Yank The Dogs Chain / Video Games

The yanking of proverbial dogs' chains in Video Games.

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• Antichamber starts you off in a room with a door marked "exit" behind glass. You will actually get to the door several times during the game, but the first few times you are simply chided about being halfway there and things.
• Case 02: Paranormal Evil: The Stinger states that despite Marty and Sally successfully surviving the zombie outbreak, they will have to deal with a new "Cannibal Boy" incident in Case 03 and that their newfound peace will not last.
• Catherine: Vincent has spent the last week in agony over not only having to deal with the fact that his girlfriend, Katherine, is hinting at wanting to make things more serious between them, but also the fact that he ends up cheating on her with another girl and the problem that Katherine might also be pregnant. He's at the end of his wits, but has finally decided to make up his mind. He's intent to set everything straight, be honest with both girls and choose to stay with one. Then the 8th Day arrives and Katherine arrives for a talk when Catherine is suddenly in Vincent's apartment, too! The two get into a heated argument, with Catherine trying to kill Katherine, but ultimately ending up stabbed herself. But thank goodness that was only a dream! Unfortunately, Katherine arrives to talk with Vincent, who is still flustered from the dream and Katherine drops a huge bombshell. She knew that Vincent's been cheating and is breaking up with him. Despite Vincent's work over the last week and finally deciding what he wanted, things fall apart all around him. Fortunately, he still has a chance to earn his happy ending.
• Clock Tower: The First Fear has the A Ending: you make it to the top of the clock tower, defeat the killer. Then, Ann or Laura (but never Lotte) will run out to Jennifer. Then Mary appears and throws Ann/Laura off the ledge after her son. Poor Jennifer. She'll also get it pretty bad in the D Ending: after running around terrified for hours, Jennifer finally finds Ms. Mary, and it told it'll all be fine. Then Mary stabs her. Girl can't catch a break.
• In one of the endings of Disgaea 3, Almaz loses everything when Mao's father declares him the overlord.
• Dragon Quest V: Ladja blasts the Hero's mother Mada right after she and the main character reunite after eighteen years of forceful separation, then mocks both of them about it. Mada survives the attack, though... and is promptly murdered by Nimzo.
• Familia: It takes most of Act 1 for Lono to reunite with his family and drive the Draconian invaders out of Kalbi. During the epilogue, the fortune teller will warn the player that the family will be split up again during Act 2.
• Fatal Frame:
  • Oh, Kei. Near the end of III, he reassures Rei that "there might still be some hope", as he thinks he's found out a way to potentially end the Tattoo Curse for good. And then Reika kills him or sends him into a deep slumber. Either way, he's out of commission for the rest of the game.
  • IV spends a good while getting the player attached to Choushiro Kirishima and thinking he'll help Ruka stop Sakuya. While he does help Ruka, it turns out that he died 8 years prior to the events of the game.
• In Fire Emblem Gaiden and its remake, Echoes: Shadows of Valentia, Alm and Celica finally reunite after seven years, and they're both excited and relieved to see each other again. Echoes even has Celica breaking into Tears of Joy and glomping Alm when she sees him. Then they get into a huge argument that causes them to split up again.
  • Berkut. After Alm beats him from the rematch, he regroups in a final attempt to prove himself the rightful heir to the throne... only to discover that his Uncle has willingly 'surrendered' (i.e. threw himself into an unwinnable battle) the throne to his secret heir, Alm. Alm finally has an older cousin to look up to, except that cousin is now a paranoid, murderous wreck from the realization that his uncle never believed in his strength his whole life and planned on giving his entire inheritance to a son he never raised. Alm's constant insistence that the throne is worth nothing compared to having family just drives him further into kamikaze attacks.
• In Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, one can always slip up and lose one's progress, Even if you're almost near the end.
• Near the end of Gorogoa, the protagonist finishes his quest to find five fruits to appease the dragon that caught his curiosity, coming face to face with its eye. Then the dragon closes it and fades away, rejecting the offering and leaving the boy distraught. Worse, he is immediately cast down and crippled for his ignorance, and his town suffers a great calamity.
• Halo: Reach involves Noble Team moving from battle to battle to repel the Covenant and save the planet Reach, humanity's most important extra-solar colony and the last bastion of might between the Covenant and Earth. They score victory after victory, sometimes at great cost, and sometimes it seems like they will even win this thing. They cannot, and for every little victory they achieve the Covenant hits back twice as hard. Even Super Soldiers can only do so much...
• In Hitman: Absolution, you can kill a random security guard seconds after he gets a call from his doctor informing him he doesn't have cancer. Since the guard is not a target, you would only do so if you feel like kicking the dog.
  • One of the targets in Hitman 2 is a race car driver whom you have to eliminate during her big race. You can help her win the race if you wish, and doing so will open up an opportunity to kill her during the award ceremony.
• I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream: The whole human race has been destroyed, except for five people have been kept alive and tortured by AM, a psychotic, all-powerful computer for 109 years. Any offers for suicide, food, shutting him down, etc. will be torn away by AM if attempted, since AM does not want to lose his toys. It becomes a plot point later on. Ted was offered a chance to go to the surface world. If he succeeds, he will discover the Earth has been rendered an unlivable wasteland.
• White Face of Imscared loves messing with the player. Whenever the player thinks the game has ended, the game opens up, or a new text files downloads to your computer...
• Thanks to the somewhat random nature of the AI Director in Left 4 Dead, it can certainly feel like your chain is getting yanked. You could have one or two dead players while the remaining survivors have next to no healing items thanks to the hordes and special infected (as well as the lack of coordination from your fellow players or just plain bad luck). The AI Director may take mercy by spawning pills or first aid kits in a side room, only for you to get ambushed by a special infected. If the AI Director is feeling very dickish, it can spawn a Witch or Tank right by the safe room, even after all the hell you went through just to get there.
  • Every campaign has the survivors getting rescued at the end of each campaign, only for the rescue to go horribly wrong, which leads them to the next campaign with none of their equipment and having to find another way out again.
• In Metroid Fusion, after an entire game of things steadily getting worse and worse, Samus finally scores a decisive victory when her nemesis the SA-X is killed in a hidden laboratory that detached from the station and detonated. When she reports it Adam tells her it's time to leave as more are on their way, and explains that because the X reproduce asexually there's now no fewer than ten SA-Xs on the station.
• Monster Hunter: World: During the crossover event with The Witcher, Geralt ends up in a society that actually respects monster-hunting as the dangerous, specialized field it is. When he slays a Leshen, an Outside-Context Problem the Research Commission couldn't even approach, Astera is more than willing to follow their own guidelines and actually pay him a king's ransom. Geralt is forced to turn it down as he's about to head back to his own dimension and Monster Hunter World's currency is no good there.
• Mortal Kombat:
  • Oh Scorpion. fate hasn't been good for you, hasn't it? From being told by the killer that someone killed your clan and family, being killed by said someone, unable to kill the killer after finding out you had been lied to, been killed - again, being given a chance to save your family and clan by the Elder Gods, only to be lied to again and so much more. At least Mortal Kombat X will be your saving grace, as you and your clan become guardians of earth.
  • Repeat after me, Liu Kang: "I hate Time Travel". Sure, it meant undoing his descent into madness as an undead overlord, but it also retconned all of history. So Cassie and Jacqui are unwritten... and the original cast... and Earthrealm and Outworld for good measure! Now he has to rewrite history all the way from the primordial ages... after dealing with Shang Tsung one last time.
• Naufragar: Crimson: Jarret had a harsh life, being kicked out of Oragibe's knight academy for trumped up reasons and struggling to find a way to cure his sister's blindness. His luck seems to turn around when he manages to escape Anetha's prison with a magical coin that could cure his sister. Unfortunately, Hyo has the Oragibe knights kidnap his sister in order to force Jarret to give up the coin.
• Outer Wilds:
  • This happened to one of the Nomai escape pods launched after their Vessel suffered catastrophic damage upon warping into your solar system. While two of the pods were able to reach their destinations safely, a third suffered numerous collisions after launch that wrecked among other things its life support systems before ending up trapped in Dark Bramble, not too far from the Vessel itself. The survivors went extravehicular in their spacesuits and tried to backtrack to the Vessel, but due to some twisted physics, they were registering two fading signals from it. The Nomai chose to follow the closer one, only to find that it was coming through a portal too small for anyone to fit through, and they were too low on oxygen to go anywhere else. You can find their spacesuits hanging motionless around that portal, some embracing each other.
    Secca: To be so close to the location of the Vessel and still be so far is... difficult.
  • The whole game is an attempt to figure out why you're stuck in a 22-minute "Groundhog Day" Loop that ends with your sun going nova, and over the course of your explorations, you'll discover that the Nomai constructed a Sun Station as part of a grand experiment to trigger a supernova and use the energy to power that very time loop, allowing them to send millions of probes in every conceivable direction, looping until they found the Eye of the Universe. You would think that reaching the Sun Station and shutting it down will put a stop to all this, except when you get there and read the station's logs, you discover that it never functioned properly, the one time the Sun Station fired didn't do anything. The Nomai's grand undertaking to reach the Eye of the Universe, what drove them to come to your solar system in the first place, failed at its very last stage, and they were wiped out in a freak cosmic accident before they could try a new approach. The Sun Station then remained in orbit for over 200,000 years until the time loop was triggered by the sun going nova on its own. Your sun has reached the natural end of its life cycle, and there's nothing you can do to save your solar system.
• In Papers, Please early on you receive a "gift" of $1000 from "a man who dropped it off at the house", which handily solves all of your finance problems. If you choose to take it rather than burn it, the neighbors take note of your sudden wealth and report you, and the government takes all of your savings pending an investigation— not just the $1000 but all the money you've saved up fair and square. Not only are you now forced to help EZIC and locked into one of their endings, since they're the only ones able to sabotage the investigation and prevent the government from learning it was a bribe (which results in a Non-Standard Game Over), but even when you're found innocent the government doesn't give any of the money back.
• Persona 3 Hey, Shinjiro! It looks like things are looking up for you in Persona 3 Portable! Not only are you a Social Link character for a cute girl, but if she maxes out your link, you survive Taking the Bullet! Sure, you fall into a coma for the rest of the game, but you wake up for the ending... just in time for said girl to die either right before you get there or in your arms. But hey, you're still probably gonna die from those drugs you were taking, so at least you get to meet up in the afterlife, right? Ehh, sorry! She's become the Great Seal for Eternity, so meeting up with her in the afterlife is... unlikely.
• In Portal 2, GLaDOS pulls several of these as a way to demonstrate just exactly how angry she is with Chell.
  • In a Call-Back to the first game, GLaDOS presents you with a Weighted Companion Cube in one of her test chambers. The instant you pick it up, she fizzles it. Then drops another, which she also fizzles after you start to solve the puzzle with it. Finally she lets you complete the test, only to mention offhandedly that the Emancipation Grill is malfunctioning and not to take anything with you. Sure enough, if you try to leave with the Companion Cube, she fizzles it yet again. Bad, bad GLaDOS.
  • At one point she offhandedly mentions having seen a deer outside. She offers, if you complete the next test, to let you ride an elevator all the way up... to the employee break room, where she'll tell you about the time she saw a deer again.
  • After continuously teasing you about being adopted (yet another Call-Back), GLaDOS promises a surprise in which you're going to "meet two people you haven't seen in a long, long time." Of course, it's a lie. Then later in that same test chamber, she promises to put them on the phone, but instead puts on a fake "prerecorded message" in which they claim not to love you. Yes, GLaDOS, we get the point. You don't like Chell. Thank you for being so discreet about it.
  • The last one is more noticeable for being subverted Hypocritical Heartwarming. Later in the game, she contradicts Wheatley when he tries to pull the same "adopted fatty" insults on Chell, creating an "awwwwwww" moment, but promptly yanks the rug out when she whispers to you, "For the record, you ARE adopted, And That's Terrible."
• In Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, after Jill has spent a good chunk of the game struggling to survive, putting a plan together to escape, evading The Nemesis, and actually succeeding in calling a rescue helicopter, the triumphant music plays as it begins to land. Then a rocket blows it out of the sky: cue Boss Fight!
  Nemesis: S.T.A.R.S...
  • It happens in the Resident Evil 3 (Remake) as well, albeit much earlier in the game.
• In Sheep, Dog 'n' Wolf, Ralph the Wolf (the main protagonist), after who knows how long time of unsuccessfully trying to steal sheep from Sam the Sheepdog, suddenly gets sucked into a game show all about stealing sheep from Sam. He finally started being successful in this task, stole Sam's entire flock, became pretty much a television star, and after a long and tiring adventure that included even a space trip, he finally got himself his own sheep. Just when you think he finally won, it all turns out to be just a dream. The expression he has when he goes back to unsuccessfully trying to steal sheep from Sam says it all.
• In Shin Megami Tensei IV, the Counter-Demon Force, Tokyo's resident Kaiju Defense Force, suffer indignity after indignity with intermittent Hope Spots that are just as quickly taken away. First the Angels enter Earth from the Expanse, unleashing demons upon the physical realm. Fortunately, they get the National Defense Divinities, indigenous deities to help defend the country. The Angels promptly escalate to unleash nuclear warfare. They release the seals on the biggest Divinity, Masakado, to provide a massive shield for Tokyo. They succeed, but lose their most promising summoner and are buried under Masakado's body. They reach to the sleeping Masakado and drill their way out, and thanks to Year Outside, Hour Inside they get out after the radiation has died out. They begin fixing things and preparing a new land... only to face the returning Angels. After being forced back into Tokyo, the organization quickly fell apart, losing the ritual items for the Divinities to rising Yakuza warlord Mr. Tayama and reduced to two members slumming out in Shinjuku.
• Jackie Ma from Sleeping Dogs (2012) is buried alive in one mission but is rescued and appears to have gone through the worst the game can throw at him. He has some serious reconsideration about his choice to be a gangster and it looks like he's going to go clean by the end of the game. So the following mission sees the poor guy Gutted Like a Fish, hung up in a back alley, and used as bait to bring Wei to "Big Smile" Lee.
• Eggman in Sonic the Hedgehog. Sure, he's an evil bastard, but he's tried so many times to establish his Eggman Empire, coming quite close more than a few times, when suddenly and quickly all his hard work is washed away. You start to feel sorry for the guy...
  • There was that time in Triple Trouble, in which Eggman finally gets all the Chaos Emeralds, only to have a machine blow and send the gems to the far corners of the Earth.
  • Then in Sonic Adventure 2, Eggie gets all the Chaos Emeralds inserted into the Eclipse Cannon, causing him to think he's invincible and can do whatever he pleases. No. His granddaddy's secret planet-destroying program is initiated when he inserts the last emerald.
  • Happens twice in Sonic Unleashed. Not only does Eggman beat Super Sonic and rid his Green Rocks of their invincibility-granting powers, but he manages to collect energy from Dark Gaia and finally builds his long-awaited Eggmanland. Unfortunately, his latest pet disobeys him (once again) and he ends up stranded in the desert with nothing but a back-sassing robot who maliciously reminds him of his constant failures.
  • Also Sonic Riders. His plan manages to work, he gets the good guys to hand over a treasure (which he's expecting to be better than an angel wing that could rule the world) and it turns out to be a very soft carpet. He then faints and the good guys say what it really is (which still isn't as good as what he was expecting.).
  • In Sonic Colors, Eggman's plan and execution are reasonably professional and almost free of buffoonery. Sonic and Tails show up to keep an eye on him even then he is poised to activate his latest and greatest evil device. It promptly explodes because his dim-witted minions forgot to clear robotic debris from the first boss that lodged into part of it after Sonic defeated it. And this is after Eggman gives us one of the best boss fights in the series...
  • In Sonic Forces, Eggy finally gets rid of Sonic and conquers the world! Not only that, he learned from his past mistakes and prepared in case the Resistance put up more of a fight than he expected. The only reason his plans failed was because of Infinite's carelessness. He decided Sonic was Not Worth Killing, meaning the Resistance kept their most powerful member. He let the Avatar go after killing their teammates, leading them to join the Resistance and team up with Sonic. And most importantly, he dropped a Phantom Ruby Prototype during his fight with Silver, which was then found by the Avatar and used to cancel the Colony Drop.
• Every time Crowe Broust finally manages to pay off his current debt in the Super Robot Wars Z series, expect him to be saddled with another equally ludicrous amount of debt almost immediately. Always.
• Deconstructed in Undertale. Knowing that one's work can get undone by a higher power without warning easily leads to apathy. After all, what's the point?
  No Mercy Sans: You can't understand how this feels. Knowing that one day, without any warning, it's all going to be reset. ...To be blunt... it makes it kinda hard to give it my all.
• Wario goes on an adventure in Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 because Captain Syrup stole a huge golden statue of Princess Peach and he wants to get it back to make a ton of money. At the end, Wario finds it, only for Mario to appear out of nowhere with a helicopter and a magnet and uses them to take the statue away, rendering Wario's adventure pointless. Wario's misfortune can be subverted if you have gathered a ton of coins and the treasures, which will give him a home by the genie based on how much money Wario has collected at the end of the game.

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