possible to suck up Eddie in Rockman 4 Minus ∞ for an item, but doing so leaves you without his guidance in certain levels, and you get less points in the End-Game Results Screen. Proto Man explains:
  "Your rookie ... Eddy. It's regrettable about him. I've never expected that his core have not found in the ruin of Wily's fortless ...! Are you trembling? I see... as I heard that his signal disappeared near you, you saw his last moment... didn't you? Don't mind, you had done best effort to him."
• In Ninja Five O, if you accidentally kill a hostage, you suffer half a lifebar's worth of damage.
• In The Simpsons: Bart Simpson's Escape from Camp Deadly, Lisa will help Bart out by giving him items, but if Bart tries throwing a boomerang at her, she will drop it offscreen. However, in some cases, there's nothing preventing you from annoying her after you get the item from her, with no consequences.
• McDonald's Treasure Land Adventure has one level where you avoid tsunamis aboard a ship with friendly penguins. Attacking said penguins will cause them to try and headbutt you.
• In Pinobee, stinging the Fairy results in her not upgrading your dash move, making the game harder, and being really nasty can end the game prematurely.
• The Messenger (2018) has an optional Voodoo Mask that you can acquire in the DLC. It has the power to grant its wearer incredible strength... ...but it requires the fear of death from a Greed Demon to fully activate, which means attempting to sacrifice Quarble. You don't actually go through with the sacrifice, since it's just the fear and not a corpse that is required, but Quarble gets so pissed off at you for even attempting it that he bails on the spot. Keep in mind it's Quarble who rewinds your ass whenever you die, so if you're not a platforming god when you make THE DEAL, your next demise will usher you to the title screen.
• In The Goonies II, talking to Konami Man will fully replenish Mikey's health. If Mikey hits him (either with his fists or the hammer), then Konami Man will refuse to heal him for the rest of the game, even if you continue the game from a Password Save.

Puzzle Game

• The classic PC game trilogy God of Thunder deducts a chunk of points any time you kill an NPC (and they come back when you leave the screen anyway). The first time you do this, Odin explains and lampshades the penalty. "My son, I know it is fun to kill people…"
• In Mole Mania, at various parts in the levels, Grandpa Mole will offer to fully restore your health once per screen. If you speak to him just after getting healed, he'll get a little annoyed and tell you to get going already. Keep bugging him and he'll get increasingly agitated with you, and eventually you will piss him off to the point of hostility, resulting in an instant Non-Standard Game Over.^note If you want to bug him just for the heck of it and not get a Game Over, stop talking to him and leave that screen when he only responds with Visible Silence, as that is the last time you can safely annoy him.

Real-Time Strategy

• In the first Homeworld you can attack the Bentusi. At first, they ask you to stop, but if you don't, they wipe you out.
• Outpost 2 has no issue with the player destroying military and industrial buildings belonging to the opposing colony, but targeting civic buildings will cause your own colony's morale to drop. Though at war, the two sides fight exclusively using automated tanks, and they don't hate each other so much that they can stomach the thought of murdering civilians.

Roguelike

• Against the Storm: If you're desperate, you can raid a trader. You'll mange to steal about half of their stock and a cornerstone... but (A) you'll piss off the queen with impatience, (B) some of your settlers can die, and (C) word will spread about your banditry and traders will go out of their way to avoid your settlement. Only do this if your life is more of a Hell than what you're about to give the trader.
• The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth:
  • Zigzagged with angel and devil rooms, which have a chance to appear after a boss fight, contain powerful items, and are mutually exclusive. The items in devil rooms cost hearts, while the items in angel rooms are free. Some 'good' actions like giving money to a beggar and donating to the shop will increase your angel room chance, while some 'bad' ones like paying a devil beggar increase your devil room chance. However, other 'bad' actions like killing a beggar, holding a pentagram and blowing up a shopkeeper's corpse increase both your angel and devil room chance. That's right, God himself rewards you for murdering beggars. And to complicate things further, before the Repentance DLC devil rooms were almost universally considered to be the more powerful option and Angel Rooms were mostly to get the Key to the Mega Satan fight.
  • Also zigzagged with the two sparable bosses. Sparing Baby Plum unlocks the Plum Flute, but sparing Hornfel gets you nothing, while killing him unlocks Brimstone Bombs.
  • In Repentance, attempting to blow up a bomb bum will cause them to retaliate by filling the room with troll bombs.
• Death Road to Canada:
  • Acting like a Jerkass in random events can cause your group's Morale to drop unless you have a character with low Loyalty.
  • Robbing a Trader's Camp can have nasty consequences, such as heavy hits to Morale and health.
  • Killing the Prime Minister of Canada causes a Non-Standard Game Over.
• Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo's Dungeon doesn't offer that luxury. In exchange, you can only steal one rare item (and that's the only way to unlock the Thief class, by the way), Mog (as Dungeon Hero X) is the strongest enemy in the dungeon who doesn't scale above Chocobo's level, and can be overleveled against (but even then, beware Mog Beam X), and you can't just trawl it to the stairs.
• In NetHack:
  • Killing your own pet has results that vary from a severe loss of luck (yes, this is a stat in the game, albeit a hidden one) to the wrath of your god, to… on rare occasion, in the case of genuinely accidental deaths, the possibility of nothing at all. (On the other hand, sacrificing your pet's corpse on a god's altar will piss your god off.) Eating your pet is also a very bad idea — but only if it's a little/large/dog or kitten/housecat/large cat, even if they weren't pets at all. You can eat your former pet giant just fine for the strength raise, but that wild and vicious housepet? Off-limits, or you're screwed.
  • Likewise, cannibalism is a big no-no to non-orc or caveman characters. As well as the karma hit, the game sneakily modifies your character with a hidden ability that turns all monsters in the game from 'unreasonably aggressive' to 'horrifying unappeasable zerg swarm'. Murder of a friendly human (and only a human) carries a large penalty, including loss of intrinsic telepathy if you have it. And for the biggest sin of all, murdering a friendly human being and sacrificing them to your gods? Opens a portal to hell. Ironically, this is a good thing if you're Chaotic — then the demons summoned will be friendly, and there's a chance one of them might be a Boss from the end game, whom you now won't have to fight.
• Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: You can pick up items from an in-dungeon store and, even if you have no money, attempt to run off with it. Players assume that they can make it to the next floor up with their items and get away scot-free, thereby making the game easier by saving money. What you then realize in short order is that the Kecleon shopkeeper you attacked has the highest stats in the game, moves twice for every one move you make, can attack 2-5 times per move, can attack from 2 spaces away and from behind other Kecleon. Assuming you survive the one (hint: you won't), there will then be a sea of them respawning for every six steps you take, meaning that you can potentially receive *96* attacks from the strongest mon in the game for every 1 move you make - you will not make it to the stairs. Think you can try to use an item to steal something and make a swift getaway? Nice try, items that let you boost your own stats or leave the dungeon (such as the Escape Orb) no longer work either. For trying to steal, you are thus beaten to a pulp and wake up (having been knocked out cold) back at your base, with half your items and all of your money stolen from you in retribution. The items that you retain are turned into Plain Seeds. Incidentally, stealing from a dungeon shop and fighting the respawing Kecleon is also the only way to recruit one… which requires you to be at Lv. 99 or above, have the rarest item in the game, and have the skill 'Fast Friend' which is only available to certain mons after you max out their IQ. But even then with all that, the odds are still a miniscule 0.1%. Good luck, you're going to going need.
• Spelunky:
  • Shopkeepers will fight back with shotguns if you start any trouble (shoplifting, blowing up part of their shop, hitting the damsel in a kissing booth, and so on). In addition, for the next level, all the shopkeepers will be hostile towards you, and there'll be one waiting at the exit. Luckily, they'll calm down after that level. If you kill any shopkeeper (even indrectly, say, by rolling a boulder through their shop), on the other hand, every shopkeeper will be hostile towards you for the rest of the game.
  • Spelunky also has altars to Kali, upon which you can sacrifice live or dead creatures for favors. If you destroy one, Kali will be angered and attack with spiders. Destroying another will shackle your leg to a ball and chain, really slowing you down. Destroying yet another will cause the level to instantly go dark and summon a ghost.
• In Tallowmere, you're given the opportunity before each run to sacrifice a bucket of kittens in order to increase your health and make the dungeon easier. However, doing so will lock you out of certain achievements (except one, which requires you to kill as many as possible), and each kitten you kill records your score on a lower-tier high score list.
• Zettai Hero Project: It is possible to steal from stores in dungeons. If you do, though, you will be pursued relentlessly by high-level dragons for the remainder of your time on that floor. Particularly crafty players can use this as a chance to power-level by taking on and beating the dragons, though.

Role-Playing Game

• The Brief and Meaningless Adventure of Hero Man:
  • Played with when it comes to the Sign Maker's key. The player can buy it from the thief and return it to the Sign Maker to get a hint about the Legend Sword. If the player buys the key and uses it to enter the basement, they are given one more choice where they can either buy the spare key or refuse. Buying it results in Hero Man getting arrested while refusing results in the thief getting arrested. In the latter case, Hero Man is a Karma Houdini for using and breaking the first key without the Sign Maker's permission.
  • Getting the Legend Sword without helping the Sign Maker first means the player knows the Sign Maker is missing his key, but refused to help him despite having prior knowledge. This results in the party being trapped in Lord Doldrum's throne room somehow.
  • Any ending where Hero Man betrays the prince ends poorly. If he steals the prince's key and goes into the Tower, he'll end up trapped on an isolated island. If he gets the prince to go to the Tower, but breaks his promise to accompany the prince, Hero Man will be blamed for the prince's death.
• Corruption of Laetitia: There are all sorts of actions that Celeste can take to increase her corruption level, but many of these means losing out on potential allies (including the only early-game healer) or possibly having to fight them, requiring the player to adopt a mindset of Pragmatic Villainy to raise their corruption without shooting themselves in the foot. An example of this is the option to burn a town rather than conquer it in a tactics minigame. While burning the town takes less effort and allows the player to loot dead bodies for souls, doing so locks them out of the town's stores and sidequests.
• Dyztopia: Post-Human RPG:
  • If the player set up Edgar, Chase, or Kiyota for romance by getting them to a link level of 3, only to pivot to Genesis or Eliza, they will be heartbroken. If they go down Genesis's romance route only to state that they only want sex from her, Akira's relationship with her will be forever ruined. Most infamously, the player can have Akira refuse to forgive Runi. All of these will result in "Broken Syncs," which will prevent the link level of the affected character from increasing. In the case of romance options, this will cause Akira to gain elemental weaknesses too.
  • If the player has no link levels with anyone, refuses to forgive Runi, and refuses to save Runi from Gemini, this will result in the worst ending where Gemini fully possesses Runi and kills everyone in the party except for Akira, who is then killed by Zazz.
• Exploring in Might and Magic 2, you can stumble across a peaceful goblin village... and choose to attack. To prove to the player that it's not always good to kill goblins, it would load as many as the game could handle.
• In the 2004 remake of The Bard's Tale, your character was an unmitigated bastard at times. This often came back to bite him on the rear. One town he accidentally burnt down by releasing a dragon set him on fire; being Snarky with a child gets you kicked where it counts; and if you drive off the lovable pooch at the start of the game, later on you have to fight an undead version of a previous enemy rather than get an ally.
• Ubiquitous in Ultima IV. The series is between Big Bads, and the point of the game is to develop the main character into a beacon of virtue for the people. Breaking into people's houses and taking their stuff actively distances the player from completing the game. Interestingly, this goes beyond simple cruelty to also boasting of one's accomplishments (breaking Humility), not being the last to flee a battle (breaking Valor), etc.
• Ultima VIII: Pagan would dispense with the whole concept of gauging the player's morality. Instead, if the Avatar was ever caught stealing, causing bodily harm, or committing any other misdemeanor in the city, he would promptly see the town sorcerer teleport to the crime scene and (graphically) blow him up. No trial, no defense, no escape. There was absolutely nothing the player could do but accept his fate.
• If you give your seemingly useless companion Terry Hintz away in LISA: The Painful, he'll return when you fight the Gents, but as a boss — one of the hardest bosses in the game.
• Shadowrun for the SNES:
  • Attacking an Innocent Bystander causes the game to punish you by taking karma points, which are needed to build up your stats. Attacking a dog will kill you (that's your totem animal). (Presumably due to a bug, you'd get the same penalty for shooting the Big Bad's corpse after you've beaten him.)
  • Also, shooting a fellow Shadowrunner (if they aren't in your party) causes them to instantly shoot back. They don't get aggressive, they just return fire, shot for shot. Of course, they have infinite HP and you don't, so obviously it's not wise to keep shooting them... Now, the odd thing is that once you've hired them, they'll calmly stand there and take fire without retaliating, and then they'll simply respawn in whatever bar you found them in and let you hire them again.
• E.V.O.: Search for Eden:
  • It's possible to kill a certain friendly NPC. If you eat the meat it leaves behind (which, when eaten from enemies, is used to heal yourself and gain evo points), it instantly kills you.
  • This is true with all friendly NPC meat to varying degrees of penalty. This is especially frustrating in the area with giant bees carrying off baby amphibians, as it is hard not to kill them, and there is no way to differentiate bee meat from baby meat. Of course, it's only a piddly 7 HP compared to the whopping 999 from the elder, but when you consider your HP will still likely be in the low double digits by that point, it still hurts.
• GLITCHED: If you leave Gus to his fate at the beginning of the game, your save file will get corrupted and trying to continue the game from that save will result in a black screen with random sprites floating down the screen. Better start a new game and save Gus!
• In the Neverwinter Nights module "Kingmaker," if you kill an innocent civilian, your weapon comes to life and kills you. Not surprising, considering that the weapon is actually your grandfather, a more-or-less Knight Templar paladin.
• Go on. Treat your companions in Neverwinter Nights 2 like complete shit. See how many of them stick with you at the end-game.
• Don't Escape: 4 Days To Survive: On Day 3 with the threat of bandits raiding your hideout, the player can obtain rat poison and comes across the food supply of the bandits, having the option to poison it. This is the only time the game outright stops and asks the player if they really want to go through with poisoning the food. It's a way to sabotage the bandits, but the game outright says that it's a very immoral choice and the player needs to confirm to go through with it. Should the player poison the food, some of the bandits will die from the poison, and Sarge will realize that it was the protagonist's group that did it. And since one of his men died from the poison, he swears revenge on the group, even if the player has managed to persuade Sarge and his men to leave the bandits. This makes it impossible to get a perfect score during the raid that night, meaning no improved parameters for the player.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • All the games in the series have a bounty system associated with crimes. You can do whatever you want, but if you get caught, you have to pay the consequences.
  • Zig-zagged in Daggerfall: if you commit a crime in a town (murder, pickpocketing, theft, breaking/entering, assaulting a guard, accidentally clicking the "rest" button), the City Guards will come after you in droves. However, you'll only be arrested and suffer the reputation drop if they manage to hit you, and dodging their attacks can actually be fairly easy; thus, although there are some harsh punishments for crimes (literal years in prison for the worst offenses), you can easily become a Karma Houdini who escapes all penalties. Even then, you'll only get thrown in prison if you get found guilty: if you have a high enough personality, speech skills, and reputation, you can plead your case in court and escape punishment, though you'll still suffer a reputation drop; and even these can be alleviated by skipping the region. Or you could just load a previous save.
  • Morrowind:
    • You are free to kill anyone you want. However, if you kill anyone involved with a quest, you'll lose the opportunity to complete that quest. This includes the game's main quest, but at least there you'll get a pop-up message explaining how you've doomed the world and should restore a saved file.
    • A high-level Fighter's Guild quest and a high-level Mages Guild quest task you with killing off all the leaders of the Thieves' Guild and House Telvanni, respectively. There are alternative quests available in each case that allow you to complete the faction questlines without wiping out the leadership of another faction. Should you choose to kill everyone, though, you'll lose out on all of the quests and rewards offered by those factions.
    • It is possible to get kicked out of the guilds you can join by breaking the rules. Most guilds will offer you a chance to rejoin by paying a certain amount of gold or gathering alchemy materials. However, if you have broken the rules 3 times, you will be permanently expelled from the guild with no hope of rejoining.
    • If you surrender to the guards after committing a crime, your stolen items will automatically be removed. However, if you have stolen a certain item such as a diamond and acquired the rest legally, all of the diamonds you have will be confiscated from your inventory.
    • Serving jail time will decrease your skill points by 1 for each day served. The longer the sentence, the more skills you lose.
  • The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion has a fame/infamy system. Infamy can be gained by getting a high bounty or doing the Thieves Guild and Dark Brotherhood questlines. If your infamy exceeds your fame, you will not be able to access shrines that can cure your diseases and most NPCs will have a negative disposition towards you.
  • Skyrim
    • The game gives you the option of breaking the hearts of the many potential spouses. Once this is done, they'll never speak to you again. While this isn't too bad for some, for others (depending on who you wronged), it'll rob you of the option to sleep at an inn or buy from certain merchants. The worst, though, is if you did this to a follower; not only will they refuse to aid you anymore, they'll keep all the stuff you gave them, including the Dragon Masks.
    • Like in previous games, committing crimes earns you a bounty and causes the hold's guards to go after you. Typically, your bounty in one hold is segregated from others, so guards in Riften won't hound you for a murder you committed in Whiterun, for example. If your bounty is high enough, however, you may find yourself assailed by bounty hunters who aren't bound by a hold's jurisdiction and will attack you from anywhere.
    • If you are seen killing any of the chickens within the town, all the NPCs in town will attack you on sight despite the low bounty the crime yields.
• Contact lets you go around and massacre random civilians if you so choose. You even get a sword that is specifically effective if you wish to do so! However, doing so makes you take massive hits to your Karma Meter, causing otherwise-friendly NPCs to attack you on sight (or, more likely, run away because they know they don't stand a chance). However, one of the possible girlfriends likes bad boys...
• Fallout:
  • Fallout:
    • There are some pretty horrendous things you can get away with in the game, but directly massacring everyone in Vault 13 is not one of them. If you kill enough people and confront the Overseer, he'll chastise the player before revealing that his control platform is A. invincible and B. armed with souped-up miniguns that can easily cut through Power Armor. Even if you escape, the game becomes unwinnable, since you can no longer finish the main quest.
    • Gaining the Childkiller title will make at least one town entirely hostile to you, and will make dealing with almost any civilized part of the world much more difficult. This happens even if you accidentally kill a child in the middle of nowhere and leave no witnesses.
  • Fallout 2:
    • Killing children brands you as a Childkiller and results in bounty hunters chasing you down. Fairly well-armed bounty hunters who level with you to an extent. And then they gain lethal armor and firepower. You have to kill at least two children before you are declared a Childkiller.^note Fortunately, the game doesn't care if your companions are the ones who deliver the killing blow. This is indispensable for taking out those nasty pickpockets.
    • Dr. Troy of Vault City asks you to smuggle some Jet in for him so he can try to make an antidote for Jet addiction. You can blackmail him in the process, but if you try to go to him for medical attention afterwards, he'll rig his Auto-Doc to lethally inject you while taunting the Chosen One for being stupid enough to place their life in the hands of someone they screwed over.
  • Fallout 3:
    • The penalties for being a bastard remain, but if your character is too good, then the bad people you have been pissing off will put a price on your head, triggering random encounters with Talon Company mercenaries. If you disarmed the bomb in Megaton, special Talon hitmen will be summoned by Mr. Burke.
    • Also in Fallout 3, doing blatantly evil things, e.g. blowing up Megaton, which subtracts 1000 karma points, or Kill Satting the Citadel at the end of Broken Steel, will often close off potentially lucrative quests. If you do the latter, you stand little chance against the hordes of angry Brotherhood diaspora with heavy weapons that greet you, so you probably deserve your fate. On the other hand, if you do survive, you get a unique .44 Magnum from an armory in the ruins of the Citadel, as well as 2 extra Tesla Cannons and a bunch of ammo.
    • In addition to the Regulator bounty hunters, there are also Abolitionist hitmen that spawn after you complete the Strictly Business sidequest, which involves hypnotizing and enslaving various people. Killing either of these causes you to further lose karma, resulting in a vicious cycle.
  • Fallout: New Vegas:
    • Doing bad things to members of any of the factions will cause that faction to turn against you. While it's not such a big deal if you piss off any of the smaller towns or gangs, if you anger the more important ones, you'll get very well-armed hit squads chasing you (New California Republic hit squads will be kind enough to give you three days to straighten up, Legion hit squads will offer no such pleasantries), or worse, the entire faction becoming permanently hostile (for example, if you kill any of the NCR's high-ranking NPCs). You also lose the opportunity to recruit companions associated with those factions. Your actions with towns, minor factions, and companions also affect the game's ending.
    • In Honest Hearts, killing or threatening (via dialogue) any of the major NPCs (such as Follows-Chalk, who you might accidentally snipe at the beginning) or being caught stealing from either the Dead Horses or Sorrows results in failure of the main quest, all tribals becoming hostile, and the initiation of an alternate quest entitled "Chaos in Zion".
  • Fallout 4 forgoes a karma meter in exchange for companion affinity. Doing things in a companion's presence that they dislike will cause their affinity to drop. If it's low enough, they'll threaten to leave for good, necessitating a very difficult speech check to keep them around (and that only works once: continue to piss them off, and they'll bail on you, no questions asked). For most companions, the things that drive down affinity are understandable: stealing, killing indiscriminately, and acting like a jerk. Some companions zigzag this, however: Strong, a super mutant, loves when you commit wanton murder or cannibalism, but dislikes shows of intelligence. Cait likes it when you act like an ass and take drugs (and go naked), but holds acts of charity in disdain. McCready, similarly, isn't fond of being nice, unless you're being nice to children. In addition, Danse, a Brotherhood of Steel Paladin, approves of acts of kindness to others, unless they're ghouls, super mutants, or synths.
  • Being a multiplayer-centric game, Fallout 76 has no Karma Meter (and at launch, it didn't even have any friendly NPCs, save for robot vendors). Instead, the game enforces relative civility between players by reducing damage inflicted by other players unless you decide to fight back. If a player kills another player who doesn't fight back, they will be regarded as hostile, have a bounty placed on their head, and will be unable to see any players on their maps (while other players can see them with special icons that out them as bounty targets).
• Small Favors: If the party manages to steal a Fairy's Fairy Wand, especially doing so after learning that you could buy it from a merchant soon after Fairy Battles appear:
  • There's a special message for detailing how much the fairy has been hurt, unlike with other thefts, which were on non-sapient monsters:
    You rip the Fairy Wand out of its hands. Its lip begins to wobble and its eyes shimmer with tears. All it wanted was to do was be friendly and help you and you stole its one and only possession.
    The fairy flies off into the forest, sobbing violently. It will never get over this. It'll go home to its little fairy family and sink into depression. Maybe it'll lash out at them, or develop an alcohol problem.
    As the years pass the inconsolable fairy will become the community's greatest tragedy. This deep scar will forever taint human-fairy relationships, leading to centuries of conflict, oppression, and fantasy racism.
    In the crumbling ruins of a distant fairy dystopia, historians will examine the account of That One Guy Who Stole A Fairy Wand and sadly shake their heads. Why? Why did they do it? They could've prevented this.
    ...[pause]but hey, you got a Fairy Wand! Sweet!
    ** The stolen Fairy Wand says that it "Doesn't belong to you." instead of "Covered in glitter." like a purchased Fairy Wand does.
  • It might also turn off Fairy Battles, depriving the party of a source of healing.
• Suikoden gives you the option to execute many of your captured enemies. Of course, with one exception (Kraze), said enemies are part of the 108 characters who must finish the game alive for the best ending. But that one execution you're allowed? So satisfying.
• Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines:
  • Going around randomly shooting people in Santa Monica isn't so much fun anymore should your bullets hit one of the invincible vampires. Especially the very talkative guy standing in the diner.
  • This also can help trigger the Non-Standard Game Over for this game, though this triggers by doing anything that violates the masquerade, not just actions fitting in the trope. For example, murdering people counts as a masquerade violation, but so does letting a human see you if you're playing a Nosferatu (a clan of vampires that are all physically deformed).
  • Less dramatically, the game inherited its tabletop parent's Karma Meter, called Humanity. A low Humanity causes it to become more and more likely your character loses control in a situation, which can easily break the Masquerade or call down a horde of cops. And one of the easiest humanity violations is simply overfeeding and killing your target.
• In Spiderweb Software's Geneforge series, not only your actions, but your attitude can affect gameplay. Taking the wrong attitude in conversations with Non Player Characters can substantially affect the way that certain NPCs and factions respond to you later in the game; changing some from favorable to neutral, to outright aggressively hostile. Getting caught attempting to steal anything from an NPC (items you aren't permitted to take are labeled as "not yours") can result in being immediately attacked and destroy your reputation with various NPCs and factions. In some cases, this can earn you an immediate Nonstandard Game Over if you anger a plot-critical NPC.
• In the primitive area in Super Paper Mario, you come across Brainwashed and Crazy cavemen whom you've been sent to rescue. Killing them will actually remove points from your score (the game's EXP system).
• In Threads of Fate, the first fight against the dragon Wylaf ends when his health is halfway depleted. However, attack him beyond this point too many times, while ignoring his admonishments to drop your weapons, and he will respond by charbroiling you to a crisp in a cutscene. Needless to say, this is an instant Game Over.
  • In the same game, you can pick optional, nonlethal fights with the weaponsmith, Rod. During these fights, his dog Johnny Wolf usually stays out of the way, but it is in fact possible for you to hit him. Do it enough and the dog will go Cucco Revenge Squad on you, which makes Rod's job a lot easier.
• If you choose the Dark Side path in the first Knights of the Old Republic, more than half the crew would turn on you, forcing you to kill them. A cut ending specifically for Dark Sided females added an additional twist to turn it into an "Everybody Dies" Ending by having Carth show up and making a final appeal. The player could then turn on Bastila, allowing the Republic fleet to destroy the Star Forge, with Revan and Carth still aboard. Another example would be on Manaan, where the player could be permanently barred from visiting the planet ever again if he/she chooses to poison the Firaxa Shark (along with the kolto) in order to reach the star map.
• Baldur's Gate:
  • If you go around slaughtering civilians, a squad of Flaming Fist mercenaries shows up to slaughter you. They're nearly impossible for a character at your level to kill, and even if you do manage to beat them, more will keep showing up later on.
  • Additionally, in this one and the sequel, getting caught pickpocketing, killing Non Player Characters, or summoning something that kills Non Player Characters activates a toned-down version of Everything Trying to Kill You.
  • A similar situation occurs late in the game when the Flaming Fist turns on you after you're framed for murder. The game will not excuse you killing the Flaming Fist enforcers even in self-defense, forcing you to go underground into the sewers. The corrupt new leader of the Flaming Fist is fair game, however.
  • Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate II are deeply unfriendly to evil characters. If you take the 'evil' option in a given quest, expect to receive a smaller reward or no reward at all. If you allow your reputation to fall into the ranges where your evil-aligned companions start complimenting you, expect prices to shoot through the roof and (at extremes) your good-aligned companions to abandon you. All of this is in addition to the above-mentioned swarms of infinitely respawning guards when you let your reputation fall too low. And to add to the injury, you only have four evil-aligned characters (one only appears in the expansion), so get used to a non-full party, or squeeze in some Token Good Teammate who is at best Chaotic Neutral.
  • Baldur's Gate III allows more freedom for evil acts, but not completely scot-free. If playing as a Paladin, going with the evil option in major quests such as siding with the goblin horde in Act I can lock you into the Oathbreaker subclass. Although with the advantages it offers, it could be seen as Cursed with Awesome. An evil Dark Urge run is particularly punishing, as you lose six companions and their associated questlines while Minthara's storyline doesn't really go anywhere due to either bugs or Dummied Out content.
• Dragon Age: Origins, while lacking a Karma Meter, has a few points where making an obviously evil choice causes allies to abandon you, regardless of their disposition towards you. Cruel actions will also earn you the disapproval of certain companions.
  • Acting like a dick in the Dalish camp, either by breaking up a pair of young sweethearts, mocking a grieving widower, or trying to loot a chest after Lanaya asked you not to, results in the local smith refusing to trade with you. Since he has an unlimited supply of elfroot — one of the components in healing poultices — this is a poor choice.
  • Pickpocketing in Denerim will end up with you getting a small army of guards attacking you while traveling through the city, complete with the guards mocking the "mighty Grey Wardens" for stooping so low as petty theft.
  • Completely inverted in the case of Owen, Redcliff's blacksmith. You can simply kill him yourself or tell him that his daughter, who was missing, is dead, after which he hangs himself. Your "punishment"? A replacement blacksmith that sells the best bow in the game. You can even lie to said replacement blacksmith and tell him that you knew Owen very well, netting you an amulet originally belonging to Owen's daughter. Who may still be alive and even make it safely back to the smithy, depending on your actions.
  • Choosing to aid the Cult of the Dragon and tainting the Urn with dragon blood will result in Leliana attacking you if she's in the party (forcing you to kill her) and may cause Wynne to do the same as well. If they're not with you and you return to the camp, telling them what you did, they'll leave.
  • The game offers you multiple opportunities to get rid of your companions, either by killing them or angering them so much they decide to leave you. As a result, you might very well have only one companion left at the start of the final battle.
• In Dragon's Dogma, if you get caught assaulting people in Gran Soren, the town guards will arrest you. Your only options for escape are either to use a skeleton key (if you have one at the time of your arrest), pay a bribe, break out if you're lucky enough to be put in a cell with a weak wall, or wait approximately 48 minutes in real time to serve out your sentence
• Choosing the Closed Fist option near the end of Jade Empire results in your more morally upstanding party members turning on you. If you succeed in killing them, they're (obviously) unavailable for the rest of the game.
• Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume:
  • Sometimes, this synchronizes perfectly with punishments for inept playing. If you simply can't handle a particular fight, the main character can put allies into God Mode, with the side effect of killing them at the end of the fight. How many battles you have used this to essentially bypass determines your ending, and it's not based on the traditional good, neutral, and evil, but "good", "bad", and "worst".
  • That's not the real punishment, though. That comes if you abuse the Plume, in which case Freya gets wise to your antics and drops down from the heavens to kick your ass.
• Fable II:
  • There are a few choices in storyline wherein you get to choose an evil option (generally going around killing people) and a good option (which is usually going around killing people, just evil ones). The evil option, such as working for the Temple of Shadows or killing a farmer or electing not to help Barnum, will ultimately create a more unpleasant world, which, of course, means fewer game options.
  • A lesser example involves NPCs. Kill someone to buy their house at a lower price, and you'll end up making less money than if you just bought it fair and square.
• Persona 3:
  • Be enough of a dick to the people you're trying to make friends with and you can reverse their Social Links. You lose all your Social Link bonuses and have to make amends. Keep being a dick after you've reversed the link and you can break it, preventing you from fusing Personae of that Arcana at all until you fix it — which can take a very long time. The easiest way to do this is to date multiple girls at once. Unfortunately, you have to date all of them in order to complete their links and complete the Compendium. Guide Dang It! does not even begin to cover it.
• Persona 4:
  • The game actually tries to induce Video Game Cruelty Potential with Nanako, your adorable cousin, with her "I love you, Big Bro!" Squee! Then of course, she is kidnapped by Namatame and taken into the TV world. After you rescue her, she apparently dies. The punishment comes from the fact that even though you really, REALLY want to, pushing Namatame into the TV (or failing to convince your teammates that there's something you're missing) nets you the bad ending. And a Kick the Dog, since he's not really the culprit.
  • Even worse, if you push Namatame into the TV, Nanako dies for real.
  • In both Persona 3 and Persona 4, while the player is given the option to be complete assholes during Social Links, it's pretty much never a good idea; breaking relationships will inhibit your progress in the dungeons, since the Relationship Values have a major impact on the development of your Personae. If you try to play the character as an anti-social Jerkass, chances are you won't get far.
  • The downright rottenest thing you can do in Persona 4 is actually let the victims die by missing the deadline to save them. Doing this accomplishes nothing except Igor rewinding time a week.
  • In 3 and the original version of 4, you could get away with pursuing romantic relationships with multiple love interests. Not anymore in Golden, however: if you try to court multiple women, one of them will find out, and she will be livid.
  • Complete certain requirements in Golden and you can get a new ending... in which you first refuse to name the killer after you've figured them out, and then destroy the only evidence linking them to their crimes. The result? The protagonist is now trapped in a controlling platonic relationship with the killer for the rest of his life, an innocent man is convicted of murders he never committed, and Inaba is trapped in a permanent fog. Want to be a dick? Congrats — you got the ending that is worse than the bad ending!
• Persona 5:
  • Failing to complete a dungeon or betraying your friends to Sae will result in you getting a Bad End, all of which end with you getting shot in the head. You monster.
  • If you enter the women's bathroom with your male Protagonist in the first half of Madarame's museum Palace, a female Shadow Mook will be waiting to get a surprise attack on you.
  • Trying to romance more than one of — or even all of — the girls at once? Come Valentine's Day, they've caught on, and they drop by to confront you about it◊. Cut to the main character lying unconscious on the floor.
• Yume Nikki:
  • This and most of the fangames associated with it gives you some kind of killing implement to use as you desire. But try using them on the wrong NPC or the Goddamn Bats and you'll probably find yourself screwed over in some manner. Some might even be Demonic Spiders in disguise who proceed to outrun you, forcing you back to the nexus.
  • .Flow in particular has a rather brutal punishment for trying to beat one of the local Goddamn Bats over the head while he's drinking: Countering your attack and then outright killing you in retaliation, which forces you out of your trance, but not before a short cutscene showing Sabitsuki's decapitated and busted up corpse. Also, in general, it seems that angering one will anger the rest while you're still zoned in, and one in particular happens to be a Demonic Spider...
• Demon's Souls:
  • If the player, whether intentionally or not, attacks an NPC, the NPC will continue to fight you until you kill them (if you die, the NPC will continue to attack you after you respawn). If you kill the NPC, he/she will never come back. This is true even if the story cannot be continued without that NPC. Considering that there are no save points, or any other way to "undo" the damage, this can be literally game-breaking. Especially cruel given the length of the game.
  • Later games in the series like Dark Souls offer a way to undo the damage non-violently, by talking to a "Pardoner" NPC and paying a rather hefty sum of souls for atonement, which will de-aggro any NPCs you've pissed off. Unfortunately, the pardoner can also be killed or turned hostile like anyone else, and if you do so, you're stuck with the same situation as above.
    • Dark Souls 2 dials this back somewhat, in two ways. First, NPCs only go hostile after being struck multiple times, making it much harder to accidentally aggro someone important. Second, dead NPCs can be temporarily revived (at a cost of souls, some quite steep), allowing access to their services.
    • Dark Souls 3 dials it back even further. Atonement is done at an inanimate statue instead of an NPC, so there's no way to lock yourself out of it. Killing a merchant will now drop their ashes, which can be given to the Shrine Handmaiden in order to add their stock to hers. If you kill the Handmaiden, she respawns just like you, but she'll be mad and jack up her prices higher and higher each time you kill her, although paying the hefty sum for atonement will reset her prices back to normal. Andre the blacksmith will also respawn if killed, although he will flat-out refuse to serve you at all until you pay for atonement. The Fire Keeper (who levels you up) also respawns, and doesn't even get mad when you kill her. She'll even sincerely apologize for respawning on you since she only wants to be a good servant and do what you ask of her, but is unable to fulfill your wish for her to die.
    • Also in DS3, you can attack High Priestess Emma of Lothric when you meet her in the early game. This will lead to you encountering the Dancer of the Boreal Valley before long, and since the Dancer is not only a late-game boss, but considered That One Boss even by the standards of late-game bosses, you will very likely die. A lot. If you can make it through the fight, you can access Lothric Castle early, but frankly, if you can beat a boss who spams hard-to-predict attacks at a level where all of them are probably a One-Hit Kill, you honestly deserve to.
• Mass Effect:
  • In Mass Effect 2, you can choose to help either the Justicar Samara or her sociopathic Ardat-Yakshi daughter Morinth during their Mexican Standoff. Helping one means the other dies. If the player chooses Morinth, she will be loyal for the rest of the game, but not only are they deprived of a war asset and one of the most poignant scenes in Mass Effect 3, but they also have to fight Morinth during the game's final stage after she's been turned into a banshee by the Reapers (and she makes no other onscreen appearances during the game). In addition, being a literal Black Widow doesn't stop Morinth from trying to sleep with you in the second game, and if you do, it goes exactly like you'd expect.
  • Additionally, in Mass Effect 3, you're given the choice between curing the genophage for the Krogan, or giving into Salarian demands to sabotage the cure in order to secure the Krogan's loyalty by treacherous means. If Urdnot Wrex is alive in your playthrough, sabotaging the cure effectively becomes an act of backstabbing your own friend, and the game ensures that Wrex will catch on to your treachery and cross the Despair Event Horizon right before your eyes. If the considerably less sympathetic Urdnot Wreav is leading the Krogan, he does not discover your act of treachery, since it's far more understandable, and less cruel, in his case.
  • Indeed, many of the crueler and more callous choices you can make in the series tend to leave the galaxy an overall poorer place, and more often than not also denying you valuable resources in the third game. In short, the bigger a bastard Sheperd is, the more crapsackier the world becomes.
• In TaskMaker, killing any NPC with a Good alignment reduces Spirit and deducts points. Killing the "Mom" NPC in Enitsirhc or "Rusty" in Poet's Nightmare, both of whom are Good alignment, will do this and render the player unusable by permanently deafening, blinding, and intoxicating them. The same happens in the sequel The Tomb of the TaskMaker whenever a player kills "Mom" or "Bucky".
• Undertale: The game is designed to push you into playing as an Actual Pacifist. Go for a Neutral Run? There's No Points for Neutrality, you miss out on the True Final Boss and several extra story elements, and the game ends with none of the problems presented really having been solved. And then there's the Genocide/No Mercy run, which is basically designed to make you give up as soon as possible:
  • Story-wise, go Genocide and prepare for guilt tripping. The first boss will ask you if you really hate her that much, the second boss will immediately spare you because he believes that you really can be a good person, a young child tries to pull You Shall Not Pass! and is only saved by the third boss pulling a Heroic Sacrifice, the fourth boss pulls a futile Last Stand so his friend can get the few remaining non-combatants to safety, the fifth boss is someone who tried to befriend you at the beginning and now is focusing all his effort to make you the player Rage Quit, the sixth is a Zero-Effort Boss because you sucker punch him as he's trying to be peaceful, and the normal final boss is reduced to tearfully begging for his life. Towns will be empty because everyone is fleeing for their lives from you, you will get the absolute worst ending possible, and basically everything in the game is designed to remind you that you are a bad person doing bad things.
  • Most monsters in a Genocide Run are totally effortless fights because the game is balanced to be challenging to a Pacifist Run player who's stuck at LV 1 for the entire game, but there are two bosses unique to the Genocide Run who aren't total pushovers — and they are instead viciously difficult and intended to make you Rage Quit from the sheer frustration of dying to them so often. The second one (who serves as the effective Final Boss of a genocide run)^note who corresponds to the fifth boss in the list above, since the other two are taken out in the same cutscene will even mock you for it.
  • And if you think you're going to complete the Genocide ending and then go for the Pacifist ending, think again. Saves and continues are an actual story element, so the consequences of the Genocide ending are going to follow you into every Pacifist and Genocide playthrough afterwards, and result in its own unique, "Soulless" bad ending. Thus, it's a meta version of Evil Only Has to Win Once. Not to mention, Flowey and his Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory certainly aren't going to let you forget what you did. Delete all saves? Nope, the game still remembers. Do it outside of the program? Still locked out of the Golden Ending. Punishment indeed!
    • If you bought the game on Steam, the fact that you completed a Genocide Run, and sold your soul afterwards to reset is saved to the Steam cloud. Not even reformatting the computer will let you escape it!
  • Even at its most basic level, the game is designed to be less enjoyable on a Genocide Run. The game is designed to be played with pacifist-level LV, so after killing monsters for just a few minutes, you've become strong enough to one-shot everything you've found with the sole exception of the two above bosses. Most fights are therefore dull and unsatisfying, and the two that aren't are unfairly hard. In between dull fights, you have to do a lot of walking around doing nothing because random encounters decrease in frequency the more you kill. You also miss out on a majority of the story content and entertaining character interactions, the Awesome Music is overridden with a bleak and dreary drone, puzzles are solved for you, and even the narration goes from relaxed and humorous to terse and dull when it's not being bloodthirsty, with all joke item names changed (Your butterscotch-cinnamon pie is usually "Buttspie", but is just "Pie" during a Genocide run or during Serious Mode, which happens when you fight Toriel, Asgore, or their son, Asriel). When you're told at the start of the run that continuing it would lead to a bad time, they're not just talking about the final boss battle, they're talking about every aspect of the run.
• Deltarune leans less so on this than its predecessor Undertale as a driving point of this game is how your choices don't matter, but never the less dives into this in Chapter 2 when you're sent to get a "Trash Orb", actually the inanimate Light World forms of all your Dark World friends from Chapter 1, to bring everyone to your new Dark World. You have the option to go into your items and throw away the "Ball of Junk", and the game warns you it is a "really really really really bad idea". Throw it away anyways, and you learn the "Ball of Junk" was a separate item from the "Trash Orb": when you get to the Dark World your friends are fine and you discover what you actually threw away was your entire inventory from the previous game. Yes, even the one-of-a-kind items you got from defeating the difficult Superboss.
• In the Neverland stage of Kingdom Hearts, you can light Captain Hook's pants on fire in the boss fight with him for laughs, but he can also hurt you by touching you when he's running around trying to put the fire out.
• The World Is Your Weapon: Downplayed. The only risk the player takes when attacking NPCs is them retaliating, but there's no effect on the story and the NPCs will drop their aggro once the map reloads. Damaging them and capturing them is also the only way to get their entries in the weapon glossary. Played straight in version 2.40+, where capturing all NPCs leads to battle against a souped-up Dolhabach and a Downer Ending.
• In Disco Elysium, it is possible to have the Detective express Fascist options (mostly bitter and angry ranting and raving about how foreigners, women, and other miniorities have ruined Revachol for the "proud" white man). Do this enough, and it unlocks the thought "Revacholian Nationhood", which once equipped, allows the Detective to internally identify as a card-carrying Fascist. This, however, also causes the Detective to start taking morale damage whenever he says anything that pushes him further towards Fascism. Fascism is thus treated almost as a form of Self-Harm, as damaging to the Detective himself as it is to those around him.
• During the opening of NieR: Automata, you (as 2B) are put through a routine system diagnosis by 9S as the Justified Tutorial. If you want (and you probably will), you can Troll the hell out of 9S by refusing to follow instructions, deliberately failing objectives, jumping about like an idiot, and just generally screwing around to get on his nerves and drag the diagnostic out. The punishment? Much later in the game, you go through that whole sequence again... only this time around you play as 9S. The now computer-controlled 2B will perfectly mimic everything you did during that tutorial with 9S. Every single thing. So if you decided to be a prick to him, you're gonna have to sit through potentially several minutes of your previous character doing it to you.
• Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse features a flexible form of Alignment-Based Endings; the player is free to choose the ending regardless of alignment points, but if the points and ending don't match, the player will incur a penalty. Said penalty is worse if the player was a Jerkass who went for the Bonds ending than a Nice Guy who went for Massacre; in the latter, the player loses all of their items, which are easily replacable and can be sold beforehand. In the former, the player loses all of their demons, which not only are either expensive or time-consuming to replace, but can't be sold or traded.
• Paper Mario 64 mod Paper Mario: Dark Star Edition will have Whacka attack in revenge when he's hit before dropping the Whacka Bump. Each time he's hit, he becomes stronger. On the eighth and final hit, he turns into a superboss surrounded by fire that has more health than anything else in the game and hurts like a truck.
• In Wasteland 2, doing things like killing off entire towns gets you kicked out of the Desert Rangers, preventing you from progressing any further in the game, and results in a hit squad being sent after you.

Run 'n Gun

• Shock Troopers: 2nd Squad: Killing real defectors from D.I.C. will subtract points from the player's score.

Shoot 'em Up

• Bank Panic:
  • Shooting a bank customer cost you a life despite the entertaining aftermath.
  • Shooting a bank robber before he has the chance to draw results in an "unfair" kill. You get less points but are otherwise not punished.
• This trope is the main idea behind a short flash game called "Consequences" — the more enemies you kill in the first half of the game, the harder it will be to complete the second one.
• In most Escape Velocity games, boarding and capturing enemy and civilian ships is a good way to earn extra cash or get escorts. Do that in the Starfleet Adventures mod, and you'll be court-martialed and thrown out of Starfleet.
• In Raiden Fighters, you can uncover fairies that, when collected, yield 100,000 points each. You can also shoot them, and if you shoot a fairy enough, she will die, resulting in a "KILLED THE FAIRY!" message and a mere 10-point bonus; that's 99,990 points lost. It's very easy to do by accident.
• Shooting innocent cars in Spy Hunter costs you points (specifically, it blocks you from scoring for a period of time, and under normal circumstances, merely driving increases the score). In the 3D games, you fail the mission if you kill too many.
• Star Fox:
  • If you shoot any blue stingrays in Sector Y, they ram you. If you avoid them all and shoot all the yellow stingrays, you get the Space Whale bonus.
  • Also, shooting your own teammates will make you not have as much backup in the next mission. Though some would rather have no backup due to the backup always requesting backup, in 64, you can't collect the medal for a level if any teammates are grounded.
• In Trouble Witches, if you poke the shopkeepers too much, they get annoyed with you and boot you from the store.

Simulation Game

• In RimWorld,
  • If you order a colonist to attack another colonist, they will lose social points with the attacker.
  • If your colonists are wearing clothing made out of Human Leather, (and do not have the Bloodlust, Psychopath, or Cannibal traits) they will get a -2 to -8 mood debuff.
  • If you harvest organs from or execute an innocent pawn, your colonists will get a -5 and -6 debuff respectively.
  • If you force your colonists to resort to raw cannibalism, they get a -20 debuff. (this does not apply for Cannibal colonists)
  • If you let a colonist eat without a table, (punishable by death) they will get a -3 mood debuff.
  • If you leave a colonist unburied, your alive colonists will get a -10 mood debuff. (This does not apply if your colonists are Psychopaths).
  • The introduction of ideologies in the Ideology DLC can flip a lot of these on their head. If you have the right ideology, not being cruel will result in mood debuffs.
  • In the Biotech DLC, you can get rid of toxic wastepacks by launching them away from your base with transport pods. They will pollute the area where they land. If this happens to be too close to another faction's base, that faction will be annoyed with you. You can also send the wastepacks to land directly on another faction's base... in which case, they launch even more of the packs back at you.
• Trauma Center. Whoo, we have a tough case here. From what you can see, your job is to fight some strange malicious virus that's somehow looks like a vector graphic version of aliens from Space Invaders. But here's the thing: that's the only thing you'll be killing through the whole game(s). You can try hurting the patients you're treating, but it will only result in a bad rating for your stage. Oh, and Angie and Val will scowl you pretty badly, which is something you will not want these two cuties to do. At some point of the game, you may realize that this series just... leaves no room for cruelty!
  • On the other hand, if you wanted to get higher scores, you had to let the viruses wreak havoc inside your patients, so you could rack up points treating the lesions, wait until the viruses attack again, rinse and repeat for higher and higher scores. Instead of, you know, killing the viruses. So it's a mixed bag.
• The first Wing Commander game allowed you to kill your wingman without retribution. Later games made the wingmen start fighting back if it was obvious you were trying to nail them, and WC3, possibly others, had you get court-martialed if you returned to base after shooting down your wingman. Unless you ejected after the deed, in which case the game forgot that you did the killing.
• In Kerbal Space Program's career mode, killing your Kerbonauts decreases your space agency's reputation, which lowers the quality and reward of the contracts you get offered. Frustratingly, this happens even if your crew dies by accident or glitch, both of which are pretty likely.
• In Star Lancer, your copilot takes over your ship and gets you court-marshaled and executed if you destroyed a friendly ship. Or rather, if a friendly ship got destroyed while your shots were hitting it. If that sounds like a petty distinction, try being forced to restart a long Escort Mission because your copilot decided that it was your flimsy cannons that blew up the friendly capital ship^note never mind that it is literally impossible to damage capital ships with any of your fighter's weaponry in this game, and not the enemy torpedo that you were desperately trying to shoot down with your flimsy cannons. Ironically, this punishment system actually encourages you to let friendly ships die rather than risk being branded a traitor by trying to save them.
• Harvest Moon:
  • In Harvest Moon DS, if your animal dies for any reason (even old age), then your friendship with the townspeople drops a lot. To make it even more interesting, killing animals is required to marry the Witch Princess.
  • The games also allow you to give nasty things to the townspeople, like weeds or bugs. Their friendship meters drop accordingly. Do this to much to your wife or husband and (s)he'll divorce your sorry ass.
  • Try raising or gathering poisonous toadstools and throwing them into the community pot at the Harvest Festival. Low-level toadstools result in sharp friendship drops with all villagers (except the Witch Princess, who presumably found it hilarious and is never invited, anyways). A level 100 toadstool... credit roll.
  • Harvest Moon: Animal Parade makes it so townspeople actually register when you use your tools on them. Swing your axe, hoe, or even your watering can at them, and watch them hate you in record time.
  • In Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life, neglecting your farm in the second year and beyond and then acting rudely to your wife when she questions you about it will cause your wife to take your child and leave you forever. It's nearly impossible to do this by accident, though; you basically have to be trying to get this ending.
    • Also in this game, if you max out Celia's heart points and marry another girl, her homestead will never forgive you.
  • Rune Factory Frontier, a spinoff of the HM series, does exactly this. If you attempt to cheat on your wife after marriage by trying to marry another bachelorette, after eliciting a "What the hell, Raguna?" from the bachelorette, your wife will storm angrily down to the date and beat your ASS. You're left with 1HP and 0RP (Essentially writing that day off in terms of workability, unless you have a stock of HP/RP replenishing food items, since the baths are closed on holidays/date days) and more importantly your wife's Friendship and Love point values reset to zero. Given that this is a game where you have to really work hard at getting your potential love interest to like you, this is a pretty huge blow, and devastating if you've married Bianca, Cinnamon, or Selphy as they all have pretty difficult to find or craft items. (Or in Bianca's case, can only be increased by constant attention.)
  • The original game has a similar punishment for rejecting a girl. After fulfilling her proposal requirements and getting into that subject, you have the option of giving some clueless or evasive response to her desire for marriage, but doing so will drop her Friendship and Love points to 0. While certain players may be inclined to do it anyway just to get a laugh at the girls chewing Raguna out, some of them say things that make him come off as outright cruel.
  • In Rune Factory 3, a similar situation to A Wonderful Life occurs if you woo Raven and don't marry her. She writes about it in her diary. What makes it worse is you do this after she pours out to you that she's afraid she will be alone forever.
• In TIE Fighter, there is a mission where, if you're fairly clever, you can disable and destroy your own command ship, a small Corellian Corvette. If you succeed, though, the Imperial freaking Star Destroyer Badi Dea shows up and launches fighters...
• Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War allows you to indulge your Video Game Cruelty Potential by taking out civilian or damaged/disabled military targets. However, doing so sets you on the "Mercenary" part of the Karma Meter, leading to harder enemy ace squadrons going after you.
  • Subverted in that depending on gameplay variables (namely player ability and plane), they may not be that much more difficult than the "Soldier" or "Knight" squadrons that you encounter on those mission versions, and by moderating the ratio or by playing Free Mission (only the Campaign affects the Ace Style Gauge), you can avoid the Mercenary missions altogether, since your position on the gauge at the end of a mission determines the next mission's version.
• Police Simulator: Patrol Officers gives you 100 Conduct Points at the beginning of every shift, which goes down any time you break a law or otherwise act in a way unbecoming of a police officer. These affect how much your Shift Points get turned into experience points, with you getting less experience the less Conduct Points you have. Losing all 100 conduct points will result in you getting fired and having to replay your shift. Simulation Mode takes this further by being much more strict with how you conduct yourself.
  • Even with the benefits of Casual Mode, which is far more lenient in regards to violations or law-breaking by you, you won't be able to get away with shooting your firearm at a pedestrian, since it will result in your shift immediately ending (and subsequently getting arrested according to the handbook) regardless of how much Conduct Points you have.
• In the PC version of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, firing on any Federation starbase would cause the mission to instantly abort, whereupon the instructor brands you "childish" and makes you restart the mission.
• SimCity:
  • In SimCity 2000, churches randomly appear in residential areas. Unfortunately, they can be a bit of an annoyance, as they don't contribute taxes to your budget. It's possible to bulldoze them, but when you do, two more will appear in other residential areas. This can continue until your entire residential area is filled with churches, which will give you no taxes whatsoever.
  • In the original SimCity, bulldozing churches will kick-start a disaster. Which is ironic, as the creator is an atheist who believes churches to be the worst thing he could inflict on you.
  • The wondrous "church virus" code. Type any curse word into the game and you'll receive a message stating "same to you, buddy!" and churches start appearing at alarming rates.
• You can do pretty much whatever you want with adult Sims in the series of the same name, but if you neglect your infants or toddlers, the social worker will show up to place your child in a foster home. The same is true of housepets in the Pets expansion, so think twice before you Kick the Dog.
• In F/A-18 Hornet, if you hit any allies or friendly buildings, you get a Nonstandard Game Over where you are "court martialed".
• In Novalogic's F-22 games, there is usually a mission where you are part of the force escorting Air Force One. Normally, when you acquire a target, it's designated enemies only. When you highlight your friendlies with your radar, they don't mind. However, even highlight, let alone shoot at Air Force One, and all 30+ escort planes will shoot your ass down — in addition to any friendly SAMs around.
• FreeSpace:
  • The game gives you some leeway if you hit your allies in battle. But if you start to cause more damage to your wingmen or escort ships than the enemies, they call you out on it. If you keep poking them with lasers, all friendly units in the mission turn hostile and attack you.
  • FreeSpace 2 actually makes a mission out of this. While undercover, you're instructed to shoot down a civilian transport. If you do, your superiors will acknowledge that you did it to maintain cover, and comment that it was an admirable sacrifice. But you'll still be executed for violating the future's version of the Geneva Conventions.
• RollerCoaster Tycoon:
  • If guests die in your park, intentionally or not, your park rating will drop. Additionally, if a ride crashes, intentionally or not, guests will avoid riding it for a while claiming that it's unsafe.
  • You can trap guests in your park by placing a "No Entry" sign over the entrance. However, leave them up for too long and guests who want to leave your park will become lost because they "can't find the park exit". For the first few guests who become lost, this won't affect the park rating at all. However, let too many guests become lost and your park rating will plummet.
• While letting tigers or T. rexes out of their cages to chase guests in Zoo Tycoon can be amusing, it'll also deep-six your zoo's rating.
• In Vietcong, killing a montagnard will result in mission failure. The same goes for prisoners of war you help to capture in one mission, even if Hawkins encourages you to execute them.
• Hitting villagers with your net or axe in the Animal Crossing games will cause them to become extremely angry or sad, preventing you from talking to them until their mood gets better and drastically lowering their disposition towards you. Eventually they'll move out altogether. (Though depending on how much you like the villager, this could be a good thing.) Other actions which will lower villagers' disposition towards you and probably make you feel bad: denying them medicine when they're sick, giving them a bug or rotten fruit when they ask for fruit, pushing them around.
• No Man's Sky:
  • Killing fauna is a good way to get The Malevolent Force on your case and out for your blood.
  • Similarly, shooting at Space Stations and starships will end with the former launching Space Police forces at you.
• In Shadow President, you can do practically anything you want to other countries, and the most your cabinet members will do is complain or resign. If you really screw up, however, the game may abruptly end with you getting impeached, or even gunned down by an assassin (complete with blood and bullet holes on your interface.)
• Attacking hospitals, churches, or ambulances in Wings will result in mission failure and a reprimand from the squad commander. Shooting down squadmates is not particularly awarded, either.
• There are score penalties in Colonization for every Indian village you wiped out.
• In Stardew Valley:
  • Dating bachelors and bachelorettes is one of the core features of the game. You aren't limited to one individual, and you can go as far as presenting each bachelor or each bachelorette with a bouquet of flowers before choosing to marry any one of them. How well do they take it? About as well as you'd expect. Said bachelors or bachelorettes will gather in the saloon (the bachelors) or Haley's house (the bachelorettes), confront you with the evidence of your infidelity, and end their relationship with you. They will then refuse to speak with you for several in-game weeks and you will lose a good portion of relationship hearts with them.
  • Rejecting Penny's love confession in her ten-heart event causes her to lose a full six hearts with the player and prevents them from romancing her. Saying you don't like kids in her eight-heart event also causes a large affection drop.
  • Selling the community center to Joja replaces the items that you need for the bundles with money. However, the player can no longer earn the smaller rewards from completing the bundles, and the bonus that would have increased everyone's affection with the player by 500 points will no longer be available.
  • Shooting people with a slingshot causes a drop in friendship, and they'll call you out on it if you talk to them afterward.
• Black & White: Zig-zagged, since A God Is You and most quests can be completed in either a Good or Evil way. Depending on the quest, the Evil path nets a different but equivalent reward to the Good, less personal effort than the Good, nothing but The Evulz, or an outright punishment. The latter case comprises everything from a hillbilly arsonist to losing out on an extra village's worth of followers in the punishing final level.
• Monster Loves You!: Mostly averted during regular play but played straight in the endgames. It's possible to be a near-complete Karma Houdini homicidal maniac during regular play and suffer only a few stat penalties, but the legacy you wind up with — the entire point of the game — is not likely to be the kind you'd want for yourself.

Stealth-Based Game

• Assassin's Creed:
  • In the first game, if you repeatedly kill innocent civilians, your "Synchronization Meter" (health bar) will start to go down. And if that's not enough penalty, killing more than three in a small timeframe will automatically give you a game over, so rampages are impossible even with high health. However, once you beat the game, the penalty is gone.
  • The sequel doesn't make you lose synchronization, but instead sticks with the "kill three and you lose" rule. ^note This inadvertently nullifies the Video Game Cruelty Punishment, as the player can simply kill two civilians, and then wait a while for the effect to reset, or kill a guard to have it reset immediately. This means that the player could kill the annoying civilians who harass you during missions with no penalty.
• Metal Gear:
  • In Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, if you go around shooting seagulls or doing sinister things in the women's bathrooms, then your CO calls you a monster, your girlfriend breaks up with you, and you can't save until you've said sorry.
  • In Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, the more soldiers you kill, the harder your encounter with The Sorrow becomes.
  • Likewise, if you go on a major killing spree in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, you collapse to the ground and throw up from the gore. All while the villain's mocking voice echoes in your head.
  • Killing children in Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake reduces Snake's life gauge. Given what most of the punishments entail when killing anyone, this is surprisingly lenient. Likewise, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain has, get this, Child Soldiers gunning for you. Anything lethal used on them ends the game.
  • Metal Gear on the NES and MSX allows the character to shoot hostages. All of these except The Mole reduce Snake's rank, which translates to lowered health and ammo capacity. This can actually make the game Unwinnable, since you need to be at top rank to gain access to certain radio contacts, who will then leave vital weapons and equipment for you to pick up. Certain hostages are also related to said contacts, and killing them breaks off their contact with you, also making the game unwinnable.
  • Zigzagged in the first Metal Gear Solid, as attacking Meryl gets you a slap in return. Kill her, and it's a Non-Standard Game Over. However, if you attack her and then don a cardboard box in the caves, it ultimately benefits you, since she'll call a wolf to urinate on you. Wearing said box from then on out will have the same effect as equipping Sniper Wolf's hankerchief: the wolves won't attack you.
  • In Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, it's normally impossible to use lethal techniques or weaponry on staff members in Mother Base. However, it is still possible to knock them out and carry or throw them around. Just remember they can still die, and if they do, the game ends in failure on the spot with Kaz and Ocelot chewing you out severely.
    • MGSV zigzags this, actually. Unlike the previous three games, there are no clear punishments for killing hordes of enemies (except the obvious 'you don't get to recruit them'); however, this is a double-edged sword with the hidden mechanic of Demon Points that can easily sneak up on you if you don't know about it. Killing hordes of people with molotovs is fun, but this wouldn't be Metal Gear if it didn't point out that War Is Hell very subtly. However, it is fairly easy to get rid of Demon Points, once again zigzagging this trope.
• In Splinter Cell and its first sequel Pandora Tomorrow, killing a civilian or other innocent would cause you to immediately fail the mission. This was averted in Chaos Theory, where you could massacre whoever you wanted (including civilians and even U.S. National Guard soldiers) and the mission would still continue on as normal (although Mission Control will berate you for going Ax-Crazy, and you receive a 0% score at the end). In Double Agent, killing civilians and security guards affected your Karma Meter, which (if you did it a lot) could get you a Bad Ending or even a mission failure.
• Dishonored doesn't really go for overt punishments (unless you break the plot by killing an essential character, anyways), and it certainly is possible to go through the game wantonly murdering every single enemy you come across. Doing this leads to a high Chaos rating, which means more rats, Weepers, and security systems to contend with, plus the overall story becoming much darker. The game is also surprisingly good at guilt-tripping you if you take the "indiscriminate slaughter" route.
• Yandere Simulator allows you to be an absolute psycho, which is understandable since you play as a Yandere who's obsessed with getting Senpai at any cost. However, this doesn't mean you can do anything without consequences:
  • Do anything naughty, like holding a weapon, being bloody, being visibly insane, taking panty shots, or committing murder, and let someone else see it, there will be penalties ranging from reputation loss (if a normal student sees you do it) to instant game over (if Senpai sees you do it, or if a Hero/Phone Addict catches you committing murder).
  • Speaking of insanity, violent actions will decrease Yan-chan's Sanity Meter, meaning you'll no longer be able to keep up a Mask of Sanity. Students will be afraid of you, delinquents will try to fight you, teachers will send you to the Guidance Counselor, and Senpai will tell you off for an instant Game Over. At the lowest levels, you'll start hallucinating and will attack anyone you come near if you have a weapon, no matter how bad an idea it is.
  • Killing people who are in a large crowd results in a Game Over as four students will gang up on you and overpower you until the police arrive. This mechanic might be nerfed in the future, such as having Coward and Evil personalities not take part or requiring a Hero to instigate it, but for now, having four or more witnesses to murder is a death sentence.
  • If you kill a student in front of someone who especially cares about them (Pippi and Ryuto, the Basu sisters, Saki and Kokona, and anyone you've matchmade), that student will, regardless of persona, attack you with the highest strength level, comparable to Budo Matsuda. If you haven't upped your strength stat, are carrying a large weapon, or just suck at the struggle minigame, they will swiftly hand you your rear on a platter.
  • Kill a student in front of Senpai, and you're done. Masks used to help, but now he'll just tear them off your face.
  • Kill a student who's a member of a club, and that club will disband, permanently locking you out of the club's benefits.
  • If you let a student's body be discovered, even if there's nothing tracing it to you, there will be memorial service the next day that eats up the pre-class hour (which is the only time certain scripted events will happen).
  • Things like mysterious pools of blood, severed limbs, or corpses decrease School Atmosphere. At low levels of School Atmosphere, students notice bad behavior more quickly, and at the lowest level of atmosphere, the Photography Club starts patrolling the halls, acting as sentinels who will give you a Game Over if they catch you killing anyone.
  • Gossiping can lower your rival's reputation for the Bullying elimination method, but it also lowers yours more as you get a reputation as a busybody and rumormonger.
  • Let the Delinquents catch you having obviously committed murder (save of the Bullies; they hate those girls), and they'll attack you. Fail the combat minigame, and they'll bludgeon you into unconsciousness, resulting in a Game Over.
  • Senpai has a hidden Sanity Meter that will take a hit if bad things happen around him. How sane Senpai is when the game's over will be a factor determining your ending. So if, say, you murder all the girls who become close to him horribly and force him to watch his best friend and little sister die in front of him, and he finds out you did it, you probably shouldn't expect to survive to credits.
  • The Student Council is a big obstacle to you, since they patrol the whole school, notice you more quickly than normal students, and can't be beaten in a fair fight since they carry pepper spray. But if you do manage to kill any of them, Student Council president Megami Saikou will be furious, since they are her friends. She will use her influence to install metal detectors and security cameras (which are normally absent outside of challenges in Mission Mode), which will Game Over you if you pass through them with a weapon and record evidence of bad behavior for the police, respectively.

Survival Horror

• The first Clock Tower gives you the option to say "Screw This, I'm Outta Here" and flee in a car to save your own skin before learning that any of your friends are dead. Doing this leads to the Scissorman being in the back seat, killing you and netting you the worst ending.
• Eternal Darkness:
  • Killing innocent people takes away a big chunk of your sanity meter (and when your Sanity runs out, your Health). When this meter empties, strange and terrible things start to happen. Depending on the player, though, this might be an incentive to kill every civilian you come across.
  • In some places, particularly Maximillian's chapter, there are entirely normal human servants milling around the house, tending to various things. Some of them are actually bonethieves, monsters who burrow into human bodies and control them from within but don't change their outward appearance. Later in the chapter, when they start attacking you, it's easy to tell them apart, but if the player tries to make things easier on themselves by killing the bonethieves as a preventative measure, that sanity goes down real fast. Think about it for a second; you're killing all the household servants because you're convinced some of them are actually terrible monsters, that just happen to perfectly resemble normal servants. Sounds like something a lunatic would do, doesn't it? What's worse is that when your sanity is low enough, talking to people will also yield different descriptions. For example, in Peter Jacob's chapter, it's possible to save a woman from a bonethief, but talking to her will still create the impression that she's a monster. Killing her, of course, still lowers your sanity meter. It's probably the scariest sanity effect in the game.
• Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly: Of the various endings in the game, one allows the player to abandon their twin sister in the village and escape on their own. Doing this doesn't even net the player an actual ending; it's treated as a Game Over. The game is telling you that no way are you allowed to leave your sister behind. Though given the canon ending, that may seem kinder...
• Fear & Hunger: Attempt to form a Marriage of Flesh with a Kid Demon you spawned, and you'll be instantly struck down by the Old Gods, resulting in a Non-Standard Game Over.
• Fear & Hunger: Termina: Murdering any contestant (with the sole exception of Pav) in the train/PRHVL Bop while some other contestants are present (who aren't currently in the party) will get you grabbed and tied up with no possibility of resisting, with you escaping only on day 3 with severe starvation and a lot of lost time. Any party members will also refuse to do anything in such a battle until they're attacked (unless, again, they're fighting Pav).
• The Video Game Remake of Resident Evil 1 has an event in Jill's game that crosses this with Player Punch. If you retrieve serum, you can stop Richard from dying of snake poison. When you get cornered by the same giant snake whilst retrieving a MacGuffin, Richard will show up to get revenge on the monster. If you stay and fight to the end, the snake plays dead and Richard ends up being fatally bitten and Swallowed Whole in a Heroic Sacrifice. You can then grab his Auto-Shotgun, a Disk One Nuke that takes the relatively common shotgun ammo and can dispense more powerful shots far quicker than the ordinary shotgun, with all of the shotgun's best traits retained in the bargain. However, if you decide to flee when Richard appears, you hear him dying off-screen, and you lose the shotgun forever.
• Resident Evil 4:
  • During the "cabin defence" sequence, if you shoot Luis (who spends good part of the level handing you medicines and flashbangs that only hurt Ganados) too much, he will (quite understandably) turn on you and kill you in a cutscene.
    Luis Sera: Adios Leon... (shoots Leon twice, killing him in return for too much friendly fire dumped on him)
  • In Normal mode, you can kill the Merchant to your heart's content, as he'll simply reappear if you leave the area and come back. Do so in Professional mode, however, and he stays dead for the rest of the game, leaving you with no way to buy, sell, or upgrade any equipment. Averted in the remake, where the Merchant is invincible on all difficulties (although there is an achievement for never interacting with the merchant during a playthrough).
  • Early in the game you meet a dog whimpering with its leg caught in a bear trap, and your options are to free it, leave it to its fate, or shoot it (in which case the dog will quickly yank its leg free and run off, You Bastard!). If you free it, it shows up to help you fight El Gigante, and is basically instrumental in you being able to defeat it with Leon's limited load-out and low health at that point in the game. If you don't, well, good luck with that fight. The dog returns in the 2023 remake where it will also distract the boss during the remade El Gigante fight, and the player has a similar choice to free it or otherwise.
  • Unlike the fish you find in a couple other places which can be killed, carried as an item, and used to replenish health, killing the fish in the lake is entirely pointless as you can't reach them to collect them. If you do it anyways though, Del Lago leaps out of the water and kills you instantly. This same Non-Standard Game Over was also carried over to the remake. Downplayed, since once Del Lago has been deep-sixed, you're free to hop back in the boat and use its infinite supply of harpoons to spear and collect the fish as an impromptu Fishing Minigame.
• It's entirely possible to have literally every faction except the Loners and the Scientists (both of whom more or less stop showing up late in the game) pissed off at you in STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl. Why in hell you would deliberately do this is a mystery.
• The Suffering will inflict more and more screamers and scares on an evil player who shoots everyone he comes across, rather than helping (or at least trying to help).
• Until Dawn: Every decision to hurt an animal will ultimately result in a worse outcome for the character. Interactions between humans are more nuanced, as acting too polite, passive, or coddling can sometimes make things worse. Still, some blatant dick choices, such as Chris choosing to shoot Ashley to save himself, or shooting Emily because of a misconception (Ashley thinks wendigo bites are contagious. They are not, it takes cannibalism to turn you into one), will definitely make things worse for you. Choose to sacrifice Ashley and she'll let Chris die when he's being chased by a Wendigo, and shooting Emily traumatizes Mike, with the ending implying that he will be convicted for her murder.

Tabletop Games

• This was a mechanic in the 1st edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. All henchmen and hirelings that player characters interacted with had loyalty ratings which were initially modified by the player character's Charisma stat. After that, a person's loyalty rating increased or decreased depending on how well they were treated. Being a Benevolent Boss by treating people well (e.g. giving them a fair share of the treasure, using one's own resources to heal their wounds, rescuing them from harm) will increase their loyalty. Being a Bad Boss and Kicking The Dog (e.g. by not paying people fairly, physically attacking them, or forcing them to do degrading things) will all decrease their loyalty. Henchmen and hirelings who fail loyalty checks can do everything from abandoning player characters to betraying player characters to their enemies. Even if your player character doesn't get a Charisma bonus, treating your associates well can make them loyal enough to go to hell and back for your character.
• The Dishonored Roleplaying Game has Chaos Points, a tabletop translation of the video games' Karma Meter which can be spent by the GM to make things harder for the PCs in various ways. While the main way to accumulate the points is by choosing to do so in order to gain some kind of benefit like rerolling a skill test, destructive or malicious actions taken by the player characters will also add Chaos Points.
• The World of Darkness:
  • In most games, all characters have a stat that tracks how moral they are; it's generally a good idea to keep this stat high. Vampires who are low on Humanity are more prone to frenzy, where you go on a brief uncontrollable rampage, in a setting where keeping a low profile is important. It also increases the length of torpor. They also have trouble interacting with regular mortals, as their Uncanny Valley nature starts to come to the forefront. Stooping to any atrocity will eventually drop your Humanity score to zero, which reduces the character to a mindless beast which is no longer suitable for play.
  • Beyond that, certain acts are so nasty that the games have special rules built to ensure violators are punished, especially in the Old World of Darkness; committing them results in instant loss of Karma Meter. The major one in both settings is diablerie, a vampire eating another vampire's soul to steal his power. In the New World of Darkness gameline Promethean: The Created, committing lacuna (stealing another Promethean's vitriol, a form of Experience Points gained by completing milestones — or in other words, sabotaging another Promethean's Pilgrimage for petty gain) is another instant-punishment act.
  • Other New World of Darkness games: For werewolves, low Harmony increases the number of triggers for Death Frenzy and makes dealing with spirits harder; for mages, low Wisdom increases the power of Paradox, which, as well as the inherent problems, can lead to them being targeted by fellow mages; Sin-Eaters with low Synergy find interacting with ghosts and performing ceremonies harder, as well as having their own Geist make more and more unreasonable demands and eventually start possessing them; and for Changelings, low Clarity results in muddled perception (as you can't tell what's real and what's fantasy), causes them to be ostracised by their peers, and makes them a bigger target for the True Fae. ... And, when coupled with high Wyrd, begins to turn them into one of the True Fae.
  • The Old World of Darkness game Changeling: The Dreaming had Banality and Bedlam for players to worry about. Too much Banality — which, if you weren't careful, could be very easy to pick up and was kind of difficult to shed — and the Changeling would forget who they were, at least until they got an infusion of glamor (assuming it was early-stage Banality; late stages might leave the Changeling so drained of glamor that they wouldn't ever remember anything about magic or who they really were). Bedlam, on the other hand, was caused by spending too much time away from normal, mundane things and was actually more dangerous since it caused the person to become disconnected from reality of any sort. First-stage Bedlam could easily be self-medicated by wandering off to go steep in low levels of Banality for a while, but second and third-stage Bedlam were actively dangerous since they were much more difficult to treat and cure (third-stage Bedlam was, in fact, impossible to cure) and the delusions could lead to the character doing anything from trying to hug a dangerous monster, or attacking their allies, to — using an example from the Nocker Kithbook — experimenting with Banality and then unleashing your experiments on a whole city of Changelings. The whole thing was designed to emphasize how Changelings were really stuck between the two worlds — too magical to live in the human world, too human to live in the Dreaming.
  • Meanwhile, over in Fan Work Genius: The Transgression, low Obligation leads to trouble interacting with Muggles. Which gets to be a bit of a problem when you consider that you need human contact to keep said Karma Meter up. Oh, and that mad science tends to be expensive, so if you can't hold down a day job, no death rays for you.
  • Princess: The Hopeful: Unsurprisingly, Princesses are subject to this to an even greater degree than normal. A Princess uses her Karma Meter in a number of power-related dicepools, so if she Compromises too often, she will have fewer Wisps to work with, have trouble Transforming, and start losing Clash of Wills rolls. On top of that, Princesses face a Sensitivity roll whenever they witness an innocent suffering, and those rolls get much tougher if the Princess directly caused that suffering.
• CthulhuTech essentially runs on this trope:
  • Killing innocents, even unintentionally, ranks up with reading the unabridged Necronomicon on dinging the sanity meter. Being responsible for a massacre beats everything but seeing Cthulhu himself when it comes to driving player characters crazy. This is due to the fact that humanity is almost completely united under the New Earth Government, their numbers have been devastated, and they're under constant threat of extinction by alien forces. Each non-crazy human is a precious thing under those circumstances.
  • There is an expansion to the pen and paper RPG, featuring a lunar colony after the enslavement of Earth by the Elder Gods. It featured a sanity loss score for "knowingly and willingly causing the extinction of the human race." That was the second highest possible sanity loss.
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Earlier editions have the Paladin's code of conduct, which keeps him acting in a Lawful Good manner and not randomly slaughtering people. Breaking the code results in the paladin losing his powers until he atones for his wrongdoing. Of course, this is all too easy to abuse by jackass DMs who try to railroad the paladin into a situation where he must violate the code.
  • Certain other classes, such as Clerics, also have their powers depend on a code of conduct, but these tend not to be enforced as strictly as the Paladin's.
  • The Game Master might also implement other measures to keep psycho PCs in check, such as changing their Character Alignment to suit their actual Stupid Evil style of play, or sending the local authorities after them. This is also one of the reasons why no sane DM would award experience points for killing civilian or "friendly" targets.
  • The best response to rampaging PCs is to realize that 1) they are not the only adventurers in the world, 2) someone whom they have wronged can spend a lot of money to hire those willing to revenge the wrongs, 3) there are always adventurers, good-aligned churches, orders of paladins, noble-minded wizards, and so on willing to respond to murderous bastards who are to quick to butcher innocent people, and 4) spells like Speak With Dead and Clairvoyance can make identifying the culprits rather easy. Good GMs make the punishment seem to come organically from the game world without needing to use game mechanics.
  • In the original Oriental Adventures supplement, characters have an honor score. If this falls to 0, your character is permanently removed from the game — Jerkass actions could cost you lots of honor points.
  • Ravenloft: Any evil deed done in the Demiplane of Dread can attract the attention of the Dark Powers. If it does, they'll give you a nifty power — that makes it easier for you to Jump Off The Slippery Slope and commit an Act of Ultimate Darkness, at which point you will be turned into a Darklord and stuck in an Ironic Hell.
• Dead Inside is designed specifically to discourage the usual Tabletop RPG standard of "kill them all and take their stuff." The PCs are (by default assumption) people who for various reasons lack most of their souls. Doing bad stuff (especially killing people) can result in losing the rest of your soul and becoming one of The Heartless. Conversely, doing good things, helping people, being courageous and optimistic, and whatnot helps regenerate soul-energy, which can be forged into a new, complete soul, which is pretty much the default goal of the game.^note After that, though, things get a lot more complicated, as you're now on the radar of more than a few ruthless, Machiavellian bastards who just stole enough soul energy to outpace soul decay, and they've got a lot of practice at taking advantage of others. Meanwhile, you've got a big sign on your back that says, "Steal this new soul from me before I become a rival." You can still do well being a good person, but you're now at a point where being Good Is Dumb is dangerous and being cleverly cruel to get around punishment starts looking more attractive.
• Dark Heresy: Especially cruel and immoral actions (and keep in mind this is cruel and immoral by Dark Heresy's standards; we're in "wanton slaughter of innocents For the Evulz" or Deal with the Devil territory) grants you Corruption Points. Corruption Points give your characters derangements and physical defects, make you more vulnerable to the lure of Chaos, make puritans more liable to burn you at the stake, and ultimately render the characters unplayable.^note Of course, this being Dark Heresy, there are a number of other ways to get Corruption Points unintentionally as well; odds are 95% of Corruption Points will come about as a result of failing Will Saves or similar (such as being a Psyker) unintentionally. Being cruel and evil on top of that just adds a lot of grease to the ol' slippery slope.
• Rocket Age: In one adventure, the heroes are in the middle of a night club when a firefight erupts. If the players deliberately or recklessly endanger innocents, the game master is encouraged to take away all their Story Points, essentially shutting down most of their special abilities and all of their second chances. This should be the standard response.
• In the TSR Marvel Super Heroes game, your experience points were called Karma. You could spend Karma to improve your abilities or learn new uses for your powers, and you gained it by acting heroically — defeating villains, saving innocents, etc. — Killing anyone, for any reason, reduced your Karma to zero, even if it wasn't your fault. The rulebook noted that certain characters like Wolverine and Deadpool were killers in the comics, then pointed out "When was the last time you saw Wolverine do anything new or unexpected?"
• The Dresden Files RPG has a stat called FP, which determines the maximum number of Fate Points you're allowed to have at any one time. You lose FP by either gaining supernatural powers or by committing certain violations, such as breaking the Laws of Magic. The catch is, FP also represents your free will. Plain old humans may not have magic powers, but they have more freedom to act, and can spend Fate Points to use their mundane abilities more creatively.
• In some editions of Shadowrun, player characters can certainly go through their jobs in horrific ways which test the limits of 'deniable asset', but in return, they gain Notoriety. Too much notoriety and even the most straight-laced Johnson might just turn the team in to whichever Megacorp has the most bloodthirsty police crew.

Third-Person Shooter

• You can kill the instructors in ArmyMen II Sarge's Heroes, but if you kill too many, you can't complete it, and Vikki will come out at the end to kill you.
• Second Sight:
  • In the tutorial level, there is one room that contains an Assault Rifle in contrast to the training weapons that you are supposed to use. You can pick the gun up and start shooting people, but then they'll send everyone after to take you down. Then you'll get lectured by The Voice.
  • In any of the levels where you have a partner, you can shoot them to death yourself and they won't fire back. But the level instantly ends and you are once again lectured by The Voice. You get the same effect if you leave them to die, just with a different speech.
• In Star Wars: Bounty Hunter, shooting random civilians will detract from your score, surprisingly.
• In Mega Man Legends, you can give into your dark side and just be a total jerk. Kick trash behind the store counters in the mall. Insult a painter by saying she has no talent. Kick puppies. Foil a bank robbery and then run off with the money. Volnutt will slowly turn black the more he does this, and stealing the money for yourself permanently turns you black and prevents you from acquiring certain power-ups and NPC interactions later on. Doing the right thing of returning the money would later reward you with more money than the amount of money stolen from the bank anyway, so it's really not worth it.
• In Mega Man Legends 2, there are two separate examples:
  • Zigzagged with just being a dickhead as a whole. Kicking animals or garbage, blowing up statues, or doing shady deals will darken Megaman over time, and if you do it enough, you will darken, causing NPCs to become rude to you and jack their prices up 20%. On the other hand, a certain shady dealer in Kimotoma is apparently into that sort of thing and will sell you the otherwise unobtainable parts for the Crusher, one of the best weapons in the game, only if you've reached this state of infamy. It's also possible to redeem Megaman via good acts, to the point you become so liked you get 20% discounts everywhere, so being an asshole is actually an encouraged viable tactic if you know what you're doing.
  • Being a dickhead to Roll specifically will also get you slapped in the short run if you try and use the Grabber on her, but like the townsfolk, she also doesn't forget: attacking her, being rude to her, grabbing her, etc will eventually sour her on you and cause her to jack up her weapon customization prices by 20%, and unlike the Crusher quest, there's no benefit to doing so.
• Inverted in Spec Ops: The Line: executions (which become increasingly brutal and vicious as the game wears on) reward the player with more ammunition. Granted, given the context of the game, it doesn't really feel like a reward.
• Syphon Filter has some of this:
  • Generally, if you kill a civilian or an ally (even by accident), it is a mission failure by default and you have to restart from your last checkpoint.
  • In Syphon Filter first stage "Georgia Street", you have to fend off a group of terrorist in Washington with CBDC army as your ally. This time, you are not required to protect every single CBDC agent here unless in certain conditions the specifically tells you to. However, if you find a CBDC agent corpse and shoot at it, the other agents will turn on you and chase you throughout the whole stage with the intent to kill. Of course, if you fight them, it will be a mission failure just like the above example.
  • In Syphon Filter 3 fifth stage "Pugari Complex", you will encounter a slaver foreman named Jones, who does not carry any weapon and he does not ring any kind of alarm when you talk to him. In fact, when you demand Jones to tell you about the location of the ill slaves, he immediately surrenders. If you decide to kill Jones despite the lack of threat, a truck will try to ram you from outside, and if you survive that, a large number of guards will come at you, forcing a gunfight. Also, you will not unlock hidden stage for Mini Game if you kill Jones here.

Turn-Based Strategy

• Disgaea:
  • In Disgaea, you are given the option of sacrificing (or accidentally killing) your own allies on the battlefield. However, the good ending will be barred from you if you kill even one of them. If you kill certain numbers of allies and then kill certain bosses, you run the risk of having the other main characters of the game grow tired of you and try to overthrow you.
  • Having 99+ Ally kills is one of the requirements for the WORST ending of Disgaea 2, which throws a level 2000 boss at you right after the final boss. Considering that the final boss is level 90, that's... quite a punishment. Thankfully, it's not irreversible.
  • Throughout the series, the player has been conditioned to be belligerent to entities with Yellow bars; while it's not essential to kill them to win the match, they will often attack you, and in the Item World, taking them down is the route to making your items better. Do this in the final battle of Chapter 4 in Disgaea 5, and you skip the rest of the match (including the Bonus List) and go to the bad ending! Oh, and there are ally kill bad endings, too, just so you know.
  • If a Dark Assembly bill fails to pass, one option is to force it to pass with a bit of musclepower. However, the Senators you knock out will like you less and be more likely to vote Nay again on future bills. That said, this is hardly a deterrent; if your army is strong enough to pass bills through violence, you can just beat down the naysayers again next time. Given that the Dark Assembly is a famously poorly-designed Scrappy Mechanic, building a team that can reliably kick the entire Senate's ass is essentially the only way to progress.
• In Soul Nomad & the World Eaters, you can use Gig edicts to steal from, pick fights with, steal stats from, and in many other ways royally mess up the populace of Haephnes. However, if you try to attack people who obviously cannot fight back (like old ladies, babies, birdfeeders, and posters), a level 30 character known as 'Heroman' will appear and fight you in their place. Heroman belongs to the Game-Breaker class known as the 'gideon' that can mutilate just about anything else in the game (and Revya and any unit he/she leads is the worst matchup possible against one), and levels up 10 levels every time you defeat him.
• Prevalent in Jagged Alliance.
  • You get a reputation among the A.I.M. mercenaries available to hire, depending on how you run things. If you are losing a lot of mercs, they will note this when you attempt to hire them — and will ask for more money or simply refuse to work for you. This can become a rather big problem when reinforcing your team, and the only mercenaries that will work for you are the ones desperate for money — old, unreliable, and very often not very good.
  • Furthermore, when you do lose a merc under your command, you are given the option to ship him back home (at your expense) or just dump him in the ocean (and save money). If you do the latter, any mercenary who was his friend (such friendships are random in each game) will be outraged and refuse to work for you.
• Jagged Alliance 2:
  • Killing your mercs intentionally by having them attack each other or blow themselves up will discourage new mercs from joining you and prevent you from collecting their life insurance.
  • Killing civilians, on the other hand, reduces the towns' Loyalty score, making it harder to train militia in their defense. Well, except for the hillbilly survivalists, but they don't really count as "civilians", since they'll start peppering your squad with shotgun shells the moment you step out of line... (by, for example, trying to loot the locked boxes in their shed).
• Xenonauts: In an apparent attempt to dissuade veteran XCOM players from applying the usual "level everything in sight" tactics, you suffer a rating penalty if civilians get caught in the collateral damage.
• In XCOM, if you charge right into indiscriminate slaughter on terror missions, you'll quickly find that you lose a lot more rating points for killing civilians yourself, than you would if they get killed by the aliens (120 points deducted versus 40 points deducted, respectively). The same applies to killing your own soldiers (including, cruelly, if they are under mind control, and your only option is killing them). The worst violation, however, is refusing to respond to a terror site, which nets you negative 1000 points in a game where getting 750 points (positive or negative) is a major accomplishment^note responding to a terror site and then immediately aborting the mission will lose you 40 points per civilian, but there are rarely more than 12 civilians on a terror mission, resulting in a significantly lower penalty than not responding at all. It also results in every single funding nation reducing their monthly funding, and making the nation that received the terror attack, along with most bordering nations, more likely to be targeted for an Alien Pact.
• Shin Super Robot Wars: It is possible to kill Jangyal in Scenario 19 of the Earth Route, who is worth a lot of money and earns the burning enmity of Heinel. But this is not advisable if you want to recruit Heinel^note Who's stats are extremely jacked up later, so...
• Crusader Kings: It's very much possible to behave as a cruel, ruthless, tyrannical, greedy, backstabbing asshole, and it's possible to raise your heirs to act like this as well. However, your vassals won't like such a ruler in a game where Relationship Values are extremely important, and several of the "evil" traits simply don't provide the same boosts as their virtuous counterparts. It should be said that raising someone else's heirs to be pure evil may potentially reap windfalls in the long term.
• Fire Emblem:
  • In Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance, the player can have Jill fight her Anti-Villain father Shiharam. If this is done and she doesn't have an A Support with anyone in the army, she'll switch sides and join the enemy, and the cast will likely have to kill her too.
  • In the remake of Fire Emblem: Mystery of the Emblem, Chapter 17 has the cast fighting the Archanean army, along with a small handful of poorly-equipped, weak Gra soldiers who are being forced to fight. In order to recruit Sheena and her bodyguard Samson, the players have to talk to them without killing any Gra soldiers. If, after that, the player decides the Gra soldiers have outlived their usefulness and kill them for Exp (which could be done in the original with no penalty), Samson and Sheena get so angry at this Kick the Dog action that they immediately turn on the cast, becoming enemies permanently. They give pitifully low Exp anyway.

Visual Novel

• Tokimeki Check-In allows you to rape one of the female leads, but doing so gives you an immediate Bad End. In two separate instances, you can watch her get raped without intervening, and while you get away with this, it has repercussions. In the first instance, you won't be able to progress her plotline thereafter (although you can pursue another girl's plotline), and in the second instance, you won't be able to progress the plotline of the girls who raped her (Ayame's already lost to you at this point, even if she wasn't raped the first time).
• Three Sisters Story will punish you for sleeping with more than one of the titular sisters, or for sleeping with any other girl in the game without a condom. Moreover, if you rape one of the girls instead of letting her admit that she's a lesbian, she'll kill herself in front of you, and before a Non-Standard Game Over, you will be told that the cops are well-aware of your role in her suicide and are coming after you.
• In Glo-Ri-A, you can rape a character in the prologue, but afterwards she shoots the main character dead, and the player gets an admonition to "Play More Serious!" This was lampshaded in a Something Awful review: Negative consequences for rape in a Hentai game?! WELL I NEVER!
• Similarly, there are a couple of points in Tsukihime where you're actually offered the choice of letting Shiki give in to his Dark Side and rape one of the girls. This will get you Bad Ended shortly thereafter, though not always for a directly related reason.
• School Days. There are ordinary and harem endings, technically, but the game became infamous for the three Nice Boat ends: to wit, a kind and bookish character Driven to Suicide right in front of the main character, that same character murdering the hypotenuse with a hacksaw, and said hypotenuse returning the favour with a cleaver. Guess how the anime adaptation ended.
• Ambition:
  • Episode 2, if you choose to consult Helen, you have the option to allow her to punch Yale, and even punch Ted, just in case you are feeling suicidal.
  • Episode 8, similarly, allows you to punch Duke in the nose. This obviously results in a Game Over, but it's worth it to see Frank tell him to not be such a pussy.
• Ace Attorney:
  • In the final case of Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney, you can choose whether the defendant, Vera Misham, is guilty or innocent. Since she's your client, and the real perpetrator Kristoph Gavin is guilty as sin, there's literally no reason for the player to declare her guilty except to be a dick. If you do it anyway, you get the Bad Ending where Vera is still declared "not guilty" (by all jurors but one), but she dies from atroquinine poisoning in the hospital without ever hearing her verdict.
  • In Ace Attorney Investigations 2, also in the last case, Edgeworth has his final Logic Chess match against a very broken Sebastian Debeste, who, on top of having just been kidnapped by his own father, albeit by accident, was already blue-screening from earlier in the morning when he was told by that same father that he is stupid and useless and that everything he thought he achieved was actually all a lie. Edgeworth even directly warns the player that Sebastian is in a very fragile state of mind and needs to be dealt with gently, and yet you have the option to tell him, "You're a failure as a person!" Doing so results in a 100% time penalty, and effectively, a loss of part of your health meter.
  • Parodied in the second case of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, where refusing to take Maya's defense causes the screen to fade to black while Phoenix narrates that he never saw Maya again. Then you're returned to the scene at the Detention Center, and Phoenix reveals he was just joking, he could never do that!
  • Throughout the series, you can accuse people besides the correct one of being the murderer. Doing this gets you a scolding and sometimes a penalty on top of that. In Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Justice For All, if you even dare accuse the Judge of murder, he'll get so pissed off at you that he'll penalize you twice, taking out a hefty 95% of your life bar. If you had incurred any penalties prior to that, then you've pretty much gotten an instant game over. Meanwhile, if you accuse the prosecutor of being the murderer, she goes to town on Phoenix with her whip, but this is "only" worth a standard 10% penalty.
• You can do a lot of terrible things in Bible Black. Most of them lead to endings where you die violently. Forcing a woman to masturbate in front of the class and then raping her unconscious form in the nurse's office, for example, leads to the ending where she finds you and stabs you in the chest. To get the endings where you're alive and sane, you need to at least try to be a decent person.
• In the Raising Sim Teaching Feeling, when you're first introduced to Sylvie, you're given the option to rape her. If you're enough of a bastard to do so, it locks you out of any opportunity to raise her affection, which means that you get the bad ending where she dies shortly afterward, with the game making it clear that your abuse caused her to lose the will to live.
• Boyfriend To Death: Yeah, go ahead, slice open poor little Ren's arm with that knife. Strade will be very pleased with you.
• While a big part of Hotel Dusk: Room 215 and Last Window is about sneaking around and learning about the other building members, there's a clear difference between deception for the greater good and just being a jerk. Unfounded accusations and harassment will quickly get you cut off from making any progress. A notable instance is in the first game, where if you bully the little girl on the stairs, the hotel manager will kick you out.
• In the third game in the Purrfect Apawcalypse series, you play as a Villain Protagonist who's quite willing to Kick the Dog — often literally in this case since many of the other characters are dogs — but while you can get away with some amount of meanness, being too openly cruel or even outright killing others is a good way to get a swift death at the hands of the character you were tormenting.
• Dark Nights:
  • Why would you kick a ghost child? Look what it’s gonna do to you now!
  • On Zeikun's route, the game punishes you for choosing not to do a Heroic Sacrifice, and instead watch all your friends sacrifice themselves instead.
• Your Turn to Die: The end of the 2nd chapter is a Sadistic Choice between a borderline suicidal little girl who's begging to be voted to die and a troubled man who's willing to redeem himself through death, and the only third option is a group-wipe that will kill everyone except yourself and another participant, including a young boy who very much doesn't want to die. Condemning the little girl to death results in the bleaker ending for the chapter and another character being killed later on, and going for the Total Party Kill results in a Non-Standard Game Over.
• In Milk inside a bag of milk inside a bag of milk, the objective is to keep the girl's confidence up so she can go to the store and buy a bag of milk. Insulting her three times will cause her to call you unhelpful, giving you a bad ending and forcing you to start from the beginning.
• The Doki Doki Literature Club! mod "Monika After Story" is set after the game ends. You get the chance to interact with Monika alone and potentially do a series of romantic activities. While there are many ways to gain affection with Monika, it's also possible to just torment her by repeatedly shutting the game off without warning her and constantly calling her out for killing the other girls (which she will remind you ad nauseum that they were NPCs. If her affection dips too low, then, upon turning the game on, she will be gone. In her place will be a tear-stained note which says she still loves you, but she realizes you hate her. She'll call you out for installing a mod just to torment her, and realizes there's no point in staying. From hereon, any time you load the mod, she will be gone and all that will be left is the letter. You cannot do anything to get her back unless you locate and delete all data saved from the mod^note including data saved to your C/Drive.
• Slay the Princess: Attempting to slay the Princess and not succeeding or keeping her locked up tends to punish the player with either a Cruel and Unusual Death in the form of Laser-Guided Karma, and/or having to deal with a more monstrous form of the Princess to deal with.

Wide Open Sandbox

• Bully: Even if no law enforcement is around, start attacking 'protected' targets (adults, girls, little kids) and they will spawn (not run in, spawn) and chase you. And if you are caught too many times, you are given detention and forced to do a short minigame. These detentions will get longer the more you do them, eventually maxing out at forcing you to cut 80% of the football field which is quite big.
• Grand Theft Auto:
  • Start killing a bunch of civilians and the police will try to kill you, getting more and more aggressive as your wanted level increases, causing them to come after you with armored cars, helicopters, and eventually military tanks. Killing cops or any other person of law enforcement shoots up your wanted meter tons faster than killing innocent people.
  • Grand Theft Auto 2 introduced the six-star/level law enforcement hierarchy of three levels of police pursuit, then SWAT teams, then an FBI stand-in, and then the military. The wanted levels are capped, so the player won't encounter FBI in the first level and the military until the final level outside of missions where they've been scripted to appear.
  • In Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, destroying the harmless News Chooper that spawns from a 4-star wanted level will cause a second Police Maverick to take its place. However, this does not apply if the News Chopper falls into water, then it will be replaced by another News Chopper.
  • In Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories, the cops were much more aggressive, with fast police cars (often four at a time) that would ram you constantly, spike strips every ten seconds, and deliberate aiming at the tires (which greatly decreased your car's performance). If any cop managed to get next to your vehicle door, you were insta-busted.
  • Grand Theft Auto IV has, in increase to realism, more aggressive law enforcement as well as more fragile protagonist. It also introduced vigilante-type civilians, so now committing any crime runs the risk of having a random NPC pull out a gun and start firing at you, even if you have no wanted level. Thankfully, it's a rare occurrence.
  • Grand Theft Auto V not only retain the aggressiveness of law enforcement as well as fragility of the protagonist, but often you can attract law enforcement just by being too intimidating i.e. being too close to certain people or doing actions that come off as stalking.
    • You can cross paths with the other protagonists in the game at any point. But if you decide to attack them, they'll warn you to stop, before killing the player controlled character. For example, if a player who is controlling Michael attacks Trevor.
  • In Grand Theft Auto Online, doing random acts of wanton destruction (or even harming them or stealing from them) will incur the wrath of random civilians on to you, which will increase the chance for them to assign bounty of you for other players to collect.
    • Also, players are classified either as "good sports" or "bad sports" based on their in-game behavior. As in the single-player campaign of GTAV, almost anything goes, but to a certain point: players who destroy other players' vehicles, Rage Quit from missions, and perform other undesirable acts to other players run the risk of being classified "bad sports" and being segregated from the main game servers with other "bad sports" while being forced to wear a dunce cap.
• L.A. Noire, Causing damages to civilian vehicles, the city and injuring people will prevent you to get the Valorous 5 star rating in the case report in a case.
• Spore:
  • Using Gravitation Wave, Fanatical Frenzy, or a Planet Buster will cause nearby space-faring races to go hostile with you, except the Grox, who will become more friendly toward you.
  • Allying with the Grox will make everyone in the entire galaxy hate you^note Specifically, it adds a -200 relation modifier to every empire, even those you uplift later or have never met. Under normal conditions, this is enough for them to declare war, which requires a net bonus of -75. This includes your allies unless you've been spoiling them (if you just want them to not declare war, you need a minimum of +125 at the time you ally the Grox. If you want them to remain your ally, you need a minimum of +225) — all at the same time!
  • If you kill a baby in Creature Stage, your relationship with that species will become Enemy, the lowest relationship in that stage - that species will attack you on sight and you are unable to ally with them for the rest of the game.
• In Crackdown, you will immediately draw aggro (and a lot of gunfire) from Peacekeepers (police) if you shoot them or any civilians. Hitting them with your car reduces your Driving stat. It's entirely possible to have the cops and the gangsters pissed at you at the same time.^note In fact, one particular racing mission specifically requires the player to drive at top speed through an artificially congested area, making it impossible not to run over pedestrians or Peacekeepers, at which point the game spawns far more Peacekeepers than usual. The point of the race then becomes surviving long enough to get to the final checkpoint.
• In inFAMOUS, you have six Karma Ranks, three for Good and three for Evil. If you get the third Evil rank, Infamous, the pedestrians may suddenly decide to attack you by either punching and kicking, or throwing rocks at you. On the flipside, if you decide to give into your more saintly ways and get your karma all the way up the good alignment, the thrown rocks will suddenly be striking your enemies instead, not to mention you'll have more opportunities to gain more experience and be tipped off to enemy ambushes.
• Elite lets you blow up friendly ships and even steal their cargo from the wreckage. However, such acts of piracy earn you a legal status of "Fugitive", which means that every police ship and bounty hunter in the game will attack you on sight. And attacking a Space Station is near suicidal, as you will quickly find yourself facing the planet's entire fleet of police vessels.
• In The Godfather: The Game, getting your Heat up too high by killing too many civilians, policemen, or security guards would instantly negate the temporary immunity from police attention that you could bribe a Dirty Cop into giving. Kill enough gangsters from one Family and you could max your Vendetta, starting a Mob War. Abuse a shopkeeper or racket boss too much and they would fight back, so you couldn't get them to switch to the Corleone side for a while. If you kill one of your shopkeepers or racket bosses, you would lose the income from them for a while.
• Killing civilians in Mercenaries costs you money and makes every faction (except The Mafiya in the first game) think less of you. Of course, if one activates God Mode, they can simply run around destroying everything until they're broke.
  • Then there is the fact you can destroy any building in the game in the sequel; however, destroy a Faction's main building and all your favoring with them instantly turns hostile.
  • Also in the sequel, you can always steal Fiona's pink sports car and take it for a joyride, but if it gets destroyed, funds are automatically extracted from your account to pay for a replacement.
• Red Dead Redemption:
  • A potentially frustrating "mission" requires you to take your cows out to pasture. Along the way, some of these cows will wander off, or get stuck on rocks and trees and just will not return to the herd. This obviously becomes frustrating, and you may want to take it out on the cow in question by putting a slug between its eyes. However, even though you own the cows and have 14 other ones in the herd, the game fails you for bringing any harm to them whatsoever.
  • Also, killing any of your family members will cause the game to instantly end and restart at the last save point.
• A Rust server administrator known as Camomo has made an art out of bringing swift, brutal, and hilarious justice to cheaters and hackers who plague his server. Some of his exploits include spawning landmines stealthily behind players using wall-hacks, laying out a field of landmines in front of one hacker's illicitly-built base, and sicking attack bears carrying landmines to bumrush aimbotters. Of course, every cheater he trolls is also banned from his server after he's done messing with them.
• Terraria is usually very tolerant of your evil ways, allowing you to slice bunnies and birds in half left and right but there are exceptions:
  • There's even a voodoo doll that lets you kill the Guide at your will! Throw that voodoo doll into lava, however, and you get attacked by the massive Wall Of Flesh. It will rip newer players apart, and there is literally no escape — you have to kill it or die to escape. Even worse — you have to kill it at least once to advance the game.
  • Downplayed with the Clothier voodoo doll. While equipping it allows you to kill the Clothier, if you do so during the night, you'll have to fight Skeletron.
  • In addition, cramming your NPCs into Noob Coobs will cause them to jack up their prices and pay you less for items.
• Minecraft:
  • Hunting wild animals for supplies and defending yourself from hostile monsters has no penalty (and indeed is just sensible gameplay). However, wolves and zombie pigmen only become hostile if attacked. Since they spawn in groups, attacking one leads to the whole family coming after you. Polar bears and dolphins are similar in this regard, as the polar bears will defend their cubs if they are attacked by the player, while dolphins are like the earlier wolves, the entire pod swarming the player if one individual is attacked. There's no bad effects to be had from attacking or even killing tamed animals, though, unless you count losing the benefits they provide in the first place. Killing too many without replacing punishes poor resource management more so than cruelty.
  • Killing Villagers in villages will also alert Iron golems (probably built by the villagers as guardians) to attack you.
    • Speaking of which, there is a popularity mechanic for each village. Your popularity will lower if you attack/kill villagers (and especially if you kill an Iron Golem). But if your popularity is too low, the Iron Golems in that given village will begin attacking you on sight.
  • Dolphins were added in 1.13 and help you find treasure if you feed one some cod. However, if you attack one, the whole pod will tear you apart.
• My Summer Car:
  • Misbehaving in the dance pavilion (peeing, engaging a fight, flipping the middle finger in front of the security guard or climbing in the stage when the band is performing), will throw you out of the pavilion. Repeating misbehaviour inside here and the security guard will throw you as soon you enter the building.
  • Leaving the electronics (TV, sauna, computer or oven) turned on for too long, falling asleep while smoking a cigarette, detonating fireworks indoors, blowing up the gasoline or the diesel canister using the fireplace or the sauna or using the garbage barrel or the grill inside the house will cause the house to be burned. Burned houses will stay like that and without modifications it is not possible to repair the house. Using the fireplace or the lightning strikes the house directly it also provokes house fire too, but has small chances to do so.
  • Refusing to pay the police fines, the police will sent you to jail and you must wait a very very long amount of hours, days, weeks or even months or years based in the jail sentence. One day sentence is equivalent to two hours realtime. A 10-day sentence can be obtained by running over people which is roughly 20-hour realtime sentence. The maximum day sentence is 999 so it could take several years to get out of the jail. In fact, you can escape out of the jail by using mods, but you cannot enter the house or Teimo's Shop meaning that you can't use the phone or buy anything including the fuel.
• Don't Starve: Every animal (non-hostile) has its innocence level measured in numbers. If you fill it to 30 (for comparison, the worst is killing a butterfly, yielding 6 points), Krampus will spawn and rob your chests.
• In Red Faction: Guerrilla, each civilian you kill costs you one point of sector morale. This has almost no gameplay effect, but it's annoying — and since the Red Faction is basically a terrorist group, sparing civilians can be very tricky.
• In Watch_Dogs, hurting and/or killing innocents (or even criminals when a non-lethal option is available) will lower your reputation. Once it drops low enough, random people on the streets will call 911 simply upon seeing you, forcing you to run from the police constantly.
• While Palworld revels in Black Comedy and Video Game Cruelty Potential, you still can't do whatever the hell you want and not suffer consequences:
  • If you are cruel to your Pals, they may revolt against you. Even without outright aggression, overworked and unhappy Pals will work much slower and often simply refuse to do anything.
  • Certain actions, like slaughtering Pals for food, assaulting passive NPCs, or capturing humans with Pal Spheres, are considered illegal. Performing them within sight of other people will get the Palpagos Islands Defense Force after you, and these guys do not mess around.
  • Passive NPCs will fight back if you attack them. In particular, the merchants and Palpagos Islands Defense Force soldiers will draw guns and riddle you with bullets if you attack them. Goes double for the Black Marketeer, not only will he set a very powerful Pal on you if you attack him, he'll also whip out a minigun.

Other / Unsorted

• The mobile card game Ayakashi: Ghost Guild punishes you for attempting to attack other players that are ten levels or more below your own, counting it as a loss on your record and taking away some of your silver (currency needed to raise the level of your cards through fusion).
• In the Light Gun Game/Rail Shooter part of Die Hard Trilogy, if you kill any cops or SWAT officers, the game will display the message "Major Disaster" and they will turn against you.
• For the holiday season in 2023, Valve got creative when dealing with cheaters and other disreputable players in Dota 2, sending them a seasonal reward item titled "Highly Toxic Lump of Coal", the Flavor Text of which basically informs them that they have been permanently banned (which they subsequently are, for real).
• In Duck Season, an obvious horror take on Duck Hunt, you have the option to shoot the dog when he shows up with no ill effect. Well, not until he first appears several times in the real world, kills your mother, tries to trap you in the video game, and tries to murder you himself, at least. If you don't happen to shoot him at all, he instead gives you an end screen and a celebratory dance.
• In Dynasty Warriors 6, during the battle of Chang Ban, you can mow down innocent Civilians to get Liu Bei to slow down. Slay them all though and Liu Bei will stop running...and then pursue Cao Cao. If you can't protect him (i.e. being offscreen), Liu Bei will rip Cao Cao apart like tissue, causing you to fail the mission.
• In Half-Minute Hero, if you try to short-change the Time Goddess in "Hero 30", she takes away all of your equipment after a set time, making it nearly impossible to clear the level.
• Henry Stickmin Series:
  • In Completing the Mission, following up from the most villainous endings of the previous two games (Rapidly Promoted Executive where you betray the government to become the leader of the Toppat Clan, an infamous criminal organization; and Ghost Inmate where you abandon Ellie after she helps you break out of prison) leads to Ellie following you back to the Toppat Clan and exposing your abandoment of her to everyone there, which causes most of the Toppat Clan to turn on you and declare you unworthy of being their leader. And you want to defeat her to gain back the leadership? But NOPE! The route shortly ends in a cliffhanger to prevent doing you everything.
  • Also in Mission, the Toppat King path gives you an option to abandon Reginald, the former leader of the Toppat Clan who's shown signs of being The Starscream to you, to the government. Taking it causes you to be gunned down by your own clan members; the fail screen even describes this as Laser-Guided Karma.
• In Madden NFL, if you attempt to run up the score to a ludicrous degree (hundreds of points, which is possible with low difficulty and money plays), the game will flash a warning begging you to stop scoring or else you'll "break the game."
• It's not a part of the code, but when you kill people without reason in Mitadake High, they will label you an RKer (random killer) and you are either banned from that server or so very dead.
• In the NCAA Football series, there is an actual penalty for doing so: you will lose sportsmanship points if you do things considered unsporting, like running up the score or going for it on fourth down instead of punting when you have the lead.
• In Paperboy, if you damage a customer's house, they will cancel their subscription. If you lose enough customers, it gives you a Non-Standard Game Over screen with the words "Paperboy Fired".
• Progressbar 95: Shoot a dog in Progresstein 3D and you lose a life. Well, you are playing as a dog in this minigame, so he wouldn't want to hurt his own folk, but still.
• In Sabres of Infinity, bloodthirsty behaviour that violates the rules of engagement (such as killing civilians and executing prisoners) will damage your reputation. Ignoring your men's needs and/or being excessively harsh towards them may cause them to rebel against you or undermine their combat effectiveness.
• 60 Seconds!:
  • While you're in your nuclear bunker, sometime a group will arrive asking for aid and you can give them food, water, medical supplies, or any combination of the three. Give them nothing? There's the high chance that they steal all your stuff, as Jacksepticeye learned the hard way.
  • If you take the opportunity to raid someone else, everyone takes a hit to their sanity. If they go completely insane, they could run off or destroy vital items. Such actions also lock you out of being rescued by the twins.
  • If you try to conserve resources by only taking Ted and leaving the rest of the family to burn, he'll go insane pretty much instantly.
• Tiny Toon Adventures: Acme All-Stars has the "Montana Hitting" minigame where you're given sixty seconds to whack Montana Max as many times as you can. You lose points if you hit Dizzy Devil or Elmyra Duff.
• If you shoot your teammate in the Midway arcade game Vindicators (or its "Midway Arcade Treasures" version), your fuel and points will be transferred to them with each hit, until you die. (This can actually be a legitimate tactic to help your partner out.)
• Being a team-killer in World of Warships will not only get you marked for all to see (you suffer either the embarrassing pink name and icon or the more serious orange name as a warning to other players that you are a danger) but you also lose rewards for combat (less XP, fewer credits). Also, if you continue to do team damage while marked as a team-killer, you start receiving the damage instead, up to and including killing yourself by damaging allies. Additionally, if you are marked as a team-killer, other players on your team can fire on or even sink you with no penalty... meaning you get no XP or money, and still have to pay the repair bills.

Non-Video Game Examples

Anime & Manga

• In Infinite Dendrogram, Player Killing has no punishment, but killing Tiens (NPCs) is the only in-game crime that receives punishment (being unable to use the country's save point). Which is justified by Tiens being living AI in a virtual world.
• In Shangri-La Frontier, PKers were a rampant menance for a while in the titular game, having enough of them to form their own guild (named the Asura-Kai) to terrorize the rest of the players. Then the developers released an update that punished Player Killing by not only giving out a bounty to anyone that took down a PKer, said person could then claim any and all loot said PKer was carrying in their inventory (including items stored in a personal space that would normally protect them from being robbed). The guild then went from The Dreaded to being seen as walking treasure boxes, and the former terrors revealed their true nature as the Dirty Coward each of them was, with a few exceptions like Pencilgon who turned their back on the guild in disgust at their cowardice.
• In Sword Art Online, with the majority of the action being set in VRMMORPGs, this is evident in how the systems treat "orange" players, who are players that commit crimes in-game (such as stealing from, harming, or killing other players outside of duels). Said players are forbidden from entering Safe Zones without being attacked by NPC guards (and in SAO in particular, often by other players who tend to assume — not without reason — you engage in Player Killing in a world where dying in-game means dying in real life) until you leave the area. In the video game continuity of Hollow Realization, getting a "blue" cursor from attacking or killing an NPC directly in Sword Art: Origin gives you all the disadvantages of being an orange player on top of being attacked on sight by any nearby monsters or NPCs in the area (even otherwise neutral or friendly ones).
  • In a personal carmic way Yui's story in the first arc could considered this to Asuna who earlier has advocated for using NPCs as bait to take down a boss disregarding how it's been established that NPCs have true intelligence or at least the ability to develop such in the right circumstances, so the Universe decided to drop an adorable little girl with no memories into her life, have the girl call her mommy ensuring that they form an emotional bond, only to cruelly reveal her to be an AI just after she drew the attention of the main operating system which was about to delete her with Asuna powerless to do anything but watch her new daughter disappear from existence. Luckily Kitito who has been engaging quite heavily in Video Game Caring Potential gets rewarded with the chance to save her, if only in an in-game object that can be restored once the Death Game is over.

Comic Strips

• Happens fairly often in Knights of the Dinner Table, given the tendency of Bob and Dave in particular to use violence as a first resort and then complain when Game Master B.A. makes them deal with the unpleasant consequences.
• FoxTrot:
  • One arc centers around Jason's difficulty to get past a powerful monster in a video game. His sister Paige manages to figure it out in a few seconds; simply put, you're not supposed to attack him, otherwise he'll rain death and destruction upon your character.
  • In another strip, Peter plays a Moral Guardians-approved version of Vice City and complains about how impossible it is to help little old ladies cross the street in the allotted time. Jason muses that you're probably not supposed to beat and rob them first.

Gamebooks

• Cretan Chronicles has Altheus, a hero tasked with avenging his brother's death, being given the option to steal gold, kill unarmed/surrendered opponents, stabbing people In the Back, and performing shameful deeds in general. Choose that option and the book increases your SHAME meter — note that if your SHAME score is too high, the book will execute you via Bolt of Divine Retribution.
• Lone Wolf:
  • Over the course of the series, there are times Lone Wolf can do things that are... morally grey at best. The penalties for such decisions take the form of difficult battles, losing out valuable items, or dying horribly. Lone Wolf is canonically a Messianic Archetype, he should act like it.
  • Averted in Book 2; when one of your travelling companions (you don't know which) tries to have you poisoned, you're better off killing the merchant than the one who actually did it. But played straight if you pick anyone else. The mercenary woman is bad enough, but if you pick one of the Knights of the White Mountain, he and his brother team up and become the hardest fight in the Kai books. They're even tougher to beat than Darklord Haakon! And this takes place before you get the Sommerswerd. Aside from cheating or being very lucky, there's no real way to win this fight.

Literature

• In the second Noob novel, the Fictional Video Game has a room full of time-frozen people that can be killed by the player. The actual in-game purpose of that room is to go talk to a plot-important character that turns out to have completely "unfrozen" before everyone else. Kill her companions instead of talking to her and she'll kill you.

Webcomics

• The roleplaying-game-within-a-webcomic in Darths & Droids makes civilians worth negative XP.
• This◊ My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fan comic shows what happens when the Cutie Mark Crusaders' Zelda roleplay turns on Scootaloo.
• Eridan in Homestuck, in the Land of Wrath and Angels, took it upon himself to kill all the angels. Despite the fact that they did not drop Grist, indicating that rather than enemies, the angels were the innocent citizens of the world (like the salamanders in the Land of Wind and Shade, or the crocodiles in the Land of Heat and Clockwork). The angels, which only died after minutes of sustained fire from Eridan's high-level weapon, proceeded to swarm him at all times once he began killing them (much like the classic chickens in The Legend of Zelda).
• The Non-Adventures of Wonderella parodies this trope by having Wonderita play an Affectionate Parody of Doom (2016) and using an ID card found on a monster to go to their house... only to meet his widow and daughter. When even Wonderella is crying from the Player Punch, that's this trope done right.

Web Original

• Epic NPC Man:
  • Two adventurers take a beating later when they try to attack the fisherman.
  • Exaggerated in Over Powered, where an adventurer gets killed by a guard because the former accidentally kicked a nearby chicken.
  • Not to mention the other player who'd kicked one deliberately, and immediately got mobbed and slaughtered by the entire town.
• In Sonic the Hedgehog 2: Special Edition, if the player mistreats Tails, he will retaliate. Docfuture does this by abandoning Tails in Casino Night Zone, so Tails starts using the game's hint mode to dish out passive-agressive mockery. Eventually it escalates to the point of Tails trying to kill Docfuture (though this is eventually revealed to be the result of brainwashing).
• Several of The C.L.U.E. Files chronicle players being needlessly violent and generally Stupid Evil, and having karma come their way because law enforcement does indeed exist in Shadowrun. Sometimes the rest of the party manages to get out in time, sometimes not.

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