Unintentional Uncanny Valley / Video Games

Clear as a crisp spring morning!

---

• Bob Chipman has this one. Though it's more about video games in general than just people in said games. Skip to 3:30 to get to the part actually about the Uncanny Valley.
• The crowds in pretty much any 7th-gen sports title. In the past, crowds were nothing more than a flat, multi-coloured blur, maybe with a couple of frames of 'animation' and no-one ever questioned it. Now individual crowd members can be picked out, with their own animations and perhaps rendered in 3D. Sounds great, except that wide-shots show the same 50 or so crowd members copy-pasted to fill a 60,000-seater stadium, and it just looks weird.
• First Person video games can fall into this as well, for several reasons:
  • They attempt to simulate real vision, except your field of view is extremely narrowed due to the fact that peripheral vision can't be replicated, and it's being projected on a flat screen. Sometimes, curved screens may alleviate this, but your field of vision is still somewhat narrow.
  • For some players, the sound design can also fall into this. Some games attempt to make the sounds more "Realistic" by trying to play them at different volumes depending on how far or close they are to the player. Unfortunately, this is surprisingly difficult to replicate since sometimes sounds may end up making a player start looking to the sides when the thing making the sound is actually supposed to be behind them.
• Digitized Sprites of real people used in games can unintentionally evoke this effect, particularly if they are of primitive, grainy quality or badly animated / missing several animation frames entirely, which results in a stiff, creepy inhuman movement in characters that are clearly supposed to be modeled from actual humans.
• Ace Attorney:
  • In case 3 of Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney, there's a cutscene involving a concert performance. While the entire game series is in 2-D point-and-click, the concert is in moving 3-D and not that well detailed. It's very unnerving.
  • Perceive segments are meant to be trippy, but focusing that close onto someone's face can feel uncomfortable (especially as you watch their mouth or throat move, made even weirder by the fact that you don't hear voices, just very slowed down "blips" representing speech).
  • Apollo Justice also has two characters whose designs make them look like they don't belong in the game. When Machi Tobaye removes his sunglasses, his eyes are shown to be blue, but they look more like a bright blue that's glowing. Then there's Spark Brushel whose whole character design makes him look like he came out of a comic book or cartoon rather than an anime; his eyes are completely huge, his blue Permastubble goes over his lips instead of around them, he's incredibly lanky compared to the rest of the cast, his various facial expressions are greatly exaggerated and he rapidly cycles through them, you can see the gums on his teeth whenever he smiles, and every time he blinks, his lower eyelids close up before his upper ones do! And then you have to look closer at all this when you have to Perceive his testimony at various points in the game.
  • If just voices can qualify for Unintentional Uncanny Valley, then Manfred, Quercus Alba, and the aforementioned Calisto Yew's voices definitely do (though Yew's is slightly less bad than the other two). Manfred and Alba's voice clips sound horribly low and drawn out, like they're not even real voices.
  • Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Dual Destinies greatly improves the character details and animations after the series took a leap into complete 3D. Every character has smooth animations and expressions that go well with the anime style. Of course, it's not exactly perfect, as this early version of a 3D Phoenix qualifies.
  • Dual Destinies also has two baliffs standing by the doors in the defendant lobby. They don't look too out of place, but when the camera zooms in on Simon Blackquill after his shackles are removed, the bailiffs look like mannequins up close.
  • The original trilogy got an HD remaster, and while it makes everything look fantastic, the HD rendition also makes certain issues more notable than before. Certain background elements simply don't look right at high resolution, such as Mia's dead body with her ghostly looking face. The animations of the characters look quite stiff and the transitions from one animation to the next don't seem so smooth, which makes their HD versions stick out even more. On top of this, the characters in the courtroom when shown from the back of the witness stand all look like they have no eyes with a dark shade over where the eyes should be. This was in the original games, though the lower resolution made it harder to notice.
• NED, the main antagonist of Albion, is a highly developed supercomputer, that communicates with the ship's crew through an android body, that pretty much falls into this. His permanent facial expression is a blank stare. Not to mention the one occasion where it malfunctions and starts walking around aimlessly. And near the end of the game, there's an entire army of these things. Pretty creepy.
• Alex Kidd in his Sega Superstars des◊igns◊ has invoked this feeling in more than a few players.
• In Angry Birds, the most noticeable feature in the series is that the Birds often have teeth. Even Red Bird has them in the game's logo. Also, both the birds and pigs lack limbs. This is averted in The Angry Birds Movie, however.
• The titular antagonist in Ao Oni. There's a reason players have a hard time not freaking out seeing that… thing!
• In ARMA II, all characters in-game show no emotions (no eyebrow movement) at all, becoming this when they are supposed to be smiling, laughing, crying, etc.
  • The way the in-game voices issue commands can also approach this, as each word the characters speak is used from pre-recorded fragments to form the commands, which thanks to the sometimes shoddy voice work can sound very different in tone and inflection between words. This leads to a very stilted, unnatural stop-start-stop speech pattern that can be both unnerving and unintentionally hysterical.
  Enemy. MAN. At. TWOHUNDREDMETERS.
• This trope may have contributed to why commercials of Assassin's Creed II are so damn creepy. To be fair, those people are supposed to be dead.
  • The Nobleman from Brotherhood is made of this. His face is artificial enough to avoid it, but the rest of him, with the hunched back and the too-small limbs — it doesn't help that one is artificial and ends in a claw — makes him decidedly wrong-looking.
• The player characters of Atlantis Underwater Tycoon run into this thanks to having very realistic faces on bodies with caricature-like proportions.
• THIS trailer for the second Bakugan video game falls squarely into this catagory. Whilst Dragonoid and Hydranoid might look brilliantly rendered, they went just a tad too far with Dan... Thankfully Masqeruade has his headgear on, so we are saved from how he could have looked.
• Some people found the title screen from Barbie Horse Adventures: Blue Ribbon Race for the Game Boy Advance to be downright terrifying, largely because the horse is animated like its legs are made of rubber, and since the horse itself looks realistic, it comes off as unnatural. The music used for it, which many also find creepy, doesn't help.
  Vinesauce: This is reaching weird uncanny valleys, that horse is apparently made of chewing gum.
• Baten Kaitos: Check out the character models from the first game. They look alright when they stand still, but as soon as they start moving or the camera zooms in, they look like marionettes with invisible strings. The sequel mostly avoided this.
• Some people feel that Bayonetta and Jeanne fall into this, with their tall figures and long, skinny limbs.
  • In Bayonetta 2, the people roaming the NYC-esque city's streets look extremely realistic, compared to the named/important characters, all of whom look like 3D anime characters. Seeing characters like these walking amongst a crowd of creepily realistic people just doesn't look right.
• Most characters in Binary Domain look like average humans and not unsettling at all, except for Dan, the player character. His facial features look less human and more akin to what you would expect a Final Fantasy character to look like.
• BioShock:
  • The first game makes it so that the Splicers and Little Sisters are supposed to be freaky looking, but what's Jack's excuse?
  • While Elizabeth and Booker look great (mostly the former) in BioShock Infinite, the people of Columbia look like animated figures.
• Brain Age has the floating head of Ryuta Kawashima. Here's the image◊.
• The Characters in Brave Story New Traveller look like love dolls. It's disconcerting, to say the least. In fact, everything about this children's RPG is frightening.
• Brink! combines very realistic, high-detailed graphics with horrifically distorted (Team Fortress 2 style) bodies. Players have extremely long necks and torsos, huge noses, and very thick legs.

• Captain Novolin has two realistically-sprited doctors in the game... and their stares and smiles are rather unsettling to some people. Sadly, you'll be seeing at least one of them after beating every level.
• The Atari ST and Amiga versions of Chuckie Egg replaced the main character with a hat-wearing anthropomorphic egg, whose bulbous pink in-game sprite is a somewhat unnerving sight.
• City of Heroes: Invoked in game. Nemesis' Automatons look almost exactly like real humans, "until you get close." It's also kinda creepy when the innocent-looking office workers pull gigantic guns from Hammerspace and blast you, all the while engaging in water-cooler conversation.
  • There's a mission in City of Villains where Automatons are posing as Arachnos agents. When they start spouting lines straight out of Stupid Evil, you know something's up. But once you get over the fact that they're robots, it just gets funny.
• Clive Barker's Undying: Bethany's Handmaidens, who were her own creation. If you look up close they have porcelain masks like victorian dolls. Behind it there is a grotesque mockery of a face. They were her demented version of servants. Must have missed all the hired help around the mansion.
• Clock Tower 3 often has this happen, although it looks a little more like a somewhat-stylized PS2 game when it's moving. A Let's Play of it on Something Awful pretty much makes the game seem a lot more Uncanny then it actually does until the FMV endings. The Dark Id probably took screenshots at the worst (or best) possible moments◊ to make the characters seem a lot more uncanny. (Although this sometimes may result in it being funny, such as this shot of Dennis where his mouth is unbelievably round◊, and this shot where his eyes seem to go somewhere else◊.
  • Also invoked when you consider that the game actually does show corpses.
• Presumably what the makers of Chrono Cross were going for with Harle. As with most deliberate attempts to do so, it didn't work.
• The trailer for Darksiders II features a girl so deep in the uncanny valley that one can be forgiven for thinking her horrified expression is due to somebody chasing her with a mirror.
• A similar case occurs in Dishonored. The soldiers and nobles of Dunwall are an ugly bunch. City guards, in particular, have gorilla-like arms, heavy jaws, and weighty foreheads, to the point where they look like deformed cro-magnons.
• This early look at the Dance Dance Revolution Wii game is very, very, creepy.
• It happens to characters in Deadly Premonition due to imperfect animation, especially when said characters smile.
• Diabetus points out this very phenomenon in Deep Fear's cutscenes during the Ronguprae of the game. Though released in 1999 for the Sega Saturn, the pre-rendered graphics resemble CGI from the beginning of the decade.
  "She's beautiful as far as things you can order off the Internet."
• The Death Jr. Series naturally has more to cause fear than this, but its offering toward the Uncanny Valley is Pandora Boxley. A sweet and well-meaning goth girl (which, in the grander scheme of the game's cast, makes her relatively normal), she is very cute despite having empty eye-sockets — IN THE OFFICIAL ART! The version of her in the in-game graphics resembles a chillingly soulless zombie far more frightening in appearance than the title hero — and he's a skeleton!
• In the video game based on Dennis the Menace, Mr. Wilson is given a very realistic looking, pixelated sprite. It looks very creepy.
• Devil May Cry 5 has a fair amount of uncanny valley thanks to Capcom using the realistically graphical RE Engine seen in the aforementioned RE7 and RE Village as well the RE2 and RE3 remakes, which suits the grounded Survival Horror but in the Hack and Slash Fantasy of DMC... it's takes some getting used to◊ (it's probably due to the previous games using anime-esque designs which is far removed in the new realistic look). In general Trish is the biggest culprit of this trope◊.
  • In the spin off reboot game DmC: Devil May Cry switching Dante or Vergil into their classic attire creates an awkward contrast◊ with their faces (which weren't designed with their classic outfits in mind).
• Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest has Mario, Yoshi, and Link appearing as cameos when you beat the game and are shown how many DK Coins you had collected. While Link and Yoshi look fine, Mario's pre rendered sprite looks quite off; the pupils in his eyes look larger than normal and his eyebrows are not even rendered at all.
• On the Nick Jr. site, there is a game where you babysit a baby Dora, Little Bill, Ozwald, and Blue. The game is mostly cute, but when Baby Little Bill gets cold, he makes a shivering sound that sound more like a ghost than a cold baby. Even creepier, until you give him his blanket, he will make the noise, wait a few seconds, then make the noise again over and over in such a timed, rhythmic, stilted way that no baby ever does in real life.
• The Grotesqueries from Drakengard, partly due to Barbie Doll Anatomy, although the Uncanny Valley is what the game's makers were going for.
• Dragon Age:
  • Dragon Age: Origins:
    • There's a scene where Leliana, your resident Spoony Bard, sings. Without breathing. It's kind of funny and kind of terrifying. It doesn't help that the face models in that game can't really contort themselves to resemble singing, so it looks as if she's just holding her mouth open whilst breathy opera music plays in the background.
    • Your Player Character can fall into this territory depending on how you design them. One instance that is unavoidable (and definitely not intentional) for mages is what happens when an Arcane Warrior Mage uses Combat Magic with Fade Shroud. Because of the way models are rendered in the game, the mouth and eyes are modeled separately...unfortunately, the entire body appears transparent and ghostly with Fade Shroud on...and then this causes the eyes and mouth to appear to be floating, and it's even visible from BEHIND.
    • Much like the singing, laughing seems to be beyond their facial muscles' ability. Which makes it creepy every time someone does laugh in a dialogue. (Flemeth does this a lot)
  • Dragon Age II:
    • The redesigned elves were given a number of small but subtle changes to distinguish them from humans. For example, they have thin nose bridges that extend out from their faces (most clearly visible in profile) and unusually-large irises in their eyes. the effect is simultaneously attractive yet eerie, and does a good job making it clear that as humanlike as elves are, they are distinctly not human.
    • The game also gave all the dwarves (with the exception of party member Varric) glassy, opaque eyes that look like something you'd see on a porcelain doll or an animal that's recently been stuffed. It's especially creepy with Bodahn and his son Sandal, since you're used to seeing them in their more normal-looking Origins incarnations.
  • A minor example in Dragon Age: Inquisition: nugs return, and now you can skin them for low-quality leather. But because their skin is peach in color, nugskin armor looks like you're wearing human skin.
• Akira Toriyama has a very distinctive artstyle - which is one reason why Dragon Quest games tend to look very cartoony when rendered in polygons or remained as a Sprite/Polygon Mix for awhile. Mostly because Dragon Quest VII had cutscenes that, even for the time looked absolutely horrifying◊.
  • While the humans in Dragon Quest VIII and Dragon Quest XI look nice thanks to the cel-shading, some of the monsters in Toriyama's Super-Deformed artstyle look quite... odd and almost fleshy.
• Sometimes, this happens in Dreamfall Chapters, between the characters' jaws flapping and the fact that some characters in Arcadia have their eyes bug out a little bit. Kian and Bip's meaning can turn into Nightmare Fuel when you see Kian's eyes bug out.
• The lesser-known precursor to Dwarf Fortress called Slaves to Armok: God of Blood is rendered in full 3D. Pretty much all of the creatures look very creepy. Especially the Kobolds, which ironically are considered Ridiculously Cute Critters in Dorf Fort fanon.
• Roughly half the cast (the energetic ones) of the Dynasty Warriors series avoid this trope (they instead sometimes border on being too cartoony, especially really big guffawing guys like Meng Huo), but the 'serene' or 'contemplative' characters like Da Qiao, Zhuge Liang, Xu Huang, and Yue Ying more than make up for them. Yue herself is a bit of a shift as the emotion in her lines show she was meant to have Action Girl expressions. She just comes off as very very strange when speaking, almost like a period automaton from an old German sci-fi movie. Compare with the Rikku example up above. Strangely, Lu Bu also falls into the second catagory depending on the game involved, as sometimes his voice is bizarrely low-pitched in comparison with his roaring angryface. Koei might have had different modelers working on different sets of people which resulted in the discrepancies between believable and non. Does not seem to happen as often in the Samurai Warriors universe.

• Earnest Evans constructed the title character out of many sprites moving together, in an attempt to create a Platform Game hero who would move more realistically than any before. The result looks nowhere near natural.
• Ed, Edd n Eddy: The Mis-Edventures was a 3D video game based on the popular Cartoon Network show. The developers tried as best they could to make the models and graphics look as close to the show's artstyle as possible, but in the end, it proved that said artstyle cannot be brought to 3D without it looking incredibly creepy. Kevin's model arguably got it the worst out of them all.◊
• The deer player characters of The Endless Forest seem like perfectly normal deer from the back...but they have human faces.
• The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and Fallout 3 both fall into this trap, as Bethesda's attempts at creating realism and a more immersive world end up having exactly the opposite effect, to the point where a game with chocolate-stained 2002 graphics and text boxes for dialogue (The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind) actually manages to be more immersive despite the latter two games' more technically advanced graphics. Or where the Khajiit and Argonians don't fall into the valley. The fact that Oblivion zooms the character you are speaking to uncomfortably close (fixed in Fallout 3 onwards where it's more of a centering than zooming) only further adds to the uncanniness.
  • This can extend to the NPC behaviour as well, resulting in Artificial Atmospheric Actions. For example, Oblivion has many NPCs that have schedules that tell them where to be and when, but the pool of possible actions is so small that they repeat the same thing over and over again. This leads to the feeling that the entire population is made up of automatons whose only purpose is to mindlessly chatter about the same nonsense all day. It becomes even more jarring with characters that need to be found in a specific location such as shopkeepers, whose job involves standing behind the counter staring unblinkingly at the door all day.
  • Of course, the PC versions have Game Mods that can somewhat fix these problems.
  • That's not to say Morrowind didn't have it. Argonians and Khajiit walk like they broke their ankles. And everyone else looks like they have broken knees. And their jaws sometimes make a weird flapping when they talk. Or the game freezes to display text with their mouth open in a weird way...
    • Of course, the Argonians and Khajiit walking like that was perfectly deliberate — Argonians and Khajiit used digitigrade motion to make them less human and more like dinosaurs/cats. This was dropped for the later games, mainly because it made people think they walked like they broke their ankles rather than like a cat.
  • This is the main reason that Argonians and Khajiit are the some of the more popular races for players. Because they aren't trying to mimic humans, they look a lot less creepy.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Final Fantasy VI is very gritty looking and the character sprites matched the style. When the game was ported over to mobile and PC, the character sprites were redrawn in a more chibi style with very bright color palettes, which completely clash against the gritty and dark colors of the backgrounds. The 2022 Final Fantasy VI Pixel Remaster fixes this a great deal, thanks to taking ques from Octopath Traveler in regards to making gritty 2D sprites work on 3D environments.
  • The PC port of Final Fantasy VII gave smoother models for characters on the map field, but for some reason, the developers decided to give every character that didn't have a mouth drawn in the Playstation version a round black circle for a mouth. This gives the characters a very bizarre look, including Sephiroth. The mouthless versions makes the character models look far less creepy.
    • The FMV cutscenes in FF7 have this effect, but unlike the future games it's not too bad◊ at worst they look more like anime action-figures than real characters. Cid in particular◊ looks most odd in the cutscenes.
  • One scene in the Final Fantasy VII Remake in particular. Right after the sector 7 plate crashes, we see Cait Sith looking over the wreckage. Not only does this character appear earlier than in the original, but his art style is extremely different than every other character, including Red XIII, making him look out of place and unnerving fans who don't know who he is.
    • Remake’s Chocobo Chick and Carbuncle summons DLC despite being intended to be cute, definitely had this effect on people who were pretty creeped out by their realistic looking eyes and faces. Cactuar who has the luxury of looking like a plush toy doesn’t invoke the Uncanny Valley.
    • When the characters talk to each other in Remake their movements can occasionally come off as awkward and uncanny as they bop their heads and hold out their arms to emote which isn’t usually how people gesticulate in real life. This is more noticeable when talking to in-game NPCs who are less gorgeously polished than the main characters.
  • Final Fantasy X dips in and out of this trope, particularly with the character Tidus. Depending on the angle and lighting, he can either be real-looking enough to, well, look real, or look like his face is a mask. Partially due to the fact that the animators used the default in-game model, present in gameplay, in most scenes, but used a much higher quality version with a fully expressive face whenever a character was the centerpiece of a cutscene. Sounds great in practice, but their habits of forgetting to use the high-quality model, or even worse have a HQ-model and a gameplay model in the same cutscene at the same time made this quite jarring and unimmersive. There is a particularly jarring scene in Final Fantasy X-2 where Yuna and Rikku are trying to puzzle something out ("Key-Mon?" "Monkey!"), and there's a close up shot of Rikku's low-quality face as she says something. It is, by far, the most disturbing thing: passionate speech, dead face.
    
    Final Fantasy X also used a realistic aesthetic for the characters whenever an FMV played. While the style itself isn't bad, it heavily clashes against the style used for the characters' in game models since the facial features look a bit too real at times. The developers must have caught wind of it since Final Fantasy X-2 has the characters in the FMVs look more like their in game models.
    • It doesn't help that the FMV characters have clearly Japanese facial features◊ while the in-game models generally don't◊. It kinda works for some characters, but for others, it's very jarring.
    • The stilted and awkward movements of Final Fantasy X characters much like Deadly Premonition can easily invoke this, not helped by the aforementioned dissonance between the voices and expressions. However a lot of fans find it endearing in a corny way.
  • In the Playstation 2 version of Final Fantasy XII, most of the human characters have a strange look to their faces. Their eyes give them a rather odd look where they look like they haven't slept in a few days, and some of the shading on their faces looks like their faces were smeared with grease or dirt. This was fixed in the Playstation 4 remaster, cleaning up the characters' faces. Likewise, Vaan's abs were shaded incorrectly in the original version, which made him look like he was anorexic. The remaster corrected this.
    
    The nonhuman characters look fine for the most part, but the Nu Mou look very weird. Since the Nu Mou appeared in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance first, you go from cartoony canine-like character to what looks like an old man that looks like it's trying to be human. Final Fantasy XIV uses a middle ground of the two styles◊.
  • Sazh's son Dajh from Final Fantasy XIII is adorable... or would be, if he didn't look like a living plastic doll. Even Sazh himself sometimes looks weird.
    • Chocolina's poker face. No, seriously, no matter how EXCITED her voice makes it seem, she just has that blank expression... As if she has no soul!
  • Final Fantasy XIV:
    • Its limitations are unfortunately quite limited. Most of the time, characters in cutscenes will use the stock emotes that the player can use. At other times, characters will use an expression not usable by players, such as extreme shock or a Slasher Smile. However, due to the limitations of the game engine, characters can look downright ridiculous when their faces get stretched beyond their limits (such as someone's jaw going really wide for pure shock). Cutscenes also have the issue where those without voice acting will frequently fall back on generic in-game animations that cannot smoothly shift into another animation (rather, it has to either play out in full or simply skip straight to the start of another animation), which looks very robotic when characters will walk up, make a generic motion or two while speaking, then turn in place to face a different direction before stepping away in that direction. Because of this, cutscenes with more realistic and human motion-captured animations (mostly ones with voice acting, though they sometimes pop up in silent ones) stick out like a sore thumb in comparison, especially in cases like the level 30-50 Ninja questline, where the villain makes use of custom mocap animations that look like they belong in an entirely different game from those used by your allies.
    • Lalafell invoke this feeling with some players, simply because many of their expressions have a strange "cartoonishness" about them that other races do not seem to have. Them making exaggerated motions compared to the much more "Grounded in reality" motions of other races causes them to stick out like a sore thumb. And that's not going into some of their shocked facial expressions which appears to have their mouths make unrealistic motions compared to their chins. Their heads also look somewhat bigger compared to their body while their eyes also seem to seem bigger tha nothers, causing them to look somewhat "Doll"-like compared to others.
    • Roegadyn were initially a male-only race, with only a few females being NPCs (Such as Merlwyb). When A Realm Reborn came about, the option to play as a female was added - unfortunately, due to either a lack of time and/or resources, Roegadyn women use literally just a modified Hyur (Human) model. This causes a bit of uncanniness in their in-game model where they simply look like a stretched human model. Sometimes, players report not even noticing that a particular NPC (Such as Moenbryda!) is a Roegadyn, since shorter Roegadyn women can be almost completely indistinguishable from a Hyur due to the various customisation options that don't allow more animalistic (such as Merlwyb) and their noses aren't nearly as "Squished" like a male Roegadyn.
    • One particular tail option for the Au Ra race appears to look much thicker than the other tail models. Unfortunately, if one looks closely, there's a huge gap where it actually connects and where it suddenly becomes much thicker, almost like someone chopped off a lot of it. This causes a few scenes with Au-Ra that have this model sitting on the ground where it looks like their tail is folded or is actually falling off.
  • Final Fantasy XV:
    • Many of the main character models look very nice - however plenty of minor NPCs sometimes look... very very off.
    • The Cup Noodles quest has the characters (Gladio and Ignis are most visible) talking about how good their Cup Noodles journey was... however they are speaking with a creepy grin plastered on their faces while gazing off onto space. For some people, this was kind of creepy... for others, it was hilarious.
  • Dissidia Final Fantasy is typically very good about avoiding this, but in the prequel, there's just something about Vaan's face reminiscent of fish.
  • Final Fantasy Dimensions uses a "smooth" type of two-dimensional sprite rather than the sharper (but still high-quality) style of the PSP port of I and II. They've often been likened to Gumby and the male characters are all stuck in a Death Glare. The iOS port for Final Fantasy V and Final Fantasy VI use the same style.
• Final Ninja doesn't initially fit this, as it's a standard case of Super-Deformed. Then you throw your first shuriken, and your foe goes flying in several pieces. Without bleeding at all.
• Fire Emblem
  • The in-game character models in Fire Emblem: Awakening have had their feet shrunken down to almost-stilts, similar to The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker except that the rest of the models are still somewhat realistic. This was apparently done to save on polygons for performance reasons, as the developers were worried that proper feet would tax the 3DS' processing power. More than one reviewer was acutely bothered by this, and Fire Emblem Fates later showed that they actually had more than enough power after all, but what's done is done.
    • Awakening also plays this for laughs in-universe in the Avatar's support chain with Tharja. They eventually get fed up with Tharja's Stalker with a Crush attitude and tell her that it creeps them out, only for Tharja to then start acting like a "normal girl" in the next part of the conversation. The Avatar admits that the sight of her trying to act like a bubbly, ordinary girly girl is actually a lot creepier than her usual gloomy witch attitude.
  • The DS remakes of the first and third games had dove into this territory with their official artwork. The in-game mugshots avert this somehow, but the official artwork (specifically Shadow Dragon), was particularly jarring to look at, especially if we're to look at, oh I don't know, Gharnef◊.
  • The final boss of Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade, a nameless fire dragon, combines this trope with Non-Standard Character Design, especially when standing next to the custom sprites.◊ The amount of detail is frigtening and malefic, with blood red scales, a maw of sharp teeth, and spiked horns on it's head, were already intimidating enough, but you can feel the amount of burning rage within the eyes, and it makes the damned beast more realistic in a game that had the characters anime stylised! Even more, it is surprisingly expressive for a dragon, with it making faces of hatred while bellowing out roars of rage, and screaming in abject agony when it is finally slain.
  • Blazing Blades's chronological sequel Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade has a ton of character art that fall victim to this, notably the awkward body proportions that make them look like Noodle People, and the glossy eyes that make several younger characters look more like porcelain dolls than actual humans, not helped by the disproportionately large heads. Most of them do look decent/unattractive enough to avert this, but the others are either dwarfish in a very weird way◊, or are just plain creepy◊ to look at. Lance◊, of all characters, gets the worst of this. He just looks really wonky.
  • Fire Emblem Heroes: Soeda Ippei's art for Arden◊, his face in particular, is rendered in an unsettling realistic way, making him stand out. Dorcas◊, by the same artist, doesn't seem quite as unsettling, so it's possible it's Arden's expression that pushes him into the valley.
  • Fire Emblem: Three Houses:
    • While the artstyle is mostly praised by the fandom, the eye designs (particularly the dotted pupils, double-tiered irises that look like they have entire eyeballs surrounded by the sclera, and the flat and low saturated colors) are generally criticized for giving the characters rather soulless expressions.
    • The CG artwork for Byleth's S-supports have rather variable levels of quality for both genders' options. Certain ones, like Petra, Dimitri, Claude, and Marianne are heartwarming and well-drawn; on the other side, Edelgard's gives the player a deer-in-the-headlights close-up of her face with an expression that makes her look like she is sucking in her cheeks. Some, like Leonie, Flayn, and Gilbert, look nearly completely different from their in-game art and designs, and a surprising number of them seem to pretend noses don't exist. Lastly, a few of them even depicted the characters with either missing or incorrect design details, which was thankfully addressed later with the version 1.0.2 update.
• First Encounter Assault Recon: Alma is made of this.
  • As are the Replica soldiers, especially with their masks off.
• FusionFall tries to give realistic animesque looks to various Cartoon Network characters. While some characters managed to survive the transition from cartoony to realistic, certain characters (like Ed, Edd n Eddy and Jake) did not manage the transition well. Ed and Eddy look hideous while Jake looks like a creepy, fat bulldog. It's worse in Jake's case because he's a prop instead of an NPC.
• Game Boy Camera, a game marketed towards kids, has some Easter Eggs that occasionally pop up while playing Like these, both of which have become memes.
• Garry's Mod tends to inadvertantly invoke this trope as you manipulate and pose your favorite Half-Life 2 characters...as flopping, corpselike ragdolls. Bonus squick is easily achieved if you import the Left 4 Dead models.
  • On the other hand, the things that you can do with the ragdolls that should be creepy thanks to this trope become downright hilarious.
  • Speaking of Garry's Mod: The fan made 3D models of the main characters from My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic that seem to popular amongst Gmodders and Bronies alike. The characters did not transition from 2D to 3D animation well, looking incredibly creepy; especially the almost human-like faces.
  • Some custom ragdolls can invoke this problem even more due to added flexibility. While the default ragdolls are rigged semi-realistically, many custom ones are rigged in a way that makes them more flexible and more useful for posing. Thing is, said flexibility causes things like necks that don't support the head and thus look broken, limbs that can rotate and bend in unnatural ways, and in extreme cases the entire body moves as if it were just a bunch of individual parts loosely tied together. To say it's unsettling is putting it mildly.
• Canister users in Geneforge are described like this in-game. It's particularly prominent at the higher levels of power when they start to glow and get a near-constant Psychotic Smirk, and particularly particularly prominent when they take a bad canister and their skin starts flaking off.
• Ghostbusters: The Video Game, in either version.
  • The realistic one (PC, Xbox 360\One, PlayStation 3\4) does a great job at recreating the original cast as they looked in 1991, which while still somewhat stylized, there are more than a few moments that look almost life-like. And in some of the cutscenes using the game's graphics as opposed to CG, the Ghostbusters tend to move more like marionettes than people, and it's a bit unnerving. Even when the animation is good, people tend to find Ray to be the most unsettling due to the fact that the developers paid so much attention to making the characters look like their actors circa 1991 that they not only included Dan Aykroyd's heterochromia, but got the right colors on the right sides of his face (left eye brown, right eye green). Realistic faces + jerky animation + often-questionable lipsyncing = unsettling character models.
  • The stylized version (PlayStation 2, Wii, portables) likewise is a bit surreal to look at due to the cartoony designs. It's meant to harken back to the The Real Ghostbusters, but the designs there were modeled to not look like their movie actors and be their own characters. While here, that is the case and they come off looking more like 3D caricatures of their likenesses, Peter especially due to the darken areas around his eyes in trying to look like Bill Murray.
• The Definitive Edition of the Playstation 2 trilogy of Grand Theft Auto has numerous problems with the character models going deep into the uncanny valley:
  • All characters are given individual fingers rather than the blocky hands with finger textures. Because the HD versions of the games are still using the old animations, you see characters with normal looking hands not moving their fingers at all while their hands flail about.
  • The player characters look ok in HD for the most part, but their faces look quite off. Claude and Tommy have this wide eyed, pouty mouth look that makes them look like they're in a constant stupor. CJ, who already had squinty eyes in the original game, looks even more squinty.
  • CJ's body textures had less definition compared to his old model. A max muscled CJ had textures that made him look more like dough and the textures used for his max fat model wasn't any better. A patch would correct this.
  • CJ's girlfriends got the worst end of the HD update. Some of them have larger eyes, nose, and/or lips that make them look older than their original models and all of them have their hair rendered in a way that looks more like a wig. Denise's headband also vanishes during the "eating at a resturant" date cutscene, showing her flat hair.
• Gran Turismo 5 gave us the little number that is Zombie Jeff Gordon◊.
• In Guitar Hero III, the graphics are notably improved from previous installments. Not all of the characters look different from previous versions, but the male singer in particular stands out. While he now mouths the words more realistically, his jaw is enormous. He nearly looks muppetesque, or what the Mouth of Sauron from the extended edition of The Return of the King might look like during a period of youthful rebellion against the Dark Lord, man, and his cramping the Mouth's style. Especially strange given that he looks perfectly normal in the animated cinematics. Let's not forget the drummer, who acts like he's part of the animatronic band at a Chuck E. Cheese style restaurant.
  • Characters in the Wii and PS2 versions of World Tour an Smash Hits are prone to having dead-looking facial expressions. This was fixed in Warriors of Rock, where the characters are often too stylized to be mistaken for a real person or show enough emotion that it's not creepy.
  • Rock Band 3 has this problem more than the first two games. Some characters have it worse than others. The Beatles game before it had shades of it too, particularly around the eyes.
• In the .hack//Games, Aura's◊ artwork◊ ended up looking creepy. Maybe it's her striking eyes or her apparent lack of a body. Given that she's an AI, it's justified.
• Halo:
  • Much like the Basement Jaxx example, Halo 3 has an easter egg of a family of either monkeys or cavemen with human looking faces.
  • Halo 2's Anniversary Edition certainly has beautiful graphics but there's just enough computer generated cleanness that lends itself to the valley at times. Still better than the original though◊.
  • Halo 3: ODST has this with the main cast, making you thankful they keep their helmets on most of the time. Buck is just a Ink-Suit Actor of Nathan Fillion but unfortunately the other two Firefly actors Alan Tudyk and Adam Baldwin don't lend their visage to their characters Mickey and Dutch who are ugly as hell.
• Although opinion varies as to how successful the game animation was, in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, a series of cast interviews reveal that at the very least the cast thought this was true of their face scanned models.
• Daniella from Haunting Ground, while all the stalkers in the game are terrifying, she in particular stands out. Firstly there's her Creepy Monotone, her unnaturally pale skin tone, her mechanical movements and her No Sense of Personal Space while talking to Fiona. There's also the bit where she doesn't react to Riccardo smacking her in the face twelve times besides a little blood coming out of the corner of her mouth, and then she turns to smile at Fiona who is seeing this through a keyhole (freaking her out). It gets worse when Daniella has Sanity Slippage out of jealously and hatred towards Fiona and she starts laughing insanely and twitching her head way too fast in pure Nightmare Fuel fashion. Perhaps even creepier is that she actually stops chasing Fiona at certain points to do cleaning, the jarring mundanity is very unsettling.
  • Some fans speculate that Daniella is a homunculus, but there's little evidence to support it in game. All we know is that she's "incomplete" which goes some way to explain her disturbing behavior. Of course the Irony is despite her uncanniness Daniella is a fan favourite.
• The pigs in Hay Day - Something's just not right with their appearance. Probably the Black Eyes of Evil.
• Avoided in Heavenly Sword where the game designers had real-life actors give real performances with motion capture sensors in order to have their real facial expressions tell the animated characters how to look. The result was lively animation that dodged the valley entirely and was praised for its stunning cutscenes.
• Heavy Rain has characters who look fine in stills, and others who crash into the valley so hard you may forget the normal-looking ones. Any close-ups of character faces in motion (like on the loading screens) are consistently creepy. Gamers are polarized enough over the gameplay to give this issue little thought, and many in the "like it" camp won't even deny it anyway. The sex scene in particular tends to directly fall into this as characters models look like they’re rubbing and biting each’s other mouths rather than passionately kissing
  • In general most Quantic Dream games have the Uncanny Valley from Fahrenheit, the aforementioned Heavy Rain to Detroit: Become Human (although that game at least had the justification that most of the cast are androids). The face mocapping of later games is impressive, but when characters need to emote they tend to look seriously creepy◊.
• This is also actually a problem with characters using/abusing normal maps that make them look very shiny to the point of making them appear as if made of plastic or rubber especially when on the skin.
• In Hudson Soft's Help Wanted: 50 Wacky Jobs, a Minigame Game where you have to work to buy stuff from the Home Shopping Network to save the Earth, you have a place called Memorial Hall to keep all your memorials for jobs, and there are visitors. One visitor, Mike the security guard, looks so realistic, but incredibly creepy. Especially when he's mad...
• Initial D 4 had a major change to its presentation; for the first time ever, Legend of the Streets would not only have voicework, but the characters in the pre- and post-race scenes would be animated. Since the franchise belongs to Sega...y'know, the company that pioneered 3D graphics in arcade games, and has refined the process over many years to create amazingly smooth, lifelike human characters...you'd think that they'd make the characters in 3D, right? Even more so for the opportunity to make original clothing, poses, gestures, etc. instead of having to rehash the same manga rips endlessly. Unfortunately what we got instead was the same manga rips, but very crudely animated; basically the same technique used for those Get Your War On videos. They look like garishly colored animatronic puppets. (Initial D 5 was an improvement, however...now they look like skillfully colored animatronic puppets.)
• Injustice: Gods Among Us has everyone's skin look like cheap plastic, which is more apparent when the characters become wet. The faces don't fare much better either with most of the cast looking like dolls and some of the males, including Regime Superman, having dark shadows around their eyes that make them look like they had no sleep. Strangest of all, some of the character's teeth are completely bright as if they have lights in them, making them glow in the dark! The sequel corrects many of the above issues, but some characters still look like plastic.
  • Netherrealm Studios games in general have been teased for the quality of their character faces ever since they switched from at least partially hand-crafted character models to pure real life facial scans, from Mortal Kombat X and Injustice onwards. Given that Bioware Studios have received similar ribbing for Dragon Age Inquisition and Mass Effect Andromeda (which also used purely real life facial scans), it seems as of 2019 the technology just isn't quite ready for prime time, or at least whatever iteration of it these particular studios are using^note One technical explanation for "Netherrealm Face" that has been put forward is that facial capture rigs record faces from below the chin, resulting in a flattened jawline and other distorted features, which is particularly unusual-looking on female characters for whom a Lantern Jaw of Justice is not typical. For whatever reason, some studios like Quantic Dreams and Kojima Productions will take this into account and shave down the 3d image so it looks more normal, while other studios like Netherrealms and Bioware seem to prefer the more square-jawed look.
    • For Injustice 2 Yahtzee once said the face tech makes the Injustice cast look like a bunch of moms and dads getting invested in Cosplay and definitely "breakfasting at the skill lodge overlooking the uncanny valley".

• Professor K from the Jet Set Radio series, with his large, stretchy mouth. In Future, his mouth isn't as exaggerated, but it's still quite big.
  • Speaking of JSR, Beat fell into this◊ in All-Stars Racing Transformed and so did Gum◊.
• Jump Force has this problem in spades in how it portrays it's the Shōnen characters. Most developers tend to give Anime games Cel Shading to compliment the cartoony characters, Jump Force decides to go for a realistic aesthetic for the cast◊ which isn't too bad for some characters but gels horribly with others who are supposed to be stylized e.g Deku from My Hero Academia. Worse still while the textures of the clothes are realistic, the skin and hair of the characters aren't, which makes for a very disconcerting effect◊ and that's not getting into how creepily detailed characters's teeth are. It's really no wonder the game sold rather poorly.
• Jurassic Park: The Game. Freakishly bad: The Girl in the car looks like a doll!
• Speaking of Jurassic Park, most Telltale Games like The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us can easily have this effect on people as the cartoony models have awkward stiff movements and tend emote weirdly. It’s much worse in games like Game of Thrones (Telltale) which have Real Life actors from the show getting modelled in game alongside stylised Telltale characters which has a very unsettling effect. This partly a result of developers’s Telltale Tool engine which was already quite aged by the time of The Walking Dead Season 1.

• Kingdom Hearts:
  • The games often have the same problem as Final Fantasy X with mixing cutscene and gameplay models, dubbed the "Pixel Mouth" problem by fans. It's particularly noticeable in one of the first game's crowning moments, where Riku takes the keyblade from Sora and later Sora takes it back. Some of the best lines in the game can be found here because the characters are using in-game models, their mouths shift only from open to closed and back (as opposed to the cutscene models, which are properly lip-synched).
  • Kingdom Hearts II:
    • This trope is probably why the Port Royal level looks so out of place. Sora is rendered in his normal anime style, with slightly exaggerated features, while the Pirates characters are more realistically detailed and proportioned.
    • Being the only other world based on a Live-Action film, Space Paranoids has a similar effect, though lessened greatly by the Tron Lines all over the place.
  • The Nobodies did succeed at this at one point... but not where it was intended; in the opening of Kingdom Hearts II. Look at Namine at 2:43 and 3:37 It's tricky to explain, but something about her face just looks off. Her brief appearance in the high-quality CGI at the end of the game was better, though.
  • Kingdom Hearts 3D:
    • The World Ends with You's characters are rendered in 3D. They all make the transition very well, being made by Nomura. Except for Shiki◊. It's not her face that's the problem; it's her body. It looks so unnaturally thin! There is a bit of Fridge Brilliance those who have played TWEWY would know: that's not what Shiki looks like at all, but a copy of her best friend Eri's appearance. She looked unnaturally rail-thin since that's how she perceives Eri.
    • Oh, and there's also a TRON: Legacy level, and it's not just CGI'ed Jeff Bridges as Clu being off as in the movie this time 'round, thanks to the presence of Sora.
  • In Kingdom Hearts 0.2: Birth by Sleep -A fragmentary passage-, the shift to Unreal Engine 4 causes the characters, especially the Disney characters, to be hit by this. The more realistic lighting clashes badly with the cartoony models, causing them to simultaneously appear to be too detailed and not detailed enough. Of note, Mickey Mouse and Goofy's muzzles end up looking like human skin, which is unsettling.
  • The reveal trailer for Kingdom Hearts IV has already had this effect on a good portion of people. For the longest time the series has used anime-esque stylised human characters who can comfortably fit alongside cartoony Disney characters. For KH4 the series has for first time gone the route of modern Final Fantasy games of photorealistic graphics with only a few stylistic touches on the human characters. The result is extremely jarring, with Sora noticeably having Japanese features not present before making for a similar effect to the FMV version of Tidus and other characters in FFX. This effect is only heightened when Sora is fighting which in the realistic environment (similar to Devil May Cry 5) is disconcerting take in compared to previous games.
• L.A. Noire: The facial animations can creep anyone out, due to the amount of high detail with the facial scan. But what's even creepier is how much the characters' cutting-edge facial animations clash with their comically stiff bodily animations.
• Orianna in League of Legends is considered this in-universe, a clockwork parody of a teenage girl with a clearly artificial happy attitude. When reliving her original self's death, her reaction is "It was fun. I like memories."
  • She's been described as looking far more human but far less alive than chunky yellow robot Blitzcrank. Who largely manages to avoid the valley, admittedly by standing on the other side to most of the human champions and waving.
• One of the reasons the animated cutscenes for The Legend Of Zelda C Di Games have become so iconic is how grotesque many of the characters are and how awkwardly and unnaturally they jerk and shuffle around in every direction for no reason. The blank-eyed expressions and the tendency for the characters to get really close to the screen only amplify this.
• Early 3D games like The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Mega Man Legends tend to suffer from this trope. The player character and the most important NPCs usually look great — but the other NPCs are often horrific. The worst are like dolls made by someone who's only seen actual humans through a kaleidoscope.
  • The carpenters in Ocarina of Time were more due to the weird way they moved. They'd move faster than their legs moved, hammer stuff weirdly and generally freak you out.
  • Adult Link's face in Ocarina of Time had his eyes one size too small and his nose long and pointy. The 3DS enhanced port gave Link a much better looking model.
  • Speaking of Zelda, Link's default form Elegy of Emptiness statue◊ in The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. It seems to be an effigy of Shigeru Miyamoto dressed as Link, but was likely much creepier than intended. So creepy, it represents the Eldritch Abomination that is BEN in the ARG Ben Drowned. Though, if it was unintentional for the original game, the remake definitely did it on purpose, and worse.◊
  • And Twilight Princess has the Oocca, basically a bizarre race of chickens with extremely creepy human heads.
    • Ooccoo Jr. is just a floating child's head with wings sticking out of the sides.
  • Fi from Skyward Sword. When unlocking the various tunes for the Goddess Harp, she sings. Mouths should not move like that.
    • It is less "Fi sings" than "Fi screams in pain while you play unfitting music."
  • The Zora race in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time were basically fish beings with humanoid bodies and while their eyes made them look like aliens, it was fitting. When The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess came around, the Zoras were made more detailed, but were given very human looking faces instead, which heavily clashed against their fish like appearance. 'The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has a happy medium; the the Zoras have a humanesque face lacking a nose and having cat-like eyes. Their head protrusions are shaped after a shark and their bodies are human shaped, though their arms, torsos, and necks are elongated.
  • The Gorons in most of the games look how they're supposed to. Darmani and Link using his form in The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask have flat nipples while the other Gorons do not, but it's nothing major. All the Gorons in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess were given nipples and they were designed to look rock-like, but they look more wrinkled than anything. The Goron elder, who has a saggy chest, also has the wrinkled nipples.
• This trope is among one of the many many problems with Limbo of the Lost. The normal people end up looking far scarier than the ghoulish ones due to creepy Poser models and jerky animation.
• Victoria von Bathysphere in LittleBigPlanet 2 has a rather realistic organic-looking head and face, especially in comparison to the rest of the characters. Combine this with her super-deformed proportions and robotic body, and players might find her appearance little unsettling at first.
• April Ryan◊ from The Longest Journey looks very ugly, especially compared with modern games.

• While most of Manhunt 2 is well animated and clean, it also gives us a very creepy taste of bad graphics porn.
• Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite as according to Word of God, the goal was to give the characters a more "realistic look" to compliment the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Many, many fans dislike the art of the game and how poor the models are, which this badly affected their launch day sells among other reasons.
• Mass Effect largely avoids this, in-game — the facial models are of excellent quality and generally look very real. However, the facial customization section during character creation can be disturbing — the facial image is animated, moving and breathing naturally even as you alter it, and the sight of it mutating as you alter the parameters is somewhat disturbing. It's also possible to end up with rather odd-looking results if you set multiple features to the extremes of the available scales.
  • All the attention to detail however can be ruined during some of the conversations where a character's head will stop too suddenly during a head turn. The living breathing character suddenly becomes an animatronic robot. Occurs most often with Garrus but happens to most characters at least once when they are in the scene but aren't the ones speaking.
  • The facial animation system would also invoke this a fair bit. As detailed as the faces are, their actual ability to emote can feel extremely limited, like their faces are made of tough rubber. This got a bit better in the sequels, but their expressions would still often be only vaguely like what was intended, and more often than not a rather blank expression would be used. If you were playing using a custom face you actually hoped this would be the case because it was plainly obvious that the facial rig was built for the default Male Shepard's face. Any attempt at smiling would just cause the custom face's mouth corners to move, with the rest staying perfectly in place.
• Mass Effect 2 hits the valley hard in its character narration trailers, most notably those for Miranda and Subject Zero. In-game, however, the majority of faces are even better than in the first game.
  • While the close-up shots aren't so bad in the cutscenes, the way the body movements and gestures are animated in the long-shots make the characters look like string-puppets or zombies.
    • Brought up to Creepy Awesome levels by the acting troupe Crabcat Industries, when they preform a live-action medley of their favorite cutscenes.
  • Miranda does still have this problem in-game from time to time, just the way she looks at you, or the way her face is set at certain points. Word of God puts this down to glitching in the game's rendering system that causes her features to be very frozen and unmoving.
  • An odd glitch of the graphics engine can cause faces to be lit very starkly from below, emulating that flashlight-face look. It can be jarring.
  • There also appears to be a problem with the default Male!Shepard facial animation, in that he cannot smile properly. This picture◊ is fanmade, but demonstrates nicely why this is a problem.
• One of the trailers for Mass Effect 3 features a small girl you're supposed to be feeling sorry for. Unfortunately, her horrific appearance prevents any empathy from arising in the viewer.
  • Almost every time someone turns their neck. Uncanny valley applies to krogans, too.
  • The synthesis ending evoked this for some players due to the eerie green glowing of some characters.
  • You can also get an Off-Model glitch due to a bug in the code for the Recon Hood that makes Shepard's eyelids transparent during "helmets off" cutscenes. The resultant uncannily large eyes make the whole thing more than a little unnerving.
• A common criticism of Mass Effect: Andromeda is that the models and facial animations are of a lower quality than previous entries in the series, evoking this for many players. The expressions of some characters appear dull and lifeless and the human models look less real than they did in the first game, caused in part by the game being made by a different branch of Bioware than the previous trilogy.
• In one of the endings of Massmouth 2, the protagonist notes that he's creeped out by the way the Big Bad's face never seems to be facing away from him (due to the way the in-game sprites are drawn.)
• In Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, Big Boss suffers from this in cutscenes featuring in-game graphics. He's got a stern face and no other emotions. His remaining eye never blinks and is always intently, uneasily focused on something. The relative lack of his trademark grunt reaction noises doesn't help. The rest of the playable soldiers don't have this problem because they're always clad in a balaclava.
• Samus in the Metroid Prime series bordered the line, went past it, and then went up from there. Metroid Prime had Samus' face designed to look realistic according to how she looked in Super Metroid. It wasn't quite right (mostly because her subdued skin and hair clashed with her bright-colored suit), but it still looked decent. Metroid Prime 2: Echoes shifted away from this style in favor of an anime look based on Metroid: Zero Mission, but the 3D representation of it made Samus look like a living Barbie doll with puffy lips and eyes that look fake. Metroid Prime: Hunters attempted to mix the realistic and anime styles together with some success while Metroid Prime 3: Corruption has Samus retain the anime style, but with a much bigger improvement in facial details. Compare the faces here.
  • All the humans characters minus Samus (mostly) in Metroid: Other M. MB especially is like a character from Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.
• The Ghasts in Minecraft make a sound that sounds ALMOST like babies. That "almost" aspect however makes them horrifying, especially when there are several all making that same sound. Thus if there is a "sound" version to Uncanny Valley, these creatures sure make it.
  • The sounds recorded for Ghasts came from the sound developer's cat after distorting the sounds. Doesn't make it any less creepy.
• Sony's first-party PS3 sports games (MLB the Show and NBA 0x) have technically excellent 1080p graphics. Except every arena looks to be made entirely of plastic, and every player looks like a wax doll.
• Someone has found a way to change character movesets for Mortal Kombat X. But having the human/humanoid characters perform Alien's Deadly Hybrid Fatality gives you, well... (WARNING: Extremely disturbing.)
• All the people in the Myst series tend towards this, especially in the earlier games (the fact that encountering them is so rare doesn't help). But by far the scariest is that little girl in Riven. She appears out of nowhere on the path and looks more like a creepy little ghost than anything else... * shudders*
  • It probably helps that the original Myst was known for taking place entirely in uninhabited areas; you don't meet your first character in person until the end of the game. So suddenly finding out that people actually live in Riven is a surprise.
• Many of the Nancy Drew games have been this, but they have been getting better:
  • Averted with "Secrets can Kill", which uses animated cartoons for the characters.
  • Many of the early ones from "Stay Tuned for Danger" until roughly "Secret of the Scarlet Hand" have this where the characters look very very artificial and never seem to move unless talking.
  • In "Stay Tuned for Danger", Nancy can examine many of the photographs and find that they are photographs of real people... but with the artifical faces put on them like cheap masks. HerInteractive never did that again.
  • Somewhat averted with Secret of the Old Clock though. Despite that they put in old photos from the 30s, they actually don't animate the scenes that take place in these so it does look out of place, but thankfully not uncanny. Some also argued it added a nice effect, since the game actually is set in the 1930s and having real-life photographs of the buildings at the time only added to it.
  • The recent games have been avoiding this - the CG-I, while still obviously CG-I going for a more realistic style looks far more comfortable. The characters actually move way more and don't come off as looking like living dolls.
• Nezumi Man features a cast comprised mostly of cute little cartoon mice, some weird looking fish heads, and a badly confused kangaroo. Very silly and fairly lighthearted, as Mega Man type fan games go. Then you get this thing as the final boss. "What the hell is that" doesn't even begin to cover it. It looks like someone stretched an old woman's face over a drum, then gave it mouse ears and way too many legs with hands at the end. It also has the smoothest animation cycles of anything in the game. That's more limbs and more movement fidelity than anything else in Nezumi Man, and it's all the more hideous for it. Especially jarring considering that somewhat human-like faces were drawn on objects in the game before, as those don't come remotely close to plunging that deep into the valley like the final boss does.
• No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle has Charlie Mcdonald's cheerleaders. They all look alike. All 25 of them. Also, on a side note, there's a store in Pizza Batt tower that's actually called "Uncanny Valley".
• While most of the characters in Advance wars look fine, Drake looks incredibly odd with his constant showing of his teeth and the lack of eyebrows, which makes him look like a demented monkey. The Nintendo Switch version improves all of the character art, including Drake, who gotten eyebrows, more detailed eyes, and keeps his mouth in a neutral smile rather than baring his teeth (unless he gets flustered).
• OFF has the Secretaries, who are portrayed with a little too much detail for a game like this, and thus look human in the worst possible way. Also, the Elsen's wheezing gasps, particularly when they're about to attack you.
• Only the Brave Can Rescue the Kidnapped Princess: The King spends a substantial portion of the "I Love My Food" scene just chewing food and staring at the screen with a wide-eyed, completely emotionless expression, with his eyes drawn larger and with more detail than they are at any other point in the game (this includes every other shot of him in the same scene).
• The first Operation Flashpoint (now renamed ARMA Cold War Assault), had pretty similar technique as above where real life faces are pasted into the low poly soldier models.
• Parappa The Rapper 2 has the characters retain their flat paper cutout style, yet the afros many character obtain are rendered in 3D. The afros look plain weird on flat characters, especially since everyone that has some form of hair is also in 2D like the rest of them. The spin off game, Um Jammer Lammy has a group of firefighters that are dalmation dogs. The leader of the group who plays as the stage's master has a pair of very wide, thick, and pink lips while all the other dogs have the standard cartoon flat black lines for lips.
• Parasite Eve has Aya's pupils look one size too large, making her look like a realistic human given anime styled eyes. The sequel redesigned the character, making her look more natural.
• PAYDAY: The Heist has every single character model devoid of any form of facial animation. Nobody even bothers to blink either.
• It's very easy to create a character of this nature intentionally or otherwise in Phantasy Star Online 2, due to the sheer amount of character customization it permits, allowing for realistic or anime-esque faces and everything in between. The limited amount of facial animation can make even normal-looking characters seem rather off in cutscenes, though.
• Persona 3 has the protagonist himself, and the mysterious little boy. The boy is just so out of place in spite of his perfectly ordinary appearance and he acts overly mature, and the protagonist looks... dead. The female protagonist Persona 3 Portable looks better, well marginally better at least.
• Pokémon:
  • Jynx may look too much like a human-Pokémon hybrid to not be Nightmare Fuel.
  • Several of the Pokémon categorized as "human-like" can fall into the Uncanny Valley. Several of the Fighting-Types are particularly creepy due to their strange proportions. Machoke◊ in particular has a body that's almost perfectly human shaped (even its hands and feet are the same shape of a human!) but its head looks like a cartoon reptile. What also doesn't help is Machoke wearing what looks like a wrestler's belt and tights, making it look even more human (though the developers insist that "tights" are just a different skin color on the body) Machoke's first and final forms (Machop and Machamp) also have the human shaped hands, but the rest of their bodies look far less human-like.
  • The PC simulator for the Trading Card Game Pokémon Play It! has some horrifying CGI human characters trying too hard to mimic the anime's art style.
  • Pikachu in Hey You, Pikachu! is animated weirdly. The way its legs stretch as it uses its foot to scratch its ears like a dog simply doesn't look right and it gains human-like hands when it waves at you for attention.
  • When Jessie and James appeared in Pokémon GO, they have rather human like proportions, until you see their large heads and their lifeless eyes◊. Compared to the other admins◊. It doesn't help that the art style in GO goes for the semi realistic route while Jessie and James look like they were directly lifted from the anime.
  • The Pokemon appearing in Pokkén Tournament have a nice mix of semi realistic textures on cartoon bodies. Lucario, on the other hand, looks like it has fur on its paws and feet that blends in with the fur on his body.
  • Invoked in Magikarp Jump. The game uses simple two frame animations for all characters with the exception of Pidgeotto which has a smoother flying animation which makes it really unsettling, perfect for your Pokemon's natural predator.
• The Uncanny Valley is invoked in Portal with GLaDOS' Robo Speak and its sudden human shift after the destruction of the Morality Core.
  (Creepy, distorted laughter) "Good news: I figured out what that thing you just incinerated did. It was the morality core they installed after I flooded the enrichment center with a deadly neurotoxin, to make me stop flooding the enrichment center with a deadly neurotoxin."
  • Chell may also count, though she's rarely seen in-game. Just... Those EYES.◊
  • A jarring contrast to GLaDOS' more organic-sounding voice in Portal 2 is the almost melodious scream she lets out as her head is removed. Whether it's deeply unsettling or just plain Narm is a toss-up.
• Psychonauts can easily stir up the Uncanny Valley in players for its Tim Burton-esque claymation looking characters. While Raz, Lili, Shasha, Milla and Ford are stylised enough to look appealing (especially Raz and Lili), the rest of the kids are just plain freaky, looking more like deranged Muppets than actual children. The sequel improves upon the cast’s designs with immensely improved and newer graphics, although some people actually find the new graphics even more unsettling due to the more detailed eyes and smoother textures on the characters.
• Whoever designed Doc Louis' eyes in the Nintendo Wii version of Punch-Out!! needs to honestly be charged with something. The game itself is silly enough and cartoony, but whenever a round ends and it shows Little Mac in his corner with Doc, his eyes are always disturbingly fixed upon you... not your in-game character, but staring at the screen at YOU, and the eyes appear to follow you.
  • Speaking of Punch-Out, there's also the Super Punch-Out protagonist's appearance in Fight Night Round 2. One shudders thinking of it.◊.
  • Mad Clown from Super Punch-Out is already pretty scary with his enormous smile, but his piercing eyes that clashes really bad with his otherwise cartoonish face, and said smile, makes it even worse.

• In Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale, this happen in some ways, but this does fit with the comedic bend of the game:
  • Dialogue during shopping tends to combine various pre-made messages with odd and most definitely hilarious results. "This is a family heirloon I will have to sell." except said heirloom is a bar of chocolate, among countless other examples.
  • Enemies, unlike the characters, are made with 3d models, which causes a weird scene when your sprite-made team of Adventurer, Merchant Girl and Fairy Clerk fight against the forces of darkness, all of which are obviously "otherworldly". Again, this can fit with the rest of the game for comedic effect.
  • Arma, as a golem (magical Robot Girl in this case) thankfully manages to act just human enough to not fall into this (though technology-related Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness does happen on occasion). Animals also like her and Recette describes her as "kind", which is made of d'awww.
• Resident Evil
  • In the original version of Resident Evil, Chris and Jill have very primitive animations when they use the laboratory computer to enter the login information. Neither character move their fingers to hit the keys and move their entire hands so that their fingers hover over the right keys. Chris' typing animations look hilariously goofy as he randomly slams his hands on the keyboard as he types. Jill's animations isn't any better, but she at least taps the keys like a normal person.
  • Resident Evil 2 didn't fare much better. It was the first in the series to utilize CGI graphics in the cutscenes, and it shows; Leon and Claire have stiff movements, and wide, dead-eyed glassy looks. Leon also has weird fishy lips and Claire looks like a barbie doll with a plastic ponytail◊. Sherry is arguably even worse. Likewise, every single character in the CG cutscenes all have overly large and thick eyebrows to the point where they could become a unibrow if they were any bigger. Even Sherry, who is a 12 year old girl, is subjected to the thick brows. This might have to do with the fact that the cutscenes are actually done in Stop Motion rather than digitally created models.
  • The Resident Evil 2 (Remake) runs into similar uncanny issues as despite vastly improved technology, the photo-realistic faces in the new RE7 engine can make the characters look disturbingly close to real in certain shots. While the male characters Leon, Marvin, Chief Irons, Ben and Robert look fine for the most part, the female characters' faces such as Claire◊, Ada◊, Sherry and Annette◊ can look plain creepy in some shots. However, Claire does look◊ great the majority of the time (barring a couple cutscenes), it's relatively few and far between in Ada's◊ case◊. Such uncanniness is largely the result of the characters' mouths often moving and gesticulating in ways that a normal mouth should not be moving in, combined with the frozen dead-eyed stares of the characters in several shots. Even when talking outside of cutscenes, the lips often do not sync with what the character is saying.
  • The HD remaster of Resident Evil has an unlockable outfit for Jill and Chris that's literally directly lifted from the Resident Evil 5 Lost in Nightmare DLC. Having Jill or Chris running around in their higher detailed character models from their B.S.A.A. uniforms makes them stand out very heavily and clash against the differently rendered characters like Barry and Wesker where their models aren't as detailed. Chris stands out the most with his B.S.A.A. outfit since his character model is way older compared to the current timeline RE1 Chris; the time difference between the first game and the fifth game is at least ten years.
• Returnal's protagonist, Selene Vassos, is modeled on her motion actor Anne Beyer. While the actual facial capture is high quality, her facial animation and eye motion can appear off, especially when viewed up close. The flexibility of her skin and the movement of her facial muscles can be noticeable.
• Psye's original design in Rigid Force Alpha consists of a creepy looking disembodied CGI head◊. Thankfully in the Redux version, she was redesigned◊ for a more Animesque look.
• Runescape uses a cartoony, yet somewhat realistic art style and stays well away from the uncanny valley. The sole exception being human children models. There's no better way to describe it then to just show you a picture of a Runescape child staring into your soul◊.

• The 3D Adventures of Sailor Moon is the first piece of media to depict the Sailor Scouts in 3D and if the intro is of any indication, it shows. The stylized look of the characters did not translate well to late 90s CGI at all, with the scouts' porcelain doll like eyes and stiff, almost zombie-like dance moves being particularly nightmareish.
• Subverted to a terrifying degree in Scratches. In nearly every screen of Blackwood Manor and its surroundings, the graphics only change by a minimal amount over time, which means you'll be passing through the same exact screens again and again with no noticeable changes. But the soundtrack only makes that disturbingly fitting, as it can put you in such suspense that you'll think something's about to change when you go through the next door or into the next screen, but it'll still get the drop on you anyway.
• The title character of the Dreamcast virtual life simulator Seaman is a rather ugly humanesque head... on a fish's body (which eventually evolves into a frog's body). And it talks to you, providing an unnervingly large number of possible responses.
• If you're old enough to remember The Secret Island of Dr. Quandary, chances are you remember this about it, especially with the Lifelike Action Figures and the more realistic NPCs.
• Self-Checkout Unlimited: The giant bunny doll in the Birthday store has...oddly human-looking teeth. When you examine it, the game notes that it looks like it's watching you.
• If you fail at the Boss Rush in Sexy Parodius, you're treated to a rather frightening image of the final boss laughing at your misfortune.
• In Shadow Hearts Covenant, there is the (in)famous "Miracle" scene. Granted, many consider it to be a Tear Jerker, but some actually suddenly found themselves ready to cry...and then laughing because when Yuri is about to burst into tears... his face proceeds to skew into something quite atrociously funny as tears literally flow from his eyes. Something that would ordinarily look creepy actually turned into a candidate for Funny Moments? interesting...
  • And somebody on deviantART even did something funny...because the avatar for "Bawplz" is a shot from that very scene. There's also wabplz, which is merely the "sad mouth" flipped upside down, making it actually look either disturbing with how wide his cheeks are, or funny with how friggin' ridiculous his mouth looks.
• Silent Hill invokes The Uncanny Vally alongside unintended cases, and given the Psychological Horror angle, it's hard to tell when it is or isn't intentional:
  • Silent Hill: The FMV CG cutscenes, despite being lauded at the time, have this effect, especially since Takayoshi Sato had no Caucasian people available to base the models' faces on. Cheryl Mason in particular has it the worst since she's supposed to be a 7-year-old girl, but her model just makes her look a shrunken-down adult woman.
• In The Sims 2 normally averts this, but you can change the parameters of character's faces, often causing this effect.
  • Even regular Sims can look weird, depending on their expressions. Sims are prone to acting like there's something wrong with them, and it shows; especially with certain NPCs, like post-childhood Mortimer.
  • The cats in The Sims 2: Pets for Nintendo DS are just reskinned dogs. They don't move right (cats have very different gaits from dogs), don't act right (cats don't play-bow, they don't wag their tails when they're happy - a full-tail lash from a cat is an angry cat - they don't move their heads like dogs do when vocalizing or sniffing...), and are in general creepy as heck if you spend any time around cats.
• The Sims 3 has this effect, especially with the more "realistic" art style end up making the Sims doll-like, especially how when selecting voice, the mouth doesn't move (although while speaking in game, their mouth do move). On the plus side, their expressions are (usually) less exaggerated.
  • There's something terribly wrong with the dogs in The Sims 3 Pets, especially when they move in Create-A-Pet. Their facial expressions are too human, and many don't look like their actual breeds.
• Attempted to be averted in The Sims 4 - rather than going further down the realistic route of The Sims 3, which was notoriously puppet-like at times, they took a distinctly more Pixar-esque route. People have stated that the cartoony design means the style doesn't risk hitting the valley and 4 can go on for longer without its graphics becoming out-dated. However other fans think the cartoony style is a huge step backwards due to the art style affecting the more realistic elements such as nature and object, despite how the facial animations themselves are more detailed than ever before. Though like The Sims 2, the exaggerated expressions often play this trope straight, as well as how the improvements in Create A Sim more often than not causing this effect while trying to create the "right" head and face shape.
  • Played straight with the "Possessed" Sims introduced in Strangerville, although justified.
  • Also played straight with skin tone mods that adds back realistic skin tones among others.
• Siren 1. Characters had animated images of actors as their face textures, with their expressions made through frames instead of actual polygon animation. It made it all seem slightly real, but also unnatural, and added to the dreamy feeling the game had.
• Alex Ahad said that when designing characters for Skullgirls he liked to have them mostly normal, but with something disturbing and off-putting about them. The ones that invoke this trope most effectively are Peacock, who looks like a cartoon character until you realise that those aren't Black Bead Eyes but eye sockets, and Filia, who looks like a normal, troubled schoolgirl - until you see the mouth, sharp teeth and eyes sticking out of her hair and realise she has a head parasite instead.
• The American and European character select screen of Snow Bros 2. Deformed photoshopped images of babies was a bad idea, especially when combined with the hardware's color palette limitations.
• The box art◊ for Phoenix Games' Snow White and the Seven Clever Boys (technically a short animated film that's being sold as a game) features horribly Off-Model versions of characters from Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Note that the characters in the film/game are completely different from the ones in Disney's version.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • Princess Elise from Sonic the Hedgehog (2006): Princess of Uncanny Valley. Being alongside characters that are modeled after Felix the Cat punctuated it even further. The other humans in the game don't help it, with their random arm flailings in grotesque parody of actual body language. Sonic Team seems to have understood this, and made the humans in Sonic Unleashed look like they came straight out of Ratatouille. Also, realistic Eggman◊ from the same game, where we even get some shots of his eyes. Compared to how Eggman normally looks, the realistic Eggman has longer limbs and while he still has a potbelly, it looks like his belly imploded. Most of the playable characters in the game look off, due to the realism of everyone else and due to the less-cartoony look with them. It really makes it apparent that they're giant, multicolored, sapient animals. The way they move is disturbing. For some reason the Sega decided to use large amount of motion capture to animate the Sonic characters movements, which put highly detailed human expressions and motions onto cartoon animals. At best, they move like people in ill fitting mascot suits with giant, bearly movable heads. None of the Sonic characters ever show any facial expressions other than the occasional blinking and their movements look either extremely odd or very stiff. Sonic in particular is stuck with a near-constant deadpan stare, and he almost never makes eye contact with his conversation partners. However, the one character this may work for is Mephiles, who would already be pretty far removed from the others if he hadn't borrowed Shadow's form.
  • The animations in Sonic Adventure make the Sonic characters look like they have trouble grasping how to move their mouths when speaking. Sonic and Knuckles have the worst of it due to how their eyes just bulge and twitch the moment they even talk. Knuckles's forehead also looks massively swollen, which makes his eyes look small by comparison.
    • "Some of the best 3D graphics"◊.
  • Sonic Adventure 2 improves the animations in the Sonic characters but somehow managed to mess up on the human characters. One jarring moment is a little girl starring into a screen and you can see how her eyes look completely dead and devoid of any emotion. The graphical fidelity looks fine in the game overall, but in the ported versions, the shader is either different or bugged since Knuckles, Tails, and Eggman look like they got covered in soot since their models look dark compared to the original versions.
  • The GUN Commander in Shadow the Hedgehog is human, but seems to be a mix of realistic and cartoon styles that do not mesh well together. His younger self, around the age of 10 or so, has the pupils of his eyes look massive and Maria also falls under the same problem. The President, which has his model ripped straight out of Sonic Adventure 2 looks even more jarring due to having cartoonishly large hands and feet in comparison to other human characters.
  • Sonic's redesign in Sonic Boom has shades of this, his elongated legs and prominent shoulders◊ as in contrast to noodle limbs he had in previous games is more than a bit unsettling. Knuckles's larger Top-Heavy Guy build is also pretty weird being too muscly and human for comfort.
  • The background NPCs animal characters◊ in Sonic Forces got hit bad with this, due to them looking far more generic and lacking in detail in their designs compared to the established cast members. Some NPCs◊ also had creepy Fish Eyes (which you can also give to the playable Custom Hero) that made them look like dead-eyed Shell Shocked Veterans.
  • Sonic CD:
    • One attempt to make the game darker was to give Eggman a more realistic sprite (on the bottom left of this picture), and it works a bit too well: his hunched-over look, his more prominent Bald of Evil, and his eyes slightly visible behind the glasses make him all the more sinister.
    • This game contains the notorious "Fun is infinite" easter egg within its Sound Test feature, which stands out as it prominently features 4 rows of deformed Sonics with demonic faces, a big problem here is that the image itself (ignoring the message within it) doesn't exactly do much in the way of conveying anything beyond the fact that Sonic is there waving his finger at you, and something about his appearance is.. for lack of a better word, "different," which causes it to be fairly easy to interpret something along the lines of the Sonics in the image being strange malicious creatures who may or may not be out for your blood, because it leaves way too much up to interpretation, and this creepy demonic face replacing Sonic's usual appearance can be extremely jarring to look at if you're used to looking at the hedgehog's more welcoming cartoonish design, which is a fact that in and of itself is very bizarre when you consider the fact that the exact same game features another hidden message that actually embraces the "finer aspects" of his design. It doesn't really help that the signature (in the bottom right) is commonly misinterpreted as being signed by none other than the devil himself either.
    • And that isn't even the only bizarre portrayal that this game has of its titular character up its arsenal, as the same game also happens to feature this thing, also accessible from the Sound Test, it is what appears to be a fusion between Sonic and Batman, producing a result that, although not exactly as questionable as the aforementioned "Fun is infinite" image, still manages to reach into the realm of the Uncanny Valley, as if the spooky demon Sonic already wasn't enough. The strange figure has the same physique as Batman and the stand out features of Sonic, in a combination that probably should not be witnessed by mankind. Furthermore, the shading in the image is done in such a way that his face is noticeably obscured from view, which, combined with the dark atmosphere can cause somebody to interpret him as eyeless, or at least be unnerved from the atmosphere itself. Thankfully, much of the tension is reduced by the fact that it is quite obviously a tribute to Batman, and isn't an alleged anti-piracy measure deliberately meant to scare people. Plus, the idea of Sonic and Batman fusing is quite humorous.
• Hilde on the Xbox 360 boxart of Soulcalibur IV. It's her eyes... her soulless eyes.
  • Ashlotte in the game itself. A CGI animated model of a realistic human-like clockwork robot is just overkill. Thankfully, her movement and voice are very human, with nothing "off" or "mechanical" about them.
    • Interestingly, her personality and the non-CGI artwork of her can have her loop around from vaguely unsettling (as a clockwork doll with a halberd should be in the 1500s or today) to, well, cute.
    • On the other hand, some human characters suffer from these problems. Like in Tira's story mode, when she says "Can I use him? Naw, he's useless!" in that exaggerated, strained voice of hers, combined with her face locked in an unnatural smile with equally unnatural Mouth Flaps...
• In the very first South Park game (the one that was a Turok clone), the characters were portrayed in 3D and were given realistic animations. Them being 3D isn't the bad part; the bad part is the realistic animations. Yes, they thought it was a good idea to give the characters of South Park realistic animations such as breathing and actual walking/running.
• Spore can really run into this if a person doesn't know how to work with the creature creator (or just any other creator) very well. An even more special mention can go to people who've actually tried to make humans with the game's tools, which is not only downright creepy, but also very, very hideous.
  • As are most attempts at re-creating pre-existing characters from cartoons, video games, etc.
• The characters in Starcraft cinematics had that weird Claymation vibe about them, that made them look rather creepy. Starcraft II fixed that, and brought us this ...THING to compensate.
  • Most of the portraits are smaller than in the video, focusing on the heads. Which is good, since when zoomed out you realize most of the units lack arms. Or, in the Hellion and Goliath's case, have absurdly skinny arms.
  • Some cinematics are marred by the portraits going back to whatever emotion they were expressing to neutral for less than a second, just enough to be jarring.
• Star Control 3 replaced Star Control 2's 2D animation with filmed claymation models. The humans and humanlike aliens look creepiest of all, much more so than the non-human aliens. The likely worst case is the formerly sexy Syreen.
• Star Ocean: The Last Hope has very pretty graphics, but this only makes the character models more horrifying. Everyone looks like mannequins or porcelain dolls with anime eyes, Lymle is especially terrifying. Compounding the horror is that her voice is in the Uncanny Valley. It's a soul-draining mockery of what a little girl sounds like.
• The Wii, PSP and PS2 versions of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed have some really awkward human models, which is probably due to the performances being provided via Motion Capture and the fact they use the same models for both gameplay and cutscenes. As a reviewer put it, they have pretty much a single expression and don't show any emotion, which becomes very uncomfortable in some parts of the game with high emphasis on character development.
  • The PS3 and XBox360 versions are better with expression and emotion, but the skin textures still look wrong. There are also other issues, particularly with Juno Eclipse's mouth: sometimes, when speaking, it's like her upper lip gets caught on the top of her teeth and just stays there. That description probably makes no sense because the image makes no sense. In fact, everyone in that game seems to have a mouth that's too large for their face, which really only becomes apparent when they're speaking.
• Stellaris has an In-Universe example with the "Uncanny" Machine Unit trait.
  • Inverted Trope with Synthetic Ascension, as Machine Empires will find the former organics to be uncanny.
• Street Fighter:
  • The Street Fighter EX trilogy being the franchise’s first step into 3D, naturally had this effect on long time fans with the previously beautifully animated World Warriors now in blocky graphics and lacking fluidity of the sprite work. This along with being made by a third party company may explain why the EX series initially failed to make any waves. One piece of offical artwork◊ by Dai-Chan even lampshades this trope with Ryu, Chun-Li and other characters In-Universe reacting in horror at being turned 3D.
    • Character-specific example with Doctorin Dark who surface seems like normal blonde guy with riot gear and gas mask, until you look at his wide, unblinking dead eyes.
  • When looked closely, the bystanders of Street Fighter IV fall into this, since they clearly used motion capture for animating them and they have the detail of plain mannequins, its jarring to see them performing the same movements over and over again.
  • During the first demo of Street Fighter V, Cammy had a very realistic European face, complete with believable nose, cheeks, and lips. Most fans didn't like this at all and Capcom quickly changed her to look more anime-esque again by the time the game's second multiplayer demo went live.
  • Actually the Art Evolution of the models in Street Fighter IV and V, tends to get this reaction thanks to the characters's massive hands and the chunky exaggerated bodies. While you'll barely notice it in the matches, it's extremely prevalent in the Story Mode where the characters are often aren't fighting and just moving around normally therefore look more freaky.
  • Street Fighter 6, being made with the RE Engine has caused this reaction from some fans with the new look of the characters which is a blend of realistic skin, hair and clothes with the usual anime-influenced stylsied designs of the characters. While Ryu, Chun-Li, Guile and Juri look perfectly fine, Luke, Jamie and Kimblee's faces can dip into the valley depending on their expressions, the silly face trade-off feature which happens during loading screens can definitely invoke this reaction in certain players even if it's more funny than creepy for most other players.
• "Adult" video game Strip Fighter 2 almost averted this by making all the detailed pictures of women be scans of actual pictures of women. Then someone got the bright idea to make the pictures wink. Without moving any other part of the face.
• Super Mario Bros.
  • In most 3D games, characters and objects that are far from the camera are rendered with less polygons in order to optimize performance on the game's engine. When done right, you won't notice how low poly the models are in the distance. When it's not done right, the results are very noticeable. For example, Super Mario 64 renders Mario's model with less polygons when the camera is zoomed out and it wasn't too noticeable (unless you looked for it) since the game was made at a very low resolution. When the game was re-released in HD for the Nintendo Switch, the low polygon version of Mario can be seen a lot more clearly where you can see the very triangular hat, hands, and feet.
  • Because Nintendo loves recycling old renders of Mario characters, especially from the Gamecube onwards, seeing such renders from that era mixed in with those from the DS/Wii, 3DS/Wii U, and Switch, can produce a very jarring effect, as it can lead to a mishmash of outdated and newer renders (Especially since the Gamecube renders have desaturated lighting and flat textures). Granted, during each era, Nintendo would usually update old renders or make new ones with brighter colors, smoother shading, more realistic textures, and better lighting. Mario Sports Superstars is the worst offender when it comes to this, as aside from recycling a bunch of old renders, one of the amiibo cards◊ released for this game garnered infamy for using a render of Bowser from Dance Dance Revolution Mario Mix with a generic render of Luigi running that was first used in Mario Tennis Open in the background, which resulted in both artstyles clashing too much.
  • The games normally have Peach, Daisy, and Rosalina that wear poofy dresses since they are princesses (except for Rosalina. Maybe.) Take away the dresses, give them a top and shorts or skintight jumpsuits (as seen in games like Mario Kart and Mario Tennis), and you get to see the girls having somewhat realistic body proportions that heavily clash with the design of their heads, which has their bodies either looking too small or their heads being too large. Human male characters like Mario, Luigi, or Wario pass the uncanny valley because their bodies were designed to have exaggerated structures that goes with their cartoon heads.
  • Mario's floating head in Mario Teaches Typing 2. Everything, from the movement of the mouth to the shape of the eyes, is slightly off, resulting in Mario looking downright creepy. It doesn't help that Mario's missing his body and he seems aware of this.
  • The robot from Mario Paint , who later became Coursebot. Although he looks less scary now, he had a very unsettling face and did not fit the childish aesthetic of Mario games.
  • The characters in Super Mario Kart look quite off due to Nintendo's attempt to have every racer rendered in 3D sprites. Koopa Troopa and the Princess suffer the worst from the uncanny valley where as their sprite rotates/adjusts, their eyes seem to move in odd positions or have one eye closed to simulate a 3/4ths view. Link also suffers from a similar problem in The Legend of Zelda. Every time Link picks up a new item, he holds it above his head with one hand and half of his face is also raised, making it look like it's melting.
  • Mario Kart: Double Dash!! and Mario Kart Wii have its characters rendered at somewhat low polygons in order to maintain a smooth frame rate. However, this can make some characters look downright odd such as the Mario Bros. having blocky hands and Bowser's face looking very angular. Both games also has everyone with gloss and shine on their models, which makes them look like plastic figurines.
  • Mario Party 4:
    • In The Runaway Guys playthrough of the game, they brought up how the victory poses after the Avalanche minigame looks quite disturbing in this regard. The worst ones are Daisy's glassy stare and Mario's pose, where only his arm moves. Not a muscle of facial expression - just the arm.
    • The opening cutscene to the game is pretty unnerving to look at (heck, even the uploader was creeped out by it), being one of the first cutscenes in the franchise to use the current art direction. All of the Mario characters are standing around in the middle of a rather realistic-looking environment and everyone looks completely lifeless while randomly making very weird and janky movements. Mario approaches the group out of nowhere with a unnatural way of walking, and as Luigi turns to greet his brother, Luigi's waist turns strangely around with both his legs creepily lifting upward for no real reason, while the Princess stares at Mario as if she's seeing through him instead of directly at him. A weird floating garbage bag-looking thing (called the Party Cube) arrives with the party hosts on-board, Luigi's jaw starts quivering to the point it looks jarring, and the Koopa "dancing" comes off more as if he's having some sort of spaz attack with his arms sticking straight out (because apparently, he was in a T-Pose) and the fact his eyes don't blink once makes it much more unsettling. Overall, the intro looks really bizarre and it feels more as if Mario and his friends were replaced by robots. Thankfully, the graphics and animations in the actual gameplay itself are much better and avoid being uncanny.
  • Invoked with the Weird Mushroom in Super Mario Maker, which transforms Mario into Weird Mario. Weird Mario's body has near realistic body proportions by trimming down his belly while lengthening his arms and legs and giving Mario's jump physics more height and floatiness like Luigi's jumps. The concept came about during development where a glitch with the Super Mushroom sometimes made Small Mario twice as tall (but not wide, making him look stretched) rather than turning into Super Mario. They liked it so much, they made it a feature but changed it to give him more realistic proportions so it would be even weirder.
  • Super Mario Odyssey has a level that is a lookalike New York City populated with realistic taxis and realistic looking human pedestrians, which stands out a lot when you have Mario, a short cartoony looking human, standing next to them.
  • Odyssey also does away with rendering Mario's hair, eyebrows and mustache as solid blocks of color, instead having them made up of visible, individual hairs. It comes off as a little too realistic compared to the rest of Mario's cartoony design. Mario can also wear swim trunks, which also has him go without his shirt, shoes, and gloves. Seeing Mario's half naked body with nipples and enlarged hands and feet makes him look outright weird. There's also a large dragon that Mario fights that simply looks too realistic and out of place in a cartoony setting.
  • Luigi's Mansion 3 has the disguised ghosts at the beginning. Most of them wear somewhat realistic smiling masks that manage to look creepier than their actual ghost faces. Luigi is visibly weirded out when walking past them.
  • Luigi in the ending of Luigi's Mansion laughs and cries at Mario when he comes flying out of the machine in a comical fashion. Luigi's eyes don't change at all during this sequence, which makes Luigi's fit of laughter look downright creepy. The remaster keeps it the same.
  • This 1998 French fangame called Super Mario PC has a somewhat aesthetic visual design, but also weird somehow. The sprite of Mario dying looks even weirder due to the lack of Small Mario; it just doesn’t look so right...
• Wario Land games are usually too cartoony in art style to fit this usually, but some of the clown-based bosses would probably head far enough into the valley to give Coulrophobics nightmares. There's Clown-a-Round in Wario World, which looks just human and somewhat CGI-like to creep someone out before they even realize it has multiple detachments heads and his real one is on his stomach: picture for reference and possibly Chortlebot from Shake It, which is at least somewhat disturbing in the least (it freaking laughs when using a flamethrower type attack for goodness sake, and the music getting faster and faster can't help much).
  • While we're on the topic of Wario World, there's Mean Emcee, who has an incredibly garbled voice, jerky movements, and just barely human features, falls squarely into this trope.
  • The Brawl Doll. Yes, it's a giant, almost sickening looking cupid type plush toy you fight as a boss. One look at those eyes will freak you out something weird, and it apparently fires laser beams.
  • Then there's the Winter Windster, the boss of Shivering Mountains. It's almost frostbitten flesh-colored, small, stubby limbs, and... the face. Honestly, the picture on that link actually makes it seem worse than its actual in-game appearance... which is really an in-game picture.
• Hacking Super Smash Bros. Brawl to swap character movesets can have some pretty strange effects on character models and animations. Hacking Pikachu with Ganondorf's moveset gives us Pikaman (or Longchu), a Pikachu with human proportions. It's creepy, to say the least. Giving Toon Link Meta Knight's moveset is also quite creepy, but is more Body Horror than Uncanny Valley. Perhaps worst of all, though, is Peach with Sonic's moveset - arms always bent at strange angles, long, clawlike fingers and long, floppy legs, not to mention the awkward and stiff clothing animation.
  • Realistic/animesque characters have puppet-like mouth flaps when saying their lines in their victory animations. It's especially jarring when compared with the rest of the game's gritty aesthetic, which has more emphasis on desaturation and detailed textures than its predecessors. Thankfully averted in later entries in the series, where characters now have actual animated mouth flaps that match their voiced lines.
• Tales Series:
  • A rare example in which the trope is invoked in the story, the Replicas in Tales of the Abyss. Despite that they are quite stylized and thankfully don't try for realism (Which would definitely create the Uncanny Valley), they don't appear this way to the player. But to the characters in the world? They look exactly like someone they know, only they speak in a Creepy Monotone thanks to not having any memories of emotion (Like Luke and Ion did), and don't even remember you. Just about anyone would be freaked if their friend died...and a clone of them showed up at their funeral, or your long-dead grandfather walks into your house, doesn't recognize anyone and doesn't even know how to act socially.
  • Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World invoked this for many people, simply by giving the anime-style character designs realistic motion-captured movements in the cutscenes.
  • Tales of Destiny 2: One factor in Reala's scrappy status is her very noodly and stretched design, as well as being incredibly pale. While this is more pronounced in some art than other pieces, at worst she looks much more like a drowned doll than a person.
  • Similarly, Claire and Agarte from Tales of Rebirth both have stretched and noodly designs, but Agarte's is much worse because her head is so large. It looks like her torso should be crumbling under the weight of it.
  • Tales of Xillia has Milla Maxwell as another unnecessarily creepy body type. She has an unnaturally thin waist, which is only emphasized by her large breasts. While alternate costumes can mitigate this problem somewhat, all animated cutscenes use the default attire and put attention to it. There's an in-story justification for this, as she says that she has never actually eaten food before in her 20 years as a human and has relied on the spirits for nourishment, but gains a love for eating during the game. The sequel did not alter this issue, if anything, she looks thinner than before, though this may be an illusion created by her new outfit that also emphasizes her breasts more.
• Invoked in the Team Fortress 2 video "Meet The Pyro". The scene alternates between footage of the burning carnage of the outside world and the Sugar Bowl within the Pyro's mind. Not only are the images of various character's faces pasted onto tiny egg-shaped cherubs unsettling enough as it is, the juxtaposition between the two realities makes the normally comic violence within the game seem much less comical when the outside world footage is shown. But even though this short was meant to be terrifying, several people ended up finding it hilarious in a Black Comedy kind of way.
  • Oddly, the new voice clips for the Heavy are slightly uncanny. He's basically stopped sounding like any kind of normal human person, and more like... maybe a chain-smoking Russian Cookie Monster?
  • Various fans have attempted to make a 3D model of the Engineer with his goggles off. The result is rather terrifying◊.
• Earlier Tenchu games had weird, generic, corpsey CGI scenes that were actually more unconfortable to watch than the blocky game-rendered cutscenes. Fortunately, ever since the PlayStation 2 era they got less awkward.
• Thief: Deadly Shadows gives us the fabulously creepy Shalebridge Cradle, an orphanage turned asylum though for a time, it was both. Inside, Garrett encounters the puppets, reanimated corpses of the worst inmates in the Cradle. Their rasping breathing is creepy by itself, but the true horror lies in their jerky, Jacob's Ladder-esque movements. It's just wrong.
  • Years earlier, Thief II: The Metal Age gave us Father Karras' twisted creations the Servants, with creepy, unblinking, expressionless golden masks adorning their faces.
• Tomb Raider:
  • The classic series on the Playstation fell into the valley and stayed there for a while. The first three games had characters within in-game cutscenes just bob their heads up and down as they spoke, which made them appear quite off and especially when a character had a strong emotion but their faces are frozen. Lara in the FMV scenes had her with a more broad range of expressions, but she seems to try too hard to express them as her grins or angry face look too extreme. The fourth and fifth games got rid of the head bobbing for in-game scenes and had characters actually move their mouths, but the mouth only opened and closed with just two frames of animation and the characters themselves moved very stiffly. Tomb Raider II had characters in FMV scenes whose eyes looked so huge that one could mistake it for an anime. By Tomb Raider III, the eyes in FMV scenes looked far more natural.
  • The FMV where Lara is ambushed by Natla's goons in Tomb Raider I has the character models look very off. The cutscene takes place outdoors and the developers tried to have the sun shining on everyone, but it made everyone look like they were slathered with shiny baby oil. Natla's henchmen have incredibly low details on their faces and the cowboy character looks like he has no eyes. The cutscene also has Lara diving into water a few times and the effect used for water splashing looks more like tiny triangular polygons rather than water particles. When Lara emerges from the water and sneaks onto Natla's boat, Lara's body looks incredibly greasy/oil rather than soaking wet.
  • When Crystal Dynamics did the reboots, Lara's appearance and facial expressions vastly improved, which pulled Lara out of the valley. Lara's facial expressions are now much more broad and are more finely detailed.
  • There was a demo video with Lara talking about what to expect in the then upcoming third game. Everything about Lara's model in the video just looks completely off in several ways. While Lara's FMV/CG model does look strange by today's standards, Lara's model in the video looks like a beta version of the same model where her eyes have a black outline and her eyebrows are much thicker than they usually are. Her movements also look incredibly robotic where she flails her arms about and twists her torso while trying to move her legs as little as possible. Lara's lip sync is also off at times where her voice sometimes comes out before her mouth actually starts to move.
  • Lara's in-game model in the first game looked very strange; her eyebrows were quite thin, the eyes themselves were round, and her hair looked like a wig. This made Lara's model look like a woman in her forties or older, despite her character being in their twenties. The sequels improved Lara's model by giving her thicker eyebrows, narrower eyes, and a ponytail.
  • Lara's teenager character model in the fourth and fifth games look fine, but her CG character art model has a bizarre look where it looks like her face is just a slightly modified version of her adult model. Herr eyebrows are faded and the coloration to her lips were removed.
• Many later Touhou Project games portray Reimu with a paler skin tone and stiffer poses (fighting game spin-offs notwithstanding), making her gradually look more off, like if she was a corpse. Miyako Yoshika, the resident zombie character, actually looks more alive, though your mileage may vary on that one. Fanon caught on with the Zombie Reimu meme. Unconnected Marketeers finally gave Reimu a rosier skin tone that makes her look a lot less creepy.
• New International Track & Field contains some hideous Super-Deformed characters as contestants. All look pretty dreadful, but the worst ones are the characters from other Konami games with a more serious feel. See them all here

• Zig-zagged in the Uncharted games as well and The Last of Us and its sequel. Naughty Dog’s games are acclaimed for having beautifully polished games with very impressive photorealistic characters, cutscenes and graphics. However the Uncanny Valley comes in when the games glitch up which only makes said beautifully polished graphics and the photorealistic characters come off as unsettling... or hilarious depending on the moment. The remake of The Last of Us has invoked this reaction in a certain amount of people due to the character models◊ getting an overhaul to be even more realistic than they already were, to the point of it being creepy, with some even considering it an Unnecessary Makeover or Adaptational Ugliness.
• In Until Dawn the face-tech and motion capture in the game is fantastic considering the developers originally made motion games but this trope still comes in unbidden more than often. Dr Hill◊ (intentionally), Matt, Emily and Jess are the biggest offenders. Samantha and Ashley have this problem to a lesser degree, Sam has werid moments where she supposed to be terrified but she smiles for no reason. Ashely's face looks odd on occasion especially in her death animations, also she has little resemblance to her actor who is quite beautiful◊.
  • Averted with Josh and Mike's faces however, which are fantastic looking◊ exactly like their actors (Rami Malek and Brett Dalton). Although for some, the realistic accuracy of their faces is unsettlingly itself.
• Miku Hatsune looks just fine and dandy in the PSP version of Project DIVA, but when you pop in the high-definition PS3 version, all of a sudden the advanced shaders and more detailed character model turn her into something that looks like a gangly woman with stiff, impossible joints and very bizarre facial proportions, as if she were wearing an animegao mask.
• The animated portraits for the children in Warcraft III. Forget the undead horde, can I slaughter some of those little abominations? PLEASE?!^note Actually, yes; you can.
  • Some of the portraits in Reforged are similarly eerie for showing no expression beyond a deadened stare even when their voices are expressing shock or rage. While the portraits from the original showed now emotion either, they were cartoonish enough for it to not matter.
• With their pasty skin and their inanimate, mannequin-like faces, the trainers in Wii Fit can be... unnerving to say the least.
• The Witcher 3 has Gaunter O'Dimm, who is just as well-rendered and stunningly-animated as everyone else in the game, but just looks disconcertingly (and appropriately)... off. And in such a way that it's exceedingly difficult to describe WHY.
• In World of Warcraft, there also are the high/blood elf placeholder models from before the Burning Crusade expansion pack of, a gallery of which can be seen here. They were modified night elf models, which meant that the male one had this creepy emotionless face, and the female ones had their eyes slanted at an almost disturbing angle. Combined with a blocky, ungainly appearance, both gender models kind of gave the impression their faces were too narrow.
  • Just before the launch of the Burning Crusade, the night elves in Scholomance were replaced with the new high elf models. However, their animations were either unfinished or the devs forgot to put them in the game. The result: elves that stood stiff as a board and glided across the floor. You couldn't even tell if they were casting a spell unless their hands were glowing.
  • Fandom is divided on the Forsaken. some consider the female Forsaken to be Cute Monster Girls, other consider both sexes to reside deep in the Uncanny Valley. Both sides are right, to at least some degree, owing to variations in personal tastes and the range of appearance options for Forsaken faces, from "cute green skinned girl" to "where's your jaw, and who stitched the leather X over your eyes?" Then again, they are zombies (i.e. the lowest point on the graph), just in varying states of decay.
  • The human children's faces are all unbelievably creepy. Something about their eyes...
    • Anduin Wrynn's new model from Cataclysm may be even further into this. He looks almost like an unusually tall 10-year-old with his father's Lantern Jaw of Justice.
  • The Taunka are arguably the worst offenders. Due to sloppy modeling, their faces are too flat and unanimated, making them look as if they are wearing cardboard masks with soulless, frozen eyes.
  • In Borean Tundra, there's a trio of human npcs that use models straight out of Warcraft III. Even before the model upgrades they appeared to have fewer polygons combined than a single standard model, making their appearance rather unsettling.
  • The reception to the new gnome and human models were rather mixed, with some feeling they fell right into the Uncanny Valley. Forget the Iron Horde - can we fight these monstrosities?!?

• Invoked in XCOM: Enemy Unknown with the Thin Men, the aliens' infiltrator units. They've been engineered to look as human as possible, but still turned out as Noodle People too thin and too tall to be perfectly disguised - to say nothing of the snake-like eyes under their sunglasses, patches of scales around their neck and wrists, or their inhuman speed and flexibility when they move. The best you can say about them is that they'd attract less attention than Sectoids or Mutons if spotted on a city street at night.
  • In XCOM 2, set 20 years later, the Speaker for the ADVENT Administration would appear to be a more advanced Thin Man, who can move much more naturally (and has a full head of hair rather than a comb-over), but he still has discolored flesh around his neck and never takes off his sunglasses. The ADVENT peacekeepers, on the other hand, have to wear visored helmets at all times to hide their grotesquely-oversized eyes, flattened noses, and misshapen foreheads, the result of aliens tampering with their DNA.
• Xenosaga Episode I used very stylized, anime-esque graphics that fell clearly to the left of the valley. However, Episode II used a slightly more... realistic... style, which ranged from mildly creepy to downright disturbing. See here. While it makes total sense for non-human characters to fall into the valley, it doesn't for the rest of the cast. They switched back to stylized graphics for Episode III.
• Egosoft's X-Universe series have traditionally been plagued by the uncanny valley. When the first game, X: Beyond the Frontier came out in 1999, it had decent character portraits (2d, pre-rendered) and decent voice acting, bar Mad Libs Dialogue on random NPCs. Come X3: Albion Prelude in 2011, they're still using the pretty much the same portraits as Beyond The Frontier did - a decade prior, with English voice actors that have even more odd pauses and intonations in their speech causing them to fall like a rock into the valley. X: Rebirth finally revamped characters to modern standards (real-time, 3D) but a lack of variety and plethora of terrifying◊ glitches at release causes them to dip down into uncanny valley; thankfully, the NPCs Mad Libs Dialogue has been toned down and they voice actors speak in more natural tones.
• Used in X-Wing on the face of the medical droid, during the medical-treatment scene, viewable here.◊
  • For another kind of Uncanny Valley, look at the man in the tank. Human necks don't actually bend like that.

• Yandere Simulator has a vocal variant. According to the game's backstory, Ayano was an Emotionless Girl, up until she met her Senpai. At which point, she started experiencing love and rage. As a result, her voice is most of the time a flat Creepy Monotone that can be slightly off. It's most obvious when she has conversations with more lively characters.
• Ys VI uses CGI in its opening movie that's much more realistic than the rest of the game's art design. This isn't a problem with the human characters, because they're careful to keep them on the better side of it. But then we meet Olha and Isha. They're Rehda, humanoids with fox tails and (the important part) elongated ears. In the CGI, they look extremely disturbing thanks to those ears - the ears help that sense of "SOMETHING VERY WRONG" so important to the Uncanny Valley effect. Thankfully, the game's use of CGI is minimal after that point.

---