The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You / Video Games

As if Anubis' bloodlust wasn't scary enough.

• The Ur-Example might be the first iteration of Zork, where the title character finds the remains of some other adventurer who didn’t make it through the maze quite in the beginning of the game, along with his pouch of valuables and his empty oil lamp. You can loot the corpse’s possessions, but if you fiddle with the skeleton itself, e.g. by kicking it, the player will be cursed: everytime you pick up a treasure, it will vanish into thin air. This persists through resets and even reinstalls, since the curse is stored in the Windows registry.
• In Alan Wake, after a big plot-revealing moment, the villain Barbara Jagger looks down on the protagonist, and then briefly glimpses at the camera, before suddenly leap/teleporting right into the viewers face, angrily growling "You!" Oh yeah. She knows you're watching...
• Animal Crossing:
  • In the original, if you quit your game without saving enough times, Resetti would pretend to reset your game in order to scare you straight.
  • In New Leaf, if the player is male, Cyrus warns the player not to let him catch the player "makin' goo-goo eyes at [his] wife, or [he'll] make ya see things in 4D!" Cyrus will make a similar remark if the player is female.
• Assassin's Creed II has an In-Universe version of this. When Ezio manages to discover the "goddess" Minerva, she tells him that his role is finished and orders him to be quiet. She then faces the "camera" and starts speaking to Desmond Miles, the assassin reliving Ezio's memories via Animus 500 years in the future, warning him about the impending apocalypse. Poor Ezio spends the rest of his life wondering who the heck "Desmond" is, while Demond's reaction (and likely the player's) is "What. The. Fuck." Adding another layer to it, because Minerva doesn't say Desmond's name until the end of her monologue, a first-time player could be forgiven for thinking that she's speaking directly to them.
• Baldur's Gate III has three different Stingers should a specific character still be alive, who will address the player directly in regards to a specific plot point:
  • If you promised to deliver the Crown of Karsus to Raphael, but convince Gale to relinquish it to Mystra instead, he will be cross with the player, claiming that the crown was more dangerous in Mystra's possession than his, and that he'd kill you where you stood, but will instead let you see the cataclysm that may result from your actions.
  • If you promised to deliver the Crown of Karsus to Raphael, but convince Gale to keep it for himself and become a demigod, he will admit that he was unhappy with you at first, but that he forgives you because he still managed to take the Crown for himself after the Netherese Orb in Gale detonated and killed him. With the Crown now in his possession, he will conquer the Nine Hells, then expand his domain further, warning "It won't be long before I come knocking on your door."
  • If you promised to deliver the Crown of Karsus to Raphael and make good on that promise, he will offer his gratitude to you: with the Crown's power, he is on track to usurp Zariel and take over Avernus, with the rest of the Nine Hells doomed to fall under his reign afterwards. Once the Blood War ends, he will seek to continue his conquest to the other realms, warning "It won't be long before I come knocking on your door."
• Batman: Arkham Series:
  • In Batman: Arkham Asylum, Scarecrow's fear toxin messes with the player directly as well as Batman, and the only warning you get before your drug trip hits is a single cough from Batman that you might not even notice. The second fear toxin sequence messes with your UI, making the wrong name appear when entering a room ("Wayne Manor"), and the third sequence makes your game appear to glitch up and crash, and then reboot to the opening cutscene, apparently having wiped your save data (a great fear for any gamer). Then you see that Batman and the Joker have switched places...
  • In the E3 trailer for Batman: Arkham Knight, the video starts to glitch out near the end. By the time that the viewer could rule it out as a video streaming problem, Scarecrow is then shown staring at the viewer and taunting them as if they were Batman.
  • Batman: Arkham VR sees its Riddler sidequest have the Riddler challenge the player directly, rather than Batman. He even comes close to dropping this trope's name, taunting the player "I suppose you thought your precious 'fourth wall' would protect you."
• In The Battle for Middle-earth I, the opening movie ends with the Eye of Sauron glowing in the middle of the screen, watching the player.
• The Binding of Isaac: Repentance: Dogma has a television static motif, and this extends to the entire screen. The cutscene leading up to the fight ends with a static blip taking up the whole game. When Dogma is killed, the screen "shuts off" like an old television set.
• The Wounds of Eventide update for Blasphemous adds several new boss fights, one of which is Isidora, Voice of the Dead. Using a relic to speak to the corpse outside of her boss room has it inform you that nothing is allowed to interrupt her song. As it turns out, that includes the pause screen (which muffles the music when active) - if you try to pause the game (usually to change your equipment), you instead get a message that "The song of the dead cannot be interrupted".
• The Choking Hands in Blood performing the eponymous act on you is represented by them appearing over your HUD.
• Borderlands has its cutscenes. Most of them are in first person. But one of the most mind blowing is... When Dr. Ned is killed, credits rolls and... Wait, what's that tearing the credits apart? "IT'S NOT OVER YET!" HOLY F***ING SHIT! Yeah, Undead Dr Ned literally tore down the fourth wall!
  • The sequel pulls it off again. Well, kind of. The cutscenes are in first person as well... But there's one cutscene that is sure to drain the last of your sanity... And that is... Tiny Tina's intro. No, seriously, she got this crazy stare that makes it seems she is looking not at the character, but rather at YOU!!!
  • ClapTrap knows we control the vault hunters... He does...
  • Tales from the Borderlands has this when Rhys first meet Shade. Rhys and Vaughn walk down a hallway with a group of corpses of bosses and characters who died in the previous games including Bewm, Shade, Professor Nakayama and Commandant Steele before having to turn back since the door is locked. Those who played the Captain Scarlet DLC of Borderlands 2 will remember that Shade didn't die at the end of the DLC and, unlike the others, wasn't a boss. Sure enough, when you get that far Shade is missing... before he gets into your face. Not Rhys's, your face! The camera doesn't redirect when his Character Intro appears on screen. Luckily, Rhys can slap him for the scare.
  • The Claptastic Voyage DLC for the Pre-Sequel features a side mission where you track down and kill an Ear Worm for Claptrap. The Earworm is almost guaranteed to be stuck in YOUR head by the end of the mission.
• In Bravely Default, if you take a picture at the opening scene, you see Agnes talking with your surroundings as background, and she's getting sucked into another dimension. It is also implied that the Celestial Realm is our world and the Big Bad is coming for there next.
• Bravely Second ups the ante. Neither the new Big Bad, nor his loyal servant have any regard for the fourth wall whatsoever. During the final battle, Providence delivers a What the Hell, Hero? speech to the player, and even attempts to delete your save file. However this is prevented by the party and the side-characters who tell the player to never give up.
• In Bravely Default II, if you somehow manage to defeat Adam in the Prologue (which is no small feat), you get a secret bad ending in which the two new Big Bads decide to travel to the players world. After a very fast credits sequence, the game informs you that you must be defeated by Adam to advance the story.
• The Cat in the Hat: In the "Freezer Burn" level, there are some evil-looking snowmen in the distance. They will get their heads and throw them in the Cat's direction. If the camera angle is moved in front of the snowmen, their heads will fly right into the screen, seemingly right into the player's face.
• In Celeste, Badeline, Madeline's Enemy Without, likes to lean out of her character portrait now and then as the trope's main page image demonstrates. When she gets angry, she crawls most of the way out of her portrait to tear through Madeline's defenses and throw her off a mountain.
• Civilization V has an in-universe example in the intro cinematic for the Brave New World expansion. During a montage of recent technological advancements, there's a clip of a Victorian audience watching L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat (see the Films - Live-Action examples), and scrambling out of their seats in terror as the train hurtles towards the theatre screen.
• In Close Your Eyes: Redux, when the player is on the route where they choose to leave The Girl, a popup will occasionally appear on the computer saying "Don't leave me." This is a warning that the girl is on that pathway.
• Comix Zone has an in-universe example that goes both ways: Sketch Turner, a comic book artist, is attacked by his comic's villain, who was brought into the real world by a lightning bolt. The villain sends Sketch into the comic book, and then draws enemies into the comic to attack him.
• In first-person murder mystery RPG Consortium, the story is built around the idea that the player and the character the player is controlling are separate characters. Eventually, certain characters start to figure this out.
• Control revolves around Jesse Faden exploring an SCP-like secret agency called the Federal Bureau of Control while it's infested by the Hiss, a red sentient wavelength which tries to increase its influence on the place by assimilating everything that comes to its way, humans obviously included. The Hiss seems particularly interested in Jesse, but also to the player controlling her, and so it will recite an incantation to brainwash you. Even worse, if you're not a native English speaker but decided to put the game dialogues in their original languages, the Hiss won't care and will talk to you in your native language^spoilerThis happens because the game actually sets the Hiss' incantation depending on the region settings you of your machine rather than the in-game language settings. Plus, it only works if the game has been dubbed in your language.
• The Corridor: After one level, the narrator tries to convince you that he's in your computer and "turns it off". He's not very convincing.
• In Cytus II, reaching level 25 as Neko#ΦωΦ will cause a story event where AEsir hacks Neko's stream. You (as in, the player) receive a phone call, and answering it forces you to play a glitched version of the song "CHAOS". Afterwards, the game resets, but upon reaching the main menu, all of the characters have been replaced by Neko#ΦωΦ. You have to play one of her songs to get the game back to normal, with a cutscene explaining what just happened.
• DanceDanceRevolution X3 has a boss song, "tohoku Evolved".^note There are actually five different step chart sets for the same song; multiple-step chart sets are common for the "Evolved" song series. If you clear it, then instead of "CLEARED", the game will say "PRAY FOR ALL". It still does that in DDR 2013, DDR 2014, and DDR A.
• Dead Space:
  • The first Dead Space has a quite disturbing death scene with Twitcher. After cutting you to pieces it looks directly to the camera before running away. That mutilated face doesn't help, either. See here◊.
  • Later on in Dead Space 2, one of the characters who has been following Isaac around the Sprawl and ostensibly helping him throughout the game, the clearly mentally disturbed Nolan Stross, has a minor psychotic episode at one point and screams at Isaac to "stop looking at [him]". He says this while looking directly at the player, not Isaac.
• Death end re;Quest has traditional AND In-Universe examples:
  • The Ludens, seeking to fulfill their precursor Iris's wish of visiting the "real" world, figure out the programming language of the "real" world and begin to merge it with In-Universe MMO World's Odyssey, causing the game's bugs and Martyrs to wreak havoc on Japan during the climax.
  • Earlier in the game, Alice of the Ludens starts alluding to a "God of Death", a nickname that protagonist Arata Mizunashi assumes refers to him because the term is always used in the context of him. That is, until they fight Ripuka in the merged world; she screams for the God of Death, and, while the camera is zoomed directly on her face, tells the God of Death off for pretending like they are a neutral party - which completely throws Arata and his friends for a loop. She then screams "TAKE YOUR EYES OFF OF MEEE!" and strikes the camera, confirming that the God of Death is not Arata, but you. Arata, who had previously grappled with the idea that his world might be watched and manipulated in the same way that he watched and manipulated World's Odyssey, realizes what is going on and directly petitions the player for help. If you've met the requirements for the True Final Boss, you can agree to help him, which gives the party the boost they need to finally topple Ripuka.
• In Death end re;Quest 2's Fallen ending, Mai has no Morality Pet to keep the evil god Marbas from completely overtaking her personality, which results in her declaring herself the God of Death after defeating the Big Bad. She then turns her attention to you, calling you a piece of shit and a murderer for seeking out all of the game's Death Ends. She then compels you to chant "El Strain Marbas", with the game switching to second-person narration to describe you chanting the phrase and having the energy drained from your body.
• Death's Gambit: Afterlife does this a few times and in the most effective ways:
  • When Sorun dies to the unknown entity and they start to drown, the game's title bar changes to "Connection Interference..." and that lasts through the entire trip through Y'lnoth.
  • Before you are allowed to regain control the game resets and you are forced to sit through the opening, except some things are off... And culminates with the glitching visage of King Sirad with a skull face. And then there's the title screen, showing child Sorun curled up, crying, in the hands of something monstrous.
  • Thalamus. You meet him at the end of Y'lnoth, he makes it clear your choices do not matter and that he controls everything, changes the title bar to "YOU WILL DIE!", messes with the inventory and stats... And that is all BEFORE the Afterlife contents.
    • Come afterlife. It's revealed Sorun's soul has been fragmented and that he's not in the control of his actions, and that an Observer (you, the player) is responsible for Sorun's actions and choice. And at the Collapsing Nightmare, Thalamus reveals to now be aware that Sorun is not moving by himself, but rather controlled by the Observer.
    • Think Thalamus is done? He knows your name, or perhaps your computer's name, he tells you to watch as he rends Sorun's soul and threatens to come after you next, proceeding to try and mindscrew both Sorun and the player even after he is defeated, trying to lure the player into starting a New Game Plus.
• Death Stranding contains a feature where you can examine Norman Reedus's character Sam. However, if you decide to be a pervert and use the camera to stare at his crotch for too long, Sam will not only flip you off, but punch the camera as punishment for being a creep. To be fair, you did deserve it...
• Destiny: The Skull of Dire Ahamkara, an Exotic Warlock helmet. Every piece of Ahamkara gear communicates with it's Guardian, addressing them as "O Bearer Mine", and seem to be at least partially sentient. Then, there's the Skull...
  Skull Of Dire Ahamkara: "O BEARER MINE." What kind of talking skull would address its host that way? A stiff, stuck-up old fossil, not me. Ahamkara: the illusion that one's ego depends on an object, or an idea, or a body. Some people say you should have no ahamkara. Some people say you need to have the right ahamkara. All I know is that YOU are not an illusion. Understand? This world around you, the people you meet—they're a little thin, right? Cardboard and drywall. Cheap theater. Come on, try it out! Say: “I am more real than this.” Feels good, doesn't it? “I am the only real person here.” Isn't it like their insults and their bullets just went a little... soft? I came to find you, only you, because you're special. You're from somewhere real. And together we can burn our way back there. Can't we, o player mine?
  • Destiny 2 has a hidden entry in the Truth to Power lorebook, only readable through datamining, which directly addresses the player looking into the game's files to spoil future content.
    "For your trespass, I would ruin your luck, wreak havoc on your drops, poison your engrams, and fill your lines with static. Thus I would curse you and dissipate the bond that ties you to your tasks. How frail you Guardians can be! How many millions have fallen silent, never to return, because the bond did not hold them strongly enough?"
• In Die Anstalt, one of the patients, Dr. Wood, is a psychiatrist who is revealed to have narcissistic personality disorder and becomes a cult leader. If you try to use dream analysis therapy on him at this point, Wood steals your pendulum and proceeds to try and hypnotize the player character into joining his "Claw Association".
• EarthBound (1994) uses this trope to masterful effect by inverting it. Having prayed for help against Giygas from everyone else in the world, Paula reaches out blindly for help... and reaches the player, who deals enough damage to destroy him. That's right: You, the one holding the controller personally finish off the final boss of the game.
• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has an unsettling example in the Dragonborn expansion. The Daedric Prince Hermaeus Mora, who appears as a mass of tentacles with an eye in the middle, is the Greater-Scope Villain of the story. When interacting with the Dragonborn, the eye moves around - not as the character moves, but as the camera does, so that he's always looking at the camera. That's right: he's not interested in the hollow avatar standing before him - he's interested in you.
• Epic Battle Fantasy 5:
  • This trope is the story behind the Big Bad. It turns out to have created the entire Epic Battle Fantasy series as its simulations and has grown angry that an outside force, the player, has been messing with them. It is fully aware of the player, will even look right towards the screen in battle, and in its defeat it will say that it has found a way to escape the game through radiation and will reform in real life at some point. If the Devourer is caught in a New Game+ and used in a game after that, its attack will destroy the world and then force the window to close out of spite, also treating the player to a Jump Scare image of Snowflake.
  • The Glitch is much more sinister than it was in the last game. It will directly tell the player to stop playing the game — "speaking" through the party themselves, with some form of possession. When "killed," it will say that it's aware it's a game construct and will always be back, and the game will give a fake Blue Screen of Death. The Glitch even threatens you in the description for its achievement. ("Even if you delete me, I'll be with you forever...")
• Escape From Lavender Town - This game has a high tendency to break the fourth wall◊, please remove all the fragile objects behind you.
• Eternal Darkness - Most of the sanity effects affect more the player than the character - the volume-changes, the "erasing your save", the fake demo box, and the slowly tilting screen will play games with you.
• EverQuest II features one dungeon, the Estate of Unrest, where the Big Bad, a malevolent ghost turned Genius Loci and low-level Reality Warper, spends the entire thing regularly taunting and threatening the player characters, but is baffled as to why he can't sense their souls to attack them. When the party enters the caves beneath the mansion where his bones lie, aiming to forcibly reincarnate him to kill them, he roars that he finally found their souls and that they won't be safe "behind that pane of glass." Then the screen is engulfed in static for a moment as a skull appears and tries to lash out at the player.
• In Evil Genius 2, at the end of the game, once the Evil Genius has taken over the world, they then proceed to kill the player, signaling that they're no longer useful to them... except Maximilian. Maximilian is shown to have A Lighter Shade of Black to him, as while he is no slouch in the cruelty department, he has shown kindness to his loyal minions before, if even just due to pragmatism. In other words, due to your service, Maximilian decides that You Will Be Spared.
• In Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria Simulator, if you "achieve" the Bankruptcy Ending (end a night lacking funds to fight or settle lawsuits), the game closes on you. When you open it back up, all your achievements have been removed, leaving only any certificates you may have earned.
  • Previous games have more straightforward examples of this trope: a number of characters from the games are capable of doing a little bit more than sending you back to the menu if they kill you. In the first game, Golden Freddy crashes the game if he jumpscares you; in the second, Shadow Bonnie and Shadow Freddy do the same if you so much as look at them for too long; and in the fourth, Nightmare and Nightmarionne cause the game to reboot if they jumpscare you.
  • This is used as a joke in Five Nights at Freddy's World: after you beat the true final boss, a rainbow with an unyielding urge to taunt the player at every opportunity she gets, she claims that the next time you sees a rainbow in the sky, that’s her coming to get you.
• Certain sections of Ghost Trick force you to hide the movements of various objects from the sight of a certain character. If he catches you while you're moving something, he freezes time, turns towards and directly addresses you about how you can't stop him, and then causes a game over right away.
• While God of War 3 has some gruesome boss finishers, the killing QTE on Poseidon takes the cake using this trope. In a first for the series at the time, the game camera goes from a third-person cinematic view to the POV of the God of the Sea himself. The view is short, but doesn't end until Kratos smashes Poseidon's head onto some rocks and pokes both of his eyes out before giving the God a Neck Snap as a parting gift. Just be glad you control him outside of cutscenes.
• We get a good demonstration of this in the arcade version of Golden Axe. When someone beats the game, it cuts to a scene of two people playing the game in an arcade. Suddenly, the cabinet explodes, and enemies pop out, chasing the players out of the arcade. They are then all pursued by heroes Ax, Tyris, and Gilius.
• Harvest Festival 64: When the player character becomes infected at the end of the game, they start staring right at the screen and don't stop, even as the game glitches out.
• The main menu of Hatred has The Antagonist holding his pistol Gangsta Style, aiming at the viewer. He'd shoot the player as soon as the Exit option is chosen.
• In-universe example: In the All There in the Manual Backstory for Infocom's Hollywood Hijinx, B-movie king Buddy Burbank was notorious for several uses of this trope. A film of his entitled Meltdown on Elm Street involved an accident at a neighborhood nuclear power plant, resulting in a nuclear meltdown. After the citizens try to resume their normal routines (only without hair), a nuclear power plant worker who survived the accident but became a horrific homicidal monster goes about killing the citizens. The climax of the film took place at the Elm Street Cinema. Burbank arranged that each theater showing the movie have an usher run up and down the aisles wearing a glowing nuclear plant worker's jumpsuit. The result was that several moviegoers died of shock. This bit of Backstory was most likely inspired by the real-life "Tingler" example mentioned above.
• The Hex opens with a phone call revealing that one of the game's playable characters is planning a murder. Over the course of the game, it's revealed that all of these characters are the protoagonists of various in-universe video games that only have two things in common - they were all made by the same person, Lionel Snill, and they all ended up falling into neglect and misfortune, as Snill very quickly lost his passion for the craft, sold out, and only continued working for the sake of his own ego. In the end, it is revealed that all of these characters were planning the murder, with the intended victim being their creator, making the whole game an elaborately-planned in-universe example of this trope. With the player's help, they use the Hex, a powerful artifact that allows them to transcend the metaphysical barrier between author and fiction, and we see a very rare example of what this trope looks like from the perspective of the attacker, with a hand reaching through Snill's computer screen and strangling him at his desktop. What makes this all work so effectively is that this murder is represented with live-action footage, a jarring contrast to the game's variable but consistently-cartoony art style.
• The House of the Dead: OVERKILL has the boss of the second stage (third in the Extended Cut) attack you in this way. One of its attacks summons several copies of itself, and if you don't do enough damage to the real one in time, the game enters cutscene mode as she climbs up via the letterboxing, leaning in close to scream and claw at you. For even better effect, the Extended Cut on PS3 is compatible with 3D TVs.
• At least a few of the frights in Ib stem from the more fearful entities in the haunted art gallery turning to face the player rather than the player characters.
• The indie horror game Imscared is not only fully aware of being a game, it also threatens the player with the message that the ghost that haunts the game will try to break out and instead haunt the players computer. It leaves notes in the game file, opens the browser and crashes multiple times. It finally ends with the game not starting anymore since the ghost has successfully escaped.
• Inscryption: In Act 3, You come across a boss called The Archivist. Her gimmick is that you use your actual computer files to deal damage to her. In her second phase, however, she creates a card based on how old the file you give her is. Then she tells you if that card dies, the associated file is permanently deleted. She doesn’t actually delete it, but you do get an achievement if you choose to delete it yourself.
• I, Robot has an enemy called the View Killer; a nasty looking spike that is fired at the player's camera rather than Robot. Because you know, giant beach balls of doom weren't bad enough.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Heritage for the Future has a number of examples.
  • One of Dio's victory poses has him accuse you of watching him and send The World to attack you.
  • Petshop will fly right in front of the camera and smirk in one of his victory poses.
  • Devo's story mode ending has him threaten to curse the player.
  • Black Polnareff's story mode ending (pictured) decides the last person in sight to be hacked into pieces as he jumps at the camera, the player.
  • Hol Horse and his Stand, Emperor, are especially notable for weaponizing it; Hol Horse shoots out the screen in one of his Super Moves, allowing J.Geil and his stand the Hanged Man to use the broken glass's reflections to strike the enemy. And in their victory pose, the Hanged Man sometimes slides into the player's sight...
• KinitoPET will directly attack the player if he notices a screen recording program like OBS open, and will flat out ask you why you're recording him, going so far as to give you a live feed of what said application is doing. He then proceeds to turn on your computer's webcam to look at you. And this is only the first time he attacks you directly.
• This happens multiple times in Kirby and the Forgotten Land:
  • First, after you defeat King Dedede, he suddenly gets up during the results screen and captures Elfilin while he's frozen.''
  • Then, After you defeat Leongar, Fecto Forgo opens their eye during their Villainous Breakdown and stares directly at the camera.
  • Then, in the post-game, Forgo Leon roars directly at the camera after he Turns Red. It's made even more terrifying with his Nightmare Face.
  • The most terrifying example comes from the fight with Chaos Elfilis, who isn't staring at Kirby; they're staring directly at you. And no matter which angle they're featured at, their eyes will always follow the camera. Even their Figure does this!
• The main enemies in La Tale, the Agasura, are said to be after the game's Game Masters for their omnipotent power of 'hack'.
• Lamers is a Lemmings parody where a group of Lemming-like humans are running toward a computer (turning and building stairs where necessary), and the player has to kill them with various weapons. On the last level they start shooting the player instead.
• Lie of Caelum: If the player loads a save file, the game will occasionally throw an exception that would normally crash the game. However, the error message itself glitches out and refers to either the protagonist or the player as the Child of Faith before allowing the game to continue. This happens once per playthrough, which means this fake glitch can keep happening if the player reflexively quits or resets the game before completing this event.
• Live A Live: In the remake's Distant Future chapter, the Loading Screen tips are replaced with the ship's homicidal AI taunting you once its true nature is revealed.
  OD-10: It would be in your best interests to stop. This ship is my domain, and I its master.
• In Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon, King Boo does this to you in one of the recon photos you take. He does this by turning around and laughing at you on what's supposed to be a static image, making this a very effective Jump Scare in a generally whimsical game.
• In Deadpool's ending in Marvel vs. Capcom 3, he throws a party to celebrate his victory of Galactus. Unfortunately, the party ends in a massive explosion, with the police threatening to arrest Deadpool and his accomplice: you, the player.
  • Also during his victory pose, he angrily approaches the camera and berates the player for sitting on a couch while he does all the hard work, or because they didn't record the previous battle to show off all his cool moves.
• Metal Gear Solid has Psycho Mantis, who displays his psychic abilities by reading your memory card, changing the screen to Hideo channel, then forcing the game controller to move on its own (using the vibration function).
  • Subverted in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, where Psycho Mantis temporarily comes Back from the Dead. He attempts the same trick... On a PS3. In other words, there's no memory card and the original controller didn't vibrate. Naturally, good old PM doesn't take it well.^note If you happen to be using a Dualshock 3 controller instead of a Sixaxis, the psychokinesis does work and PS remarks how vibration is back.
  • Inverted later on, where after a minigame in which the player has to tap a button as fast as possible, the player is advised to place the controller along any area of their arm that's sore from said minigame, at which point the controller vibrates. The characters then immediately talk about this being a form of Shiatsu massage and go on an extended explanation for how Snake received it through his nanomachines in-universe.
  • Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes has some fun in this manner with parts of the original game that broke the fourth wall. During the torture scene, Ocelot preps Snake for a few rounds of electric shocks in the form of a minigame. He actually starts explaining exactly how the minigame will work in overtly game mechanic terms. After explaining which buttons to mash and which to just submit, he states "Don't even think about using Auto-Fire, or I'll know"; in The Twin Snakes, this is compounded by him turning towards the camera and pointing menacingly at the player. He will know, too - in either version, if the button is pressed fast enough that the game reads it as "auto-fire", you keep getting zapped even after the time runs out until you die. The scene where Psycho Mantis vibrates the controller also adds a quick shot of Snake nodding to the player as if to say "go ahead and do what he says".
  • Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty takes it even further. Late in the game, Mission Control begins sprouting nonsense monologues, including an admonition to "Turn the game console off right now!" Their later attempt to extensively explain what the hell is happening is half calling out Raiden for being exactly the sort of self-righteous hypocrite their S3 Plan is designed to protect, and half attacking fans of the first MGS who missed the point and played the game as a power fantasy.
• Monster Hunter: World: During the final phase of the battle against Iceborne's Final Boss Shara Ishvalda, the monster's eyes stop tracking the Hunter and start tracking the player's camera.
• Some characters in Mortal Kombat 9 break the fourth wall during their victory poses. Some of them are friendly (like Kitana, who winks at the player) but others, like Mileena, tend to be very threatening.
  • In Mortal Kombat: Deception, Scorpion's victory pose consists of launching his spear to the only available target. Give up? It's the audience.
  • A few fatalities of the franchise also involve breaking the fourth wall. For example, Kenshi's "Scatterbrained" from 9 has him slam the opponent three times with his telekinesis on screen, which breaks the screen, and blood splashes on screen, with the opponent's left eye sticking to the screen. He then slices the opponent in half, also causing more blood to spill on screen.
  • The current page quote comes from The Joker's ladder ending in the eleventh game, where, upon obtaining the power of Kronika's Hourglass, he alongside fellow psychopaths Havik, Mileena, and Hsu Hao to wreak havoc across the realms, and directly threatens the player by shooting out their TV screen.
• Andres Borghi has made many creepy characters as the stars of his M.U.G.E.N-powered game The Black Heart, but Noroko is unique among them for her use of this. Her ultimate, One-Hit Kill special involves her beginning to cry in front of her opponent, who approaches her, and then we're treated to a first-person, cinematic sequence of what said opponent sees: her revealing an eyeless, nose-less, mouth-less face and reaching out towards the screen, or alternatively opening a deformed mouth and screaming at you. After this, the hapless opponent collapses dead, presumably of sheer fright. Even straighter, if she wins the battle, you may occasionally see her hand scratching your screen, leaving trails of blood on it.
  • Alleged "dragon-tier" cheapies also count, but in a very serious, literal way. There exists a sort of arms race between MUGEN creators for the most powerful character, and mere One Hit KOs do not even cut it anymore: cheapies oftentimes essentially hack MUGEN or even create their own MUGEN to ensure they beat the opponent. The culmination of the Cheapie War is "dragon-type" characters, said to be potent computer viruses disguised as characters, who will take down the opponent... and your PC alongside it. However, most of these characters (if they exist at all) are private. Probably the most well-known supposed Dragon-tier in MUGEN is "Mathrus", and even then exceedingly little is known other than that it supposedly cuts a computer's internet connection. Only one alleged photograph of "Mathrus" exists, according to which it seems appear as a Felhound.
• In the Bad Ending of Nanashi no Game, the cursed RPG is passed onto your DS.
  • Exaggerated in Nanashi no Game Me: the curse gets spread to everyone who owns a DS.
• Right off the bat, the game Off asks you for your name and gender, so that the characters in the game can talk to you and actively refer to you as the one who is taking control of The Batter in his mission to purify the world. In your first encounter with The Judge he even refers to you as the one who holds The Batter's strings. Far into the game, one of the characters will give you, in exchange for an item needed for the secret ending, a hint that directs you to the game's Readme file, where a seemingly useless piece of advice suddenly makes sense. By the end of the game, as it becomes more and more obvious that The Batter is an Omnicidal Maniac, The Judge urges you to help both of you atone for your actions and stop The Batter from completing his mission. If you reject him, he says you'll end up killed by your own wicked marionette. If you agree, he'll say your choice was pathetically useless, but still the right one.
• Early in Omikron: The Nomad Soul, you (the player) are told that it is your own soul which entered Kay'l's body at the beginning of the game and which is now hopping around the inhabitants of Omikron. In other words, your own body is now one of The Soulless until you beat the game.
• In OneShot, this is the whole premise of the game. The game is about you, the player, helping the character Niko on their journey. Niko often speaks directly to you within the game itself, but there is also The Entity, a malevolent death-seeking force who often addresses you directly via popups on your computer. And after you decide whether or not to have Niko smash the sun, you can't play the game any more, because that was your one shot, unless you find instructions on how to delete your save file and access the Solstice route.
• Played for Laughs in Overwatch with Sombra's "Hacking" Play of the Game / Highlight intro. It starts by showing a different player's intro, complete with the player's name and Hero used, only to suddenly cut out to reveal that it's actually Sombra who got PotG, giving the impression that she "hacked" her way to it.
• A great example is in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. In this game, all your fights take place on a theater stage, and you derive power from the in-game audience's reaction. During one boss battle, just when the boss seems to be defeated, it gets up and eats the audience, recovering half its health.
  • Happens more than once in the game. Cortez steals the audience's souls, Magnus Von Grapple 2.0 uses audience members as ammunition for a rapid fire machine gun, and the Shadow Queen absorbs the audience to restore health.
  • Works in reverse too... the fourth wall doesn't protect Mario, the partners or the enemies either. Cue audience members charging on stage, with Shy Guys knocking over background decorations, Boos making characters immune to damage and everything from items to food to rocks being thrown at Mario (or anyone else) depending on how well you're doing.
    • The fourth wall doesn't protect the audience either. Should someone in the audience try to heckle Mario or his partner by throwing garbage at them, Mario or his partner can return the favor by jumping off the stage and attacking the heckler, forcing the person to leave. They might also be trying to throw items to you, so pay attention lest you hit someone who was just trying to help.
  • In Super Paper Mario, several characters refer to the player as "a being from another dimension". The Fridge Horror sets in when you consider that Count Bleck's plan is to destroy every dimension.
• In Persona 4: Arena, one of Shadow Labrys's super attacks has her summon her Reverse Persona, Asterius, to deliver a killer punch to her opponent. Said punch hooks towards, and cracks, the screen. Her victory pose has her use Asterius to destroy the screen, causing everything to fade into television static.
• Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth uses the 3D effect of the Nintendo 3DS to this effect. Like most games on the platform, it uses pop-in 3D, as if you're looking through the screen into a box. One of the bosses late into the game, one encountered during a Wham Episode, intensifies its whammyness by moving up to the camera, over the interface into pop-out 3D to attack the player, not the party. You probably will freak out the first time it happens.
• Persona 5 uses this to extremely creepy effect: In the opening of the game, a deep-voiced person presents you with a This Is a Work of Fiction disclaimer and asks whether you agree to it: Saying "Yes" starts the game while saying "No" boots you back to the start screen. During the climax, it's revealed that the person with the deep voice is the Big Bad and part of his endgame is to erase the heroes from existence by convincing the world to deny that they're real. By accepting the disclaimer, you unwittingly helped him do it.
• Pizza Tower: The game's title screen initially begins with Peppino giving the fourth wall a Thousand-Yard Stare in pitch darkness until you push a button and turn on the lights, revealing the menu. An Easter Egg for the title screen amps this up to eleven. If you wait for forty seconds, Peppino will jump at the screen while screaming and crash the game. On a lighter variation of this, during Peppino's Final Judgement, if you get a 72% or lower completion rating, Peppino will call the cops on you.
• This scene from Pokémon Platinum, when Giratina enters.
  • In Pokémon Sun and Moon, Lusamine, now fused to a Nihilego for her final battle lunges at the screen in a similar manner to Giratina, complete with a nastily insane grin.
  • Challenging the machine-possessing Rotom in Platinum involves a brief moment where Rotom's outline appears to be embossed on the screen and causes it to shake before the battle begins, suggesting that Rotom possessed your DS.
  • A meta example: during the promotional period for Pokémon Sword and Shield, the company simulated a nature cam livestream within the Glimwood Tangle. During the livestream, an Impidimp walked up to the camera and breathed on it, fogging it up...just as the viewers would have gotten their first full look at a Galarian Ponyta. Given that the Impidimp line feeds off of others' frustration, it's likely that it did that so it could feed off of the now-frustrated audience watching the livestream.
• Pony Island does this repeatedly. You're playing as someone who is playing an in-universe Pony Island game, and even though that character has their own story and you are not really them, the line between the real game and the in-universe game, and the player and the player character, is frequently blurred. At a critical point in the game, in order to take your attention away, you, the player, suddenly start receiving Steam message popups from the game, regardless if you're online or not. Shortly afterwards, the game realistically fakes crashing on you, again to distract your attention. And as if that wasn't screwed up enough, after you beat the game, it flat up asks you to uninstall it.
• In Quest Fantasy, the player is regularly addressed and threatened by some characters. In the climax of LPSE, the player is actually converted into RPG Maker data in order to fight S O U L.
• In Quest for Glory II, if you throw rocks or daggers at Julanar (the woman turned into a tree), you'll get a Nonstandard Game Over where the projectile deflects and breaks the screen, with the Have a Nice Death message telling you that your punishment for attacking an innocent woman is having to go out and buy a new monitor.
• In RuneScape's "Branches of Darkmeyer" quest, this is the secret to Vanstrom Klause's "Stare into the darkness!" attack. Not only will the player character take massive damage if facing Vanstrom when the screen goes black, but they will take the exact same damage if the character is facing away from Vanstrom, but the camera is still on him.
• In Sam & Max Hit the Road, there is an Easter Egg where making Sam pick up an item that can't be picked up will make him say "I can't pick that up." Do it again, he'll say "No, really. I can't pick that up." Again... "Are you dense? I can't pick that up." Do it a couple more times and he breaks down sobbing. Max says to the player "Now you've done it. You've broken Sam's spirit with your stupid attempts to pick up that silly object. In fact, if I didn't find his pitiful sobbing so amusing, I'd come out there and rip your limbs off!" Doing it again, Sam merely whimpers with Max saying to him "Just ignore them, Sam. Maybe they'll go away."
• The Interactive Fiction game Shrapnel, in which the protagonist is caught in a Time Crash, has a few But Thou Must! moments where, no matter what the player types, predetermined commands appear. In a Let's Play of the game on the Something Awful forums, the LPer simulated this experience by convincing the mods to edit people's posts (without the usual notification that a post had been edited) so that it appeared everyone supported the forced commands.
• During Silent Hill 2, whenever Pyramid Head makes one of his harmless appearances, he usually appears to be staring directly at the camera rather than at James.
  • During the intro cutscene, though the reflection of James's face is pointed at himself, his eyes appear to be angled up and to the side, i.e. looking directly at the camera/player, who would be just over his shoulder behind him, from James's perspective.
• The SQUID Guardian in Sonic Frontiers is (in)famous for staring dead at the screen when an encounter with one is triggered.
• Implied in Skylanders: SWAP Force: The scene that plays before you fight Kaos's Mom has her speaking to the player, rather than the Skylander they control. Given that she's much more experienced than her son, it's likely she actually tries to go after you.
  • Kaos ups the ante in Trap Team. Kaos speaks directly to the player through the speaker on the Portal of Power attached to the game system, threatening to imprison you in Traptanium if he defeats the Skylanders. He also messes with the controller's rumble feature in one cutscene to prove this that trope is in full effect. Morever, during the final battle with Kaos, he actually makes good on his threat and tries to suck you into the Skylander realm multiple times, though luckily he only manages to suck in random objects from our world at best. Lastly, during the credits, he berates you for defeating him, claiming you only beat him because you had a ton of help from the game developers.
• If you somehow manage to glitch out of bounds in Slender: The Arrival, Slender Man himself will teleport directly to you shortly afterwards and kill you with a taunting message aimed specifically at the player.
  Slender Man: "Not even a bug in this game can save you from me."
• Though there's never a threat of physical harm, Spec Ops: The Line does it in a really weird but intelligent and disturbing way. The loading screens talk directly to the player, saying things like "This is all your fault." and "How many Americans have you killed today?", but also "You are still a good person." Given the main character suffers from Sanity Slippage and cognitive dissonance, the game is hurling emotional abuse at you throughout the story to force you to feel some of what the main character is feeling.
  • There's also a very subtle moment after the infamous White Phosphorous scene, a moment that's already a Player Punch. If you pay attention to where Lugo points, you'll notice it isn't directed at Walker. He's pointing at you.
    Lugo: HE TURNED US INTO FUCKING KILLERS!!
• Any Augmented Reality game which treats the player as an in-game character to be targeted and attacked, with examples including Spirit Camera: The Cursed Memoir.
• The entire premise of Super Hero Squad: Comic Combat. Doctor Doom discovers the fourth wall and threatens to conquer YOUR world.
• Super Smash Bros. Brawl's Gamyga, an enemy resembling a sentient sunflower built "like an avant-garde work of art from some young art-school grad", seems to have a Thousand-Yard Stare and never looks at the attacking character. However, its trophy points out that it is indeed facing its attacker, since it's facing the screen, directly at YOU.
  • Inverted by the Duck Hunt Duo. A few of their attacks simulate an invisible Gunner using the Nintendo Zapper to shoot at their target. That's right, the fourth wall isn't protecting the in-game characters from outside interference.
• Ways your fish can die in Survive! Mola mola! include stressing it by tapping or shaking the phone, blinding it by changing your lighting settings or taking flash photos, "blowing bubbles" into the microphone, and wiping out its entire spawn in the starting cutscene by swiping the eggs away with your finger.
• Downplayed for Survivor: Fire, which ends with the message "How would you escape in a real fire?"
• This trope cuts both ways in There Is No Game, as the game is not safe from the player abusing even the user interface and "random" ads to get to the bottom of the mystery, and The Creator is not safe from Glitch, almost getting murdered when Glitch takes over the appliances in The Creator's house.
• Tomb Raider II did this at the end when Lara sees the player peeping in on her after a shower. "Don't you think you've seen enough?"
• Touhou Project:
  • Kogasa Tatara is a lowly stage 2 boss with the power to "surprise people". Compared to the rest of the cast, it's pretty much nothing... Up until she shows up as the Extra Stage midboss, complete with the appropriate spike in power and difficulty. What a surprise for the people playing the game. She actually even does this before the game has even started by appearing on the game disc — the first and only non-final boss to do so, and reappears in the next game as a midboss.
  • A somewhat different example is Clownpiece, whose power is to drive people to violent insanity. Her boss battle is so brutal, unfair and frustrating (one of the hardest bosses in an already infamously hard franchise, even on the ostentously "easy mode"), that if you have not smashed your monitor in a violent rage by the end of it, you are probably either a god of gaming or a god of patience.
• UK Sight Reading Tournament: The lead-up to the final stage of UKSRT X has Peeesh Noticing the Fourth Wall, crashing In the Groove, launching his own version of it, jumping out of the program window, and "possessing" an audience member, at which point he fights the tournament's champion by manually, physically adjusting the stage's Interface Screw!
• Ultima VII starts off this way, with a red demon poking his head through your computer monitor, telling you how he's going to take over your earth just as he's taking over the world of Brittania.
• Unbound Saga ends with your protagonist, Rick, finding out he's a video game character, trapped in a virtual reality world. He then warns you (the player, as in, the guy holding the console) not to try any funny ideas, or else YOU'RE NEXT. Roll credits.
• Weaponized in Undertale, in which a few important characters are aware of the game's SAVE mechanic and the player's ability to reset and replay the story.
  • Many players end up killing Toriel in the process of trying to figure out how to get past her when she tries to keep you in the ruins, and a common response is to quit, reload, and try again until they succeed in sparing her. But if you do so, the resident jerkass Flowey the Flower calls you out on it, saying that while no one else may remember, he knows what you did, and just because you reset the game for a do-over doesn't erase what happened the first time. And later during a Neutral playthrough, Flowey — being the Big Bad — hijacks the game and saves over your file, messes with the intro and Game Over screens, and even uses quicksaves during his boss battle if it looks like you're getting the upper hand.
  • During a "Genocide" playthrough, Sans the Skeleton identifies not the protagonist but the player as the true source of the "temporal anomaly" he's sensing, and mocks your DETERMINATION to commit genocide on the basis that "just because you think you can. And because you can... you have to." He then brutalizes you as badly as you deserve, turning save states, your menu screen, and even the concept of turn-based combat against you. He knows you, the player, can just reload and retry the boss fight if you lose, so his objective is to be so screamingly difficult that you Rage Quit and walk away, or maybe reset the game and try a non-violent playthrough next time. He'll even taunt you by keeping track of how many times he's killed you or commenting on how pissed-off you look when you reload after losing.
  • Complete the Genocide Run and you'll meet the First Child, who reveals that they are the Abstract Apotheosis of Level Grinding and that feeling you get when your Stats, Gold, Exp and Level go up. And now that you've reached your level cap and beaten the game, they think it's time you two left the world of Undertale behind and moved on to the next world. They then give you the opportunity to become partners and destroy everything. Accept, and the Child will join you in destroying all of existence. Refuse, and they "kill" you and force the game to quit as they destroy the world. Boot up the game again and you'll be greeted with an empty void, before the Child reappears and offers to reset everything back to the way it was... if you give them your soul. Agreeing allows you to play the game again, but results in the Child taking over the main character's body upon reaching what would usually be the Golden Ending — the implication being that they will kill everyone again or, at the very least, that you can't escape the consequences of your actions from the Genocide Run. Of course, considering what you have to do to complete the Genocide Route, it's hard to say you deserve a happy ending anymore.
• In Warframe, the Grustrag Three and the Zanuka Harvester can briefly disable the Close button and the Alt+F4 commands, to keep you from escaping their Nonstandard Game Over.
• The Russian kidnapper in Welcome to the Game can hear the player through their microphone. Which means that in addition to turning off the lights, you have to be quiet when he is around.
• In the When They Cry series, supernatural beings sometimes speak to the players, telling them that they can quit playing anytime, and that usually means the players admit their existence.
• The Devil's Corridor in Ys Origin uses wind through its pipes to play a terrible song that is said to drive humans mad. Until you somehow disarm that trap, you will be hearing its song drilling into your head and you will have to come through this damned hallway from bottom to top hearing this song if you are playing as Demon Toal. By the time you are completely done with this place, you will keep hearing it in your head for hours!
• In Yu-Gi-Oh! BAM, when Devack and Roman brainwash your friends that aren't part of the main cast, the game uses your linked friends' Facebook profiles as pictures. (If you don't have any it uses BAM Terminals as pictures instead.)

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