More than other media, video games often depend on Rule of Fun and Acceptable Breaks from Reality to make things more entertaining for players. Sometimes, it can be fun to remind players that if someone tried to copy the average video game hero's actions in real life, they'd get very different results.
Examples here should be about scripted or story events. Examples game mechanics that are more realistic than expected should be added to Unexpectedly Realistic Gameplay.
Games with their own pages:
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- Apex Legends: In Titanfall 2, players have used Grenade Jumping to pull off record-breaking Gauntlet runs
. When Octane tried it, he blew his legs off. - Army of Two: The Army of Two games are completely over-the-top action despite being set in modern times. The second game in the series, the 40th Day, has a completely ridiculous plot concerning mercenaries trying to destroy Shanghai and many of the choices the player characters can make are also ludicrous. However if players choose to have a child they've rescued earlier in the plot try to retrieve a gun during a shootout he'll be unceremoniously shot dead.
- Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood: Ezio's love interest, Caterina Sforza, rides off with the intent of reclaiming her home. After getting pulled out of the Animus, Desmond and the audience are abruptly told that she later died of pneumonia without success in her mission or ever seeing Ezio again. No matter how important or famous a person is, it's not uncommon to hear that they quietly died of something mundane.
- Blaster Master Zero III: Jason has a habit of running his vehicles ragged, as was known from SOPHIA Zero wearing down before the previous game; likewise, Lucia is dead, leaving Leibniz to do all the maintenance himself, a subject where he probably was inferior to her. Put the two in the same Metal Attacker without Eve, and G-SOPHIA SV's breakdown becomes a matter of when.
- Bug Fables: In Metal Island's Spy Cards tournament area, there is a crack in the wall that can be dug through, not unlike cracks in other areas. All it does is tear a hole into Carmina's room and have Team Snakemouth crash in there. Not every crack in a wall is going to lead to some hidden spot with treasure; this is just a regular tear in a building that leads to the next room.
- Bugs Bunny & Taz: Time Busters: When Gashouse is defeated, his ship sinks into the Moon Valley with him in it and he freezes in a block of ice. When it's shattered, he does not leap out of the water complaining about the cold. Instead, his dead body floats away and sinks into the ocean, the extreme temperatures having killed him.
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3: During the tank gunner section in "Goalpost", while the M1 Abrams Ia is a badass Cool Tank, it's not a good idea to drive it and all 57 tons of its weight into a parking garage only rated for 30 tons. The crew realizes this about half a second before their tank falls through two stories into the basement. They survive, thankfully, but the fall — and several of the other cars falling on it through the massive hole it made — messed up the systems of the tank enough that they're forced to continue on foot.
- Chrono Trigger: In the starting area, Millennial Fair, you can pick up someone's lunch to replenish your HP. Just a classic bit of video game kleptomania which will have no further consequences? Not so, as later you're put on trial and the person in question testifies against you, lamenting that you ate their lunch right off the table.
- Dark Souls has the well at Firelink Shrine. Due to video game logic, you might believe there's some secret down there... but it is, in fact, just a well. Jumping down it gets you killed. Surprise.
- Desperados III: During the siege on O'Hara Ranch, Kate's uncle learns the hard way why any injury, especially in a time where modern medicine doesn't exist in its current form, should be taken seriously. When he takes a bullet from a Gatling gun to the shoulder, and goes on to leave it untreated and still bleeding, up to an hour later, he perishes from blood loss. Doc McCoy, a trained doctor himself, can only examine the dying man and decry him as a fool for letting his wounds languish too long.
- Deus Ex: Human Revolution:
- In the DLC The Missing Link, a Belltower commander makes mention that a number of their people that Jensen "peacefully" knocked unconscious by bashing them in the face with a metal fist are in comas.
- While infiltrating the police station, Adam can convince an old colleague to give him security clearance so he can move around in the open. However, doing so will get the man fired for giving an unauthorized individual permission to enter restricted areas without consulting his superiors.
- Dragon Age: Inquisition: One side quest has the Inquisitor collect pieces of an ancient sword and ask Dagna to reforge it, only for her to explain that you cannot remake a sword from its shards. She instead makes a new one using the collected pieces as inspiration.
- One of the many endings available in Duck Season revolves entirely around this trope. Upon discovering that he's being stalked by a menacing figure who knows where he lives, in a neighborhood recently struck by a spate of serial killings, the player character can respond by simply calling the police and telling them what they just saw. Police Are Useless is completely averted in this case, and they deal with the situation decisively.
- Elden Ring: One of the weapons you can find is the Jar Cannon, an experimental weapon...that was abandoned for being so experimental, none of the soldiers assigned to it actually knew how to use the damn thing.
- Eternal Damnation: When escaping the police and burglars in Lorie's apartment, John jumps out of the window and into a dumpster... and then ends up in the hospital due to the injuries from the fall. Trash bags are better to land on than asphalt, but they aren't soft enough to let you just walk off a big fall.
- Evil Genius: Trying to run your evil organisation like an Abusive Workplace (e.g. traps that can trigger even while your employees are in the area, not having sufficient areas for food, recreation and sleep) will result in a constant drain on resources as mooks that either die or abandon your organisation need to be replaced. This is made much worse if you lose some of the higher-ranked mooks, who require a lot more time and effort to train. In addition, triggering a red alert (which will automatically set all non-employee character as enemies to be killed on sight) is generally a bad idea as the massacre of everyone on your island causes a gigantic increase in heat, because naturally the various forces of good will want to know why all their personnel (and most likely several civilians) were just gunned down.
- Fallout:
- The first two games are two of a vanishingly small group of pieces of media that acknowledges that women are just as susceptible to Groin Attacks as men. A critical targeted attack at a female antagonist's groin get descriptions like "She takes it like a man. That is to say, it hurts."
- After becoming a citizen of Vault City in Fallout 2, Dr. Troy will provide the player with free healing. He also initiates a quest to smuggle Jet into the city for him (to make an antidote, although he doesn't tell you that), at which point you can blackmail him for a modest amount of cash every month for the rest of the game. If you do this, however, and go back to him for healing at any point afterwards, he summarily slips you a lethal injection and dryly comments on the spectacular feat of idiocy that is putting your life in the hands of someone you're blackmailing.
- Fallout: New Vegas:
- The Glory Hound trope is given this through the New California Republic. General Oliver wants a dramatic Final Battle to conclusively end the Legion threat so as to increase his fame. The problems with this are the following: a final battle situation requires the enemy group's entire forces to commit to it and usually are the result of an event like a prolonged siege. Instead, due to the vast majority of the NCR's troops assigned to defend the Dam, the Legion's troops and spies have free rein to travel the Mojave without NCR checkpoints or patrols to catch them, with meager NCR forces defending other locations of interest. Indeed, if the Courier doesn't do anything to stop the Legion's actions beyond the Dam, the Legion will catch the NCR off-guard with a massive attack by the Fiends on Camp McCarran, while the Great Khans pick off random NCR troops elsewhere in the region, the Strip will be hit by a terrorist attack arranged by the Legion, and while the Dam might face the Legion's heaviest troops, the lesser ones will simultaneously attack lightly or undefended targets like Camp Golf or Novac. The Second Battle of Hoover Dam is ultimately a Deconstruction of the "final, decisive battle" trope. It's just Hollywood-style bad tactics at its finest.
- Killing the leader of a faction in game often causes a Decapitated Army, such as with the Fiends or Kings, a tactic that is suggested by some characters for handling some of the factions such as them. The game defies this with the Legion though: You can walk up and kill Caesar, which various characters comment on and state that the Legion is doomed in the long term without his leadership. However, his death doesn't mean the Legion is over right now, because the Legion is still too big of a force to simply keel over right away without him. Just killing the leader doesn't mean the army will automatically give up and surrender; if anything, it drives them to war more because now they have a personal reason to fight. The same is true for the NCR as well; killing the major leaders of the NCR is just killing the major players of the Mojave section of the NCR, meaning they'll simply pull back to California, where they have still a large army and people to rely on. If siding with Mr. House, he'll even mention that killing Caesar or Kimball isn't a good idea if the player suggests doing so, because they'll both simply become martyrs to their faction, especially President Kimball.
- Fallout 4: If the player sides with the Institute, they can become its new Director, and still have only minimal control over its operations. After all, Father gave you the position without consulting the other department heads, and you're some unknown actor who walked out of the wasteland, not a fellow scientist who worked their way through the ranks normally.
- Far Cry:
- At the start of Far Cry 4, Pagan Min asks you to wait for a bit as he takes care of some business. The game expects you to leave the table, discover De Pleur torturing the other guy captured with you, and ultimately start the plot, and someone used to normal video game logic would expect the game to pause forever until the player leaves. If you do wait for a bit (around fifteen minutes)... Min comes back and resolves the business he invited you for, which actually leads to an alternate ending of the game where everything is explained and you accomplish Ajay's goal in under an hour.
- Far Cry 5 begins with the police approaching a cult to arrest its leader, Joseph Seed, for suspicious activities. The marshal wants to arrest Joseph, while the sheriff thinks they should leave so they can get the national guard to handle Joseph and the cult. The group detains Joseph, but the cult causes the helicopter to crash as it's taking off, and this convinces the cult to start their mission and start capturing civilians. The only good ending is when the player refuses to arrest Joseph Seed; after hearing Joseph repeat a phrase from the helicopter ride, the sheriff wisely chooses to retreat because Joseph has a spy and obviously has a plan against them. In real life, the authorities have been told to never underestimate a criminal and have had it drilled into their heads that trying to use brute force is the dumbest decision you can make when you are outmatched and outnumbered.
- Fire Emblem Engage:
- Those BFS weapons that strike hard enough to send enemies flying backwards? Yeah - trying to initiate combat with them actually gives your opponent time to get the first strike on you because they're so heavy.
- At one point, Zephia tries to stop the heroes by simply closing a door on them. What do the main characters do? Break it down.
- Like most Fire Emblem games, you have Child Soldiers - ones that are quite young at that. (The incarnation of Anna here is 11, while Jean is 10.) Not only do many of the really young characters have a poor Build stat (meaning heavier weapons will actually slow them down), but their health stat is also generally low. Because they're, you know, children.
- Five Nights at Freddy's:
- In the original game, the Custom Night allows you to set the difficulty of the separate animatronics, from a number between 0 to 20. Surely beating this (potentially) extra-hard challenge after the main campaign will give you a nice reward, right? Nope - you just get fired for tampering with the pizzeria's animatronics, which you really shouldn't be doing since your job is just a security guard.
- Ultimate Custom Night makes use of the Air-Vent Passageway trope, as did many of the other games in the series. But while Mangle, Springtrap, Ennard, and Molten Freddy have no problems with climbing through the ventilation shaft in front of the player, Withered Chica (who is a Big Eater) will get stuck in the vent as she tries to get out (which if this happens, will also keep every animatronic in the same vent except Mangle from getting out as well), though she will eventually wiggle free a short while after she gets stuck.
- For Honor subverts the Rule of Cool you'd expect during a few of the heroes' optional multiplayer executions. Such as Lawbringer preparing to give his opponent the coup de grace, only for them to die of their injuries before he can. Or Warlord ramming his sword through someone's chest and having trouble getting it out afterwards.
- Grandia: The first party member, Sue, is a spunky eight-year-old who insists on adventuring alongside protagonist Justin. Though she is remarkably intelligent, mature and capable for her age, it turns out that traveling halfway around the world, hiking through remote wilderness and constantly fighting monsters is just too much for her; around the game's halfway point, she becomes very ill from the stress and overexertion, and she is forced to go home, leaving Justin to continue adventuring without her. She also has a much slower skill growth rate than any other recruitable character in the game, reflecting that she's just a kid whereas the rest of the party are adults.
- Hotline Miami: At the end of the first game, Jacket has torn apart the Russian mob in Miami, doing in a few days what the police couldn't do in years... And gets promptly dragged in court and thrown in prison. Murdering criminals is still murder, after all.
- Infernax:
- As a Shout-Out to Castlevania, there's a piece of meat hidden inside a breakable wall in one of the locations that Alcedor must clear to progress. Should Alcedor eat that meat, instead of being healed like a Castlevania player might expect, they are treated to a special cutscene where he immediately proceeds to vomit as a result, even lampshading how ridiculously dumb it was to eat that meat.
- In another Shout-Out to Castlevania, crouching in a certain spot for a length of time will cause a tornado to appear and pick Alcedor up as if to take him to another part of the game's world. Instead of being transported to another location, however, you get another special cutscene wherein Alcedor is instead violently reduced to Ludicrous Gibs. What would you expect would happen to a person if they were actually picked up by a strong tornado?If only Alcedor knew that kneeling for ten seconds at that specific location would call upon a deadly tornado... he might not have done it.
- I Was a Teenage Exocolonist usually lets Sol get away with anything that saves someone who would have died if they had done nothing. An attempt at using Instant Sedation to keep a character from going on the outing on which they can get killed almost kills them in itself. On top of this, as Sol has to visit the person's quarters to put the sleeping pills in their drink, everyone figures out that Sol is the one who did it and several authority figures now want to know why they apparently randomly poisoned someone.
- There are some things that play this way in Jak 3 after the events of the previous game:
- Killing a head of enemy faction does not make that faction go away instantly. Jak II ended with killing off Metal Head Leader, but come 3, the Metal Heads are still attacking the Haven city, whose protecting shield has been destroyed in the previous game, thus leaving it unprotected. Also, just because the former leader keeled over it doesn't mean a new leader won't take charge as Errol did.
- Just because you're the Hero and saved somebody/something it doesn't mean you have immunity for collateral damage you caused because of your reckless and revenge-driven behavior. In Jak II Jak working for Krew in order to get back at Baron Praxis sparked the destruction of the above-mentioned shield of the Haven city and allowed for Metal Head invasion to happen in the first place. People are not forgetting this, and it ultimately leads to Jak's banishment in Wasteland at the beginning of Jak 3.
- The King of Fighters XV: Q: What would happen if you oversaw a martial arts tournament which culminated in the stadium getting trashed and many spectators being put at risk? A: 75 lawsuits, losing practically all of your fortune settling them, and your reputation getting dragged through the mud. Ain't that a shame, Antonov?
- In Little Nightmares II, Six and Mono take down the Hunter by blasting him with one of his shotguns. The noise made by the shotgun is extremely loud and Mono isn't wearing any sort of noise canceller, so he is temporarily deafened by the extremely loud noise, unlike most games (and media in general) where Steel Eardrums would be in play. (This is represented by the game not playing any audio for a few seconds.)
- The Flash game Luis Launch tasks the player with slingshotting the titular protagonist into outer space to celebrate his birthday. Once they actually do so, he runs out of oxygen and suffocates within seconds, unlike most launching games where the character can survive being launched into space.
- In Limbus Company, when the protagonists have a run-in with security at the casino, character Ryoushuu tries pulling off a Falling Chandelier of Doom in order to get an advantage. She borrows the dagger of Yi Sang and throws it at the line holding the chandelier, dropping it...and hurting no one because no one was standing directly beneath it. It's immediately lampshaded with Dante asking what she was even trying to do, cuing her to answer with 'A performance.'
- Mafia III: As you play as a (half) black man in Louisiana in The '60s, most white people do not trust you and most other races hold you in little regard too. Some businesses are segregated with "No Coloreds" signs in the windows, and walking inside can get you arrested for trespassing and loitering. Suspicious civilians and store-owners might even call the police on you even if you clearly haven't committed any crime. Just walking too close in front of police officers arouses suspicion and can earn you a beating if you aren't careful.
- Mary Skelter: Jack's blood is able to purify the built-up Corruption of Blood Maidens and also pull them out of Blood Skelter; even before he joined the Blood Team, he would frequently cut himself and allow his best friend Alice to calm herself with his blood. The first time he receives medical attention, he is diagnosed as a chronic anemic and is portrayed as being physically frail and prone to falling unconscious.
- Max Payne spends most of the first two games popping painkillers in his mouth like M&Ms in order to restore his health. But these are actual medicine, and not just normal video game power-ups, so come Max Payne 3, he's addicted.
- In Megadimension Neptunia VII, the protagonists discover the villains have an airborne battleship and wonder how they were able to procure one. Cut to the villains having a Seinfeldian Conversation about having bought the thing on finance and its effect on their budget overheads.
- Mega Man X5's plot revolves around the Maverick Hunters attempting to prevent the Eurasia Colony from crashing into the Earth by destroying it. Since that's the goal, you'd assume that destroying the Colony will save the day. However, even if the player succeeds in destroying it, pieces of the colony still make it through the atmosphere and crash into Earth anyway. It's not the near-extinction-level event that it's implied the entire intact colony colliding with Earth would be, but Mega Man X6 makes it clear that even in the good ending the aftermath is still devastating.
- The Mental Series has the three protagonists kill their way through four games to get to where they need to be. This is all glossed over until the fifth and final game (befittingly entitled Murder Most Foul), where the three are now the most wanted criminals in the country after all the murders that they have committed.
- Mindshadow (an adventure game released in 1984) - At one point fairly early in the game, you tie a vine around some rocks near a cliff to climb down. If you're carrying too many items (which, given the genre's "take anything that's not nailed down" mentality, is fairly likely), the vine will snap under the load, resulting in a game over, unlike most adventure games where the protagonist has a Hyperspace Arsenal.
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- NEO: The World Ends with You: Susukichi has thick fingers. Just an art style quirk? Nope. It actually affects his ability to type text messages.
- No More Heroes:
- While most of the assassins in the first game match Travis in fighting ability, endurance, and ability to move around or adapt to how he comes at them, the third-ranked assassin, Speed Buster, is a frail old lady whose sole weapon is a Wave-Motion Gun. The entire point of the stage is simply getting close enough to take it out of commission - once that's done, she has no way to take on the much younger and better-armed Travis.
- The entire plot of No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle kicks off because Travis killed most of Jasper Batt's relatives. This was something that happened in the first game in a bunch of copy-pasted side missions with almost no fanfare, and neither Travis nor the player expected it to come up again or have any real consequences.
- In Octopath Traveler II, Alrond's father attempted to revive Wellgrove's economy by tossing money at its residents, hoping they'd spend it to help out the various merchants and other shops. Instead, most people simply retired or used the money to move elsewhere, since they were basically set for life.
- The Oregon Trail (2021):
- Sucking out snake venom is still an option. However, it now comes with the side-effect of the healer getting a fever themselves. There's a reason this method's not recommended these days with the availability of anti-venom.
- Broken limbs and gunshot wounds now result in maximum health being reduced. Even after the injury heals naturally, the health penalty will remain and can only be removed by a physician at a fort. First aid can only do so much to mitigate such injuries; proper medical care is required.
- Cool, Clear Water is not in effect here. The party may come across ponds and water holes, but the water is stated to taste bad, be cloudy, and have mosquito larvae swimming in it. Drinking such stagnant water carries the risk of dysentery or cholera. There's a reason one emigrant warns "Don't dig a water hole! Drink only river water."
- OMORI: In Headspace, Omori wields a knife as his weapon in traditional RPG combat, where he hits enemies until they run out of HP and suffer Critical Existence Failure. Then you wake up and, if you go along with Kel, get into a real-world fight with Aubrey, who Took a Level in Jerkass compared to her dream self. The fight ends after a single attack, when your opponent (along with everyone watching) freaks out at you brandishing a knife and calls off the fight. Even Kel thinks that carrying a knife is unacceptable and takes away your weapon. Even if the wound isn't enough to incapacitate, basic human instinct dictates that almost anyone would have a much stronger reaction to being hit with a knife than they do in most games, and you can't expect bystanders to stay neutral while a friend is getting stabbed.
- Paladins: Played for Laughs with Maeve, who has a seemingly bottomless supply of throwing knives. Since they disappear after hitting a target or missing, the player will just forget about them and assume they stop existing. However, if she loses a match, she'll complain about having to retrieve all of the knives she's thrown.
- Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous: Played for laughs in one optional interaction in the Wintersun area. If Daeran is in the active party and is in a Romance Sidequest with the Player Character, he'll suggest to them they fulfill one of his sexual fantasies by making love under a waterfall. The PC can choose to shove him into the pool, whereupon he emerges dripping wet and complaining that those romance novel authors should be flogged because that water was way colder than he expected—being water from a mountain stream in winter.
- A Plague Tale: Innocence: Killing Vitalis is a big one for the protagonists. Yes, Vitalis was a corrupt sadistic power-hungry monster who no one in the audience would miss, especially since he was excommunicated. The townsfolk don't immediately run off or try to capture Hugo and Amicia and may or may not know much about the witch-boy with rat-powers who killed a psychotic witch-tyrant with worse rat-powers and saved them. But regardless of whether or not he was evil, the fact the protagonists killed such a high figure in the hierarchy of the Catholic Church means that the Church will never stop hunting them and the local townsfolk do know the two are wanted, and so they have to leave the region.
- Pikmin 4 has captain Shepherd mention that her father, the previous leader of the Rescue Corps, had a firm Keep the Reward attitude... and the Rescue Corp is basically completely broke because of it and relying on charity and the necessity of their job to keep themselves up and running, with the game's treasure hunting on the side being as much to give themselves some funding as it is to get the sparklium to power their ship.
- Police Quest has multiple events that will catch players off guard if they try to play as a typical Cowboy Cop or Adventure Game hero:
- As police lieutenant Sonny Bonds, you have to follow police procedure by the book to avoid the myriad ways you can get a game over. While some decisions are obvious (such as not shooting someone who has a gun drawn at you), some are not. Shoot someone who only might be reaching for a gun in his glove box? Turns out he was an unarmed FBI agent, and you're fired. Forget to frisk the raving lunatic? He'll draw a knife and kill you. Need to open a door with a battering ram? You have to get permission from a judge to use it first.
- There are also non-fatal ways this shows up, too. In Police Quest 3: The Kindred, you can miss points if you fail to follow proper procedure when writing someone up for a ticket. You can also question witnesses, some of whom lie or are uncooperative with the cops. Many of them aren't even hiding anything, and have no real reason to lie; they just don't want to talk to the cops, simple as that.
- Police Quest 2: The Vengeance ends with a shoot-out in which Sonny shoots a suspect; as a result, the suspect dies. Sonny is immediately put on administrative leave for three days as the Internal Affairs division of the Lynton Police Department reviews if his actions were justifiable homicide. Thankfully it's deemed to be so, and they award Sonny by giving him a two week vacation with pay for taking down the bad guys.
- Police Quest 3: The Kindred has Sonny notice that his wife isn't getting proper medical care on one of the machines in the hospital. Rather than fiddle with the dials himself, like many an adventure game would expect you to do, the correct solution is to bring it to the attention of the hospital staff who know how the machines work, and let them fix it.
- In Police Quest: SWAT, using a flashbang on an elderly woman with a bad heart has her die immediately, instead of doing no damage like most other games. There's a reason flashbangs and the like are emphatically less-lethal weapons and not "non-lethal" ones - because there simply is no such thing as a non-lethal weapon.
- Police Quest: SWAT 2 will suspend an officer for shooting a suspect as well, even if it was justified.
- Punch-Out!!, in the several of the promotional comic strips feature the boxers' quirks getting the better of them, including:
- Aran Ryan stuffs horseshoes in his boxing gloves. In the game, this just gives his punches extra power. In the comic, the extra weight leaves him unable to use his arms, and as such he gets completely clobbered.
- Soda Popinski feeling sick from one soda bottle too many. Unlike the game where he keeps chugging on them with no ill effect.
- Red Dead Redemption: No matter how much of a badass you are, taking on the army in a standup fight won't end well. And that's how John Marston dies, when Edgar Ross decides that You Have Outlived Your Usefulness.
- Red Dead Redemption II:
- There are two wealthy families, the Greys and the Braithwaites, that are engaged in a feud that goes back generations. The gang attempts to exploit the rivalry for their own benefit by doing jobs for both families. However, both families begin to notice that their interactions with the gang are always followed by more attacks on their property. Once they put two and two together, both families retaliate against the gang; the Greys lure them into an ambush in the town of Rhodes that leads to Sean's death, while the Braithwaites kidnap Jack Marston.
- Killing the man financing the Pinkertons isn't going to stop them. Considering Leviticus Cornwall was extremely powerful and wealthy, the Federal government can't ignore such a high-profile murder, resulting in even more people being deployed to find the gang.
- Molly O'Shea drunkenly confessed to being the one who ratted the gang out and everyone believed them as alcohol makes them less likely to lie, right? Wrong, as Molly's confession was just a drunken cry for attention and only ended up helping out the real traitor.
- Resident Evil:
- Resident Evil 2: As opposed to being crushed by debris or attacked by G-Birkin like in the original game, Annette gets slammed against a concrete wall. Claire tags in to finish off her husband in her scenario, and Annette survives long enough to get back to Sherry and cure her of the G-Virus, but dies from her injuries moments later.
- Resident Evil 4: Apparently, Salazar believes Talking Is a Free Action. Too bad for him that Leon does not. Both times that Salazar tries Evil Gloating, Leon makes him pay for it, first by damaging his hearing with a bullet to a listening horn, and second by pinning Salazar's hand to a wall with a thrown knife. A variation occurs in Resident Evil 4 (Remake) when Salazar stands right in front of Leon, unarmed and in the open, for some villainous gloating: Leon actually rolls his eyes in frustration and disbelief and lights the little bugger up with his handgun.
- Resident Evil 4 (Remake): The first time Ashley has to jump down from a high spot into Leon’s arms, she doesn’t simply jump down directly into a Bridal Carry, she has a mild panic attack at the very idea of it and has to be coached into it by Leon. And his knees realistically buckle a little bit when he catches her because even though Leon is in excellent shape, it’s still upwards of 120ish pounds landing on him from fifteen feet up. Of course, they accomplish this feat repeatedly over the course of the rest of the game with no issues after the first time.
- The Secret World:
- The Tokyo story arc ends with the players leading an all-out attack on the Orochi Group's headquarters and attempting to kill the apparent Big Bad. As you progress through the penthouse, CEO Samuel Chandra flat out warns you that he is going to make your life a living hell if you continue; naturally, you ignore him - after all, even with Orochi's vast resources, Chandra can't very well declare war on a secret society like the Illuminati or the Templars, can he? Well, it turns out he doesn't need to: after all, Orochi's a legitimate corporation, and actually has even more pull than the secret societies because it doesn't need to conceal its existence. You arrive home to find that Chandra has sent the security footage of your break-in to the media, successfully framing you as an international terrorist. From then on, you are a fugitive - in both the legitimate world and the secret world - and the only way to avoid ending up being subjected to random assassination attempts is to have your face surgically altered.
- As demonstrated in both The Secret World and The Park, Nathaniel Winter spent a fortune building Atlantic Island Park on a relatively obscure island off the coast of Maine, using his immense wealth and government connections to ensure that the construction continued despite the numerous fatal accidents. Once the park was actually opened, the "accidents" continued, this time killing several guests - some of them children. End result? The Park was closed within two years, and Nathaniel Winter's continued attempt at bribery left his reputation in tatters and his finances ruined. Because construction is a dangerous business, corruption can sweep a few worker deaths under the rug, but once paying guests and children start turning up dead, nobody's going to look the other way.
- Sly 2: Band of Thieves: Sly and the gang's attempts to win Jean Bison's Lumberjack Games by sabotaging him are all for naught since the judges are in Jean's employ and he just threatens them into giving him a good score. So in a last desperate attempt to win, they incapacitate and disguise themselves as the judges. However, unlike all the other times such disguises have inexplicably worked, Jean almost immediately realizes they're not the real judges (all of his judges are ducks, and they all suddenly change both height and fur/skin color) and knocks them all out.
- Spider-Man (PS4):
- One of the collectibles you can find is a prototype of a Spider-Man plush toy. Peter reminisces about how the creator of the plushie offered him royalties to produce the line. While Spider-Man could capitalize on his likeness in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, here it shows that he can't do so legally without revealing his Secret Identity.
- Near the end of the game, Mayor Norman Osborn ends up turning New York into a nightmare Police State in response to the Sinister Six wreaking havoc and the unleashing of the bioweapon known as Dragon's Breath. Unfortunately for Osborn, reality bites hard; the American public and federal government do not exactly respond well to a municipal government official acting like a tinpot dictator, and he's Resigned in Disgrace once everything is resolved at the end of the game, with a strong implication that he just barely avoided serious legal prosecution.
- StarCraft: The Protoss campaign in the first game ended with Tassadar committing a Heroic Sacrifice to kill the Overmind, leaving the Zerg Swarm without a leader and putting an end to their invasion of Aiur, the Protoss homeworld. Right at the beginning of Brood War, it's revealed that, even without a leader, the Zerg are still rampaging everywhere on Aiur, just in a more disorganized way, and the Protoss are forced to leave anyway to ensure their survival.
- Super Epic The Entertainment War: When you defeat the evil RegnantCorp CEO at the end of the game, the mega-corp doesn't suddenly cease to exist. He's just another cog in the corporate machine, as he himself says, and will be soon replaced by someone else. Unless you can get the Golden Ending, that is...
- Super Metroid features Crocomire, who is defeated by being backed onto an unstable bridge and having its skin gruesomely melted off in acid. After it vanishes off-screen, the ominous pre-boss room theme starts playing. After Samus runs over to the spiked wall, the boss theme starts playing again, which seems to indicate that Crocomire is still alive and ready for a second phase. The skeleton of Crocomire breaks through the wall to leap at Samus... only to comically collapse and die before it can do anything else.
- Tales of Xillia: Alvin tries to shake Jude out of his Heroic BSoD while on the cusp of one of his own by trying to egg him on into getting angry. During this event, he accidentally shoots Leia and almost kills her. Despite being a trained marksman, Alvin was emotionally distraught at the moment and waving a loaded pistol around. It was only a matter of time before someone took a bullet.
- ThanksKilling Day: In the latter half of the game, the kid can attempt to escape from the pilgrim killer by driving away om the farm's tractor. However, since he's a kid who's probably too young to be able to drive, he ends up swerving the tractor all over the cornfield and crashing it into a fence.
- Transformers: War for Cybertron: In the first few levels of the Autobot campaign, Orion Pax personally fights on the field as a Frontline General. After becoming Optimus Prime, however, he then spends the rest of the campaign off the field until the very last level. This makes perfect sense: he's the leader of the faction now, he's much more useful organising the entire war effort instead of personally gunning Decepticons down. In comparison, Megatron is playable in almost all of the Decepticon campaign's levels, this being a deliberate choice by the writers to show that Megatron is much more interested in tearing down the Autobots and their government than he is actually creating a functioning society to replace it.
- Trials of Mana:
- Angela's prologue has her thrown into the aptly named Frostbite Fields wearing nothing but a highly Stripperiffic leotard. Less than ten minutes later, she starts coming down with hypothermia.
- Riesz is an Action Girl, but she's not a One-Man Army. When raiders invade her kingdom, kill her people and kidnap her brother, she has to run in order to find help. She also never gets a chance to go on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge, instead having to find ways to stop the plans of the Big Bad while putting her kingdom's reconstruction on hold.
- Uncharted 4: A Thief's End:
- The typical Uncharted puzzle has Nate figuring he has to ring a series of bells in a tower in sequence. When Nate tries, he finds too late that a mechanism constructed centuries ago is not in the best of condition. It takes one ring for the bell to collapse downward and smash the passage open. What were you expecting? For an ancient mechanism to still work perfectly?
- Sam finds an old sword on Libertalia and decides to show it to Nate, only for the sword to fall apart in his hands with one swing. A weapon that has been exposed to the elements for hundreds of years with no maintenance isn't going to be in usable condition.
- Under Night In-Birth: Phonon's story has a significant element of this in how she hopes becoming an In-Birth will allow her to finally make something of herself. She expects surviving an encounter with a Void to be an easy route to free superpowers; it's actually a terrifying experience that puts her at near risk of death. After she recovers and starts making waves with the city's other In-Births, she works up to take on Hilda, the leader of Amnesia. She expects a posturing showdown that will boost her street cred, and is shocked when Hilda immediately goes for the face.
- Undertale has a "Sell" option in shops, but unlike most RPGs, most shopkeepers will not take your stuff. The first shop you visit even lampshades the absurdity of buying random junk from people who walk in. You can sell items at one specific shop, but it's said outright that it's because that shopkeeper belongs to a race of Cloud Cuckoolanders, and they're also really bad with money and desperate for patronage.
- The Unreal Tournament games play this in regards to No OSHA Compliance. A lot of the "real world" (for the games' time period) venues the player can battle in are workplaces which would be incredibly unsafe to work in, including being able to easily wander into something that smashes you to bits, tendrils of flesh-searing energy easily jumped into, no guardrails along walkways that you could fall a long way off of or into something dangerous, etc. They're available as arenas for the Tournament thanks to the Liandri corporation confiscating them from their original owners because of these dangerously-unsafe working conditions - the only reason they remain as such afterwards is that people dying in them is the point now, and it adds to the challenge of fighting for your life in them.
- Early on in The Walking Dead: Season Two, you meet and befriend a Post-Apocalyptic Dog. Unlike most examples of this trope, it's a starving animal that has been living in the wilds with no human contact, and it has absolutely no sense of loyalty to its new-found human friend. When Clementine attempts to share a can of beans with it, the dog snatches the whole can and then attempts to maul Clementine when she picks it up. This is Truth in Television, as taking food away from a dog is a really good way to get bitten, even in the case that the dog in question is not particularly hungry and thoroughly domesticated and friendly with most people.
- Wolfenstein sometimes has its hero B.J. Blazkowicz pose as a Nazi or collaborator to infiltrate something or other and he's always really bad at it but somehow it works. His accent in German is terrible, he's not really familiar with his cover stories and tends to make some kind of weird joke when questioned, he's huge, he refuses to heil, and he barely conceals his seething hatred of Nazis. Usually he gets away with it anyway because of Nazi arrogance; he looks like their Aryan ideal, they can't believe one of their enemies would just show up like this, they think he's mocking inept American spies, etc. But midway through Wolfenstein: The Old Blood, which started out with one such infiltration working perfectly, he poses as a waiter and brings the Big Bad some wine - and she notices all those things other Nazis disregard, plus that he's serving her spoiled wine of a type the establishment knows she dislikes, and stabs him through the palm, wondering how he could have possibly thought he was doing a good job fooling anyone.
- Xenoblade Chronicles 2: In the battle against Morag early in the game, Rex knocks down a nearby water tank to douse Brighid's flames. Later, you return to the area to find the locals are very upset with you for wrecking their water supply, and some even attack you over it.
- Xenoblade Chronicles 3: During a Chapter 6 sidequest, after the City has relocated from its original location high atop Swordsmarch to below sea level, several people get sick due to the sudden elevation change without time to acclimate.
- In one scene in Yakuza 4, a panty thief leaps from buildings to get away from his target and slips off the railing. Beginning to fall, he flings one of the bras he had stolen onto a nearby fire escape like a Grappling-Hook Pistol. It slides around it and stops his fall... for half a second since it had nothing to clip onto (and would have just ripped if it did), sending him crashing into the street below.
