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"At first, Stanley assumed he'd broken the map, until he heard this narration and realized it was part of the game's design all along."
The Narrator, The Stanley Parable

Some games keep a very tight rein on the player's capacities, which can work quite well, as long as the player never tries something that makes them realise just how hard the game is trying to prevent them from going off the script. Other games never realise in time the full scope of the Combinatorial Explosion and break like a fragile twig the first time a creative player gets a grip on them. Only a brave few dare try and respond wittily and internally-consistently to absolutely everything a player could try.

This is where you go out of your way to get around the limitations of the game, somehow break it, or find other inconsistencies, but once you get there, you find that the dev team has already thought of that possibility. This is where you're not supposed to be, or any place it would take an unreasonable effort to reach. It can also be trying out a vast number of tricks and item combinations and find that each one is accounted for in the game code.

Take note: It's not just about specific reactions where they could've just put a generic one, situations you stumble into randomly, or Easter Eggs found in far away places. It takes thought and effort to find out that the dev team really is one step ahead for this trope to come into effect, when they think about details and events they wouldn't have been expected to.

See also Easter Egg, Crazy-Prepared, Artificial Brilliance, and Genius Programming. Compare The Producer Thinks of Everything, where the creators of a TV show seem to have planned out very, very far ahead, Unexpectedly Realistic Gameplay, when the developers think about this, but the player doesn't and No Fair Cheating, where the dev team installs ways to punish people for trying to achieve goals unfairly (can overlap if they think of the clever cheats too). Contrast with Creator's Apathy.


Type of Games having their own page:


Examples for specific titles:

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Other game examples (by genre)

    Adventure Games 
  • AI: The Somnium Files - nirvanA Initiative:
    • During an early fourth wall-breaking quiz to determine whether the player can handle spoilers from the first game, the host will have some unique dialogue for answering specific names from the first game. He sometimes even gives you a second chance to answer the question if your guess was close (i.e. answering with the correct character's last name when the question specifies their first name).
    • Several Somniums have locks blocked by passwords revealed by solving puzzles. If you happen to know the puzzle solutions ahead of time you can skip the puzzle and enter the solution; the dialogue changes so that the player character is making a blind guess, and their partner is left bewildered by the guess working. This also includes an early question that is designed to railroad you into Ryuki's route, letting you take Mizuki's route early (but not quite Sequence Breaking, since you need all of the endings before the final route opens). This does not, however, include the nil number that utterly breaks the game world; that is actually randomly-generated to prevent players from grabbing it from a walkthrough.
  • Ben Jordan: Paranormal Investigator:
    • Using the "Touch" icon everywhere will, in the final case, sometimes bring up a message chastising you for acting like Hercrabbiness. Hercrabbiness is a YouTuber who in her Let's Play of the series enjoyed using it on everything and everyone she could try. The final case also brings up a different message for trying to use it on a priest, which is "Shouldn't that be the other way around?"
    • At one point in case 5, the player will have a blowfish that has not been prepared properly (read: Very poisonous) in their inventory. Sure enough, there is an actual response to the player telling Ben to eat the poisonous blowfish.
  • Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars:
    • In Syria, George is told to say "Il a'kl kalb" to a kebab salesman specifically to anger him so Nejo can steal his brush. Before you speak the words to the salesman, George can ask other people around Syria what it means. However, after saying it, George will not be able to do this - except to Nejo.
    • Also in Syria, the player needs to use a key to enter the bathroom. The player can try to steal it, but George will refuse to do so.
    • In Ireland, the player has to use the sink in the basement of a pub for a puzzle. If the player leaves the sink on before the events in Ireland are completed, George will mention having to help bail out the basement because "Some idiot left the faucet running". If the player actually turns off the sink, George will not mention this.
  • Cave Story: There are a number of checks to prevent the player from sequence breaking.
    • Most notably, it is possible to use the machine-gun to skip a big portion of the Plantation. But doing so without the necessary fetch-quest will result in a message telling the player they cannot pass. Once the rocket building fetch-quest is completed, the player is free to perform the area skip instead of riding the rocket. This has been demonstrated in nitsuja’s former world record (TSA 50:10.30) 42 minutes into the run[1].
  • Chicory: A Colorful Tale:
    • The player is asked what their favorite food is at the start of the game, which determines the name of the dog protagonist. If an important character already has that name (ex. "Chicory"), instead of refusing your entry, you're asked what your second-favorite food is. If you keep doing it intentionally, it goes all the way up to tenth-favorite before going with a more generic next-favorite. And if you name yourself as a lesser NPC, they may even comment on it (ex. "Curry" in Brekkie wonders if they should start a club for Curries).
    • Caramel runs back and forth offscreen to find items for the Clothing Swap store. If you swap out multiple clothes in the same trip, Caramel gets unique animations where he's visibly more and more sweaty and winded.
    • At the end of the credits, if the player beat the game under a certain amount of time, Chicory will comment that you were, quote, "REALLY FAST".
    • After the sequence where you have a fight with Chicory shortly after discovering she's spawning the corruption, you're immediately given where to go for the next area. However, you can go back and call your mother (normally just the Hint System), which will start a unique conversation discussing what just happened with her, after which you'll get the hint option like normal.
    • If you try to use the transit bench during the climax where Pizza is stripped of the Brush and all hope seems to be lost, there is a note saying that the transit system is closed due to "seemingly apocalyptic circumstances".
    • Normally, dying during a fight will cause Pizza to fall down hurt before the game inexplicably rewinds back to the phase you were currently on. While mechanically the same, dying during the final boss fight against the brush, specifically during the phases after Chicory's Big Damn Heroes moment will have Chicory helping you up instead.
  • The Interactive Fiction game Counterfeit Monkey is set in a world in which people are capable of removing any letter from any object's word/term to change it into an entirely different object (e.g. removing the letter 'l' from 'pearl' to change it into a pear), a concept that naturally makes for tons of potential letter-wrangling and object transformations, and it pulls it off beautifully. To list just a handful of examples of the game's staggeringly expansive implementation:
    • The crowd at the fair will normally cheer if you solve the word-balance puzzle by changing the apple or pear to something heavier or lighter (e.g. changing the apple to an ale), but they will gasp in disgust instead if you do so by transforming the pear into an (obviously severed) ear.
    • It is fully possible to make a cock ring. Attempting to wear it prompts a snarky response from the (male) character currently sharing your (female) body. Showing it to the professor who wants you to change a naughty term to an innocent one causes him to have a hilarious reaction.
      "Waterstone sees what you've made of the cock, and clutches desperately at his hair as though he's going to tear it out in tufts. His eyes bulge and water. I've never seen the man so close to apoplexy. I think that was exactly the wrong thing, somehow."
    • In fact, the game has various amusing responses to you doing... suggestive things with naughty-sounding items. Putting gel on the (chicken) cock/(church) member/(donkey) ass will cause Alex to awkwardly cut short his typical description of "you rub an amount of gel on the [object]", and trying to get the bartender to paddle any one of these objects into their homonyms will cause her to smirk and refuse to do so.
    • If you buy the Britishizing goggles and examine the power cord you get much later on in the game with them on, the cord's prongs will be described differently than if you had examined them without the goggles on.
    • If you get the crazy idea of shooting the anagramming gun at its own reflection, it turns into an anagramming gnu. Then the gnu sees its own reflection and changes back into a gun to prevent Unintentionally Unwinnable, and you're even rewarded with an achievement!
    • If you still have the rock at the end of the game, you can bypass the kayak puzzle entirely by changing the rock to a roc and getting a free ride across the ocean on its back.
  • The Curse of Monkey Island:
    • The clock in Puerto Pollo is powered by the clock of the computer running the game. It even plays a bit of LeChuck's theme on the hour.
    • There's a series of small signs on Plunder Island set up by the Naturalists' Society. One of these is next to a thorn bush in a patch of quicksand. It identifies the bush as a "Pappapisshu Bush" and explains that "pappapisshu" is a native word meaning "Youch!". After reading the sign, Guybrush says "pappapisshu" instead of "ouch" for the rest of the game. If he doesn't read the sign, he says "Youch!" as usual.
    • When Guybrush meets Palido Domingo on the beach, he can ask him how long he's been sunbathing. Palido will say he's been sunbathing since the month three months before the date set in the computer. If the game is played in January, he adds "By the way, Happy New Year".
    • When making the hangover cure in the endgame, you can tear up your tofu mask and sprinkle it on top. It has no effect, but it changes the item graphic.
    • There's a few Easter Eggs that can be found by repeatedly doing things that most people would stop doing when nothing happened initially.
      • If the player tries to walk into the lagoon on Blood Island, the game won't let them. If the player persists, Guybrush will eventually walk into the water and find his The Secret of Monkey Island self drowned and tied to the Idol of Many Hands.
      • If the player reenters the crypt where Stan has set up his insurance business, all they will get is a greeting from Stan. If the player enters enough times, Maggie from The Dig will appear on the spider's web in the corner, and a spider will appear and drag her off.
      • On Skull Island, Guybrush relies on LaFoot to winch him down to King Andre's cave. LaFoot always loses his grip and drops him until Guybrush uses an umbrella to float to King Andre's cave. If the player lets LaFoot drop Guybrush enough times, Guybrush will finish his business with King Andre and take care of one last thing before returning to Blood Island: climbing back up the mountain and throwing LaFoot off.
  • Day of the Tentacle:
    • In the final sequence, you can attempt to go up to the attic and close the door, but Bernard will say that Purple Tentacle might lock it and trap them up there. There is no reason to go up there in the first place, so it's surprising that there's a specific line to deal with such a situation.
    • One puzzle has Hoagie slipping something into the suggestion box for the Constitution. Another puzzle (which has you tricking the founding fathers into starting a fire and later making them evacuate) takes place in the same room. How far along you are in that puzzle affects the first one:
      • If Hoagie drops the item in the suggestion box before the fire is started or after it's put out, he suggests they check the box. George Washington says he has an idea to which John Hancock asks "Does it have to do with starting a fire?"
      • If Hoagie drops the item in the box after the fire is started, he again suggests they check the box. George Washington again says he has an idea. This time, John Hancock asks if they're going to torment Betsy Ross again.
      • If you try to get Hoagie to drop the item in the box during the evacuation, he refuses since no one's watching.
    • Laverne starts the game with a scalpel in her inventory, but she doesn't need to use it. (Bernard does.) The first time she's taken to Dr. Tentacle, she asks if he's going to use his scalpel. After he says he's not, she asks if he wants to use hers...unless she's already given it to Bernard or Hoagie in which case she says nothing.
  • Edna & Harvey: The Breakout: You can use everything with everything and even talk to inanimate objects (besides Harvey), which will give you unique responses. The only way to do something that doesn't result in a custom response is finding a bug that allows you to do something that wasn't meant to be possible. The default responses aren't even voiced because they weren't meant to be triggered.
  • Farnham Fables:
    • In general, almost every possible interaction will yield a unique response.
    • The hidden "Nudie Mode" allows you to turn clothing invisible when you mouse over it. Obviously, you can see almost any character naked, but this also works on things like background elements and inventory items.
    • In Episode 1:
      • The fox will run to the south after smelling Gloria's clothes. The princes can either go to the south, or take the long way around the forest; doing the latter will result in the fox being confused as to why you'd do that.
      • Once Gloria is reunited with Rachael, whichever prince is currently holding the skirt will be the one to hand it back to her. Normally, this will be Philip, since you have to give him the skirt so he can make the fox track Gloria, but if you give it to another prince first, they will give Rachael the skirt, with a unique sprite and dialogue for each one.
  • In Gabriel Knight:
  • George of The Jungle The Search for The Secret, based on the George of the Jungle series has a saving system that prevents the player from entering a profane or otherwise inappropriate name by refusing to accept such a name.
  • God of War (PS4):
    • Atreus has a large number of unique lines depending on what a player does, even some off-the-wall behavior. For instance, if the player has Kratos attack while there are no enemies present (for example, if you're trying out new moves), Atreus may ask "Are you... exercising?"
    • Early on in the story, Kratos has to throw his axe into the Lake of Nine in a cut-scene right after a boat-ride from the Witch's cave. Normally, when entering a boat, Kratos never recalls the axe, but when he enters the boat this time, he will recall the axe if he does not have it.
    • Normally, Mimir is present whenever Kratos and Atreus fight the Valkyries. However, since you can enter Muspelheim before reviving Mimir (Albeit vastly under equipped), it's possible to fight the Valkyrie Gondul before reviving Mimir, and if so, there's different dialogue between the two. Kratos also gives his own responses to Atreus' complaints as they move up the mountain.
    • During your second trip to Helheim you will see Baldur standing near a low wall. Try throwing your axe or a boulder at him and the cursor will disappear, preventing you from damaging him. It's pretty much impossible to ambush him just in case you were trying to see how clever you are.
    • In the post-game, if the players visit Freya's cabin, they'll have dialog about what she'll be up to now, Given you killed her son Baldur it's not hard to guess why.
  • In the Hitchiker's Guide To The Galaxy text adventure, it is necessary to the plot at one point to "enjoy Vogon poetry". Earlier, you can "enjoy mud" (it's nice and squishy!), but if you try enjoying Ford, you are sternly told that this isn't that type of game. Additional fun can be had by inputting random words into the Guide — it has entries on some very unlikely things. Also, the game will often refer you to a footnote (Like SEE FOOTNOTE 9), and when you type "footnote 9", it tells you something. If you keep on going through the footnotes (Trying footnote 10, 11, 12, etc.), eventually you get a string of "There is no footnote (number)", until you finally get "It's fun reading all the footnotes, isn't it?"
  • King's Quest VI has Alexander Breaking the Fourth Wall to yell at the player if they made him fall repeatedly during one sequence (if he wasn't killed by said fall).
  • The Last Express:
    • At one point, Cath must steal the Firebird egg for Kronos, while also stealing a briefcase full of money from Kronos to show to August Schmidt. While you can lose the spoilered item, have it stolen back, give it to Kronos, or never find it at all, the game takes into account whether or not you also stole the briefcase if Kronos gets the item, and reacts accordingly. What makes this more impressive is that Kronos getting his hands on the item results in a Non-Standard Game Over, meaning they thought of all of this for a path that leads to a bad ending.
    • If you hide Tyler's body in your compartment's bed, then take it out and put it back on the floor before Milos enters your compartment (which you have no reason to do), you get a unique game over in which Milos pulls the emergency brake upon discovering Tyler's body.
  • Leisure Suit Larry 1: In the Land of the Lounge Lizards, being the first Sierra game to be publicly playtested, included a wide variety of possible inputs to any situation, often with comedic responses: During playtesting, the developers would take note of various phrases used by players in certain situations, and think of new ways for the game to react to it. For a particularly amusing example, typing the command "masturbate" at any time would result in the prompt "The whole idea was to stop doing that, Larry!"
  • In Lost Pig, there is a topic-based conversation mechanism for interacting with the gnome, who is the only non-player character (apart from the pig). You can choose to ask the gnome about himself, the area he lives in, the player character Grunk, Grunk's mission, most of the game's items and scenery, any strange words he mentions, his philosophies, and a lot more. It can actually take up most of your game time trying to find as many topics to talk to the gnome about as you can. There is a toggle-able menu that suggests topics for you to talk to the gnome about based on what you have seen already and what he has mentioned, but even going through the whole Dialogue Tree created by this doesn't go through all the options. There are several Easter Eggs that can be found by introducing topics that wouldn't normally come up in the story, such as telling the gnome about adventure games.
  • Maniac Mansion has some early examples:
    • There's a publisher in the game you can send things to and get a contract from. However, the only two things you can send him which will advance the game: the manuscript after it's been edited by Wendy and Green Tentacle's demo tape. If you send him the manuscript unedited or edited by someone other than Wendy, there's a specific cutscene for that. There's also cutscenes if you send the cassette tape with the old record, Syd or Razor playing, or the tentacle mating call on it.
    • Furthermore, if Syd or Razor gets a contract for their playing, you can show it to Green Tentacle. He kills you in response.
    • If you have Wendy edit the Meteor's manuscript, you can send it to the publisher to get it a contract and present the contract to the Meteor to get a different ending where the Meteor ends up getting interviewed on a talk show. You can also use Bernard to contact the Meteor Police and have it arrested. What happens if you do both? The interview still happens, but gets interrupted by the Meteor Police coming to arrest him.
    • One item, the Old Rusty Key note , is found hanging from the chandelier in the living room. To acquire it, the player needs to get the chandelier to fall note . If one of the kids is standing under the chandelier when it falls...it narrowly misses them, but they say "That was close."
  • Metroid:
    • Metroid II: Return of Samus:
      • In most sections, you won't be able to traverse the hazardous liquid that prevents you from progressing before killing all of the Metroids in the area without dying a horrible death. At one point near the end, though, you would have enough armor and energy tanks to attempt it normally... if the dev team hadn't added a set of spikes blocking that part of the tunnel. The spikes go away after you destroy the Omega Metroids in the previous section, as does the liquid.
      • Further, the various beam items respawn after you collect them, so unless you somehow screw with this aspect, you can never get an Unintentionally Unwinnable by overwriting your Ice Beam permanently, as you will always be able to collect an Ice Beam at the end.
      • If the player attempts to enter the Queen Metroid's room before killing all the Metroid larvae, the Queen Metroid does not appear (although she can be heard roaring in the background), and a cluster of crystals blocks the entrance to the egg's chamber. Fortunately, while Samus is barred from returning to the previous room or progressing forward, a hole in the floor allows her to exit the nest and return to the room with the broken Chozo Statue. The Queen Metroid only appears (and the crystals automatically disappear) after all of the larvae are exterminated. Additionally, the hole in the floor is still open during the boss battle (in case the player doesn't have enough missiles or energy and needs to make an emergency exit to restock), but is covered up when the battle ends to ensure that the player can only progress forward and is no longer able to backtrack.
    • Super Metroid:
      • It's possible to "beat" Ridley on the Ceres Space Station at the beginning of the game. If you deal enough damage without taking too much yourself, he'll briefly drop the capsule with the last Metroid, only to grab it again and fly off.
      • The fight with Draygon can be made much simpler if you shoot out one of the cannons on the walls, exposing electric wiring inside, letting Draygon capture you, and then using the Grappling Beam to connect to the wires, channeling the electrical circuit through Samus and shocking Draygon to death.
      • You can turn off upgrades in the menu, and there are distinct beam animations for every possible combination of activated beam weapons, which amounts to 26 different beam animations (given that the Spazer and Plasma Beams are unable to be enabled at the same time without hacks).
      • If by some chance you are able to sequence break all the way through the searing hot caves of Upper Norfair without the Varia Suit and survive, arriving at Lower Norfair will result in a very rude awakening: almost every single room is as hot as the worst parts of Upper Norfair. It's virtually impossible to get anywhere through it without a tool assisted run.
      • During the second half of the final battle, if you stop blasting Mother Brain for a moment, you'll notice that she attacks much more frequently (bordering on Beam Spam) and moves much faster than in the first half. This doesn't make the battle any more difficult - it just serves to show that Mother Brain realizes the gravity of her current situation.
    • Metroid Fusion:
      • It's possible to leave Sector 4 without collecting the Diffusion Missiles by doing an incredibly difficult series of Shinesparks. Doing so will award Samus with a secret cutscene where the A.I. and the mysterious Federation official commend her on her skillful use of the Shinespark before telling her to "get back on task" and wondering how many players will see the message.
      • On your first trip to Sector 6, Samus has to contend with blue X Parasites that have adapted to Sector 5's sub-zero temperatures. Being that Samus is now part-Metroid, these freezing X do a lot of damage to her when they intentionally suicide bomb Samus as an attack. After getting the Varia Suit, which protects Samus from extreme temperatures, the blue X become just more healing: however, the X don't immediately know that and will continue to throw themselves Samus until physically seeing it's no longer harming her, after which they'll start to run. You can even continue to avoid the blue X like they're a hazard and they'll still try to attack her all the way to the end of the game.
    • In Metroid: Zero Mission, steps are taken to make sure the player can continue ahead even after performing ridiculously complex Sequence Breaking. For instance, if the player gets the Screw Attack early, the Ripper that must be frozen so that you can stand on it during the Kiri Guru boss fight cannot be killed by the attack, unlike other Rippers. It's even possible to beat the game with only 15% (or as low as 8%) of all the items, thanks to several hidden routes that allow you to proceed forward, with the game acknowledging this accomplishment with unique end screen artwork.
    • Metroid Prime: During the escape sequence at the end of the prologue, there is a cutscene that ultimately ends in Samus losing all her powerups. It's possible to skip this cutscene by clipping out of bounds and taking a shorter path that doesn't even see the room... but when you land on Tallon IV, you'll find that Samus lost her gear anyway. Humorously, there is no similar check for the sequel's equivalent moment, which can cause some Unintentionally Unwinnable if mishandled, but can make the beginning of the game easier if worked with properly.
    • Metroid Dread was designed with speedrunners in mind, with developers accounting for players fighting certain bosses with equipment obtained before the "intended" time. The pinnacle of this is the prerendered video for accessing the final area; this is a unique transition with its own video unseen for any other transitions yet the developers included three separate versions of it to account for Samus having only the Varia Suit or even just the Power Suit even though reaching that point of the game without the Gravity Suit is impossible without using unintended glitches. This proved prescient: speedrunners pulled off such runs within weeks of the game's release.
  • At the start of Metroidvania game Ghost 1.0, you're prompted to enter your name and advised to "choose wisely, as it can't be changed later". If you type "wisely", the game responds "Ha-ha, very funny" and quits to desktop. If you enter "changed later", the game reminds you that your name can't be "changed later" and tells you to "type another name". If you type "another name", the game expresses its annoyance and quits to desktop again. Each of these also nets you an achievement.
  • Minecraft: Story Mode:
    • At the first crafting table, you're given a couple of items and asked to create a sword. However, due to the particular set of ingredients given to you, you can create a lever instead. Doing this nets you an achievement and a bemused reaction from Petra, who tells you to try again. The lever comes back three episodes later, when you actually use it to open a secret passage.
    • When you're asked to choose between Olivia and Axel's plans at the end of the first episode, they start listing reasons why you should go with their choice. If you stand around long enough, they eventually fall silent and just wait for your decision, but if you wait even longer...
      Axel: Uh... goggles.
      Olivia: What?
      Axel: I'm running out of things to say.
    • In one puzzle, Jesse has to craft something that can be used to hit a pressure plate at the opposite end of a room. The most obvious solution is to create a bow and arrow, but creating a fishing rod will also solve the problem (you end up using the hook to activate the plate).
  • The Neverhood:
    • Return to the Nursery's mailbox after Willie's death and you will find Klogg sending you letters instead, taunting Klaymen and trying to convince him that We Can Rule Together.
    • If you wait too long to make the Last-Second Ending Choice, Klogg comments on it.
    Klogg: No no! Nooo hurry. I can wait here as looooong as you can.
  • Ōkami:
    • Being a game based around using your Celestial Brush to interact with and create objects, there are many extra things you can use the brush for other than the set skills the game teaches you. For example, you can use your brush on any NPC you wish. Summoning bombs or slashing them will send them flying, but drawing a circle around them can make them react happily and rush to pet you. Drawing circles on the residents of Kamui Village uniquely turns them into wolves.
    • One particularly funny usage of the brush that exemplifies Developer Foresight can be found after defeating Orochi during the festival in Kamiki Village. Several villagers are sat round a barrel of Thunder Sake, and it is possible to get each of them drunk or even electrocute them with it.
  • OneShot:
    • If you solve a puzzle without the Entity's help and inspect the nearest computer, it will be confused about how you were able to have solved the puzzle without its help.
    • You can take up to ten photos of Niko at the photo studio in Refuge. Any of them will work for the library card...except the one where Niko blinked.
  • The entire point of the interactive fiction Pick Up the Phone Booth and Aisle. Just start with the title alone, and try flying, swimming, or some infamous IF buzzwords, really, anything, and see the results. PUTPBAA is a combination of two earlier games with a similar concept: the author's own Pick Up the Phone Booth and Die, and Aisle. The latter game takes place in the middle of a grocery store, and only lasts a single turn. The player can use this window of time to perform such psychotic actions as climbing the grocery shelves, or stripping naked.
  • The Prime Pro Rhyme Row series by Andrew Schultz. They have a special response to any rhyme you can think of that uses real words. The game actually encourages thinking of as many as you can, even if they won't immediately help, because solutions you find now are kept track of for later and ones that aren't still contribute to a free puzzle skip.
  • Quest for Glory: The series had a ton of these, especially amusing for players who think of particularly creative ways to get themselves killed.
    • If you play as a thief, you start out with a lock pick in your inventory. If you type "pick nose", the hero will stick the lock pick up his nose and die, and you will get a game over. However, if your lock-picking skill is high enough, you will get a message that says, "Success! Your nose is now open!". Later games have the game reply "Success!" with the same sound effect the player hears when picking a lock. This also increases your lock picking skill.
    • In the second game, you can actually cross the Impassable Desert by yourself and reach the city of Raseir instead of waiting for the caravan to cross as part of the group. It doesn't actually do anything for you because the city guards won't let you in, but if you have enough supplies and know where to go, it can be done.
    • Entering the EOF initiation test with a lighted lamp will disqualify you because you didn't obey the EOF's orders.
    • Throwing mud at Ad Avis will not work and he'll mock you for it,
  • Extremely common in Rabi-Ribi. The game has achievements for doing things like fighting Lilith before gaining the help of any bosses, beating the game without collecting any items except the bunny amulets and consumables, and in the later case, some parts of the game world change to accommodate your lack of movement options, like new springs and breakable walls.
    • Going back to the ledge you couldn't jump up after getting the Rabi Slippers (or after defeating Cocoa, if you're doing a 0% items run), will show a scene of Cocoa dropping down from the ceiling along with a spring. If you try to do that during the first two post-game chapters, the scene just won't happen, because Cocoa is too busy manning to shop to be able to show up.
  • Rise of the Tomb Raider: in the geothermal valley there is a well. Since it doesn't look too much deep, and there is water on the bottom, the developers realized that players would obviously jump inside, only to find that Lara can't jump out anyway; thus they added climbable rock inside the well to allow her to use her pick-axes.
  • Episode 2 of Sam & Max: Freelance Police ("Situation: Comedy") has Sam go on Hugh Bliss' game show Who's Never Going To Be A Millionaire? to win the prize. To win, Sam must swap Hugh's impossibly difficult questions with Peepers' cue cards which contain ridiculously easy questions. The first of these is "Am I blue?" While it's very likely that the player will simply answer with "No, Hugh, you're not", it's also possible to get Hugh to change his skin color to blue and get a correct response with "Yes, you are."
  • Sam & Max Hit the Road has it that you can try to pick up something that can't be picked up and Sam will tell you this. If you repeatedly try to pick up the object, he will get more and more upset and eventually Max will comment. However, that's not the Foresight part. The Foresight comes into play if you try to do this during the point of the game where Sam and Max are separated (when Conroy and Lee-Harvey throw Max into the Mini-Golf course) and Sam has a new set of lines.
  • The Secret of Monkey Island:
    • Otis reveals his name to Guybrush during their conversation when he's in jail. If the player never initiates the conversation before freeing him, he tells Guybrush "The name's Otis, by the way." after he's released. Similarly, it's possible to complete Meathook's challenge without engaging him in conversation and learning his name. If the player does that, Guybrush starts to address him only to realize he doesn't know Meathook's name and Meathook tells him.
    • Sinking the Sea Monkey with the rocks is entirely optional. Depending on whether or not the player sinks the ship, either Guybrush's crew or Herman Toothrot will come looking for him in the catacombs after LeChuck goes back to Melee Island. The ending will show the other still on the island. (Escape from Monkey Island establishes the ship being sunk as canon.)
    • After Guybrush fails to eliminate LeChuck at the wedding, LeChuck punches him all over Melee Island. The first place he lands and can be interacted with is Stan's used ship lot where LeChuck punches Stan into the air and Guybrush can pick up a bottle of root beer. The player can use the root beer to dissolve LeChuck right there, or let him punch Guybrush to another location on the island. One of the possible locations is the dock in town. If the player eliminates LeChuck there, Guybrush and Elaine will be visible in the shot of Stan finally falling into the bay.
    • One of the three trials assigned by the Pirate Leaders involves breaking into Governor Marley's mansion and stealing the Idol of Many Hands. This trial ends with Sheriff Fester Shinetop arresting Guybrush, confiscating his sword, and throwing him into the bay to drown. After Guybrush gets himself out of that mess, he finds another sword next to the ladder out of the bay and takes it, saying "I guess I need a sword." Another of the trials involves buying a sword and learning to fight with it. If Guybrush hasn't bought a sword before he gets arrested and thrown into the bay, it won't get confiscated and he won't find one next to the ladder.
    • The trial involving stealing the Idol of Many Hands ends with Guybrush being thrown into the bay to drown. After he rescues himself, Governor Marley comes to talk to him and agrees to spend some more time with him after he completes the trials. When Guybrush completes the trials, he returns to town, sees LeChuck's ship sailing away, and is told that Marley has been kidnapped by him. What happens if the player saves stealing the Idol for the last trial to complete? Guybrush sees LeChuck sailing away as he climbs out of the bay and is told that Marley was kidnapped while trying to save him.
  • In The Sword Of Etheria, the tutorial asks you to perform a knockback attack, however it fails to tell you that the attack requires you to have stunned the enemy for it to work until after it is attempted. The dialogue changes if the player succeeded in their attempt, acknowledging their success and then explaining the technique in case the player stumbled on the correct answer.
  • In Syberia: The World Before, during one part of the game, Kate Walker decides to call her American friend Olivia using one of the guest house's rotary telephone booths. While the number is not clearly shown, Kate accurately makes the motions for dialing a full number. If you can make out the number she used to call Olivia, 212-359-1519, you can call that same number later in the game when you're presented with a touch-tone phone you can freely dial.
  • Episode 3 of Tales of Monkey Island (Lair of the Leviathan): If you for some reason decide to help De Cava collect 100,000 grubs in order to build a new Cochlea for the manatee (A task which would take around 9 months of non-stop playing without modifying the save file); not not only will you receive unique dialogue from him when you collect 50,000 and 99,999. But the entire chapter of the game that has you recovering the old one will be skipped (with you still capturing De Cavas crew somehow, despite never even meeting them now).
  • The original Tomb Raider I for PS1 made very sure a lot of the weapons were hard to miss:
    • There are many places where if you miss a weapon, you'll find it at one of that weapon's ammo pickups in a later stage, and in increasingly obvious places (going from hidden secrets to being in plain view. Even if you miss every single time, you get one final opportunity to do so in Natla's Mines where each member of the Quirky Miniboss Squad is carrying one of the three findable weapons and are set up in a way where it's practically impossible to get past without fighting them. If you don't have a full inventory after this stage, you are deliberately avoiding picking up weapons.
    • That said, it is actually possible to get through Natla's Mines without reclaiming any of your weapons, even the starting pistols. If you do, to ensure the game isn't Unwinnable by Insanity you'll just start the next level with the pistols in your inventory. There'll also be a free Uzi pickup practically right in front of you, meaning you'd have to be one stubborn donkey to miss these ones.
  • In Trace Memory Ashley comes across an old newspaper about her mother's murder. Without any prompting, the player can decide to take a photo of the newspaper with Ashley's DAS. If they do, the scene where Ashley talks about it to her supposed father later in the game changes slightly. She'll show them the photo of the newspaper instead of just telling them that she saw it.
  • A rather dark example occurs in Wandersong. If you try to Sequence Break the game by playing the first three songs when you aren't supposed to know them, it triggers a "special ending" where Audrey murders the Nightmare King and the world ends.
  • Zork:
    • The game responds to commands such as "win" and "die", and characters react to the phrase "Hello, Sailor".
    • In Zork II, at one point you come across a room containing naught but a giant bucket. If you should type "kick bucket" while trying to Get Ye Flask, the parser helpfully replies, "Kick the bucket? OK, if you insist. *** You have died ***"
    • "Eat", 'Eat what?', "Eat Self", "auto-cannibalism is not the answer."
    • "Count Blessings" results in "Well, you're playing Zork, for one..."

    Card Battle 
  • Hearthstone:
    • The Paladin-exclusive Noble Sacrifice triggers when an enemy attacks and summons a 2/1 minion which redirects the attack to itself. As the name implies, the Noble Sacrifice is not expected to survive this, but it is possible by various methods, such as blocking the original attack, buffing the Sacrifice to tank it, or just resurrecting him afterwards. Appropriately, his attack line sounds pleasantly surprised that he's alive at all.
    • Doomsayer is a 0/7 that destroys itself and all minions at the start of your next turn, and is summoned with a dramatic "THE END IS COMING!". If you manage to attack with itnote , he'll proclaim "Did I miss it?"
    • Adventure mode bosses have several minions that are unobtainable to players, but can be controlled through cards like Mind Control. These unique minions also have attack quotes, with many of them sounding quite disdainful/surprised that they are being used by the player or having comedic quotes like a stone golem that wishes Blizzard would add him in Heroes of the Storm.
    • The "sorry" emote was removed from the emote list (due to people using it sarcastically) however even after that every new hero released has still had a "Sorry" line recorded. Why? Because there's one joke card that randomizes your emote selection and that can generate the old "Sorry" emotes.
    • Ysera and her retained counterpart Ysera the Dreamer add a card to your hand called Ysera Awakens, a spell that deals 5 damage to everything except Ysera. That also includes Ysera Unleashed, a third version of Ysera that is likewise immune to the damage despite not being able to generate Ysera Awakens.
    • Raid Boss Onyxia fills the board with 2/1 whelps and is immune to all damage while you control a whelp. However, that effect isn't just limited to the whelps summoned by her: it also includes token whelps created by other cards from the same set, tokens created by cards from different sets, token whelps that aren't even thematically linked to Onyxia, and even a few collectible cards like Big Ol' Whelp and Mechanical Whelp.
  • Shadowverse:
    • Ghosts normally banish themselves whenever they would be destroyed. They still have a death line programmed, and it can only be heard through a single type of interaction (Ghosthound Sexton).
    • Every card has a line for summoning, attacking, evolving, and dying. Eidolon of Madness has an effect that prevents it from attacking, and Heavenly Aegis is indestructible. They still have attack and death lines respectively.
    • Every single card has an animated version, even the limited-time reprints of cards that come in base form such as Ta-G, Katana Unsheated and generated card Tokens such as Ghosts. If you use an animated card such as Urd to summon a copy of another follower, that new copy will become animated too. With the release of Seer's Globes, players can now freely animate any card of their choice.

    Fighting Games 
  • From Blaz Blue Chrono Phantasma onwards, the Mirror Match theme — Blood Pain II — will also play for Jin vs. Hakumen matches. By this point in the series, this is more of a Late-Arrival Spoiler.
  • Dragon Ball FighterZ
    • Typically, when Android 18 uses her Accel Dance super, Android 17 joins her. If she is on the same team as Krillin, however, her husband will join her instead.
    • Beerus's level-3 super has two different animations. Typically, it consists of Beerus flicking his opponent on the forehead, like when he first fought with Goku on King Kai's planet. If the attack does enough damage to KO Goku Black or Fused Zamasu, however, the animation is changed to Beerus erasing Black and/or Zamasu from existence as he does Present Zamasu in Dragon Ball Super.
    • If Gotenks is on the same team as Piccolo when using his Charging Buu-Buu Volleyball attack, Piccolo will join in.
    • If Adult Gohan is not on the same team as Gotenks, his Ultimate Kamehameha super will change into the Brothers Kamehameha, which he fires with Goten by his sidenote . Additionally, if Super Saiyan Gokunote  is on Gohan's team while Gotenks isn't, Goku will join in and turn it into the Family Kamehameha.
    • Depending on the combination of team compositions and stage selection, extra cutscenes may play before a battle begins or after a battle ends that pays tribute to key events in the series. For example, if Goku and Frieza are the lead characters on their respective teams when starting a fight on Planet Namek, a cutscene will open of Frieza murdering Krillin, triggering Goku's transformation into a Super Saiyan. If the stage is transformed into its destroyed version as a result of a Destructive Finish, and Goku wins against Frieza in the end, another cutscene will play of Goku flying away, Frieza launching one final attack on Goku, and Goku countering and killing Frieza.
  • Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2: DUAL Ultimates are powerful combo attacks with which your hero uses one of a given character's strongest moves in tandem with that character (for example, the Kamehameha with Goku). Android 16's is Hell's Flash — and 16 has to detach his hands to use it. However, when your hero uses it, they mimic the initial pose... but fire the earth-shattering blast from their open palms instead. The same happens if they use Eis Shenron's Ice Cannon, which is ordinarily fired from his left arm shifted into an Arm Cannon.
  • In Fist of the North Star: Twin Blue Stars of Judgment, Kenshiro's "Hokuto Zankai Ken" super imposes a time limit on his victim, in which they lose the round via classic Hokuto pressure point hitting when said timer runs out. However, when done on Souther, nothing will happen to him at all when the timer runs out and he even laughs about it, reflecting his dextrocardia immunity to Hokuto Shinken.
  • Garou: Mark of the Wolves: If you selected an alternate color for your character, then they will be depicted with said alternate color in all pixelated cutscenes. Hand-drawn CGs do revert to the default color, however.
  • The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy:
    • Every playable character has a different quote for when the final boss fight begins.
    • Should the player choose to play through story mode while wearing an alternate costume, Mandy will be wearing one of her own alternate costumes during the part where the player has to control her and make her beat up Billy during the end credits.
  • The console versions of Guilty Gear XX Accent Core up to Plus R include a bonus "GG Generations" option which changes the game's mechanics slightly to resemble previous games. "GG" mode changes how Instant Kills work so that they can be repeatedly used and escaped from via onscreen button prompts. If the victim misses the inputs they eat an immediate unfailing Instant Kill. Yet Order-Sol's Instant Kill "Dragon Install Sekkai" is a long and complicated button combination, and the actual IK portion only triggers if the victim's health is low enough, so how did the dev team work around this? When Order-Sol's in "GG" mode, performing a successful IK here triggers his EX form's IK, "All Guns Blazing."
    • May's Instant Kill in Xrd (where she blasts her opponent into the sky with one of the Mayship's cannons) gives May unique dialogue when she uses it on Johnny, the owner of the Mayship. Also, Dizzy's Instant Kill (where she diverts an incredibly powerful Kamehame Hadoken before Necro can vaporize her opponent with it, and her opponent surrenders after seeing the ensuing mushroom cloud in the background) gets absolutely no reaction from Bedman (who's in a coma throughout all his fights) but gets one from his bed mecha, and Elphelt using her Instant Kill (where she fires a special bullet at her opponent that makes them fall in love with her) has dialogue from a Mirror Match Elphelt lampshading how she's being seduced by herself.
    • Xrd in general has a surprising amount of this. Each character has a different reaction to Dizzy's IK, for example. Certain character combinations will trigger special dialogue under certain conditions as well - Sin's IK has special lines that only ever trigger when facing Dizzy, Sol, or Ky. Faust's dialogue is noticeably more hostile whenever facing Zato, someone he has a very bad grudge against. Elphelt has a special winquote that only triggers when defeating Sin.
    • In Strive, winning a fight as Goldlewis Dickenson will have him pull out his stopwatch and remark on how long it took to beat his opponent, with his lines corresponding to how much time has actually run down on the fight timer. However, setting the time limit to endless will instead amusingly have him say "Zero seconds! Wait, that's not right. Is my watch broken?"
  • In Marvel vs. Capcom 3, the Kattelox Island stage normally has Tron Bonne in the background next to Tiesel Bonne, cheering on the fighting. If Tron Bonne is one of the fighters, though, she will disappear from the background and Tiesel will cheer her on instead. One step further: If two Trons fight each other, Tiesel will appear confused and stare at the two of them trying to work out what's going on. If Tron is defeated, Tiesel will hunch over and look depressed for the rest of the match... unless another Tron enters the match (either by the enemy player using her as well, or using the Multi Man card in Heroes and Heralds), which will cause him to be confused for a while before starting to cheer again.
  • Slap City:
    • Each character has their own win quotes after a Vs. match depending on who you beat. This also applies to many of the alt skins (as they are different characters using the same moveset). There is also unique dialogue for winning a team match and a 4v4 match. They even have lines for the scenario in which a person in a vanilla character skin set beats someone using an alt skin set of the same character.
    • Princess Remedy and Frallan canonically used to date in their own series and can marry in the first game. As a nod to that, If Princess Remedy and Frallan are in the same match, and one grabs the other, they can press the taunt button to do a special "throw" (it's them kissing). Also, if specifically both of them are on the same team and win a match, there's not only unique dialogue, but a unique victory animation, neither of which plays if Remedy teams up with Frallan's alt character, Nuna.
  • In Street Fighter IV, the Small Airfield stage has Balrog ("Boxer") appear in the door of one of the planes. If Balrog is one of the fighters, Vega ("Claw") will appear instead. If both Balrog and Vega are fighting, M. Bison ("Dictator") will appear instead. This is also also a reference to how these three characters had their names swapped around between the Japanese and English versionnote , hence the use of nicknames.
  • Super Smash Bros.:
    • Super Smash Bros. Melee will properly display the name of Giga Bowser on the jumbotron of the Pokémon Stadium stage should he somehow appear there. Additionally, otherwise unused announcer voiceclips will be spoken if Giga Bowser wins a standard match (provided that the game doesn't crash) or if the game is hacked so that Giga Bowser can be selected from the standard character select screen. There's even a separate clip for Giga Koopa, as Giga Bowser is named in Japan (though the game calls for the wrong clip depending on the set language; if it's set to English it will call for Giga Koopa and vice versa).
    • Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U has the Spirit Train from The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks as a stage, with Link operating it. But if either Link or Toon Link (or Young Link in Ultimate) is selected to fight, then Alfonzo will be driving the train. Similarly, the Dream Land 64 stage still has the "King Dedede sometimes floats by in the background" element that it had in both the original Super Smash Bros. and Melee, but unlike those two games, Dedede is playable now, and if he's selected to fight, that background element simply won't appear.
    • Super Smash Bros. Ultimate:
      • Assist Trophies and Poké Ball Pokémon will not spawn from their respective items if they already have a presence on the stage. Alucard will not spawn on stages with reflections or mirrors due to him being a half-vampire.
      • Palutena's Guidance for Cloud mentions how his Finishing Touch attack deals high knockback despite only doing 1% damage. However, if the current match is a Stamina match (where knockback matters much less), Pit will remark that he doesn't need to worry about that.
    • Palutena's Guidance in general will have differences depending on if its opponent is using a male or female variation, or if the alternate color is someone different like Alph or the Koopalings. Similarly, Snake can't make a CODEC call about Ike in his Radiant Dawn visage; it has to be the Path of Radiance version which featured in Brawl.
    • Despite Master Hand only being playable through hacking the game or in the penultimate battle in World of Light, the Pokémon Stadiums still will feature its name in the screen. Similarly, it will also appear in the Boxing Ring screen (its title being "The Puppeteer").
  • Skullgirls: One detail that was actually voted for by the fans concerns Beowulf and Black Dahlia: Beowulf has a "Hype" mechanic where he uses certain follow-ups and taunts to get the fight's audience pumped up to make his moves stronger, which is indicated by an invisible audience cheering him on. However, if he is fighting in Black Dahlia's night club against her, the audience will boo at him instead; they're not going to cheer for their employer's opponent when she can hear them.
  • In the obscure 90's fighting game War Gods, Pagan's "Medusa's Head" fatality involves her pulling out the gorgon's head, which turns the opponent into stone then blasts them to pieces. But if her opponent is Tak, who's already a Living Statue, the "turning into stone" part won't work on him and he'll taunt the head instead. Medusa still blasts him to pieces.

    First-Person Shooter 
  • Area 51 (FPS): In one level, you start off near a gas station. If you shoot the sign for it, one of your teammates will remark "I don't like those prices, either".
  • BioShock Infinite:
    • The first time the Luteces appear after Booker has a weapon, he can try to shoot them. Doing so results in them remaining unharmed and saying "You missed." Continuing to shoot them results in an Overly Long Gag of them saying "Missed. Missed Again. Four out of five? And a miss. We can do this all day."
    • If you hang around the Luteces after they've finished their first speech, they'll eventually tell you that it's pointless to wait around for them to leave, but they'll disappear as soon as you're not looking.
  • Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
    • The tutorial takes place inside an enclosed target practice room, and opens with an announcer asking you to empty your gun into the target in front of you. He will acknowledge your actions if you decide to instead empty your gun into everything but the target.
    • Later, when the training surprises you with flashbang training (by dropping one in front of you), the game congratulates you for your quick reactions if you react appropriately.
  • Half-Life:
    • In Half-Life, immediately after the resonance cascade but before you are granted any weapons, you have to talk to a scientist (Eli Vance) and have him use a retinal scanner to open a door for you. It is possible, of course, to kill Eli, just like all the others, but it takes some doing — you have to wait for a different scientist to eventually resuscitate a downed guard, then slowly push that guard back to his doom so he'll drop a pistol for you to shoot Eli. The instant he dies, the door automatically opens.
    • Half-Life 2:
      • There's one spot where you have to activate a gate by plugging two car batteries into a contraption. One is right next to it, and the other is, predictably, inside a car. Said car is extremely heavy to prevent you from punting it off the cliff with the gravity gun like you can with the others, and if you decide to stone-cold pick up the battery and fling it into the ocean... it respawns. Additionally, in the first chapter of the game, the player must move a crate to an open window to climb out and progress. If the player inexplicably throws all ten-or-so crates out the window, the crates will respawn.
      • In Episode 1, the player does not have a weapon for a portion of the game. There is a room you fall into with a gate, with a lock you must shoot off with a gun. This is to ensure the player finds a weapon in that room before continuing. However, if the player, for some reason, wastes every round of ammunition in that room without shooting off the lock, the lock will simply fall off and the gate will open, allowing the player to progress anyway.
    • Half-Life: Alyx: There are various items you can find that you can wear as hats or masks. Most are what you'd expect, such as construction hard hats or respirators, but the game also lets you wear more unorthodox things like traffic cones. But what really pushes it into this trope is that, if you walk under a Barnacle while wearing something on your head, the hat will get grabbed and sucked up instead of you.
  • Halo:
    • Halo: Combat Evolved: In the Justified Tutorial level, Bungie went so far as to record special voice lines in case the player decided to turn around after getting the pistol and kill Captain Keyes: Cortana screams that "the Chief's gone rampant"note  and every crewman on the ship turns hostile.
    • Halo 3: If a vehicle gets flipped over, the player gets the prompt to "Press RB to flip [vehicle]". If you manage to exploit a glitch to flip the Elephant (a massive tracked Base on Wheels that serves as a mobile respawn point) over, the prompt becomes "Press RB to...Wait. What? How did you do that?!"
    • In Halo 3: ODST's second flashback mission, finishing the mission in a Warthog is the most common means of completing it (which triggers a cutscene where Dutch drives off a cliff and bails out of the Warthog before it crashes into a wall and eventually explodes), but finishing the mission in a different vehicle, such as a Ghost or a Chopper, alters the cutscene by replacing the Warthog with whatever vehicle the player was driving when they drove off the cliff.
  • In the first map of The Sacrifice in Left 4 Dead, the survivors have to free a Tank trapped inside a train car so they can go through and progress. While the Tank is active, a crafty player might try to sneak inside the train car to open the door and have everyone run from the Tank. Attempting to do so will have the game outright tell you that you need to kill the Tank first and the door won't open until then.
  • In Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, remember the second part of the Normandy level, where you call in a P-47 Thunderbolt to bomb out German artillery pieces? Well, you can call that same aircraft in later to destroy a German half-track hampering your way. The reason he doesn't help you to destroy the Tiger I tank encountered later in the same level is due to the pilot telling Powell that he has to make it back to base due to low ammo.
  • Memoirs of Magic:
    • Usually Lord Rifnaf, along with King and Queen Essay, are protected by forcefields that prevent you from killing them by any means. However, using the GZDoom console command "mdk"note  reveals that they have complete death sprites - and killing Lord Rifnaf maxes out your Wanted Meter, as is expected.
    • If you use the "noclip" console command to go through one of the red forcefields while destroying the Dark Citadel or Holy Ark of Helios, you'll find that the doors to the Magnus and Mead Tavern and corresponding Boulevard Emporium are sealed off even though there's no way you'd otherwise get in there.
    • One of the playable characters, Leo, cannot use guns, and cannot usually hold or even purchase them. If you abuse console commands to force Leo to hold a gun, he will be incapable of firing it; swapping to another weapon prevents you from swapping back to the gun, effectively removing it from your inventory.
  • The Nameless Mod:
    • It has this all over the place, mostly because as a mod for an over twenty-year-old game, they know all the exploits in the engine. For example: climbing over a fence before you can unlock it will result in an NPC on the other side asking how you got there, and listing some of the possible methods, such as grenade climbing (sticking a grenade to the wall, jumping on it, sticking another to the wall, jumping, removing the first, and repeating).
    • There is an area that you will only be given password information needed to enter if you ally with one faction. If you remember the password and use it to enter while aligned with the other faction, you will receive special messages commenting on your entry and giving a little information about the area.
    • Not only that, if you break the game's plot by doing something like killing a plot-important NPC (who are normally protected by armies of goons and robot turrets), the game will actually call you out on it (in the form of a large talking logo of the modder group, no less), and ask you why you felt it was a good idea to try to break the game, with answers ranging from in-game justified reasons to "It seemed like fun". The logo will then kill you for breaking the game.
  • Prey (2017):
    • The game will almost always acknowledge if you skip steps in quests or do things in different orders than expected. For example, if you head to Psychotronics before inspecting the elevator, January will wonder how you knew the elevator was broken, then give you the instructions they'd normally give there.
    • If you look at Morgan's feet during the intro helicopter ride, you see they're tapping their feet to the background music.
    • Morgan's bathroom at the start of the game will have the toilet seat up or down depending on which gender you're playing as. That's attention to detail.
    • You can kill just about every character anytime you meet them and the plot will change accordingly, such as saving December by killing January before the latter kills the former, something that the game never even hints is possible.
    • The epilogue takes an incredible amount of choices into account and has Alex and his team discuss them in a manner that sounds completely natural, averting Mad Libs Dialogue. For instance, if you kill Alex in the simulation but nobody else, the operators will warn Alex he should be wary, since "Morgan" seems to have something against him and Alex will defend you, saying you had every reason to do so. They'll even remark on when you do some things, such as wondering why you saved Igwe only to kill him later, if you did so.
    • Literally every single NPC on Talos-1 is a named character and accounted for. Every single one. You can use the terminals in each department's security booth to track who is where on the station; not only can this be used to track down specific people, but it updates in real time to account for NPCs changing locations.
    • The Scavenger Hunt will change the chipset from being very useful to completely worthless depending if you put in the code before or after actually finding all of the numbers.
  • Quake: in the first map of the third episode of the Scourge of Armagon expansion pack, at the beginning, you have to ride a trolley across an acid-filled chasm while fending off deadly explosive volleys from Vores, reach a tower, and fight your way up for a key. Or, you can sequence-break the whole thing by climbing the surrounding cliff, walking across an extremely thin ledge, and hop right on top of the tower. The game acknowledges this by triggering a message that reads "You're not supposed to be here!"
    • The Quake example above is a throwback to Duke Nukem 3D, where various hard-to-access areas of the game have similar "You Aren't Supposed To Be Here" messages scrawled on the walls. Some of them you can only find by using the walk-through-walls cheat, as in the section with the helicopter at the end of Episode 3 Map 4 ('L.A. Rumble').
    • For being a game created purely for multiplayer, the devs paid a hilarious amount of attention when it came to bots responding to player chat messages in Quake III: Arena.
  • Team Fortress 2:
    • Like most Source Engine games, players have the ability to type "kill" into the developer console to instantly die, in case they get stuck somehow and need to respawn as a last resort. When a team wins a round, during the brief time before the next round starts, they gain 100% critical hits while the losing team loses access to their weapons, something that fans have come to call "humiliation". Lest players decide to suicide to deny their opponents a free kill, the "kill" command is disabled during this period. The Soldier's suicide-bomb taunt, however, is not; this was probably intentional.
    • The Spy has an unlockable invisibility watch called the Dead Ringer, which instead of activating immediately, will cause him to feign his death when he is attacked, leaving behind a fake corpse as the real Spy vanishes into the shadows (mostly) unharmed. Because this is a video game, a real kill does a lot more than just ragdoll the Spy's player model — his weapon and an ammo box drop to the ground (which is what happens when anyone dies in this game), his name is grayed out in the scoreboard, a kill notification appears in the top right as if the Spy actually died, and the killer earns a point and, in certain circumstances, possibly also a Steam achievement for "killing" the Spy. All of this has been taken into account and all will trigger (or pretend to trigger) upon a fake kill, just in case the player is paying extra close attention. But there are still clues a savvy player can use to tell if a Spy has used the Dead Ringer. For example, when a player uses the DR, the ammo box that they drop doesn't actually provide any ammo, and has no sound effect when picked up. This is essentially the only flaw in the deception, asides from an overeager Spy dropping dead from Scratch Damage.
  • Tower of Guns:
    • If you are smart enough to climb out of the main area of the Battlements level and jump off the Tower while possessing the Long Fall perk, you find yourself in a small secret stage with developer Joe, who pretends to be surprised by your actions and warns you that leveling and player stats may behave oddly. After that, you have to start from the very first level.
    • If you jump (or fly) too high in the Battlements, you get a warning message warning about possible "buggy collision detection at such heights". However, if you strive for ascension to the very top of the Tower (which is very unlikely, since it may require stacking 20 double jumps with increased jump height or obtaining an exceedingly rare gun with recoil so strong that it can serve as a jetpack), after climbing those humongous clockwork-like steampunk mechanisms, there is another message from the dev that congratulates you with "breaking the game", and a reward consisting of even more perks that are, well, quite useless if you are so good to have reached the top.
  • ULTRAKILL: In the final arena of 4-3 A Shot In The Dark, the final arena is activated by putting something on a pedestal - ordinarily a torch taken from the beginning of the level. However the pedestal accepts different kinds of pickups: from a secret blue skull, through a more secret soap to the red skull which is obtainable in this level only through the cheat menu. The colors lighting up that arena are different for each case.
  • Unreal Tournament 2004 has the Lightning Gun sniper weapon. It's hitscan and has no area damage, so it's theoretically impossible for players to kill themselves with it. However, just in case someone, somehow, does manage to do just that, the devs left in an appropriate suicide message: "<player's name> violated the laws of space-time and sniped himself".

    Hack-And-Slash 
  • Devil May Cry:
    • Devil May Cry: On a New Game Plus playthrough, Mission 2 no longer plays the cutscene where Dante gets stabbed by the Alastor before he acquires it. After all, he has already acquired it on the first playthrough and it permanently stays with him onto the next ones, so there's no reason for him to be stabbed by the sword in its cutscene again.
    • Devil May Cry 4:
      • Vergil's S-Rank taunt in the Special Edition has him spinning a miniature Summoned Sword on his index finger before shattering it. If you launch an enemy directly upwards and taunt under them, they can actually fall back onto the spinning blade which is actually coded to deal damage and juggle them.
      • In Mission 18, the normal way of destroying The Savior's jewels requires you to topple the boss first. But if you manage to destroy an exposed jewel while the boss is still floating in the middle of the stage, a cinematic plays and shows the boss flinching on the specific body part where the jewel is located. This unique interaction can be observed more easily in Heaven or Hell mode where the jewels are shattered in one hit.
    • Devil May Cry 5:
      • The fights against Urizen in the Prologue and Mission 8 are meant to be Hopeless Boss Fights. Should the player somehow manage to win anyway, they'll be greeted with a rather humorous text-only ending where Everybody Lives, and the achievement/trophy "Well, I'll Be Damned" while unlocking "Son of Sparda" difficulty. If the player manages to do this on their first try with an un-upgraded Nero, it will also unlock "Dante Must Die" difficulty for them.
      • It's possible to skip the Hell Antenora encounter in Mission 2 by jumping over the pit it takes place in.
      • Using Dante's unlockable Bloody Palace taunt while having his DmC palette swap equipped shows that the roots of his hair are still white when he slicks it back, implying that he simply dyed his hair black. This is unnoticeable with his normal hairstyle even in close-ups, making for some nice attention to detail.
      • The combat system's mechanical complexities mean that it's possible to stress-test the game with particular attacks and see how they respond (for instance, players have found numerous ways as Nero to counter Vergil's aerial assault, with one user managing to use Nero's drop-kick taunt to knock him out of Sin Devil Trigger before he could take off.
      • There is a lot of contextual detail put into Nero's Devil Breakers.
      • If Nero has no Breaker equipped and is just using the mechanized stump, he can still fire out Wire Snatch. This is because, if you look closely, the Breakers actually open up to fire the wire out from Nero's palm — so without a Breaker, they just fire out normally. Also, Rawhide actually increases the range of Wire Snatch since its main gimmick is a powerful whip.
      • Nero's Breakers come in two types: "hand" and "claw" types. Nero had different animations for actions involving two hands depending on which of the two he has equipped. For example, if Nero has Overture equipped, he'll use it to help reload Blue Rose for the Color Up move. If he has Helter Skelter equipped, he has to stow Blue Rose under his arm to reload since Helter Skelter's drill bit can't hold the massive magnum.
      • Nero's S-rank taunt where he claps his hands together while pepping himself up has a different sound effect in New Game Plus if Nero has no Devil Breakers, since he now has two natural arms — instead of the metallic smacking of his flesh hand hitting his cyborg one, it's just the sound of natural clapping.
      • There are situational dialogue lines that can be triggered if you go off the main path to find some secrets and collectibles, such as Dante lampshading the Qliphoth's shortcuts in Mission 10, or Griffon chiding V (and the player) to stop wasting time if you proceed further into the alternate path of Mission 4.
      • Dante's Royal Block skill has more animations in this game unlike the previous iterations. In Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening and Devil May Cry 4, he would automatically face the enemy that he's guarding against, but in Devil May Cry 5, he can block attacks even if his back is turned against the enemy.
      • Activating Devil Trigger makes the character's voice sound demonic. While this is a recurring trend in the series, the previous classic Devil May Cry games only had this audio effect limited to grunts, battle cries and taunts. With Devil May Cry 5, this now includes any Dialog During Gameplay and Boss Banter. The game would also reflect the change in real-time, which means that you can toggle the demonic voice effect even if the character is speaking mid-sentence.
      • Vergil's taunt from the Special Edition of Devil May Cry 4 where he spins a Summoned Sword on his right pointer finger makes a return in the Special Edition of this game, and it still has a hitbox to juggle opponents with.
  • Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity: In one level, you are attacked by a Guardian. Normally the Guardian is far too strong for you to take out, and the goal of the level is to escape it. However, if you replay the level, it's entirely possible for you to be powerful enough to defeat the Guardian. If you do, a cutscene plays of it exploding and the level ends instantly, letting you skip the majority of the level's objectives.
  • Hi-Fi RUSH:
    • You can return to the hideout at any time, even when doing so is pointless or wouldn't make sense. Your teammates have nearly an hour's worth of unique dialogue depending on when you decide to do this, most of which leans on or outright breaks the fourth wall.
    Korsica: Listen, Chai... does it always need to be so...meta when we come back from a break?
    Chai: (looking directly at the player) Well, if SOMEONE wants to just walk away from the heat of things, this is what they get.
    • Track 3 ends with a Seemingly Hopeless Boss Fight that Chai is unable to damage due to not having recruited Macaron yet. If the player comes back on Level Select and uses Macaron to defeat the enemy in question, CNMN (who Chai also had not met at this point) chastizes Chai for cheating and has the regular cutscene play anyway.
    CNMN: Mister Chai, Sir Macaron has yet to join you. This is cheating!
    [Chai defeats the enemy]
    Peppermint: Well, this messes everything up.
    CNMN: Do not be afraid! I will activate the cutscene as usual!

    Miscellaneous 
  • Angry Birds 2: The special pigs who nap when you let them idle too long won't be able to use their abilities when the birds come toward them. You can use this to your advantage against some of the nastiest pigs such as construction or fireman pigs.
  • Aperture Hand Lab: In the start, the game has unique messages when you wait too long before exiting the elevator or moving to the platform. In the elevator, the announcer starts repeatedly urging you to exit the elevator before giving you the back-up exercise: "achieving excellence while standing in an elevator", and then, after you "complete" it, it gives you the next exercise: "achieving excellence by exiting the elevator". The game also has similar messages about approaching the platform as well. Also, the game acknowledges when you are Flipping the Bird to the personality cores.
  • Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon:
    • In general, if you're ahead of advice Handler Walter would give you, such as using a repair kit in the prologue before he tells you too, he'll commend your proactiveness.
    • If you, for whatever reason, not bring the weapon meant to take down the Ice Worm, Michigan will call you out on it.
      Michigan: G13! Let's see that fancy gizmo that Arquebus paid the big bucks for. What?! You didn't bring it?! G13, Your ability to ruin my field trips is uncanny!
    • Some bosses have events that occur as the fight continues, such as an AC joining the fray or an ally needing to leave prematurely. The in-game dialogue accounts for what happens if the player defeats bosses before these events even have a chance to trigger. For example:
      • If you are able to do a One-Hit KO on the Juggernaut boss before Arquebus forces Rusty to Opt Out halfway, the game actually accounts for this with Rusty being left in Stunned Silence for a brief moment before acknowledging your accomplishment and saying that he'll clean up the remainder of enemies posted at the location for you.
      • In the mission "Defend the Dam Complex", King and Chartreuse will have different dialogue depending on which one of them you attack first, and again depending on which one of them you bring down to half health first. Raven's Operator also has different dialogue depending on whether King, Chartreuse, both, or neither of them are still alive by the time Raven arrives. Defeating them before the real Raven arrives results in Ayre telling Raven that the mission is complete, before suddenly realising that another AC is headed their way. Raven's Operator will also point out how they've been defeated already, advising caution to the real Raven.
    • In the mission to assassinate V.VII Swinburne, he will have different responses depending on whether you attack him while his back is turned as Ayre suggests, or wait for him to turn around and see you first.
      • If his pleas for mercy are accepted, he becomes untargetable by lock-on but can still be attacked. If he is destroyed, Ayre will give a unique response, calling out Raven for dealing with him in this way.
    • Late in the game, the player receives a mission from Middle Flatwell to help him ambush two Vesper pilots. If you ignore the plan and just rush in, the pilots will have different dialogue, and Flatwell will chew you out for ignoring him.
    • If, for some reason, you defer doing the Training exercises until before the last mission of the NG++ ending, ALLMIND has special lines expressing shock and confusion at 621 having never undergone certification.
  • Death Stranding has a lot of this. Unsurprising, considering who made it:
    • Play the game on your birthday and there will be a birthday cake in Sam's room, as well as a special message from Mads Mikkelsen giving you some extra Likes.
    • Early on, you're informed that BTs respond poorly to human bodily fluids (blood, mucus, urine, etc.) and you later get anti-BT weapons that exploit this fact. You may remember that there's a urination mechanic in this game. It works on BTs; yes you can fight ghosts by pissing on them.
    • While transporting, you can come across hot springs that you can use to bathe. If you do it while transporting human cargo, the person you're transporting will join you in the hot spring and later give you extra Likes.
    • Sam's harmonica playing improves dynamically; at the start of the game he sucks, and he improves based on how much you have him practice.
    • Trying to use the urinate mechanic on other people gets rightfully disgusted refusals from Sam. Trying to do it on Bridget's corpse makes Sam freak the hell out ("What the fuck is wrong with you?").
    • The nature of the setting requires that Sam take out enemies non-lethally for safety reasons. Think you can get around that by knocking enemies unconscious into water so they'll drown? Wrong. They have auto-inflating life jacket collars that keep their heads above water, just like you.
    • At one point, the Big Bad replaces one of your packages with a bomb, starting a quest where you have to find Fragile and get her help disposing of it... or you can just skip meeting Fragile and dispose of the bomb yourself by doing all the steps right away. Do it, and you get a special radio conversation between Sam and Die-Hardman lampshading your Sequence Breaking.
  • Don't Escape 4: When you get to the Sidereal Plexus lab on Day 3, whilst trying to get in the roof will collapse, ordinarily leaving Barry and Cody both in danger. If you happen to get to that point in the game having not recruited Barry or Cody, the roof still collapses, but the game treats it much less dramatically (with the music that usually plays absent) since nobody is in danger.
  • Event[0] had a notable amount of work put into programming the dialogue for Artificial Intelligence character Kaizen. Since the player's only method of interacting with the world is through interfacing with Kaizen, the game needs to be able to recognize a large amount of possible inputs and respond in a way consistent with his current in-game mood. This results in thousands of possible lines of dialogue, as well as a system to switch up some phrases to sound less pre-programmed and more like a natural conversation. This video (warning: some spoilers) goes more in-depth.
  • Hasbro Family Game Night 2: If, while playing Jenga, you cause the tower of blocks to fall towards Mr. Potato Head, you will get a special cutscene where he panics and jumps off the table.
  • The Jackbox Party Pack:
    • In Quiplash, certain responses to specific prompts will earn a specific response from Schmitty the host. For example, if you answer "The world's most boring video game" with "Quiplash", Schmitty will get quite testy (and vulgar). He, in a Running Gag taken from You Don't Know Jack, also has specific responses for if someone tries to name themselves "fuck you" either once, twice, or three times in a row - the first time he'll make you change your name, the second he'll deduct $5000 before you even start, and the third he'll declare you the loser outright.
    • The Fibbage series not only won't let you put in the question's actual answer for your lie, but in some cases bans synonyms or misspellings. For example, you can be told you're too close to the truth if your lie for a question about a strange thing someone ate is " Cessna" when the actual answer is " airplane". While this was loosened in Fibbage 4, it comes back for one of the special episodes to help preserve a gag: Spoiler
  • In Job Simulator, there's a copy machine that duplicates whatever you put on it. For example, if you put a stapler on it, you get a fully functional stapler. So what happens when you physically put your face on it? You get a brain.
    • You can also put money in the copy machine, which results in poorly-made counterfeit money with "nice try" written on the back.
  • Last Word: Whitty can try to leave the estate, at the end of the game, before fighting the boss, when she's free to go because you have the Last Word and thus gain its immunity to being subject to commands, and Whitty, becomes her own NPC Roadblock, stopping because she feels she should stay, instead of being stopped by The Mouth as with immunity, it can do nothing to stop you.
  • League of Legends:
    • Items that have an effect that can be activated will also have a cooldown time associated with this effect. Selling the item while its effect is on cooldown and then buying it again immediately will return you the item back at the start of its cooldown period again. A similar trick ensures that the Keystone rune Unsealed Spellbook can't be used to do away with summoner spell cooldowns if you use the rune twice in quick succession — replacing a spell on cooldown for a new one will cause the new spell to still be on the same cooldown time as the old one was. Additionally, if you are waiting to respawn and buy Redemption, the only item that can be activated while dead, it will start on a cooldown equal to your respawn timer.
    • Some champions have reaction quotes to buying certain items. Occasionally this includes items that are thematically fitting for the character but that would never actually be useful in gameplay, such as Karthus buying Athene's Unholy Grail (an item whose best perk is when you heal or shield an ally, which Karthus is incapable of doingnote ).
  • In Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, if you type a whole bunch of incorrect characters in rapid succession, the program will bring the lesson to a halt to ask if you're okay and recommend that, if you're frustrated enough to keysmash, you should take a break and cool off.
  • Levels in Motocross Madness were square valleys delimited by sudden and very steep mountains, apparently impassable. If, however, you got enough speed and approached them at the proper angle, it was possible to — just barely — climb on top, and find a flat, featureless land. The curious player who would then ride off in the sunset, expecting to find a fall into the void, an invisible wall, or just an out-of-bounds crash, would then find that the devs had foreseen this, and planned accordingly. Cue a cannon sound, followed by the player and bike being launched back inside the level boundaries at ridiculous speed.
  • The Mystery Case Files developers tend to think of everything a player might do, however odd or counter-intuitive. For example, in Escape From Ravenhearst, you can run every object accessible at the time through a scanning device, and see its X-ray image; if you're playing the Collector's Edition in which tokens must be gathered and energized, the tokens' scans show sparkles after charging, just like the tokens do.
  • One remix stage in NES Remix has you play through a mirrored version of World 1-2 from Super Mario Bros as Luigi. The instructions are "Get to the Goal Pole!". If you beat the level by taking one of the warp pipes instead, it counts as a Miss.
  • Ring Fit Adventure is an exercise game that requires some pretty intense workouts. But for those worried about bothering their neighbors and roommates, it also includes "Silent Mode", which substitutes the more vigorous exercises with quieter/softer ones.
    • Even more clever — the infrared sensor on the right joycon is used to measure the player's heart rate after a workout.
  • Town of Salem in fact has results for investigative actions that are, under normal circumstances, impossible. (Consigliere investigating fellow mafia members, this cannot happen.) It also has achievements for actions that are highly improbable but can only happen under a transporter or witch screwing with the targets, such as a framer framing themselves, a janitor cleaning their own dead body, or a killing role attacking themselves.
  • Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego? (1997):
    • It's actually possible to try and use the time cuffs on people, usually for a funny comment, such as a Roman saying "I'm cleaning up — but not through thievery!" or Ann Tikwitee saying "Uh gee, I don't think there's a thief in my pocket, do you?"
    • Using a battle axe on Rock Solid makes him say, "OUCH! Don't cut me down to size!" while he makes a surprised face.
    • Giving a torch to Hatshepshut results in her saying, "CAREFUL! Or you'll singe my false beard!"
    • You can actually try using items together or hand them to people, often getting you a response where they tell you something about that item. The only time wherein you don't get a response and it just puts it back are say, assembling pieces or where you would expect them to not need it.
    • In cases where there is a Point of No Return, the crook is always arrested after said point. If you have not assembled the Carmen Note and thus cannot activate the Time Cuffs (or know where they are hiding), you are blocked from progressing by a Broken Bridge until you do. For example, in the Leif Eriksson case, the Vikings will take their time preparing their boat until the note is complete.
      • For the 1492 case, one piece of the Carmen Note is hidden on the other side of the world from the other two (It Makes Sense in Context). This piece of the Carmen Note is automatically given to you, specifically to avoid a very very frustrating trek.
    • One case involves using a phonograph. Everyone you can actually speak to (sans the crook) will have a response, and you can actually play the recordings back to the people for their responses.
    • In addition, some Dummied Out content suggests even further foresight from the writing team, as there are some deleted lines that result from actions that cannot occur in gameplay. For example, there is a line that can only result in attempting to use the time cuffs on Gutenburg or Caesar — this cannot ever happen, as they cannot be interacted with once the Carmen note is assembled. There is also some humour in the dummied out content, such as how you could apparently use the torch on a mummy and be told, "Nope. This is a burial, not a cremation."
    • Suppose you're feeling a little cheeky during Gutenberg's case and make the notice say "Thief on the goose", "Sheep on the loose", or "Sheep on the goose". Gutenberg does indeed respond to these rather than the normal "This is gibberish!" when you mess up.
    Gutenberg: "Thief on the Noose?" No, that's after we catch him!
    • During the 1961 case, you have to run a simulated launch pattern via punchcards. Put them in the wrong order, and the computer will acknowledge every sequence.
  • In the video game version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, entering in one of the names of an actual million-dollar winner (such as John Carpenter or Dan Blonsky) or either part of host Regis Philbin's name will cause Regis to mock you and enter in a more disparaging name such as "Phony Cheats", "Fakey Fakerson", "Smarty Pants", "Imposter", or "Wannabe".
  • The ClueFinders 3rd Grade Adventures: The Mystery of Mathra:
    • For the Rings of Fire, the game intends you to uncover tiles in a Battleship like way, but it will expect you to do it in a certain order (Based upon the math problems given to you). If you just play it like Battleship and fire at tiles that are "hits" based upon the ones you got correct before, the game will have dialogue for this and even acknowledge that it's correct.
    • Going back to the room which houses the key half after you've obtained it will have a golden trinket resting in its place. Joni even has new dialogue if you put it in her backpack.
  • In WarioWare Gold, the microgame hosts have special voice lines for unique scenarios such as failing three times in a row, clearing a microgame at the last second, clearing 15 microgames in a row without failing, failing a microgame by not doing anything, failing or clearing a fake-out microgame (of which there are very few), and so on.

    MMORPGs 
  • Destiny:
    • If you use the point emote to dramatically point at Crota during your battle with him, he notices and angrily points back.
    • If you hide from Skolas instead of fighting during your battle with him in the Prison of Elders, he'll make various comments in Fallen language such as getting annoyed at you for hiding or thinking that you've run out of ammo.
    • Headshots are massively effective on all enemies except Vex; since their brains/cores are in their torsos, they'll keep fighting even if you completely blow their heads off.
    • Going into the legendary "Loot Cave," a cave in the Cosmodrome where, if players stood in the right spot, they could endlessly shoot Hive troops until they dropped legendary engrams, which could be decrypted by Master Rahool in the Tower. In later versions of the game, the cave leads to a pile of Hive bones that can be activated, triggering a voice that says "A million deaths is not enough for Master Rahool!"
    • In the Iron Temple, you can attempt to climb Felwinter Peak by jumping up cliffs in order to find a hidden SIVA cluster. There's no incentive to do so, but you can climb all the way up to the summit of the mountain, well past the cluster; this area serves no real gameplay purpose, but it's all rendered anyways.
  • Destiny 2:
  • Final Fantasy XIV
    • The game has a staggering amount of dialogue changes that acknowledge connections and interactions with NPCs you've previously met, as well as accounting for uncommon scenarios. Some of the dialogue is subtle recognition, but there's also lines that gives little extra touches within cutscenes. There are also many instances of characters from past expansions or zones who will have new text that acknowledges things you otherwise wouldn't expect, such as Little Ala Mhigo having the characters there discussing the events of Stormblood even though they are a full expansion past use. In particular, after Endwalker, numerous characters in previous expansions locations have updated lines about the story.
    • Tending to crops while the weather is clear leads to an animation involving your character watering them. If you water your crops while it's raining (which you'd have no reason to do, since they're watered automatically by the rain), the Warrior of Light just turns the soil instead.
    • "Misery" is a debuff that indicates a character is overcome with negative emotions. You can use the /comfort or /rally emotes on these characters, and it will remove Misery.
    • Multiple Trials have mechanics that will instantly wipe the party if you have too few members. However, if you turn on the "Unrestricted Party" options before starting the fight, such mechanics will be changed or removed. For instance, Titan's Granite Gaol seals the player in rocks, which needs outside help to escape from; if you're doing the trial with just one player, Titan will never use this attack.
    • During 2.55, there's a point where Tataru wants to become an Arcanist. When you visit Thubyrgeym to check up on Tataru, Thubyrgeym tells you that she's currently embarked on a trial. If you haven't unlocked Arcanist yet, she explains the trials to you. If you've unocked Arcanist and done the quest already, she gives an As You Know. However, if you're an Arcanist and haven't done the quest yet, she explains the trial and then suggests that you and Tataru accomplish it together to aid your mutual training. Considering that you can get to level 5 and get the quest done ten minutes after you unlock the class, it's an impressive bit of foresight.
    • During the 3.0 story of Heavensward, if the Warrior of Light is wearing a helmet during Haurchefant's death scene after clearing The Vault for the first time, the game will remove the Warrior's helmet. No taking the edge off of the moment by dressing in a bunny suit.
    • In the patch 3.4 story quest, "Two Sides of a Coin," Alphinaud and Alisaie will speak about how well you know each other depending on your progress in the Coil of Bahamut raids. If it has never been started, then this will have been the second time the Warrior of Light will have met her. If you've made some progress, Alphinaud will make a comment about how he knows you and Alisaie have been looking into that, while if the Final Coil of Bahamut is cleared fully, the two of them getting together is treated like it's old times.
    • In the Weeping City of Mhach, the Ozma Shade casts Doomsday that will instantly kill everyone if they don't beat it and return to Ozma fast enough. In the slight chance that you manage to avoid the attack by having dead players revive at just the right time, Ozma will then endlessly pelt the survivors with smaller meteors that give stacks of Magic Vulnerability Up until they die as well.
    • The dwarves of Tomra in Shadowbringers are a race of Little People, and everything is appropriately sized to them, including their homes. This is reflected in a dwarven house in Tomra which can only be accessed if you're playing as a similarly-sized Lalafell; a character of any other race can't enter because they're too big to fit through the house's front door. However, even that gets its own bit of foresight; even though a Lalafell can fit inside the dwarf's house, the Lalafell can't summon any mount while inside said house, because their head would hit the ceiling.
    • The Chocolate Korkappor is a Japanese-exclusive Mount that can be redeemed from a code for making purchases at a chain of convenience stores. However, the code is not region locked, and anyone outside of Japan can obtain it. The mount still comes with the relevant flavor text despite the exclusivity.
    • Trusts, introduced in Shadowbringers, can only be run with the characters available during that part of the story (Holminster Switch can only be run with the Crystal Exarch, Lyna, Alphinaud, and Alisaie for example). However, leveling Trusts up allows you to use all the core cast, and the developers accounted for this by having all the playable cast have unique reactions to mechanics they normally could not see. For example, in Dohn Mheg, all the Trusts have unique reactions to the final boss's Tightrope Walking mechanic, including Y'shtola (who joins right after this dungeon) and the Crystal Exarch (who doesn't become a permanent Trust member until three patches worth of content later). Similarly, during Endwalker, the dungeon Ktisis Hyperboreia has three unique Trust character only usable in that dungeon (Emet-Selch, Hythlodaeus, and Venat), who all have unique interactions with the first boss's mechanics. Running it with the Scions, however, has them all react to it even though they originally aren't involved in the story.
    • Trials also account for scenarios where they would be defeated be far sooner than normal. For example, the encounter design in the Jade Stoa would normally have Byakko send you into the sky with a tornado, bringing ruin to the arena. If you take him on with Unlimited Party active and defeat him before the transition phase, the arena maintains its visual integrity upon clear. There's no tornado to wreck the Jade Stoa, after all.
    • During the crossover questline with Monster Hunter in the Stormblood expansion, the Warrior of Light can express surprise at a Palico that can talk. If the Warrior of Light is a Miqo'te or a Hrothgar, the Palico will call the Warrior a Hypocrite, since they're also a talking cat.
      Warrior of Light: A talking cat?!
      Palico: Oh that's rich, coming from you. Have you looked in a mirror lately?
    • In the 6.0 mission "Bonds of Adamant(ite)", the allies who show up or are mentioned helping will change depending on the post-MSQ Raids you've complete.
      • When Alisaie looks up to the skies to see a group of flying crafts soaring by. Normally, it's Manacutters piloted by Ishgardian Knights. If you completed the Shadow of Mhach Alliance Raid series, it's the Redbill Sky Pirates instead, focusing on Leofard and Cait Sith.
      • When Soroban and Hancock join the Scions, what they say changes depending on if you completed the Four Lords story and Return to Ivalice raids. Without them complete, Soroban just comes with a Kojin relic and learned that Hancock was on his way to Sharlayan and decided to join him. As well, Hancock just looks back at the massive airship in the air when he says that he needed a particular type of transport to get everything there. Complete them and the katana with the relics is revealed to be Tenzen's Phoenix Blade and that the other Lords urged Soroban to take it to aid them in saving the star. As well, Hancock will add in that the Majestic Company offers their greetings to the Warrior of Light, happy to accompany them on another adventure, complete with the Prima Vista hovering in the background in one cut. Completing both Eureka and Save the Queen will also have Hancock mention how the Bozjan Resistance and Ejika Tsunjika both chipped in to help out, though with a bit of grumbling from the latter on how he would have liked a bit of forewarning. The latter's presence is also dependent whether or not you let him sacrifice himself, and if you brought him back if sacrificed.
      • When Cid and the rest of the Ironworks show up, the number will increase slightly depending on if you complete the Omega storyline. Doing so adds in Alpha and toy form Omega. Additionally completing the Sorrow of Werlyt will get you a message and care package from Gaius: an Allagan artifact salvaged from Valens' Weapons project.
      • Horary Boulder got his adamantite from Mor Dhona, but with some help. If you cleared the Alexander raids, the Idyllshire mercenaries that helped out include one Slowfix and his fellow goblins to gobbiebomb the hell out of the Allagan security systems.
  • Kingdom of Loathing:
    • The game has special messages for certain things that can only be obtained through exploits, such as finding plurals for unique items (Ex. The plural for Emblem of Ak'gyxoth, an item rewarded to the very first person who summoned Ak'gyxoth, is literally "Emblems of Ak'gyxoth, you dirty exploiter"), or trying to do unclickable actions via HTTP links (Ex. Attempting to use a Comfy Sofa without owning one will result in you in falling to the floor and taking damage). Hot stuffing, an item that can only be crafted by using a JavaScript command, is listed in the Discoveries section under the "Dirty Exploits" category.
    • At one point during the Sauceror's Nemesis Quest, they create a potion that turns them into a slime, allowing them to infiltrate the slime convention. You can't use skills and are treated as though you don't wear any equipment. So, totally useless. Now, there is a bonus dungeon inhabited by other slimes called the Slime Tube. It is a rather high-level zone, usually reserved for Aftercore. so, if you go into this tough area in that useless form, you get an Easter Egg.
    • The Zombie Master class's playthrough focuses on attacking enemies and eating their brains. There is exactly one regular monster that will never drop a brain — a mummy (a type of zombie that had their brains taken out during preperation).
    • During the Naughty Sorceress quest, you eventually come across a door that can be opened by any key, the contents of the door changing to reflect what key you used. Normally, you're supposed to use 6 keys that many would not have if they rushed through the game without exploring (e.g. many players had no idea the 8-bit realm existed and therefore never knew the existence of the digital key). That's not this trope. What is however, is if you decide to insert a balloon monkey... You literally get an easter egg balloon.
    • A Chefstaff is a stick that does piddly squat physical damage, but grants immense bonuses to spell damage. If you attempt to club enemies with one, you'll discover they have five unique attack messages specially prepared for just such a case, three of which berate the player for not using an all powerful staff for its intended purpose. One of these five messages however, "You pretend your enemy is a pinata, sadly your beating doesn't dislodge any candy, but it does do X damage." will change into "You're holding a large stick. You're fighting a pinata. You let nature take its course for X damage." if you actually are fighting the one pinata monster found in the game.
  • RuneScape:
    • A magic shop keeper gives out free Mind Runes and Air Runes every five minutes or so. Trying to sell the freebies back to him will net you a sarcastic "Thanks for returning the samples!".
    • Similarly, the leprechaun near the Falador cabbage patch is the only one who won't convert cabbages into banknotes, instead going on a hilarious rant about how sick she is of the smell.
    • After "The Blood Pact", Xenia remarks that she'd like to see the necromancer's ceremonial mask. Reassembling the mask, putting it on, and talking to her with it results in her telling you that you look stupid.
    • The prince/princess of Miscellania that you court will respond to various emote actions; the "Blow Kiss" emote is the only one required to court them, but they will react appropriately to dancing or threats.
    • Another NPC who reacts to emotes is Sir Tiffy in Falador. Saluting to him is required for one of the Falador achievements, but you can give him the "Goblin Salute" from the cave goblin quests instead, and he'll think you're strange.
    • There are an awful lot of Continuity Nods to which quests you have or have not completed, in dialogue or in subsequent quests.
    • At the beginning of "The Death of Chivalry", you have an encounter with Saradomin. He remembers your participation in the "Battle of Lumbridge" world event from 2013, and which side you were on. If you did not participate, he concludes you are one of the Godless and treats you with suspicion.
    • If you complete "The Death of Chivalry" (a 6th Age quest) before "While Guthix Sleeps" (a 5th Age quest), you can use the Black Knight Captain's armor from the former as a disguise to infiltrate a Black Knight base in the latter. This includes the Black Knight Captain cosmetic override, allowing you to wear your regular armor.
    • The "Crackling" perk from Invention has a 5% chance per rank of inflicting extra damage to your enemies. It doesn't work on higher-tier vampyres, because their only weakness is blisterwood, and blisterwood weapons can't be augmented with perks.
    • There was a glitch where it was possible to enter the Draynor Bank Robbery cutscene and pick up the Blue partyhat that would drop. This partyhat actually has a different Item ID than the regular Blue partyhat and is untradeable. If the player attempted to equip it, it would disappear and a message in the chatbox would say, "Please send in a bug report and tell Jagex how you got that hat."
    • In the Player-Owned Port, the Barmaid's minigame is to serve beer to a rush of thirsty customers within a time limit. If any of the Port's NPC adventurers are in the tavern, she can also offer beer to them. All twelve of them have unique refusals.
  • Star Trek Online is starting to work its way there. More recent missions have had numerous failure conditions and alternate methods of accomplishing goals. In the Romulan series, for example, there are several Dialogue Trees, with new options opening up depending on the character's diplomacy level and several sections where a violent character could blast through without even talking at all. There are numerous points, even in the earlier missions, where a sufficiently sneaky character can approach enemy soldiers and eavesdrop on them to learn potentially useful information ahead of time, which they wouldn't have heard otherwise.
  • World of Warcraft:
    • Back in the days before the Cataclysm expansion pack was released, if you went through a demon-infested gorge, jumping in exactly the right places and using a since-patched glitch known as wall-walking (which was literally jumping up a normally untraversable wall or terrain in a very precise manner to trick the game into thinking you've grabbed a foothold), you could enter the then-uncompleted Mount Hyjal. When you got there, you found a zone that was actually fairly fleshed out, including the skeleton of Archimonde. The actual note that merits this entry: construction signs telling you that you weren't supposed to be here and better get out, and you would receive a debuff called "No Man's Land" that instantly teleported you out even if you somehow manage to enter it. There were even rumors that you would be automatically reported to a GM upon receiving the debuff, as the player would have had to deliberately and willingly break the rules of the game by using an exploit several times to get there.
    • Also, when water walking didn't apply to mounted people and it was nigh impossible to get to it, an island to the south-east end of Kalimdor had a message in a bottle with, basically, "How did you get here?!"
    • If you make a rude gesture at Mountaineer Pebblebitty (which you are likely to do, considering what she puts you through), she has an appropriate response ready.
    • Most city guards will react to emotes, /rude them, they respond in kind, salute them, they salute back, etc. etc. Also, flex your muscles at them. They are not impressed.
    • Drakuru's storyline, specifically the Zul'drak segment, can be initiated without completing the first part in Grizzly Hills and Drak'tharon Keep. If Drak'Tharon Keep was completed, Drakuru will acknowledge this and be glad you are still joining him - whereas if you did not, Drakuru will say he was watching you and thought you would make a great minion.
    • The Mists of Pandaria quest "Li Li's Day Off" requires you to take your NPC follower (a kid up for some sightseeing) to three predetermined places she wants to visit. However, you can take her around on a tour through the entire Valley of the Four Winds zone first, which, while not required by quest objectives, will make her comment something about every place you visit. She's very much a Little Miss Snarker, so taking the full tour with her is worthwhile at least once.
    • The Dominance Offensive storyline for the Horde in patch 5.1 makes you constantly travel to various locations, mostly by asking the indigenous Tak-Tak to give you a kite ride. However, one piece of the long quest chain asks you to travel to Silvermoon City, which is on another continent, and to boot, about the farthest from Pandaria that you can get. The quest designers expect you to take the portal; if you speak to Tak-Tak instead, he says, "I ain't flyin' a kite to Silvermoon City! You crazy?" You get a similar retort Alliance-side if you ask to take a kite from the Alliance base in Krasarang to Darnassus (which is about the same distance away as Silvermoon is from the Horde base).
    • Rogues who had completed a questline Wrathion gave them will be acknowledged by Wrathion when they talk to him in Mists of Pandaria.
    • In the Well of Eternity dungeon, where you go back in time 10,000 years, players who looted the Warglaives of Azzinoth from Illidan will be noticed by his past self. "You seem prepared."
    • Wielding the now-unobtainable Atiesh, Greatstaff of the Guardian while fighting Shade of Aran in Karazhan will prompt him to yell "Where did you get that?! Did HE send you??". This is a reference to Atiesh's original wielder being Aran's son, with whom he had a... rather strained relationship.
    • During one quest in Warlords of Draenor the player is tasked with sneaking into a nearby enemy base. At the point when this quest was introduced flying was not enabled on the continent, but the player could potentially use a weapon which throws them in the air to glide into the base. Whether the player waited for flying to unlock or used an item, the quest giver would immediately teleport you back to the starting line and berate you for nearly blowing your cover during a stealth mission.
    • Archdruid Glaidalis in Darkheart Thicket has a unique voice line if there are any druids in the dungeon group. He even has different voice lines depending on the spec of the druids in the group.
    • Many other NPCs act differently around various classes. If, for example, you do the Stormheim questline as a Fury Warrior, Helya will recognize you from the quest in which you get the Twinswords of the Valarjar from her.
    • More for druids: their exclusive class area features dream portals that druids can use to teleport to several locations on Azeroth, many of them marked by a Great Tree that is important to green dragons. You may find that one of the portals is shut — a much, much earlier questline in Feralas deals with sealing that zone's dream portal to prevent Nightmare corruption from pouring through it. A druid who had completed that quest will find that their seal still stands, and they may break it if they want use of the portal.
    • Vanilla raid boss Nefarian had a special ability to screw over each class (switching warrior stances, messing with shaman totems, etc) and an accompanying quote. Each time a new class has been added, he's been given a new quote to address them with.
    • One mandatory questline for Legion's order hall campaign requires you to liberate Exodar from the Burning Legion attack. Your order champions will join you in the fight against Rakeesh... but if they are out on a mission, they won't join you. Fortunately Velen is powerful enough that you don't need their help.
      • Warlocks get a unique interaction with this particular moment that stands out. Normally your champions will happily report to you and help you out and Velen will be thankful for the aid. A Warlock however, has the toadying demon Calydus and angry destruction warlock Rittsyn show up, with Ritssyn commenting that Calydus bugging him to come out to help you has him minutes away from killing the demon. This back and forth gets an exasperated "Well this is awkward." from Velen under his breath.
    • At the start of Mists of Pandaria content, Horde players get a letter from General Nazgrim ordering them to report for duty. If the player completed the Vashj'ir storyline, the letter addresses them by name, recalls the time Nazgrim (then a Legionnaire) fought alongside the player against the naga, and is overall more friendly and personal in tone.
    • One of the starting Death Knight quests requires you to kill a member of the Argent Dawn who belongs to your own race. The character will recognize you and say something about your past. What makes this a case of Developer's Foresight is that if you start a Worgen or Goblin Death Knight, two races that joined the Alliance/Horde after the events of Wrath of the Lich King, you'll belong to a different faction than the regular members of that race. Worgen Death Knights are former servants of Archmage Arugal as opposed to being residents of Gilneas City, and Goblin Death Knights originally belonged to the Steamweadle Cartel and don't fall in with Bilgewater until after joining the Horde.
    • A handful of quests require you to heal injured NPCs, giving you a bandage or other item for you to do so. Later expansions from Legion onward usually let you use healing spells instead on them if your class has them.
    • The questline for Human's heritage involves a return of Vanessa VanCleef - who faked her death in Cataclysm and returned in Legion for the Rogue class quest campaign. If the player is a human rogue? Vanessa will in fact acknowledge this and have a different response if you ask her to explain about herself to you.
    • Part of the "Embers of Neltharion" storyline in Dragonflight includesScalecommander Sarkareth using a MacGuffin to subjugate every Dracthyr. Naturally, the player character is immune - since they are not a dracthyr. But if the player is an Evoker? They somehow resist, which Sarkareth comments on.
    • Part of the "Blue Dragonflight/The Veiled Ossuary" storyline in Dragonflight has the player go to Booty Bay for a couple of quests. If the player has tanked their reputation with Booty Bay to the point that they'd get attacked on sight (not entirely unusual for players working on the Insane in the Membrane achievement), the NPC offers the player a buff that will set their reputation to Friendly for the duration of the quests.
  • In Warhammer Online, the devs watched alpha testers get to some pretty strange places, and rather than fixing it, they either added kegs of dynamite to blow yourself up, so you can respawn where you are meant to, or by adding high-level boss characters you can fight if you can get an entire party to that spot.

    Platform Games 
  • Banjo-Kazooie: One of the questions in Grunty's Furnace Fun has you match a character to their Voice Grunting, introduced by Grunty with the rhyme "Listen well and make your choice, which character has this dumb voice?" It's possible for the voice in question to be Grunty herself, and if this happens, she'll say "which character has this cool voice", not "dumb voice". She wouldn't insult herself, after all.
  • Banjo-Tooie: Via the use of in-game cheat codesnote , it is possible to progress to later levels earlier than intended. The game will not let the player enter a boss fight that they are unequipped for, usually resulting in a line of dialogue that hints at where to find their moves.note 
    Chilli Billi: You don't stand a chance against me. Get back to the Cliff Top and complete your training!
    • Those same in-game cheat codes will give Master Jiggywiggy unique dialogue if the player attempts to observe the Altar of Knowledge near the level, which usually results in him telling you how many more Jiggies you need, giving you the option to teleport back to his temple, or state he already opened the door for you.
      Jiggywiggy: Oh! That's strange... it would appear that some other force has opened this door!
    • The first time you rescue a Jinjo, it will ask you to look out for the remaining members of its family. However, if the very first Jinjo you rescue is the sole white one, he will have unique dialogue, basically telling you to reunite the other Jinjo families.
    • There is a Grip Grab ledge that leads from Jinjo Village to the Wooded Hollow. Many gamers doubt its use, but with Bottles' House being permanently locked after beating Tower of Tragedy, if one didn't activate any of the silos from the Wooded Hollow or beyond, they would be unable to access those areas without that. Doubling down on this, it is possible to get to the ledge without Grip Grab using a glitchy jumpnote , but King Jingaling will prevent you from entering the passage without seeing him.
      Jingaling: Yo there! I think you should come and pay me a visit before you leave.
    • It is also possible to use a Beak Bust-related glitch to get onto the platform to the Plateau in the Wooded Hollow; presumably because of this, there is an invisible wall near the door to the Plateau. However, it is still possible to bypass the wall by glitching onto the area near the broken staircase.
    • While the Wonderwing will prevent you from taking damage when you enter terrain populated by a Dragunda, he will still spit you out. This may seem like an attempt to Nerf the Wonderwing (which worked in the piranha water in Banjo-Kazooie), but it actually serves the purpose of preventing you from getting two Jiggies in Mayahem Temple without the Golden Goliath or Wading Boots (the Dragunda will spit you all the way back to land, as opposed to later ones where he just spits you back where you were standing).
  • Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night has a late-game ability, the Invert Shard, that allows Miriam to flip the game world upside-down so that she can walk on the ceiling. Should the player happen to do this in one of a handful of game areas that have no ceiling, which would leave Miriam "falling" forever, Miriam will simply cast Invert again once she reaches the top of the screen, casting her back down to earth.
  • Castlevania series:
    • Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance:
      • You are not supposed to hit the Living Armor that gets killed by Talos, since it's a cutscene, thus you can't do anything. But if you get Cross subweapon and Wind spellbook, you can hit it, revealing that its name is Revenge Armor, though it doesn't go to the bestiary.
      • At one point, you get slightly different dialogue with Maxim depending on whether or not you'd found one of Dracula's relics. Most of the relics are inaccessible at that point, and the one that can be found is not easy to reach unless you use the Ice Book/Sacred Fist combination to propel Juste forward. Even without that method, it is possible to backtrack as soon as you get the Double Jump ability and score the relic that way (all before meeting Maxim in the relevant cutscene), but many players won't think to do that.
      • You can access a Castle B warp gate sooner than you're supposed to with use of the double jump and Sacred Fist/Ice book combo, but you need to at least meet Death in the Clock Tower before you can use the gate.
    • Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow has a boss named Dmitrii, who is a Ditto Fighter — any attack Soma hits him with, he'll use in turn (though no matter the level of Soma's attack, Dmitrii always copies it at Level One). This includes nearly every attack in the game, including ones you can only possibly have in this fight on a New Game Plus. He can even copy Hell Fire, the attack you can only learn by completing the game on Hard. What's more, he's also able to copy the attacks used by the characters in Julius Mode.
  • In Celeste, There are a few examples of this.
    • Madeline can be given whatever name you'd like her to have. However, if you name her Alex, the name of Theo's sister, Alex's name will change to Maddie.
    • You can meet Theo for the first time in both Chapters 1 and 2. If you skip both of these encounters, when you meet in Chapter 3, his dialogue will be slightly altered.
    • The ending slightly changes depending on how many strawberries you've collected. If you complete the game with little to no strawberries, the pie Madeline makes at the end of the game is just an empty crust.
    • The path to the secret strawberry in Chapter 9 requires you to jump into some spikes so you respawn at a certain point. Death automatically resets the Golden Strawberries (and you) to the start of the level, but if you're crazy enough to go for both the Golden Strawberry and the Moon Berry, the strawberry will temporarily detach from you so you can pick it up later.
  • In Jak II: Renegade, there are barriers all over the city to prevent you from Sequence Breaking. However, if you let a zoomer glide through the field and try to hop on it halfway through the game will blow you up and report "Trespasser neutralized."
  • In Kero Blaster, it's usually impossible to acquire the Kuro Blaster parts in Normal Mode, because you need to have equipment from later levels to get to them. However, it's possible to get the jetpack at the end of the OXOX Hotel, reopen the closed boss door, and move back far enough in the stage to die and get a game over, allowing you to start the stage over with the jetpack. Pixel thought of this, and should you use it to go to the secret area, you won't find anything except Mizutani commenting on how impetuous you are.
  • Kirby Star Allies has some cutscenes with this; at the start of the game, reaching the Friend Heart introduction scene with an ability will cause the hat to remain on Kirby, but will not be shown when the cutscene is replayed. Beating Void Termina, on the other hand, will save the team you had and the ability you used when the final blow was dealt to the ending cutscene. This means the team you decided on and the ability you kept throughout the fight will differ; you can go with the usual normal Kirby and three allies or discard all or all but one or two allies during the final phase of the fight and the cutscene will change. For example, going to the final boss with Sword Kirby and discarding all allies except for Rick & Kine & Coo during the final phase will cause the ending cutscene to have Kirby keep the Sword ability and Rick will be shown. They even made a version of the final cutscene that has no abilities or allies. Said ability and allies will also be saved in the credits.
  • Minty Fresh Adventure!: Dialogue from an NPC, Game Over Screens, and ocassionally animations will change depending on what form you're in when they happen; For example, if you talk to Trixie after being turned into a tube of toothepaste by Poison Joke, she will refer to you as 'insignificant toothpaste', and there's an achievement for managing to die in both Toothpaste form and petrified by a cockatrice.
    • If you buy the free news report from Trixie's airship, she will throw the desk she was leaning on out of the airship by the end of it. Returning to the ground floor, you can use this desk as a platform to get over the poison joke, making the platforming at this part slightly easier.
    • Continuously knocking on Zecora's door at the very beginning will let Colgate frisk her for more and more information, until she finally gets annoyed and refuses to answer. This changes the dialogue at the very end, where she admits her decision to trick Colgate into helping the Ursas was mostly because she annoyed her.
    • Saving Minty in the caves will add her to the crowd scene at the end, no matter what ending is otherwise acquired.
  • The Missing: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories: After you beat the game, should the player go for a second playthrough as J.J.'s pre-transition self in the Post-End Game Content, you'll find that voice actor Steve Wiley does all of the performance work, saying the very same lines of the story, making the very same "Emily!" calls, taking the very same breaths and grunts and groans and crying, and doing the very same screams of pain when taking damage to the limbs (some of them high-pitched), as her passing counterpart.
  • Nosferatu on the SNES, in its Game Over screen, shows a Fatal Family Photo of the protagonist Kyle and his kidnapped wife Erin and asks whether you want to continue or not. If you choose not to continue, under normal circumstances, the game shows a cutscene of the eponymous vampire as he's just about to actually bite Erin and turn her into a vampire before showing the Game Over text. The thing is, the game has two endings, and the bad one is triggered by dying and continuing a certain number of times. Once you've done that, the photo is altered slightly to show Erin with a more furrowed brow and vampire fangs as a hint that she's been turned - in turn, if you die and elect not continue after that point, the game skips straight to the game over text without the cutscene, since Erin has already been bitten offscreen.
  • In Phoenotopia: Awakening, you're supposed to access the Cosette region by playing the royal song for the guard at the checkpoint; you learn the song after completing the castle dungeon and saving Prince Leo. However, if you collect 30 Moonstones, you can unlock the Franway to Cosette before this. If you warp to Cosette and try to leave backwards through the checkpoint, the guard is briefly baffled about where you came from, before deciding that you must be a local he's never met before and letting you pass freely anyway.
  • Psychonauts:
    • At one point, you have to go into the minds of a few people to assemble a disguise to trick the warden. A lazy or creative player might think that just jumping into the warden's mind would be quicker. The game will let you try it, but all you'll get is an amusing note explaining that the warden is protected against psychic interference. Similarly, if you try to jump into any of your fellow campers' heads, you'll get a notice saying that the mind-jumping device won't work on minors.
    • In the normal course of gameplay, after saving the turtle Mr. Pokeylope, you carry him for about 30 seconds before losing him forever. If you decide to take Mr. Pokeylope to camp after saving him, every camper reacts to him in different ways, mostly involving how adorable he is. The PC version on Steam even made showing him to all the campers unlock an achievement.
    • In fact, just about every NPC has unique dialogue for every item you can possibly present to them. This is especially notable with Boyd, whose mental world revolves almost entirely around held items (none of which you're ever told to show him, by the way). This also applies to the Den Mother, who has unique reactions to each and every item you've collected throughout the level, despite the fact that you wouldn't think to take those items out in the middle of a boss fight.
    • One particularly amusing example: Using the "Rose" item from Black Velvetopia on the dog painters will make them tell you to "Go find someone your own species."
    • The Lungfish Call item makes a... rather "specific" sound. If you use it near Dr. Loboto, he tells Sheegor to "go outside if [she's] going to do that."
    • Using cheats early in the game allows you to use late-game powers on characters that wouldn't usually be around when you'd actually obtain that power. If you do this, almost every character has dialogue that you wouldn't hear if you played through the game normally. For example, if you use cheats to get confusion at the start of the game (when it's normally the last power you get in the game), many characters have voice lines that are normally impossible to hear otherwise.
      • Oleander exclaims "Mr. Bun, where are you going?" when Confusion is used on him.
      • When attempting confusion on Sasha, he simply tells Raz that he is not so easily confused.
      • Boyd temporarily snaps out of his paranoia and realizes that not only is there no conspiracy, but he also figures out the Milkman's true nature... too bad Confusion only lasts a few seconds.
      • Humorously, the G-Men all briefly forget what they're doing before the confusion wears off and they remember that they have to be incognito.
    • Clairvoyance allows you to see through someone else's eyes, specifically permitting you to see the world as they do. Each and every single character in the entire game, including every single enemy type and random animal just hanging around, sees you differently. Seagulls see you as a cat, Censors (basic enemies) see you as a virus, your love interest sees you as a dashing prince, etc.
    • Much like with the warden, if you just try to steal Gloria's award with invisibility or telekinesis instead of going into her mind, you get unique scenes where she thinks the thing is going off on its own and won't let it leave anyway.
    • Each line of dialogue from every character is properly lip-synched in the character models, no matter how incidental.
    • Near the end of the game, if you were to use the crow feather on the de-brained Sasha and Milla, they have different voice lines than using it on their normal, "brained" selves.
    • Vernon has a new line of dialogue when rebrained if his brain is found before Franke's, which you'd really have to go out of your way to do because her brain is at the start of Thorney Towers and his brain is at the very end.
  • Psychonauts 2:
    • Like in the previous game, there are lots of different perspectives on Raz that can be found via Clairvoyance. Most notably, characters who go through Character Development when it comes to their perspective on him have their visuals change over time from something negative to something positive. Most notably, Norma goes from seeing him embarrassed in his underwear, to seeing him as The Mole (represented by a literal mole), to seeing him as a respectable Psychonaut.
    • If you activate your camera in front of various people, they'll voice a reaction to it.
    • The Memory Vaults in Psi King's Sensorium are specifically designed to be inaccessible until you get Mental Projection later on in Cassie's Collection - not even pyrokinesis will open them. This seems a bit odd, as this is the only mind where you can't obtain any memory vaults in your first run-through, but both of the vaults have spoilers for events that are revealed in between the two minds: one vault shows the Psi King's true identity as Helmut Fullbear of the Psychic Seven, while the other one shows Ford using the astralathe on himself.
    • In one of the levels, Cruller's Correspondence, there's a segment where Raz has to write a name using a typewriter. Both the full name Lucrecia and their nickname Lucy count as success. Additionally, if the player instead tries to input a swear word or slur, the last letter will be censored with a "#". Ford will also call out the player for doing so.
      Ford: Such language in a high-class establishment like this!
    • During the Postgame, after Raz learns that the family "curse" about going into water was a load of bupkis, the Hand of Galochio is friendlier to him and doesn't pull him under, and he stops taking damage from water (though it does still function the same).
    • After completing the game, the panel explaining the history of the Psychonauts is updated with The REAL events of the fight with Maligula, complete with the chapter about the Psychic Six changing to be one about the Psychic Seven.
  • Not only do the devs of Rabi-Ribi know every Sequence Break in the game (and have even purposefully built a few in,) there's achievements for the majority of them, including finding and beating Ribbon before Cocoa (the first boss of the game,) finding Lilith (a late-game boss) before any other boss, reaching System Interior II before defeating Rumi, and beating the game without collecting anything but Ribbon and the Bunny Amulet.
  • Rampage has a few levels featuring waterways and a different animation for if a monster falls into these waterways. The Foresight comes if the monster's damage meter runs out in the water and a different death animation plays.
  • Skylanders:
    • Jet-Vac uses a vacuum device to attack and fly. His flight capabilities are limited and indicated by a gauge based upon how much compressed air he has in his tanks. If you deplete some of it, and activate the secondary attack (which sucks enemies towards you), he refills it.
    • Several skylanders put hats on in different ways. Some skylanders that already wear hats will actually swap them out with another one if you equip it.
    • The first Boss Battle in Swap Force is a Bullfight Boss where you have to trick the boss into running into the wall at you and crash. To do this, the player must have their Skylander in the boss's sights, and the boss will follow you if you walk around. Two Skylanders (Stink Bomb and Stealth Elf) have abilities that let them turn invisible. If you are in the boss's sights and turn invisible, then the boss will not follow you around.
    • In Spyro's Adventure, there are crystal walls that are normally invulnerable and require bombs to destroy... unless you are using Prism Break, whose expertise is altering crystals.
  • Sly 2: Band of Thieves has the "Security Announcement" during the tutorial in Cairo, where Bentley will attempt to keep the guards calm and resume normal duties. Normally when you hear this, going down the stairs to the first Rope Walk part, you'll be heading away from Bentley but if you double back to him you'll see that the character model actually does the motions of speaking these lines.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog 2: In Chemical Plant Act 1, there's a warp tube that's impossible to access by normal means - not that most players would have any practical reason to, since the tube in question simply loops back on itself. Despite all this, if you use Debug Mode to get past the spring that blocks the entrance, the tube itself is fully functional.
  • In Sonic 3 & Knuckles, the cutscene at the end of Mushroom Hill Zone Act 2 has Sonic (or whoever you're playing as) running after the Flying Battery, then jumping on it. It's possible to move Sonic to the left of the screen after hitting the Capsule before the end-of-level points tally shows up (and Sonic does his victory pose). If you do that, then Sonic will jump over the Capsule in the cutscene, rather than getting stuck or clipping straight through it.
  • In Super Mario 64 DS, Chief Chilly has different dialogue for each playable character when you face him. This includes Yoshi, even though you can only fight him as Mario, Luigi or Wario without the use of cheats.
  • In Super Mario Bros. Wonder, the level "Rolling-Ball Hall" has an area that is blocked by a wall until the Wonder Flower summons a giant rolling ball to destroy it. However, if you use your Elephant form to knock a regular-sized rolling ball into the wall, it'll break and you can go right down, where you'll eventually find a bunch of talking flowers confused and annoyed that you did things out of order.

    Puzzle Games 
  • Puzzles from Baba is You will often require solutions that look or sound like exploits. Common examples include item duplication, shoving two words onto a single space, and using items to shove other items through walls. Knowing the exact physics of each and every one of these is required reading.
  • Pâquerette Down the Bunburrows:
    • The "baby bunny" solutions to many puzzles are often counterintuitive, including but not limited to using alternative methods of entering a level to change Pâquerette's starting position or breaking walls without using a pickaxe.
    • It's possible to use the pickaxe to get out of bounds, which the game presents as an empty glitchy level. Some are not empty.
  • In Petal Crash Online, if a match ends the instant it starts (possible by using custom rules to reduce the board size and increase the number of spawners so the screen is already completely filled with blocks), the time elapsed on the results screen will read "lol nice".
  • The Nazo Puyo spin-offs of Puyo Puyo utilizes all the mechanics involving the player's Puyo as much as possible and creating many different goals to take advantage of them all, even utilizing mechanics that are rarely or never used in a normal Puyo Puyo game. Examples including using the "ghost" 13th row, climbing up stacks by rotating, wedging in Puyo by exploiting the Puyo's "pivot", and toying with the properties of gravity with both Iron Puyo and Blocks.
  • Pony Island:
    • Retroactively invoked; some players had the gall to replay the stage at EXP Beach enough times to actually get 100 EXP in Adventure Mode, so a patch made it so you do get the Pony Wings, not to mention some unique dialogue, from doing this.
    • Didn't get all the tickets on your first run? And now you know which one(s) you missed? No problem. After completing the game, the Start Menu is glitched to include a 'select chapter' option.
  • In Portal Reloaded, puzzles are designed to be solvable in only one timeline, but clever or skillful players can manage to exit the puzzle chambers in the "wrong" timeline. The A.I. notices this, and provides a time portal to get you back on rails.
  • In the 1997 PC game Smart Games Puzzle Challenge 2, there is often more than one way to solve a puzzle. Just solving it will give the message "That's your best score for this game. And yet... you can do better." When the ideal solution to a puzzle is found (or if a puzzle with only one solution is solved), the message "Spectacular! That's the best possible score for this game." appears instead. But, if the player manages to find a solution that that fulfills all the winning conditions while scoring even more points than the ideal solution, a different message appears: "Incredible! That beats the best score we were able to get!"
  • In Sushi Striker: The Way of Sushido, Skill Copy allows the player character to use the opponent's last-used skill. The in-game opponents use overpowered skills that the player character is not supposed to use. The designers have anticipated people would attempt to use Skill Copy to use these overpowered skills and have planned ahead in two ways:
    • Some of them are outright ignored, such as all of the permanent effects and the final boss's unique skill, What's Mine Is Yours. In these cases, they don't count as skill usage for Skill Copy, meaning it will copy their last-used skill besides those.
    • For the ones that Skill Copy can imitate, the A.I. will behave differently, holding off on using these skills except as a last resort, and they will always use that skill, then immediately use some other skill in an attempt to minimize the amount of time you can copy it.
  • The Talos Principle: If you choose to scale the Tower, you will have to use some help from The Shepherd, who fills the role of the second player in the cooperative puzzles. Through some heavy puzzle and platforming skills, though, you can do the area without it - and it will earn you a developer's cameo near the top, as it has been anticipated.
  • Unpacking:
    • There is a sound for every item being put down on every surface.
    • Certain objects, like pill bottles and baby rattles, will make sounds when you shake them, just like the real things.
    • Should you fulfill certain requirements in the environment just for fun, like for example making an equation out of fridge magnets, you will be rewarded with a sticker and an achievement.
    • You'll still be able to clear the level if you put all the items (including existing ones) in the wrong places. It's called Dark Star Mode, and the protagonist will comment on how messy she is at the end of each level.
    • You'll get a different comment from the protagonist at the end of each level depending on what room you're looking at before moving onto the next home.

    Racing Games 
  • When Jak X was ported to PlayStation 4, many fans assumed that the Daxter and Ratchet skins wouldn't be included, as they required either hooking up a handheld system that was a decade old whose digital store was shut down or porting over the least popular PS2 Ratchet & Clank title. But, not only do the Daxter skins unlock automatically, the Ratchet skin now unlocks via a save of the 2016 Ratchet & Clank game!

    Rhythm Games 

    Roguelike 
  • Brutal Orchestra has Bosch giving commentary each time you die, and usually gives advice if you die to a boss. If you die against This Pitiful Corpse, who cannot deal damage to the player under any circumstances, Bosch instead questions how it's possible and tells the player that Talia and Nico, the developers, are disappointed in you.
  • The Consuming Shadow:
    • The risk of being Driven to Suicide by the growing madness of your situation is an actual gameplay mechanic. This manifests as attempting to shoot yourself via minigame. The Warrior Does Not Like Guns, however, and instead of shooting himself, will attempt to cut his own throat. However, if you have no more ammo left, the minigame to not shoot yourself will fail...except in the case of the Warrior, where he will still attempt to cut his own throat
    • Related to the above: if you check the Warrior's inventory, he has six bullets despite exclusively using melee attacks. This only becomes relevant if the player runs out of time, at which point the Warrior will turn his gun on himself like all of the other player characters do.
    • The "Why The Hell Did I Bring This" achievement is rewarded for bringing the car muffler to Stonehenge, where it is of no use to the player and takes up equipment space that could be used for another, much more useful item. Its icon even shows the Scholar staring at the muffler in bemusement.
    • Randomly casting magic is a bad idea in this game, as a failed spell will cause damage to your character's already limited and fragile sanity... except if you manage to discover a spell this way by blind luck, whereupon you get an achievement, "The Scientific Method."
  • Dicey Dungeons:
    • Just about every card has an associated gadget the Inventor can make by scrapping it - including enemy cards that can only be attained and scrapped with the Reversal gadget. The few cards that don't have gadgets are never given to enemies and don't appear in the Inventor's item pool.
    • The Alchemist's Bear Potion can also work on you, if you steal it or inflict Curse? on Alchemist to reverse the card's target. Even more impressive, the Bear class has its own unique sprite, equipment, and Limit Break, and other characters will comment on the fact that you've now transformed into a bear.
    • In Bonus Round, the Marshmallow rule swaps all fire-related equipment with ice-related equipment. This contains some obvious swaps, like Fireball to Snowball, and Whip (burn on 6) to Lament (freeze on 6), but also introduces 19 exclusive cards for fire/ice cards that don't already have matching counterparts.
  • Dwarf Fortress
    • If you piss off the humans or elves enough to start a war after letting their guild representatives wander through your fortress, they avoid any traps said representatives have seen.
    • There was a report on the forums of a dwarf that got disemboweled and somehow managed to recover. Everywhere he walked, he'd trail a little "~~".
    • If a standing unit loses the ability to stand (either from legs/nervous system injury or losing consciousness) and has another unit's weapon stuck inside them, they continue standing up because the game can actually tell the other guy is holding them upright.
    • In Adventure Mode, kobolds that are within the player's field of view but in the dark show up as ", to represent their glowing eyes. If the kobold in question has lost an eye, it will show up as '.
    • If you convict someone of a crime committed against them, the other dwarves will be "outraged at the bizarre conviction against all reason of the victim of a crime."
    • When it comes to tear and wear, everything is accounted for when implemented. Even when the amount is so minimal it would never come up in normal play. Archcrystals, probably the oldest fortress ever played, ran into this problem about four hundred years innote  when their centuries-old buckets started disintegrating from wear, followed by wooden workshops and beds.
  • Elona has the Captured Super-Entity Ebon the Fire Giant. Not only does the game let you try to lockpick his chains to release him, the developers also coded in what happens after you let him loose, complete with What the Hell, Hero? shouts from soldiers trying (and likely failing) to stop the rampaging giant.
  • Hades has a ton of situational dialogue that's only seen in very specific situations. A few examples...
    • There's a special conversation if you have the Yarn of Ariadne on-hand when encountering its previous owner Theseus.
    • Hypnos has unique dialogue for how you specifically die in each run, including standing in magma, getting caught by a trap, or even just dying unusually early.
    • The final boss fight has a subtle dialogue change in case the player manages to escape the Underworld on their first attempt (which is very difficult but very possible). Usually, Zagreus will references the forces of the Underworld killing him over and over in previous runs, but will subtly change it to call them incompetent wretches that couldn't stop him.
    • In a each Trial of the Gods, using a certain Olympian's Call boon against them will prompt a uniquely frustrated reaction. The same will occur if you use Hades' Call in the boss fight against him.
  • HyperRogue:
    • The description of Demon Sharks says that they are demons from Hell that fell into the water. Sure enough, if a demon follows you across...
    • Anything that creates fire will ignite the flammable materials in the Vineyard and the Dry Forest.
  • Nuclear Throne:
    • In update 25 of the game, Vlambeer added footstep sound effects, which changed based on what sort of surface players walked on. In update 27, getting the Extra Feet mutation gave you more footsteps. Y.V.'s B-Skin, where he floats, doesn't make any footstep noises.
    • Rebel has a B-skin which gives her a winter coat. What happens when you reach the frozen city with her? She puts on the hood over her head.
    • Whenever Robot levels up, the "select a mutation" screen is rewritten to say "install an update". If you're picking more than one mutation, it also says "Do not turn off Robot".
    • The hidden underwater "Oasis" zone has every playable character and bandit in it encased in a bubble except for Robot and Fish, who obviously don't need it to breathe. (Y.V. only has one to keep his money dry.)
    • The clock hands in Crown of Haste will change with your computer's clock.
    • Getting YV to Level Ultra will change the "Generating..." text on the loading screen to "Verifying..."
    • In YV's Crib, if you have YV use his airhorn, Yung Cuz will cheer. In addition, if you destroy the television, Yung Cuz will cry.
    • Pausing the game as Chicken while in a decapitated state will also display her headless avatar on the Pause screen.
    • Dying to the final boss gives you a special message: "You almost reached the Nuclear Throne".
      • Dying to the final boss via collision damage gives you this mocking message: "You reached the Nuclear Throne"; subverted in that doesn't unlock character who is described to be unlocked by "reaching the Nuclear Throne" - have to actually sit on the Throne for that
    • The Oasis actually keeps the elemental weapons in mind, with fire weapons fizzling out and lightning weapons hurting everything on screen — including you.
  • Spelunky:
    • In the unlikely circumstance that two trees in the Lush area are generated side-by-side at the same height, their tops will form one long canopy.
    • If you pick up an item in the shop but figure the price tag is too steep, then you can always blow up the shop, right? If you touch the merchandise, walk out, and attempt the Ballistic Discount technique above, then you will be shot the moment you light the bomb instead of when you throw it into the shop.
    • In the HD version, during the ending, when the character(s) are flung out of the volcano, they would normally faceplant into the sand; if any of/the player(s) have a parachute, it will deploy and they float gently down.
    • In the HD version, you can sacrifice yourself to Kali if you happen to be stunned while on her altar.
  • Streets of Rogue's tutorial covers all its bases.
    • Punch the door down instead of opening it like you're instructed to? The Resistance Leader responds in amazement.
    • Kill the shopkeeper you're supposed to purchase a key from? His corpse will drop the key, and the Resistance Leader responds appropriately.
    • Kill the friendly bouncer who serves as the tutorial's living punching bag instead of tranquilizing him? The leader's suitably annoyed.
    • Try to tranquilize the leader instead? He's wearing protective thermal underwear, you see.
    • Throw a rock at the leader after he just made you walk through an explosive tripwire? Admits he probably deserved that.
    • Purposely throw all your rocks away such that you can't safely disarm the second explosive tripwire from a distance? He asks if you're trying to break the tutorial or something.
    • Smart enough to step away from the generator that's clearly about to explode? He's disappointed that you're not a total schmuck.

    Shoot 'em Up 
  • The Nintendo Switch version of Cuphead has some alternate boss routes that happen when you do certain things. (These were originally scrapped plans for the bosses, which then made their way into the game anyways.)
    • If you don't shoot Ollie Bulb when he shows up, he disappears, and Horace Radish appears in his place, who will attack you alongside Chauncey.
    • When Djimmi the Great is scanning you during his fourth phase, he will summon a tiny Cuphead puppet if you're shrunken during the process. This puppet does not get its own phase, instead attacking alongside giant Djimmi for the next and final phase.
    • In Sally Stageplay's fight, there is an angel that you can jump on in Phase 1, which causes a buttress to fall in the background. If the husband in the background is in front of the priest when this happens, he will get killed, which ends Phase 1 immediately and causes some changes in the fight. For one, the nursery in Phase 2 will become a nunnery instead, and instead of babies, it spawns nuns who throw rulers at you. Also, in Phase 3, the husband will appear once again, this time as a god in Heaven.

    Simulation Games 
  • Cute Knight: In the Windows version, trying to save after an ending has been achieved, gets a message of:
    It's a bit late for that now!
  • In Evil Genius, secret service agents usually infiltrate the rooms of your underground base via doors, and given enough time, they will hack any door. If they find something incriminating or vital, they'll try to blow it up or take pictures for evidence. If you try and block off incriminating evidence, agents that get close enough will start shooting whatever is in the way, leading to explosions and fires. If you're foolish enough to build a room then brick up the entrance, agents will find (read: make on the spot) secret entrances into the sealed-off portion of your base and carry on with their despicable do-gooding while you are helpless to stop them because the entrance is bricked up. This also works in reverse — locking up an agent into a bricked-up cell only leads to him using another secret passage to get out, and he could end up smack dab in the middle of your power plant. FFFFFFF----
    • Clever players have found a way around that by building what they call an Ãœber-trap, coupled with a Freak Trigger. The former is a sophisticated room, full of wind blower traps, separate from the rest of your base that keeps agents from escaping. The whole thing can be made out of a freezer, in case they die (so their dead bodies don't increase your heat level). The Freak Trigger is a series of small rooms, where you put your Freaks, who lumber around. They're dumb enough to trigger every sensor they step on, and you can tie those sensors to traps in the Ãœber-trap room. Thus, not only are agents unable to escape (the door is there, it's just locked and set to allow only your evil self in), but them being constantly thrown from one wind trap to another generates a ton of cash for you thanks to trap combos (you don't even need to steal on the map anymore). The reason to put sensors in a separate room is because agents tend to shoot at any sensor they find, but they usually ignore traps. As a bonus, the game has a cap on how many agents are allowed on the island at once. If you trap the max number in the Ãœber-trap, you won't get any more agents arriving and messing up your plans.
  • FreeSpace: Multiple:
    • The first game came bundled with FRED (FReespace EDitor), the same development tool the designers used to create the main game's missions. They included a rather amusing response to one attempt at crashing the program. FRED has an autonaming feature: before the user gives a ship a unique name, it is given a generic name based on its class and how many ships have been placed already. It was discovered that attempting to trick FRED's autonamer by renaming a ship to the next ship name in line (for instance, naming a ship "Ulysses 2" and then placing a second Ulysses) would result in the new ship being autonamed "URA Moron 1". For those interested, renaming a ship the next ship in line and renaming a ship "URA Moron 1" results in the next ship being "URA Moron 2", and so on.
    • In the first mission of Freespace 2, if you don't jump out when the mission is complete, the ships you've been escorting will actually go through the docking procedure with the ship that you're told is coming in for them to dock with. You can watch several minutes of scripted sequence and dialog that pertains to absolutely nothing important.
    • When the second Sathanas juggernaut destroys the GVD Psamtik in the mission "Straight, No Chaser", the Sathanas will normally blow the Psamtik away in seconds. However, its beams aren't scripted, just flagged as allowed to fire at will. On the off-chance that they miss enough so that the Psamtik is not immediately obliterated (essentially requiring all but one beam in the first two volleys to miss), the ship's commander and allied command exchange increasingly panicked dialog as the damage starts to pile up. The commander even reports that their jump drive has been destroyed, so you won't wonder why the Psamtik doesn't just take advantage of its luck and retreat while still in one piece.
    • Similarly, at one point the first Sathanas attacks the GTD Phoenicia. Usually it just gets blown up in the first volley, but if it does survive, the captain basically says "Screw This, I'm Outta Here" and jumps out. Mention of this is made in the debriefing.
    • The first time you encounter the Shivans, the weapons you're equipped with are not nearly powerful enough to do more than annoy the Shivan ships. The debriefing makes note that no Shivan ships have been destroyed at all, anywhere. If you do manage to administer a Death of a Thousand Cuts to the enemy and blow up one of their ships, the debriefing is altered so that Command congratulates you on proving the new enemy is not invincible.
    • Occurs very frequently throughout the series. There are numerous ships that can appear in multiple missions, but stop appearing if they are destroyed. Easy to miss since most of these are freighters and transports of no real importance. The most obvious example is the Actium and Lysander.
    • Fan-made expansions often do this too: Blue Planet has one mission where you lure a destroyer into a trap by disabling some lesser capital ships. The crews of these ships figure out what you're up to and try to warn the destroyer that it's a trap. Even if you destroy their Comm subsystem to prevent this, the ship's crew will manage to jury-rig an emergency transmitter to get the warning off anyway.
      • Also from Blue Planet, let's say you used cheats to win the Unwinnable by Design mission "Delenda Est". A Sathanas juggernaut called "Mr. Cuddles" will show up to kill you. If you manage to survive that (probably also by cheating), you get a special debriefing.
  • Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons:
    • Many games within the series have events based on your friendship with certain people. Some of the events involve characters who are in the pool of potential Love Interests; some of the events must be seen if you want to marry them, but some of them are optional. If you see these optional events after you've married them, the dialogue will often be slightly different — in addition to calling you by your nickname, they'll say somewhat more romantic things.
    • In Harvest Moon DS, if your Ball item gets lost, Mayor Thomas will return it to you. Your ball can get lost if you so much as sneeze (though you can purposefully ship it or give it to people), but if you specifically throw your ball in the water? Thomas will appear angry and dripping wet, and chide you for being so irresponsible! If he wasn't a champion swimmer, your ball would be lost for good.
    • When you want to propose to someone, you need to use the Blue Feather. If you show it to an eligible partner, then they'll either agree to marry you or refuse. If you show it to the other townspeople, you get responses ranging from congratulations on your upcoming engagement, to mistakenly thinking that you're trying to propose to them. This is taken even further in Island of Happiness. There are around 70 extra side villagers that can move to your island. Even though they don't have face graphics, and are all simple Palette Swaps of each other, they'll each have their own special response to the Blue Feather.
    • Story of Seasons (2014):
      • When you upgrade your house from the basic shack to the first level, your first barn is added on at no extra cost. Shortly after, Eda—the farmer that trains you—brings you Hanako, the cow you trained with, for free. She also walks you through basic cow care. If you manage to not upgrade your place until after Eda dies in Winter Year 1, then it's Guild Master Veronica who brings you Hanako instead—having held on to her until you had your barn as Eda wanted you to have her, and asking you to care for her in Eda's memory. The flavor text after Hanako is received even changes slightly.
      • While the wife is giving birth, her husband is off to the side, pacing; when the baby is heard crying, he darts towards the delivery bed, only for Angela (the nurse) to tell him to wait because the delivery isn't finished (as the "baby" ends up being twins) and then comes and gets him to let him know. If Angela is the one giving birth, then it's Marian who shoos him away and then walks over to let her husband know—since obviously she would be too occupied to do so.
  • In Kerbal Space Program, you get specific flavor text for performing experiments on different planets. A set exists for doing science while landed on Jool, despite the fact that Jool is a gas giant and has no surface to land on. Another set exists for doing science while flying at the Mun; the "flying" situation requires that the craft in question be flying within atmosphere, which the Mun does not have.
  • In MechWarrior 2, several missions required you to navigate a sprawling city full of civilian buildings. The missions didn't require you to deviate much from the predisposed path, but many curious players did it anyway because all the buildings could be inspected to reveal what was inside (and destroyed with no consequences, if the urge struck you). That they were all believably labeled (offices, hospitals etc.) showed a fair amount of Thinking of Everything all by itself, but at some point — way away from the mission's objective — you'd find a building labeled "Oh, just a building" that, when inspected, showed "Don't shoot me!". If you blew that up, a nuclear explosion would happen that'd destroy the entire level and everything in it.
  • No Umbrellas Allowed:
    • Every item can be examined with your appraisal tools, even those that are given to you for free or are withdrawn by the customer for plot reasons. Some of the major characters have their own signatures such as Nari and Prof. Choi (although they're supposed to be marked as "Unidentifiable" since they're not on your signature list), while certain plot items won't show you the material or production year even if you check for them.
    • You can't make money out of the expired EMT card that Mr. Gong forces you to buy on Day 7. If you try selling it, Merry confiscates it from you, and you can't sell it to Hanja either even if it's five working days old, the minimum age for items to be considered as junk.
    • Darcy will notice if you use the Private Slots to accurately appraise items sold by Fixies, who refuse to accept subjective (blue) cards even if they're correct. He still warns you to use the Private Slots carefully since other customers will accuse you of scamming them to secretly buy their stuff for much cheaper.
    • Your customers will always comment on the kinds of items that you sell such as knockoffs or broken items, or if you've been kind to them or have been supporting AVAC. They'll also notice if you have the Pre-Avarice Criminal Badge.
  • Papa Louie Arcade:
    • From Sushiria onwards, Vincent will normally be the one to deliver alternate outfits and coupons to customers. If said customer is Vincent himself, then Akari will be the deliverer instead. If this happens when the customer is currently in the order station, the player chef will instead deliver it, like in Bakeria To Go!.
      • In Mocharia, where Akari is a default chef and thus unavailable anywhere else, Rhonda is the one who delivers the clothes/coupons to Vincent. This detail was added in the game's 1.0.2 patch; before then, the game would have crashed if Vincent received a coupon/outfit.
    • Joy/Ninjoy will have a different placement in the parade depending on the identity she's currently in. If she's dressed in her vigilante persona, Ninjoy will walk alongside other costumers based on the customer award she has. Meanwhile, if she's wearing her regular outfit, Joy will join Roy in the Papa's Pizzeria parade float.
  • In Roots of Pacha, the villagers have unique comments on your clothes. For example, Vuak will comment on how you are "glowing", although it's just the glowing mushroom cap you're wearing.
  • Rune Factory:
    • In Rune Factory 3, because of Fantastic Racism, Micah can't initially enter the Univir settlement when in human form, and if he has a companion with him (even one who knows about his Woolly form) they will insist on not entering since humans are not welcome. If Raven's quests have been completed (and thus she's comfortable transforming in her monster form around Micah), she and Micah are then able to enter the settlement freely.
    • In Rune Factory 4, your child has unique dialogue if you take them with you the very first time you enter the game's very first dungeon, Yokmir Forest. The only possible way to see this dialogue is if you play as Frey and choose to marry Vishnal before ever progressing the plot in any way, as every single other marriage candidate in the game requires areas or characters than can only be unlocked if you progress with the plot.
  • The Sims has a surprising amount of this when it comes to different expansion packs, and how they may interact with one another:
    • Many of the items from the House Party expansion are things that can be found in public places and would lend themselves well to clubs and other hangouts, so when the Hot Date expansion introduced the ability to travel downtown, an alternate version of downtown was created for House Party users which extensively uses House Party's items and decor.
      • One item that deserves special mention is the DJ booth. Hot Date actually went so far as to include an NPC to operate it on community lots, complete with the ability to request songs.
    • The Hot Date expansion adds the ability to go on dates. If Vacation or Unleashed is also installed, dates can be taken to Vacation Island, and Unleashed's in-neighborhood community lots as well.
    • The Unleashed expansion adds the ability to own dogs and cats as fully-fledged family members. If Vacation is installed, they can actually be taken on vacation with the rest of the family, and the pre-made resorts and campgrounds from Vacation were upgraded with pet-related objects to support them (and some other aesthetic objects from Unleashed), though there are some signs that suggest this was an afterthought.
      • The new community lots in Unleashed can only be traveled to by the whole family, which can be annoying when you just want to shop for pet supplies. Well, if Hot Date is installed, Unleashed will actually update one of the pre-made downtown lots with a pet store so you can buy pet supplies without making it a family outing.
  • The Sims 2:
    • Don't think you can get away with screwing around with the social worker if she shows up to take your kids. Most sadistic players who played the first Sims usually boxed the kid or the worker in a room with no doors or the like in order to prevent the kid from being taken away. Trying to pull the same trick off in the sequel, and if the worker can't reach the kid after a certain amount of time, she will teleport both herself and the kid to her car.
    • Each expansion in The Sims 2 included big gameplay elements that would have to be accounted for in future expansions, leading to extra features that you would never see if you only had one or two installed.
      • In University, the college neighborhood has certain restrictions due to time passing differently and students being in their own separate age group with its own game mechanics, which all later expansions had to take into consideration. Students also have teenage voices, meaning the voice actors would have to record lines for all the things adults can do but teenagers cannot.
      • Nightlife introduced a new aspiration, (Pleasure), which would need to have wants and fears assigned to it in all later expansions.
      • Open For Business allows players to run their own business, meaning all community lot items in future expansions (such as food stands and pet shops) would need to work when controlled by the player.
      • Pets cheated a bit; cats and dogs aren't permitted at university, and they can't be taken on vacation. Still, though, they can interact with objects only included in previous and future expansions.
      • Free Time's hobby system assigns an appropriate hobby to almost EVERY SINGLE OBJECT IN ALL EXPANSIONS.
    • Don't think you can cheat in the DS version without consequence. Setting back your DS's clock will cause the concierge to accuse you of being a time-traveling witch and aliens will swarm the town. There is no consequence for setting your DS clock forward, other than causing bugs to occur more frequently.
    • Sims with an Outgoing personality sometimes pull out a hand mirror and primp as an Idle Action. If the player has Nightlife installed and the Outgoing Sim becomes a vampire, the Sim will look into the mirror, sneer at it, and hiss. (You know, because vampires don't show up in mirrors.)
  • The Sims 3: In Seasons, a random townsperson is chosen as an NPC to work the kissing booth. If this NPC happens to be related to your Sim, the option to kiss them will be greyed out with a message about Sims not wanting to kiss their relatives.
  • In SnowRunner, most trucks can be equipped with a snorkel that allows the truck to drive into deeper water. Surely, the developer just increased the depth in which you could drive without drowning the truck, right? Actually, the game recognizes the intake on the snorkel as such. If you drive into water and roll the truck enough to submerge the snorkel, but not enough to stall the engine, the engine will take water damage while it runs.
  • Stardew Valley
    • Some NPCs are placed in unreachable locations for some of the town festivals (such as the Wizard and Linus at the Spirit's Eve maze), but nevertheless have unique dialogue about the situation if the player manages to somehow reach them anyway.
    • Similarly, the caged skeletons and penned animals that show up during certain festivals can be talked to if a player no-clips past the fences. (Although all of them just say "Hi.")
    • The mine carts are repaired as the reward for completing the boiler room bundles (or paying 15,000 gold). These can access the quarry if the player has completed the crafts room bundles. If the player hasn't, the mine carts can go to the mines, the town, and the bus stop, but the quarry will remain locked until the player has completed all of the craft room bundles and repaired the bridge.
    • You can display any item on the Grange at the Stardew Valley Fair, including objective-based ones. Such as the Mayor's shorts. Starting in Version 1.1, the Mayor gets offended, bans you from competing, and offers you 750 stars as hush money to take it down, and Marnie gets flustered when she realizes what that "strange purple cabbage" is. Version 1.3 allows you to put the shorts in the Luau potluck soup for a unique scene, and Version 1.4 allows you to wear them yourself!
    • An Anti-Frustration Feature allows the player to push past characters that may be in the way. Attempting to push the desert casino bouncer out of the way will result in him not budging and saying "Nice try."
    • Trying to use the out-of-bounds bug to reach the casino staircase results in the bouncer catching you, throwing you out, yelling "you little punk!" and hitting you with a Mega Bomb. He does the same thing if you try using a mod to warp into the Casino before you've unlocked it.
    • Using a pile of staircases to complete the 100-level quest in Skull Cavern gets you a reprimand that you were supposed to do it the hard way... but you still get the reward, for having the chutzpah to cheat. If you do the quest using fewer than 10 staircases, your benefactor is sincerely impressed and remarks that he expected you to cheat.
    • Typing "/cheat" into chat gets you a message saying "Nice try."
    • If the player was married to Emily prior to 1.4, she has different dialogue in the scene where she allows you access to her sewing machine. This is otherwise impossible to see since she normally gives you permission to use it long before you can marry her.
    • Since Linus never goes to town outside of cutscenes and events, it's nearly impossible to get caught going into a Dumpster Dive by him. 1.3 added the Night Market, which he does have to cross town to go to. He has a different reaction to seeing you elbow-deep in a trash can.
    • YouTube personality DangerouslyFunny is a goldmine of these, and either finds them himself or demonstrates them a lot. To wit:
    • Update 1.5 added chatbox reprimands for naming yourself an item code.
    • Making your character's favorite thing "Stardew" or "ConcernedApe" yields unique messages when you get a Stardrop (the normal message is "the taste reminds you of [Thing]").
      You found a Stardrop! It's strange, but the taste reminds you of... ConcernedApe?! Well, thanks, I guess!
      You found a Stardrop! You feel a profound connection to the valley itself.
    • If you didn't take the bus to Calico Desert but need to take it back to Pelican Town, Pam won't be there to drive it. So you are shown in the driver's seat!
  • In Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom, if you customize your loadout with leech cannons and then leach the boss to zero, then the following cinematic FMV actually has a different prerendered CGI shot of the boss adrift incapacitated rather than being destroyed. To spend the budget to prerender a CGI shot for an obscure play approach was unexpected.

    Sports Games 
  • Rusty's Real Deal Baseball fully expects you to progress the story by haggling down the prices of the Microtransactions for the minigames, using various in-game items that can solve the myriad of issues in Rusty's personal life. Because of this, choosing to instead pay full price for a game without using any items brings up a special series of cutscenes in which Rusty receives the relevant items anyways from Pappy van Poodle, a mentor character who is otherwise unmentioned until the epilogue and who happens upon the items himself, giving them to Rusty either as gifts or because he has no need for them. This ensures that the main story is still able to progress as intended even if the player refuses to cooperate with it.
  • Backyard Sports: In any Humongous version of Backyard Baseball or Soccer, Pablo Sanchez can be put on a team that uses black as its main color. During gameplay, Pablo normally will, at random points, say "¡Vamos [team color]!". However, given that the normal, correct Spanish word for "black", "negro", is not so politically-correct if heard by an English speaker, Pablo will instead opt to say "¡Vamos Equipo!" (Go Team!)

    Stealth-Based Games 
  • After completing a Child Liberation side mission in Assassin's Creed Syndicate you're given a short cutscene. If there were any guards left alive after freeing the last group of children, the cutscene shows your Rooks beating them up while the kids run for safety. If you eliminated all the guards beforehand, it instead shows the Rooks calmly reassuring them and walking with them out of the factory.
  • Hitman:
    • Blood Money:
      • In "Till Death Do Us Part", the developers added an extra cutscene where disguising as the priest during the wedding lets you tie the knot for your target.
      • "Till Death Do Us Part" takes place in a rural swamp estate in Mississippi. At the start of the mission you see a group of poachers shooting gators in the swamp for sport. If you join in the shooting, they have specific dialog for it. This is the only mission in the game where NPC's will not be alarmed by the sounds of gunshots, as long as they don't see anyone actually get hit.
      • "Curtains Down" allows you to sabotage a production of Tosca during rehearsals. The hinted method is to replace the prop gun with a real one, but a well-timed shot from out of sight will also count. However, the developers also foresaw the player getting reckless with this — the prop gunshot is part of the opera's soundtrack, and anyone who hears 47's gunshot will still investigate the source. The same trick applies to the wedding ceremony in "Till Death Do Us Part", where if you shoot the target during his wedding ceremony when all of the men draw guns and fire them into the air to celebrate and time your shot with theirs, they will react with confusion and the death will be counted as an accident.
    • The World of Assassination Trilogy has many of these moments. If 47 can disguise himself as a person of interest, he will almost always has some sort of interaction that shows off relevant skills, and the developers went out of their way to try and cover as many instances of weird player behaviour as they could:
      • If a witness reaches a guard, they will accurately describe whatever 47 was wearing at the time of the crime. Guards will also share the details over their headsets, although this doesn't seem to create new extra-aware guards or witnesses.
      • NPC's seem to have slightly different lines depending on how many bodies they discover in one spot. Similarly, the lines will be different if the player stole the victim's clothes.
      • Guards will see through ledge "accidents" if the target was killed before you threw the body off. However, pushing a conscious target or throwing an unconscious body down will be treated as an accident.
      • While the developers chose not to add car batteries to the levels from 2016 (likely for balance purposes), they still went through them to make sure previously unusable water sources work with electricity in case you take a taser-type item with you. A notable example is the large spring bath in Hokkaido, where 47 can fry everyone relaxing in it (five people by default).
      • Shooting Maya Parvati's prosthetic arm in Colorado won't do any damage to her.
      • In "World of Tomorrow" The Bag of Gunpowder can be detonated by Silvio Caruso's cigarette.
      • In "World of Tomorrow", if Francesca's wine is spiked with emetic poison and she finishes vomiting, she will have different dialogue for ending her date.
      • Waking up Sal Falcone in Sapienza after eliminating Francesca De Santis has him annoyed at being told to hurry up when Francesca doesn't answer her phone, feeling slightly miffed the latter didn't have the same courtesy.
      • Shooting someone with glasses in the eye adds a crack to the lense(s) (although the head won't have a bullethole in it). Likewise, shooting through several glass surfaces adds a bullet hole to each one.
      • Just like in "Situs Inversus", there is a heart for a heart transplant near the mortuary in subsequent Hokkaido missions, and you're able to destroy it, but if you do so, you get a "Non-Target Killed" penalty as the heart is for a non-target.
      • In "Club 27", you can find a soundproof recording booth used by Jordan Cross for when he sings during the band sessions, and if you enter it and shut the door, it will cut out all outside sounds and dialogue. The reverse (silencing the inside of the recording booth) isn't true, however.
      • You can use any poison to ruin Soders' stem cells; while sedative poison doesn't appear anywhere on the level, if you bring some in with you, it'll have the same effect as any other poison for this opportunity.
      • Most targets who have phones that can be used to draw them out (such as Roberto Vargas and Francesca De Santis) have a voicemail message, just in case the player decides to ring them when they're dead or pacified.
      • Sparks from generators (or really, any source) can cause broken fire extinguishers and propane flasks to explode.
      • If 47 is wearing a security disguise, NPC's will sometimes report crimes to him if he's the only guard in the near vicinity. They'll then note that he isn't co-operating, and seek out other guards (but fortunately don't mention 47).
      • You can kill Sierra Knox by electrocuting the champagne puddle that results from her drinking from the trophy.
      • The Kronstadt Consumer Android in the expo hall has different responses depending on what disguise 47 is wearing when he approaches it. Almost all of the prominent outfits that 47 can disguise as in the level have unique dialog attached, and in different ways too. There's even suit-specific dialog for the Corky the Clown outfit that isn't found in the level. Some outfits, like the Medic outfit and any of the racing outfits are only used on the other side of the map, and there's not ever a reason to visit the expo dressed as these people, but you will get dialog from them all the same.
      • You are able to throw a remote explosive onto the racetrack in Miami's "The Finish Line" to kill Sierra Knox, and will be considered an accident.
      • In "Three-Headed Serpent", the conversation and events that occur while disguised as P-Power change based on whether or not the bodyguard and/or Catalina Delgado are present, and you can sneak into the compound to perform the tattoo without having to talk to the latter.
      • In "Another Life", if a flyer is put in Cassidy's mailbox, he'll eventually meet with Charles Blake III.
      • The dislodged section of Savalas's office window in "Golden Handshake" functions like a falling object, and thus can kill an NPC if they happen to be underneath the window when it's pushed off. In fact, if you position 47 correctly, it's possible for him to be crushed to death as well.
      • In Ambrose Island's "Shadows in the Water" mission, obtaining the uplink access keys nullifies the need to destroy the control unit, as it becomes a worthless paperweight, but it can still be destroyed anyway. Grey will call 47 a show-off if he does this but congratulates him for being thorough.
      • The torches in both "The Ark Society" and "The Farewell" will ignite any oil or gas it comes into contact with.
      • In "The Ark Society", there are several unique interactions in the Lie Detector test that Zoe Washington sets up. Depending on how you answer, it’s possible to admit to having no loyalty to Janus or the Washington twins, causing Zoe to be impressed by 47 being a lone wolf and allowing him into the Ark Society, or she'll act strange and get rejected. It’s also possible for Zoe to unmask 47 as an assassin, immediately turning the level into a hostile area.
      • In "End of an Era", The masked variant of the Elite Facility Guard disguise, which only appears after the ICA facility goes into lockdown, does not count towards the "Chameleon" challenge, likely as it serves no purpose for the player (everyone is an enforcer if you manage to get the disguise), and it is quite tricky to obtain anyway, especially since the idea is to avoid them.
      • In Mendoza's "The Farewell", one of the winery workers makes a comment about Valentina Yates (wife of Don Yates, the primary target of the mission) being a vegan. If asado is served, Valentina's seat is the only one missing a cut of meat.
      • After Don Yates' speech in "The Farewell" he will mention Ken Morgans' death to a patron at the party, and then Valentina will mention that they had adopted Kens' dog, Pickles, when Ken died. This isn't a name that's been made up for the level, if 47 holds Ken at gunpoint in "Club 27", he will mention Pickles in a bid to let 47 spare his life.
      • If you assassinate Tamara Vidal in "The Farewell", flood the distillery, and then change back into your suit, then go to Diana as she observes Yates chew his staff out, Diana will have a unique conversation with 47 about the accident being a "waste of wine".
      • If you kill Don Yates at the beginning of "The Farewell" before talking to Diana, when Diana asks 47 to take him out, 47 will quip that he's way ahead of her.
      • Losing the rusty crowbar in "Untouchable" is impossible as it will always respawn in the same room, in order to prevent narrative and gameplay soft locking where the player cannot proceed.
      • Both "Greed" and "Pride" escalations have a bunch of this, in the former you are able to take coins from non-marked targets, likely to prevent soft locking, and the latter has the narrator respond to specific actions by 47, such as choosing between the easy and hard paths each time, which may not come naturally to a Hitman player.
  • Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun:
    • Enemies that are seen to die in perceived "accidents" will not raise an alarm. This includes dropping boulders or icicles on them, pushing them off cliffs, or provoking oxen into kicking them.
    • If you knock a guard unconscious and another one finds him, he will wake him up and raise an alarm. However, if the guard comes to on his own and doesn't find anyone around, then he won't raise an alarm out of shame of being knocked out.
    • If a guard's route involves them speaking to another guard or civilian and that person disappears, the guard will return and become suspicious and take a look around.
    • Dialogue changes if you do things in an unusual order. For example in Mission 4, finding the secret passages before you rescue Takuma will cause your characters to mention that they already know about them. Mugen's dialogue will similarly change in Mission 7 if you save the villagers and then him.
    • Each character has their own Bond One-Liner if they are the one to kill the Big Bad. This includes Takuma, who requires the somewhat improbable process of knocking said Big Bad unconscious and then moving him into a spot where Takuma can get a clear shot.
    • Likewise in the standalone expansion Aiko's Choice, the final mission has Aiko entering the hidden sanctum of Lady Chiyo's fortress alone to assassinate her old mentor personally - in other words, the level is intentionally set up so Aiko is the only one who can enter the final area to do the deed. But if you manage to arrange things so someone else kills Chiyo instead (for example luring her out and having Takuma snipe her) then you get a special achievement ("What's Done is Done") and there will be a special dialogue between Aiko and the character who made the kill.
Takuma: I know this is not the ending you wanted, Aiko. Please forgive me.
  • Sheep, Dog 'n' Wolf: In level 13, though very difficult, it is technically possible to get past the mine field without the use of the metal detector. Since the metal detector is needed for obtaining the gold coins to lure Yosemite Sam into the jail later on in the level, there is a second metal detector in the jail.
  • Early in Splinter Cell: Double Agent Version 2 (The one on Gamecube and PS2), you can access an email from Enrica to Jamie cautioning him to watch his stress levels due to his heart condition and his pacemaker. If you remember this in the final mission and decide to take a shot at him with the OCP attachment, it will indeed short out his pacemaker and take him down. He is the only enemy in the game that is vulnerable to the OCP.
  • In Splinter Cell: Conviction, the new, improved takedowns include slamming a hostage's head against the wall. If you do this in front of a light switch, the Player Character slams the hostage's face into it. This turns the lights off.
  • Yandere Simulator: Multiple:
    • If a club leader sees you commit murder, they won't allow you in their club, and have a specific line for it. It's very unlikely that Budo Masuta or Itachi Zametora would survive to bar you from their clubs, as they are Heroes and will attempt to apprehend you directly (which can only end in their deaths or you getting a Game Over), but they both have voiced lines for the situation.
    • The headmaster has a voiced reaction for you sneaking up to him while wearing the cardboard box.
    • It's really unlikely that you could take a Panty Shot of Nemesis-chan without her killing you in the process, but if you do, Info-chan has lines for it.
    • It's worth noting that the latter two were added in response to the Let's Players who managed to bring those situations up when they were first implemented without the special reaction.

    Strategy 
  • If you use an Action Replay to boost the experience gained in Disgaea DS, the game will adapt the characters leveled up in this fashion so that they need to more than double their total EXP gained just to go up one more level — essentially forcing you to keep using that cheat just to level up at the normal rate. Of course, by the time it figures it out (which varies from character to character), you could already have your characters' levels in the 4000s (usually, it figures it out by around 2300 or so).
  • Fanmade BattleTech translation Megamek allows some of the various vanishingly small opportunities in the native wargame to occur, including a Mutual Kill (which is difficult since rarely will two sides simultaneously and completely destroy one another). When it happens though, it is able to not only recognize the fact that both sides lost, but announce that the winner is "the Chicago Cubs!!!".
  • The remakes of Disgaea 2 added several DLC characters. Depending on when you acquire these extra characters, there will be bonus dialogue depending on who is available. Some examples:
    • Acquiring Dark Éclair normally has her bond with Rozalin in the story scene afterwards, but if you have Overlord Priere by that time, Dark Éclair and Priere will have a conversation comparing notes.
    • Ash and Marona get alternate dialogue depending on whom was summoned first. If Marona was summoned first, she proves a bit grossed out by Ash, whom was forced to confine himself to a plunger. If Ash was summoned first, he proves wary of Marona, thinking her a duplicate due to her summoning materials being Taro's game and save data.
  • In Galactic Civilizations II, there is a specific endgame screen that triggers only if you deliberately supernova your last inhabited star system.
    Worker Salaries: 4500 bc
    Raw Materials: 125,000 bc
    Propulsion System and Fuel: 5500 bc
    Death Beam: 10,000 bc
    Blowing up your own homeworld with a Terror Star: priceless.
  • In Hard West, the only available weapons in the game are firearms; there are no fistfight mechanics. What happens if you enter a tactical encounter with a character who doesn't have any weapon equipped? He receives a special gun named the "Rusty Peashooter", which is a sixshooter revolver inflicting 1 point of damage per shot.
  • Mental Omega: Used to make sure the player can't Dungeon Bypass or that missions play out as intended.
    • Hamartia (Allied 24):
      • A ways into the mission, the allied Boomerang Division base to the south-west will be levelled by an army of mind-controlled Russian and Latin Confederation forces, who will bring in an MCV to begin building their own base. If the player is quick enough in building their own army they can prevent this from happening, but the game will simply spawn waves of armoured Russian reinforcements with a fresh MCV as long as they don't have a Construction Yard.
      • A wave of mind-controlled Allied forces will attack the player's base from behind, with Lionheart bombers severely damaging but not destroying their Construction Yard. It gets Chronolifted back to the Paradox Engine soon after, with intel stating that it's too badly damaged to keep in the field. If the player manages to protect their Construction Yard with the Force Shield power or by shooting down the bombers, the intel message is changed to the Construction Yard being in too much danger and it's Chronolifted back anyway, with the player's own Chronolift not working on their Conyard if they try to use it themselves.
      • Despite the massive odds and size of the defending Epsilon base surrounding the Mental Omega Tower, it is possible for the player to finish off the defenders and attack the tower directly. However, because the Allies are supposed to lose the mission and fail to destroy the Mental Omega, it will stop taking damage after it hits 70% health, though the player is given one free use of the Domination Support Power if they pull it off.
      • Reinforcements from the Paradox Engine are available as a Support Power throughout the mission. Since the final phase is a desperate last push against Epsilon with all of the Allies' remaining forces, the Reinforcements Power will stop working after 60 uses since they've got no one else.
      • During the phase involving protecting the Weather Controllers, the player can save the one closest to the Epsilon defenders even though Libra is expected to destroy it quickly. if they do this, then the mind-controlled Barracuda squadron that spawns in to attack the Weather Controller in the player's base will target the other Controller first, then the player's. If the player uses Force Shield to save the Weather Controller, a second wave of bombers will spawn in to ensure it's taken out.
      • The off-map mind-controlled Kirov and Barracuda waves that target the Weather Controllers are all scripted to take far less damage than normal until they've reached their targets, to ensure that all of the Weather Controllers are destroyed like they're supposed to be.
    • Fatal Impact (Soviet 23): The innermost three Spatha Defense Systems the player has to destroy are located in a heavily defended fortress and will be shielded by Iron Curtains once the player gets close enough, with the player expected to upgrade Volkov in a Psionic Converter to allow his weapons to pierce the Iron Curtain's protection. Should the player try and use a Nuclear Missile to take them out, an off-map Iron Curtain will shield the Spatha Systems to make sure the player has to do things the hard way.
    • Death's Hand (Soviet 24): The Hands of Ereshkigal Yuri deploys against the player and their Soviet allies are completely invulnerable, intended to put the mission on a soft time limit since they'll slowly demolish the allied bases and then the player's. If they're destroyed by any means before the scripted event, the mission ends in failure instantly.
    • Hamartia and Babel are quite unique to the campaigns in that they're a Perspective Flip of the exact same battle, pitting the Allied and Epsilon Player Character against each other. The AI enemies in this battle are thus coded to employ a typical player strategy for greater immersion: massing air units. Hamartia sees the Epsilon AI throwing waves of Invaders and Basilisks (supplemented by mind-controlled Thors, Rocketeers, Kirovs, Wolfhounds and Vultures in the defense phase) at you, while Babel sees the Allied AI attacking you with groups of Rocketeers, Thors and Warhawks.
  • Pikmin:
    • The series has a hard limit of 100 maximum Pikmin in the field. Someone will make note of common ways the limit is kept if they occur, such as grown Pikmin being stored away when there are already 100 on the field. However, there are also times when a Pikmin is automatically placed into the field, usually when an Onion releases the first seed of a type of Pikmin after discovering or extincting it, and the game will forcefully put the farthest Pikmin from that location back in its Onion if needed. Additionally, when entering a cave in the second game, Pikmin that aren't buried or with the leaders are put back in their Onions. In a few caves, it is possible to obtain more Pikmin, and those extra Pikmin will be automatically put away if they exceed the limit due to buried Pikmin on the surface.
    • Candypop Buds turn Pikmin of one type in to Pikmin of another. Normally, they are not encountered until after already meeting the Pikmin of their type (and getting their respective Onion, which stores them), but they are programmed to not spawn should the player go over to an area they would be through glitches or hacks. This is to prevent having Pikmin without an Onion to store them in.
    • Pikmin 2: The Submerged Castle can only be reached by Blue Pikmin, as the entrance to that dungeon is underwater. The main boss in that dungeon needs Purple Pikmin to be defeated. But if you try to hack the game and allow Purple Pikmin to access water, the game will flat-out tell you that only Blue Pikmin can enter the dungeon.
    • Pikmin 3: Due to the more story-driven areas, there are invisible walls set up to prevent Sequence Breaking in a lot of places, though some can be avoided. Notably, one is placed on top of the blue Onion to prevent unlocking Blue Pikmin early by going out of bounds and reaching a part of the area normally inaccessible until a plot-based event late in the game.
  • In Starcraft II:
    • The Hydralisk and Roach are normally ranged attackers, but when attacking enemies in melee range, they use a different attack animation where they slash at the target with their claws. While it's largely cosmetic as the melee attack has exactly the same properties as the normal attack, it also ignores Point-Defense Drones, which only work against ranged attacks.
    • Wings of Liberty:
      • Two missions have specific objectives that are not "destroy the enemy base". If you do destroy the enemy base in these missions, you get a special announcement from Matt Horner that the enemy is in full retreat, and are given the victory immediately since it's now impossible for the enemy to stop you from achieving your goal. Later expansions actually give achievements for doing this sort of thing.
      • The player can watch a news broadcast after every mission. Many of these broadcasts are changed after completing Media Blitz, due to Arcturus Mengsk's crimes in the first game being revealed to public.
    • Heart of the Swarm:
      • In the tutorial of the campaign, Valerian Mengsk is testing the newly dezergified Kerrigan to see if she can still control the Zerg. Your objective is to trash the lab to teach him a lesson. If instead of zerglings you try to do so with drones, Valerian will express his confusion.
      • In one the cinematics Kerrigan is seen chilling with her favorite zergling. Its appearence will vary depending on whether you have completed the Zergling Evolution Mission prior and which permanent mutation you chose for your zerglings there.
      • The dialogue during Char and Kaldir story arcs will change if put off until after Zerus. In fact, there is a different final cinematic for Char if it is done after Zerus.
      • If the story calls for Kerrigan's dialogue, her portrait and voice will be different if Kerrigan is currently regenerating in a cocoon.
    • Legacy of the Void:
      • Artanis' appearance changes after Zeratul's death - Artanis replaces one of his psi-blades with Zeratul's warp blade. This change is reverted after the campaign ends - Artanis uses the warp blade as a Weapon Tombstone and resumes dual wielding psi-blades in the epilogue. This applies both in-game and in the menu.
      • During the third mission, Zealots will have a unique model with their nerve-cords severed. This is the only time this particular model is used, as Zealots are replaced with factional variants afterwards.
      • Fenix has unique voice lines for being deployed during Unsealing the Past, since in that mission he acts as a Mission Control. In addition, everything reference to him changes once he changes his name to Talandar.
      • Rohana's dialogue during the final mission of the main campaign changes depending on which Spear of Adun powers were chosen.
    • Co-op Mode:
      • Taking certain commanders on certain maps will alter the dialogue - specifically Alarak on Chain of Ascension (the Mission Control is Alarak's subordinate), Stetmann on Mist Opportunities (the Mission Control is Stetmann himself), and Vorazun on Scythe of Amon (the Mission Control is explicitly there because Vorazun sent him to scout the situation).
      • Speaking of Alarak and Chain of Ascension, on this particular mission his unit rank is changed from "Highlord" to "Challenger".
    • Nova Covert Ops:
      • During the third mission, there is unique dialogue if Nova ventures too close to the zerg bases.
      • During the seventh mission, there are many, many different paths and methods to proceed, so that just about every loadout variation for Nova can complete it.
  • Super Robot Wars OG:
    • The games have sets of dialog for any character piloting any mech (except in cases where characters have their own specific, exclusive one), occasionally with some humorous results.
    • Additionally, an early scenario in OG2 has the player, with only four units, being ambushed by three boss units. However, with persistence, a player can beat them, resulting in a Breaking the Fourth Wall moment and rewarding the player with various powerful items.
    • If players inputted the same cheat code from Super Robot Wars EX that lets players use the Neo Granzon right off the bat in Dark Prison, then some of the conversations and scenes will change. This does come with the consequence of not witnessing the Granzon's awesome transition into the Neo Granzon.
  • Super Robot Wars Z has many such instances. For example, The Big O is a ground unit which has melee attacks which do not work against aerial opponents, but if you attach a "Minovsky Drive" which allows it to fly and use these attacks, you see that they have specialized, completely unique animations for mid-air use. Lampshades the whole idea with the ground-only Iron Gear (WM)'s punch attack — if it's given some way to attack aerial foes, it won't use its boosters to jump up. Rather, it just kinda floats up, perfectly in key with its source.
  • Total War
    • Rome: Total War:
      • Fight next to a city and you'll be able to see it almost entirely on the battle map. Fight near the ocean with a fleet nearby, and you can see the ships on the edge of the map, in the background. Fight next to one of the Wonders and you'll see it in the distance. Fight a battle in Sicily, and you'll see Mt. Etna spewing smoke on the horizon. Rome is the first game in the series that introduces the concept of buildings catching fire and collapsing into piles of rubble if they're heavily damaged by siege weapons.
      • One shared with Medieval II: Total War as well - Nearly anything your Generals do can earn them a new trait or ancillary. Have a general visit or become governor to a town with an Arena? He may become a fan of the games. Leave a General between cities at the end of a turn? He might gain a trait regarding logistics. Have a General regularly fight armies of a particular faction? He may earn a trait that has him hate that particular faction and get a bonus commanding against them. Hire mercenaries often? He may get a mercenary captain in the retinue. Govern a city with a temple? He may get a priest of that temple in his retinue. This even applies to agents and naval captains.
      • Before most battles, the commander of the army will give a speech. If the army is commanded by a captain (no general is present in the army) the speech will be very short, along the lines of "let's kill them, men", while an actual general will treat the player to a longer speech. The content of the speech will depend on a large variety of things, including: the faction you're playing, the faction you're facing, which side has the numerical advantage, if the general has fought, won or lost against the faction before and how large a portion of the total military strength of both factions is present. Even some traits the generals may have will affect the speech, in addition to the effects they have on the general's stats, so a Boring Speaker will stutter a lot and be uninspiring in general, while a Great Speaker's speech makes even the player excited. The most experienced generals will even analyze the composition of the forces present, such as which side has more missiles, cavalry, etc., and give the player advice on how he should approach the battle. Becomes Fridge Brilliance when the player's army is on defense and the general says something on the lines of "the enemy will make the first move, I think"; the attacking army is supposed to make the first move, but the buggy A.I. will occasionally fail to do so, which the in-game characters seem to acknowledge.

    Survival Horror 
  • 2Dark: A lot of the little things can trigger their own responses. For instance, in the final level, there's a child guarded by two nameless, hooded members of Krach's cult. Killing just one and having the other discover the body leads to him remarking "You want to save the kids, Smith, right? Let me make that task easier for you by one." and he heads straight to kill the child unless you can thwart him in time.
  • Alien: Isolation:
    • If you turn on the light inside the vent while following Axel in Mission 2, he will quickly tell you to turn it off as you are approaching a grate from which a patrol of looters might notice you.
    • In the Crew Expendable DLC if you lure the alien into the rooms with the windows showing Parker/Dallas or Lambert on the other side, they will obviously hide until the creature is gone to avoid drawing its attention (Dallas/Ripley in the third room will stay on his place instead, ignored by the alien).
  • Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth: There's a moment where Jack needs to access a ladder locked on a ceiling by shooting its lock. Doing it under the ladder makes it fall on Jack and badly injure him.
  • Eternal Darkness has a few examples involving spellcasting. If you have the bright idea of using the Recover spell with Ulyaoth to replenish your mana faster, you'll see that it indeed works... except it only recovers as much mana as it took to cast. Later, as Michael, you can use the Enchant Item spell on his portable flashlight to change the color of its beam to match the Ancient fueling the spell.
  • FEAR 2: Project Origin:
    • You start the game in a parking lot. If you shoot at a nearby car for the heck of it, your squadmate tells you to stop ("hey, it's not your car!"). A short while later, you meet with your superior, who asks why you're late; your squadmate says "Becket was busy vandalizing shit". He has different responses if you jump in the fountain ("Becket decided to take a bath in the fountain") or just take a long time doing nothing ("Becket was busy admiring the scenery").
    • One firefight later in the game takes place in an elementary school's auditorium, with several wooden props set up for a play. The soldiers you fight will actively call out which prop you choose to take cover behind, with a special message if you pick the donkey: "The ass! He's behind the ass! Shoot the ass!"
  • The final stalker in his second form in Haunting Ground can't be hidden from under normal circumstances. If you possess a special item that makes you invisible, however, and manage to tuck yourself away in the one corner out of his line of sight long enough to give yourself time for that invisibility to activate, he will still have unique lines recorded suggesting you're hiding from him.
  • As Boundary Break discovered by hacking the camera to move it freely, Mr. X in Resident Evil 2 (Remake) is always somewhere in the station hunting you. Even when he's nowhere near you he still makes all the proper movements, opens doors to examine rooms, swats zombies out of his way, and even reacts appropriately when he hears a gunshot.
  • If you enter the final boss battle in either Silent Hill or Silent Hill 2 without any ammunition for your ranged weapons (which are necessary to defeat the final bosses in question), or run out during the battle, the boss will start to take damage of its own accord until it dies, allowing the game to be won.
  • If you find a glitch and fall outside the boundaries of the level in Slender: The Arrival you die and text from the Slender Man appears at the bottom of the screen saying "even a glitch in the game can't save you from me."
  • In Subnautica, repairing the radio in your escape pod or building one in your base lets you contact a nearby spaceship for help, only for them to be destroyed the same way the Aurora was, thereby leading you into the game's main plot. However, if you put off repairing/rebuilding the radio until after curing the plague and disabling the Quarantine Enforcement Platform, the Sunbeam instead reports that they can't get through the orbital debris from the Aurora's destruction.
  • It is normally impossible to complete Sweet Home (1989) with only one party member alive. However, you can complete the game if the Final Boss reduces your party down to one... and you'll get a unique ending for it.
  • In Ultimate Custom Night, Scott Cawthon declared 50/20 Mode to be impossible, but programmed in an 'UNBEATABLE!' victory screen just in case. Good thing he did, because it was only a few weeks before Rhemery became the first person to beat 50/20 mode. Of course, Scott has had previous experience with people beating Harder Than Hard modes that he couldn't, starting way back with BigBug's victory over the original 20/20/20/20 mode, so no wonder he was Genre Savvy this go-around.

    Third-Person Shooter 
  • Chapter 3 of Kid Icarus: Uprising revolves around Pit fighting a three-headed hydra and chasing its disembodied heads. The order you take out its heads determines which "role" each of the heads will play in the land portion of the chapter, and each head has unique dialogue for each "role".
  • Max Payne 2:
    • The first non-prologue area involves the investigation of a warehouse area. One of the private cleaners of the site insists on letting you in and showing you to the main storage area, at which point he and several of his underlings ambush you and the real violence begins. Unless, of course, you already know what's going to happen. You can simply kill him upon your first encounter.
      Max: [monologuing] The perp's disguise didn't fool me. He was leading me into a trap.
    • Any stage that allows you to roam around in one way or another supplies you with many little sweets, some dialogue, and some actual animations:
  • In Max Payne 3, Max can carry one large rifle or shotgun and two smaller weapons. Max will realistically carry his longarm in his off hand due to the lack of a sling, even during cutscenes. And if Max needs to go Guns Akimbo, he has to drop the long gun. The game even edits cutscenes to take account of whether or not Max entered the scene carrying a rifle and has to put it down or have it taken.
  • Spec Ops: The Line has unique voice lines when you use squad commands, depending on where the enemies are. Order a flashbang on a bunch of enemies hiding in a bus, and Walker will say "Empty that bus!" In a shootout in a museum with a T-Rex skeleton, he'll say "Take out that guy by the T-Rex!". Adams and Lugo will also shout out enemy locations in the same way.
  • Splatoon:
    • On any stage featuring platforms with propellers on them, shooting said propellers will move those platforms and ink will rebound off of the propellers in the process. The damage that the propelled ink causes is negligible, but can finish off an enemy who is really, really low on health. If this happens to the player in an online match, the game will declare that you've been "splatted by ink from a propeller!" (Or "Splatted by propeller ink!" in later entries.)
    • In the first two games, rematching the Final Boss of the main story is actually a Here We Go Again! scenario with more comedic and laidback dialogue throughout due to the somewhat reduced stakes. Splatoon 3 similarly gives different introduction dialogue for the first three bosses of its main campaign, with your opponents now treating it as a friendly sparring match.
    • Characters will often make unique comments for certain player actions and accomplishments. For example, the third game has Cap'n Cuttlefish asking if you lost your wallet if you backtrack to a previous kettle in the Crater, and your Mission Control praises you if you manage to beat the level "Conserve Ink-Splat Sustainably" without firing any ink at all.
    • Splatoon 2:
      • If you try to enter Octo Canyon as an Octoling upon completing the Octo Expansion campaign, you will automatically change into an Inkling upon arrival (since Agent 4 is supposed to be an Inkling). The same applies for if you try to enter Deepsea Metro as an Inkling, as that's the Octoling Agent 8's storyline.
      • If you try scanning the amiibo for Callie and Marie amiibo before completing the second game's Hero Mode, they instead show letters from the two about how they're in the middle of something.
      • Since the Octo Canyon can be played with any weapon after being completed with its intended one, some will have modified layouts to still make them beatable, such as Stage 6 adding extra blocks to platforms so you can still reach the Grapplinks without the Charger.
      • Nintendo caught on that dataminers uncovered post-Splatfest dialogue before their respective Splatfests are completed in the first two games. So for the Final Fest of 2, they put more generic placeholder dialogue that only says who won, with the more fleshed out conversation only being implemented into the game's data closer to its conclusion.
    • Splatoon 3:
      • During a Splatfest, you cannot challenge any member of the band performing in that hub (Shiver, Frye, and Big Man in Splatsville; Agent 1/Callie and Agent 2/Marie in Inkopolis Plaza; Pearl and Marina in Inkopolis Square) to a Tableturf Battle, with the attendant remarking that they're not available. You can only challenge them by taking the train to one of the other hubs.
      • When scanning in an amiibo of a Deep Cut member, they have different dialogue depending on if you did it in Splatsville or one of the Inkopolis hubs.
      • If you have Color Lock on, the boss of Site 2, Frye, will not only have their ink be blue instead of yellow, their tentacles and clothes will be too.
      • There's unique dialogue if you let the time run out in the Salmon Run tutorial without hitting the egg quota (something you have to intentionally do). Mr. Grizz jokes about rethinking your future at the company before automatically bumping you up to the quota and ending the tutorial.
      • Mudmouths have a unique icon and "splatted by" text in case you manage to get yourself killed by their Collision Damage. You have to go out of your way for this to happen, considering they are completely stationary and harmless except for the Lesser Salmonids they spit out. The same goes for Chinooks, which appear during only one event type, never directly attack players, and can only deal Scratch Damage.
      • Mr. Grizz has a unique line of dialogue if the crew wipes or runs out of time without putting even a single Golden Egg in the basket, which is extremely unlikely to happen even on higher Hazard Levels.
    • Splatoon 3: Side Order:
      • Replaying the first climb or revisiting the tutorial boss will automatically change your Palette to Pearl's if it wasn't already, since these events take place before you get any other Palettes.
      • If you attempt to replay the final boss using Eight's Palette with the Octo Shot, the game will automatically swap your Palette with Agent 4's Splattershot since you weren't supposed to have Eight's Palette by that point.
      • The game expects you to use the Color Wail to defeat the Overlorder during the climatic final fight, but if you choose to simply shoot it until it dies, you will get alternate dialogue from the cast acknowledging your choice to tough it out.
  • Transformers: Fall of Cybertron:
    • While playing as Starscream, the player can find a crown and have him wear it for the rest of the level as an Easter Egg. During a cutscene towards the end of the level, Starscream gets thrown into a wall and knocked out by Grimlock before player control switches to Grimlock; if Starscream is still wearing the crown at this point, it gets knocked off by Grimlock's throw and accidentally crushed when Grimlock walks past.
    • Shortly after Grimlock gets loose, the various Decepticon guards will attack you... but the unarmed scientists and workers actually working at the facility will run away, duck for cover, or simply freeze up out of fear. Some of the guards will also choose to flee instead of fighting, as they know how much more dangerous you are.
    • Early in the game Optimus passes by Grimlock's quarters, where Warpath was just searching for him. If you go inside (which you have no reason to do and wouldn't probably think of, given there's an attack going on) and look at the morbid stuff he has in there (weapon racks, a locker filled with heads, etc.), than Optimus will make some weary comments about Grimlock's violent nature. You can also turn on the TV in the room and sit down to watch it; doing so gets you a nasty comment from Ironhide over your radio chewing you out for not getting to the battlefield when you're needed.
    • When Megatron confronts Starscream, a button prompt tells the player to press the fire button to "shut Starscream up". If you hold off on firing instead, a surprised Starscream proceeds to go into a lengthy rant about how he's the better leader of the Decepticons while waiting for you to shoot him. Similarly, if you linger a bit instead of walking away immediately after beating Kickback, he'll make fun of you for sticking around.
    • When you confront Shockwave as Grimlock, if you listen in on Shockwave and Megatron's conversation instead of attacking right away like the game expects, the two continue their fully scripted conversation and exchange some private information the player won't otherwise hear because the two think they're alone.

    Tower Defense 
  • Plants vs. Zombies 2: It's About Time: Snap Pea is a plant that eats zombies whole, then spits their head out as a projectile. Medusa Zombie is a zombie that turns hypnotized zombies or zomboids facing her into stone obstacles. If Snap Pea eats a Medusa Zombie and spits out her head, the projectile will turn any zombies near the point of impact into stone.

    Turn-Based Strategy 
  • Advance Wars
    • All the games (except for Days of Ruin) starts the campaign with a training mission with predeployed units and a simple "defeat all enemy units" strategy. These are virtually impossible to lose without specifically trying, though there is helpful dialogue if you somehow manage to do so. If you keep moving your units around until they're all out of fuel (there's no properties to resupply you), the instructing CO will chew out the newer one for intentionally wasting resources just to see what would happen.
      • From the second game:
        Nell: Andy! What in the world? Your units are out of fuel!!!
        Andy: I, um...I though I saw something, and...
        Nell: Don't lie to me, young man! You were playing around, wasting time and fuel! I am VERY disappointed! Open up the Map menu and select Options, please! Now choose Yield, and we can try this over from the beginning.
        Andy: OK... I won't mess up again.
    • Nearly all of the "Survive for X turns" missions have unique dialogue if you actually manage to win early by rout or capture.
    • Days of Ruin has Mission 15: An Icy Retreat where Captain Brenner is holding off the enemy in a tank which is eventually destroyed mid-battle. Although it's basically impossible to win this match without losing that tank, the devs actually did account for it just in case: you get unique dialogue where Brenner tells his units to flee while he holds the enemy off for as long as he can.
  • Tactics Ogre:
    • Sometimes, units may be knocked off of cliffs by attacks. If there is nothing down there, that unit is removed from battle. But if they're a flying unit, they will fly back up if knocked off.
    • You are allowed to name your "order" in the remakes. In Reborn, it will prevent you from giving them any vulgar names.
  • The Battle For Wesnoth:
    • The first scenario of Descent into Darkness has Malin Keshar raising the dead to defend his hometown from an orcish attack, and then being exiled for practicing necromancy. However, if you won the battle without raising any, he instead leaves the town on his own.
  • XCOM 2 has a rare example of light discipline: in murkier maps, your soldiers will keep the flashlights on their weapons off while concealed. When revealed, they turn them on.

    Visual Novels 
  • For a series that often gets accused of the opposite, Ace Attorney actually offers quite a bit of this, particularly in the latter games.
    • The first case of the first game requires no pressing to finish, and the aspect of pressing is only brought up during the second case. However the "Press" option is still present in the controls and pressing it will have Phoenix questioning the witnesses as per normal.
    • In the final case of Justice For All, after clearing all of Matt Engarde's dialogue options after he reveals his true nature, he retires for the night. If you choose to meet with Engarde again, the jailer informs Phoenix that he's refusing to meet with him, and the game immediately cuts to Adrian in the detention center.
    • Some of the later games include special Non-Standard Game Over sequences for when you fail a trial at a point where a normal Guilty verdict would make no sense, but you still haven't solved the case yet. For example, during the final trial in Dual Destinies, at one point you will have proven that neither of the two suspects did it, but the true culprit's identity remains unknown. If you fail the segment where you indict Bobby Fulbright as another suspect, both Simon and Athena go free because Guilty Until Someone Else Is Guilty isn't actually a law in the Ace Attorney-verse, but they never get closure about the murder because they missed their chance during the UR-1 retrial and the suspect escaped.
    • For example, in Spirit of Justice, during the divination séance of Inga's final memories. You have a testimony from a witness, that was previously used to prove that the person the victim was talking to on the phone was in the bazaar, from the sounds that can be heard over the phone corresponding to events the witness claimed occurred in the bazaar. You then have to use that same testimony to point out that the assumed time the memories are occurring is wrong, as the witness claims the events occurred at around 2PM, while the TOD is put as 3PM. To do this the player must pinpoint a specific spot in the memories that correspond to the events from the testimony, the two main ones being the supposed "gunshot" and the laughter heard over the phone. If the player attempts to use the laughter they will get unique dialogue where it's pointed out that laughter is a common occurrence in a place like a bazaar. They also will not occur the usual penalty, due to being on the right track with their logic, before being returned to the séance.
    • And a minor example from the third game: In the section where you play as Edgeworth and talk to Iris for the first time, you'd typically ask the questions in order as laid out for you. Doing so triggers a Psyche-Lock, cluing Edgeworth in that Iris is hiding something. The next dialogue option has him directly ask Iris if she's the murderer, and Edgeworth figures out she's telling the truth because the psyche-locks are absent. However, if you ask her about being the murderer FIRST (without finding out about the psyche-locks) Edgeworth's internal monologue reveals he, rightfully at the time, has no way to actually know if she's lying or not.
  • Ballads at Midnight is fairly a linear romance game, but in chapter 4 the player character will have the opportunity to introduce herself to the vampire Lucius. This prompts a name-entry screen where the player can type in anything they want, but Lucius will have special reactions to referential names like "Dimitrescu," "Buffy," and "Dracula," seems to disapprove of most curse words, and will even forcibly rename the player if they insist on stealing his name before he introduces himself.
  • Coffee Talk:
    • There's more than one possible reaction towards incorrect orders depending on how badly you messed up in them. Some customers will tell you that it's not what they wanted, but at least it has the ingredients or flavor they requested.
    • In Episode 2, Lucas gives you his contact card and a fidget spinner with his number on it, and he requests you to give either of them to Riona on her next visit. You can give them to Rachel on her first visit, but she'll return them to you because she already knows and follows Lucas on Tomodachill. You can also give the fidget spinner to Gala on his first visit, which he'll use to entertain the hospital children. These special reactions count as secret achievements.
  • Doki Doki Literature Club! has several of these in it:
    • Sayori's suicide scene has a fake Ren'Py crash screen. If you check the game files after it appears, you can discover an actual traceback.txt file, which under usual circumstances is used to determine the cause of the crash. The end of this file features a hidden message from Monika.
    • After Monika deletes everyone before Act 3 starts, she will call you by your character's name, and then your OS profile's name. If you're currently streaming, however, she will only call you by your character's name and then admonish you for bringing an audience a little later, giving you a measure of privacy.
    • If you start a brand new game after deleting Monika's character file, the game starts with Sayori suddenly going insane and the game crashing, followed by her character file being deleted. If you open the game up again afterward (or delete Sayori's character file yourself), it just shows the image of her suicide in grayscale. The normal ending explains why this happens: Sayori, now president of the Literature Club, gains the knowledge about everything Monika did and knew. If Monika is deleted before you even start, Sayori gains knowledge that everything is just a visual novel. As Sayori becomes aware that she's in a game, it drives her insane.
    • If you try to reinsert Monika's character file into the game after she "resurrects" the other three, a message pops up from her telling you to stop playing with her heart, before the game erases it and continues as intended.
    • If you manage to load save files from a different "Act" than the one you're currently in (the video shows someone trying to view a scene from Act 2 while in Act 1), Monika will chastise the player for "cheating" and then send you back to the menu.
  • Ghost Trick offers several branching areas where you're allowed to travel over the phone lines to check out areas that aren't even crucial to your immediate task, but if you choose to, you're often given information that will come into play soon thereafter.
    • An early example involves Emma and her daughter Amelie, Lynne's neighbors who seem only tangentially related to the story. Later on, Amelie is kidnapped by the foreigners and held hostage as ransom against the justice minister... or so they claim. If you've been checking in on them during the night, and if you travel to see them during the ransom phone call in question, you see that it's all a bluff using a recorded message spliced together from the arguments Amelie has been having with Emma during the evening.
    • One of the areas in the game is normally unlocked by watching a phone call while undoing someone's death. If you manage to miss it Lynne will give you the phone number a bit later.
  • Pesterquest:
    • Vriska's route gives you the chance to come up with a character name when playing FLARP, which includes some easter eggs:
      • If you enter the names of Terezi, Aradia, Doc Scratch, or any variations of them, Vriska will push you into the water. There isn't even an ending card before the game fades back to the start screen.
      • If you choose Tavros or any variations, she'll say that name is "too wimpy".
      • If you name your character after any of the other Trolls, she say that's not original enough.
      • If you enter Vriska or Mindfang of any variations, she'll tell you that doubles aren't allowed.
      • If you choose "MSPA Reader", she'll accept it while saying that it's a strange name but it still suits you.
    • The credits show the name of the track for Terezi's route to be a QR code. Scanning it results in a message telling you to "CH3CK TH3 M3T4D4T4", where you'll find a message that says "oh wow you really checked."
    • In Tavros's route, the MSPA Reader and Vriska will remember the player class and name you chose in Vriska's route.
    • The music that plays in Aradia's route contains "Megalovania", and the credits list the track as being called "yeah, it is", intended as a response to people asking if that really is "Megalovania" they can hear. It can also be interpreted as a response to people saying the song is not Aradia's theme but Vriska's, since she was also involved in the scene from Homestuck where it plays.
  • XBlaze is set as a prequel to the rest of BlazBlue franchise, with XBlaze Lost: Memories showing two major characters at a very young age. The central one of the two contracts amnesia at the start of the story, allowing you to input a name for her. Try to input the name she is better known as, 'Nine', and the game will tell you 'The time has not come for that yet...'. It also vetoes names like Konoe, Phantom and various members of Nine's family.
  • Zero Escape series:
    • In Virtue's Last Reward, in order to unlock the door in an escape section, you need to get a key from within a safe, by unlocking said safe with a password. All your passwords you find are stored in the file screen, and after you've completed an escape section, you can replay it by selecting it on the flow chart. If you replay one of them, you'll be able to automatically open the safe by entering the password, thus bypassing the puzzles. If you do so, then there'll be unique conversations when you go to leave the room, particularly if there is something within the room and its puzzles relating to the plot. The same thing obviously happens if you happen to guess the password and input it without having found it. One particular example is in the lounge, where doing this will result in Phi stopping you from going through the door, and shouting a quick lecture on lunar eclipses at you, much to the confusion of protagonist Sigma.
    • Several in Zero Time Dilemma:
      • The player can type a number of answers for different choices, including the nonsensical. For example, after finding Mira dead in one timeline Eric asks Q who killed her. Among the options are Q, Eric and... Gab.
      • If the player knows Zero's identity, there are a few places where extra dialogue can be found. When typing in who killed Junpei, putting in Delta causes the game to say "HE IS NOT HERE". Typing it in during the Mexican Standoff leads to an Easter Egg ending where Q turns around and apologizes before shooting him, leading to surprised reactions from Eric and Mira.
      • Throughout the game you can see who's dead in the pause menu. If you check during the ending D-END 2 you'll see that Phi and Q are marked as DEAD throughout... until Diana and Sigma's children are born and their status is changed to ALIVE. Time travel is involved.
      • There are often multiple ways that answers can be typed in when prompted. For example, to progress when Eric is demanding to know who killed Mira you can type in "NO IDEA", "I DONT KNOW" or simply not answer, all of which are valid. Not only that, but during the Force Quit: D scenes the player can type in either "BLUE BIRD" or "MUSIC BOX" for the second item.
      • If the player solves a puzzle through guess work, because they're replaying an already completed room, or solves it before acquiring all information the game expects you need to know, the characters will say something about how they accidentally stumbled onto the answer, or how the answer just popped into their head. They also often say something akin to "I feel like we skipped a few steps...", or muse over how it feels like the answer was something they just somehow knew, particularly tying it into most of the characters having a connection to the morphogenetic field.

    Wide-Open Sandbox 
  • AI Dungeon 2 averts this trope. While it may seem like a human programmed a lot of objects and characters into the game, the entire experience is actually created on-the-fly by the game's Artificial Intelligence.
  • Bully
    • English class requires you to play a mini-game where you must unscramble letters to form as many words as you can. One level includes the letters F, G, H, I, S, T. If you spell 'shit' using those four letters, it doesn't count, and the teacher just gives an amused response. The European version updated English class so players get the same "funny but it doesn't count" response for 'git'.
    • When protagonist Jimmy Hopkins dresses up as the Mascot, he can't interact with people normally, which includes kissing girls. However, if he goes into a couple specific cutscenes in which he gets kissed in the mascot outfit, the girls kiss the mascot headpiece on its nose.
  • Endless Sky:
    • The [T]alk command, normally used for bribing the opponents or requesting help from allied ships, gives astonishingly appropriate answers when used on odd targets:
      • Attempting to talk to a wormhole gives "Like most wormholes, this one does not appear to be very talkative."
      • Choosing to talk to a drone will inform you that you got no response.
      • Similarly, asking a Space Fighter for refueling or repairs informs you that they do not carry any spare fuelnote  or repair equipment.
      • Requesting repairs from another broken ship has them respond that they are still waiting for theirs.
      • And asking for help when you don't need any also informs you on that.
    • The [L]and command also appears to be context-sensitive. When flying over the wrong celestial body, it will inform you that "This planet is too hot/too cold to land on.", "This planet is uninhabited." if neither too hot nor too cold, "You cannot land on a gas giant.", and of course that "You cannot land on a star!". It also recognizes moons from planets.
  • Ghost of Tsushima:
    • Jin's allies and enemies alike will react to his preferred tactics - the honourable Samurai or the dishonourable Ghost. For example, using stealth and terror tactics on the Mongols will cause them to huddle around lights, and some will panic and flee in terror the moment they see him.
    • Finishing the main quest before the sidequests will alter dialogue in various ways. For example, one enemy threatening you will shout "We'll send your head to Lord Shimura" (if you spared him) or "You will join your uncle in death" (if you killed him).
    • Jin will give context-sensitive voice lines when using the "Honor" gesture (a short bow), from giving praise to a recently-killed Worthy Opponent to apologizing to slain peasants to simply thanking merchants for their custom. NPCs will similarly return the respectful gesture and comment according to the situation and their station.
  • In Goat Simulator, you get an achievement for crashing the game, after you reload it of course.
  • Horizon Zero Dawn:
    • There's a few early sidequests and their dialogue changes whether or not Aloy is still an outcast or has proven herself.
    • Similarly, people in Meridian will have different dialog during their quests if you've already saved Avad from the assassination attempt or rescued Prince Itamen and Dowager Queen Nasadi from the Shadow Carja.
    • If you neutralized the outlying Eclipse camps before reporting to Sona and Varl during the "Revenge of the Nora" mission, Varl will mention it and express his amazement at Aloy's capabilities. Sona is less impressed, though.
    • Similarly, if you've already cleared out at least two Corruption Zones before talking to Marea at Mother's Crown during the "A Seeker at the Gates" mission, she'll also be impressed with Aloy going One-Woman Army on something the entire Nora military couldn't fight.
    • There are plenty of fetch quests for machine parts, an animal skins, etc. In almost every instance, if you've already have it in your inventory, Aloy will just give it to them.
    • If you have The Frozen Wilds DLC, certain dialogues in the main story missions will change depending on whether or not you completed the DLC missions, and vice-versa.
  • The inFAMOUS franchise has a few:
    • In the first game, there's one final temptation for a heroic Cole to cross the Moral Event Horizon by detonating the ray sphere again. If you do this and you've garnered a good reputation, the civilians that attack you on the street will scream about how Cole betrayed them instead of the generic comments about his monstrosity, and the heroic posters you would have chosen to be plastered up will have all been crossed out, marked up, or had stickers with broken hearts put on them. It also works the other way around. If you chose not to despite having Evil Karma the people will start to question you and your Evil Posters will have a question mark over them.
    • Cole suffers from justified Super Drowning Skills because water causes him to short out. Even tiny puddles cause enough of a surge to One-Hit Kill most enemies up to and including minibosses, which can be used in certain situations to completely bypass tricky fights.
    • In inFAMOUS: Second Son, Delsin usually flashes an exhilarated grin as he's performing an Orbital Drop. When using it in the first battle against Augustine, right after she kills Reggie, the expression is one of pure, undiluted rage.
  • Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor: When an Orc Captain stops to taunt you, he might reference your last encounter or the current situation. Try engaging the Captain while riding a caragor, while a wild caragor is running rampant, or after being seen riding a caragor, hopping off and engaging on foot. The taunt will be different in each case.
  • Middle-earth: Shadow of War
    • The Nemesis System from Shadow of Mordor has been greatly expanded and is more active as almost any action you take can and will be referenced by Orc and Olog captains. Anything can trigger a captain ambush with a wide variety of voice lines for each situationnote 
      Caragor Riding Captain: [Ambushing you when you try to summon a Caragor] I've got that Caragor you wanted. Now die!
      Poisoner Captain: [Ambushing you after you poisoned a grog barrel] That's not how you do it! Amateur. That's four times the dose you need! Ever heard of supersaturation?
      Captain: [Ambushing you in the middle of a hectic fortress fight] When I followed the alarm I thought I'd find trouble. Instead I found you.
      Captain: [Ambushing you after killing his rival and, on the same turn, trying to flee a fight] My rival's been killed. The Tark's about to be killed. Well this is quite a day isn't it?
      • Depending on your interactions with them, Captains might come Back from the Dead for vengeance, or simply to kill you a third time. They develop fears, vulnerabilities, immunities, mental ticks and varying injuries; All in which you can either exploit, use your advantage, realize too late, accidentally trigger and get killed by, or puke while looking at... respectively.
      • Any Orc or Olog grunt that kills you will be promoted to a Captain, and will remember their humble origins as a grunt. An Orc slave that kills you will remain bitter since their slave brand will prevent them from being taken seriously despite being a captain.
    • Talion will call the orcs by (first) name during Death Threat missions. Some orcs do this as well, but due to the massive amount of randomly generated names, dialogue apart from the name is more limited.
    • After an orc captain dies, the grunt orcs around him will comment about his death while fleeing. In fact, there is death dialogue for every single orc name in the game. Ditto when a Captain is Brainwashed; orcs will call out their name as they call him a traitor.
    • Worms just run the moment they see you, knowing you are gonna magic into their mind for intel.
    • Idril, Baranor, and Eltariel react in shock if you dominate orcs during your missions with them.
    • Wearing the Eltariel skin in the main game and changing armors and cloaks alters the skin's color scheme as well.
    • The handprint Talion leaves on his opponents during branding eventually vanishes. It may seem like a glitch, but checking which of your allies have it seems to indicate that those you had to shame before branding will always have the resulting scar, and those you recruited without Mind Rape eventually lose them.
    • If you plant an orc spy in an enemy fortress, their clothes revert from the blue used by allies to the red ones Sauron's army uses.
    • The game has a special way of dealing with conflicting animations. When you are in a position where you should be able to pull off a stealth kill or execution, but you're stuck in an action that prevents this, your wraith buddy Celebrimbor will appear and do it for you with no cost on your Focus or Might meters.
  • Foxes in Minecraft can pick up items, holding them in their mouths. They mainly do this with food, eventually eating it to regain health, but can also carry other things. If they get their teeth on a piece of gear, any offensive enchantments on it will increase their attack power. And if they somehow snag a Totem of Undying — which you'd have to drop intentionally in front of the fox, since you can't die while holding it — they can use it to come back to life if they die, even though the totem normally only works on human players.
  • Saints Row: The Third has vehicle customization options for all of the ground vehicles...including the ones that are supposedly not able to be customized. (You can only customize vehicles which "can't" be customized through exploiting a glitch.)
  • Terraria: The Princess is unique in that she has a Happiness line for every NPC in the game, including a copy of herself. It is impossible to have two of the same NPC around at once in normal gameplay, but if it is somehow done with the Princess, she will comment that her clone is "a little unsettling to be around, but terribly cute!"
  • Yume Nikki: If the player turns Madotsuki into a snowman without using the Yuki-Onna effect and makes their way to the Storage Room's entrance (where a fire rages), Madotsuki will slowly melt until she is a hat and scarf lying on top of a puddle of water.

Non-video game examples:

    Anime and Manga 
  • Hunter × Hunter: Gon plays through the In-Universe game Greed Island in order to find some clues to his father's wherabouts, whom had helped develop the game. Upon beating the game, Gon is allowed to take three item cards back to the real world. Gon realizes that the first entry in his players list is an anagram for his father's name, so he smuggles the Accompany card (which warps you and your party to any player you specify) into the real world by using another spell card to disguise it as an item card and not a spell. Ging knew that Gon would end up doing this, and made it so that the Accompany card would actually warp Gon and his friends to Ging's student Kite instead.

  • A filler episode in the Davy Back Fight arc of One Piece has the Straw Hats playing Pirate Dodgeball against the Foxy Pirates. Pirate Dodgeball also has a massive rulebook with Obvious Rule Patches for seemingly everything (including accidentally swallowing the ball.)

    Apps 
  • The iOS app Siri is an "intelligent personal assistant" that can look up information via voice commands. It also has smart-ass responses to a number of questions, requests, or commands, like "How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?" ("That depends on if we are talking about an African woodchuck or a European woodchuck."), "What are you wearing?" ("Aluminosilicate glass and stainless steel. Nice, huh?"), "Talk dirty to me" ("The floor needs vacuuming."), "OK Google"note  ("I think you got the wrong assistant."), and "OK Glass"note  ("Stop trying to strap me to your forehead, (name). It won't work.")
    • As was discussed once on What the Fuck Is Wrong with You?: Co-hostess Tara's sister once unleashed a barrage of insults on Siri, who replied "You kiss your mother with that mouth?".
    • If you tell it something suggesting you may be suicidal, Siri will suggest the most appropriate suicide hotline for you to call and offer to call the number for you.
    • A possibly-faked viral image suggests that if you accidentally call her "Cortana" (the name of Windows's assistant program), Siri has a passive-aggressive tantrum about your other OS. (Her actual response is "That is like comparing apples and... not apples.")
    • Siri has in fact caused Apple trouble when the dev team has occasionally failed to think of something, and this was take as a deliberate slight.
  • Bezier Games has an app for use with their One Night series. As of this writing, this series consists of five different games (Werewolf, Daybreak, Vampire, Alien, and Super Villains) and a few bonus packs which are all designed to be used together. However, this is zigzagged at best:
    • One of the roles featured in Werewolf is the Doppelganger who assumes the role of whoever's card her player looks at. They had to account for the night actions of roles from the subsequent installments, so up until Vampire, the announcer added the various roles with night actions to the original list. But starting with Alien, the announcer simply says to perform the other role's night action at that point.
    • If non-villagers are added from multiple games, the announcer says to prepare for an epic battle even if there's only one of each non-villager. At first, the announcer said to prepare for an epic battle between villagers, werewolves, and vampires, but didn't include aliens when that game was introduced. As of Super Villains, the announcer simply says to prepare for an epic battle.
    • One aversion is that if only one werewolf, vampire, or alien is selected, the app still asks those roles to look for others. On the other hand, Super Villains has an enemy (Henchman number 7) who doesn't have any abilities. If he is the only non-villager from that game, the app tells him to wake up and go back to sleep.
    • The total number of roles across the five games and bonus packs is eighty-six as of 2019. While it's highly unlikely that someone would have that many friends to play such a big session, it is possible to select them all. If so...
      Narrator: Really? You've selected all the roles? I have better things to do and I'm sure you do too.

    Film 
  • Circle follows a group of fifty people who are kidnapped to take part in a Deadly Game in which they vote on someone to die every two minutes. Once the group figures out what's going on, they attempt several methods to prevent anyone else from dying, but it turns out that their captors have already planned for everything they can think of. No one can vote for themselves; if everyone abstains from voting, then a victim is selected randomly; if the group forces a tie, then everyone in the tie will die unless someone changes their vote.
  • Escape Room: Tournament of Champions: In the beach room, Zoey finds an apparently unintended exit on the sun/moon next to the lighthouse, making it seem like she's found a way to go Sequence Breaking. However, it automatically leads to the next room anyway.
  • CRS from The Game (1997) manages to arrange a Batman Gambit designed to get Nicholas to break into the CRS building in search of the man behind it all. It turns out they planned for some things they suspected he would do:
    • We find out that Nicholas has a Book Safe in which he keeps a gun which he uses to break into the building. Only they found out about the gun and replaced the bullets with blanks.
    • Nicholas' break-in takes a bad turn when he shoots his brother by mistake, and jumps to his death out of remorse only to land in an airbag in the middle of his surprise birthday party. It's later revealed they planned for if he didn't perform that last action.
      Jim: You know, thank God you jumped, because if you didn't, I was supposed to throw you off.

    Literature 
  • Good Omens:
    [The ship's captain's] questing finger moved slowly down the page, and stopped. Good old International Codes. They'd been devised eighty years before, but the men in those days had really thought hard about the kind of perils that might possibly encountered on the deep. He picked up his pen and wrote down: 'XXXV QVVX'. Translated, it meant: 'Have found Lost Continent of Atlantis. High Priest has just won quoits contest.'
  • Harry Potter:
    • According to Quidditch Through the Ages, there exists an official rulebook filled with a list of over 700 actions players are not allowed to take in a game of Quidditch, up to and including unauthorized use of badgers. The body in charge of this book prevents the public from seeing it to prevent players from getting any ideas. (The list is mostly redundant, since the ban on using wands during play renders 90% of the fouls on the list impossible to commit.)
    • In Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the Marauder's Map insults Snape when he tries to use it. It turns out that these were not a generic response to unauthorized access, but personalized insults specifically placed in case Snape ever tried to access the map.
      "Show yourself!" Snape said, tapping the map sharply.
      It stayed blank. Harry was taking deep, calming breaths.
      "Professor Severus Snape, master of this school, commands you to yield the information you conceal!" Snape said, hitting the map with his wand. As though an invisible hand were writing upon it, words appeared on the smooth surface of the map.
      "Mr. Moony presents his compliments to Professor Snape, and begs him to keep his abnormally large nose out of other people's business."
      Snape froze. Harry stared, dumbstruck, at the message. But the map didn't stop there. More writing appeared beneath the first.
      "Mr. Prongs agrees with Mr. Moony, and would like to add that Professor Snape is an ugly git."
      It would have been very funny if the situation hadn't been so serious. And there was more...
      "Mr. Padfoot would like to register his astonishment that an idiot like that ever became a professor."
      Harry closed his eyes in horror. When he'd open them, the map had said its last word.
      "Mr. Wormtail bids Professor Snape good day, and advises him to wash his hair, the slimeball."
  • In The Stormlight Archive, King Taravangian experiences days where he is either kind but stupid, or intelligent but amoral in varying levels each day. In order to judge whether or not it is safe for him to make policy decisions, he created a series of tests for himself on his most intelligent day which would inform his aides of how intelligent he was that day, and they would limit his powers accordingly. More than once, he has tried to cheat the system by deliberately failing certain questions, but on that most intelligent day, he included mechanisms to catch when he was doing so and shut his attempts down.
  • Matthew Sobol in Daemon, being a literal genius, made his daemon able to respond to most situations. Failing that, it instead subtly railroaded people into taking decisions that benefitted it. At the end of Freedom it's revealed that the exploit the not-so-Omniscient Council of Vagueness were going to use to take control of it was put in there on purpose, and only worked when they were testing it. Once they tried to properly activate it, it traced the attempted attack back to its origin and used it to wipe out their finances, leaving them destitute and powerless.
    "Thanks for invoking this event, and remember, if you're not playing the game, it's playing you."

    Live-Action TV 
  • The Big Bang Theory: Sheldon doesn't drive, preferring to let others chauffeur him around. When the others demand he get a drivers license, they set up an elaborate simulator to practice for his actual drivers test. Howard used resources from a vehicle simulator he developed for the military to provide the closest real-world analog. Despite Sheldon's experience with video games, he cannot drive safely at all. Amusingly, the program is far more accurate than it needed to be, allowing Sheldon to drive through a local mall...
    Leonard: How did you manage to get on the second floor of the Glendale Galleria?
    Sheldon: I don't know, I was on the Pasadena Freeway, missed my exit, flew off the overpass and one thing led to another.
    (you can hear screeching tires followed by a crash, along with a number of animal noises)
    Leonard: Aw, the pet store.
    Sheldon: Remind me to compliment Wolowitz on the software, it's amazingly detailed.
  • Season 20 of Big Brother US had a "Punishment" called Hamazon - which required the houseguest in question to eat every piece of food on a plate that was "delivered", which of course was ham. However, on one occasion, a Muslim contestant (Faysal) chose that punishment. Muslims cannot eat pork products, so he was given a vegetarian substitute instead of ham.
    • On two occasions in both US and Canada (which use similar rules), a Non-Gameplay Elimination happened during the jury phase (in which evicted players form the jury, who vote for the winner). Because of what happened, the player who left would not be eligible to cast a jury vote - thus opening the possibility of a tied vote. In order to avoid this, the vote was given to the viewers - and when the viewers went to cast their vote (Which was done online), the player was given three choices - one for every potential final two out of the three players remaining in the game.
  • Journey to the Center of Hawkthorne from the Community episode "Digital Estate Planning" features a few examples:
    • The player's avatar is based on a picture the game takes of the player. The A.I. can recognize when the player is the boss' illegitimate son, who's not supposed to be playing. It also turns out that they prepared for if he wins the game, and he's forced to sign a document denying any relation to the boss before he can claim the prize.
    • The A.I. can recognize when the players are working together instead of competing with each other, with the latter being how the game is supposed to be played.
      • However, the fact that the game is supposed to be played competitively leads to an aversion. It's discovered after Britta and Pierce have a heart-to-heart and she strikes and kills him.
      Britta: I guess there's no "hug" button.
    • The developers apparently prepared for the chance that a player would accidentally kill a shopkeeper... and decide to kill the rest of his family, loot his shop, and burn it down to cover all that up.
    • Since the point of the game is to get to the ending as quickly as possible, it's interesting that the developers allowed for the possibility of romancing an NPC to the point of starting a family and getting their kids to mine materials for the game's crafting system. And that can be done to the point of creating robots, attack helicopters, and atomic bombs.
  • ER was always shot on film, and in widescreen. The first seven seasons were aired in 4:3 pan-and-scan; it began airing first-run in widescreen HD with the eighth season. The moment DVD became widely available, Warner Bros. created the DVDs using the original widescreen film. These masters are very high quality. However, as of yet, they have not been restored in any way. So the film masters of the early seasons can be dirty at times, and sometimes will show equipment on the edges that were intended not to air, but were left in because of the original intent to air in a standard aspect ratio.
  • The goal of the game show Legends of the Hidden Temple was to make it through the temple, but temple guards would attack you (and the path would almost always lead you through them) and take a Pendant of Life. However, it's possible to make it to this part of the game without having two full pendants of life. If the team made it this far, the last half would be placed in the temple, usually in a place they were required to go rather early so they have a fighting chance.
  • Monster House had an episode where two teams of past contestants competed to fix up a frat house. To mark which one was winning, host Steve Watson posted a flag bearing that team's color, red or blue. At one point, the two teams decided to join forces and try to complete the build together. Even though this wasn't offered as an option, Steve brought a purple flag for the occasion.
  • Most of the Whammy animations on Press Your Luck involve the Whammy stealing money from the player. The 2019 revival added special Whammy animations that play on the off chance that the player doesn't have any money in the bank (such as getting a Whammy first thing in the game or getting two in a row). It also has special whammies for being the first spin in the game, and one for returning contestants.
    "I've come to take all your cash! ...What? You don't have any money? [beat] Well, this is awkward." [walks away sheepishly]
    ''(Psst, You're on!) What? I'm not ready yet! {Storms off} This never happens to Elizabeth Banks!

  • Averted in a life-saving way in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Our Man Bashir". In the episode, a Teleporter Accident leads to many of the crew's bodies being saved as holograms into the superspy thriller program that Dr. Bashir is playing. Not only does he have to keep them all alive within the story, if the story ends they will all die. With seconds to go on the countdown, Bashir has reached the final moments of the game's plot and can't stall any longer — so he has his character pull a sudden Face–Heel Turn and activate the Big Bad's Earth-Shattering Kaboom machine himself. Since the developer obviously didn't imagine a player doing that, the program hangs and everyone is saved.
  • A few seasons of Survivor have had an even number of jurors — this resulted in the possibility of there being a tied vote at the end. Sure enough, if this happens (which it did once), the second runner up would cast the tiebreaking vote.

    Manhwa 
  • Yureka: Happens in-universe within the Fictional Video Game Lost Saga. There is a skill for identifying different poisons, a cooking skill, there are Easter Eggs, self-aware NPCs, a karma system, magic fusion, and hallucinogenic drugs (for tricking people into believing you have clones). It turns out it was only one guy who programmed all of Lost Saga, making it so that it would self test and implement new facets. A self-evolving game.

    Pinball 
  • On the vast majority of pinball machines, if nothing seems to have happened on the playfield for a while and no flipper has been touched, the game reasons that the ball is stuck and starts randomly firing off all of the kickers and features on the table to attempt to unstick it. Some games also have quotes or special displays at this point (FunHouse (1990), for example, would say "Where did you go now?").
  • The pinball game Indiana Jones: The Pinball Adventure features a sinkhole chute that is guarded by three targets. Normally the sinkhole is accessible only when the targets are struck and dropped out of play, revealing access. Because pinball games are physical, it is possible to slip by without striking the targets. The character Short Round will cry out, "you cheat, Dr. Jones!" and awards bonus points. There is also a bonus section where you are supposed to hit various targets to fight against a swordsman displayed on the screen. However, if you remember that the ball launcher is designed like a gun trigger, you can indeed follow in Dr. Jones' footsteps and just shoot him.note 
  • The same could be done on The Shadow pinball machine, where you could make a pinball shot to defeat attacking Mongols, or just shoot them. This added a tactical dimension, as shooting the Mongol awarded far fewer points, but certain features were not accessible during the Mongol Attack, meaning that skipping it could avoid you being frozen out of the feature you actually wanted.
  • Williams Pinball machines were famous for their ability to detect when a physical part of the machine had failed and compensate for it by modifying the rules of the game. So if a sensor hadn't triggered for a while, the game would substitute another sensor along the same rail or shot. This was an incredibly useful feature for arcade owners, and the source of some annoyance that machines from other manufacturers didn't do this (this wasn't their fault, though - Williams patented it.)
  • The Addams Family
    • If a ball enters the Vault while the Bookcase barrier is still supposed to be blocking it, the game proceeds as if the vault had been opened. Gomez even compliments you about this:
      Gomez: Dirty pool, old man. I LIKE it!
    • The game lets you lock balls in one of three shots. One of them is the swamp. You reach the swamp if you launch a ball too weakly. The game takes notice if you lock the ball from the launch lane.
      Gomez: Good thinking!
  • FunHouse (1990):
    • Rudy's mouth is normally only a valid shot when it is either shut or locked open as he sleeps, but incidentally shooting the ball into his mouth while he's speaking causes him to swallow it and spit it out, scoring a "Rudy Gulp" bonus. In the similar table Red & Ted's Road Show, which featured two talking heads named Red and Ted, shooting the ball into Red's mouth while she's speaking will make her spit it out, asking Ted why he likes the taste of pinballs.
    • Additionally, the table's standard multiball mode requires locking two balls, then shooting a ball into Rudy's mouth while he's asleep. However, there's also a "Quick Multiball" award that, when activated with both balls locked, will start the standard multiball mode without having to shoot the ball into Rudy's mouth. If the multiball round starts via Quick Multiball, each hit to Rudy's mouth awards a million points—this in addition to the normal multi-million-point trap door shot. (This table averts Loophole Abuse, however. If both multiball modes are active, but two balls drain before a trap door shot is made, the bonus for hitting Rudy's mouth doesn't apply for the second-chance multiball.)
      Rudy: What was THAT?!
  • In White Water, if the player shoots the ball weakly around the orbit, causing it to roll backwards through the No Way Out lock mechanism and back onto the lower playfield, Willie shouts "You found the secret passage!" and a bonus is awarded.
    • Scared Stiff has a similar shot which, if made, automatically progresses the player through one of the Tales of Horror.
  • On Star Trek: The Next Generation, if you drained a ball or timed out during a Mission Mode without scoring points, you would get a minimum point bonus while hearing Data say, "Had you propelled the ball along the proper trajectory, you would have been rewarded." If you hit the flipper buttons while Data speaks, an annoyed Picard will cut him off and the game will reward you a consolation prize of 10,000,000 points:
    Picard: Thank you, Mr. Data.
  • Cirqus Voltaire:
    • If the ball falls into the Highwire lock from a weak ramp shot without being lit, you are awarded a lock for Highwire Multiball (described as a "Sneaky Lock" by the game, with an animation of a pinball tip-toeing across the display).
    • When the ball is stuck to the magnet on the Ringmaster's hat, he will then swing his head around and drop the ball. This means the ball will take a random path back down. Since some of these paths will drain your ball, the ball saver will briefly activate after the Ringmaster lets go of the ball in case it happens.
    • And in a case of Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs, it is possible for the ball, upon being let go by the Ringmaster, to fall into the Highwire lock. This will also award the "Sneaky Lock" bonus and will allow you to bypass having to hit the nearby targets to activate further locks.
    • The ball can also fall into the hole underneath the Ringmaster after being let go. In such a case, a "Ringmaster's Hideout" bonus will be awarded.
  • Theatre of Magic has a hole under the trunk to lock balls in the center of a loop. Normally, diverters to the holes are down until lock is lit, but it's still possible to shoot the loop lightly so that the ball stops mid-loop and falls in the hole. Doing this will trigger a special animation where a magician falls down the stairs into the Haunted Basement: "Oooohhh Noooooo! Ow oof aak oof ack! This ball is full of wonders!" and allow you to lock balls without spelling "Magic". In a double case of developers' foresight, doing this a second time in the same game will only award some points.
  • A Death Save is a pinball maneuver where, after the ball falls down an outlane, the player whacks the machine in order to bounce the ball back into play from below the flippers. Some games, including most Data East tables and Rick and Morty, detect this move and give points for it.
  • A highly frowned-upon technique in pinball is called a "Bang Back", where a player strikes the machine's front or underside to force a ball back into play as it's going down the drain. Allegedly, some early pinball companies would discourage this by placing downward-facing nails or spikes on the underside of the cabinet under the drain to injure anyone trying to cheat this way.
  • The "Three-Switch Rule", a standard on pinball machines from post-World War II and onward, will let you keep playing without penalty if the ball has tripped 3 or fewer switches before you lose it.note  Machines released from The '90s and onward have started creating exceptions to these rules if the testers have discovered ways to gain free points, modes, or even multiballs by exploiting this rule. Companies like Stern and Jersey Jack Pinball encourage their testers to look for them so they can create these exceptions.
  • Jurassic Park (Stern) normally requires you to capture a Spinosaurus to start King of the Island Multiball. If you also catch a T. rex beforehand, a different intro animation plays.
  • Rick and Morty: During "Roy – A Life Well Lived", the flavor text accompanying each choice made takes previous choices into consideration. For example, starting with a negative choice before making a positive shot leads to Roy being an Enfant Terrible before channeling his need for attention into a career as he gets older.

    Operating Systems 
  • The Windows CE emulator in Virtual PC was clearly programmed by someone who understands bored techie tendencies. Attempting to set up a recursive emulation results in an error with the text "You just had to try, didn't you?" This may be considered erroneous behavior, since it means the emulator doesn't perfectly recreate the environment, but on the other hand, dicking around with recursion is pretty erroneous to begin with.
  • The Unix cal command prints calendars. If you type cal 9 1752 you get the calendar for September 1752. The 14th follows the 2nd because England converted from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar at that time.

    Sports 
  • In Chessboxing there are rules for how to handle when a match runs out of times before either fighter wins. As in boxing, the fighter ahead on points in the boxing match wins. This trope comes in, however, in a situation that The Other Wiki says has never happened: if the points in the boxing match are tied and the chess match ends in a draw, the person playing black wins.
  • In many sports there are (sometimes extremely detailed) rules for what happens when a player is injured, feigns injury, bleeds or is otherwise incapacitated. The fact that these rules exist might get you thinking about the game. Particularly detailed rules exist in Rugby and American Football, but the rules on bleeding soccer players are also a bit too detailed for comfort.
  • Hockey has some extremely detailed rules about extraordinarily unlikely scenarios, most of which have never come to pass, (and an unusual number of them surround goalies). Most hockey fans - even dedicated ones - are unaware these rules even exist. For instance:
    • Goalies are not allowed to play the puck anywhere past centre ice (to prevent goalies from joining the rush as an extra attacker).
    • If a goalie is pulled for an extra attacker during overtime and the goalie's team loses, that team forfeits the "loser point" in the standings they would otherwise have earned for making it to overtime (the only exception to this is if the goalie was pulled due to a delayed penalty call against the other team). This was apparently put into play to discourage teams from going offence-heavy in overtime to take advantage of the smaller number of players on the ice. What truly pushes this into "bizarre" territory is that any team that pulls its goalie in overtime also triggers a second obscure rule that states that the goalie cannot then return to the ice, even if one of the active players swaps out, until the next stoppage in play (a goalie returning to the ice from the bench on the fly is an extremely rare play on its own, nevermind doing so in the further unlikely event that a team in overtime has pulled said goalie).
    • In the event that a goalie gets injured, each team keeps a backup goalie dressed so that they can swap in. But what happens if that goalie also gets injured? The league has detailed rules on who gets to sub in, including exactly how long an emergency "third goalie" has to warm up (two minutes if they aren't already dressed, no time if they are dressed or if they are being asked to defend a penalty shot).
    • While players get injured or tossed out of the game all the time, what happens if the refs are incapacitated or otherwise unable to do their jobs? Given that refs aren't typically involved in the rough parts of the game, this is a pretty unlikely event, but the league has a list of steps to take if the refs are unavailable. First the league tries to find replacements, and if that fails the teams are asked to agree on a neutral third party to ref. If that doesn't work either, then each team must put forward one player to act as referee (meaning, yes, the players may actually be asked to ref their own team). Surprisingly, this particular rule actually DID come into effect once in the NHL (during a game in 1983 between the New Jersey Devils and the Hartford Whalers, the refs and linesmen were delayed by weather and didn't make it in time for the first period).
  • Current National Football League rules allow points to be scored by either team during an extra point or two point conversion attempt. In addition to the defending team being awarded two points for the equivalent of a defensive touchdown, this includes provisions for a team to be awarded a single point for a play resulting in a safety. However, while it is rare but not unheard of for an offensive team to be awarded a one point safety, the sequence of events required for the defense to do so - either a tackle for a loss of at least 85 yardsnote  or a double turnover, with the second turnover being recovered by the offense in their own end zonenote  - are so unusual that they have never happened in an NFL game.
    • While this has also never happened, in the event that a team were to forfeit a game, the team that did not forfeit will be considered to have won with a score of 2-0. This is because the two-point safety is the only type of point in the entire NFL that is not attributed to a single player.

    Tabletop Games 
  • The number of unusual and obviously dangerous substances that the Dungeons & Dragons writers stat out the effects of touching, eating, drinking, or doing something borderline suicidal with approaches the infinite.
  • The notoriously lecherous rulebook for F.A.T.A.L. required complicated dice rolls and provided very detailed results tables for all sorts of encounters. It's most notorious for having rules that governed every orifice a horny male could possibly insert himself into, with females whose ages ranged from 99+ down to... infant.
  • The point of the conditional modifiers in Hoyle's Rules of Dragon Poker. If it could conceivably happen, there's probably a rule change for it. Notable examples include the end of the world, UFO encounters, and the Detroit Lions winning the Super Bowl.
  • Old World of Darkness / Chronicles of Darkness:
    • In the Old World of Darkness, a rulebook gave the stats for using a chainsaw as a weapon. Not so unusual, except it also included the moral and psychological repercussions of using a chainsaw on another flesh-and-blood person.
    • In 2010, White Wolf released an April Fool's pamphlet of "optional game hacks", including rules for riding animals into battle. Not traditional mounted animals like horses, but animals that could also attack, like grizzly bears, pterodactyls, and unicorns. As with the chainsaw above, it also included stats for using a double-ended dildo as a weapon.
    • In the previous incarnation of Vampire: The Masquerade, some Disciplines (like Dominate) were notoriously prone to failure or easy to ignore. To hammer home that the Spiritual Successor Vampire: The Requiem is more ruthless and harder to cheese, the developers state that the need for eye contact is symbolic rather than literal, and if a character were to try to ignore this rule by wearing sunglasses, said Ventrue player is free to laugh at the n00b's incompetence.
    • V20 backports these rules to Vampire: The Masquerade, and further notes that even removing your eyes doesn't render you immune to eye contact — it just makes it much easier to avoid it.
    • The dev team was kind enough to supply the likely effects massive pressure differences would have on vampires. In space.
    • The 'Armory' books list (among numerous other Improvised Weapons), the effects when using a belt sander or post-hole digger as weapons.
  • Psionics: The Next Stage in Human Evolution:
    • Are you trying to melt a metal door? There's a table of melting points in the book.
    • There are rules for scoring drugs, including additional difficulty modifiers based on what the player is trying to get.
    • The book also provides role playing cues for players who have taken drugs, including the ones that don't exist in real life.
    • There are strict addiction thresholds and rules for the effects of overdosing and addiction.
    • Did you run someone over with a car? The damage done is included in the book. Were you standing too close to a car that exploded? That damage is also in the book. Did you just hit someone with a car that you telekinetically threw? That damage is also in the book.
  • GURPS is famous for its extremely detailed ruleset. Nearly any situation has rules for how to do it. Want to target a body part? You have specific penalties to hit each one of them, including eyes, skull, vital organs and genitals, each one having different damage multipliers and special rules. Fighting enemies in a moving vehicle? GURPS has full rules for chase scenarios. Need to demolish a building? GURPS has rules to calculate the damage of any amount of dozens of explosive substances. Want to play a psychic intelligent blueberry muffin? You can.
  • Taken into account in-universe by the Dark Powers in Ravenloft. One of the cardinal laws of the setting is that it is impossible to escape. It would be easy to say that any such effort simply fizzles out, but many times in the rules time is taken to spell out exactly what kind of side effects a particular brand of escape attempt might have.

    Toys 
  • Leap Frog's Alphabet Pal is a caterpillar that teaches kids the alphabet. One of the settings is to have her say the sounds of each letter. In early versions, pressing 'F' followed quickly by 'C' or 'K' would cause it to say "fuck". Leapfrog realized this and released a later version, in which trying to do this results in it giggling and saying "That tickles!" before saying the sound.
  • Transformers toys:
    • Omega Supreme's toy in Transformers: Energon has three parts: A giant battleship, a huge train, and a small robot which forms the head. When in combined mode, Omega Supreme's body (Made of the crane and the battleship) has a head of sorts that can be raised when the actual head unit isn't attached. Why is this? So the big guy still has a head if the head robot were to get lost.
    • The same with Armada Sideways. Either of his small "mini-con" partners turn into his head, one for his Autobot form and one for his Decepticon form. However, he has a pop-up head just in case you lose both the mini-cons.

    Web Animation 
  • When Pomni realizes she got censored in The Amazing Digital Circus and is informed by Caine that swears are not allowed due to the game being for all ages, she promptly tests the game's profanity filter right then and there. Every single word she can think of is blocked.
  • There is a Strong Bad Email in which Strong Bad buys a new comfortable chair to check his emails with, but the chair itself is huge and covers up most of the computer screen. Strong Bad proceeds to respond two of the biggest mysteries of the series by taking off his wrestling mask and showing a picture of his parents on the computer screen, but both are obscured by the chair. If one attempts to use a flash decompiler to remove the chair, Strong Bad's head will be missing and the picture will have the message "nice try dodongo!" on it.
  • The Weebl's Stuff video "Strawberry Pancakes" had the main character shoot a person, causing the town's population sign to decrease each time the video looped. If the video looped enough times, the population would eventually be completely killed off, and the person who gets shot would be replaced by a zombie. (It was handled by ActionScript, so compromises had to be made when the video was adapted for YouTube.)

    Webcomics 
  • 8-Bit Theater had an in-universe example with Black Mage attempting to copy a spell that Sarda used to rewrite reality according to his will, deducing it to be a "Rewrite Reality According to My Will" spell. It turns out to be a "Rewrite Reality According to Sarda's Will" spell instead.
    • In fact, Sarda casts all his spells this way, at least when he's around Black Mage. When BM copies an incredibly painful spell that Sarda has just used on him, he discovers that it's not a "make target vomit out his intestines" spell, it's a "make Black Mage vomit out his intestines" spell.
    • As Black Mage puts it: when Sarda casts a spell that hurts you, and you learn that spell, you learn to cast a spell that hurts you.
  • In Homestuck, Sburb has an insane number of ways that players can get their game back on track if things off the rails. Wayward Vagabond exists solely to help the players defeat the final boss if they screw up and aren't able to take him on. Act 6 reveals that a player who enters a game completely alone (something that renders Sburb completely dead and Unwinnable) still has a backdoor to a form of victory. It's also able to account for the players prototyping their sprites with anything. Including other sprites.
  • The Order of the Stick: If you try to look for future strips ahead of when they are actually posted (by typing in the page URL of what would presumably be the next comic after the previous one), you're greeted by Belkar, who tells the viewer that the author does not post strips in advance.
  • xkcd had an interesting April Fools' Day in 2010, which can be found here. It has responses to several unlikely things:
    • Type in a certain four letter word. The response? I have a headache.
    • Try entering 'Help', 'Sleep', 'Kill' or 'Destroy!!!'.
    • Or 'Next to Last'.
      • Followed by 'Enable time travel'.
    • 'Cheat', and of course, 'Quit'.
    • When you type 'look' you have exits of "West" and "South". Going "West" repeatedly will report interesting statements about each room you visit. It's the lyrics to the chorus of "Go West" by Pet Shop Boys.note  Hilarious. Going south will result in being eaten by a grue, unless you thought to type "light lamp" first.
    • And if you type 'go east' after going 'west' once, you get: "You are at a computer using unixkcd." The same thing happens if you type 'look'.
    • Entering 'xyzzy' will respond "Nothing happens", rather than a generic "must be roto".
    • Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right...
    • Many real Unix commands are programmed in, such as "sudo." The site suggests using a few, including "cat", which just responds, "You're a kitty!" This comes from the one XKCD comic that named Cuteness Proximity.
    • Try "sudo rm -rf /". Similarly, ":(){ :|:& };:".
    • "find" also works; the game asks you what you want to find, and suggests "kitten." If you search for the aforementioned kitten, the console searches for the bizarre "game" Robot Finds Kitten.
    • "make love" results in the predictable "I put on my robe and wizard hat." This itself is a reference to the TOPS-10 operating system, which used the "make" command for the creation of a file. When "make love" was inputted, the OS would respond with "not war?" before creating the file.
    • Try "Make me a sandwich" and "sudo make me a sandwich".
    • "reboot" and "sudo reboot"
    • "go down"
    • "goto 10"
    • Try "Hello Joshua"
    • Try Vim or Emacs.
    • The response to trying to use nano is also quite amusing.
    • Try "xkcd", and then "unixkcd" multiple times.
    • "date" will return March 32nd

    Web Original 
  • Akinator knows pretty much every single person or character that anyone in the world even slightly cares about. It's not the developers, per se, but the contributions of millions of players that make up its nearly bottomless knowledge. He also catches onto your attempts to con him — try to click "No" every time and the answer will be "A PESSIMISTIC FELLOW", and his description "Someone who kept clicking on No to see what happens". He also frequently catches on to random answers by guessing "A guy who gambles on everything." He also knows a lot of non-characters, including "Yourself", "Your mum", "The Internet", "Xbox-360 controller" and "underwear". If the non-character hasn't already been added, he'll guess "Something I don't know because it's not a character". He also quickly guesses if you're trying to make him guess himself. Someone also tried to trick him... but he properly guessed "The palm trees in the background".
  • This website can check if any website is down for everyone, or if it's just down for you. If you entered the website's own URL to see if it was down, it would report, "If you can see this page and still think we're down, it's just you." This custom message was later removed.
  • The Gaston Trilogy has an in-universe example. Lefou's Quest IV has no fewer than five unique ways to die on the first level alone, one of which is both ridiculously elaborate and relatively obscure, and the game over screen also references which way you died last. It's also possible to do a ton of actions that seem counterintuitive such as using someone else's belt as a weapon on the boss or stab him with nothing, which all have unique responses, and damaging the boss in his eye results in him getting an eyepatch.
  • Twitter had a 140 character limit (Now changed to 280). If you try and make a tweet with more characters and click at the nick of time, it will read "Your tweet was over 140 characters. You'll have to be more clever".
  • Is X a Prime Number? tells the viewer to stop wasting bandwidth whenever they look up an even number. Although "https://aprimenumber.com/index.php?prime=0" just leads to the main site, it does have a unique message for zero, which can be found at "https://aprimenumber.com/index.php?prime=00". Negative numbers would formerly redirect you to the creator's main website, as will any string with an underscore in it. Finally, entering letters produces the message "I need a real number, yo." It also has snarky comments for prime numbers under 10, as well as the numbers 13, 42, 69, and 666.
  • YouTube alternative Piped has the domain name "piped.kavin.rocks". If you type "kavin.rocks" to see if the site hosts anything else, it used to redirect to a Rickroll, though this was changed when the domain started hosting other alternatives to things such as Reddit and Twitter.
  • Pokécheck is a website that, among other uses, can check the legitimacy of any Pokémon uploaded to it. It takes everything into account when checking to see whether or not a Pokémon was likely edited or created using an external device, across three whole generations of games and events. (as Gen VI hasn't been implemented yet as of 5/5/14) Obscure spin-offs and limited-distribution events? Taken into account. Differences between Gen III to V data-structures like garbage bits in nicknames that are preserved in the transition between generations? Well documented. The fact that XD's Shadow Pokémon and certain Gen 5 legendaries cannot be shiny? Factored in perfectly. Unusual stat totals? It's got that covered. An obscure glitch that only affects five species? Of course. And if a Pokémon has a Trainer/Secret ID of 00666 or some equally unlikely number, it displays the message "Suspicious trainer IDs." The only way past it is to hack a Pokémon that is identical to one that could have been generated by a core series/Gamecube Pokémon title. Which is the intention.
  • This Very Wiki has custom messages for trying to edit somebody else's thread postnote  or add a post to a locked threadnote . There's no edit button on others' posts and there's no add post button to locked threads, so this is quite hard to come across unless somebody accidentally posts the URL to edit their own post or add a post to a formerly-open thread, or types out the URL themself for some reason.

    Other 
  • The Amazon Echo, a speaker/microphone array that acts as the interface for Amazon's cloud-based personal assistant, has a long, long list of "Easter Egg" phrases to which it will respond with a joke answer, and as a cloud-based platform, more are being added every day.
  • Cortana (the assistant for Windows 10 and Windows Phone, not the Halo character) has a long list of Easter Egg phrases she'll respond to. For instance, try "How is Master Chief?", "Tell me a joke", "Who's your daddy?", "What's your favourite colour?", etc.
    • Despite these joke/Easter-Egg responses, its obvious that the goal for such personal assistants is to handle, if not everything, a bewildering array of requests. Ask Cortana about a restaurant, for instance and rather than just doing a web-search, it will display its menu and hours in a "restaurant" template created just for such questions.
    • Try asking Cortana about Siri, and she'll say "I think it's cool that she's out there trying to make people's lives a little easier."
  • IBM RnD, according to Prof Moriarty speaking on the Sixty Symbols YouTube channel. "You read [one of their research papers] and questions arise. Then you go back and see 'oh, right, they've done that as well'. And then you think 'well maybe this', but every single question is covered."
  • Detroit's Comerica Park, home of the Tigers, has a statue garden of their legendary players in the deep center field stands. One of them is memorialized with his glove up and open. The artist took the time to fill the interior of the glove with small nails, so that on the one-in-a-million chance that a home run is hit into the glove, the statue will "catch" it.
  • When using some email processors, if you write the words "Attached is/are..." without giving an attachment, and then hit "Send," the program will point this out, then ask you if you want to attach anything. Same thing goes if you try to send an email with a blank subject line, since most email processors filter blank-line messages as spam.
  • The free music program Spotify plays commercials between songs. If you mute your speakers during these, the commercial pauses until you unmute the sound.
  • Several websites are now able to detect if the user has adblocking software installed. Some merely add a message intended to guilt-trip you into turning it off, while others are more intrusive. Some take it to absolutely ridiculous levels; Blip.tv, for example, rapidly gained infamy for making you stare at a static message for 90 seconds that helpfully informed you that their ads were much shorter.
    • Similarly, certain websites limit how many articles you can read in a month before you have to pay and login to read them. Many of these are smart enough to detect if the user is in Private mode on their browser (which doesn't save cookies, which these sites use to track the number of times you access them), and immediately bar access even if you otherwise have free articles remaining.
  • Google Maps:
    • Driving directions are given for journeys on different continents, including at necessary places "Sail across [insert body of water]". At one point, this would even instruct you to swim hundreds of miles if you chose to restrict your method of travel to walking while your destination was across the ocean.
    • Often times the navigate feature will choose the fastest route, not necessarily the shortest route, as the shorter route may take longer due to factors such as lower speed limits, more stoplights, etc. However, it also takes traffic into account as well. It's also scarily accurate with the estimated time to arrival, adjusting the ETA accordingly with your average speed.
    • An update tells you which lane you need to be in if encountering a fork or intersection and the secondary routes along the way with a change in ETA if you decide to take that route.
    • It was once reported that asking an older version of it for walking directions from The Shire to Mordor would result in it replying "Use caution — One does not simply Walk into Mordor."
  • As it turns out, someone had the foresight to add tamper-proof measures to photobooths — they'll take your picture if they detect someone trying to, for example, steal money from the machine as this thief found out.
  • Laws are often awfully specific, especially if they forbid something. That has a very simple reason: Almost all legal systems work under the assumption that anything which is not explicitly forbidden by law is allowed and no law may ever apply retroactively. So whoever writes the laws has to anticipate a lot. Some laws are therefore rather general, but some are awfully specific, like the German law on nuclear explosions.
  • In Disney Theme Parks, there are attractions that use animatronics in their pre-shows or during keystone moments of their attractions. Animatronics break. Because of this, many of these rides have B-Modes in place so that immersion/story flow can continue without issue.
  • The Catholic Church in 1564 ratified De Defectibus, a document that includes contingency plans for all sorts of things that could go wrong during mass. Among them are what to do if a rat runs off with the consecrated host, if a spider falls into the chalice, if either becomes poisoned, if the priest becomes ill, faints, or dies in the middle of mass, if enemy soldiers storm the church, and if a flood or other natural disaster occurs. This is because Catholics consider the Mass, especially the Liturgy of the Eucharist, as Serious Business, and there are certain defects that can invalidate the celebration and consecration.
  • VirtualBox can automatically assign an operating system to virtual machines, depending on what's being typed. Naming one "Mint" can make it assign Ubuntu to the machine, since Linux Mint is a fork of Ubuntu.
  • The wireless NES controllers for the Nintendo Switch are not designed to be played in handheld mode despite them being able to slide into the Switch like the Joy-Con controllers (which is largely to charge them), but if one does decide to slide the NES controllers onto the Switch vertically and play it in handheld mode, the + Control Pad is automatically reconfigured to be like a Joy-Con, treating the up and down buttons as left and right and vice versa.

 
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Alternative Title(s): The Dev Team Thinks Of Everything

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Peach's Reaction To Peachette

Before the final boss battle of New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe, Peach will call out to the player from her locked tower. She calls out Mario or Luigi's name if you play as them, and a ''Help me!'' if you play as any other character...but if you play as Toadette while using the Peachette power-up, a question mark will appear over her head and she just says '' What?''

How well does it match the trope?

4.88 (34 votes)

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