There Are No Bedsheets

There is no nightwear either, apparently.

A Video Game Trope, usually seen in Role-Playing Games.

Back in the 2D era, it was fairly easy to show characters getting into bed. One sprite for the back of the bed, one for the sheets or blanket, slot the character sprite between them. In fact, in countless such games the player can "lie down in bed" simply by walking his character into it from the side, at which point they look just like they're tucked in safely.

However, when games went 3D, players expected to see realistic bedsheets. This is nowhere near an easy task, as bedsheets need to curve realistically and be able to be sloughed off the bed when the character arises, something that's very difficult to do with polygons. This gave the developers three choices:

• Show a bedsheet as a single polygon slab (or at best several polygons). This is almost never done, because it looks awful.
• Go whole hog and program realistic bedsheets. For most games this is simply too much work for too little gain.
• Do what most RPGs do, which is simply remove the bedsheets entirely, or make them welded to the bed so the character sleeps on top of the blanket.

For many games, your hero will be lying in bed, but there will inevitably be no sheets or blanket on it; the hero may as well be lying on a slab of rock. The only exception may be when showing someone who is ill and not actually expected to get out of bed at all during the course of the game.

Compare No Flow in CGI and No Such Thing as Dehydration.

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Examples:

Action Games

• Honkai Impact 3rd includes dorms where chibi versions of your Valkyries can be placed in as if they were actual living quarters, including decorations and furnishings. When a Valkyrie wants to sleep, she will simply roll onto the bed and conk out without disturbing the sheets.

Adventure Games

• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time: Link during his Good Morning, Crono. He and the Kokiri are used to sleep in their treehouses' beds without any bedsheets, likely because Kokiri Forest is always warm enough.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword has Link simply flop on top of a bed when he sleeps in one (fully clothed), regardless of whether or not they have sheets.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: NPCs will sleep in their clothes atop the duvet covers, even in an environment where this would be less than ideal (such as a stable in the middle of a freezing tundra). Averted when Link goes to bed, since the screen cuts to black and resumes with him standing and stretching.
• Shenmue on the Dreamcast. Ryo at least sheds his sneakers and jacket, but always sleeps atop his bedspread.
• Oblivion boasted a day life cycle for each NPC, meaning that at night, they would go home and sleep in their beds. On top of their bedsheets. Fully clothed.
• Back to the Future: The Game - Marty wakes up in episode 4 on top of his blankets, fully dressed.
• Bully had sheets on Jimmy Hopkin's bed… and being a teenager, he never bothered to make his bed, so the sheets are forever a tangled mess that he lays on top of. Some of the beds Jimmy could sleep in were simply undressed mattresses, though those tended to be intentionally crappy-looking with at least one resting on top of concrete bricks.
• Episode 2 of Life Is Strange starts with Max waking up in her bed, but there are no bedsheets. Similarly, there is a scene in Episode 3 where Max and Chloe wake up in Chloe's bed.
• Hugo's House of Horrors In the second game, Penelope lies down on the bed and sleeps, on an apparently bare bed, and does not even remove her shoes.

Role-Playing Games

• In Divinity: Original Sin II, characters lie down on top of the fully made bed. The Optional Sexual Encounter after Act III adds a layer of absurdity, as after the Sexy Discretion Shot, the characters are lying on the bed, still fully clothed and armed.
• Dragon Age: Origins have characters lie on their beds without sheets. Of particular note is Arl Eamon, who is supposed to have been sick and bedridden for weeks, if not months. A piece of concept art depict him all wrapped up in blankets and sheets, but in-game he's lying fully clothed on the bed like he's taking a quick nap.
• Final Fantasy X: Whenever Tidus is shown on a bed, there is no blanket.
  • Similarly with Yuna in Final Fantasy X-2.
  • Beds in Final Fantasy IV have sheets every 2D version of the game, but when it was remade with 3D graphics, they were mysteriously nowhere to be found.
• Kingdom Hearts: This trope happens in every game in the series, with the exception of Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, where there are no beds.
• Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas: Many beds are like this, as it is After the End and clean linens were one of the earliest casualties of the war.
• Fallout 4 is much the same way, though it's usually justified in that the vast majority of beds you'll encounter have no sheets to begin with, with some being nothing other than a bare mattress on the floor.
• Grandia II: While all the beds in the game have sheets, the characters will only be shown lying on top of them, except for one scene with a bed-ridden character.
• Aversion conveniently enabled in Paper Mario. Since all the characters are 2D in a 3D world they can just slip under the sheets without anything needing to be changed.
• Averted in Rakenzarn Tales, as Kyuu will get under the sheets when the cutscenes show him in bed. In this instance, it's just overlaying part of the bed sprite on top of him, so when we see him get up, he just slides out from under them and the sheets don't move. Doesn't bother to change his clothes, but it's not like he had time to grab his pajamas before he got transported to Rakenzarn.
• Averted in Super Mario RPG. After spending the night at an inn or similar place, Mario can be seen under the blanket of the bed. You even have to hit the jump button to make him get up. This is a bit of a cheat though, since the game is technically sprite-based.
• A brief aversion near the start of Lunarosse where Channing is under the covers when he's sleeping in. Like the Rakezarn Tales example, it's a case of just overlaying part of the bed sprite, so when he jumps out of bed, he does so without rustling the sheets at all. He does also avert the tendency for characters not to change outfits before going to bed, as he comes out wearing only his boxers.
• Also averted in Rakenzarn Frontier Story as Kyoko is shown under the sheets of her hospital bed. Oddly, still wearing her usual outfit.
• People in the Gothic series simply sleep on top of the mattress, with nothing covering them.
• Zig-zagged in Undertale, where the player character goes to sleep on top of the bed in Toriel's house, and wakes up under the sheets - it's implied that Toriel covered them when she brought the pie into the room. They're also shown lying on top of the bed at the inn in Snowdin... for about two minutes, because the snoring in the other room is keeping them awake. Then if they stay in the MTT Restort, they'll actually go entirely under the covers and can move around under them because of how big the bed is. Finally, there's the True Lab, where they can lie in a bed with the sheets at the end of it, until one of the amalgamates pulls said sheets over them.

Sandbox Simulation

• Animal Crossing beds may or may not have bedsheets in their models, but characters will universally ignore them and just lie on top of them, using the same animation for a normal bed as they would for a hammock or a bench-press.
• Cube World has characters sleep on top of the bed and the blankets face down with their weapons still on their backs.

Meta

• A Running Gag for Two Best Friends Play, who reference this whenever the character of the game goes to sleep ON TOP of the covers. When they discovered that Deadly Premonition of all games actually rendered proper, animated sheets (albeit cheap-looking ones), Pat was floored.

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