History Main / DeconstructionGame

* ''VideoGame/SonicTheHedgehog [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXu75Gytj58 OmoChao Edition]]'': AnnoyingVideoGameHelper (This game actually has added challenge -- you have to avoid everything that triggers Omochao's comments as much as possible for RankInflation, and for SpeedRun enthusiasts, there's the fact that the timer won't freeze whenever Omochao speaks.)

* ''VideoGame/MetalGearSolid2SonsOfLiberty'': Sequels with [[RecycledScript suspiciously similar premises to the original]], linearity and the illusion of choice in video games, and the concept of video games [[IJustWantToBeBadass as a power fantasy]], among [[DeconstructorFleet many other things]].

-> ''The truth, Walker, is that you're here because you wanted to feel like something you're not: '''a hero'''.''
-->-- '''Lt. Col. John Konrad''' talking to '''[[PlayerCharacter Cpt. Martin Walker]]'''...and [[LeaningOnTheFourthWall the player]], ''VideoGame/SpecOpsTheLine''

-->-- '''Lt. Col. John Konrad''', talking to '''[[PlayerCharacter Cpt. Martin Walker]]'''...and [[LeaningOnTheFourthWall the player]], ''VideoGame/SpecOpsTheLine''

-->-- '''Lt. Col. John Konrad''', talking to the '''[[PlayerCharacter Cpt. Martin Walker]]'''...and [[LeaningOnTheFourthWall the player]], ''VideoGame/SpecOpsTheLine''

-->-- '''Lt. Col. John Konrad''', talking to the '''[[PlayerCharacter Cpt. Martin Walker]]'''...and [[LeaningOnTheFourthWall the player]].

* ''[[http://www.kongregate.com/games/raitendo/you-only-live-once You Only Live Once]]'': Platformers in the vein of Mario. True to the game's name, [[spoiler: if the protagonist or the antagonist dies, their death is permanent, and the other one of the two gets arrested depending on which of the two dies.]]

* ''VideoGame/Receiver2'' is a general deconstruction of gun tropes. Guns are finicky, capable of jamming in a number of ways, requiring manual reloads of the magazine bullet-by-bullet, discharging if handled inappropriately, and each gun is filled with its own little quirks. Their lethality also isn't understated: Two shots from most pistols kills you, one shot from a turret's rifle-calibre bullet or your Desert Eagle kills you. The tapes you find in game frequently call out standard tropes and give realistic gun advice, recommending looking up local laws, confirming your targets, and ensuring that proper escalation has been followed to avoid unnecessary deaths and potential prison time.

* ''VideoGame/DutyCalls'' rather in-your-face deconstructs linear military shooter AmericaSavesTheDay.

* ''[[https://store.steampowered.com/app/1997680/REFLEXIA_Prototype_ver/ REFLEXIA]]'' on Steam is a minimalistic half-parody DatingSim, similar to ''Doki Doki Literature Club'' in that [[spoiler:it has a self-aware heroine]] and deconstructs dating sims and harem games too. However, its mockery is much more scathing, presenting visual novels as cheap manipulative affairs using basic tricks to make players feel for one-dimensional characters, reducing complex emotions to illusionary choices and game achievements, and the players themselves for getting attached to "waifu" archetypes that in the end are not much more than masturbation fodder. It can be argued that it deconstructs [[spoiler:horror meta-games]] like ''DDLC'' as well, given that [[spoiler:some of the heroine's self-aware and InterfaceScrew abilities are played for horror]] but, since [[spoiler:she repeatedly states she's just an image and some scripted lines]], it's clear she can't be taken seriously in her [[spoiler:fourth wall breaking]]. The final part however becomes somewhat of a reconstruction in that [[spoiler:the heroine learns how to love herself and to face her feelings of being a meaningless visual novel character]], but for the same reasons above it rings somewhat hollow almost to the point of being a BrokenAesop.

* ''VideoGame/WeBecomeWhatWeBehold'': MemeticMutation and FlameWar. The game demonstrates how our media's tendency to [[IfItBleedItLeads only cover things that spark outrage]] and the public's tendency to hold ignorant beliefs based on little evidence is very dangerous. [[spoiler:Through the players actions, the society descends into a [[FantasticRacism brutal race war]] where squares and circles kill each other in a horrifying cycle of violence. [[HopeSpringsEternal The square/circle couple who advocated peace and tolerance survive though]].]]

* ''VideoGame/WeBecomeWhatWeBehold'': MemeticMutation and FlameWar.

** The [[KillEmAll No Mercy route]] also can be seen as a deconstruction of playing a VillainProtagonist, especially in games with {{Karma Meter}}s and/or MultipleEndings. Plenty of games that have the option of being "evil" often try to play it off for RuleOfCool, RuleOfFunny, or still have you in a [[BlackAndGreyMorality "lesser of two evils" situation]]. Not ''Undertale''. To do a No Mercy run, you need to go out of your way to hunt down and kill absolutely everything in each area you can until a specific message pops up, and the game will make you feel horrible for it. The quirky humor of the game vanishes, replaced by a dark and dreary ambiance. The [=NPCs=] will either disappear because they're running from you in terror or treat you like the despicable scum you are. All the encounters are either [[AntiClimaxBoss pathetically easy]] or [[ThatOneBoss hair-pullingly hard]] so that you never get to actually enjoy yourself in battle. Your sympathies throughout the whole thing will lie with the victims. All of the game's puzzles are automatically solved (because [[BigBad Flowey]] is [[BigBadDuumvirate helping you]]), and all non-essential areas are warded off by force fields, so you can't do anything except fight. And most importantly, if despite all that you still go through with it until the very end, you can never "reset" your way out of the consequences - short of tampering with your computer, your sins will remain with you forever.

%%* ''VideoGame/SpiderAndWeb'': [[spoiler: SecondPersonNarration]]

** Firstly, the game completely plays with your perception of LevelGrinding. Play through the game like it's a normal RPG, fighting enemies and bosses, earning exp and leveling up? Well, at the end of the game you're told that [[spoiler: [[ExperiencePoints EXP]] stands for '''Ex'''ecution '''P'''oints, and is a measurement unit for [[YouBastard how much pain you've inflicted on others,]] while [[CharacterLevel LV,]] or [[FunWithAcronyms LOVE]] as it's otherwise called in ''Undertale,'' is '''L'''evel '''o'''f '''V'''iolenc'''e''', and acts as a measurement unit of [[ItGetsEasier how desensitized you've]] [[GainingTheWillToKill become to killing.]] Playing this way puts you on track for the worst ending, which reveals that ''[[TheFourthWallWillNotProtectYou YOU]]'', the player, are the real villain of the story, and every boss you mercilessly cut down was a HeroAntagonist out to stop you (with the exceptions of Toriel and Papyrus, as Toriel didn't realise your evil and Papyrus [[AllLovingHero believed you can still be a good person]]). It also invokes BeingEvilSucks by making every fight an AntiClimaxBoss that goes down in one hit, and the ''two'' that don't are designed to be [[ThatOneBoss as frustrating as possible]].]] TakeAThirdOption by sparing the sympathetic characters and [[WhatMeasureIsAMook only killing minor enemies]]? [[spoiler:You're told that every monster you killed could have had friends and family, the general populous and one of those main characters, the previously mentioned Flowey, will still remember you as a mass murderer, and you get called out for being a hypocrite.]] The only way to achieve the best ending is through a PacifistRun.

* ''VideoGame/{{Harvester}}'': A deconstruction of EvilIsCool and VideoGameCrueltyPotential. However, it's not an anti-videogame tract relying on heavy-handed moralizing, but actually a ''mockery'' of the accusation that video game violence causes real violence by making the violence cartoonishly bleak, unrealistic, and improbable to follow through on. Even the bad ending outright states that censorship of otherwise fictional violence is moronic.

* ''Videogame/CrueltySquad'' deconstructs power fantasy open-ended first person shooters. Instead of playing as an stoic, invincible super-badass who can shrug off gunfire like no problem and sneak through any heavily guarded compound, the main character of Cruelty Squad is a deeply flawed and depressed loner who dies in just a few hits. The main character murders hundreds of enemies and kills powerful people, not out of some grand quest or moral obligation, but because its his job and he treats it as such. Lastly, the world is a contrast to the inviting, intricate and detailed environments of triple-AAA gaming, instead taking place in an actively hostile and uncomfortable environment with Alien Skies, warped textures, and a horrific screeching soundscape. In essence, while those games seek to provide an accomodating and enticing experience, Cruelty Squad is all about breaking the player down and getting under their skin.
** The protagonist is a clear deconstruction of common videogame main characters, especially the ones common in military-themed shooters, with a background with military training, a stoic, and subdued personality, able to equip themselves with all sorts of fun upgrades, who takes orders from a disspassionate MissionControl figure. Where the main character of Cruelty Squad differs from characters of this type is that these tropes are used to point out how much of a loser he is rather than build him up as a badass. His military training was in a death squad rather than the more noble soldier occupation, and he's using his advanced training to kill for whoever pays his company the best. His silent personality is the symptom of depression and apathy at his situation in life, while the upgrades he gets destroy his body and debase him as a human. His Mission Control is also rarely on any meds to begin with, and sends a death squad to his apartment to kill him by accident, only to apologize and laugh it off once the protagonist escapes.
** Many common game tropes such as ResurrectiveImmortality, UltraSuperDeathGoreFestChainsawer3000, and EquipmentUpgrade are canon to how the Cruelty Squad universe works, and their implementation is pretty horrific. The player character coming back after death with a cheap 500$ penalty? Everyone else in the world can do this too, which ultimately drives many people completely insane since they can never die. The extreme ultraviolence the game revels in is part-and-parcel of this world, since everyone is immortal anyways. While dying might be painful, it's no more of an inconvenience to your targets than paying a phone bill, and ultimately renders much of the carnage you cause to be pointless. Lastly, the implants you get are useful and fun, but are often underscored with some kind of horrific effect on your body. Speed implants replace your organs, stealth suits make you literally smell like shit, heavy armor suffocates your body, and so on. In choosing to enable videogame upgrades on himself, the protagonist ruins his body and becomes a mutant. In summary, the Cruelty Squad world is a place where people can never truly die, are tortured endlessly by immortal and extremely powerful beings, and slowly have their bodies and spirits transformed by the suffering they endure.
** Most video games have their economies based around buying and selling items of fixed value. Cruelty Squad ties its economy to an extremely volatile stock market, where not only stock prices but the prices of organs and fish are prone to wild swings during and in-between missions. The stocks are also influenced by what happens in missions too. Get a mission to take out the CEO and heads of a company on the market? You better sell your investments in that company before going through with that mission, lest you lose your shirt when the stock plummets afterward.

* ''[[VideoGame/RecettearAnItemShopsTale Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale]]'': Is primarily all about running the item shop in an RPG. You can still accompany adventurers to the dungeons though, which ends up bypassing the deconstruction potential in the FridgeLogic of tropes like ShopFodder, by having both sides of the game feed into each other in a way that dodges the question and wouldn't be true for the average shop.

* ''Fanfic/PokemonStrangledRed'' discusses an eponymous hacked game within a DeconstructionFic, with the plot kicked off by the implications of being able to store living creatures as data (specifically, ''what if those systems fail?'') and what would happen if the glitch Pokemon and their GoodBadBugs were real entities that could be called upon by anyone with the right knowledge. [[spoiler:As one would expect, it comes at a [[SanitySlippage very heavy cost]]]].

* ''VideoGame/DokiDokiLiteratureClub'': [[DatingSim Dating sims]], [[HaremGenre harem games]], the nature of [[NonPlayerCharacter NPCs]], and [[BreakingTheFourthWall the divide between the player and their character]]. [[spoiler:One of the non-romanceable side characters is self-aware and [[GoMadFromTheRevelation steadily going insane from the knowledge that she's a video game character]], eventually becoming an obsessive {{Yandere}} towards the player (not the PC, ''[[AddressingThePlayer the player themselves]]'') who [[InterfaceScrew screws with the game's files on your computer]] to try and force you into romancing her, which in turn causes the rest of the girls to start going mad and killing themselves as their flaws and personal issues get [[{{Flanderization}} Flanderized]] to their LogicalExtreme.]]

* ''VideoGame/DokiDokiLiteratureClub'': [[DatingSim Dating sims]], [[HaremGenre harem games]], the nature of [[NonPlayerCharacter NPCs]], and [[BreakingTheFourthWall the divide between the player and their character]]. [[spoiler:One of the non-romanceable side characters is self-aware and [[GoMadFromTheRevelation steadily going insane from the knowledge that she's a video game character]], eventually becoming an obsessive {{Yandere}} towards the player (not the PC, ''[[TheFourthWallWillNotProtectYou the player themselves]]'') who [[InterfaceScrew screws with the game's files on your computer]] to try and force you into romancing her, which in turn causes the rest of the girls to start going mad and killing themselves as their flaws and personal issues get [[{{Flanderization}} Flanderized]] to their LogicalExtreme.]]

* ''Fanfic/PokemonStrangledRed'' discusses an eponymous hacked game within a DeconstructionFic.

* ''[[http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=1z2lxiqua980sedk +=3]]'': Standard intfic assumptions, [[spoiler:specifically that your inventory is the sum total of items on your person that you can interact with.]][[labelnote:explanation]]You're in front a troll who wants three objects before he'll let you pass. All you have on you is a fancy calculater that's completely useless. The solution is to [[spoiler: give him your shirt, shoes, and pants. After all, if you were naked it would have mentioned that to you!]][[/labelnote]]

** The protagonist is a clear deconstruction of common videogame main characters, especially the ones common in military-themed shooters. Background with military training? Check. Silent, stoic, and subdued personality? Check. Able to equip themselves with all sorts of fun upgrades? Check. Follows orders from a disspassionate Mission Control figure? Check. Where the main character of Cruelty Squad differs from characters of this type is that these tropes are used to point out how much of a loser he is rather than build him up as a badass. His military training was in a death squad rather than the more noble soldier occupation, and he's using his advanced training to kill for whoever pays his company the best. His silent personality is the symptom of depression and apathy at his situation in life, while the upgrades he gets destroy his body and debase him as a human. His Mission Control is also rarely on any meds to begin with, and sends a death squad to his apartment to kill him by accident, only to apologize and laugh it off once the protagonist escapes.

* ''[[VideoGame/RecettearAnItemShopsTale Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale]]'': Is primarily all about running the item shop in an RPG. You can still accompany adventurers to the dungeons though, which ends up bypassing the deconstruction potential in the FridgeLogic of tropes like VendorTrash, by having both sides of the game feed into each other in a way that dodges the question and wouldn't be true for the average shop.