Run Or Die / Video Games

Run or Die in Video Games.

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• Every enemy in Amnesia: The Dark Descent. You have no means of self-defense, so if you encounter a monster, your only hope is to run as fast as you can and hide until the monster stops chasing you.
• ANNO: Mutationem: At The Consortium's underground facility, Ann encounters a Brown Note Being called The Eroder that's impervious to her current weapons and can only escape from it when starts pursuing her to avoid being affected by its instantaneous kill-effect upon contact until she locates a weapon that can destroy it.
• Arrogation: Unlight of Day sees you playing as a reporter (and decidedly a non-combatant) exploring an abandoned village. Naturally, your best best of escaping when attacked by zombies or the Raven-demon is by running the hell away. In fact, the demon monk who's the sole boss can only be defeated by being sealed.
• At the end of the prologue in Baldur's Gate, the beginning-level Player Character and their mid-level mentor Gorion are ambushed by the Big Bad Sarevok and some minions. Gorion stays to fight while telling the Player Character to flee, which they do. He kills or disables the others and holds off Sarevok for a while, but hasn't really got a chance. When you actually fight Sarevok at the end of the game, at least he's got only about two to two and a half times your levels.
• Bendy and the Ink Machine: You have to run away from Ink Bendy whenever he comes to the scene.
  • In Chapter 1 of the first game, you're safe because he's behind something that is boarded up (though considering his strength and teleportation abilities, it's unclear why he doesn't chase you). You still have to run away because the entire studio is being flooded, which is possibly Ink Bendy's doing anyway. In Chapter 2, Sammy Lawrence summons him; as you're trying to escape, he shows up in a jump scare by using a pool of ink to teleport directly in front of you. In Chapter 3, he will teleport around the levels you're doing Twisted Alice's errands on and you need to hide. Even if you manage to unlock the tommy gun, there's no damage it can deal him. In Chapter 4, Ink Bendy doesn't come after you, but a fight between him and the Projectionist shows what happens to strong characters who don't run or hide from Ink Bendy.
  • Starting in Chapter 2 of Bendy and the Dark Revival, you must quickly find a hiding spot when the game tells you that Ink Bendy is getting near. Getting in his view is almost always guaranteed an instant death.
• Bloody Zombies have a zombie horde of around a hundred in population showing up near the Tower of London, far too many for you to fight, and your only option is running like crazy and find a way to activate the bridge so you can get away. Your character actually lampshades it aloud onscreen:
  "Can't take them all, leg it! Run... run... RUN!"
• The Borderlands 2 DLC Mr. Torgue's Campaign of Carnage features a sidemission that partially subverts this. It requires you to allow a fiery badass skag to chase you in a rough circle across the map as exercise. You can kill it as easily as any other badass skag (which may not be that easy depending on the difficulty mode), but that will piss off Tina, its owner, and fail the mission, requiring you to start it over. The mission objectives for each waypoint humorously play this straight.
  FOR THE LOVE OF TORGUE, RUN FASTER!!
• Call of Duty 2: The mission "Outnumbered and Outgunned" starts with an attempt to hold position when faced with an Afrika Korps attack, but quickly devolves into a chaotic retreat by the British from the town of Toujane as the Germans overwhelm any attempt at defense. The main objective throughout the mission after the first turret section can be surmised as "get the heck out of there".
• Clock Tower: When Scissorman shows up, you run for dear life until you find either a place to hide or a means to drive him away.
• At a couple points in Condemned 2: Bloodshot, the interface itself says "RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!", most memorably when you first encounter the rabid grizzly bear.
• Crash Bandicoot has plenty of these levels throughout the series, running from giant boulders and giant polar bears and that’s just the early games.
• Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony: In the prologue, Kaede and Shuichi flee from a Mini-Mecha that's actively hunting them until they reached the gym.
• Dark Echo: Some levels involve the player trying to outrun an increasingly large mass of enemies, all converging on the player.
• Dawn of War: Retribution: The second level of the campaign sics a Baneblade on your heroes before there's any chance to bring troops. It also handily serves to introduce the "Fall Back" mechanic (your units move a lot faster towards the closest rally point, but are uncontrollable), as well as the Cast from Money revival when one hero is inevitably killed. The Baneblade keeps pursuing you until the very end of the level, where you hack some heavy turrets to turn it into scrap.
• The survivors can't do any damage to a killer in Dead by Daylight, at most stunning them with a barricade or flashlight. They also run slower than the killers, forcing them to rely on misdirection and quick wits to outsmart them.
• Dead Space
  • The Hunter in the first game. You can attack it if you want, but it won't have any effect beyond briefly slowing him down. In order to escape, you have to lead it to the appropriate place to turn it into a Mutant Alien Zombie Popsicle; later on you have to do the whole thing again, but this time you get to Kill It with Fire.
  • Dead Space 2 starts with this: Isaac is bound in a straitjacket, so his only option is to run the hell away from the necromorphs trying to kill him. Averted later, however: while there are battles that are more sensical to run from, you can fight any and everything that you come across, and because of closed room traps, you frequently are required to.
• Dynasty Warriors: If you see Lu Bu, run away. Players new to the series will doubtlessly be cut down as though they were a mook. He is the most powerful character in the series, and once he shows up, your only hope of survival is running away and completing the mission objective before he catches up. It's technically possible to beat him any time he appears, but you'll need a high-level character with a good weapon. And if he appears during the final battle of a character's story, he's usually just an ordinary (but tough) boss.
  • Samurai Warriors has the same thing going on with Keiji Maeda and Tadakatsu Honda. Unless you are high-leveled and carrying a strong weapon, your choices when faced against either of these two men is limited to two: get away from them as fast as you are able, or prepare to go down swingin.
• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim opens with the player in Helgen as it's attacked by a dragon. There's no hope of fighting it, since being a condemned (possible) criminal, you have no weapons, magic, or armor, your hands are bound so you cannot use the weapons of those who die against the dragon, and it's invincible anyway. And if you stay in the open long enough, it'll kill everything else then notice and come after you. Said dragon turns out to be none other than Alduin, the Big Bad himself, and he had come to Helgen to kill you specifically.
• If you happen to come across Chester, a ventriloquist dummy dressed up in a business suit in Emily Wants To Play, the first thing you have to do is to run to the next room before he catches you.
• Empire Earth: One Greek campaign mission starts you on a small island. The island's resources are only there to get you a few boats so you can leave, as an unstoppable army makes landfall soon after.
• Anyone who's played the Etrian Odyssey games long enough to encounter a FOE (which isn't very long) will tell you that unless you're massively overleveled for the floor you're on, you run the hell away from them. One particular case in Heroes of Lagaard is Salamox, who's nest you need to steal a MacGuffin from for a mission early on in the game. The chancellor, as well as the game itself, warn you that if you try to fight past it, you will die. They aren't kidding.
• If at any point in Evolve you are the last hunter alive, this is a necessary gameplay mechanic. While certain hunters may be able to evade or slow the monster down for a while, the only real recourse it to survive long enough for the rest of your team to respawn.
• EXTRAPOWER: Attack of Darkforce: At one point Blackberry and Kurogane make their way into one of the attack ships of the Dark Force fleet. Unfortunately they're found out, and Co-Dragons Mensouma and Undaita are on-board. Either one can kill the heroes in a turn or two, so the only thing to do is to run and find an escape as the bosses give chase, crashing through walls or melting into the floor to pursue.
• After the planetary shield drops in F.A.K.K. 2, tough new enemies appear and Julie straight up declares that fighting them with her current weapons is futile. They technically can be killed, but it requires the better part of your current arsenal's ammo cap to down even one, so it's pretty awesome when your shiny new toys later in the game can grind them to hamburger.
• In Fallout 4, during an early mission for the Railroad, Deacon gives the player this advice regarding Coursers, elite model synths. Generation 1 and 2 synths are obviously-mechanical (though sleek, white, and rounded as opposed to the Retro Future look of other robots) and are deployed as Mecha-Mooks, while gen 3 models are indistinguishable from humans and used to gather intelligence in the wasteland. Coursers are gen 3s that are programmed purely for combat — basically making them an Expy for Terminators — and they are every free synth's worst nightmare, charged with hunting them down and taking them back to be "retained" by the Institute.
• Fatal Frame final boss ghosts are like this whenever you encounter them prior to the end of the game. All of the games have a sequence where the main character must just run the hell away from the invincible ghost, lest she catch you and end your game instantly (interestingly, with the exception of the Kusabi, all of these ghosts are female). The third game has the Final Boss as a random encounter throughout (hint:RUN!), and also reintroduces the Kusabi from II in the Minakami Village areas. Though you can fight him off once or twice, it's really a better idea to just flee. He's freaking tough.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Bahamut from Final Fantasy III. You encounter him very early in the game, and if you don't run then he'll kill you on turn one.
  • The "Guardian" mecha in Final Fantasy VI is used as Border Patrol. You can finally fight and defeat it in the endgame.
  • The spider robot during the Dollet mission in Final Fantasy VIII, which appears unexpectedly and chases the party all the way back to the evacuation point. It doesn't have a particularly powerful offense, but it's impossible to kill (except at one point) and it appears during a Timed Mission so you can't waste too much time fighting it.
• Fire Emblem:
  • In Thracia 776, as soon as Galzus steps out of the castle in chapter 6, it's time to haul ass in the other direction. Your units at this point have no business even starting to fight a swordfighter with Astra, Luna, and the three most relevant combat stats maxed out. (Besides, killing him with precipitous RNG abuse now prevents you from recruiting him at the end of the game.) The trick is in finding time to visit the houses in town for loot, and not letting your party get log-jammed too much trying to escape, before Galzus starts hunting you down.
  • Similar to Galzus, Vaida in Blazing Blade first appears as a ridiculously overpowered enemy thanks to her Spear being enchanted with Nergal's magic. It's highly recommended that you stay out of her attack range and focus on defense, since the mission only requires you to survive for 12 turns rather than defeat every enemy. And also like Galzus, while she is killable if you're clever and/or over-levelled enough, doing so prevents you from recruiting her later on.
  • Path of Radiance: Stepping past a certain threshold in chapter 11 prompts the Black Knight to mosey onto the field. Due to his stats and literal Plot Armor making him a walking force of death, it'd be best to run to the escape point. Subverted the next time he pops up in chapter 24, where he will stand at the start of the map and just observe so long as no one goes into his range. Can possibly be played straight again when the time comes for Ike to duel with him - if his stats are simply not good enough to survive 5 turns with the Knight, you have the option of just booking it.
  • Shadow Dragon: Once you reach the prison in Prologue 4, the Sable Knights arrive. They're all Level 11 knights, when you'll be lucky to have a Level 6 character. In-universe, Malledus suggests leaving a decoy to draw them off (and you have to in order to open the door to the end of the map). They can be kept from arriving at all by killing Gordin instead of recruiting him, which given his miserable growths isn't a loss, but otherwise, run.
  • Fates has Chapter 12 of the Birthright route, when after a failed assassination attempt on Garon, Corrin's party is forced to retreat. Xander, who's hunting Corrin down, is too strong to defeat at this point, and the player must get Corrin to the escape tile.
  • Three Houses: Episode 4 of the Cindered Shadows sidestory has the party pursued by a Guardian Golem after retrieving the Chalice of Beginnings. The golem has staggeringly high stats that make fighting it head-on hopeless; the goal of the map is to cut your way through the phantom soldiers summoned alongside it and escape to safety before the gates close and trap you in with it.
• F.3.A.R features the appropriately named multiplayer mode "Fucking Run", in which you must... well... run to escape a supernatural Wall of Death and reach safe zones. Fans and critics alike praised the mode for being downright intense.
• Averted in Golden Sun: The Lost Age with the Serpent bossfight. It can be fought as soon as you enter its lair, but it regenerates 200 HP per turn (there's only one other boss who regenerates that much, the horrifying Dullahan). Going through the dungeon to shine light onto it weakens it until it eventually regenerates a much more reasonable 30 HP.
• Guild Wars:
  • In Prophecies, the last part of the "Great Northern Wall" mission has the character running away from a large group of Charr.
  • Later, one mission has you running from an army of Mursaat. If you attempt to fight, the party will die in seconds, due to the Mursaats' ridiculously powerful Spectral Agony attack. It is only after you have your armor "Infused" with spells to neutralize that attack that you can fight them on equal terms.
  • In Eye of the North, the quests in Kamadan, Kaineng, and Lion's Arch that take the character to the Eye of the North areas end with the player running away from destroyer groups.
• Invoked in Halo: Combat Evolved when you first encounter the Flood. After the cutscene introducing them, the game changes your mission objectives to, quite simply, "Escape!". You can try to kill every Flood you see, but the cost in health and ammo will be high; you're better off running from most of them and fighting only when you can't avoid it.
• Hotline Miami: In a game where the player is used to killing everyone on each floor before moving on to the next batch of enemies, the Part 3 level "Crackdown" is eventually interrupted by a SWAT Team whose members can only be stunned. The objective then becomes to sneak out past them while they're distracted.
• In Kirby: Planet Robobot, levels 1-1 and 6-8 both end with Kirby getting chased down by a mechanized Whispy Woods, and you have to flee to safety to the left. If you defy the trope to stand and fight, he's actually killable; he drops the first Gold Sticker in 1-1 and the final Code Cube in 6-8.
• Let It Die: If you stay on any floor too long, the Jackal Gang will arrive - each one is Level 200 and has a corresponding fully-upgraded set of gear to match. They become killable if you can get close enough to their level - until you reach floor 42 and they skyrocket to Level 300.
• Live A Live. The Behemoth, present in Cube's chapter, acts like the above trope: facing it doesn't even prompts you a Hopeless Boss Fight, just a grim Game Over screen. Granted, this chapter is emulating a survival horror setting, and your Playable Character, being a maintenance robot, is very ill-equipped for dealing with any kind of threats. To the point that the Behemoth can be defeated eventually, but by an NPC, not you. Said NPC being an armed soldier tasked with this creature's escort, so it's justified plenty.
• In The Lord of the Rings Online, there's the Session Play Instance "The Fall Of Moria". You play as a dwarf alongside Durin and break down a cave wall to find Mithril. Only to end up trapped, facing the Balrog. Yes, the same one that Gandalf fights in the future, mentioned above under Film. Your quest objective? Survive then, Escape.
• In Mass Effect 3, the Reapers, at least in the Galaxy Map. As you explore the Galaxy looking for Plot Coupons and War Assets, you run a risk of attracting the Reapers' attention every time you use your ship's sensors (without the sensors, you can't find anything). When the Reapers finally notice you, the Reaper Horn blares, and it's time to run. Getting caught by one of the Reapers is an automatic Non-Standard Game Over, no matter how good of an Ace Pilot Joker is. There are only three missions in the game where you can directly engage the Reapers, and it's always with some kind of outside help from allied forces.
• Mega Man 8-Bit Deathmatch has the confrontation with Evil Robot-possessed Sunstar. While you still have access to your weapons, the boss will No-Sell everything you throw at them until they begin to charge up a big energy blast that envelops the entire room. The gate leading to outside the boss room opens up and you begin your escape from the Wily Star, dodging crumbling ceilings and the place falling apart along the way.
• Mega Man Battle Network: Randomly encountering a stronger version of a boss you've defeated in the past when you're not prepared for it is quite likely to become a case of this, as they tend to be much tougher than the previous version. In a rather sadistic design choice, the option to flee was removed in the fourth game, making it entirely possible to suddenly end up stuck in a battle with something that can kill you in one or two hits on top of potentially having more HP then the final boss. They weren't nice enough to make you not get a game over for losing, either.
• Metroid:
  • In Metroid Fusion, the SA-X is ridiculously overpowered compared to Samus, being comparable to your power level at the end of Super Metroid ^note it came from the X within Samus' infected Power Suit components and Samus being gimped by her new weakness to cold and a suit that doesn't protect her much. Your friendly AI commander actually gives you this instruction in as many words. As you progress through the game, you go from hiding, to running from, to preventing from following, and finally fighting at the very end of the game.
  • The E.M.M.I. from Metroid Dread are plated with some of the strongest stuff in the universe, and the second Samus encounters shrugs off several Power Beam shots and a Missile she fires at it before chasing after her. You will have to deal with seven of them total, the first of which is partially busted. If you have the Omega Cannon (and the Omega Stream for later E.M.M.I. encounters), find a long hallway and blast its face off with it; if not, this trope is in full effect.^note You have a very narrow window when it catches you to Melee Counter it and escape while it reboots; blow it, and Samus gets skewered.
• Minecraft: The Warden is a Boss in Mook Clothing that spawns in the Deep Dark if a player activates a Sculk Shrieker too many times. It hits incredibly hard with its basic attack, has more health than the Ender Dragon and Wither combined, and if it's angry towards the player can chase them down incredibly quickly while bypassing most obstacles that give other mobs pause. Should the player try to hide from its wrath, it also has a ranged attack in the form of a wall-piercing sonicboom that can't be blocked by shields or terrain and bypasses all armor. The Warden is blind but can hear and smell the player, it can be distracted with thrown objects, and if it cannot detect the player for a while it will despawn, making distraction and sneaking away the only practical course of action against it. If the player somehow manages to kill it, it drops a paltry 5 exp and a Sculk Catalyst (which isn't too rare around the Deep Dark). To drive the point home, The Warden doesn't even count towards the Monsters Hunted advancement, which requires killing every other Hostile Mob type in the game.
• Mother 3: The Chimera Factory. The Ultimate Chimera. If it touches you or any member of your party, that's it. No Hopeless Boss Fight, just a cutscene where the Chimera chomps down and the screen quickly turns red before you get to the Game Over screen. It shows up again on the bathroom floor of the Empire Porky Building, just to give you a Jump Scare.
• Oakwood: In the event that she hasn't already managed to evade them in some other fashion without getting seen by them beforehand, the only option of survival available for player character Madison in the event she is successfully seen by any of the dinosaurs she encounters is to run as fast as she can and hope that she makes it to a safe location in time to avoid getting eaten.
• In OFF, a few turns into your first fight with Enoch, the Batter will warn you that he's too huge, and urge you to flee. When you do run, he begins chasing you down the hallway from his office, and the process is repeated if he catches you. Defeating him is technically possible, but he has 99999 HP (over eight times as much as Sugar) and higher Defense and Spirit than anything/anyone else in the game other than Hugo and the Ballmen, but Hugo doesn't attack you, and you don't fight the Ballmen as the Batter. You get no experience/credits/items for attempting to fight him, and the game continues as though you fled.
• Otter Island: When you eventually come face-to-face with the shapeshifting creature, your only option is to run (as the game prompts) and find shelter, as you have no weapons or other means of defending yourself. You have to be speedy about it as well, because the creature is almost as fast as you are and changes direction quickly to try and cut you off.
• Outlast: Before you even begin playing the actual game, you get a bit of expository text at the beginning that gives a little bit of background information on the Player Character Miles, and states, in no uncertain terms, that he cannot physically fight back against the threats he encounters, and that running and hiding are your only methods of survival. This is also true for the protagonists of the Whistleblower DLC and Outlast II, Waylon and Blake respectively.
  "You are not a fighter; to navigate the horrors of Mount Massive and expose the truth, your only choices are to run, hide, or die."
• In the Paper Dolls duology, fleeing from the scene is the best way to deal with ghostly ambushes if you're unarmed and without proper sealing items against the spirits.
• Paper Mario games have Clefts. If examined, you'll be warned that sometimes there's no shame in running, as they have so much defense that you can potentially find yourself incapable of harming them at all without the right items or moves ready.
  • Paper Mario 64: The truest example of this would be the "Invincible" Tubba Blubba, as if you battle him prior to finding out his weakness, you'll be completely incapable of harming him, thus making escape your only option.
  • Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door:
    • The Iron Clefts in Chapter 3 of the second game have infinite defense, meaning they're invulnerable to anything except being bashed against each other. You have to run, then come back with Yoshi to defeat them.
    • Doopliss from Chapter 4 of the second game becomes invincible after stealing Mario's body. You encounter him three times- once when returning to Twilight Town, again when leaving Twilight Town and once again when you return to Twiligh Town- but will be forced to run from him the first two times.
• Persona:
  • In Persona 3, as you explore Tartarus, if you linger too long on any given floor, The Grim Reaper will show up. He can be fought, but it's a very, very bad idea. One of Elizabeth's last Requests is to kill him; it's doable by that point, but unless you know how to cheat the system, you're still likely to die a few (dozen) times.
  • The same thing happens in Persona 4 Golden, but somewhat differently: if you open 20 chests in a single dungeon run (without going back to the entrance), then you'll hear the chains rattling. From that point on, any chest may contain the Reaper as a Superboss, but the game is nice enough to warn you prior to opening the chest that it seems like a really bad idea. If you're foolish enough to open the chest without being ready, then you should probably run away or die.
  • Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth:
    • The game has your advisors freak out the first time they spot an FOE and beg you to run if you get caught. They aren't being overly cautious - you need to be at levels appropriate for midway through the next labyrinth before an FOE becomes less of a struggle.
    • There's a special story example in the Old Doll, a special FOE which appears in the Evil Spirit Club. There are a few enemies which chase the party, but only the Old Doll will do it across multiple rooms. And it's faster than you. Faced with it chasing them, the party have no choice but to run like hell and try to find a way to trap it. You actually have to get into a fight with it in order to trap it, as in order to lure it into the trap you have to let it get close enough that it will catch up. Unless you're on a New Game+, you can't kill it - you have to escape from the battle and keep running.
  • Persona 5; if you dick around too long on one floor and you start hearing chains, it's time to haul ass in the other direction. (Unless he's sick with the flu, in which case 72,050 free experience for you!^note But Persona 5 Royal fixed this so that the Reaper can't get the flu. Ever. Good luck!) You really have to be trying for it, because the levels are short, and the timer is very long.
• Pikmin 2 features the Waterwraith in one dungeon, which cannot be killed except with a Pikmin variety that cannot be brought in and can only be created at the last floor. Once it drops down, you had best haul ass to the exit.
• Pizza Tower: In the last phase against Fake Peppino, the floor breaks apart and Peppino has to run down a long tunnel while escaping from the boss who's now a giant crawling head with their mouth ga.ping open.
• There are several sequences in A Plague Tale: Requiem where Amicia has to run from a horde of rats. These sequences play out as you just pushing run while taking turns and jumps at the appropriate time. There is also a similar scene where she runs from guards.
• In Poppy Playtime, there are instances where you are being hunted down by the gigantic Living Toys in the Playtime Co. factory, and the GrabPack is ineffective against them as a weapon by itself. Your only chance at survival is to escape.
• Prince of Persia: Warrior Within has your encounters with the Dahaka except in the true ending, by which point you'll have a weapon that can kill it, and it becomes the True Final Boss. All you can do is run away and try to find somewhere where it can't get to you.
• RATUZ: The antagonist of the game is Prisoner Three, who was turned into a violent and deadly mutant rat by a serum. Most of the times he appears, he's completely invulnerable and will relentlessly chase down Prisoner Five, instantly killing him upon catching them or attacking him with his tail. The only times Five or his allies get to fight back is when Five manages to find a car to ram Three into a wall near the end, and in a few of the Multiple Endings — though this turns out to be futile in all except the Golden Ending.
• Nemesis and Tyrant T-101 come close to this in Resident Evil, but you actually can fight them. The Ustanak in the sixth installment plays this very straight in his first appearance: When he shows up, you run your ass off. The remake of Resident Evil 2 upgrades the Tyrant into an unstoppable stalker-type enemy. At best you can knock him down for eight seconds, at the expense of enough ammo to render the game unwinnable on harder difficulties if you do it too much. Your only real option once he’s found you is to book it.
• Silent Hill:
  • The series' infamous Pyramid Head is an example in all of his incarnations. He's completely invincible to any form of attack the characters have access to. Even when he is finally "defeated", it's less because anyone harmed him and more because his purpose was complete, so he committed suicide.
  • Silent Hill: Shattered Memories has no combat at all. You are told early on that running away from the enemy monsters is your only means of escaping the Otherworld. You also have the ability to hide, but it's pretty darn useless.
    "You have to run, Daddy. You can't fight them. Run!"
  • Silent Hill: Downpour channels the Otherworld Chases of Shattered Memories with the Void chases; when it appears you pull a 180 and run, throwing anything you can in its path to slow it down.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • Sonic Adventure has "ZERO", a robot that pursues Amy Rose and her avian companion "Birdie" throughout her stages. With the exception of their final encounter as a boss, "ZERO" cannot be defeated: hitting it with Amy's hammer will knock it over, but it will eventually get back up; and it will keep getting up more quickly the more it is hit until it becomes impervious to Amy's hammer strikes. The only way to survive an encounter with "ZERO" is to high-tail it to the end of the stage.
  • Sonic Frontiers has the Titans. Sonic's attempt to fight the first one head-on became a Curb-Stomp Battle, since he can only defeat them in his Super Mode. So when the other Titans attack him while stripped of the Chaos Emeralds, he resorts to escaping before they can kill him.
• Spider-Man (2000) features Monster Ock as the game's final "boss", which is used very loosely, because to beat him, there's only thing you can do, run and webswing out as fast as you can before the base completely blows up, or you die.
• SpongeBob SquarePants: Creature from the Krusty Krab adapts this style of gameplay for the "Super-Sized Patty" stages, where Plankton has to run through Bikini Bottom or get crushed to death by the titular patty chasing him down. It Makes Sense in Context. He can slow it down using his Freeze Ray (or "Dispiculator" as he calls it), but this buys him a second at most before the patty breaks free.
• In Spooky's Jump Scare Mansion, your only real option when faced with one of the Specimens (other than the harmless Specimen 01) is to keep running until you lose it. You eventually get an axe, but its effectiveness ranges from barely flinching a foe to stunning it for a room to mutating it into a stronger form.
• In a secret mission in StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, you awaken a Protoss/Zerg hybrid just after setting the base's generators to overload. You don't have the firepower to take it down (and even if you did, it's invincible), so you're forced to run from it as you try to make your escape from the secret base. For the most part, it's an Advancing Boss of Doom, and it's possible to slow it down using an alien-tech "Chrono Rift Device", and other delaying actions are also possible. At one point, however, the invincible foe disappears from sensors, which is actually worse than knowing where it is; when it inevitably reappears, it does so very close to you.
• Star Wars:
  • In one of the third round of missions in Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy, a mutated rancor appears and you have to run away from it through the entire level (while fighting dozens of dark Jedi) until you can achieve an environmental kill. In an earlier level, you have to help prisoners escape from a rancor pit, usually by leading the rancor away from their group while they Run Or Die.
  • The Final Boss of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is Darth Vader himself. Since Vader is in his prime and the player character is an ex-Padawan who only recently regained access to his Force abilities, nothing the player does to Vader slows him down for more than a few seconds. He doesn't even have a health bar, as if to emphasize that fighting him is a death sentence. The only thing left to do is turn and run while Vader slowly follows after you, shredding the scenery and pathway ahead with but a thought.
• Sunrider 4: The Captain's Return: The final part of the dungeon crawl in Chapter 5 sees your Ryders being chased through the halls of said dungeon by Admiral Kuushana and her Wolf Squadron. They pursue you relentlessly, advancing one room every two turns. If they catch up to you, it's game over. And yes, you still have to deal with the dungeon's puzzles and traps on top of this.
• Tales Series:
  • Tales of Destiny: In the PS2 remake, if you run around in one place with all your party members set to Auto for grinding purposes, bonus boss and Tales Of Destiny 2 antagonist Barbatos Goetia will eventually show up and exclaim that he's giving you the choice to run away or die. He's not kidding, since even if you do somehow manage to get his HP to zero, he'll just keep on fighting.
  • Tales of Phantasia has a Hell Lord monster infesting one area of the Slyph Mountain. If encountered, it will casts a powerful summon spell to kill off an entire party in one blow, forcing you to keep retreating until you solve a dungeon puzzle to get rid of it. Fortunately, running away from it is pretty easy to do.
• Team Fortress 2:
  • On a typical match, if you see a Pyro taunting with the phlogistinator, in the middle of battle, and the weapon is glowing, run away. The Pyro is literally invincible until the taunt is finished, and when it's finished the Pyro will unleash crits. Which means if you're dumb enough to stay right next to him, you die. Pretty much instantly. Your body will become ashes.
  • You are doing good on the game and you turn around a corner and see... An ubercharged Heavy. What makes this worse is the visual effect that it gives to both the Medic and his partner, which is their entire body with it's team color with a very, very terrifying eye and expression.
• In the penultimate level of Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, your objective is to survive being chased by a werewolf. In this universe, werewolves are highly resistant to vampiric powers and they despise the species. Gameplay-wise, this means your powers and weapons are useless. Even worse, the werewolf ignores the console codes that make you invulnerable and invisible. Your only recourse is to run and try to survive the four minute countdown. There is an alternative way to put the werewolf down, however.
• Warcraft Expanded Universe:
  • Warcraft III: In the second level of the Blood Elf campaign, you start with several barely-defended bases on the mainland that are immediately attacked by vastly more numerous and fully-upgraded undead forces.
  • World of Warcraft:
    • In the dungeon Halls of Reflection, after beating a couple preliminary bosses the final "boss" consists of running from the Lich King until help arrives. Unlike most examples, escaping requires defeating waves of enemies so that the Alliance or Horde leader you're accompanying (Jaina Proudmore for the Alliance, Sylvanas Windrunner for the Horde) can break down the ice barriers barring your way.
    • At the end of the starting zone for Warlords of Draenor, Grommash Hellscream sends the entire Iron Horde after you and your allies. The only option left is to run for the docks at max speed before the rest of the army arrives.

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