Edge Gravity

Early video game designers figured that if a player walked toward the edge of, say, a cliff, it was only reasonable that if they kept going when they got there, they'd fall off (typically to an untimely death). This sounds reasonable enough and makes sense.

But try it in real life. Go on, we'll wait.

It's not as easy as it looks. Reasonable though it may seem, it's actually very very hard to step off an edge. It's something that the human body has an autonomic aversion to doing, as it requires moving your center of gravity out in front of your feet. Which means that it is, in fact, unrealistic for it to be trivially easy to walk off a cliff.

Edge Gravity is the property of the edge of a platform to actively resist the player's motion over it.

Edge Gravity can be implemented as simply as having the motion of a player character halt momentarily when an edge is reached; it may be indicated by having the character teeter on the edge. Games which use analogue controls may require that the player extend their control to maximum to cross the edge, or even press the "jump" button (reflecting that while you might want to jump off, or climb down, you're unlikely to want to step off the edge). Alternatively, a game may let the player go straight off the edge, but automatically spin around and hang from it. Or, to make absolutely sure, it could flat out slap an Invisible Wall in front of them.

Early Sierra Adventure Games were notorious for their lack of Edge Gravity (and for being condescending toward any player who fell victim to a steep drop). Avoiding such drops was often difficult because of the camera angles and difficulty of depth perception in a 2D game with 16 colours.

These are most commonly found in third-person 3D Platformers. First Person Shooters and 2D Platformers generally don't, though Donkey Kong Country is an interesting exception.

2D Platformers can generally simulate the effect with careful level design. Some kind of harmless obstacle is placed in front of important edges. This means that a careless (or extremely fast) hero won't walk into a Bottomless Pit or take a Leap of Faith without the player meaning to. Edges that aren't so important (because falling has no serious consequence) can thus be navigated at full speed with no cost to the player, making for a smoother playing experience.

If the Edge Gravity is unreliable, it can be a form of Fake Difficulty, and if it's so powerful as to be impossible to overcome, it can work as an Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence. Some games pair this with Bottomless Pit Rescue Service.

If this happens while not on a platform edge, you just hit an Invisible Wall instead.

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Examples

Action Adventure

• In Beyond Good & Evil - you simply can't jump down or over an edge unless the game expects you to. (If you try, Jade will instead do the "grab the edge" routine, after which you can either climb back - or try to jump down once again, resulting in Jade looking around, seeing that the fall would have been fatal, and maintaining her grip.) This applies to vertical obstacles as well, sometimes leading to Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence situations.
• inFAMOUS has many edges that are impossible to cross unless you jump. You can't just walk onto the street from the sidewalk, you must make a five foot leap.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening has a variation. If Link steps over the border between a solid tile and a falling hazard (holes and water), he'll start slipping towards the hole, but be able to struggle back to solid ground. The further over the hazard, the harder it is to get back. Using the Roc's Feather during the slip will make getting back easier. Taking advantage of this allowed a lot of Sequence Breaking in the original, but it was tightened up for the DX Updated Re Release to fix an Unintentionally Unwinnable flaw.
  • In The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, walking off an edge will make Link grab on to the edge instead of falling. Anything faster will make him jump off.
  • In The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap pits will actively pull you in so strongly that, as soon as you out a single pixel on the void, running directly in the other direction at max speed may still not save you.
  • Link in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess will, if forced to walk off an edge, usually grab the edge and hold on for dear life. This makes it difficult sometimes to get him to actually jump off when you want him to, such as if jumping to a lower level in an area.
  • In The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks, you are actually attracted to lethally empty voids, and approaching any edges in the game is a mortally bad idea. Unless you want to jump to a different platform, which is only accomplished by running at the edge at high speed.
  • This is taken further in The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword; Link is now almost completely magnetized to the floor he's standing on, and unless you're dashing directly toward a ledge, you'll need to hold the control stick in place for a few seconds before he actually jumps off. Dropping down and hanging from a ledge is now done via pressing the A button once you're standing close enough for the prompt to show up.
  • In The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, there's actually no Edge Gravity, which means even if you're walking slowly, you can still accidentally fall off a ledge. Especially frustrating when you're trying to jump off of a tower, as they have holes near the edges which you can fall through when trying to jump off. Thankfully, Link at least now has a paraglider to keep him from plummeting to his death.
• In Pirates: Legend of the Black Buccaneer, standing near edges of platforms and ledges will have your character dangling precariously while trying to keep his balance.
• In Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice generally won't let you fall off an edge unless you jump first, which comes in handy considering you're playing as a ninja who's constantly traversing cliffsides and rooftops.
• Shadow of the Colossus: The game has mild edge gravity on edges from which falling would do moderate to severe damage: Wander instinctively backs up from them if he isn't running fast, but you can get him to go over them by jumping. (Of course, that's not always a good idea...) Wander's horse Agro also exhibits this. She might jump off of a small cliff ledge if you spur her immediately beforehand, though this may result in a temporary limp. Anything above a certain height and she'll refuse to jump every time, scrambling to a halt or turning away at the last second.

Action Game

• Die Hard is an especially egregious case. If you try to climb down the roof of the building on a rope, our hero refuses to do so saying he'd have to be desperate to try it, and yet he'll happily walk through an office window to his death. (Pointed out by The Angry Video Game Nerd).
• In Escape from the Planet of the Robot Monsters, if you wander off of a platform, you'll turn around and hold onto the edge with your arms.
• Metal Slug, starting from 2 onward, have an additional animation for players where if they're dangerously close to an edge with a fatal drop, they'll precariously dangle over the other side in an unsteady manner.
• Averted in the X Men arcade game, as shown here, complete with a Narmtastic scream that wouldn't be out of place in King's Quest!

Adventure Game

• Astonishingly present in Leisure Suit Larry 2: Looking for Love (in Several Wrong Places), where otherwise there are a lot of things that can kill you. You even get points for almost falling off the cliff, though they get taken away immediately afterwards.
• In the first Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars, one location on a mountaintop has an inexplicable "walk off the edge" option. If you try it, George understandably refuses, so at first it looks like just another of the game's many joke options. However, not long afterwards, you find yourself held at gunpoint by the same ledge, and the only way out is to distract the gunman (with a Not Completely Useless Joke Item, no less) and make a well-timed Leap of Faith onto a handy soft-topped Jeep.
• In Stray, ledges can only be walked off for the smallest of falls. Otherwise the only way to descend from a ledge is if a valid destination is within range, which will trigger a jump prompt to appear.

Fighting Game

• The Super Smash Bros. series of games exhibit this along with unique character animations when at the "event horizon". The game also features a variation of this trope that causes character to latch on to any nearby ledge when falling, a sort of Ledge Gravity.
  • Edge gravity is oddly variable in the series. A character performing a dash attack or an evasive maneuver has infinite edge gravity; however, a walking or running character has almost none (which is good, as it allows for air-based edge-guarding); certain attacks have no edge gravity (which can actually cause suicides, as with Fox's and Captain Falcon's side specials); and in some cases pressing Down + A for a Down Smash while on the edge will often cause the character to instead Fast Fall into a Down Air off the edge, which is invariably fatal. Can be avoided via C-Sticking, but still annoying. In the Wii U/3DS version running over the edge results in a sort of 'rolling off' manoeuvre where the character moves smoothly instead of awkwardly dropping.
• Present in Dissidia Final Fantasy, dodging towards an edge will hang the character on it, you'll have to dodge again, or jump before dodging, if you want to get out of this (however, you can just walk off, but dodging is a no go)
  • It should be mentioned that the AI completely forgets about the edge gravity and will only dodge once, getting caught on the edge and almost always guaranteeing a hit (this is completely acceptable to most players, since they otherwise have unbelievable reaction time.)
• Contrasting Virtua Fighter, who standardized the concept of Ring Outs in fighting games, the Soul series doesn't allow you to walk off the edge of a ring without being pushed out or at least doing something yourself that would cause you to go over (like sliding over the edge or jumping out).

First Person Shooter

• GoldenEye didn't just have edge gravity, it was literally impossible to step off an edge, even a foot high one (and no jumping, either). With the only exceptions being the very first level which required a bungee jump at the end, and the final level where you preferably make the other guy take the fall instead. Its Spiritual Successor Perfect Dark didn't, but still had no jumping.
  • There are other places that lack edge gravity, like when jumping into the bunker in the first surface level. And in the Aztec level, there's a big chasm you can fall down that leads to a different part of the level. There's a slab you can walk on to cross the chasm, but you can't walk off the side of the bridge into the pit, even though there are no rails.
• Star Wars: Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy lacked this, and sometimes the more acrobatic enemies would actually jump off cliffs to their doom just by trying to get to you or dodge your attacks.
• In every game of the Unreal series, the player can't fall off a ledge when not running, though the implementation of it is odd enough that you can, for instance, crouch-walk far enough that you're levitating in the air just past a ledge, only to suddenly fall off of it when you let go of the crouch button.
  • In Serious Sam as well.
• BioShock has a few docks with no railing, but you can never walk off into the water.
• In Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2, if your character steps off a ledge or something similar, they will dangle off the ledge for a period of time; getting back up on the surface requires a teammate to help you up. This period only lasts for a certain amount of time, however. If no help is offered before that time runs out, you fall and die. However, if you go really far over an edge, such as a long jump off the side or being tossed/knocked off by a Tank, it's an instant fall and instant death.
  • Because of the game mechanics, if your grip completely gives out, you're going to die no matter what. This includes hanging over a 2 foot drop that you would most likely survive from!
• PAYDAY: The Heist:
  • The Diamond Heist mission takes place in a tall building and at several points in the level, you go to the roof and you can also see SWAT teams climb up the building and climb over the ledge to reach the roof. However, you can't fall off the building on the roof or through the broken windows inside no matter how much you try to thanks to an Invisible Wall.
  • The Green Bridge level also has one at the wrecked portion of the bridge. You can't jump off the edge no matter what.
• Vermintide II: Even if you take a running jump off a ledge, you somehow catch yourself and hang there, helpless but able to be rescued by a teammate before you fall. A few effects can bypass this, like being Punched Across the Room by a rat-ogre.

MMORPG

• In Black Desert Online, your character will teeter over edges for a moment before walking off, even if you're sprinting. Enforced if you're riding a horse that knows the Caution skill; they will adamantly refuse to walk off any ledge that will inflict even a scratch worth of fall damage, meaning that if you really want to get your horse down that cliff, you'll have to take a flying leap and take a lot of fall damage, rather than shimmy down the cliff at an angle and take a few scratches worth.
• Wizard101 and Pirate101 both have this everywhere, since jumping serves no real purpose and is basically just an emote.

Platform Game

• Electronic Popple have characters, both you and mooks, teetering and trying to maintain balance when near the edge of a cliff or pitfall.
• In Tomb Raider, the player can choose whether to walk (by pressing Shift while playing on PC or the R1 button while on PS1) or run. When walking, Lara will not walk off an edge.
  • Tomb Raider games made after the developer change (Legend, Anniversary, Underworld) will have Lara spin around and hang after running off an edge. Even if you want to drop from a height that wouldn't hurt her (much), she will cling to any available ledge like a lifeline; a lifesaver at times, but often results in issues.
• In the original Prince of Persia, if you walk (by holding Shift) over the edge of a drop, the titular character will stumble slightly and back off, as if the game is asking "are you sure?", since doing it again will cause the prince to step into the abyss. Running over the edge doesn't have this restriction.
• Nicely averted in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time by making the Prince jump off the edge, spin around and dangle off the edge by his hands; this actually proves a useful maneuver when ducking wandering creatures, or dodging activated traps. On the other hand, walking towards an edge will cause the Prince to flail and take a step back as he regains his balance. Both of these carry over to the second and third games in the trilogy.
• Bunny Must Die is one of the few 2D platformers that actually has this. Sadly, it mostly contributes to the feeling that the main character was a Sherman tank in a former life.
• Inverted in Castlevania: Falling from the edge of a platform results in falling down instantly at terminal velocity, as opposed to the gradually accelerating fall that happens if you jump down the edge.
• Spelunky will have players teeter slightly over the edge, which can cause them to drop the item they were holding onto. Crawling over to a ledge resulted in the spelunker flipping over to hang from the ledge. They can also grab onto a ledge by moving toward it while falling (or automatically in the remake).
• In Mega Man, not only do you not have edge gravity, the magnet beam forgets to check your downward acceleration, so the game thinks you've been falling for quite a while when you step off and you rocket downwards. You fall slower if you jump.
• Played with in the 2D Adventure Game A Boy and His Blob, where walking off an edge would give the player 2 seconds of realising he was not walking on solid ground ... cartoon style.
• ToeJam & Earl (the first one) averts this; your player will teeter for a while before caving into the player's commands and falling off. If they're using running or rocket shoes though, they'll take a big leap instead.
• Lampshaded in the tutorial of 1213, when being instructed to jump over a pit. Don't worry! You can't fall off by walking over the edge. That would be very silly of you, wouldn't it.
• Lode Runner 3D had a rather gimmicky implementation, in that you could only fall off corners, not edges.
• Super Monkey Ball and some of its sequels have a variant: Most platforms have a very small rail at the edge, about 1/10th the diameter of the ball in height and width, though they become increasingly infrequent as you progress through Expert mode. Running into a rail while moving slowly and/or at a shallow angle may cause it to hold you on the platform, but don't count on it in most circumstances. The game also has unique monkey animations for when the ball is right on an edge without a rail or on top of the rail itself.
• Several Sonic the Hedgehog games use this trope.
  • Sonic Adventure 2 allows Sonic, Shadow, Knuckles, and Rouge to stop and teeter for a second if you steer them into an edge and they aren't rolling. Interesting in that they can go from crazy fast to full stop instantly, which you can't do manually. This only happens when you're moving quickly over a ledge that will drop you about 1 1/2 times your jump height, so you have to walk or jump off of high ledges and can't just run.
  • Sonic Heroes is annoyingly random about its edge gravity. It'll prevent you from running off the edge, except when it abruptly doesn't. However, one circumstance that is guaranteed to toss you off the edge is combat. If a power character attacks, he'll frequently move forward with the punch, which the edge gravity isn't programmed to notice. Since it's the game where the 3D Sonic's overabundance of bottomless pits reached critical mass, expect to die from punching several times.
  • In the 16-bit Sonic games like Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and 3, as long as Sonic (or Tails or Knuckles) isn't running at full speed, they will sometimes come to a complete stop if they reach an edge, regardless of if there's a bottomless pit or not. They all have unique animations if they're right on the edge. Sonic, in fact, has three in the second game; he'll balance on one leg if you're only near an edge, glancing over the side; will be on both tiptoes leaning over with his arms windmilling for balance if you're right on the brink; and if you turn around, he balances on one foot facing away from the ledge.
  • In Sonic Unleashed, Sonic the Werehog will automatically grab ledges if he walks off of them, but only specially designated ones that glow. There is a downloadable stage that is almost entirely this.
  • In Shadow the Hedgehog, this is played with—if you're running into a cliff at full speed, Shadow will stop and tumble a bit before standing upright. If you're thrown at the cliff and are unable to stop (I.e. hitting a spring or driving to the edge) he'll just fly off.
• Harry Jr. in Pitfall 3D: Beyond the Jungle won't willingly walk off a cliff...once. If the player tries again, though, he'll happily fall off the edge (sometimes this takes several tries, though). Unfortunately, Harry won't 'bump back' from the edge if he's walking on a container or box.
• Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards: When balanced on an edge, Kirby will wheel his stubby little arms, teeter back and forth, and exclaim "Woah!" in the most adorable voice ever.
• Bug has this, on platforms with edge "borders". You can't walk or jump off a bordered side of a platform, unless you did a high jump (via a spring, or by Goomba Springboard).
• Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Sunshine will cause Mario to grab onto a ledge automatically if he ever steps off. This becomes an essential mechanic in the latter, with cliff-climbing sessions with ledges too narrow (or obstructed) to walk on but still grabbable.
• Super Mario Land sports Castlevania-style gravity, where jumping off a ledge lets you fall down at a regular clip, but walking off one yanks Mario straight down to his death at near Mach 1 speed.
• Banjo-Tooie also allowed Banjo to grab onto a ledge if he fell off one. Oddly, Sergeant Jamjars had to teach Banjo how to do it.
• If you are playing a pirated copy of Mirror's Edge, anytime Faith attempts to leap off buildings/rooftops she'd slow way down: Mirror's Edge: Gravity Edition
• Jazz Jackrabbit had Jazz stumble to regain his footing if you walked too far off an edge without going straight off.
• Dustforce has an interesting variation. Since the game is about parkour, running any sort of speed over a ledge will cause you to flip over it in a horizontal line. Useful for maintaining momentum, bad for trying to fall down a pit.
• Astro's Playroom has this active at all times: it's physically impossible to run off a ledge if you're on the ground, so it can only be done if Asto is in the air.
• Disabled by default in Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, but can be enabled as an accessibility feature. It's very useful when fighting enemies on small platforms where you'll often be running sideways or backwards without knowing exactly where you're going.
• Jersey Devil has one of the strangest examples of this in video game history, where their attempt to do this actually ends up averting it. If you approach the edge of a ledge, Jersey Devil will do a tiny little hop forward: the hop is too small to be of any use, and often it can screw up your attempts to properly jump off an edge. Naturally, it's a gigantic Scrappy Mechanic.
• Exaggerated in Barney's Hide & Seek Game: Barney absolutely refuses to walk off a cliff or take a jump he doesn't think he'll make, holding up a stop sign and saying "Stop! Wait til it's safe." It's not supposed to be possible to get around this, but with very careful positioning you can get Barney to actually fall in a Bottomless Pit.

Puzzle Game

• The game EDGE, by Two Tribes, is all about this trope. You have to use edge gravity to hang onto platforms you can't stand on in order to solve puzzles.
• Quantum Conundrum is sorely lacking in edge gravity, making for annoying Fake Difficulty.
• Deadly Rooms of Death has levels with pits, but it is not possible to fall into them even if you try. The manual justifies this by saying that "Smitemasters are too experienced to accidentally fall into them."
• Comes into play in The Castles of Doctor Creep, in that your character stops not only at the end of a floor, but at the edge of open trap doors as well. This means that the only way your character can die from falling is if a trap door opens directly underneath (in which case the character dies immediately).

Real Time Strategy

• Sacrifice was set on a series of flying islands, with Insurmountable Edge Gravity to stop anybody falling off. (The game mechanic included neither jumping nor climbing, and each island's surface was composed entirely of slopes that could be traversed merely by walking, no matter how steep.) Flying creatures, however, could travel beyond the edges — meaning they could take the straight route across concavities that ground-based creatures had to go around — and if one was killed by a ranged attack while over the edge, its body would vanish into the abyss.

Roguelike

• In the game Dwarf Fortress's Adventure Mode, the player can walk off a cliff... provided they hold Alt while they press the arrow key, and then confirm the move on top of that. On the other hand, dodging an attack automatically makes you move to a random adjacent square and can easily result in jumping off a ledge.

Role Playing Game

• Particularly noticeable in Final Fantasy X-2. Yuna will wobble and gasp when she gets too close to the edge of a cliff, or when a jump is mistimed.
  • Probably added as a courtesy to players of the original Final Fantasy X, in which you couldn't walk (or jump) off of anything at all. X-2 takes place in the same world, but with 3D movement tacked on.
  • She actually does walk off a cliff accidentally in a cutscene though, while dizzy from vertigo. Guess where the camera goes during this scene too...
• Followed to the point in Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers when the player tries to run Layle off a cliff to a fatal drop; he will fall for a bit then use his gravity-bending powers to pull himself back up from the last thing he fell off of.
• In Gothic, characters can walk towards some edges at less than running speed and will stop short of walking off it. While this does a good job at keeping characters from falling off high areas to their death, and saves on some NPC stupidity, this also make it difficult to slowly walk to and drop down to any narrow areas just below where you currently stand.
• In Ultima VIII: Pagan, there were three speeds to move at: a careful tiptoe, a walk, and a run. You could only actually fall off a cliff at a full run. Attempting to tiptoe (and maybe walk) off a cliff stopped movement, and had the character teeter at the edge, saying "Whoah!"
  • The "tiptoe" speed could be used to force the Avatar to fall off (after his "whoah") as long as you were doing it absolutely perpendicular to the edge of the cliff - given the slightest chance he'll walk around instead. Which isn't as useful as it sounds since there are several places in the game where you have to fall down a hole, which can be frustratingly difficult to arrange.
• The first 3 Wild ARMs games have the character teeter if you want towards an edge. You can then choose to jump down or not. If you're running, however, you automatically jump down. However, if there's a Bottomless Pit below the edge, you just fall. Go figure.
• In The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall, moving over a ledge normally involved your character jumping from it. As most holes in dungeons were one span across, trying to force your character to fall down them without landing on the other side or clipping into either wall was more difficult than it should have been. You couldn't sneak (speed reduction) off of ledges either.
• In Wizardry 8, some edges have invisible walls to prevent you stepping off them, and others don't.
• In the Mario & Luigi series, platforms over bottomless pits (at least the ones that'd be 'out of bounds') simply have a convenient invisible wall to stop you falling off the edge. This is very, very noticeable in Somnom Woods in Dream Team, which mostly takes place on a cliff but has nowhere you can actually fall off except where there's land below.
• Demon's Souls, the Dark Souls games, and Bloodborne avert this completely. There is no tell when you're at a ledge or not and your character drops like a brick the moment you walk off one. Makes dark areas and narrow areas where enemies are attacking you particularly annoying.

Simulation Game

• All three Lost in Blue main characters go "Whoaaa!" when they get too close to the edge of a high cliff.
• Minecraft plays this interestingly, you have no edge gravity during normal movement, but if you crouch down it is impossible to fall, and you can even move a few inches beyond where you would normally fall from.
  • What makes this weird is that if you release the crouch key while being a few inches beyond the block you're "standing" on, you'll simply fall down, often to your death.
• In the Trainz model railroad simulators, the routes are built on what seem to be infinitely tall square tables. If the train derails and goes off the edge of the layout, the engines and cars float in midair rather than fall forever.
• Animal Crossing series has Edge Gravity for player characters but not for snowballs. Or sports balls, such as the kind you may be trying to take to a neighbor, possibly over a bowed bridge.
• This used to be an annoying part of World of Tanks. Due to a lack of any decent physics in the early game, it was a trivial thing to hang 50+ tons of armored death machine off the edge of a cliff while shooting down onto enemies below. Moving tanks whose drivers weren't paying attention would also hit the cliff edge and simply stop.
  • The first big physics update to the game made massive, armored vehicles teetering on cliffs act exactly like... Well, massive armored vehicles teetering on cliffs. Self-inflicted deaths from tanks dropping/sliding/hurtling off of cliffs immediately skyrocketed. And yes - it was hilarious.

Sports Game

• A very interesting version in the Tony Hawk games. When going vertical on your skateboard (or bike or what-have-you) you will frequently turn around corners, so that you come down perfectly - well, as long as there's ramp left to land on, anyway.
• In SSX for the Xbox 360 and PS3. If you're moving toward a bottomless pit that's off the beaten path, the player character will deliberately resist your control and try to steer away. You'd better listen to them.

Stealth Based Game

• Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty and Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater: If the player character dives or rolls off the edge they will fall, but if they run or walk off, they will grab the edge and hang there. Irritatingly, certain traps are made by changing the Edge Gravity of a given set of floor...
• In Hitman, most edges are protected by an Invisible Wall. Some of them display a Context-Sensitive Button prompt when approached (e.g., "press B to climb down").
• Assassin's Creed provides you with just about every conceivable option. Walking to an edge (generally) makes Altair stop. Running to an edge makes him visibly teeter and either regain his balance or grab onto the edge. Specifying the Le Parkour mode makes him leap off the edge without hesitation — hopefully to a platform or handhold.
• The Splinter Cell series counters its near-suicidal aversion of Edge Gravity with Sam's ability to dangle off most anything he can fit his fingers on, so long as you press the D-pad in that particular direction. In the first iteration (at least), alert guards didn't even have the ability to aim down at Sam, nor did they consider stepping on his hands.

Survival Horror

• The eerie alternate world of Silent Hill is loaded with cutaway floors that are impossible to fall through. This was averted in Silent Hill 3 where falling into a Bottomless Pit is now a threat with game mechanics designed around it. As per the instruction manual, holding R2 to walk around with your weapon raised (referred to as "Caution mode") also makes it impossible to fall off a pit unless an enemy happens to attack you and knock you off while you're at the edge, and there's even a puzzle later in the game expects you to know about this. If you accidentally walk up to the edge of a pit you'll have a short window to press the other direction to recover your balance, with the window being tied to the difficulty you're playing on.

Wide Open Sandbox

• No More Heroes
  • Contributes to Rank 6 boss. You two battle on a beach, which she has filled with pitfall traps. When you run over one the first time, Travis falls in and has to climb out fast before a grenade the boss tosses in goes off. Once the pit is exposed, however, it has no edge gravity - running into it forces another climbing session, as does running too close to it.
  • You cannot run into the ocean. You can drive into it, the game takes you back to the motel.

Other

Film

• A weird non-video game example occurs in X-Men Origins: Wolverine during the climactic battle on the top of the coolant tower. Punched, kicked, tripped, backdropped and blown up, characters always land on the top of the wall, which is less than a meter wide-though considering that the characters are immune to falls, it wouldn't really matter.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition: When a creature is affected by a forced-movement effect, such as a bull rush or a telekinesis spell, and the effect would move them off a precipice, they get an extra saving throw to attempt to catch themselves at the edge and end the effect prematurely.

Real Life

• Sumo matches have this in the form of Tawara, partially buried rice bales that mark the boundaries of the ring. Just like in fighting games they prove very useful for a fighter facing a Ring Out.
• Seen in Real Life in this New York Times video [1]. Even with water underneath, people stop multiple times upon walking to the edge, and only ever step or jump off with considerable effort.

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