Shoo Out The Clowns / Video Games

• Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War features the Wham Level where the resident Plucky Comic Relief and The Big Guy Chopper gracefully leaves the stage by performing a Heroic Sacrifice and is eventually replaced by the Captain Snow. If that isn't a clue that shit is about to get worse, nothing is.
• Bayonetta:
  • In the first game and its sequel, Butt-Monkey Enzo only appears at the very beginning and end of the games, before the plot really kicks off and after everything has been settled. The only other times the player will see him (in medal/trophy form) are from getting Stone awards, and that's something to try to avoid. This is justified in that he's a regular human who has no chance whatsoever against the forces of Paradiso (and Inferno in 2), so he mostly gives Bayonetta the information she needs and she heads off by herself.
  • The other major comic relief character, Luka, is seemingly blown up by a missile right before the final fight with Jeanne, and he's tossed out a window just before the battle with Balder. He's not revealed to have survived until after each fight. He has a more active role in the finale of the second game, but by that point he phases out of being comic relief.
• Taokaka tends to disappear from the plot of the BlazBlue games whenever it takes a serious turn. She's barely present at all in the final game.
• In the True Ending path of BoxxyQuest: The Gathering Storm, all of Catie's quirky, loveable teammates get taken out by the Reversion Pulse just in time for Legion to be revived, at which point the usually lighthearted game turns deathly dark and serious.
• Cave Story: Balrog, the humorous half of the Quirky Miniboss Squad, makes himself scarce about two-thirds into the game, just before the Climax Boss shows up. In the normal ending, the fight in the Labyrinth is the last time you ever see him; in the Golden Ending, he shows up after the defeat of the True Final Boss to pull off a Big Damn Heroes moment.
  • In the scope of the Normal ending. Curly Brace seems to be the only cheerful person right before everything makes a turn for the worst (crippling the Core, Egg Corridor exploding, all Mimigas kidnapped). Tragically, Curly Brace is killed off, and heroically no less.
• Devil May Cry 5: In the early parts of the game, Nico and her van can be summoned for upgrades, with her arrival, dialogue lines, and store music providing a bit of levity before boss fights. But once the protagonists start diving into the Qliphoth seriously to stop it, Nico starts falling behind. By then, Divinity Statues start appearing, which, while relatively soothing, are still much more otherworldly and impersonal compared to the van.
• Disgaea:
  • Lampshaded in Disgaea DS: During New Game Plus, the Prinny commentary stops during really emotional scenes, usually prefaced with something to the tune of "I'll shut up for awhile." It's back as soon as the dialogue turns goofy again.
  • Also spoofed in the second to last chapter of Disgaea 2, when Those Two Guys Hanako and Taro (who are, for the most part, just coming along because they're fangirling/fanboying the more plot-important characters) realize that they're going to need real motives if they want to stay relevant (which they, of course, fashion out of complete bullshit on the spot).
• Happens to Mickey Mouse, Goofy, Woody, and Jessie during major events in Disney Magic Kingdoms. The former two in particular will have at least a few quests to help kick off an event and/or figure out how to deal with the eternally-respawning tapper enemies with a few more quests later on, and the latter two will have semi-related side-quests. All four are helpful for collecting tokens and event currency regardless, but soon enough, the plot will focus solely on the new characters introduced in the event (e.g. those from Beauty and the Beast), who are the only ones who can participate in the event's boss battle(s).
• Fallout: New Vegas: The final story expansion pack, Lonesome Road, is by far the bleakest of the DLC's and entirely devoid of comedic characters, which is a complete 180 from the over-the-top pulp sci-fi humor of the previous DLC, Old World Blues. Aside from the duplicate of ED-E, the only NPC's encountered in The Divide are the ruthlessly hostile Marked Men, and the Big Bad, Ulysses, is a Creepy Monotone-voiced Scary Black Man clad in a duster and respirator mask, whose face is fixed in a glowing, unblinking stare.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Final Fantasy VI wraps up several storylines during a pivotal moment in the middle of the game, particularly with Ultros. Kefka also goes from a literal Clown to the most menacing being in all reality.
  • In the Final Fantasy VII prequel Crisis Core, the humorous Chocobo Summons will never appear in the DMW during certain dramatic boss battles (e.g., the fights with Sephiroth, Angeal, etc.)
  • In Final Fantasy VIII, the increasingly bleak predicament facing the party are interspersed with segments featuring the buffoonish Laguna Loire. Come disc three, the least militaristic of the main party is in a coma, and the final Laguna segment occurs shortly before things get even worse.
  • In Final Fantasy XIII-2 Mog is "phased out" during a dramatic sequence where Serah is alone in the Void Beyond and has to confront Caius by herself. He's not truly gone, because he's also her weapon and the mechanic for finding hidden treasure, but he may as well be in terms of the storyline.
  • In Final Fantasy XIV, you meet Hoary Boulder and Coultenet, two adventurers who join the Scions of the Seventh Dawn in the patches between A Realm Reborn and Heavensward. These light-hearted adventurers bring some comedy relief when needed, but when things takes a turn for the worse with Patch 2.5, they're slowly phased out, disappearing before Patch 2.55's Wham Episode. They stay out of the entirety of Heavensward's main story and don't return until Patch 3.2 as they're protecting themselves and Minfillia's adopted mother after the events of said Wham Episode.
    • The Inspector Hildibrand questline is a Denser and Wackier side-story where the Warrior of Light plays the Hypercompetent Sidekick to the titular Clueless Detective. Each major update, barring expansion releases, includes a new instalment of the questline. However, Hildibrand and his questline make absolutely no appearances durring the entirety of the Darker and Edgier Shadowbringers expansion save for an out-of-the-way cameo in one of the dungeons. He is slated to return for the Endwalker expansion.
• You know that Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade is about to get dark when Chivalrous Pervert Sain, the closest to a comic relief, shows up less and less in-story (aside of his supports, that is). This could just be explained by how the Fire Emblem series handles storytelling. Since one of the main premises of the series' gameplay is that Anyone Can Die, it becomes impossible to have anyone but the main lord(s), enemy characters or NPCs take an active role in the story because those characters may or may not be alive, which is why later games (starting with The Blazing Blade, coincidentally) have realized how limiting is this and have around a half-dozen characters or more only "retreat" when defeated and stay on the baselines, injured but alive, so they can talk on plot events.
• Five Nights at Freddy's is initially full of Black Comedy, mostly involving the sheer awfulness of the nightguard job getting multiple lampshades. For instance, the Phone Guy nonchalantly telling you about how being stuffed into a suit can result in "a bit of discomfort... and death." The moment the Murderer is brought up, everything starts to go downhill. When he actually shows up, the games lose any and all elements of Black Comedy that they used to have, replacing Phone Guy's almost overkill attempts to make the job seem completely normal with him casually informing you that if you screw up, you will die a horrible death, and that all you can do about that is, at best, crawling away to bleed out unseen by the children, and replacing the goofy-looking mascots with an Artificial Zombie that is visibly rotting.
  • Phone Guy's complete omission from Five Nights at Freddy's 4 reveals just how little of a laughing matter the series has become by this point.
• God of War Ragnarök: The story's tone takes a turn for the much darker (thanks in part to the rippling effect it has on the cast, especially on Sindri) once Brok, the uncouth and irreverent dwarven smith (with more foul language than the rest of the cast put together), gets killed by Odin. It's this very same irreverence that got him killed, too, as he had zero qualms with haranguing "Tyr" over every spotted thread once he felt things smelled fishy enough, and the impersonating Odin felt backed far enough into a corner to blow his cover and lash out lethally.
• To show how much more serious Halo: Reach is than the earlier Halo games, the Covenant all speak in an indecipherable language, even the formerly Plucky Comic Relief Grunts, effectively making them all much scarier. Also a Continuity Nod: most of the Covenant forces in the very first game only had a few repeating speech sounds, with only the Grunts speaking English. The game itself pulls this trope with Jun, putting him on a bus with Dr. Halsey before the final mission.
  • In Halo: Combat Evolved, Master Chief has left Cortana behind in the ring's control room when he encounters the Flood and 343 Guilty Spark. The Marines, with their confidant wisecracks, are also mostly absent for the rest of the game, and dropship pilot Foehammer momentarily returns in the final mission only to have a bridge dropped on her.
• In Hi-Fi RUSH, CNMN, the comedic Non-Action Guy of the group, is absent from the final fight with Kale in Track 12 due to getting mostly blown apart stopping Kale's mech at the end of Track 11.
• Iji is a very dark game throughout, but many of the logbooks are still quite funny, even if in a Black Comedy way. The humourous logbooks are mostly gone once the Komato arrive, and are gone entirely in the final few levels when things become especially desperate.
• The Journeyman Project: Buried in Time gets a lot more somber after your wisecracking AI sidekick turns himself into a virus in order to free you from the big bad.
• Kingdom Hearts started out with Donald Duck and Goofy as party members, and has to figure out how to use them as the story has become much more dramatic and serious over time.
  • In Kingdom Hearts, Ansem separates Sora from Donald and Goofy for the battle against him, but Sora then has to rescue them over the course of the final battle.
  • Several boss fights, including the final one, in Kingdom Hearts II have Sora separated from Donald and Goofy.
  • Lampshaded in Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance], where Goofy asks "Do you think we'll ever get to do something important?"
  • Kingdom Hearts III zig-zags this: When the ending Boss Bonanza begins, Donald and Goofy decide to stay behind to hold back a Heartless army, allowing Sora to fight alongside the other Keyblade wielders. When only the final boss remains at the end of the bonanza, they have finished clearing out the Heartless and volunteer to help Sora finish the fight while the other Keyblade wielders stand guard behind. While there is a Sequel Hook at the end, Donald, Goofy and Mickey Mouse are all written out preceding hints for a shift towards a more Final Fantasy-esque setting.
• The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky The 3rd: The English versions of the trilogy insert comedic banter into the descriptions of empty chests you have already looted. However, in the climax of the third game, with its heavy topics of Survivor Guilt and self-harm, the chests just say "This chest is empty" so as not to clash with the tone.
• The Legend of Spyro: Dawn of the Dragon: Before Spyro goes to face Malefor, he tells his adopted brother Sparx that he can't come with him, as he wouldn't survive the journey to the villains' castle. Instead, Spyro asks Sparx to lead everyone underground while the world begins to fall apart. Sparx is shown to be among the survivors after Spyro unleashes his World-Healing Wave.
• The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker:
  • Tingle, who via GBA link lets players make use of his help in finding extra rupees, fighting enemies with bombs, healing, and finding the Tingle Statues in dungeons, peppered with his silly sense of humor. However, come boss fight time, Tingle quickly excuses himself (with reasons such as embarrassment at meeting Aryll, or a twisted ankle) and Link is left to face the boss alone. Besides the cheapness of being able to Tingle Bomb bosses to death, Tingle would hardly fit in with scenes featuring Link slaying titanic creatures of darkness and reuniting with his sister.
  • It's the same with Hyrule, where most of the dramatic, plot-relevant things happen. However, the technical reason that the Tingle Tuner doesn't work in these areas is because it only works when the area in question has a map, which neither boss arenas nor the entirety of Hyrule have. Cleverly, it phases pretty damn well into the story justification.
• Happens in all three Marathon installments:
  • In the first game, Leela drops Out of Focus halfway through the story, being replaced by the rampant AI Durandal until the finale.
  • Two thirds of the way through the second game, the player is forced to shut down Durandal, who only returns in the last three levels. In the two levels preceding the final chapter, Robert Blake and the surviving BOBs withdraw from the story, escaping via a hijacked Pfhor shuttle.
  • In Infinity's penultimate act, also set after Durandal's shutdown, Tycho assigns the player to assist the Pfhor intaking over the BOBs' base, while in the final act, the BOBs are absent altogether, as with the previous game.
  • The Game Mod Marathon: RED features in its third act the Big Bad capturing the player character and converting them into a techno-organic Hybrid Monster, while their comrades and wisecracking Mission Control are killed off completely.
• In Max Payne 3, Raul and Giovanna, upon finding out that the latter is pregnant, pull a Screw This, I'm Outta Here prior to the final act, leaving Max to hunt down the Big Bad solo.
• Metal Gear:
  • Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes signals its Darker and Edgier turn from its predecessor, Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, by throwing the adorable little child soldier who provides Mission Control guidance for the Cryptid Missions into prison where he is tortured and raped, and the quirky Magnificent Bastard with a Mecha anime genre motif who spent most of the previous game disguised as a funny Purity Sue now has a shaved head, has had a bomb surgically implanted into her guts and has been the victim of a Mind Rape so thorough she's a Laughing Mad hollow shell. Also qualifies as Break the Cutie.
  • Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, Ground Zeroes's second part, pushes this even further, mutilating Kaz and transforming him from a funny and likeable character into a hissing vengeance-crazed psychopath. The Comic Relief Cécile and the heroic Amanda are pushed offscreen, and Huey, who makes a reappearance, is now referred to by his real name "Emmerich" instead of by his cutesy nickname and is now a very sinister character.
• For Act 1, Monark has plenty of moments of lightness, especially as the True Student Council room fills up with new members and they have random, oftentimes comedic banter with each other. In Act 2, when their friend and the Vice-President's little sister Chiyo is murdered and the group is disbanded, the comedy and lightheartedness of the game disappears and is swallowed up by the rest of the dark, gloomy, and depressing atmosphere of the game. Then it returns in Act 3, Deepest Depths, once the Vice-President goes through Putting the Band Back Together.
• OMORI: Once the player enters Black Space, the cheerful and bright Headspace is completely swept aside as Omori explores several disturbing and surreal worlds.
• In Ori and the Will of the Wisps, the Silent Woods, the most corrupted region of Niwen, where Ku is stranded at the beginning of the story and massacred by the Big Bad while attempting to escape with Ori at the end of the first act, are the only place that Lupo the cartographer doesn't dare enter, instead having Ori map it for him as a sidequest. They're also empty of Moki and other NPC's aside from the distraught treekeeper Kii, due to the residents having been Taken for Granite by The Corruption. After Ku's aformentioned near-death and "funeral", the Greek Chorus of Moki that had been observing Ori's progress assume a more dour mood and retreat into the background for most of the remainder of the story.
• PAYDAY 2 does attempt to be serious most of the time, but it also has a lot of quirky contacts and funny moments like escorting a drunk pilot wearing a santa hat and stealing goats that have cocaine shoved up their ass. By the time the Reservoir Dogs heist rolls around, things become a lot more serious and the humor is abandoned completely. Bain is kidnapped by a shadow organization and being tortured. The usual cops and SWAT that you fight are replaced with Murkywater PMCs, which (in the story anyway) are a lot more aggressive. The crew starts finding very strange artifacts that are linked to said organization and are extremely dangerous. The Hell's Island heist has your crew storming the place to rescue Bain, but when you reach him, he's so beaten up and bloodied that you barely even recognize him. Bain then collapses due to a virus that Murkywater injected him with and now he's going to die in a few days. The last heist takes place at the White House where the crew rob the place of Presidential pardons in order to clear their names for good. By the time the crew succeeds, Bain dies and a funeral is held for him where the crew toss their masks into the open grave and effectively retire from heisting.
• Perfect Dark Zero takes its serious turn when Joanna's father Jack is killed, which is shortly followed by Chandra's reveal as The Mole.
• Persona 3 has an incredibly extreme example. Around the point where the plot gets really dark, your goofy, bad-pun spewing Big Good is revealed to be a very insane villain who was just using you the whole time to bring about The End of the World as We Know It. And then he's quickly killed off.
• In Persona 4, the party is joined by Teddie, an anthropomorphic bear/mascot creature as they investigate a series of bizarre murders. After Nanako, the protagonist's young cousin and foster sister, goes into a very serious coma, the majority of the party heads to confront the man behind the murders, Teddie stays behind with Nanako and none of the other characters realise he wasn't with them until afterwards. As the party learns the suspect wasn't behind the murders, just the kidnappings the party had been thwarting, and was manipulated into that by another person, Teddie outright vanishes from the plot until the player identifies the true culprit.
• In Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth, Rei, one of the two new characters, is a cheerful young girl with a love of food, and a tendency to misinterpret what other people say as references to types of food, in contrast to her stoic partner Zen. At the end of the fourth labyrinth, Rei finally recovers her memories- that she died after living a short, lonely and unfulfilling life- and shortly thereafter, is captured by a spider to lure Zen to the top of the final dungeon. In Rei's absence, the endgame becomes much more somber- your party members are no longer having fun at the festival that serves as the game's hub, most of the Strolls and dialogue scenes while exploring the labyrinth talk about the desperate struggle to reach the end and what it truly means to live, and some of the background music and character voiceovers change accordingly.
• At the start of a Plague Inc. game, the news ticker depicts many different news, more often than not humorous notes like "Nintendo to Pixelate Toad in future games" or "Artist murdered in his house. Details are sketchy". However, once your plague starts becoming a serious threat, the news ticker becomes an Apocalyptic Log, informing you of the measures different countries are implementing in order to stop the pandemic and which governments have fallen into anarchy.
• On Police Quest 4: Open Season's final day, Detective Carey is separated from his LAPD comrades and must infiltrate the Big Bad's hideout alone without any backup or comic relief.
• Pokémon Sun and Moon and the sequel Pokémon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon has Hau leaving to train just as the player prepares to confront the Big Bad.
• Psychonauts has the Censors, a goofy reoccurring enemy that comes in several types and appear throughout the game's several Mental Worlds. They are completely absent in the final and most Nightmare Fuel-centric Mental World, the Meat Circus. Additionally, a Point of No Return at this point prevents Raz from returning to the real world, rendering him unable to see the camp's kids again until the ending.
  • Something similar happens in Psychonauts 2 - after Raz reassembles Ford's psyche and learns the truth about Maligula, the player reaches a Point of No Return that pits them in an entirely new location for the remainder of the story, cutting them off from all of the funny NPCs in the Motherlobe and the Questionable Area until the post-game.
• Sean Macguire from Red Dead Redemption 2, one of the most comedic and lighthearted members of the Van der Linde Gang, gets captured by bounty hunters during the Blackwater Heist that takes place before the game even begins. Therefore he is absent during the rather somber first Chapter of the game. Arthur and co. rescue him during Chapter 2 and he sticks around until well into Chapter 3, where he is shot in the head and dies, after which the game takes a dark and dramatic turn starting in chapter 4 and beyond.
• In Red Faction II, Tangier, the only member of Alias's squad remaining allied with him after Molov's betrayal, jumps out the window of Sopot's Statue prior to the Final Boss battle. The player's performance over the course of the game determines whether she survives the fall.
• When Samurai Shodown III came around, SNK decided they wanted a "darker" atmosphere. This resulted in drastic redesigns for most of the characters (Large Ham Kabuki actor Senryo Kyoshiro apparently Took a Level in Badass), and the removal of the more light-hearted characters, including Gen-an, Cham Cham and her brother Tam Tam, Caffeine Nicotine, Jubei Yagyu (?!) and Charlotte. Samurai Shodown IV came around and added some of them back in, and by Samurai Shodown VI, the entire cast has been reunited.
• Occurs very noticeably in Issue #10 of The Secret World: for most of "Nightmare In The Dream Palace" you're playing through John's memories of the wild night on the town he had with the hilariously dickheaded Che Garcia Hansson; this particular night out features punch-ups with Akashi, duels with the House In Exile, Bullet Dancing with the Korinto-Kai, and even a dance-off with Ricky Pagan. Exactly one scene after Che leaves Kaidan, John was charged with detonating a Filthy device on the Tokyo subways; you not only have to fight off his nightmares of Lilith and what she might do to him if he fails, but you're given a horrific recollection of the exact moment he detonated the bomb and became the Black Signal. Worse still, the Black Signal then realizes that you've been reading his memories and retaliates by turning the mission into a Mind Rape of the player character. Even the Black Signal lampshades just how grim everything got once Che departed.
• One of the many side things you can do in 7th Dragon III: code VFD is collect Cute Kittens, which results in them lounging around in various parts of Nodens HQ, most notably the cat cafe. So how do you know things have gotten disastrous in Chapter 6? ND's pink Dragonsbane kills off most of life in Tokyo, including the cats.
• In Silent Hill 2, Laura, the Only Sane Girl in town, is completely absent during the Dark World sequences. Justified in-story in that, being a very young girl, Laura has no guilt over past sins or skeletons in her closet for the town to use against her.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • In Sonic the Hedgehog 2, when playing as Sonic with Tails tagging along (the default play mode), the opening scene of Wing Fortress Zone involves the biplane getting shot down, with Tails inside. Sonic has to tackle this level and Death Egg Zone all by himself. Tails reappears to pull off a Big Damn Heroes moment when it's all through.
  • Sonic 3 & Knuckles uses this to a lesser extent. Tails follows Sonic all the way through Death Egg Zone, but if you have all the Chaos Emeralds, you're granted access to the True Final Boss, which consists in Super/Hyper Sonic fighting Eggman's final mecha one-on-one in space. As Tails is unable to transform, he stays behind, only returning in the ending to pick up Sonic and the Master Emerald with their biplane, the Tornado.
  • In Sonic Unleashed, after Dr. Eggman's newest mech is defeated, Dark Gaia is able to revive thanks to the weapon's destruction and enough of its pieces gathering together to reform a physical, if still incomplete, body. When Eggman tries to loudly order it to crush Sonic, it uses one of its tentacles and smacks him and his pod up and out of the Earth's core to battle by itself.
• In a much more literal example, the Something Awful Goonstation servers for Space Station 13 originally featured a Clown job position for inexperienced to play as, essentially giving them the privilege of annoying the crew as a newbie without any repercussions. However, the Clown job became so notoriously annoying and players who willingly chose it interfered with the gamemode so often\ it was eventually removed from the job list, and instead was only available through an admin command as a punishment.
• The first trailer of Street Fighter X Tekken features Kazuya breaking into Ryu's dojo, having just delivered a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown to Street Fighter's Joke Character, Dan Hibiki. According to Word of God, Dan didn't survive. Although he does turn up as the guy running the tutorial.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • Every 2D game starting with Super Mario Bros. 3 does this in its final world. While the final worlds of the first two games plus Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels were about as lighthearted as the prior worlds (if considerably more difficult), Mario 3 gave its final world a much Darker and Edgier tone, removing all the toad houses and match games, diminishing the color palette to mostly black and red, and exclusively using the airship, fortress and cave themes for its in-level music. All future 2D Mario games, including the Yoshi's Island games, would do the same kind of thing with their final worlds.
  • In Super Mario Galaxy, once you're eligible to enter the final level, you can speak to the Toad Brigade leader, who at first expresses willingness to go to the final confrontation with Bowser, but then gets a headache and says the Toad Brigade can't come after all.
  • Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon puts a decisive end to the Polterpup and missing Toad subplots a little after the game's darker aspects are revealed, but just before it really hits the fan.
• In Syphon Filter 2, Logan's G.I. allies disappear from the story after the first act, setting the darker tone for the rest of the story, and only two survive to the final act, in which the first, Ramirez, is killed off, while the second, Chance, reveals himself as an Agency mole.
• Upon picking up an item in Tomb Raider II, Lara will exclaim "ah-ha!" upon her discovery, giving a somewhat whimsical feel to her adventure. The last level takes place in Lara's home where the remnants of the cultists Lara dealt with throughout the game show up to kill her in revenge for her killing their leader. Lara does not make any sounds upon picking up items since she's more focused on killing all the home invaders.
• Throughout Tomb Raider: Legend, Zip and Alister will constantly chatter and bicker between themselves as Lara listens over the radio while she goes on her adventures (and will snark at them as well). During the last level where Lara is about to confront Amanda, she calmly tells Zip and Alister to not talk or interrupt her at all, which they comply with and don't speak to Lara until Amanda is defeated.
• Undertale:
  • Many items have either goofy contractions when viewed in the menu or a humorous description or sound effect when used in battle. During more dramatic boss fights or on a No Mercy route, the abbreviations are changed to be less silly (for example, a Spider Donut is abbreviated as "SpidrDont" normally and "SpdrDonut" in serious mode), and the wacky sounds and joke descriptions are removed. On the plus side, the Instant Noodles bypass the Overly Long Gag of their preparation and are eaten raw for a vastly stronger heal, with the game remarking that "they're better dry."
  • In the No Mercy route, Sans and Mettaton, who are normally recurring sources of comic relief, will appear considerably less often and make it clear from the start that they don't find what the player is doing funny.
  • Also in the No Mercy route, those incidental silly monsters that appear in random encounters are ones you will have to ruthlessly slaughter left and right; in particular, you have to specifically kill Snowdrake in Snowdin order to proceed with the route. Killing enough monsters to depopulate Snowdin without killing him will cause the game to remark that "the comedian got away", and kick you out of No Mercy mode.
  • If you kill Papyrus on a Neutral route, Sans will be absent from all the usual places where he appears on any other Neutral route until you reach the Last Corridor, where he will give his usual dialogue about what EXP and LOVE really mean, before asking you if you would "do the right thing" if you had the ability to (referring to your Save Scumming ability). Either response will have him call you out on killing his brother, as will most of the ending phone calls.
  • If you befriend both Papyrus and Undyne, you can call them at various points in the game to get their often humorous commentary on your current location. Once you reach the passage before The Core, though (where the game gets darker even if you aren't on a No Mercy route), they inform you that you won't be able to reach them once you go inside.
• The first half of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine involves Captain Titus and his soldiers plowing their way through hordes of orks, giving it the feel of a fairly standard A Space Marine Is You storyline. Then Nemeroth and his Chaos Space Marines show up...

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