What Do You Mean Its For Kids / Video Games

"Who's kiddy now?"

Nintendo

• Kirby, which is normally an adorable and colorful franchise, is famous for this.
  • Kirby's Dream Land 3 has the infamous boss fight against the True Final Boss, Zero, a giant eye with a red iris who freaking shoots blood at you as an attack, and later rips its own iris out of its body in a gory manner to keep fighting and then explodes, shooting blood everywhere! That boss fight is why Kirby is reputed as surprisingly creepy.
  • Kirby: Canvas Curse has the final boss Drawcia. When her first form is defeated, she turns into a partially melted looking face with five eyes, all while emitting utterly demonic sounding laughter, that turns into equally as demonic screeching.
  • It's practically a Running Gag for the Kirby series that it will feature pretty dark elements and Surprisingly Creepy Moments. Kirby: Planet Robobot is probably one of the darkest games in the entire franchise, with the penultimate boss being a grieving father who slowly has the memories of his (unbeknownst to him, still living) daughter erased by the supercomputer he’s using. Then during the final battle with said supercomputer, he progressively has his soul erased from existence. Rated E for Everyone!
  • Kirby Star Allies takes it a step further, actually being rated E10+, which serves as a clue that it's going to be darker than most outings. And sure enough, it's revealed that the main villains are essentially a psychotic cult dedicated to reviving a dark lord of destruction (who in the Japanese, Chinese and Korean versions they refer to instead as a God), led by an absolutely insane priest who, at one point, drains his generals' life force to restore his own, then uses their husks as bludgeons, before sacrificing both them and himself to revive said dark lord. Then you get to the Final Boss, which resembles Sachiel and has a segment where you go inside and attack its heart, complete with realistic veins, blood dripping from the ceiling, and each of the four cultists tied up in fleshy cocoons. To make matters worse, the lore implies the Final Boss, Dark Matter, and Kirby himself are all connected somehow.
  • Kirby and the Forgotten Land throws more of this into the mix. Besides being set on what seems to be an abandoned Earth, the last bosses in the game resemble something out of a Resident Evil game. From possessed lions than can shoot laser beams, to a giant glob of goo with partially digested faces all over it.
• The Legend of Zelda has several examples of this:
  • The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time has a dungeon and a sub-dungeon that include zombies, mummies, hands sticking up out of acid, walls made of skulls, really long arms that grab you, frightening music, a creepy miniboss, and guillotines and torture devices spattered in blood. In addition, Castle Town while Link is an adult is a ghost town infested with zombies.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask has recurring themes of death, apocalypse and corruption, yet it was rated E for Everyone. Later re-releases would bump up the rating to a more appropriate E10+.
  • The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker definitely looks like it's for kids, and had an E for Everyone rating to match. Then you start playing and the first thing you see is an intro screen describing that Hyrule and its inhabitants were destroyed biblical style, then you get to see the Re-Deads, then there's the climax where Link impales Ganondorf through the head and he turns to stone. Given these elements, saying this game is "kiddie" is something fans won't take kindly to. The game would later be bumped up to an E10+ for its 10th anniversary rerelease on Wii U.
  • To this day, the only games in the series to be rated higher than E10+ are Twilight Princess, Link's Crossbow Training (which are both intentionally Darker and Edgier than most other games in the series), and the Hyrule Warriors spinoffs (which justify the rating with their heavy emphasis on combat).
• Magical Starsign starts as a cute, fluffy game but once the second act starts things swiftly go downhill. There's too much horrible stuff going on here to list it all without taking up pages, but to sum it up: The main plot is about bringing mages to a planet where just being there turns them into into gummy-like inanimate blobs to be used as fuel for a space worm.
• Metroid:
  • Super Metroid is a creepy, dark and atmospheric game where the very first area has corpses littered across the ground, there's a level with ghosts that look like clusters of skulls melded together and perhaps most infamously, the game features one boss being stripped to the bone, and it got a K-A rating. Then when it came to Virtual Console in 2007, it still kept its Everyone rating. When it came to New 3DS Virtual Console in 2016, it was re-rated to a more appropriate Everyone 10+.
  • Metroid Fusion. You begin with the story being that Samus was nearly killed by a parasite called the X, and you're dropped right into the BSL Research Station, which is, as far as you know, completely devoid of human life thanks to the X. Early on you have to navigate a series of eerie unlit corridors because there's been an explosion in the quarantine room. Turns out it's just a Hornoad-X, but if you explore a bit you find a room completely frozen. If you decide to continue further inside, despite the damage you take from the cold (you've been injected with Metroid DNA) you see Ridley (who was supposed to be dead) frozen in a block of ice. Play farther into the game, go down the Main Elevator, and what appears to be Samus bursts into the shaft. Then it zooms right in on 'her' face, revealing that it's some kind of mimic. You later find out that this mysterious entity is called the SA-X, and that it's tracking you. You also can't even hope to kill it yet. You are told to run if you encounter it. And it does catch up with you. Then there's a boss called the Nightmare. It's been flying through the background of the damaged area of the ARC Sector, startling you the first few times it happens. Then you fight it. It has a creepy mask, and when you damage it enough the mask breaks, revealing its disgusting alien face that, as you damage it further, begins dripping.
• Mother 3 may have very cutesy cartoony-looking graphics like the first two games, and with a predecessor as lighthearted as EarthBound (1994), and how kid-oriented it looks on the surface, most people don't expect a game like this to have things such as multiple incidents of Family-Unfriendly Death, most enemies featuring serious amounts of Body Horror, characters going through realistic emotional issues and very deep rooted psychological trauma as a result, a scene where a 12-year-old boy and his friends go on a terrifying hallucinogenic drug trip, a villain who represents the sins of humanity and also runs what is basically a dictatorship over the protagonists' home, animal abuse with an electric collar, a child committing suicide by electrocuting himself due to the psychological trauma he's experienced, etc.
• Paper Mario:
  • Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door had some very questionable dialogue, two female main characters (a ghost and a wind-spirit/fairy/creature) who are almost completely naked (granted, neither has nipples or genitals, but still), Princess Peach does an Invisible Streaker, demonic possession, and Hooktail chewing up Toads while they are still alive. The rating? E.
  • Super Paper Mario: The story involves stopping the destruction of reality, one villain who is a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds and another who is the Mario equivalent of The Joker. There are also a surprising number of Disney Deaths.
  • Paper Mario: The Origami King is rated E by the ESRB. Even if you factor in the paper motif, the child-friendly comedy and the standard Mario goodness that permeates the series, they clearly have to have overlooked the rampant character mutilation, one act of suicide, widespread slaughter and torture, and a villain whose goals amount to a Final Solution.
• The Pokémon games fall under this, as the plot of every game in the series runs surprisingly deep and dark, the villains are often terrifying and vile, and many Pokémon have dark backstories. Some games, however, fall under this trope more than others:
  • Pokémon Black and White feature many moral questions, a grieving, disillusioned champion, and a little girl literally killed in her sleep by nightmares, as well as the implied mental abuse and brainwashing of a young man, manipulated all his life and kept in an emotionally immature state (with a creepy theme and childlike "playroom" to show it, itself accompanied by creepy music) by the Big Bad Ghetsis, with said Big Bad being quite possibly the most vile villain the main series has ever seen.
  • The Orre games were one of the first instances where the games truly started exploring darker territory, albeit Colosseum more so than XD featuring, among other things, a gritty, bleak Crapsack World of a region and a deadly practical, vile, ruthless evil team that would give Ghetsis a run for his money. It shows that Colosseum's protagonist, Wes, being 17, is practically ancient by Pokémon protagonist standards back then, and even now is still quite old.
  • In Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team, you have to save the world from an impending comet while fighting against a Gengar that accuses you of being a cruel traitor that was cursed for selling out his own Pokémon. In Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time and Darkness, the plot is that you have to change the future because, as it is, it is a world of complete and utter darkness, where the sun never rises and the wind never blows. Besides that, innocent Pokémon get kidnapped, you have extremely freaky visions and, above all else, this whole game is a suicide mission. That's right. You die at the end and you know you're going to die. Chew on that. Finally, in the re-release of Time and Darkness, Explorers of Sky, they have mini-stories. And each one of those has a bad part, but the worst is probably in the last one, when one of the antagonists plans to suck your soul out of your body (think dementors), possess you, and go to the past in your body to convince people he is you. In the post-credits story, the Big Bad disguises himself as a good guy, visits you in your dreams, and tells you that the world is going to end, that it's all your fault, and that you and your partner should kill yourselves.
  • Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Gates to Infinity appears to be Lighter and Softer... until you get betrayed by a fake damsel in distress, learn that the Big Bad is an homicidal nihilist who has murdered potentially dozens of other humans summoned to stop him, see one of your allies frozen into a block of ice and shattered into pieces and fight a non-Pokémon Eldritch Abomination composed of hopelessness, mistrust and despair. Definitely kid-friendly.
  • Pokémon Sun and Moon have new Pokédex entries that tend towards the darker and more realistic, for example, many of them elaborate on the predator-prey relationship between Pokémon, whereas previous games and iterations of the franchise barely touched upon such things. Some of them even explicitly mention death, which is something the series had generally avoided previously. Adding to that, the Big Bad of the game is surprisingly dark and twisted, guilty of several types of parental abuse, including emotional abuse, manipulation, and neglect to outright abandonment. Furthermore, Team Skull is a surprisingly cerebral deconstruction of the typical Pokémon evil team with goofy grunts, as it's revealed that they merely ended up that way due to their inability to find better lives and are only doing what they need to to survive and their leader is a jaded man who is heavily implied to have been physically abused by his parents.
• Wii Karaoke U. It's rated E10+, and its graphics make it look just like Wii Sports and other family-friendly Nintendo titles. Oh, and there is absolutely zero censorship for any of the songs, leading to Cluster F-Bombs and Intercourse with You songs having their lyrics printed on-screen◊ for you to sing along to. So if parents want to have a karaoke night with the kids, they should probably be careful about which songs they pick.
• Yoshi's Crafted World is a rare example of a children's video game that fits the Our Slashers Are Different trope generally found in works intended for mature audiences, thereby serving as a Parental Bonus with one Surprisingly Creepy late-game level containing murderous demonic invincible axe-wielding ragdoll clowns who make loud annoying screeching sounds chasing after the player character Yoshi, despite the game being otherwise bright and cheery.

Other

• Batman: Arkham Series: The series' first three games were rated T for Teen (parents strongly cautioned for kids under the age of 13). The games have very minimal blood/gore, but is full of brutal death, intense violence, psychological horror, sexual content, corruption, and of course Batman and his villains acting more nightmarish than ever before, all packaged along with extremely dark themes and storylines that can be chilling from their concepts alone. There's a very good argument to be made that they are the darkest Batman adaptations ever made. There was quite a lot of video game industry chatter on the effectiveness of the ESRB rating system when both Arkham Asylum and Arkham City were released and were not rated M for Mature. Finally rectified with Arkham Knight, which was rated M.
• Blam! Machinehead was inexplicably rated K-A^note Kids to Adults, the mid-90's equivalent to the Everyone rating despite its cutscenes featuring a bevy of violent and sexual content (the first 20 seconds of the opening feature a man being turned into chunky salsa while the ending has the villain's head being blown off by a pistol, with bits of his head flying toward the screen). The actual gameplay is more tame, largely owing to the early PS1/Saturn-era primitive 3D, but still features enough graphic violence against organic beings that T rating would've probably been more fitting. In comparison, the same developer's far more tame Tomb Raider I, which was released a month later, was rated T.
• Brain Dead 13 is a game where the protagonist gets to die in all sorts of graphically violent ways, which has made it extremely hard to understand why this was given a K-A rating then.
  • There's the whole issue with Vivi the vampiress and her titillating appearance, Buxom Beauty Standard figures and Male Gaze, and one suggestive magazine in the Freeze-Frame Bonus that can be too suggestive for children, yet we may never understand why all of these are totally safe for kids with a K-A rating. What's even stranger is that Japan's game rating organization (pre-CERO) slapped each box of the game (exported from America) with an "all ages" (全年齢, zen nenrei) rating on a green sticker, hoping that its audience of children would be less sensitive to mind-numbing bloodless violence and sexuality than America's children (due to cultural differences). The proof is in the pudding here◊.
  • The iOS port averts this by ramping up the rating to a 12+, which is an equivalent of either a "Teen" or an "Everyone 10+" rating.
• Cave Story is known for its accessible and engaging gameplay and cutesy visuals. It also features slavery and war themes, four nightmarish final bosses (The Doctor, who loses control and mutates, then him possessing the Core, Sue, and Misery, then the Heavy Press which attacks out of nowhere and is a Kaizo Trap if you don't realize what it is quickly enough, then finally Ballos, who has a horrific backstory and red, dripping, tortured faces in his head), a level with zombie dragons crying blood and most of the cast dying before your eyes at regular intervals. And still goes with a rating of E10+.
• Cookie Run: Kingdom: While not the most graphic example, the story's spotlight on warfare, religion, corruption, and the fact that cookies are "made to be eaten" is kind of heavy for a colorful, cutesy game rated E10+.
• Cuphead:
  • With constant references to tobacco, alcohol, gambling, and rather disturbing imagery, as well as the Devil himself as the Big Bad along with a few mentions of Hell, would you believe that this game is rated E10+ by the ESRB? It's almost as if they're applying the Values Dissonance of the time period this game is paying homage to.
  • And while nobody is saying that kids can't enjoy difficult games, the cutesy cartoon look of the game belies a wickedly difficult Run-and-Gun game, which might catch both kids and parents off guard.
• D4DJ Groovy Mix is rated 4+ on the iOS App Store and "E" for Everyone on the Google Play Store. While the game's overall themes are not particularly explicit, being a game centered around four-member DJ idol units who produce and perform music and half of which are high schoolers who produce cute and cheerful songs (not unlike those of more traditional school idol franchises), there are several elements that throw those classifications into question:
  • One of the units is Merm4id, known for being a Ms. Fanservice quartet; their card illustrations often have the unit's members wearing skimpy outfits (including their default stage costumes) and having provocative expressions (Rika's "1st Anniversary" card features her on what's obviously a stripper pole, and her "Summer Festival 2022" card shows her and Saori with the game's title written on their breasts) and some of their songs feature unusually naughty lyrics for an "idol" franchise; one of the most notable examples is "LOVE BITE", the title of which is a slang term for a hickey kiss, and the lyrics of which are all about enticing the assumed-male listener into giving one to the narrator to prove themselves as an ideal boyfriend. Even when their songs aren't about partying or being erotic, they still go into relatively mature themes, such as "I will never die"; given the title, one of the lines being "I don't choose 'give up'," and the dreary and hopeless themes of the lyrics in general, it's strongly implied that the narrator is trying to fight off suicidal ideation.
  • Even the non-Merm4id units get their fair share of fanservice, most notably the cards from the "Welcome! Peaky's Freedom Summer!!" event, which features all four members of Peaky P-Key in bikinis and in poses that would give M4 a run for their money.
  • There are prominent swear words in some songs, most notably "Smell of the Game" ("That is bullshit, blazing!") and "Excuse My Rudeness, But Could You Please RIP?" ("Fuck it" not even 10 seconds into the song).
  • The members of Abyssmare all have Dark and Troubled Pasts, and Sophia's in particular features a suicide attempt. Their story also goes into the greedy business politics that happen in the entertainment industry, notably Sho Mitsuhashi's tendency to discard talent that he longer finds financially viable, something that ends up causing the members of Abyssmare a considerable amount of misery, especially Neo.
• Dawn of the Dragons is a Flash browser game that's marketed to children on kid-friendly sites like Kongregate with the promise of high fantasy and relatively simplistic gameplay. The premise is simple enough - a farmhand rises to become a champion. How that champion gets there, though, is brutal and unapologetic:
  • Text and images show enemies being dispatched in a number of gruesome ways (having their throats slit, being impaled by multiple swords, being decapitated, main characters being covered in gore and viscera). Several of these deaths are described with paragraphs going into detail about the minutiae involved, and how the main characters stand back to watch someone they've just sliced open bleed to death.
  • In "Peril of the Pumpkin Patch", two children are spied on and chased by creature with a flaming jack-o'-lantern for a head. His victim, the girl, has her head mounted on a pike (that is also seen in one of the chapter images), which is subsequently used to terrorize the residents of a local town.
• Digimon Survive might as well as be one of the, if not the darkest member of the Digimon franchise. The premise of the game is Survival Horror where a group of students and two locals end up being Trapped in Another World and were chased by deadly "not-Digimon" known as "Kemonogami" or "Monsters". Anyone Can Die, anyone can go insane and die, and whenever someone goes insane, there's nothing you can do about it. And whenever humans do die, they die in pretty gruesome ways, with Black Blood splattering on the screen. The game sometimes even has the audacity to provide you dialogue options that chill down insane party members and in several occasions, in-game characters try their best to do the same, but the deaths are all route-locked and characters visibly going insane is a point of no return. Jeri might had been ended up traumatized for most of the second half after Beelzemon killed her Leomon, but at least she gets out of her funk — if your Team Mom or Best Friend-in-Law went insane because someone they loved die, you might as well as build them a nice grave.
• The Dog Island is a 2008 action-adventure game for the Nintendo Wii and Playstation 2, based on Artist Collection: The Dog and Friends. For a licensed game based on cute, goofy pictures of dogs taken with a Fish-Eye Lens, it has a surprisingly deep and dark plot-line involving the main character having to get a rare flower to cure their sick sibling, helping a town full of talking dogs with their personal demons, and having to avert The End of the World as We Know It by fighting with a reanimated dinosaur skeleton to get a magic artifact.
• Drawn to Life:
  • The first game has a rather dark plot, and some references to the Bible. It also has some rather imposing bosses such as the Angler King. And when the boss Frostwind literally turns red, it looks like he's spitting blood when he opens his mouth. And it still got away with an E rating!
  • The DS sequel has the infamous ending, a woman nearly committing suicide so her son could be Mayor, and the main villain's reasons behind his scheme to seemingly end the world.
• Though Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams is about a cute Kid Hero going on adventures, it also has dark Coming of Age Story symbolism behind it and also has a fair chunk of Nightmare Fuel. The world-switching mechanic alludes to how adolescence feels. Owltimate Edition reveals that Giana has an abusive dad who her sister protects her from, which adds some more symbolism in how she's powerful in the Dream World but not-so in real life.
• A Hat in Time.
  • While most of the game is fairly cheery, it has an exceptionally dark sense of humor that permeates the entire game. The game also shows a rather startling amount of casual violence (for example, Moustache Girl's seminar shows a jar full of blood and other organs), and things like the "Queen Vanessa's Manor" level are legitimately frightening.
  • The various nooses you can hookshot in the forest are ESPECIALLY bad for this. They cheerily talk about how you can use them to get a lift whenever you'd like! And that it's been so, so long since they've been wrapped around a nice neck... and Hat Kid sure has a smooth, slender one... there's even a Subcon villager HANGING from a noose of his own and TWITCHING nonstop near one of them.
  • The Switch port subverts this by re-rating the game from E10+ to T.
• The Kingdom Hearts series features several Disney characters and allows the opportunity to explore worlds based on Disney films. However, several characters die in the series, not to mention a depiction of murder in Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep. There are also themes of depression and some depictions of blood. Word of God via Tetsuya Nomura has stated that Kingdom Hearts was not originally created with kids in mind but the decision to include Disney characters has inevitably got the attention of children. The first game was rated E but the rest were rated E10+.
• Although the Klonoa games are perfectly family-friendly, they have a fondness for sudden dark and depressing moments that are much heavier and more dramatic than you would expect from a cutesy series about a cartoon cat-rabbit boy going on adventures. To recap the first game, Klonoa's kindly grandfather dies in his arms (and the "Phantomile" voice acting makes Klonoa sound very traumatized by it), the Big Bad of the game wants to revive an Eldritch Abomination to cause a Class X-4 Universal-scale Physical Annihilation scenario,and then Klonoa finds out that he has Fake Memories and that his best friend Huepow has been playing him along the entire time in the hopes he would stop the Big Bad's plot (although Huepow has genuinely become Klonoa's friend by this point). It turns out that Klonoa is actually a kind of interdimensional warrior who drifts from world to world to save them from whatever discord threatens to unravel them and then is forced to say goodbye to whatever friends he made on his adventures with no chance of ever seeing them again. And it is implied that his memories are wiped each time this happens, as he never mentions Huepow or the world of Phantomile in any subsequent games. Even discounting the actual events of the games, the Fridge Logic around Klonoa's dream traveler status and how it condemns him to a life of eternal loneliness and suffering through no fault of his own is heartwrenching.
• The pirate original Famicom game The Lion King 5 seems like a perfectly kid-friendly game at first, that is until you get a Game Over and find the character committing suicide. Yes, really.
• The Little Tail Bronx series, more specifically Tail Concerto and Solatorobo: Red the Hunter, takes place in a World of Funny Animals where just about everyone has Mini Mechas within a World in the Sky. This same series also features abhorrent villains that will lie, cheat, and steal just to get their way, ancient planet-busting monsters with designs straight out of Neon Genesis Evangelion, and heavy themes of faith, war, and genocide, never shying away from death when the situation calls for it. Despite all this, the games were rated no higher than E10+, though it's probably telling that CyberConnect2 probably got wise to this, and strictly started making Fuga: Melodies of Steel and its sequels for an older audience, going all-in on the dark and mature themes (along with that big black T rating being a huge tipping point on the Audience Shift).
• In Australia, Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals was rated G (that country's equivalent to E), despite being one of the most mature games on the system.
• Mega Man
  • Mega Man X4 was when the Mega Man X series started to get dark. In Zero's opening cutscene, Zero is having a Nightmare in which there is blood on his hands. And don't get us started on Double. Mega Man X4 had an E rating at the time of its original release.^note The Mega Man X Legacy Collection re-release was bumped up to a T rating.
  • Mega Man Zero looks like an average kid's game, but is the darkest series in the franchise, with the main plot being hinged upon genocide. And somehow the ESRB saw fit to give this series an E rating. From the bloody intro of Mega Man Zero to Elpizo's ear-grating scream, it's baffling on why was rated E at the time of its original release.^note However, like the Mega Man X Legacy Collection, the Mega Man Zero/ZX Legacy Collection was bumped up to a T rating, but this may be partially attributed to the inclusion of the Japanese versions, which had a lot more Machine Blood. And then there's Omega and Dr. Weil.
  • Mega Man Battle Network 2 is the darkest of its sub-series of games, entirely because it was borderline uncensored in its content. So cue Lan, an actual child, occasionally throwing out an expletive, the main antagonists of the NetMafia "Gospel" trying to get numerous people outright killed off and explicitly injuring or even burning people who get in their way, the entire whiskey rap, the innuendo-laden Ms. Millions encounter, and so forth. The game's rating is the same as the rest of the Battle Network games: E for Everyone, six and up. Likely the only reason it didn't get rated higher is that no one is Killed Off for Real — even when characters are directly blown up or Lan gets exposed to what should be lethal amounts of electromagnetic radiation. All the other games are much more in line with the age rating, to say the least.
• Nightmare Ned is a dark, hauntingly beautiful PC game released by Disney Interactive in 1997, at a time when Disney was most known for their more child-friendly PC games such as The Lion King and 101 Dalmatians. Unfortunately, this game is somewhat infamous for its Family-Unfriendly Violence and its many examples of Nightmare Fuel, obviously.
• Ni no Kuni is in a similar boat to Wind Waker in that it uses colourful anime-style graphics (specifically, it was animated by Studio Ghibli) despite it dealing with some surprisingly dark themes. The main character (who's only 13 by the way) watches his mother die of a heart attack only a few minutes into the game, and the eponymous 'other world' is very clearly a Crapsaccharine World with everyone living in fear of an Evil Sorceror who can effortlessly Mind Rape anyone who even thinks about standing up to him. Then there's Myrtle's story in the real world, which gives a surprisingly realistic view of how domestic troubles can traumatize kids psychologically. And Drippy drops G-rated equivalents of Cluster F-Bomb all over the place.
• PETA is known for controversially marketing graphic content involving animal cruelty to children. Their parody games Cooking Mama: Mama Kills Animals, Pokémon Black and Blue, Super Tanooki Skin 2D, and the others are no exception. They're gory and usually feature videos of animal abuse, but they're based off family-friendly properties and are generally cute looking.
  • Kitten Squad, an original PETA game, is supposed to be for children, with its Sonic the Hedgehog-esque premise of Ridiculously Cute kittens shooting animal-abusing Mecha-Mook, happy-go-lucky music, and cute character designs. Besides the unintentional Surprise Difficulty as a result of bad design and PETA's usual Anvilicious Author Tract advocating animal rights, the highly disturbing storyline and cutscenes won't hesitate to use sad music, blood, and graphic descriptions of animal abuse to carry out the Author Tract even more. An orca is separated from her family at sea, stuffed into a small tank at a straw Bland-Name Product version of SeaWorld, forcefully impregnated six times, and Driven to Suicide after witnessing her orca friend committing one. A sheep is castrated, forced to live under harsh weather conditions and in a crowded pen, sees other sheep painfully and bloodily sheared, and is nearly beaten to death when he faces this fate. The T rating ESRB gave isn't probably enough...
• The Professor Layton series makes you think it's rated E+10 because kids can exercise their minds with fun puzzles, has cartoon-ish style characters, and has white humour, so why they dont make it E instead of E+10? Because there are various types of crimes, as well as political subjects, some murder cases which turn out to be fake, an Omnicidal Maniac who used an Humongous Mecha to destroy and kill people, surreal and paranormal events, a connnection with the devil which turns out to be just the Herzen family heraldic shield, and HIGH amounts of Nightmare Fuel.
• R-Type Delta is rated E. The final stage features depictions of fetuses as enemies to shoot. The stage beforehand isn't much better, having enemies spewing blood. The ending for the R-13 is a Downer Ending and features it becoming captured by the Bydo, with the final shot after the credits being of the ship enveloped by Bydo matter. R-Type Final later pulled it again, featuring such elements as a final level which shows two people engaging in sexual behavior (albeit in silhouette) and another Downer Ending where your now-biomechanical fighter is corrupted by the Bydo and kills his former comrades.
• Rayman 3: Hoodlum Havoc has all sorts of sexual innuendos, Globox getting drunk, and the swamp hag using the word "pervert".
• Rayman Origins is also well known for making the fairy girls (all of them) absolutely blatant sex-objects, complete with Hartman Hips, Jiggle Physics, Suave voices (albeit in pig-latin), porno-like music when you save them and the trailer shows Rayman using his hair to blow Betilla's skirt up...also, Betilla created him, so that technically makes him his MOM. Just to top it off, the manual describes Betilla as a badASS.
• Scooby Doo: Escape from the Coolsonian is infamous for containing a Screamer Prank played disturbingly straight: after using a crowbar to open up a sarcophagus, the player finds a message (written in a small font against a dark background, forcing you to focus to read it) which is interrupted by a full-screen image of a mummy and a loud scream. This could terrify even adults if they didn't expect it, but this was a game promoting the kid-friendly movie Scooby-Doo: Monsters Unleashed.
• Silhouette Mirage has plenty of biblical references, minor swearing, alcohol use, and takes place in a post-apocalyptic world caused by a biological holocaust. Its rating? E for Everyone.
• Some attribute the commercial failure of Shantae to this, among other factors. Shantae's cutesy, colorful graphics, goofy humor, E rating, and being on the kid-friendly Game Boy Color lead to the assumption that it's a kid's game. The problem is, it's also strangely... sexy for something aimed at kids, and also more difficult than your average kid's game. Later games avert this more and more by adding some darker humor, among other content, to the point that Half-Genie Hero (and later Shantae and the Seven Sirens as well) is given the ESRB of T for Teen in North America.
• The Sly Cooper series has you play as a raccoon thief who witnessed his parents' murder at age eight and seeks to avenge their death in the first game. In addition, the series contains suggestive humor, depictions of tobacco use, and references to alcohol. Band of Thieves even features drug dealers, and it was rated E. To this day, no game in the series has ever received a rating higher than E10+.
• Sonic the Hedgehog sometimes has content that you wouldn't expect from a colorful video game series with cartoon Funny Animals:
  • Sonic Adventure ends with the flooding of a whole city by a water dragon-monster that explicitly committed genocide in the distant past out of revenge.
  • Sonic Adventure 2 features mass government killings, including a terminally ill 12 year old girl, Eggman using "weapons of mass destruction", blowing up the moon, and putting a gun against Amy's head, and Sonic nearly dying in the equivalent of being chained to a bomb.
  • Shadow the Hedgehog was going to be aimed at older fans, but Sega decided to tone it down to the new E10+ rating. Judging by the use of realistic guns, minor swearing, dark storyline, and textures straight out of an M-rated game, it looks like they failed.
  • In Sonic the Hedgehog (2006), Sonic gets murdered at the end of the game. (He gets better.)
  • Sonic Lost World features very dark dialogue such as "I long for death's cold embrace", "First you're contemplating genocide" and talk of skinning alive, and Amy and Knuckles get the life sucked out of them. (They get better.)
  • Sonic Forces has a bleak and warlike atmosphere set by Eggman's nearly-complete world domination, an outright monstrous villain who will not hesitate to kill a few innocent cartoon Funny Animals on-screen and much, much more offscreen, and Sonic being mentioned to have been tortured for 6 months^note this is only mentioned in the English version of the game, the Japanese version mentions no such things. (They get better.)
• Spanish for Everyone! on the Nintendo DS appears to be a mere low-budget Edutainment Game to teach kids Spanish. The plot involves the main character Shawn turning into a drug mule at the end of the story, and his friend Miguel heavily implied to have been gunned down with his family Scarface-style by a drug cartel. And if that wasn't enough, there's a heavy sexual reference (the town La Zorra, which in English translates to "bitch"), and a bull character who doesn't care that he's going to die and accepts his fate. Rated E for everyone. Apparently, the messed up plot was done on purpose by the developers, who figured that nobody was going to bother playing their game, and just wanted to have fun.
• The two Tales of Xillia games are this trope in Australia, where they somehow managed to get PG ratings despite the first game having violent deaths and occasional blood in cutscenes and pretty explicit sexual references (there are jokes about bondage kinks) and the second game being Bloodier and Gorier, featuring huge amounts of blood in death cutscenes, terrorist attacks complete with masses of bloody civilian bodies (in one of the first areas of the game, at that), sexual references as normal and incredibly dark themes towards the end of the game. (The main character has to murder his brother to save the world.)
• Practically too many bootleg (and sometimes original) Browser Games to count; featuring super inappropriate themes such as pregnancy, surgery, and sometimes even violence or sex (the last one can't help but make you think "fet...ish...ga...me").
• Undertale has a Nightmare Fuel page large enough to rival some countries, and not without reason. It also touches on some fairly heavy themes, including morality, death and the death of children in particular, depression, and even suicide. Take Video Game Cruelty Potential to its logical extension, and the comedic trappings of the game completely disappear, replaced by a grim, disturbing slog as the player murders their way from one lovable character to the next. All said, it's a game that's able to scare and/or move many adults, let alone kids! Despite this, the game is rated E10+ and Toby Fox has implied or directly stated on multiple occasions that he considers it to be a family game and has no quarrel with children playing it.
• Crash Fever has alcohol usage (New Year's Celebration) cursing (Black Ground's story quests, as Ophiuchus swears a lot, comparatively) death, and much, MUCH fanservice. The rating? Solid E, folks. And to add more insult to injury is that a few CHARACTERS can swear, but in the chatrooms of multiplayer, YOU can't.
• Fortnite's Battle Royale mode often gets hit with this. Sure, it looks like an afternoon cartoon and nobody seems to die as a holographic projector is always shown picking up the eliminated players, but behind the facade it's still a shooter where the only goal is to murder everyone else until only one player is left standing, leaving many people (parents in particular) wondering how it managed to get a comparatively kid-friendly rating of Teen despite its premise.
• The Snack World was meant to be a toyetic kids franchise like a lot of other Level-5 games, and got an all ages rating in Japan, but the sexual innuendo in some of the dialog was enough to get it a T rating in the states.
• Bugsnax is a game all about catching and feeding bugs made of food to cute characters that wouldn't look out of place on a puppet show for kids. However, during the climax, it's revealed that Bugsnax are actually parasites that change the body. Furthermore, If a player doesn't do all of a character's sidequests and completely transforms them, a single Bugsnak will be able to kill them. The quotes they say before they crumble into food and their responses if their companion dies can be disheartening, too. On top of this, all the characters have very complex and adult relationship issues, that, while never becoming inappropriate in any way, are well beyond the understanding of the kids who would be drawn in by the puppet show aesthetic.

In-Universe

• Parodied in Grand Theft Auto V with the in-universe animated series Kung Fu Rainbow Lazer Force. It's a Christian version of Power Rangers made by fundamentalists with an ax to grind against modern society, presenting their bigotry against everyone from LGBT people to non-Christians to public school students to evolutionary biologists as "family values" and everybody who doesn't follow their narrow interpretation of Christianity as an evil sinner, to be violently splattered by the morally pure heroes. In short, Rockstar Games' parody of the double standards of American Moral Guardians, presented as way too prudish about sex but not nearly prudish enough (or even outright celebratory) about violence, especially when it comes to children's entertainment.

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